ful of the lowly whom it pursues; mindful of the good men perplexed by its requirements; in the name of charity, in the name of the Constitution, repeal this enactment, totally and without delay. Be inspired by the example of Washington. Be admonished by those words of Oriental piety-" Beware of the groans of the wounded soul. Oppress not to the utmost a single heart; for a solitary sigh has power to overset a whole world." THE SCOTTISH REVIEW: A Quarterly Journal of Social Progress and General Literature. No. I.-January 1853. CORDIALLY, do we welcome this Quarterly. It does honour to the great temperance cause. In appearance and in execution it is most excellent, while the price is only one shilling. The contents of this number are--I. Bitter Beer and their Puffers. II. Burns. III. Emigration. IV. The Forests of India. V. The Malt Tax. VI. Pauperism. VII. The Story of the Covenanters. VIII. Social Progress. IX. Notices of New Books. X. Statistical Compendium. The staff of contributors includes Professor Nichol, Thomas De Quincey, George Gilfillan, Rev. Dr Begg, Dr Lees, A. Prentice, Mrs Ellis, and Mary Howitt. WE perceive that a twopenny monthly temperance magazine, called The Abstainer's Journal,' has been started, under the superintendence of the Rev. William Reid. The friends of the cause will, we trust, assist in pushing it into extensive circulation. THE CABINET. THE BIBLE. IT is God's heart of love opened to us for the knowledge of salvation, for pardon and peace, for strength and comfort in the Holy Ghost; it discovers to us our corruption and helplessness, that we may be in fear of ourselves, and gladly receive the remedy which God has provided for us; it reveals to us the Lord Jesus Christ born in our flesh, that we might be born again into his life and nature; it is the record of his actions and miracles, that we might go to him as the physician of our souls, and trust in his power for our own healing; it calls us to him, all guilty and defiled as we are, for washing in his blood; it is God's standing declaration of his mercy to a perishing world, and his offer and conveyance of full and free redemption from our sin, misery, and danger.—Ã dam. COMPASSION FOR THE HEATHEN. conscience to inquire after an expiation. I SEE a poor Hindoo driven by a guilty I see a Bramin directing him to eross a desert of a thousand miles, to the temple of Juggernaut in Orissa, and there, after the practice of severe austerities, to offer the costliest gifts which he can present; he does all this, and on his return he receives a little consecrated rice: he attempts to subsist upon this till, famished, he perishes on the plain,-white to this day with the bones of such deluded pilgrims. Is this romance? Nay, it is a well attested fact. But who among us that knows the virtue of that blood which cleanseth from all sin,' who would not rejoice to seize the hand of this wretched votary, and say 'Behold the Lamb of God!'-Cecil. THE FULNESS OF CHRIST. COME unto me, saith your Redeemer, and all your maladies shall be remedied, all your necessities shall be supplied. berless sins? I offer to you unlimited What though you have commited numpardon. What though the law of God, which you have violated, the law to which you can render no satisfaction, denounces its curse upon your head? Fear not, I have turned the curse from you; I have borne it myself in your behalf; I have fulfilled the law; I have made an atonement. What though you are immersed in weakness and corruption; unable to think any good of yourself; unable to will or to do; unable to discover the method of pleasing God; unable to continue in the path of righteousness were you placed in it? In your weakness my strength shall be made manifest and perfected. Your corruption I will cleanse in the fountain I have opened for uncleanness and sin. By the Holy Ghost the Comforter, whose influence is at my disposal, I will enlighten your understanding, and renew your heart. From me you shall learn the will of my Father; from me you shall have grace, whereby you shall serve him acceptably. What though you are surrounded by present evils? I am head over all things; all power is mine in heaven and in earth. My peace I give unto you. All things shall work together for good to you in the end. I lead you to a world where there shall be neither pain, nor sorrow, nor death. Your friends who sleep in me shall God bring with me. "Your light afflictions, which are but for a moment, shall work for you a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory.'-Rev. T. Gis borne. THOMAS GRANT, PRINTER, EDINBURGH. FAITH AND SIGHT. WE have heard of the mathematician | by sight?' It is not opinion, however who wished for a spot outside the world stubborn, or prejudice, however fixed, or on which to rest his lever. This would credulity, however facile. True, it is behave served other purposes than those de- lieving what we do not see, and believing sired by the philosopher. There is no it as firmly as though it were grossly, subsuch platform accessible to man, whence stantiated to sense, for it is 'the evidence of he may survey the physical globe. To things not seen;' but is there in this aught gain enlarged conceptions of it, we must absurd or incredible? Unless it is held travel painfully over its surface, or climb that we can perceive everything that exists to a mountain top, and there combine and in the field of universal truth, which, as enlarge our notions of its geography; or, finite beings, we cannot do and unless it better though more perilously, we may em- is argued that God cannot reveal to us bark with the aeronaut in his floating car, what is known to himself; then we assume and in the sky, far overhead, perceive how the possibility and necessity of faith. Even insignificant is the scene which constitutes the Pantheist, who, as but an infinitesimal to us our little world, when compared drop or wavelet in the great ocean of existwith the vast expanse embraced in our ence, cannot, whatever yearnings he may field of vision; or, could we rise yet higher, | have after omniscience, but own that he is how impressive would be our view, as we much stinted in point of knowledge, often gazed till the features of the outlined earth greatly short, and much indebted to foreign faded before the eye, and its huge dimen- help, must admit its necessity; and the sions were visibly dwarfed amid the em- Deist, who allows omnipotence in God and bosoming spaces of infinity. But there is the faculty of belief in man, must concede a more important altitude than this ima- it possible. Faith, then, is belief of testiginary point to be coveted and reached. mony-testimony respecting our nature, There is a spiritual world whose confines, condition, destiny, and duties-not only though including the present, stretch into testimony too true and well evidenced to the future. To that world all have rela- be doubted, but the single testimony tions, and to know our relations well is the which can be reckoned of value on such highest wisdom of man. Would he could points-the testimony of God, the maker, survey them as from a pinnacle! as they lawgiver, and judge of all; for he that may be thought to see them who have the planted the ear, shall he not hear? he that insight of archangels, or as they may be formed the eye, shall he not see?' In the thought to know them who have experi- Bible, God, who is infinite in mercy, has ence of immortality! But these large- given us, as it were, those results of spiriminded and much-experienced ones come tual knowledge which, had we been looking not hither to tell us any mysteries of being, from his position, we should have seen, or to unfold the relations and duties of and much more that no intellect could mankind. Nor is it needful they should, for descry. Things are thus revealed in their we may project ourselves to such a point real importance and relative proportions of view, without and above, as shall give to faith. And looking thus into and us the desired clearness and reach of ob- around us with the eye of faith, what do we servation. To know ourselves as we are, behold? Not only truths and facts before we need but inquire of Him who sees us unseen, but we look on the scenes and as we are, and whose great eye takes in transactions of the present with a purged the wide compass of things. Let us learn vision. How different the perceptions of of his Word, observe our true character, the man of sight and the man of faithposition, interest, and duty as inhabitants the man who discards and he who receives of the present scene, by looking at its revelation, in regard to the same objects! phenomena and at ourselves, objectively Look to the planetary and stellar orbs. viewed as among them, from the vantage The former sees in them little more than ground of Faith. Standing eminently here, the result of certain principles of gravitawe can see order even in the whirling tion and indigenous fire-mist. The matworld beneath, and calmly listen to the ter of the globe is to him, not so much a voice of wisdom, undeafened by its battle. substance evoked from nonentity by the Life is written over with characters of fiat of the Great Causer, as a vast conglomystery; but faith has mastered the merate of silica, alumine, and lime, knotted cypher, and can read the riddle. For here and there into mountains upheaved what is faith that faith of which the by central fire, and furnishing much curiapostle speaks, when, addressing Chris- ous employment to his hammer and tians, he says, 'we walk by faith, and not crucible. Mind, a thing of which he No. VII. NEW SERIES. VOL. I. speaks as of his locks, something belonging to him, a 'principle' of activity and intelligence rather than a conscious being, and his very self. Life, a result of organization, a series of thoughts and feelings-a time of yesterdays and to-morrows-a scene for eating and drinking, sleeping and waking, buying and selling, winning and losing, marrying and giving in marriage. The grave, an inevitable receptacle into which men drop, and to which, with pitiful faces and woful weeds, we carry others. Death, a change, too unpleasant to be mooted, and not to be breathed in circles polite. Hereafter, a thing of which we know little, and the less of which we know the better-a plunge in the dark, whose ghastly idea is not to be intruded amid the music and the dance, the business, bustle, and pleasure seeking of life-sufficient unto that day being the evil thereof. Not so looks on all these things the man of faith. He knows all the other can, but much more. 'By faith he understands that the worlds were framed by the word of God.' He stops not short at natural laws; but, piercing into their core, recognises the design of a supreme workmaster, not regardless of his creatures, and abscondent in some far retreat of immensity, but present and interested in all his works. Mind, with him, means man; and man means a being immortal, responsible, and guilty. Life, the period of his probation; death, the hour of its expiry, and grand turning-point of existence. Eternity, the duration of the weal or woe that lies before him; the grave, a prison, or a chamber, where the body is kept till again rejoined by its undying tenant, when shall take place that second and public judgment, and at which every man and woman sprinkled with atoning blood shall be pronounced, by lips that_cannot deceive, righteous, and ushered into eternal joy, and at which every man and woman who has trampled on that blood shall be pronounced, by the same impartial lips, and once for all, anathema. Such, according to the belief of the man of faith, is the condition and destiny of mankind. He believes that all men have sinned, and need salvation-he believes that Christ, the incarnate Son of God, died for sinners, even the chief-he believes that God is just in justifying the ungodly—that the command of the Saviour is on him, to win souls who may be set as jewels in the mediatorial crown. His Saviour's love fires him; the views of the mighty Manlover become his own. Henceforth religion becomes his uppermost concern. His eyes turn naturally to those around him, in the domestic circle. His wife, his children, his friends now seem not so much objects to solace him in his human home, as beings to be saved. Neighbours and citizens are beings to be saved. Our swarming streets, our noisome lanes, our frequented highways, are full of beings who need to be saved. There are the hungry who need bread, the naked who need clothing, the sick who need nursing, the helpless who need succour, the ragged boy and the ragged girl who need to be taught, clad, and fed; but all equally, and all in addition, need to be saved. He would not forget the body-others, without his eyes, can perceive its wants; but he minds the soul. And as there are many in this broad world besides his countrymen and kin, his sympathies radiate outwards. There is a European continent full of Pantheists, and Rationalists, and Sensualists, and men in the toils of Popery; there is Asia, with her countless sons, Islamites and Hindoos, Tartars and Chinamen; America, with her red-skinned and giant races; Africa, with her Caffres and Bushmen, and woolly heads -all of them needing to be saved! The Word read and preached, blessed by the Spirit,-the gospel of Jesus Christ, understood and believed, can accomplish this result. Missions, then, which is the name of the great machinery of evangelization, can be to the man of faith no secondary business. Far from sneerer is the man of faith at the efforts of the educator, or other wellprincipled philanthropist. All well,' is his kindly hail to such, whom, to the ut most, he aids; 'you have built apparatus at various points along the stream of life to filter the waters, and done much interim good to the people on the banks: I am at work on the fountain-head, seeking to purify and sweeten them there.' One thing is needful-salvation for the lost: 'Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God unto salvation; and to his mind the grand, the absorbing business of Christian zeal, is to spread among men, that the Spirit may bless it to their souls, the excellent knowledge of Christ.' Thus faith reveals to us the work to be done, which, in a sentence, is, that being saved ourselves, we strive to get others saved. Let us now see how faith also qualifies and nerves for the execution of this work. From the character of the work itself, it is not difficult to infer who are the parties proper to do it. At a glance we see it cannot be men of sight, though not a few such have assayed the work of moral reformation. Every reflecting person perceives more or less clearly that there is something wrong, if not with human nature, with human beings. Hence many warm-hearted, and several largeminded, individuals have, from time to time, been found scheming, and speaking, and writing about human progress, elevation, amelioration, and such like. But not knowing clearly what they were anxious to compass, ignorant of, or ignoring, chief facts in the condition of man, their efforts have been distracted, so much firing into space, and beating the air. Who, then, are to do the work? Men of faith, who believe that there is a God, and that he has spoken to men by his Son from heaven-who believe that there is in every man a soul to be saved or lost-saved by receiving, lost by rejecting, Christ. Christians, in all the grades of society and spheres of life, keeping their own places, and living their religion in secret before God, and in public before men, and all doing good as they have opportunity, adorning and commending the gospel they espouse. And, besides, a supply which, if such Christians are multiplied, shall never be scarce, of men who will devote their lives to the exclusive service of God, in the ministry of the Word abroad and at home. Let us not mistake the marks of the persons required to do the work of Christ. There are many who say, Lord, Lord! totally disqualified-many others but indifferent helps-and some about the Church, of whom the best that can be said by charity is, that they are of no use at all. For this work are wanted, not the formalist, or mere professor-not the complacent money-giver, who looks as if he had done somebody a favour, or been 'profitable to the Almighty,' instead of having performed a duty or enjoyed a privilege not the seat-taker, who pays to be snug when he has a mind to endure or enjoy sermon, as he may consider the case to be, and who pays his pew as he does his box at the theatre or place in the train-the man of silly bustle or frothy ebullition, who gets himself now and then artificially roused to terrible acts of zeal-not the blind partisan, or crazy zealot-the person of studied eccentricity, or impracticable crotchets not the unhappy speculatist, who is ever losing the time of action-not the intolerant, who will commune with nobody -not the latitudinarian, who embraces all and sundry-not the censorious, who contribute nothing to any Christian cause but hard words and objections, who act as if they thought both Church and world must perish without their criticism, ignorant that both shall either sweep them along in their triumphant current, or wash them, like rotten drift-wood, to the shore. Nor is so much owed as may seem to those amphibious kind of persons who are bent on bridging over Christianity, and the various isms that get into vogue, so that it may ever have the good word of the world, which is but a doubtful privilege-men who stretch religion on a Procrustes bed, and pare and clip its figure to the crib, making 'reason' the measuring unit, who would compress its elastic spirit within the old bottles' of a lean and shrunk philosophy, and make it step in the shoes of every half-grown 'science' and unbearded thing that apes the gait and mouths the words of Truth-not, in fine, those drones of the hive, who live on the fat of the outward blessings which Christianity brings, and who, though apparently valuing its peculiar privileges, will not lift a finger to help in a Christian work. Not such-not any such; but men and women who have caught ardour at the cross, who, knowing the value of their own souls, compassionate those of others-are filled with a generous terror lest fellow-creatures should perish, or come short of all that blessedness to which the gospel of Jesus can raise the vile. To them, as to Gideon's three hundred men that lapped, and not to the common mob, will God give the victory! Nor are the persons wanted altogether rarities. Thanks to God, there are of them in our churches. There is one kind of man we want, sitting in his study amid codices, and versions, and manuscripts, guarding jealously the sacred canon and text, not from professional and scholarly zeal merely-such scholars are but the drudges and quarriers to better men-but because he believes in a literal and plenary inspiration. There is another, working day and night, grown old in Scripture exegesis-a labour of love and of faith. There, in the pulpit, is another, fervent and faithful, keeping nothing back, but speaking because he believes. There, standing by sick-bed, offering a pastor's counsels or pastor's prayer. There, in the pious elder, ruling well, and giving example to the flock.' There, in the student, sitting by his lamp; in the preacher newly invested with the holy function, saying, 'What wilt thou, Lord, have me to do? If the world is not converted, what am I to say to Christ? There, in the godly neighbour, dropping the word in season; the man of business on 'Change,' and in the market place, not 'making baste to be rich,' but diligent in business, fervent in spirit, serving the Lord; the tradesman in the workshop, rebuking the profane jest and the impure word; that father ministering at the household altar; that mother in Israel, in the midst of her little ones, travailing, as in birth, till Christ be formed in them; that bed-ridden saint, passively witnessing for Christ, believing that they also serve who only stand and wait;' that rich man, casting humbly in his gifts;' that poor widow, giving her two mites, which make a farthing; that frequenter of the church and social prayermeeting, and whose closet can tell of mighty wrestlings at the foot of the mystic ladder. In fine, there he is, that single-handed, things are possible to him that believeth?" And as we firmly believe that efficacy is God's, let us also firmly believe that instrumentality is man's. Moses cried unto God at the Red Sea, and was chidden, not indeed for crying unto God, but for doing no more: 'Speak,' was the great reply, 'speak unto the people that they go forward!' We are to assay even the impossible, knowing that at a fitting juncture Omnipotence shall interpose. We cannot convert the soul, but we can preach the Word; just as the Israelites, though they could not push back the solid billow, could use their limbs and walk up to its margin; and if we cannot preach the Word, we can by our substance cause it to be preached, and all at least can pray that its preaching may be blessed. As those who by profession 'walk by faith,' let us lift up faith's eye and look on the fields. Then, perceiving that the harvest is plenteous, but the labourers few, we shall, in the spirit inculcated by the Saviour, pray the Lord of the harvest that he would send forth labourers into his harvest. ISAIAH LIII. 9. G. C. H. 'AND he made his grave with the wicked, and with the rich in his death.' single-minded missionary in the field; or if you want a Scripture type of the strong believer, see him in the valley of Elah, where the man of Gath, brutal and huge, and cased in solid armour, grasping a spear whose staff is like a weaver's beam, defying the armies of the living God, saying, Give me a man that we may fight together, is met and confronted by a stripling Bethlehemite, clad only in the costume of his shepherd hills, and carrying a simple sling; and now, as in the valley and between enclosing armies, they engage, who would not back the Philistine, and tremble at the pitiless odds against which the devoted boy, as if presumptuously, rushes? And yet, to the dismay of the alien hosts, and the amazement of the quaking faithless Hebrews, do we see, in that unequal contest, the blasphemer overthrown, and the foot of the ruddy shepherd planted on his neck! And what made him so strong but the power of faith? for he said, 'the battle is the Lord's.' And that which strengthened David strengthens the soldier of the cross on the high places of the field. What the son of Jesse was, standing alone amid craven friends and violent foes, facing the type and champion of Philistine idolatry with but his sling and his stone, is the missionary. Friends have faltered and quailed, the powers of darkness have bestirred themselves, pretended coadjutors, like Saul and his men, have remained aside, envious or neutral, while heathenism in its hugest shape confronts him where he stands; but how often, defenceless looking as he was, with only a Bible for his weapon, and amid savage tribes, has this and that Goliath superstition, been seen to fall before the unwarlike man, for he too said, The battle is the Lord's. Thus sunk and perished Druidism in our island home-thus fell, as with a crash, the old Papacy, smitten to its vitals at the Reformation-thus, in many a broad tract of Hindostan and Polynesia, were extinguished self-immolation and infanticide; and thus, in Calabar, has the mortal wound been given to the time-entrenched rites of human sacrifice. O then for men of faith, with clear eyes to know and strong hearts to do their part!, O for such rife and But even those interpreters who hold plenty at home, in our pews and in our the Messianic reference of the oracle, have pulpits; and abroad, reaping with their had some difficulty in satisfactorily exmighty sickles in the white harvest-field-plaining the passage. It seems strange Elijah-like men, whose prayers can stop the very rain of heaven, or bring it down in floods! Then should the 'great mountain,' that bugbear difficulty, become a plain before us, and nations be born in a day. Then should cease and determine our dubious and hypothetical petitions, as though we said to the Almighty, 'If thou canst do anything!' Do we not hear the pungent rebuke, "If thou canst believe, all These words in our translation are obviously elliptical, and require something to be supplied to make them express a distinct meaning. He made his grave with the wicked,' and he was with 'the rich in his death.' The natural signification of this statement is, 'He was buried with the wicked, and was with the rich in dying.' Those interpreters who deny the reference of this oracle to the Messiah, have been reduced to the greatest difficulties in their attempts to extract anything like a a coherent meaning out of these clauses. It would serve no good purpose to detail their absurdities. One specimen, not worse than many others, will suffice. 'They, i. e., my people, treated him, i.e., my servant, as a wealthy tyrant.' that the burial should apparently be put before the death, and there is no correspondence with the facts of the evangelical history. He whom we acknowledge as the Messiah, was not buried among the wicked, nor was he associated with the rich in his death. Various methods have been adopted to meet the difficulty. Some have supposed that the words, 'the wicked' and 'the |
