responsibilities to "the living God." He made a new effort to escape from the awful position in which he stood. Again he found himself helplessly and hopelessly overborne by the vehement and riotous ragings of Jewish malice against Jesus. He was also made to feel the weight of Jewish contempt for his authority and his person, and of their determination to override all his prerogatives. "If thou let this Man go," cried they, "thou art not Cæsar's friend; whosoever maketh himself a king speaketh against Cæsar." Still more alarmed at the danger of damaging his interest with the Roman government, for the sixth time he made the effort to persuade the Jews to permit his release of their victim; "brought Jesus forth, and saith unto the Jews, "Behold your king?" Commentators have intimated the possibility that Pilate designed thus to try the power of irony, or that he wished to ascertain whether the sentiment of loyalty toward any sovereign had place in the Jewish mind. The Jews, however, gave him instant proof that they were too terribly in earnest to be affected by irony, or to be the subject of any experiments to ascertain their loyalty, and evinced that they were likely to consider themselves insulted by the intimation that "the Nazarene' was their king. Again, therefore, "they cried out, Away with Him! away with Him! crucify Him!" "Pilate saith unto them, Shall I crucify your king?" "We have no king but

Cæsar," answered the chief priests.

One more collision between the governor and his perverse and unmanageable subjects was occasioned by the title which. was put upon the cross, for "Then said the chief priests of the Jews unto Pilate, Write not The King of the Jews, but that, He Said, I am King of the Jews. Pilate answered, What I have written I have written." An act of decision at last, the only one in which he uttered or conducted himself with the dignity and authority which became him, either as a man or a Roman governor.

A volume might be written setting forth the instructions.

suggested by the facts in the history of the trial of Jesus Christ, and which would deepen in every Christian heart the unspeakable mercy which moved Him in every step, from his throne to Bethlehem, and from Bethlehem to Calvary.

One object of the present article will have been answered, if it shall in any measure assist "believers in the Son of God" in studying the history of " the contradiction of sinners against Him," from the commencement of His public ministry to the night of His betrayment, and aiding their conceptions of the "mighty woes" which became concentrated upon His sol from the moment of His arrest in Gethsemane until His sufferings on the cross were finished." Such studies of the “sufferings of Christ" will also eminently help our preparation to contemplate "the glory which should follow," and to join in that anthem of eternity "Unto Him that loved us and washed us from our sins in His blood.”

ARTICLE IV.

HUMAN AND DIVINE THINGS CONFOUNDED.*

We have below an unfortunate title to a very able, but what we apprehend will prove a very useless book. In a new land like this--the author being an unknown member of the Episcopal Establishment in England-the very title will hinder its circulation, vastly. For there are multitudes who have a beetle-headed prejudice against doctrine which is the Scriptural word for the inspired teaching of religious truth; and as to dogma, which is a purely human and unscriptural word as applied to matters of belief, they cannot away with it. The words represent distinguishable things. In his own land Mr. Garbett seems to possess a respectable "Church" reputation, as the mention of himself in one of his Notes as the

*THE DOGMATIC FAITH, etc. Bampton Lectures for 1867. By Edward Garbett, M. A., of Christ Church, Surbiton, London, Rivingtons, p. 307.

Boyle Lecturer for 1863 on the "Divine Plan of Revelation," indicates. There are passages in the present work richly worthy of commendatory quotation, as the tracing the stream of Christian belief back to the fountain-head, pp. 57-62, the valuable Notes in the Appendix, 6, 9, the list of Church Confessions, p. 277, and that of authors who are witnesses to the historical faith from A. D. 97 to A. D. 1814, pp. 271-275. But much more than this would be needed to carry the nineteenth century in America with a book of such teachings, having such a title, both squarely against the grain of modern thought. The writer who could do this must be either a very trustworthy and sure, or a very eccentric and paradoxical thinker and famous already in either case. Mr. Garbett is neither. He starts "an Inquiry into the relation subsisting between Revelation and Dogma," meaning by the latter chiefly human constructions of beliefs, between which, if there is anything more than an arbitrary relation, there is certainly none such as he affirms. And with these he everywhere confounds inspired doctrine, thus bringing this, against which there is too much prejudice, within the circle of the interest or prejudice that prevails against human dogma. The very word "Dogmatic" will repel multitudeseven many of the best Christians-from his pages. Lecky, in his History of Rationalism, treats Scripture doctrine as if it had the same origin with dogma, and even with superstition; an error that never can be cured by writers who fall into the opposite one, at least, apparently.

Mr. Garbett, indeed, falls into the double blunder, all the way through, of confounding two things distinct in thought and two also distinct in Scripture. In a note he cites the only passages in which "dogma" is used at all in the New Testament-five all told-but he does it with an astonishing disregard of the fact that in no one of them has it the meanings he gives it, either that of humanly stated doctrine, or even that of divinely stated doctrine. These five instances.

are as follows: (1.) "Decree of Cæsar Augustus," Luke 2: 1. (2.) "The decrees for to keep," Acts 16: 4. (3.) The decrees of Cæsar," Acts 17: 7. (4.) "The law of commandments contained in ordinances," Eph. 2:15. (5.) "Blotting out the hand-writing of ordinances that was against us," Col. 2: 14. His only comment in his note is this: "In the first three instances the sense of command is indisputably conveyed." What is this to the purpose, if no one of the things commanded is a belief? They are, instead, decrees and ordinances. One would hardly agree that the ordinances which characterized the Jewish ceremonial, and which were swept away by Christ, stood on the same foundation with Christian truths the one addressed to reason and faith, the others matters of outward practice. Even if each is accompanied with a command, how does that show that an article of faith. stated by man carries with it the authority of a divine command? And how do the decrees of Caesar, or even those of the apostles, touching matters of practice, authorize man to exercise authority or stretch a command over religious belief?`

There is a broad gap here, which the author steps over with astonishing simplicity and unconsciousness or with astonishing lack of logical perception. Let us hear what he has to say for himself: "What God teaches must necessarily have the authority of a command. (Therefore what man teaches must also!) It was the opinion of Chrysostom, Theodoret, and Theophylact that the doctrines of the Gospel are described under this term, (command or dogma), and the opinion is shared by many critics of later times. But the ideas of stability, certainty, and authority conveyed by "dogma" are confirmed the more, if in all the five places where the word occurs in the New Testament it is understood in that sense of command or decree which it undoubtedly bears in three of them."

But how, pray, if in all these cases matters of act and practice--and never of belief--are the subjects, and the only sub

jects of divine command; if inspiration might have called the divine communication of truth to be believed "dogma," but never did, in a single instance-making broad and clear the distinction between dogma and doctrine; how does it appear that man's view of truth, in proposition or compend, even if accurately following the divine communications, has the authority of God's decree, ordinance, or command in itself, and is to be called, in the Scripture sense--dogma? Yet this is all the author has to offer in defense of so regarding it and so naming it throughout his book! From such a writer and thinker what could be expected but iterated and re-iterated and re-re-iterated attempts to state what dogma, so conceived, is; the only success of which is to show a more and more hopeless floundering, and sinking in quagmires of thought? He seems at last utterly incapable of distinguishing between truth, or the direct apprehension by the mind of reality, and its statement in words, (or what is supposed to be a statement of it), and actually ascribes to the XXXIX Articles of the Church of England the authority of Holy Scripture! with a refreshingly unconscious tyrannical spirit that might satisfy some American bishops. This is the more surprising, because he can sometimes at least in secular things--work out a clear and sharp distinction, as between law and power in nature, p. 72, and it must be the effect of his "churchly" or sectarian education. And it is the more mournful because he often states strongly and admirably the necessity of doctrine without the mind and belief of doctrine within it to all the phases of real spiritual life.

Sometimes the inextircable confusion of the writer's mind. in respect to several terms standing for several things appears in the use of them all in a single sentence: e. g. "The gradual corruption of her doctrine, (that of the church) consisted not so much in denying the truth with which she had been put in trust, as in adding to it dogmas of her own." Any clear thinker would use these three italicised words for three things, as