passage appears to mean either that the Dean hesitated to affirm that the condemnation of the lost is everlasting, or that he based his belief in its everlasting character on philosophical considerations rather than on the language of the New Testament.

We do not know whether Dean Church wrote other letters which referred to the controversy which arose about the criticism of the Old Testament in connexion with the publication of Lux Mundi besides that which he sent to Dr. Liddon in reply to the latter's expression of sympathy with him at the time of Lord Blachford's death. But if we may assume that the Editor would not have withheld any letter of importance and general interest on this subject, we cannot but think that in this case also there was a hesitancy parallel to that in the two instances which we have given.' In this letter Dean Church, after thanking Dr. Liddon for his kind thoughts,' goes on to say:

'It gives edge to such trials when troubles and anxieties such as you speak of are added to them. Ever since I could think at all I have felt that these anxious and disturbing questions would one day or other be put to us, and that we were not quite prepared or preparing to meet them effectively. To us Church people the general answer was so clear that it made us think that they wanted no further trouble; and they have been left outside our sphere of interest, to be dealt with by a cruel and insolent curiosity, utterly reckless of results, and even enjoying the pleasure of affronting religion and religious faith. This was sure to be, from the intellectual and moral conditions of our time; but it seems to me that our apologetic and counter-criticism has let itself be too much governed by the lines of the attack, and that we have not adequately attempted to face things for ourselves and in our own way, in order not merely to refute, but to construct something positive on our own side. That, it seems to me, is the great triumph of Bull's Defensio and of your Bamptons, and we want something of the same kind, which has not yet been done, for the Bible-what it really is, how it came to be, who gave it us. That the difficulties about it have been forced, not on arrogant and conceited "experts," claiming monopoly of all criticism, but on deep-thinking and devout Catholic believers like * *, and have given him trouble, seems to me to show that there is something unsatisfactory in the present condition of things-though I am the last person to know what ought to be done to meet it. All that I can say for myself is that for such men my trust is in patience and sympathy' (pp. 341-2).

1 Such an attitude might be to some extent due to the Dean's humility as well as to his justice. His humility was characteristically illustrated by his unwillingness to accept the Deanery of St. Paul's (pp. 199-203, 207-8). His subsequent refusal to become Archbishop of Canterbury (p. 397) was probably justified by 'reasons of health.'

Yet, though the letter appears to be to a certain extent in deprecation of the vigorous and uncompromising attitude which Dr. Liddon consistently assumed on this matter, it will be observed that its general tone is that of opposition to what we are frequently told are the certain and necessary results of the critical study of the Old Testament. And we may compare, in this respect, the somewhat stronger language of a letter written to Lady Welby a few months earlier in 1889:

'But-apart from scholars and people claiming independencewhen the ordinary mass of us have to choose between speaking of the Bible as the Church has hitherto done and the new language of criticism, it is fair to ask, "What does criticism say?" And here it seems to me that, while the questions have been innumerable, and the answers also, the crop of clear, certain, convincing answers has been a strangely small one. Nothing seems to me more remarkable than the contrast in our time between the certainties of physical science and the contradictory and uncertain results, the barrenness, as a whole, of criticism applied to the questions which most interest men. 'I certainly know no one who is capable of revising the received belief about the Old and New Testament' (p. 337).

These passages may well, in our judgment, be carefully considered by a numerous class of persons who, without adequate knowledge either of theology or of criticism, are boastfully adopting opinions about Holy Scripture which run counter to the traditional belief of the Church and are full of lofty contempt for all who do not agree with them. And the Dean's words have a lesson, too, for eminent scholars whose attitude towards the criticism of the Bible has been anything but cautious.

Nor is a reminder less needed in some quarters that the traditional way of regarding Holy Scripture will hardly hold its ground without patient and detailed and constructive study of the sacred text.

In writing of this book we have referred mostly to very serious subjects. It has a lighter side in the accounts of travel already alluded to and in many literary allusions, of which one of the most interesting is in the account of the Dean's experience as a student of Browning's poetry,' while there are abundant signs of such a 'sense of humour' as that of which the Dean of Christ Church wisely says in the preface that it seldom gets due credit for the good work it does or helps to do' (Preface, p. xviii).

We have, we hope, shown that thoughtful readers cannot afford to overlook the Life and Letters of Dean Church. And, In a letter to Mr. Stanley Withers, dated February 9, 1890,' printed on pages 342-44. We regret there is not much more of what we may call 'literary correspondence.'

1

even apart from its merits, it will be valued as a memento of the high and noble life of a teacher of the widest knowledge and the most fearless honesty, who has left a deep mark in many thinkers of his day.

Yet, deeply as he marked cultivated Christian thought in England, our knowledge of Dean Church's published writings is tinged with regret. There are reviews and essays, lectures and sermons, short historical books-all filled with deep thought, singular suggestiveness, and skilled writing; but there is no magnum opus. The student who could have luminously lighted up by-ways of history has not done so on any large scale; the writer who could have told with vivid power the rise or the fall of great empires has not left any book which can be put on the same shelf with Gibbon's masterpiece; the critic, philosopher, historian, and divine who could have given us a history of the Papacy which, by its insight into cause and effect, its grasp of great principles of human thought, its knowledge of facts, its entire impartiality and unsurpassed judgment, would not only have been a work of the highest interest, but would have supplied the rational basis for a just estimate of the Church of Rome and a right attitude towards the reunion of Christendom, has left this task undone. It is not only intellectually tantalizing, it is, we feel, a moral loss to the English-speaking races that the powers which the Dean's books most abundantly exhibit should not have found a wider scope and, it may be, a more permanent usefulness.

ART. V. THE TEXT OF THE SYRIAC GOSPELS. 1. The Four Gospels in Syriac, transcribed from the Sinaitic Palimpsest. By the late ROBERT L. BenSLY, M.A., and by J. RENDEL HARRIS, M.A., and by F. CRAWFORD BURKITT, M.A.; with an Introduction by AGNES SMITH LEWIS. (Cambridge, 1894.)

2. A Translation of the Four Gospels from the Syriac of the Sinaitic Palimpsest. By AGNES SMITH LEWIS, M.R.A.S. (London, 1894.)

A GENERATION has passed away since the publication by Cureton of a Syriac text,' which has necessarily been noticed, for commendation or disparagement, by every subsequent

Remains of a very Antient Recension of the Four Gospels in Syriac, hitherto unknown in Europe. By William Cureton, D.D., 1858. Dedicated to the Prince Consort.

The fortunate

writer on the original text of the Gospels. discoverer of the venerable remains then first brought to light predicted in his Dedication that they would take their place in the ranks of Christian literature. Different and contradictory opinions have prevailed as to what that place should be. While Cureton's text was unsupported it was difficult to criticize it, except on grounds of internal evidence. The aspect of the case has now changed. The publication last autumn of another recension, very closely related to Dr. Cureton's, has enlarged the field of observation, while the still more recent publication of the English translation of Mrs. Lewis's codex has brought the subject within the sphere of the ordinary reader. The spread of education has produced in these days a multitude of divinity students who are neither Orientalists nor scholars, but who will welcome a handy little volume. We note as a sign of our times, and what in a former generation would not have been essayed, much less accomplished, that it is a lady who has discovered the codex for scholars and popularized its contents for the masses. The story of two expeditions has been told by her sister,1 and we hear that, even as we write, these intrepid ladies are making a third search in the Library of St. Catherine's Convent. We should not be surprised to see them return with other precious transcripts, but the publication of a 'Codex Ludovicus' is enough to shed lustre on a lifetime.

We hasten to place in the forefront of our remarks this sincere expression of our admiration of the courage and perseverance of the ladies as discoverers, because we must find serious fault with the work of one of them when she essays criticism and commentary. We have already, in our Short Notice in the January number, referred to the signs of haste in Mrs. Lewis's work, which are indicated by the inaccuracies in the Introduction to her Translation. Her first line is ambiguous, for she describes her manuscript as 'the latelydiscovered Codex of Old Syriac Gospels.' Mr. Burkitt is an equal offender when, in a signed communication to the Guardian (to which we shall refer again), he takes as his title The Sinai Palimpsest of the Old Syriac Version of the Gospels. These descriptions may, and ought to, be read in connexion with Mr. Burkitt's statement that the Sinaitic MS. contains what he calls 'Syr. vt.' in a purer form than the Curetonian, and with Mrs. Lewis's references (Introduction, p. xiii) to the Curetonian Gospels' and to 'the Old Syriac text; but the unwary may be led to suppose that 1 How the Codex was Found. By Margaret Dunlop Gibson, 1893. 2 October 31, 1894, pp. 1707–8.

2

Mrs. Lewis's Palimpsest and Cureton's Codex are copies of one text. They represent the same text, but yet they are rather recensions of it than copies, if the latter term be used in the sense in which we speak of a copy of Homer, or of St. John, meaning a transcript, more or less faithful, of the text of the writer. Mrs. Lewis's Introduction prefixed to the Syriac text is more carefully composed than her Introduction to her Translation. Her English book, while it will be useful to many, will also mislead some readers. We merely advert in passing to the strange statements in the philological arguments on pp. xv and xvii, which seem to imply that the vernacular of Mesopotamia was almost identical with that of Palestine in the time of our Lord,' and which apparently confuse the latter dialect with what is called technically 'Palestinian Syriac.' We remind the reader that the Palestinian Syriac version is not 'extant only in the form of a lectionary,' for fragments have been published of what seems to have been a complete copy of the Pauline Epistles.3 Passing to a more serious fault, we find that on p. xxvii Mrs. Lewis writes about the last twelve verses of St. Mark as follows: '[The omission] occurs in other ancient codices, notably in both the Sinaiticus [ie. ] and the Vaticanus ... in the Greek Codices where these twelve verses do occur, the Téλos (“end”) is always found after verse 8 and also after verse 20.' Would the reader suppose from this statement that the codices in which these verses are found number many hundreds, and that they are omitted by two only? We invite the attention of our readers, and of Mrs. Lewis, to a certain monograph on the subject, and to the other works named below. But it is easier to ignore arguments than to refute them.

On p. xviii we read: 'The Peshitta, or "simple" version, . . . is one which underwent successive revisions in order to bring it into harmony with the Greek Codices.' This is in flat contradiction to the opinion of Mr. Gwilliam. Between him and Mrs. Lewis we will not attempt to interpose, except

1 See Dr. Neubauer's Dialects of Palestine, pp. 53, 54, in Studia Biblica, vol. i. 1885.

2 For this dialect see Schwally's Idioticon d. Christ. palästinischen Aramäisch.

3 The Palestinian Version (Anecdota Oxoniensia), 1893, p. xix. Why does Mrs. Lewis seem to doubt what is the exact date of the Vatican Lectionary? 'About A.D. 1029' (p. xix). It was written in the year of the Greeks 1341; see Versiones Syriaca (Adler), p. 139.

4 See Nov. Test. Gr. (Delectus Lectt. cur. Gul. Sanday), Oxon., 1889. 5 Burgon's Last Twelve Verses. See also his Revision Revised, pp. 422-4; Scrivener's Introduction, 4th ed., vol. ii. pp. 340, 341; Miller's Textual Guide, p. 126; Dr. Taylor, Master of St. John's College, Cambridge, in Expositor, July 1893.