The rule laid down by Cicero, "prima est historiæ lex,”* has been our motto and guide. So far as the English Episcopate is concerned, "the fathers" are bowed out as authorities. The Episcopalian Church is established by law; by law therefore her claims, be they what they may, must be tested.

E. M.

ART. II.-Shakespeare and the Bible.

On Shakespeare's Knowledge and Use of the Bible. By CHARLES WORDSWORTH, D.C.L., Bishop of St Andrews. London: Smith, Elder, & Co.

1864.

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HEN the literary world is teeming with Shakespearian publications of all sorts, sizes, and degrees of merit, our readers will not be surprised that we too are found devoting some space to the well-worn theme. The work of Bishop Wordsworth, already in a second edition, places the subject in a relation suitable for our handling, and presents us with a starting-point, though we do not bind ourselves to a criticism of its contents. It is, we believe, the most elaborate attempt yet made in its special line—the relation between the plays of Shakespeare and the Book of God. What the Bishop undertakes to establish is the fact of the poet's familiarity with and indebtedness to the Bible; and this he elucidates under four main heads, viz., words and forms of speech, historical allusions, religious principles and sentiments, and poetical diction. All attentive readers of Shakespeare, whose minds are at the same time conversant with the Bible, will be prepared to hear that the Bishop has fully proved his point. It was indeed impossible, save for a peculiar perversion and inattention, to fail. We are apt, indeed, in our familiarity with the two books, to overlook the frequent and manifest allusions in the one to the other; and one chief merit and use of the Bishop's work is to bring the fact into clear light. However the fact is to be accounted for, whether as the effect of early training, or of lively interest in and intercourse with the books, and men of a period eminently biblical in its tendencies and tastes, or, as the Bishop seems to think, of a special and personal relish for the divine book, or of all these together, it is unquestionable that the poet's mind was deeply imbued with

* Our Contributor is not the first, we believe, who has misapprehended the maxim of Cicero.-Ed. B. & F. R.

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biblical knowledge. We are indeed by no means sure that all the Bishop's examples in proof can be sustained; his laudable zeal in elucidating his theme, has, we think, in several instances, carried him too far. We are, however, equally satisfied that a little farther research would produce an additional number of examples fully making up for those which it may, on this score, be necessary to deduct from his enumeration, and thus that his thesis stands completely demonstrated.

It will be seen that Bishop Wordsworth's book treats exclusively of the external relations between Shakespeare and the Bible. While appreciating it as a highly praiseworthy effort in Shakspearian criticism, we are at the same time of opinion that he has not expended his labour on that aspect of the poet's many-sided writings most important to a lover and student of the Word of God. We do not blame him for adhering to the subject he has chosen; we venture, however, to suggest another, as we think more vitally interesting, and shall present a few of the developments of which it is capable.

It is as the poet of human nature that we wish now to appeal to Shakespeare. Here confessedly his great strength lies. In many departments excellent, in this he is peerless. Faults of various subordinate kinds have been alleged against the style and conduct of his dramas by various writers, according to their various tastes; but in this supreme respect, as the delineator of the workings of the human heart, and of the features of human character, he is recognised as above criticism. His works present a collection of spirit-photographs; humanity, many-souled, has stood before him for its portrait. He has created for us a multitude of ideal personages, who have in our imaginations a real and full personal existence. We know them, judge of them, try to understand them, and to penetrate their motives, like the characters of history, or the persons clothed in flesh around us. His men and women are to be studied, and in studying them we learn to know ourselves and all men. An experience of his power here has taught us to have faith in his delineations. If, in any case, we fail to apprehend the propriety of a speech or of a deed, we attribute the failure, not to any want of perfection in him, but to a want of perception in ourselves; and, as in judging of persons in actual life, we wait till a deeper study has shed light upon the character and cleared up the mystery. If, for example, we sometimes find his Hamlet mysterious and unintelligible, we know that it belongs to Hamlet's nature, as to the nature of many living men, to be mysterious and

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unintelligible. Criticism in this department has so often been already put to shame, in its hasty misappreciations, by deeper study, that it now humbly owns his supremacy, and sits at his feet to learn.

We accept, then, of the poet's representation of man in his actual state; and upon this we think an argument in behalf of the Book of books, of some considerable apologetic value, may be based. It is to man as he is in his actual state that the Bible revelation is addressed. If the Bible is God's book, it is God's book for man, professing to recognise and to describe him in his existing condition, and to furnish the remedy for the moral maladies under which he suffers. But is the view which the Bible gives of man's moral condition a just one? Perhaps it has erred in its diagnosis of the patient. It is certain that evangelical, that is, biblical theologians and preachers, are often charged with making man worse than he is, and allowing him less of moral goodness and strength than actually belong to him. Shades too dark, it is said, are thrown into the picture, from the gloomy and morose imagination of Puritans and Evangelicals. It is evident that this is a question intimately pertaining to the fitness, and hence the very divinity, of the professed revelation. If the Bible has misrepresented the disease, it cannot be supposed to have found out the remedy. If man's condition be not such as the Bible sets forth, then this book is fundamentally wrong, and, as a system of moral renovation, it is proved to be worthless. The question admits of being brought to a very simple issue. Do the Bible and Shakespeare agree? All allow that the poet has correctly apprehended and delineated humanity? Are his delineations coincident or not with those of the book for which inspiration is claimed? If so, we are at a loss to understand why so unanimously, even by unbelievers and rationalists, Shakespeare should be hailed as the canonized poet of humanity, while the pictures of man drawn in our divine book are set aside as false and gloomy caricatures.

On this question, we cite Shakespeare as an independent witness. Bishop Wordsworth, we presume, would ascribe the coincidences of sentiment we are about to cite, at least many of them, to the poet's familiar acquaintance with, and use of, the Bible. This, though meant to be complimentary to him as a man, we believe to be false to his merits and his renown as a poet. If his representations of human nature are, indeed, in their most piquant and vivid touches, due to his having his mind imbued with biblical instruction, it is time the fact should be recognised, and the praise heaped upon his genius assigned to the right quarter. But we will

"Shakespeare a Calvinist !"

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not do the poet injustice. With the Bishop we see in his writings many unmistakeable allusions to biblical expressions and facts; but with these we have, in our present argument, nothing to do. We believe his pictures of human nature to be thoroughly original, and his fame as the poet of man thoroughly deserved. Hence we appeal to his writings on the question before us, as presenting views of an actual moral condition entirely independent of those of Scripture,―views drawn from the resources of his own experience and observation, and traced by the inimitably quick and certain pencil of his own genius.

"Do you know," said a friend in conversation,-a friend now deceased, whose memory all who knew him will ever delight to honour, the late Reverend Henry Angus, of Aberdeen,-"Do you know that Shakespeare is a very excellent Calvinist ?" A Calvinist! shocking! Bishop Wordsworth is careful to avert the very possibility of his poet being named in the same breath with the odious sect. "I cannot refrain," he says, (p. 124) "from noticing how little the mind of Shakespeare appears to have been infected by the Calvinistic and Puritanical leaven which had already begun, in his time, to exercise a strong and spreading influence among his countrymen. It is true he does not shrink," &c. And the good Bishop proceeds to quote one or two of the poet's most Calvinistic-looking sentiments, adding, "At the same time he takes care to explode the pernicious doctrine of fatalism," as if fatalism and Calvinism were all one, and it were perfectly fair to put the one term for the other. It is amusing to mark how intelligent people continue all their lives to be frightened by a name which they have learned to dislike. We doubt if, though Shakespeare's writings had contained an orderly enunciation of all the articles of Dort and Westminster, Bishop Wordsworth would have acknowledged him a Calvinist. It is a similar procedure when, farther on (p. 228), having adduced one or two passages from the poet, characterizing hypocrites, the Bishop thinks it "not improbable" that the Puritans are alluded to.

We do not, however, at present dispute about names. We say that whether Calvinist, Puritan, or not, Shakespeare knew the world and its ongoings, and that, in his views of human life, he simply confirms the teachings of Scripture.

1. We may glance at his representations of the general aspect of the world in its relation to human happiness. That the world is wholly out of joint; that, in all its ongoings, it is pervaded by derangement and depravity; that the soul of man can find no satisfaction in its resources; that it is in itself "vanity and vexation of spirit:" this is the testimony

of the Bible regarding it, and on this rests the need for the remedial system embodied in the gospel. And this is also the uniform testimony of Shakespeare's plays. There, as indeed in the works of all the more profound and thoughtful spirits, the views taken of human life are prevailingly melancholy. Many passages in these plays seem but the expansion of the sad burden of the preacher, or of the complaint of Job: "Man that is born of a woman is of few days and full of trouble; he cometh forth like a flower and is cut down, he fleeth also as a shadow and continueth not." It is superfluous here to present quotations, a few are given by Bishop Wordsworth (pp. 125-130); and many of the most striking are familiar to the mind of all educated men. All his greatest works, Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Timon of Athens,-we need not go over the whole list,-have for their practical lesson nothing else than just this: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world; for all that is in the world, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life, is not of the Father, but is of the world. And the world. passeth away, and the lust thereof."

2. The Providence that rules the world is another point in regard to which comparison may be instituted. The Bible teaches that, with all its disorders and unhappiness, the world has not been abandoned by God to the play of mere chance. We are assured that he makes the wrath of man to praise him, restraining the remainders thereof; that the ambition and injustice of the ungodly are links in the chain by which he accomplishes his purposes; that he often educes results from the activities of men different from those purposed by the human actors. "Howbeit he meaneth not so, neither doth his heart think so; but it is in his heart to destroy and to cut off nations not a few." Thoughtful men, in all ages, altogether apart from the discoveries of revelation, meditating on the facts of human life, and observing how an order higher than that of man makes itself manifest in human affairs, have found themselves unable to believe in chance, and owned themselves subject to divine superintendence and control. This superior control will be esteemed by us, according to the temper of our own spirits, either an iron necessity, a dark and remorseless fate, or a wise and paternal guidance: the one, when, destitute of confidence in the Supreme, we find our purposes thwarted, and our hopes disappointed; the other, when, having faith in God, we gladly recognise his providence working for our good. But however we may regard it, the fact of such a superintending overmastering providence we cannot overlook.