find, however, that the foot plants itself firmly in the soft ashes. It is as if you walked amid snow. You bend the body backwards; you step upon your heel; your pace quickens; you break into a slight run; the run becomes a gallop; never once does the foot misgive; you career down the almost perpendicular cone, as if you were bounding along on a horizontal meadow. What it took you a long weary hour to climb, you descend in ten minutes. Arrived safely at the base, you turn and look upwards. High in air is the spot where you stood but a few minutes before. You wonder where you have found the wings that have borne you to the earth; or what good genius it is that has transported you so easily to the foot of the mountain! We again set out on our return-journey over the same black lava fields. All around was desolation. The mariner in mid ocean is not more completely beyond sight of land than we were out of sight of the habitable cultivated earth. The scene appeared as the globe itself may be supposed to appear when the last fire has passed over it, converting it into a field of cinders, and entombing its goodly cities, and its flourishing groves and plains, in a grave of ashes, even as the towns and vineyards that covered Vesuvius at the beginning of our era now lie buried beneath this dark lava flood. The sun was westering, and his descending orb bung suspended, in a sky of perfect glory, over that region in which pagan mythology had placed the "Elysian Fields." For from our position on the mountain we could look across the bay of Naples, and the promontory of Posilipo, to the shore of Baia, and the Phlegræan fields. The holy land of paganism was under the eye. We halted again and again to gaze on the scene. Glorified by the setting sun, whose light as he sank became every moment more rich and mellow, the scene did seem "the Islands of the Blessed." M. Appia, to whom this is the favourite region of Italy, sitting down upon a mass of lava, and drawing forth his pencil, in a few minutes produced an admirable sketch of it. The sky was an arch of pure amber; the sea beneath was a mirror of gold; the long promontories and islands that barred and streaked the ocean, clothed, as they were, in vermilion and purple tints, seemed to float between earth and heaven. Earth and sky breathed of peace. Verily, it looked a region where pure spirits might dwell, and where they might forget the toils of their earthly pilgrimage. But that glory was short-lived. The sun went down, and although the first effect of his departure was to deepen the purple on island and mountain, and to suffuse the scene with a richer glory, yet soon the gold began to wax dim, and the purple to deepen into blackness; and long before we had reached Resina, from which we had started in the morning, the stars were out, and a broad moon, emerging from the flanks of Vesuvius, shed a flood of silver upon the vineyards that lined the shore, and the waters of the bay that engirdled the mountain. The glimpse we got of the elysium of paganism had its moral. We had seen it under a light that glorified it. The poets themselves had never painted it more gorgeously, Still it was but a vision-an affair of colouring-and it quickly faded. Meet emblem we thought of those religious systems which deluded anciently, and delude still, so large a portion of mankind. Poetry and art glorified them; but paganism had no reality the gorgeous colouring in which a sensuous imagination dressed it could give it neither truth nor stability. It quickly went out in night-eternal night. There before us were the seat and centre of the pagan mythology. How dead even there! Christianity goes down into the tomb, and at its appointed hour it rises again; and even now it is giving signs that it is coming out of its sepulchre in Italy. But paganism goes down into the grave, and rises not again. Even on the shore of Baiæ, and beside the Elysian fields, it is giving no symptoms of resurrection, no tokens that morning shall ever dawn upon its long night. The gospel alone is immortal. Of all the systems that have flourished upon the earth, Christianity is the only one which, starting with the morning of the world, shall behold its evening; shall listen to the knell which will announce that "time is no more." However plausible, brilliant, showy, all the false religions may say with short-lived man, "What is our life? it is even a vapour which appeareth for a very little, and then vanisheth away." They are all of them "gourds." Christianity is the oak. Their early luxuriance for a time threatened to overtop and extinguish the tree of truth. During the week which Paul passed at Puteoli, how often must he have looked across the narrow bay to the opposite shore of Baiæ, and contrasted the system there enthroned with the gospel which he preached: the one reigning over both eastern and western worlds, the other numbering but a few followers. But now Baiæ is desolate; the shrines of Cumæ are deserted, and its temples lie in ruins; while the gospel is going round the earth and erecting its trophies in the most distant hemispheres. The quick efflorescence of the false religions has been succeeded by their quick putrescence; and that putrescence has but supplied nutriment to that great tree whose boughs cast their shadow over those graves where the once proud rivals of the gospel sleep their eternal sleep. J. A. W. German Theological Literature. 653 X.-GERMAN THEOLOGICAL LITERATURE. Zeitschrift für die Historische Theologie. Jahrgang, 1865. То а The third part of this valuable Journal for the present year contains a full and minute account of a Dutch work of Dogmatic Theology, which is characterised by the writer of the article-Dr Rippold, of the university of Heidelberg-as "the most important phenomenon in the history of the Church of Holland at the present day." It is an extensive work, in three volumes, on the Doctrine of the Reformed Church, and has already reached a fourth edition, which appeared in 1862. It has excited the greatest attention in Holland. All the existing religious parties of the country have felt themselves compelled to notice and reply to it. "There is not a theologian worth naming in the Netherlands who has not come to explanations with the author. The orthodox party, both the strict and the moderate, the old liberal juste milien party, the Groningen school, and the latest Empirical school, to say nothing of the Catholics and the smaller sects,-all have attacked him, and been answered by him in succession; and these theological conflicts still continue, they are even hotter now than ever. right understanding, therefore, of the present condition of the Church of Holland, it is indispensable to have a correct idea of the celebrated and apparently epoch-making work. The author is Dr J. H. Scholten, and his doctrinal stand-point may be gathered or guessed from the following passage of his Preface. He holds it to be not only of great general importance, but of particular moment at the present time, to investigate more narrowly the essential principle of Protestantism, as it developed itself within the Reformed as distinguished from the Lutheran Church. For if, on the one hand. a rationalistic neglect of the faith of our fathers is happily giving way to a lively interest in it, a neglect which was the necessary consequence of the dogmatism of the 17th and 18th centuries, and the trammels which it imposed upon the free development of Protestantism,-there is a tendency, on the other hand, in not a few, to confound the essence and spirit of Protestantism with the letter of the earlier formulas and confessions. It is therefore necessary to investigate accurately the spirit and principles of the doctrine of the Reformed Church, in order that neither the precious treasure left us by our fathers may be despised on account of the earthen vessels in which it has been conveyed to us, nor the earthen vessels be mistaken for the treasure itself, but rather that the danger may be avoided of confounding substance and form, and of holding for Reformed what is either in principle unreformed, or at the most a mere temporary form wherein the reformed principle manifested itself at the commencement of the Reformation. By means of such an investigation men will come to see how different a mere anxious holding on to the letter of the old Confessions is from heartily surrendering ourselves to the spirit and principles of the Reformed Church, and a zealously going on to build upon the evangelical foundation laid by our fathers, undisturbed by the outcries of a party who allow themselves to pronounce the hardest censures on the doctrine of their fellow-Christians, while they themselves, if weighed in the balance of ecclesiastical orthodoxy, would be found wanting. A theologian who writes in this strain is apt to be regarded by us as a sort of cross or half-breed between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. But in judging such piebald continental divines, we ought always in fairness to VOL. XIV.-NO. LIII. X X remember that they are, at least, an improvement upon the generation of theologians who immediately preceded them, that they are describing an upward movement from worse to better, not a downward one from better to worse. The last generation of Dutch divines would hardly have spoken as Scholten does here, so warmly of the treasures bequeathed to them by their evangelical forefathers; and it opens a door of hope for the future of the once highly honoured and valued Church of Holland, to find that such language is beginning again to be made use of by theologians, who write with sufficient originality and power to compel the attention and to call forth in opposite directions the criticism of all theological parties in the land. In his fourth edition, Scholten enumerates seven results as already gained by the previous editions of his work. We have not space to name them all, and they are not all of equal importance. We select the following as bearing upon the relations of his work to the extreme liberalism, which has for a long time maintained the ascendant in the national church. 1. The doctrine of the Reformed Church, and specially the dogma of predestination, is now treated with greater justice than it used to be under the influence of the former liberalism. 2. A deeper speculation regarding theological questions, is putting down the arbitrary dicta of rationalism. 3. The Arian way of denying the Godhead of Jesus, but acknowledging his pre-existence, is more and more losing ground, in spite of its former ascendancy. 4. The problem of the freedom of the will has entered into a new psychological phase. 5. Men begin more and more to see that the principle of free inquiry, first brought into currency by the Groningen school, does not allow us to stop at the results of that school, but rather presses us on to a farther development; and that the freedom of science upon the field of philosophy and criticism, not only brings no harm to the Reformed Church, but sets, evermore in a clearer light, its fundamental truth, viz., the grace of God in Christ Jesus as the only ground of salvation. Such a work as Scholten's is evidently the product of a transition period. It will, we may well hope, throw a bridge across the chasm between rationalism and scriptural faith, by which many of the younger minds of the Dutch nation and church may be enabled to pass over from the former to the latter, without, it may well be, returning to the letter of the old Belgian confession; but still, let us trust, going back to what is still older, "the form of sound words," which Timothy, the representative of young divines and preachers, received of Paul the aged, and which he was exhorted to hold fast," in faith and love which is in Christ Jesus." Several of the last numbers of the Zeitschrift, have been enlivened by a brisk collision of opinion, on a point of great interest in the historyf of the Waldensian Church, between Professors Herzog and Ebrard o Erlangen. The point in question is the date of the Nobla Leiczon, the Noble Lesson, one of the most important and valuable literary monuments of that church. "Till lately," says Ebrard, "the Nobla Leiczon was regarded as one of the oldest of the Waldensian writings. Dieckhoff, indeed, sought to bring down its date, in common with the whole Waldensian literature, to the fifteenth century, but upon grounds which were set aside first by Herzog, and, lately, in the most conclusive manner by Zeschwitz. Gieseler assigned its composition to about the year 1200, supporting this view upon verses 6, 7 : : "Ben ha mil et ceut aucz compli entierament Que fo scripta l'ora car seu al dernier temp." Herzog, also, acknowledged that these words would lead to the end of the twelfth century, rendering them thus :-" Indeed, 1100 years are now past away since the hour was written that we are in the last time," and understanding the allusion to be to 1 John ii. 18, the date of which epistle the author must have of course distinguished from that of the birth of German Theological Literature. 655 Christ, so that if the verses are genuine, they lead to a date which lies fully eleven centuries later than that of 1 John. The question, however, has recently taken a new turn since the discovery, in 1862, by Mr Bradshaw, a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, of the Waldensian manuscripts which Morland in Cromwell's time collected in the valleys and brought to Cambridge, but which had long been given up for lost. In February of that year, Mr Bradshaw fortunately discovered them in the library of the university. Now volume B of the collection is a MS. of the Nobla Leczon, of the fifteenth century, and it contains verses 6, 7, in common with the Geneva and German codices heretofore known, but before the word cent there is an erasure in the MS. under which the numerical 4 is still clearly discernible. This Morland Codex, therefore, had originally the reading, Ben ha mil et 4 cent aucz, &c. Another volume of the Morland MSS. contains a fragment of the Nobla Leiczon, in which ver. 6 reads thus, Ben ha mil et cccc aucz compli entierament. We have thus a variation in the reading of the text, and the question arises, Which of the two readings is the genuine one? In an article on the Waldenses in his Real Encyclopædia, Herzog thinks the question is now settled conclusively against the older date. As the Waldenses, after their adhesion to the Reformed Church in 1332, fell instinctively and for practical objects into the way of altering passages in their older writings, which did not agree with the Reformed Confession, so as to bring them into conformity to it; nay more, as with Leger (in his Histoire générale des Eglises Evang. des Vallees de Piemont ou Vaudois, 1669), the practice began of ascribing fabulously old dates to the Waldensian writings, and even falsifying manuscripts with that design; so Herzog sees here an instance of a similar falsification. The reading, mil et cent aucz, is a corruption of the text; in the erasure of the Morland Codex we have the genesis of the corruption before our eyes. The reading, mil et quatre cent aucz, is undoubtedly the true one, and thus the date of the composition falls as low as the fifteenth century. From these reasonings and conclusions of Herzog, Professor Ebrard expresses his strong dissent. He still maintains, in the face of the Morland MSS. the genuineness of the reading, mil et cent aucz. Dr Herzog has done his best to defend his position, in a reply to Ebrard, but Ebrard has come forth with an able rejoinder to the reply, and the whole question may now be held to be thoroughly sifted. For our own part, we think that Ebrard has decidedly the best of the argument. He has confuted with complete success the rash assertion, that the earlier date found in some of the MSS. was a deliberate falsification; and he has been able to give a probable and satisfactory explanation of the fact, that, in the two Morland MSS., the later date should have taken the place of the older one. We agree with him in thinking that Dr Herzog has surrendered his former opinion of the age of the Nobla Leiczon too hastily and without sufficient reason; and we commend this interesting discussion to the attention of any of our readers who may at present be occupying themselves with the history of the Churches of the Valleys. Conciliengeschichte Nachden Quellen bearbeitet. V. Dr C. J. HEFELE, Fütter Bond. Freiburg: Herder. The work of Dr Hefele of Tubingen, on the History of the Councils, is not, as some have supposed, a mere supplement to such collections of Concilia such as those of Monsi and Harduin. It is a thoroughly independent study of the Councils, in connection with church history, and the general history of the time when they were held. The volume before us fully mantains the reputation gained for the author by the former parts of his great work. It begins with the accession of Gregory VII, and ends with the death of the Emperor Frederic II. It thus embraces the period when the papacy was at its height of sway in Europe. There is, as before, a most painstaking exa |