fond of taking a person to pieces and unfolding a character-as great a master of the explicative art. How he peeps under foibles and oddities to look at the heart-lovingly dilates upon themdraws us near to strange bits of humanity, and holding a hand of each, makes us friends for ever! Smith does great service in bringing down to the common level some highflying pretence or title that gives itself airs, and claims to sit apart. Lamb does a service peculiar to himself in bringing some forlorn eccentricity up to the level of our ordinary sympathies. Lamb is subjective, individual—a man dreamy, whimsical, and unpractical. Smith moves in the stream of affairs, and has always work in hand. He is too intent on producing conviction to have time for the erratic quaintnesses and leisurely delights of Lamb's meditative fancy. For the same reason, and for higher yet, he can never descend to the tricks and starts, the coups de théâtre, the utter ribald nonsense, which offend us in Sterne. The very structure of the sentences marks the contrast-the rapid flow of Smith's, the shortness and slight connexion of Lamb's, as though deliberately uttered at intervals, in monologue, between the whiffs of the musing pipe. Sydney Smith all minds, in their order, will more or less appreciate; the common prosaic temperament gets out of patience with Lamb, and thinks him childish. Observe how the two speak of the rising convict colony of Sydney. Lamb writes to his friend at the antipodes, 'What must you be willing by this time to give for the sight of an honest man! You must almost have forgotten how we look. The kangaroos-your aborigines-do they keep their primitive simplicity un-Europe-tainted, with those little short fore-puds, looking like a lesson framed by Nature to the pickpocket! Marry, for diving into fobs they are rather lamely provided à priori; but if the hue and cry were once up, they would show as fair a pair of hind-shifters as the expertest loco-motor in the colony. . . . Do you grow your own hemp? What is your staple trade-exclusive of the national profession, I mean? Your locksmiths, I take it, are some of your great capitalists.' Sydney Smith expresses his fears that, in spite of the example of America, this

VOL. II.

H

country will attempt to retain the colony under harsh guardianship after it has come to years of discretion. If so, endless blood and treasure will be exhausted to support a tax on kangaroos' skins; faithful Commons will go on voting fresh supplies to support a just and necessary war; and Newgate, then become a quarter of the world, will evince a heroism not unworthy of the great characters by whom she was originally peopled.'

In conclusion, we must repeat our protest against the mistake which regards wit as the principal endowment of that powerful and noble nature against that popular error which persists in associating brilliance with reckless superficiality. With justice has Sterne entitled this narrow and vulgar notion the Magna Charta of stupidity and dulness. An illustration, he says, is not an argument —of course not—nor do I maintain the wiping of a looking-glass clean to be a syllogism-but you all, your worships, may see the better for it.' Let that keen and massive intellect have due honour -and yet more, that brave, and tender and self-sacrificing heart. Let Sydney Smith be remembered as a man who fought in the van of reform, when reform was accounted infamous; who to his own sore loss, in a profession sadly eminent for servility and prejudice, stood forth against gigantic wrongs, and helped our country to its present home prosperity; who would put out the same energy in saving a poor village lad which he lent to aid a nation's cause; to whom vanity was a strange thing, and envy a thing impossible; and who used his dangerous and dazzling gifts never to adorn a falsehood or insult the fallen, always to crown truth with glory and to fill the oppressed with hope. With prophetic insight, he could discern, in humane solution of the problems of the present, the established axioms of a better future,-could be sure that the novel superstructure of to-day would become the venerated foundation of tomorrow; and to the life he lived and the cause he advocated may be applied, with fullest justice, those wise words which Tacitus has placed in the mouth of Claudius:-Inveterascet hoc quoque : et quod hodie exemplis tuemur, inter exempla erit.

THE CHRIST OF HISTORY.*

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN tells us, among other reminiscences

of his youth, of a friend he had who often perplexed him sorely by his skill in disputing after the Socratic fashion. At last, young Franklin grew afraid of granting the most obvious proposition or making the smallest concession, lest from such admission he should be drawn on to a mortifying surrender of all he had undertaken to defend. And indeed no style of argument so tests the caution of an antagonist in defence, or so tries his temper on defeat. It comes round by such an unlooked-for circuit on the undefended rear. It encroaches like a habit, and may become invincible by a single indulgence. It seems to act so provokingly on the motto which an old proverb assigns to the assuming man,- Make me a place where I may sit down, and I will make a place where I may lie down.' Yet no method of dialectic assault is more legitimate than this, or more permanently successful. Masterly is the process which, from a minute mustard-seed concession, can slowly develope large-limbed broadly-spreading consequences, never afterwards to be uprooted. It requires, however, considerable clear-headedness and no small attention duly to trace and estimate the growth of some such logical organism. On this account the more brilliant reductio ad absurdum will always be more serviceable for ordinary minds or a temporary purpose. But let the mind once have tested, with painful scrutiny, the slow steps of the argument which starts from a point where the adversaries are at one, and no conclusions are so likely as those thus

* The Christ of History: an Argument grounded in the Facts of his Life on Earth. By JOHN YOUNG, M.A.

arrived at, to find a place among the established and irreversible judgments of a lifetime.

Such an argument Mr. Young essays to conduct on a question of the highest moment. Consenting to take the minimum of fact which any sane scepticism will grant him concerning the earthly life of Christ, he shows, by a process of cumulative reasoning, that even this cannot fairly be accounted for except on the supposition that Jesus had 'more immediate, constant, and perfect access to the Infinite Fountain of Being, than was possible to the constitution of a mere creature.' Our author will place himself, for the sake of argument, at the zero of rationalism. Let there be only some such substratum of fact in the Gospels as even a Strauss is compelled to allow-let the miracle, if you please, be mere imagination-let the historian be liable, like all others, to mistake,—exclude as you will authoritativeness and supernaturalism,-grant only that whereupon all are agreed, the actual existence of Christ about the time professed, and that his life was, on the whole, what the Evangelists describe it, and that admission gives a humanity inexplicable except on the ground of Divinity. Such is the proposition which Mr. Young enunciates and proceeds straightway to prove.

We are glad to see the question approached from this side-to find a field of argument so little wrought undertaken by a competent hand. Great is the caution requisite, if a reasoner on such ground would avoid assuming unawares what lies beyond the premises to which he has reduced himself. Many are the temptations to point out difficulties and follow out collateral arguments which suggest themselves so invitingly at every turn of the road. The end must be distinctly seen from the beginning, and the one object kept rigorously in view through every step he takes. The author possesses the candour, the steadiness, and self-control requisite for the worthy enterprise to which he has braced his powers. His division of the subject is judicious and well-sustained; his style lucid and masculine. His sentences go with girded loins. His German studies are not betrayed by cloudiness of thought or

uncouth long-windedness of speech. Neither is he guilty of that hortatory diffuseness or conventional rhetoric which too often enfeebles or vulgarizes our English treatment of religious topics.

The argument is arranged in three books:-First, The outer conditions of the life of Christ; Second, The work of Christ among men; Third, The spiritual individuality of Christ. We shall now follow Mr. Young over the ground thus marked out, and see in what way he expands the modicum of material allowed him toward his great conclusion, and how his logic, Dido-like, makes the poor bull's-hide of land enclose an affluent and many-towered Carthage.

To commence then with the outer conditions of the life of Christ, his social position is the first fact which presents itself for scrutiny. We see a poor artisan brought up among humble illiterate folk, and destitute alike of the culture or of the patronage which might have raised him from this obscurity to power and distinction. Character is no random product-a capricious violation of the harmony between cause and effect. The most original minds must bear some impress of their origin and of their age. Yet if we except the surmise in the heart of his mother (the cause of which must for the present argument be passed by, as professedly supernatural), there was nothing in his position to encourage the carpenter's son to anticipate greatness,-everything rather to quench aspiration had it been awakened. In the social circumstances surrounding Christ, there was nothing capable of building him up to the man he afterwards became. Such a product, from such causes, is an inexplicable anomaly, if he were simply one of us.

The shortness of his earthly course must be remembered. He dies at the age of thirty-three, after a public career of only three years,―dies, as the sceptic allows, because the world would tolerate him no longer, because he would not abandon his mission. We cannot indeed measure life by the clock. Striplings have died Methuselahs in intellect. Youth has originated mighty movements among men. But, for the purpose of social regeneration, time to mature a plan, or at least, adequately to transmit an impulse, is