God, and as the accuser or the devil, has relation to man. His power as fallen bespeaks the height of his original power. He dared to pit himself against the Son of God. When he said, "All this is given to me," we are not authorised in denying his truth. Jesus also called him the "prince of this world." Whether this world was his fief until he ceased to be vassal, or not, he inhabits a sphere higher than ours, though not distant from it, the heavenly places, and over that part of the world which has not yet felt the beneficent influence of Christ he exerts an incalculable power.

Here Dr. Godet digresses to discuss the theory that the Biblical account of angels was derived from the contact of the Jews with Babylonian and Persian teaching during the captivity. Those religions taught seven archangels, not three and no doubt the later Jewish documents reproduce them. But the Scripture is independent of these fables. Already the two supreme angels of light were companions of Jehovah when He visited Abraham; the book of Genesis was written long before the captivity, and, as to the archangel whom it discloses to us as the chief of the empire of darkness, it does not make him a god, as the religions of the East do, but a poor creature trembling before God, and all the more miserable because he had been so highly endowed.

The last question discussed is the most important the relations of the angels with mankind. Here Dr. Godet passes beyond the limits which we ordinarily prescribe to our speculation; but it will be found that there is very much in Scripture to warrant every inference that he deduces from analogy. His analogy begins with the design of God to unite the human race into one by the publication of the Gospel. Till the coming of Jesus Christ, the people of Israel seemed separated by a wall of brass from all other nations. The Greeks and the Romans occupied the foreground of the scene; Israel, in its isolated position, appeared to sustain no relation to these great actors in history. Nevertheless, a profound study will give us to see that the development of these peoples proceeded, in a multitude of points, step by step with that of the people of God. History progressed simultaneously with the always increasing influence of this unique people; until the moment came when, the barrier falling away, the Jewish and the Gentile peoples united. This union took place in the Church, and ended ancient history. It was predicted in Scripture; for God had, from the beginning, contemplated the unity of the human race in the Gospel.

So it is with the still vaster unity in God's universe, which will be consummated at the second appearing of the same Jesus Christ. The temptation and the fall of the first man, and, up to a certain point, the very creation of humanity, were the first facts which attest the relation existing between the two spheres. If Satan was really, in his original state, the monarch to whom had been confided the government of this earth, there is but one conclusion to be drawn from the earth's subjection to man,-that God substituted man for

Satan as the ruler of the earth, and that, in creating man, He gave Satan a successor and a rival. He was a vassal in revolt, and his kingdom was given to another. Hence his zeal to turn man from his course. The defection of man, however, has served only to glorify yet more the wisdom of God's plan. What is the course adopted by the Supreme? To conquer the enemy He must confound him; and to do this is to show Himself not stronger merely, but more good. The archangel made himself god; the Son of God becomes man. The Word is made flesh. Under the form of the most humble of all human lives He realised that absolute submission which the archangel and the first man refused. Satan finds in humanity a power or principle which resists him. He hastens to meet this enemy. As he had conquered in the garden of abundance, he thinks to conquer in the garden of privation. But he meets a conqueror. Jesus remains firm, notwithstanding all his suggestions and his offers. He holds fast His relation to God; to God, for the conservation of his physical existence; to God, for the means of establishing His kingdom below; to God, for the hour when His miracles are to be accomplished. The whole course of His ministry was only the confirmation of that dependence to which He was pledged in the desert at the outset. And, after He had consummated His expiatory and restoring work, He was crowned and installed as the new sovereign of the earth. Then there was a change of dynasty (Jno. xii. 31); the world passed to another Master. Satan was despoiled; and his right of sovereignty was transmitted to Jesus Christ, who transmitted it in turn to humanity, His family, in whose name and as whose representative He wrestled, obeyed, and vanquished. Such a transmission was possible in virtue of that solidarity of the species which distinguishes man from angels.

In the struggle between the evil angels and the Kingdom of Christ the holy angels take a part both contemplative and active. Throughout all times down to the consummation of the great sacrifice they have studied to penetrate the abyss of the Divine mystery. But they are actors also. The greatest do not disdain to attend upon and aid the weakest of the Lord's people. This Our Lord's words mean, though He may not intend to signify that every human being has his own attendant angel. It is an idle question to ask whether God cannot help us without the intervention of ministering spirits. He values love too highly, it being His own essence, not to take all means to make it more abundant, as between Himself and His creatures, so among His creatures mutually. His love towards all, the love of all towards Him, of all towards all, makes the glory of His Kingdom. Finally, the relation between men and angels will be sealed by mutual judgment: men will judge the rebellious angels; and the good angels, Our Lord tells us, will separate the good from the evil among men. And, after each of these two classes of beings shall have thus rendered homage to the Divine sanctity in relation to the other, the end of the ways of God towards both shall be realised. God will unite all under

Christ the Head. And, as the two great currents of the ancient world, the Jews and the Gentiles, were, after successive approaches, at last united in the Church, so the two great classes of beings of whom the moral universe is composed, men and angels, will, after a series of benevolent relations, submit in concert to the sceptre of Jesus Christ, the Creator and Lord of angels, the Creator and Lord and Saviour of men, the Judge of both and all.

Much of this may appear Miltonic and speculative, and certainly there is too much tendency here and there to forget in modern angelology the absoluteness of God in this victory over evil, and the fact that it is sin rather than Satan that Our Lord put away in the sacrifice of Himself. There is not much of this danger, however, in the present Essay. It tends to render very vivid and real the faith which Scripture requires us to hold in the existence and activity of angels. We see very forcibly the inductions of nature, the analogies of history, and the positive teachings of Scripture. We feel, after perusing it, that the domain of Divine grace and of the kingdom of light is, as it were, enlarged around us. As a view of the sky filled with stars wonderfully enlarges our conception of the physical universe, so faith in the existence of angels gives a character of infinity to the idea which we form of the Kingdom of God. So also it tends to give reality to one's sense of the horror of sin. Every temptation is seen to be a snare laid by a mortal enemy, every sin a complicity, not merely criminal but mad, with an odious and malignant power. And this faith exalts our view of the Redeemer's person and work. He is not only the Head of men, whom He has saved by His sorrows; He is also the Head of angels, to whom He has given existence and whom He conducts to their perfection.

It would have been pleasant to give a digest of some of the other essays in this volume: especially of one on the Four Greater Prophets, and of another on the Book of Job. But we must leave this graceful and original volume to our readers. Another series of studies on the New Testament may be expected soon to appear; and no doubt some of the topics that now divide Faith from Unbelief will receive in them worthy treatment.

MERLE D'AUBIGNE.

THE Evangelical Church has lost one of its brightest lights in the departure of Merle d'Aubigné. Down to his seventy-eighth year he laboured industriously in the good cause, and literally ended his work with his life. On Sunday, October 20th, he partook of the communion with his brethren in the Free Church of Geneva; he then conducted family worship in the evening with his own household, and retired to the rest from which, before morning, he passed to his eternal activity. His funeral attested how dear and how honoured he was in Switzerland; and everywhere throughout the Christian Protestant world there has been but one common feeling of reverent sorrow

awakened by the intelligence of his death. He was born on 16th August, 1794, at Geneva; his family having taken refuge from France on the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He studied theology in Geneva, and owed much of his early religious training to the influence of our Haldane. He continued his studies in Leipzig and Berlin without losing the ardour of his devotion. His spiritual conflicts were at first very severe, but they issued in a most remarkable conviction and a peace of soul which never afterwards was lost. Frederic Monod and he read together the Epistle to the Romans, and, like Augustine of old, found, in its twelfth and thirteenth chapters, the impulse to an entire and life-long consecration to God. Neander exerted an influence upon his theology, the effect of which is easily discernible in his writings. From 1818 to 1823 Merle exercised his ministry at Hamburg as preacher of the French Reformed Church; thence he removed to Brussels; in 1831 he was called to the professorship of theology in Geneva. While diligent in his professional duties, he was one of the foremost champions in the cause of the establishment and vindication of the Free Church in Geneva; indeed, the movement owed more to him than to any living man. As tutor of theology his whole remaining life approved his excellence, not only in Switzerland, but far beyond the limits of his own country. He was not only the teacher of his students, but their spiritual pastor; occasionally stern, but always exercising a holy and good influence.

D'Aubigné is best known to the world by his books. It was at the Wartburg Luther Festival of 1817 that he first conceived the idea of his great and life-long labours on the History of the Reformation. From 1835 to 1853 that history appeared in five successive volumes. With 1858 began a similar series on the History of the Reformation in the time of Calvin, the completion of which is yet to be expected, though the last volume on the movement of Reform in Italy and Spain he did not live to complete. The number of his other books, discourses, and essays is endless. But his popularity throughout the Protestant world rests upon the basis of his history. It has been translated into most European tongues, and in America few books rival it in general acceptance. The dramatic vigour and freshness of the style accounts for much; but the intense feeling for the great truths of the Reformation, combined with no slight sympathy for modern culture and progress, accounts for more. Doubtless, there are many points which need the correction of more thorough sifting; but, on the whole, the history of the Reformation will not have to be re-written. Dr. d'Aubigné's practical influence on his times was not, however, limited to his writings. His was a large and catholic soul. Nothing that affected the interests of Christ's kingdom was indifferent to him. He began his religious life under what we may call Methodistic influence; he received the tender and catholic impress of Neander's theology; and his Genevan Calvinism was much moulded and purified by these early and never-effaced elements of broad and catholic religion. The Evangelical Alliance had in him a never

weary supporter. He was the prop and the ornament of its gatherings. Those who have seen him on such occasions can never forget him. A rigorous Calvinist, and a firm champion of the perfect inspiration of the Scripture, he was, nevertheless, animated, as all men witnessed, by a catholicity which defied the restraints of his narrow creed. After all, it was his narrow and unbending creed, as some would call it, that gave him his immense power. There is nothing so mighty as a profound conviction of truth. D'Aubigné never wavered as to the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But it is the unanimous testimony of those who knew him that there were few men who were more free in speculative investigation as to points not decided by the infallible oracles. Finally, his religious life was the crown of his character. Among the many Evangelical champions who began their conflicts with the present century, and are now, one after another, passing away, none has left the memory of a more blameless and entirely Christian life. His humility was in proportion to his gifts. His charities were large; and his influence on all with whom, through a long life, he came in contact, was uniformly sacred. But we forbear. There will be, no doubt, some permanent record of the life and labours of a man who, beyond most others, may be said to have "borne the burden and heat of the day," of a day in which the Christian course has been more sorely tried than in any period since the Apostles. When that record shall appear, we shall be among the first to .welcome it.

FEUERBACH.

ON September 13th, departed this life Ludwig Feuerbach, in the sixty-eighth year of his age. The history of recent philosophy, rich as it is in destructive workers, has no name more conspicuous in destruction of all that men should hold dear than the name of Feuerbach. Forty years ago he passed through Hegelian Pantheism to sheer Atheism. In 1841 he published his Wesen des Christenthums, a blasphemous work, in which Atheism passes into Antitheism, that is, into direct enmity to the very idea of any God whatever. In it the religious principle is made the root of all evil; and truth is only to be found in the utter destruction of every so-called spiritual idea. As years rolled on he went further still: he abandoned the notion that man is in any sense a rational being; and proclaimed the fundamental principle of the new philosophy to be this, that "the body is the I, and only that which is sensible, or pertaining to sense, is real." As a deduction from this, external nature was placed above man, and this much admired philosopher uprooted the principles of all philosophy. The following are his own words, describing the process of his intellectual development: "God was my first thought, reason my second; man is my third and last thought." But what he understood by man appears from another and still better known apophthegm of his, "that which man eats man is." Hence, Feuerbach may be called the father of modern materialism; and, in Germany, at least, he has done more