LITTLE GREAT MEN. E VERY one must have noticed the great tendency that exists now-a-days among the smaller fry of the scientific and literary worlds to belittle the labours and the results of men who are, in verity, Tritons among these minnows. There seems to be no choice for writers who cannot be great scholars themselves, but to carp at those whose bigger brains and better directed industry have really achieved something for mankind: the position of appreciation from a lower level does not seem to occur to them; and every modern hod-bearing builder, just capable of running up a temporary house whose faults of construction are hidden with plaster and stucco, deems himself qualified to squint askance up the Pyramids and hint that the masonry, to say nothing of the design, of Cheops is no better than it should be, while he astonishes his own little circle of groundlings with an "an I would, I could." I have lately learned from men of this stamp some surprising things in Art and Science. It was new to me, I confess, that Turner, of all men the most faithful lover and follower of Nature, and the most rewarded by her for that love and that pursuit, got his designs from letting children mix coloured beads together or by running damp colours promiscuously over his palate. With all the shifting imagery of cloud-scape and sea-scape before him, was Turner likely to have stooped to this? I could have marked this anecdote as a lying clot of dirt, flung from below, without the positive evidence afforded by the vast and inimitable series of sketches, still extant in every stage of finish, which he has left behind him to attest the fatherhood of his paintings and redeem them from such an imputation of bastardy. All our great men are compelled in these times to take some particular department of truth under their cognisance. Science has extended its researches so far that another Verulam, if we had him, would have to drop that proud motto, "I have taken all Nature to be my Province." Spencer, perhaps, is the most extended thinker of the day and the one whose range is widest; but the ordinary leaders of thought wisely confine themselves each to his own branch, knowing full well that there is more than he can master there; feeling that his investigation will aid the labourers in cognate fields of thought; and that when, for purposes of generalisation and of checking his own results, he desires to go outside his own section of nature, it will be better for him to accept the laws laid down by other specialists, than to plunge into the experimental verification of their rules at the cost of much precious time and energy. But while Huxley or Tyndall would not think of turning aside to impugn the accuracy of Dr. Hooker's account of a foreign flora they had never seen, and while the great botanist in turn would not care to controvert Max Müller's history of some obscure Semitic dialect, the ordinary little great scholar of the day (save the mark !) will rush in and set all four right all round! A political economist, like Mill, may expose as ludicrous the old Mercantile System, and the theory that whatever cause operated to keep cash in the country increased its wealth (no matter what the drain upon its resources might be), and that any state of things that tended to send gold away was ruinous, whatever other commodities might flow in to take its place. No modern student of that science will venture to support the demolished theorem, but I will venture to predict that yesterday, to-day, and tomorrow, Canadian editors and Canadian politicians will be found depicting to a people not uneducated in political economy, the hard cash disappearing over the border-line and carrying Canada's prosperity away with it. It was only the other day that a Professor * in a Canadian University, whose fame has not yet reached the dimensions attained by either Spencer or Tyndall, dubbed the latter a Philistine; kindly explaining that this term implied "impenetrability to ideas be * "Professor Tyndall's Materialism." By Prof. Watson, March number of CANADIAN MONTHLY, to prevent much risk of a rejoinder from any German scholar of notoriety. yond the more or less limited circle of con- But the above examples sink almost into insignificance by the side of Professor Gregg, whose lecture on the Mosaic Authority of Deuteronomy set my mind at work upon this subject. His views are so refreshingly amusing, and at times so ingenuously open as to his own want of study of the subject, that I hope I may be permitted to run shortly over them. The difficulty is just this: Ewald and a host of other authorities, the leading lights among modern Hebraists, and by Hebraists I mean those who have studied the history, customs, manners, and literature of the nation, as well as its mere naked language,―have come to the conclusion, after mature deliberation, that Moses did not write the fifth book of the Pentateuch. It would not be necessary for my present purpose, even if I had the material before me, to give the grounds and reasons they adduce for this belief. It is enough to say that most of the best critics concede that their position is unassailable, and that even those who differ from them yet allow that they are of all men the best qualified to speak upon such a subject. One would have thought that the evil fate which Boyle and Temple met with when they impugned the justice of Bentley's criticism upon the Epistles of Phalaris, would have taught all minor scholastic lights not to attack too rashly the soundness of the views held by men confessedly occupying the first rank in their profession; but it is not so. Luckily for himself, Professor Gregg keeps at a sufficient remove from the arcana of his subject In the first place, how touchingly candid is the admission our Professor makes, that the last chapter, recording the death of Moses, I may have been written by some one else! There is an air, too, of coy reluctance about even this concession, as if the lecturer were aware how much his position is weakened by it! For the same hand that penned this finish may have added other parts, may have strung together traditions or even fragments of a previous record, originally compiled by one or more writers of different dates, thus accounting for the clear internal evidence detected by Ewald, and by others before him, that parts of the book in question were the work of a man who called his God by the name Elohim, and the rest by one who worshipped the Lord Jehovah, no mere verbal distinction, but one which coincides with two varying phases of belief in God and two comparatively distinct periods. Professor Gregg then intimates that "novery profound scholarship is absolutely required" to settle this vexed question. According to him, "a diligent, judicious, devout student of a good English translation of the Scriptures, is fairly competent. to dis-cuss and pronounce a decision on the controversy, and is just as likely to arrive at a right conclusion as are those who make a great parade of scholarship," &c., &c. Now this flattery of your audience, "who do not pretend to be profoundly versed in oriental literature," will not deceive many. I, for one, am no Hebraist, but it does not require a knowledge of the mysterious vowel points to teach me that no common-sense student of our authorised version can pronounce the dogmatic decision which he is asked to do. When Niebuhr first analysed the legendary history of Rome and traced it back to its original ballads and oral traditions, he met with much opposition from pedants, but I have yet to learn that anybody ventured to say that the ordinary English reader of a translation of Livy could have adduced reasons against which Niebuhr's learned objections would not have "a feather's weight." And how much greater is the difficulty in this case. Adopting for the purpose of the argument the ordinary Biblical chronology, the question here is as follows: Professor Gregg affirms that Deuteronomy was written in the year 1451 B.C. Ewald, on the contrary, says it was written in the reigns of Uzziah (B.C. 810), Manasseh (B.C. 698), and Josiah (B.C. 642). But Ewald derives his argument from the Hebrew text, and Professor Gregg considers the English version, translated A.D. 1604-1611, sufficient to confute him with. Now, let us put a parallel case, so as to catch the ear unskilled in Hebrew and which may not fully fathom the enormity of the Professor's mistake. Taking the average of the three dates given by Ewald, we find the date of the production of the book in question would be some 750 years later on his hypothesis than it is on the Mosaic theory. Now, let us suppose that the history of our own English literature depended on the internal evidence it affords, and that, in the year of grace 2300, Macaulay's New Zealander undertook to translate those volumes of it which had survived. We will suppose that he did it faithfully and well according to the best of his lights, making no doubt sad hash of our idioms, and translating our birds and beasts pretty freely into the names of his own very distinct fauna. Now, we will further imagine that two schools of criticism exist in New Zealand, one of which (the heretical crew) affirms that "King Lear" was written by an unknown author in the sixteenth century, while the other (orthodox to the backbone) propounds the theory that because the scene is laid in England in shadowy prehistoric times we must date it back to A.D. 850 at least, or somewhere in the mists of the Heptarchy. The school of the unfaithful appeal to language and local allusions, to comparisons with admittedly sixteenth century works, and claim to number among their ranks the ablest New Zealand scholars in the English tongue in all its varying dialects, from the days of Cadmon to those of Elizabeth. No matter! The great Greggaki-Wai-Kato, champion of orthodoxy in general and of this book in particular, issues his fiat that the faithful need go no further than their own admirable Zealandese version to confound these abominable heretics and to confute their disturbingly new views and opinions. How well the professor's arguments would chime in! I can hear him deliver this crushing exordium: "Isn't it 'likely,' judging from the brutal manners of these ancient Britons and Anglo-Saxons, that Lear's daughters would be unkind to him? There is at least a likelihood' that Lear would be very angry with them. Then is it not moreover likely' that his brain would give way, and in that case what would be more natural than the words we find put in his mouth? The theorists who attribute this book to a man who lived seven or eight hundred years afterwards 'virtually admit this likelihood, for it cannot be supposed that any writer would have put his thoughts into the mouth of' Lear, 'unless there was at least some likelihood that the real Lear might have spoken as the imaginary one is made to speak.'” O. great is the power of your oratory, GreggakiWai-Kato; but do they teach logic in your New Zealand universities in the year of grace 2300? As to the objections to the dramatic use of Moses' name, I suppose the worthy Professor adheres fully to the belief that Moses wrote Genesis, and with his usual candour will admit that "probably" he was not personally present at all the scenes and incidents he there depicts. Is there nothing dramatic in the scenes of patriarchal life? Nothing dramatic in old Isaac's querulous questionings as he feels the hands of Jacob, or in Esau's passionate wailing when he finds his brother has supplanted him a second time? If not, I do not know what the word “dramatic" means, and must suppose that Professor Gregg considers no writing is dramatical unless the name of each character is printed before his speech and the entrances and exits are marked in italics and between brackets. But if Professor Gregg concedes that Moses did write Genesis dramatically, not acting as a mere scribe to the Spirit in copying out the very words that Isaac or that Joseph used (for in that event the merest dullard who could hold a pen might as well have been the inditer), but that, moved by God to portray the fortunes of his race from the earliest times, he had set himself to work, employing the genius, the learning, and the industry God had given him, to embody all the floating traditions, all the few written records that might have been committed to papyrus since Jacob came down into Egypt, and in so doing had clothed those dry bones of fact with that love and tenderness which yet make us weep with Joseph over hisreturning and forgiven brethren,-if, I say, we are to admit that Moses blamelessly put his words in the mouths of the patriarchs, and was only careful not to obscure the great moral lessons which the spirit of God pointed out to him in their actions, how then can we blame the anonymous writers of Deuteronomy if they acted in the same way towards Moses ? In neither case was there any deception or intention to deceive at the time. It must have seemed a pious work to collect together such fragments of the written or unwritten words of Moses as were extant at the time of Josiah, and fuse them into a new volume. The result of that work has probably been the preservation of what would otherwise have been lost, a risk it had already run several times. It may be fairly conjectured that it was the discovery of the book of the law by Hilkiah in the same reign, after it had been entirely forgotten, in some nook of the temple, that supplied the impulse and possibly in part the material for this compilation. For I am quite willing to concede that several of the commandments it contains were known long before the time of the kings. But what then? Does it follow, as Professor Gregg affirms, that therefore the book in question was in existence from the time of Moses downwards? Not at all. It merely shows that these particular commands were known, and had been handed down somehow, and proves nothing as to the existence of the book as a whole, which is the point in dispute. Of all the Professor's other arguments, I will now only answer one, which is addressed rather to the over pious than to the over clever. As, however, the first class perhaps outnumbers the latter, and as the point he attempts to make is very taking to the untrained eye, I will briefly reply to it. Quoting the conversation between our Lord and the Sadducees about the resurrection, he says that our Saviour, by his not contradicting the Sadducee when the latter said, "Moses wrote unto us," and so on, "virtually professed to believe that the law in Deuteronomy was of divine authority and that it was written by Moses." Now, even if the context really bore out this contention, which it does not, how low a view does this take of our Saviour's mission! Admittedly, at that date, the book of Deuteronomy was treated in common parlance as the work of Moses. What then was our Saviour to do? Was He to unravel the knot of error which the evil ingenuity of the Sadducees had extracted out of an old law, by appealing as He did appeal to the eternal verities of which God had himself witnessed to Moses? Or was He, as Professor Gregg it seems would have had Him do,-was He to stop at the threshold of the question, evade the one point on which the clustering multitude were thirsting for His authoritative decision, and, turning aside, to plunge into a question of literature and history, offending alike at one blow, both those who believed and those who disbelieved in a life after death, by thus shocking one of their most prejudiced national opinions?* The Professor admits that, up to the time of the Reformation, literary criticism was asleep. It accepted the forged letters of Clement and Ignatius, many of the spurious and apocryphal books of Scripture, and the Mosaic authority of Deuteronomy alike. Mr. Gregg goes hand-in-hand with modern thought in rejecting most of these, but he still clings to the last volume of the Pentateuch. But surely it is argument run mad when he adduces the opinion of the world up to the time of the revival of learning as evidence in support of his theory as to Deuteronomy, and rejects it entirely as unworthy of weigh as to the authenticity of the other documents! I think I have said enough to show that a reliance on the best modern criticism as to the authorship of the books which compose our Bible is by no means incompatible with a firm belief in the golden threa of Divine teaching that runs through them all. It is much to be hoped that men like Professor Gregg may not succeed in inducing the youth of our universities to array themselves in opposition to modern research and enquiry, in the vain idea that these are forces antagonistic to Christianity, and that the Truth needs to be shielded by─Professor Gregg. F. R. read De Quincey's postscript to his "System of the * If Professor Gregg will kindly look up and Heavens as revealed by Lord Rosse's telescope," he will find that modern critics are by no means "driven to desperate shifts by the exigencies of be even a permissible function in a Divine messenger their position" in this respect, and that it could not to correct other men's errors in science or history. ANCIENT SOCIETY.* TH HE archæology contained in the Book of Genesis recognizes an evolution in the progress of humanity. There is the simple story of a first pair living upon the fruits of the earth, to whom is granted that dominion over the animal creation which a great poet laments has "broken nature's social union;" there is mention of the first smith, the first minstrel, and the first mighty hunter. There is mention of sexual relations condemned by the laws of the people to whom the narrative was given. The constitution of Israel, moulded by a Sheikh of Midian, the existence of blood-feud, and the means provided for condonation of manslaughter and the restoration of the offender to society, the land law and marriage law, unfolded in the later books of the Pentateuch, suggest themselves as worthy of study in the light of advancing knowledge of archaic institutions. But the transition of the narrative from the mythic period of the paradisial to the patriarchal state, though it covers an epoch of acknowledged length, is too rapid. The hint of ages of sin and darkness is all that is given, and we turn from its meagre outlines to the study of flint implements and crania, to broken pot sherds and the barrows of the ancient dead, to the laws, folk-lore, customs, and languages of living savages, for information of the "phases of all forms" through which man has come, up from the hole of the pit whence he was digged, to the state of civilization. The branch of enquiry most interesting to the general reader is that which deals with the growth of social and political institutions, and which has been discussed by Mr. Her bert Spencer from the a priori standpoint of his philosophical system, and by Sir Henry Maine as a proper legal study. Mr. Morgan's work deals with social systems revealed to him during the progress of his celebrated researches into the systems of consanguinity and affinity of the Human Family, the results of which are given in one of the * Ancient Society; or, Researches in the lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization. By Lewis H. Morgan, LL.D. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1877. ponderous quartos published by the Smithsonian Institute. In little more than half the time from the foundation of the Roman city until the appearance of the lofty figure of the first Cæsar (the highest product of Roman civilization as politician, statesman, and warrior) there has been established on the North American continent a civilizing power, in comparison with whose forces the might and majesty of imperial Rome are of significance merely to point a political moral. Before the hurrying concourse of the chariot wheels of the invading races the aborigines have been swept as withered leaves before the gale. The dry North American atmosphere is said to be so charged with electricity that the nervous activity it imparts wastes the reproductive powers, and that new migrations will be constantly required to feed the stream of living action destined here to cherish the earth, to enlarge the bounds of freedom, and to exalt the dominion of man over the forces of nature. May we not enquire if this new habitat of civilized man, endowed with such a natural stimulus of human development, did not also impart by its kindly air, by its rigours of heat and cold, and by the teeming fatness of its soil, some special activities for the elevation of its native peoples? What were the links which made the tribal bond? what rights and duties had their origin in tribal relations? and in what manner were they sanctioned by the law of tribal custom? Was the simple tribal code like to the rules binding upon uncivilized men under similar conditions elsewhere? Had it any inherent force or expansive energy, giving a foretaste of good things to come? Can we discern in the rituals, the folk-lore, the customs of the aborigines, any gleams of that Light over the Valley of the Shadow of Death, the Dayspring from on High, the Dawn of the evergrowing sway of Moral Order? The central truth of Buddhism offers the only key for unlocking the mystery of human life and history: "The revolutions of matter, the destructions and renovations of the universe, are but the play of the transcendent forces of moral order and destiny, the product of moral determinations. Out of these |