and therefore its inspiration in making these claims! No more dangerous doctrine has ever come from the pen of men." ("Whither?" p. 73.) The supremely dangerous doctrine, he here virtually says, is that which conflicts with the authority and inspiration of Scripture. And again (p. 72): "It is not to be presumed that divine inspiration lifted the author above his age any more than was necessary to convey the divine revelation and the divine instruction with infallible certainty to mankind.” (Italics ours.)

Is this a mind which "regards the 'reason as the fixed point, the solid rock of truth, to which the Bible' must be adjusted at all hazards, and by all necessary modifications of faith"?

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The address says that the miracles which the Bible narrates have been used by apologists in a way prejudicial to the influence of the Bible. It does not intimate that miracles did not take place. On the contrary, it not only assumes their existence, but lays great stress on one class of them, theophanies, miracles in which God appeared among men, showing "his form in the midst of the elements of nature and his countenance in the faces of intelligent beings." We quote a passage from Whither?" in which his thought about the miraculous as centring in the Theophany is more fully given. "These manifestations of God in the forms of space and time and in the sphere of physical nature are of vast importance in the unfolding of divine revelation. These are the centres from which miracles and prophecies flow. If there were such theophanies or divine manifestations in the successive stages of divine revelation, then we should expect miracles in the physical world and prophecy in the world of man. If Jesus Christ is God manifest in the flesh, then prophecy and miracles are exactly what we should expect so long as He abode in the flesh in this world." (P. 279.)

Dr. Briggs's criticism of the ordinary apologetic use of miracles has regard only to the manner in which they are presented. The most important side of them, the ethical, is kept in the background. They are presented as wonders of power rather than of love. But "the miracles of the Bible are miracles of redemption."

The apologetic use of prophecy is also criticised for overworking (which has involved exaggerating) its marvelous side and overlooking its ethical. God does not write history beforehand with the aim of showing men his superior knowledge. His predictions are means for the accomplishments of loving ends, not the registered decrees of fate. has recalled more than one of his messages of woe." "He postpones judgment till men count him slack in the fulfillment of his promises and mock and jeer at his justice."

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We should have been glad to discuss Dr. Briggs's views of the scope and function of Biblical theology, and some of the doctrinal statements incidentally made in his address. But for this we have left ourselves no

room.

We will, therefore, not depart from the line of our thought, and

only move on in it a single step by quoting a sentence from his article on "Biblical Theology" in the "Presbyterian Review" for 1882, which sums up his conception of the science. It is good reading for those who deprecate the introduction of what they deem this rationalistic, destructive science into a Presbyterian school of theology.

"Biblical Theology would not present a mere conglomerate of heterogeneous material in a bundle of heterogeneous Hebrew literature, but would ascertain whether there is not some principle of organization; and it finds that principle in a supernatural divine revelation and communication of redemption in the successive covenants of grace extending through many centuries, operating through many minds, and in a great variety of literary styles, employing all the faculties of men and all the types of human nature, in order to the accomplishment of one massive, all-embracing, and everlasting Divine Word adapted to every age, every nation, every type of character, every temperament of mankind; the whole world."

THE PRELUDES OF HARPER'S FERRY.

CONCORD, MASS., December 22, 1890.

To the Editors of the Andover Review:

In a paper with the above title Mr. W. P. Garrison has seen fit to question, in your pages, the evidence upon which I stated in "The Life and Letters of John Brown (Roberts Brothers, Boston, 1885), that Brown "declared a definite plan of attacking slavery in one of its strongholds, by force, as early as 1839." It does not appear that Mr. Garrison himself possesses any evidence on this point, nor did he take the trouble to inquire what testimony I could bring forward. He preferred to impute to me extraordinary negligence or indifference respecting facts easily accessible to a biographer who had intimately known John Brown and his family for nearly thirty years; and that, too, concerning a matter which had repeatedly been given to the public, and never, so far as is known, questioned by any one before. Brown had himself mentioned it to many persons in his lifetime; his widow mentioned it to Colonel Higginson, Wendell Phillips, and other friends in 1859, and they made it public. So well was it known to those in Brown's confidence, that Theodore Parker said (writing from Rome to a friend in Boston), November 26, 1859: If I am rightly informed, he has cherished this scheme of liberating the slaves in Virginia for more than thirty years, and laid his plans when he was a land-surveyor in that very neighborhood where his gallows (I suppose) has since grown. This is in accordance with his whole character and life." Certainly it is; for John Brown, unlike Garrison and most of the abolitionists, was bred up from boyhood in antislavery principles. His father, Owen Brown, was an abolitionist as early as 1790; and John Brown had his own anti-slavery character fixed, as he tells us, by an incident occurring in 1812, when he was a boy of twelve.

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Mr. Garrison, proceeding from one conjecture to another, next says: As to the acquainting his family with his purpose of attacking slavery

in arms, in 1839, the proof is again wholly defective." Had he consulted Brown's biographer, or Brown's family, Mr. Garrison could have learned what this proof is. In order that your readers may judge how "defective" it is, I will add here a letter written to me by the oldest surviving son of John Brown, to whom I appealed for evidence, and who will no doubt be accepted as a witness, competent, truthful, and with no possible motive for misrepresentation. I may add that John Brown, Jr., made this statement to me as early as 1878, and that similar accounts of the transaction were given me, then, or at other times, by Mrs. Mary Brown, the widow of the martyr, and by his sons, Jason and Owen. F. B. SANBORN.

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PUT-IN-BAY, OHIO, December 12, 1890.

MY DEAR FRIEND, I have yours of the 6th inst., inclosing an article from the "Andover Review," written by Mr. Wendell Phillips Garrison, entitled The Preludes of Harper's Ferry. - I. John Brown, Practical Shepherd." In that article it appears that Mr. Garrison attempts to settle the question of how early father formed his plan to attack slavery by force. It is, of course, impossible for me to say when such idea and plan first entered his mind and became a purpose; but I can say with certainty that he first informed his family that he entertained such purpose while we were yet living in Franklin, O. (now called Kent), and before he went to Virginia in 1840 to survey the lands which had been donated by Arthur Tappan to Oberlin College; and this was certainly as early as 1839. The place and the circumstances where he first informed us of that purpose are as perfectly in my memory as any other event of my life. Father, mother, Jason, Owen, and I were, late in the evening, seated around the fire in the open fire-place of the kitchen, in the old Haymaker house, where we then lived; and there he first informed us of his determination to make war on slavery, — not such war as Mr. Garrison informs us 66 was equally the purpose of the non-resistant abolitionists," — but war by force and arms.

He said that he had long entertained such a purpose, that he believed it his duty to devote his life, if need be, to this object; which he made us fully to understand. After spending considerable time in setting forth, in most impressive language, the hopeless condition of the slave, he asked who of us were willing to make common cause with him, in doing all in our power to "break the jaws of the wicked, and pluck the spoil out of his teeth." Naming each of us in succession, "Are you, Mary, John, Jason, and Owen?" Receiving an affirmative answer from each, he kneeled in prayer, and all did the same. This posture in prayer impressed me greatly, as it was the first time I had ever known him to assume it. After prayer, he asked us to raise our right hands, and he then administered to us an oath, the exact terms of which I cannot recall, but in substance it bound us to secrecy and devotion to the purpose of fighting slavery, by force and arms, to the extent of our ability. According to Jason's recollection, Mr. Fayette, a colored theological student at Western Reserve College (Hudson, Ohio), was with us at the time, but of this I am not certain, - he was often at our house. As to the others, I know they were present; and if my affidavit could add any strength to my statement, I am ready to make it. At that time Jason was about sixteen years old, Owen between fourteen and fifteen, and I was between eighteen and nineteen years of age.

If there had not afterwards been an opening for slavery in Kansas, it is possible his attack upon it in the States would have been longer delayed ; but he was not the man to abandon the most deeply cherished purpose of his life. He would have played his hand, even if he played it alone.

Mr. Garrison's article, as an argument, may be stated in all its strength in these terms: "If John Brown entertained the purpose, as early as 1839, of making a forcible attack on slavery, he would have made a record of such purpose in his little memorandum-book. No such record can be found in his memorandum-book. Therefore John Brown did not entertain such purpose as early as 1839. Which is demonstrated."

The good taste displayed by Mr. Garrison in virtually attempting to impeach John Brown's own statements to you and others regarding this matter, as well as the statements of his family (two of them living witnesses), is not quite apparent. Perhaps this should be wholly charged to a great hunger for controversy; which, it is hoped, may henceforth find satisfaction without attacking the veracity of the sincere friends of his father and his family. Faithfully yours,

F. B. SANBORN, ESQ., Concord, Mass.

JOHN BROWN, JR.

ARCHEOLOGICAL NOTES.

AMERICAN antiquities have assumed a painful phase of late. They have been mixed with spectres of Indian plots and war. Nothing could be more vital than Miss Alice C. Fletcher's discussion of the Messiah Craze" at the second annual meeting of the American Folk-Lore Society, which was held at Columbia College Thanksgiving week. Cambridge, in its University papers, strikes a kindred note. Professor Bandelier's report of "Investigations among the Indians of the Southwest United States" makes the pages of the Archæological Institute glow. "The Indian religion bows to the season for its rites . . . and places animals on a footing of equality with mankind." The red man is a slave to witchcraft. His dances, now grotesque, now shocking, are his magical spell against his foes. The Spaniards always knew mischief was brewing when an Indian dance began. To the Ethnological Bureau at Washington, sorcery has been at the bottom of the recent troubles.

The

Bishop Hare ascribes the Messiah fanaticism to the heathen party among the red men. "Pressed by the advance of the whites on the one hand, and by the civilized and progressive party among the Indians on the other, the fiercer Indians find themselves cornered, and are like wild animals at bay. Hence the flame of delusion has been fanned with desperation. Savage seers have predicted the coming of the Son of God to avenge the wild Indian, and to swallow up the whites in an ea quake. Braves don the mysterious shirt and whirl like dervishesilliam ghost dance, crying, "The buffalo are coming." Finally they sw ormerly this state they see, or think they see, their departed friends an nbylonian Christ. How intense this struggle of Paganism to reinstatele says of pears in the speech of a prophet at Rosebud Indian Ager, cation of a Father in Heaven has placed a mark at each point of the First, a clay pipe, which lies at the setting of the sun, and r Sioux tribe; second, there is a holy arrow lying at the

and holding yielded the

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The per

represents the Cheyenne tribe; third, at the rising of the sun, there lies hail, representing the Arapahoe tribe; and, fourth, there lies a pipe and nice feather at the south, which represents the Crow tribe. There may be soldiers round you. Do not mind them. Continue the dance. If the soldiers surround you four deep, three of you upon whom I have put holy shirts will sing a song which I have taught you, and some of them will drop dead. Then the rest will start to run, but their horses will sink into the earth." To have unchained such furies of heathen superstition is a responsibility from which one can only hope a Christian government is as free as is demonstrably the Christian missionary.

That detestable word "Americanist" has come into new vogue, · first by the essays of Dr. D. G. Brinton, of Philadelphia, under that title. This does not prevent his book from being instructive and stimulating, though the author frankly owns himself, on certain points, at variance with most modern anthropologists. The most conspicuous of his heresies is the origination of American men on the American continent. Dr. Brinton attacks the theory of the Mongoloid genesis of the North American Indian. So vehement a broadside of facts and arguments must do execution. To him the red man and the mound-builder are one. Each has sprung from the soil.

The address of M. de Quatrefages at the Eighth International Congress of Americanists is in a totally different vein. That learned member of the Institute, on October 18, at Paris, said, categorically, “In my view, America was originially, and has always been, peopled by migrations from the Old World." Putting away dogmatic considerations in favor of scientific, and admitting that man is subject to all the general laws which control animals and plants, M. Quatrefages made a powerful argument in favor of America's colonization, like Polynesia's, from Asia. The Tertiary tribes crossed with the reindeer on the bridge of ice spanning Behring's Sea. Every year the winter rebuilds the bridge which connects East Cape with Cape Prince of Wales." The Aleutian Islands and Alaska formed a second route to tribes but imperfectly skilled in navigation. Through strata and their fossils, comparative craniology, linguistics, and ethnography, the Americanist will trace the itineraries of his ancestors, till some day the map of American migrations will be delineated from Asia to Greenland and Cape Horn. It is no small merit of the "Popular Science Monthly" of January, that it has translated this most remarkable paper of a remarkable gathering.

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"Were the Druids in America?" is a question which will seem preposterous to some. It is discussed by the American Antiquarian" of September last. The cremated body at the base of the Serpent Effigy near Quincy, Illinois, is the starting-point. With the Druids, fire-worship, sun-worship, serpent-worship, and phallic-worship formed a complex system which stamped itself on the megalithic monuments of the land. these things in America combine with the cremation of the dead, as reca. idic altars, to attest the influence of Druidic priests in pre-Columes? The writer inclines to the affirmative, though with hesita

pose o

Accordi

time, but

student a uch dubious speculations we pass to firmer ground in the eas of Inspiration. These were drawn out in a clear and the others, before the American Oriental Society, at its annual aung in Princeton, by President Martin, of the Imperial ColThe Taoist is a materialist, yet he believes in spirit-bodies was between e

strength to

was about si