religious faith. There is one point of great difference. The former finds its strength in the minuteness of its application. The more thoroughly and definitely it can explain every little fact, the more perfect is it. The science of faith finds its strength in the largeness of its application. It believes that all is for the best. Experience, in many ways, confirms this faith; but when it attempts to show, in regard to every thing, just how it is for the best, it falls into guesses and dreams. Its scope, in regard to details, is rather practical than theoretical. It is safer when it urges that we should make the best of this and that, than when it undertakes to say precisely what God meant by this or that; although, now and then, even this last flashes into the light of certainty. But though the science of faith is, like physical science, confined within circumscribed limits, yet our outward life and our inward life are both made up largely of what is not strictly scientific. It is stated, I know not with what truth, that the greatest naturalist of the country never makes a prophecy in regard to the weather, for the reason that the science of meteorology is not in a state to justify such prophecy. In fact we have no scientific right to predict a change of weather; yet much of our life is shaped and guided by such foreknowledge. So, in our spiritual life, we may admit much that is not absolutely scientific, provided it does not contradict the fundamental principles of the science of faith. There is left space for the play of imagination, for the dreams of hope. One individual, or one class of individuals, will need and will use this privilege more than another. One, for instance, will look forward with a simple and quiet faith into the future, content to know simply that love is immortal and infinite; another will love to shape a heaven, and fill it with fair shapes of blessedness. Thus, while one may be calm in the simplicity of his great hope, the other may be buoyant and enthusiastic, fired by the prospect that stretches in clear outline and coloring before him. They are like an elder and a younger brother approaching together the home they love. One walks with quiet and sober tread; the other leaps and dances along his way. The older seems to the younger cold and indifferent; the younger seems to the older childish and uncontrolled. But they are brothers. With equal love and equal longing they are approaching the same home, and the same love is waiting to greet them both. ART. VI.-GEORGE RAPALL NOYES. THE recent death of Professor Noyes, on the third of June just past, invites a few words in commemoration of his great service in the field of sacred letters, which for forty years has made him eminent as a critical interpreter of the Scriptures, and for twenty-eight as a faithful and honored instructor in the Cambridge Divinity School. It was during his residence in Cambridge, as tutor in the University, that our late teacher and friend had laid out the line of study which he followed so strictly and persistently, almost to the hour of his death, and had already reaped the first fruits of it in his earliest published work, the Translation of the Book of Job. His life as minister of a country parish -first in Brookfield, from 1827 to 1834; afterwards in Petersham till 1840-did not interfere with that special task of scholarship he had prescribed to himself. He was, as we learn from his associates of that date, a faithful and diligent pastor, systematic in the performance of his duties, and commanding respect by the purity, dignity, and force of a character already well matured. As a scholar, his rank was taken from the start. His precise and accurate habits of thought; his resources of erudition, more rare then than now; his free use of German authorities in the critical handling of his task; the scrupulous honesty with which, while not insensible to sacred association or literary charm, he was ready to sacrifice every thing at need to a clear and faithful rendering of his text, appeared in his "Amended Version of the Book of Job," first published in 1827, which placed him at once among the very foremost of that honorable company of scholars, led by Buckminster and graced with the names of Everett, Palfrey, and Norton. The department which he had chosen he marked so thoroughly as his own in this publication, that no other name has been thought of in comparison; and it does not seem to have occurred to any other to match himself against him in that field. The labors so begun were continued during his thirteen years' pastorate, covering the entire second half of the Old-Testament writings, that is, the translation and exposition of all the Hebrew Bible, excepting the strictly historical books. - The qualities of learning and intellectual honesty, which made the publication of these works an era in Biblical scholarship among us, demanded the exercise, at that time, of no mean order of courage. If it was a sacrifice of pious taste on the altar of truth to abandon such a phrase as "Worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness," or "He giveth his beloved sleep," or "I know that my Redeemer liveth," it was a challenge to a still harsher judgment, when opinions, deeply imbedded in dogma, and wrought in many minds into the very substance of Christian faith, had to be renounced. A critical study of the Hebrew prophets, with the best helps of modern erudition, led steadily and soon to the conviction, that the supposed prediction of Jesus as a personal Messiah came from the misinterpreting of a few scattered passages, and had no ground in a right understanding of the record. For the publication of this opinion in the "Christian Examiner" of July, 1834, Dr. Noyes was threatened by the State AttorneyGeneral with prosecution under the old statute of Massachusetts against blasphemy. This threat stands as a waymark of the old theological intolerance, which the last thirty year advance in critical study has rendered a mere curiosity of the past; and to this advance no one has rendered more patient, more consistent, more honorable service than he. The eminence of his position as critic and expounder, the clear and positive quality of his thought, with his early experience as college tutor," made his the one fit name to be From 1825 to 1827, commencing three years after his graduation from the Divinity School. placed in the succession after that of Dr. Palfrey, the excellent and accomplished teacher of sacred literature in the Cambridge School. His labors here began in 1840; so that his term of service has lasted to within a month of the close of the twenty-eighth academical year. During this long period, perhaps the most interesting thing to witness has been his steady growth in the respect and attachment of the young men under his charge. There was a slight shade of prejudice at first, moved by something narrow and rigid in his habits of thinking; something at times austere, caustic, and dry in his forms of speech. There is an age and there is a cast of mind that likes what is sentimental and a little vague; which is caught by the sympathetic fancy of Furness's interpretation, and resents a ruder and drier style of criticism; which delights in the eloquent mysticism of Coleridge's speculations, and chafes at the hard realisms of an honest scholar like Professor Noyes. And in the narrow line of study of the Hebrew text and exposition of the gospel record, in which we first came to know him nearly, he was matched, somewhat at a disadvantage, with the tender seriousness, the personal attractiveness, the busy, patient, affectionate activity, the high view of personal duty, the sacred and deep sense of professional obligation, which gave so peculiar a charm to the instructions of Henry Ware; or with the literary wealth, the wide mental sympathy, the liberal and diffuse imparting from large stores of general learning, the generous and easy communicating of personal sympathy, which characterized what was best in the labors of his successor. But, as Dr. Noyes's method in his own studies was singularly steady and persistent, so was his growth in the appreciation and honor of his classes. There was noticeable, first, a decision, definiteness, and frankness in presenting the results of critical investigation; a freedom from theological bias or dogmatic prepossession; a fearless confidence in the power of truth in the open field, outside the limits and defences of a particular literary theory about the sacred books, which all told of a fresh intellectual atmosphere. Results as to the date and composition of the Pentateuch, for example, which Mr. Nor ton, with characteristic caution, published not till long after, in annotations to a work of great cost and learning, made the substance of frank and familiar expositions, in the early stages of theological study; so that it was impossible for an intelligent pupil of Dr. Noyes to feel, ever after, that timidity and dread, as to questions of canonical authorship, which still hedge round the discussion of these topics. His own opinions, on matters both critical and doctrinal, were rather positive and precise, and were far enough from being hastily radical. And there was an advantage in this which young men were not slow to recognize, if only by way of relief and counterpoise to the vacillating, loose, chaotic mood into which one is apt to be cast, at a period in life when all his opinions on topics the nearest to conscience, the most sacred in the eye of faith, the most precious from cherished association, are cut loose to abide the test of analysis, perhaps to meet the shock of controversy. The clear, patient, precise, methodical restatement of a fixed order of opinion, may seem a little limited and narrow, as if its course was cut and its boundaries marked by prejudice, and not by pure reason. But it may be doubted, after all, whether a trained and resolute will in an instructor is not as valuable as a stored and cultivated mind, that is, when they exist in harmony together. One wants a point of rest somewhere, outside of him; and will often thank what seemed the obstinate self-will of a preceptor, who has not allowed too free a course to his inductive speculations. Such a point of rest was found in the mental integrity, the scrupulous accuracy, the wary, keen, and balanced temper of Professor Noyes. But with it there was a great and growing generosity of mind, an openness to intellectual sympathy and friendliness, a respect for honest opinion, a loyalty to mental freedom, which made him more and more the vindicator and champion of liberal thought, when that seemed challenged and feared, as much as he was the representative of clear, sober, and devout thought, if that ever seemed in danger from random and loose generalizing. One's faith, at bottom, is the growth of one's whole moral and spiritual nature, not the result of set mental |
