already passed through fourteen editions, and was regarded by Lacordaire as in many respects a timely and able defense of Christianity against modern scepticism. Auguste Nicolas first discusses principles of Natural Theology, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul. His argument for the soul's immortality, drawn from conscience, from the sense of responsibility, and from the idea of justice, is expressed with remarkable clearness and force. From these preliminary disquisitions he passes to the necessity for a Revelation, and the evidences of a Revelation, both internal and external. Moses is interpreted in the light of science and of monumental remains; the question of miracles is discussed, and various doctrines of the scriptures are stated and defended. Under the head of the doctrines of Christianity, the author, as a devout Catholic, includes Purgatory, Confession, the Sacramental Presence, and other dogmas of the Church of Rome; yet his work is none the less interesting as the contribution of an able and learned Romanist to the defense of Christianity against the more recent forms of infidelity. Quite different in its spirit and aim is the work of Michel Nicolas. The volume consists of four essays: (1.) The sources and the formation of the Pentateuch; (2.) The general principles of Mosaïsm — subdivided into Jehovism and the Theocracy; (3.) Mosaïsm from the death of Joshua to the close of the monarchy; (4.) Hebrew Prophetism. Two of these essays originally appeared in the Revue Germanique; but these have been revised and elaborated for publication in their present form. The general point of view of the author is, that the institutes of Moses never were in full vigor among the Israelites, and that, except with a small portion of the people, Mosaism in its fundamental principles, was not known and adopted until the later times of the monarchy. The author makes a distinction between the age of the Mosaic ideas and institutions, and the period of the composition of the Pentateuch in its present form. The latter he insists cannot be carried back beyond the return from the Babylonian captivity. His argument is, that the Elohistic and the Jehovistic documents represent the two distinct currents of religious thought and feeling; and that these could never have been united as they appear in the Pentateuch, as if derived from a common source, until an age when the ancient opposition between Jehovism and Elohism, as types of religious parties in the nation, had entirely disappeared; when the divisions which had marked the whole history of Israel from the time of Moses to the end of the monarchy, were effaced and forgotten. Regarding Jehovism and the Theocracy as the fundamental principles of Mosaïsm, and the prophets as the adherents and expounders of that system, Nicolas interprets the controversies of the prophets with the idolatrous tendencies of the people, as the strife between the Jehovistic and Elohistic parties in the nation. Thus the men of the North whom Hezekiah summoned to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover, were Jehovists, and they showed their zeal for their more metaphysical conception of the Deity, by destroying the altars of the Elohists, who wor shipped one God, indeed, but through the medium of sensible images and the powers of nature. Under Manasseh, the Elohists returned to power, and slaughtered the prophets and other advocates of Jehovism. Josiah, in turn, declared for Jehovism; but under several of his successors, Elohism was again in the ascendant. Yet from the time of Hezekiah, the monotheistic doctrine which our author attributes to Moses under the name of Jehovism, steadily gained influence in the nation, and in the time of the captivity, it entirely superseded the rival system of Elohism. Then the way was prepared for harmonizing the two in the Pentateuch as we now possess it. We content ourselves with stating, without refuting, this theory of Nicolas, as a phase of recent Biblical criticism. His first essay gives a condensed and comprehensive view of the history of criticism upon the Pentateuch. But while Nicolas assigns to the Pentateuch in its present form no higher antiquity than the time of Ezra, he regards Moses as a real character, and his laws and institutions as a substantive reality. Indeed the dissatisfaction and distrust awakened by his first essay, are in a measure allayed, when he comes to treat of the general principles of Mosaïsm. He shows that the resemblance between the institutions of Moses and those of the Egyptians, is confined to mere outward matters of detail, while there is between them a radical diversity in principle and spirit. The author's discussion of monotheism and the theocracy contains much valuable thought. He traces the conception of God as the self-existent Jehovah, and also as the king of Israel, back to the original settlement of Israel in Canaan. Nicolas closes his work with a disquisition upon the Messianic element in Hebrew prophecy. Biblical students will find much to interest them in these Etudes Critiques, however they may differ from the author in his principles of criticism or in his general conclusions. Nicholas is Professor at Montauban, but sympathizes with the Tübingen school of criticism. THE EGYPTIAN CHRONICLES, by William Palmer, M. A., late Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford,' offers to the student in Egyptology a new scheme for the harmony of sacred and Egyptian chronology, based upon his reading of the "Old Chronicle," as preserved by Syncellus, who probably copied it from the Manetho of Africanus. Lepsius gives it in his Königsbuch der Alten Ægypten, in parallel columns with other ancient lists, so that one can see, at a glance, the relation of this table to the various tables based upon Manetho by his Greek critics and commentators. Bunsen speaks contemptuously of the "so-called old Egyptian Chronicle," as a fiction compiled by some Jewish or Christian impostor, even later than the third century. (Egypt's Place, i. 214.) This Chronicle, which Syncellus describes as the oldest Egyptian document written in the Greek language, is simply a list of dynasties, from the gods and demigods, down through the reigns of human kings, to the thirtieth dynasty. It begins as follows: 1 1 Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts. Two volumes, octavo; pp. 1053. "Time of Phtha there is none, as he shines equally by night and by day. "Haids, son of Phtha, reigned three myriads of years — 30,000. "Then Kpóvos, it is said, and all the other twelve gods, reigned years 2984. "Then eight demi-god kings reigned years 217. “And after them fifteen generations of the cynic cycle were registered in years 443;" — total, 34,644. Now begins the first proper historical dynasty of kings, the XVI. of Tanites according to the Chronicle; and the sum total of kings, from dyn. XVI. to dyn. xxx. inclusive, is 1881 years. This is the document which our author proposes to make the key to the chronology of Egypt. The date of the Chronicle itself is assigned to the fourth century B. C.: but Palmer supposes it to have been based upon a Hieratic scheme of chronology which dated from about B. C. 1322. The Chronicle is based upon "the idea of a succession of worlds, and of a certain period of time ending the existing world and introducing a new one." These periods of reconstruction were measured roundly by the Sothic cycle of 1461 Egyptian vague years; or, more strictly, "that particular space of 1461 years which begins from the conjunction of the movable new-year, or Thoth 1, with the heliacal rising of Syrius, fixed to July 20 of our Gregorian calendar for that part of Egypt which is just above Memphis." The last of these Sothic periods falling within the range of the Chronicle, dates from July 20, B. c. 1322, and would have closed in A. D. 139. But the theory of Mr. Palmer is, that with a view to make the conquest of Ochus in the fourth century before Christ mark a new reconstruction, the author of the Chronicle antedates this Sothic period, by throwing back its unfulfilled years into a fictitious period of the cynic cycle. He next resorts to various hypothetical processes to reduce the nominal and mixed years of the Chronicle to a true standard of time; he treats the immense periods of Sothic cycles as nominal years, to be reduced to months, by the following equation: 33,603 nominal years equal to 1 month and of a month each 2922 full Egyptian years [+341 fictitious] + 40 of the current cycle thrown up + 217 +443 more of the cycle thrown up + 1881 of kings to B. C. 345. This reduces the XXV Sothic cycles of 36,525 nominal to IV of 5844 full Egyptian years, coming down to A. D. 139. Then, after wandering through a perfect labyrinth of formulas reminding one of the pages of the Calculus, or of a millenarian computation of the prophetic numbers of Daniel and the Apocalypse — the author comes at length, on p. 892, to the conclusion that the Egyptian priests placed their epoch of the creation no further back than B. C. 5362. From this datum he constructs, in parallel columns, a harmony of Sacred History and the Egyptian Chronicles, down to A.D. 139; to which is added an Appendix on Babylonian and Assyrian antiquities. The work is a prodigious monument of industry, perseverance, and enthusiasm in the pursuit of a specialty; and though some of its interpretations are but clever guesses, it cannot be overlooked by the student of chronology. It is printed in elegant style, at a cost of about $10. = A supplementary edition of Petermann's Mittheilungen (published at Gotha by Justus Perthes) contains the first part of a geographical description of Inner Africa, compiled from the best sources, by A. Petermann and B. Hassenstein. This supplement will be completed in about five numbers; each number to contain, besides the letter-press, two sections of a map of Inner Africa, drawn on a large scale, and exhibiting the routes of all travellers who are quoted as authority. The map, when completed, will extend from 30° N. to 8° south of the equator, and from 12° to 35° E. from Greenwich. The first number, which has just come to hand, contains the Nubian desert, Darfur, Kordofan, etc. The text embraces Moritz v. Beurmann's travels through the Nubian desert in 1860, Theodore Kotschy's travels from Khartum to Kordofan in 1839, and Brun Rollet's travels in the marshy regions of the upper Nile in 1856. The whole work will be an accurate and complete compendium of geographical exploration in central Africa down to 1861. The sections of the map can be joined upon canvass as a wall-map for convenient reference. Several of the regular numbers of the Mittheilungen for 1861 contained sections of Th. v. Heuglin's expedition to Inner Africa, with accompanying essays upon the fauna of the Red Sea, etc. Ein Beitrag zur CRATO VON CRAFFTHEIM UND SEINE FREUNDE. The author of the above work is fully justified in terming it a "Contribution to Church History." Whoever has attempted to explore the history of crypto-Calvinism with such aids as our standard historians proffer, will know the value of a book which lays before him the correspondence, relations, and labors of nearly the whole circle of divines known as cryptoCalvinists. The author was fortunate enough to discover, not long since, in the archives and libraries of Breslau, a perfect mine of unused material, embracing the original correspondence of the party. In the elaboration of his work he has not only guaranteed his historic truthfulness by continual reference to the sources, but has reproduced, in an appendix to the second volume, no less than eighty-two of the original Latin epistles, covering the period extending from Sept. 1, 1550 to June 16, 1603. Among these may be found epistles from Beza, Ursinus, C. Peucer, Camerarius, Musäus, Crato, Victor Strigel, etc. etc. As will be seen, the documentary value of the work is by no means inconsiderable. The letters alone occupy a hundred octavo pages, closely printed. One object of the writer, though by no means an unduly prominent one, is the vindication of the historic and abstract right of the German Reformed Confession against the assumptions of ultra and exclusive Lutheranism. This is referred to in the opening paragraph of the Preface as follows: "Ill will toward the Union,' and the confessional strife thereby engendered, have by natural consequence conducted back to history. The more confidently it is taught and maintained that the reformed church is only an apostasy from the reformation of Luther, and that the Lutheran church on that account does not make union, but herself is the Union, the more urgently have the Reformed found themselves summoned to seek the answer thereto at the hand of history. In history they have also had to investigate the reason why, with them, inherited love for their Confession proves compatible with the most sincere love to the Union." The work is thoroughly elaborated, and will take its place as a standard reference-book in its department. Few books of its size have cost greater labor. PERMANENT DOCUMENTS ON THEOLOGICAL EDUCATION.' THOUGH bearing a local name, and originated for a temporary purpose, the Western College Society has brought into existence a literature novel, unique, and of enduring value, illustrative chiefly of the connection between the higher departments of education and the progress of Christianity. These "Permanent Documents" have already reached the dimensions of three large octavo volumes, and may be divided into three distinct classes. First, there are the sixteen Annual Reports of the indefatigable Secretary, Rev. Theron Baldwin, in each of which, after disposing of local and occasional matters, he discusses some one important point in the history of classical and theological education, as related to the history of the church, and which, taken together, constitute a thesaurus of facts and principles touching Christian education, such as can scarcely be found anywhere else. In the second place, the Discourses and Addresses at the anniversary meetings of the Society are not mere popular harangues designed to excite emotion and raise money, for the occasion, but the carefully considered and elaborately written views of some forty or fifty of the most learned and judicious clergymen, presidents, professors, scholars, and teachers, of the whole country, on the profoundest educational problems of the age. The first of the Discourses is by Mr. Barnes, the second by Dr. Beman, the third by Dr. Bacon, the fourth by Dr. Condit, and the fifth by Dr. E. Beecher. These are contained in the first volume. The Addresses in the second volume are by Doctors Bacon, Stowe, Beman, Cox, Linslay, Hall, E. Beecher, Peters, Hon. R. Wilkinson, Professors Haddock and Park, and Presidents White, Sturtevant, and Sprecher. The table of contents is not less rich in the other two volumes. In the third place, these "Permanent Documents" include also certain 1 Permanent Documents of the Society for the Promotion of Collegiate and Theological Education at the West. Vols I, II, III. New York: John F. Trow. |