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the neighbourhood.

LATENT HARMONIES.

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Had we not possessed John's gospel, we should never have known that such a question was asked; and had we not possessed Luke's gospel, we should never have seen the special propriety of asking it at Philip.

We have chosen these examples because in them the truth of certain miracles happens to be implicated. If the coincidences now quoted be real and undesigned, then, not only are they an irresistible argument for the truth of the collective narrative, but they establish directly as facts the healing of Malchus's ear, the cure of many sick and demoniacs, and the miraculous feeding of the multitude with five loaves and two fishes,- for it is in the recital of these miracles that these coincidences, so truth-vouching, occur. And if, again, these miracles be true, then is Jesus all that He professed, for it was in support of His claims as Messiah that He wrought these miracles.

But from the gospels we may transfer this test to other portions of the New Testament. We have there a book mainly occupied with the travels of St. Paul; and alongside of it we have thirteen epistles ascribed to the same apostle. Now, even supposing that the author of the Epistles and the author of the Acts were the same individual, it has been triumphantly shown, by a sort of microscopical survey, that nothing but scrupulous truth or omniscient falsehood could account for the complex and involute agreement which subsists between them. To detect these latent harmonies was perhaps the greatest service to historic Christianity which acumen and sound sense united have ever rendered; and though it is impossible to offer any abstract here, we may safely congratulate as proof against circumstantial evidence the sceptic who reads the "Horæ Paulinæ," and still doubts whether such a man as Paul existed, whether his epistles be genuine, and whether the Acts of the Apostles be true.

We have often visited the ruins of a famous castle, with which, no doubt, many of our readers are well acquainted. Long ago it was captured, and that it might never be a stronghold to the patriots of Germany again, the enemy burnt it and blew up the walls. But in the weedy foss is still shown a huge fragment of a tower, which, when exploded, alighted there; and in the goodly joining of its stones and the hardening of its ancient mortar such a rocky mass had it become, that when lifted from its base, instead of descending in a shower of rubbish, it came down superbly a tower still. And, like that massy keep, the books we have been considering are so knit together in their exquisite accuracy, the histories are so riveted to one another, and the epistles so mortised into the histories,—and the very substance of epistles and histories alike is so penetrated by that cement of all-pervasive reality, that the whole now forms an indissoluble concrete. And though all coeval literature had perished, though all the external confirmations were destroyed,- though all the monuments of antiquity were annihilated, strong in its intrinsic truthfulness, the New Testament would still hold its lofty place—a tower of self-sustaining integrity. And though the efforts of enmity were to succeed as they have signally failed,-though learned hostility were to undermine its documentary foundations, and blow up that evidence of manuscripts and early versions on which it securely reposes, so finely do its facts fit into one another, so strongly are its several portions clamped together, and in the penetration and interfusion through all its parts of its ultimate inspiring Authorship, into such a homogeneous structure has it consolidated, that it would come down again on its own basis, shifted, but nowise shattered. Such a book has God made the Bible, that, whatever theories wax popular, or whatever systems explode, "the Scripture cannot be broken." J. H.

THE STORY OF GREAT HISTORIES.

RALEIGH'S HISTORY OF THE WORLD.

ONE of the most splendid personages in the court of Elizabeth was Sir Walter Raleigh. Well born, from his youth upward at home among the fair and the noble, with that exuberance of life which exhibited itself equally in an appetite for knowledge and an eagerness for action, and with that happy adjustment betwixt a brilliant imagination and a handsome figure, which gave a poetic charm to his movements and a matchless felicity to his repartees, he was in the camp an Apollo, and amongst carpet knights a Mars. Not so chivalrous, because not so unselfish, as Sir Philip Sidney, he was no less accomplished; and if never so high in the favour of his sovereign as Burleigh, Essex, and Cecil, he was quite as acute and much more ambidexter than any of these far-seeing favourites. A gay trifler in the saloon, but "toiling terribly" in his study; as able to navigate a ship as to build it, and as ready to encounter the Spanish Armada as to explore the enchanted coasts of Guiana; the companion by turns of statesmen and buffoons, and equally respected by reverend pedants and roistering buccaneers; at once a gallant and a sage, this most versatile and manysided man had the merit of bursting the scholastic fetters of the period and sketching a design which was at last realised in the Royal Society, whilst he doubtless was equally entitled to Spenser's dedication of the "Faery Queene:"

"To thee, that art the summer's nightingale,

Thy sovereign goddess's most dear delight,

In whose high thoughts Pleasure hath built her bow'r,
And dainty Love learn'd sweetly to indite."

At fifty-one years of age Sir Walter found himself under sentence of death, a prisoner in the Tower of London. From day to day the execution of this unrighteous decree was deferred, till he got inured to his position and came to be very much in the predicament of a man who is apprised that his malady is mortal, but whose sensations are those of perfect soundness. His busy mind could not rest; and shut out from explorations and adventures, he amused himself with experiments in science. In the garden was a little building where the lieutenant of the Tower had once kept his poultry. It was put at the disposal of the captive, and he converted it into a laboratory, and in this "hen-house a contemporary describes him as passing the entire day in "distillations." However, Raleigh was not destined to forestall the discoveries of Boyle; and the chief result of his chemical researches was a cordial which went by his name, and which long held its place in the materia medica.

A considerable library might be formed by collecting the books which have been written in captivity or exile. Beginning, perhaps, with the "Tristia" of Ovid, and including compositions as sacred as the Apocalypse and many of the Epistles of St. Paul, it would be rich in more recent poetry and theology. But in its modern era the master-pieces of this prison literature would be Grotius "On the Truth of the Christian Religion," the "Pilgrim's Progress," and Raleigh's "History of the World."

Happily for himself Sir Walter had never been the mere fighting animal which constituted the warrior of those days, and his detestation of deep drinking preserved his faculties clear and unclouded. In his journeys and voyages, he usually carried with him a great box of books; and with his powerful constitution and with a brain free from obfuscation, he could overtake long spells of study in those intervals when coarser comrades lay soaked in tipsy slumber.

PRISON AMUSEMENTS.

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And now, in the thirteen dreary years to which his durance extended, the folios which had so often enlivened the bower and the cabin walked into the cell of the captive and did their utmost to cheer him; and in the pleasant gossip of Plutarch and the careful details of Polybius, in the caustic wisdom of Tacitus and the vivid narrations of guileless old Herodotus, the solitary student grew the best informed of Englishmen.

In such circumstances most men would have been content to beguile the hours and would have thanked the volume which helped them to forget. But Raleigh's mind, ever active and forth-going, could not rest in simple contemplation; and his accumulating knowledge sought outlet in a book. The work of which he formed the bold conception was a History of the World. And when it is remembered that the English language then contained hardly a single specimen of historical composition, and that the author had nearly reached his grand climacteric before his first instalment issued from the press, we must allow that not the least heroic achievement of the stout Elizabethan knight was the book which he thus projected and carried forward at the foot of the scaffold.

The first folio was published in 1614. It brings down the mighty tale from the Creation to the Roman Conquest of Macedon; and, notwithstanding its numerous digressions and the disproportionate space in the earlier portion devoted to rabbinical speculations, it is one of the stateliest fragments in existence. Very different from those subsequent compilations which go by the name of " Universal Histories," and which for the most part are a meagre sketch of separate nationalities, it attempts to survey the fortunes of mankind, and to recite, so far as it can be recalled, the story of the universe. Bringing together the more salient incidents in the rise and progress of every race, and viewing them in

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