(Paul) says, Luke the beloved physician greets you.'* Clement of Alexandria writes: And in the Epistle to the Colossians he (Paul) writes, &c.'+ Tertullian has the following: From which things the apostle restraining us, expressly cautions against philosophy, when he writes to the Colossians, 'Beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, contrary to the foresight of the Holy Spirit.'‡ The allusions of Justin Martyr may be found in his dialogue with Trypho, where he says: 'Christ is the first-born of all things made; the first-born of God, and before all the creatures.' § Theophilus of Antioch, in his three books to Autolycus, writes: 'He begat this emanated Word, the first-born of every creature.'|| In like manner Marcion received the epistle into his canon, and Eusebius placed it among the acknowledged books (oμoλoyoúμeva). But the universal reception of the epistle has recently found an exception in Mayerhoff, to whom may be added Professor Baur of Tübingen. The posthumous treatise of the former needs no formal refutation, since his arguments have attracted little attention and found no welcome response, even among his rationalizing countrymen. The stamp of authenticity is imprinted on every paragraph of the epistle. He who can believe that it was first composed in the second century out of the materials furnished by the epistle to the Ephesians, has certainly failed to perceive its characteristic peculiarities.

IV. V. The connexion between the Epistles to the Colossians and Ephesians has been treated in a preceding article,¶ as well as the time and place at which they were written.

VI. Contents. The epistle, like most others written by Paul, consists of two parts, a doctrinal and a practical. The first extends from the commencement to ii. 23; the second from ii. 24, to the conclusion. Each of these leading portions may be subdivided into two paragraphs, viz. I. (a), i. 1—23; (b), i. 24—ii. 23; II. (a), iii. 1—17; (b), iii. 18-iv. 18.

* Et iterum in epistola quæ est ad Colossenses, ait: Salutat vos Lucas, medicus dilectus (Col. iv. 14). Advers. Haeres., lib. iii. cap. xiv. sect. 1. † Καν τῇ πρὸς Κολοσσαεῖς ἐπιστολῇ, Νουθετοῦντες, γράφει, κ. τ. λ. Strom. lib. i. p. 277 (ed. Colon. 1688). Conf. Strom. iv. p. 499; v. p. 576; vi. p. 645.

A quibus nos apostolus refrænans, nominatim philosophiam testatur caveri oportere, scribens ad Colossenses: Videte ne quis vos circumveniat per Philosophiam et inanem seductionem, secundum traditionem hominum, præter providentiam Spiritus Sancti. De Præscript. Advers. Hær. cap. vii. p. 235.

§ πρωτότοκον τῶν πάντων ποιημάτων; πρωτότοκον τοῦ Θεοῦ, καὶ πρὸ πάντων TOV KтLOμάTWV.—Dial. cum Tryph. pp. 310–326 (Colon. 1686).

|| Τοῦτον τὸν λόγον ἐγέννησε προφορικὸν, πρωτότοκον πάσης κτίσεως.—Lib. ii, p. 100 (ed. Colon. 1686.)

¶Eclectic Review for April, 1844, article 3.

I. (a). After the salutation, the apostle expresses his thanks to God for the faith and love of the Colossian believers and his unceasing prayer on their behalf that they might be filled with the knowlege of the divine will in all wisdom and spiritual understanding, so as to walk worthy of the Lord and well pleasing in his sight, abounding in good deeds of every kind, for which they were strengthened by the power of God working within them. He again expresses his thanks to God the Father, who had prepared him and the Colossians for the heavenly inheritance, since they had been delivered from the kingdom of ignorance, and translated into the spiritual kingdom of the Son, through whose blood alone are procured forgiveness and complete redemption. The mention of Christ and his atonement suggests the propriety of describing his person and dignity. Accordingly, he is declared to be the Eternal God, the creator and upholder of all things and all beings in the universe, the head of the church, and the first-born of the dead, having pre-eminence over spiritual intelligences as well as renovated humanity. This description was primarily directed against the false teachers, who, by placing the Saviour on an equality with angels, lessened his essential dignity. As Lord over all, Christ is said to have reconciled all things by his blood, and the Colossians also, divested of their previous enmity, to the end, that if they continued steadfast in the faith of the gospel, they might be presented faultless in the immediate presence of the Almighty.

I. (b). In this paragraph the apostle expresses his joy in the office to which he had been called, notwithstanding all his sufferings, because these very sufferings tended to promote the progress and to subserve the completeness of the church universal. In discharging the duties of his ministry he affirms that he had to preach the gospel fully, to instruct and warn all men, both Jews and Gentiles, and to present every one perfect in Christ. It was for this that he laboured and earnestly strived, especially for the christians at Colosse and Laodicea, and as many as had not seen his face. For them he entertained the most earnest solicitude that they might be established and knit together in love, being fully assured in their understandings of the mystery of God-the divine purpose of blessing mankind in that Saviour in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. He then proceeds to caution them against a deceitful wisdom grounded upon human authority, and not derived from Christ. In opposition to a philosophy so false and dangerous he reminds them that all the fulness of the Godhead dwelt in Christ bodily, and that they themselves had been spiritually quickened by his grace, having been delivered from the yoke of legal observances

and superstitious rites. They ought not to allow themselves, therefore, to be seduced from the gospel by a pretended wisdom, which affected intercourse with angels and spirits, enjoined the observance of ceremonial ordinances, abstinence from meats and drinks, and an ascetic neglect of the body. If they had died with Christ to the law, why should they be again entangled with the yoke of bondage?

II. (a). This section is occupied with general precepts of a practical kind, in which the readers are exhorted to be heavenly minded, to withdraw their affections from sinful objects, to crucify the lusts of the flesh, to lay aside such practices as those in which they had once indulged, and to be clothed with virtues belonging to the renovated nature. They are exhorted above all to have the love and peace of God predominant in their hearts, to edify and admonish one another in their mutual intercourse; and at all times to give thanks to God the Father, who had created them anew after the divine image.

II. (b). The apostle now subjoins various directions regarding domestic life, especially the relative duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, servants and masters. To these is added an exhortation to continued prayer, combined with watchfulness; prayer, in particular, for the writer's release, that he might be at liberty to preach the gospel. He refers them to Tychicus, the bearer of the letter, for information regarding his state; as also to Onesimus, of whom he speaks with affection. The concluding verses are occupied with salutations from various individuals, and an injunction to have the present cpistle read before the Laodicean church, while the epistle sent from Laodicea to Paul should also be read in the church at Colosse. The apostle concludes by subscribing the epistle with his own hand, and thus imprinting upon it the seal of authenticity.

Art. III.-Reynard the Fox: a renowned Apologue of the Middle Ages, reproduced in Rhyme. Longmans.

AMONG the works which, during the middle ages, obtained a wider popularity than the most popular in the present day can boast, The most pleasant and delightful History of Reynard the Fox,' as it was called by our earliest translators, held perhaps the first place. Germany, France, and the Low Countries, each claimed the honour of its birth-place. For many centuries this was the story to which the populace listened with untiring delight; and from the introduction of printing even to the present day, it has often been found, in the rudest form, the sole book

which the German or Flemish peasant calls his own. In Eng. land this widely-celebrated 'brute epic' seems to have been known from a very early period; introduced probably by the Flemish burghers, who were so constantly visiting our ports with their merchandize. And although during the middle ages 'Reynard the Fox' never superseded the popular tales and ballads of genuine English growth, at the close of the fifteenth century, and during the following period, it took its place among the books of the people; and many a black-letter copy, and many a later one, printed on coarsest paper and with wellworn types, still attests how interesting and amusing the story of Reynard's unequalled cunning was formerly considered.

A work which attained so wide and so lengthened a popularity, must have possessed a merit of some kind; and therefore we fully agree with the present translator, that not without reason on their side are they, who charge it against our early writers upon books, as a very heinous sin of omission, that they should barely have alluded to the existence of a work perhaps the most notable of all the compositions which have come down to us from the early middle age;' a work, we may add, which, from its wide-spread popularity, must have been influential in no common degree.

The same obscurity which hangs over the birth-place of 'Reynard the Fox' rests also upon the era of its production. As to its origin, all is dark and uncertain; the more we investigate, the older grows the poem.' In a more elementary form it has been traced as far back as the ninth century; but certain it is, that before the close of the twelfth it was recognized as a wellknown work-Richard Cœur de Lion referring to it in one of his satirical poems. That it is very ancient in its origin is, we think, to be deduced from the form of the story alone; one in which the scene is laid not in courts or cities, but in the wild wood, and in which the interlocutors are all brutes.

At first sight, and ere we have become acquainted with the singular skill with which the tale is constructed, and the wonderful force and spirit with which each character-brute though he be-is delineated, we might think this form would militate against its popularity; but the history of popular literature—we use the term here, not in its general, but its strictly specific sense-has shown that 'the brute fable' is most frequently to be met with in the earliest stage of a nation's literature; and that so strongly does the uncultivated mind cling to that species of fiction, that an appeal through the medium of fable to a rude multitude has often proved successful, when close reasoning or earnest and eloquent pleading would have been alike in vain.

And it is natural that this should be so. The mass of the populace, unused to a wide range of thought, have many tastes in common with children, and we all know with what intense delight they listen to stories, in which the lower order of animals are the speakers and actors. It would seem, indeed, as though the slowly awakening imagination required to descend, ere it soared upward. Now the bird, the beast, even the fish, endowed with speech and reason, are not so widely removed from common apprehension as the wild and beautiful, or awful beings which find a place in the popular legends of a more advanced stage of the human mind. The habits of the talking brute belong to every day life, and all his characteristics, whether they refer to his original condition or to his superadded rationality, are still what every mind can comprehend. His very virtues,-fidelity, honesty, kindly feeling, require no effort of the imagination to realize, and his evil qualities,-ferocity, gluttony, force, fraud, cunning, are but the transcript of what may be seen all around.

While we willingly yield our admiration to the artistic skill displayed in the construction of the great 'brute epic' before us, and acknowledge the inimitable talents and knavery of its hero, we still feel assured, that had the poetry, or the characters, been of a higher order, the marvellous popularity of the work would have been proportionably circumscribed. But, although of poetic passages there are very few, and the morality is genuine common place, worldly morality, there is a dramatic character, and a vein of keen, biting, flashing satire throughout, which proves that the most authentic version of 'Reynard the Fox,' though probably constructed from a much older poem, was the production of no barbarous age. We have already remarked, that France, Germany, and Flanders, have each laid claim to it. Much criticism and research have been bestowed by continental scholars on this subject, and the weight of evidence seems to assign to Flanders or North Western Germany the honour of its birth, and about the commencement of the thirteenth century for its date. It was at this period, the most important and stirring of the centuries of the marvellous middle ages,' that 'the citizen class made gigantic strides towards the crection of that order of middle rank'

in the continental states throughout Germany and Flanders, no less than in Italy and France-in all laying the foundations of that fabric which speedily grew up into a rival stronghold of political power, and set up the burgher commonalty of the towns, in array against the feudatories of the territorial lords. Already had the genius of commerce made her habitation in the Hanseatic Towns; whilst Augsburg, Nuremberg, and other cities of Northern Germany, were fast following