sense of the twenty-four hours, the commencement of which, very probably, was at sunset, as the meeting was held at night (see v. 8, 11). It should, of course, be remembered, that the Sabbath in the New Testament, as well as the Old, always means Saturday; and it is to be regretted, on three grounds, that the word should ever be applied to Sunday. 1st, because it appears to make the Apostle Paul condemn

our day of worship. 2ndly, because it obscures to common readers the narrative of the resurrection. And, 3rdly, because it gives so comparatively low a view of the day itself. The associations of the word "Sabbath" are rather with severe and Jewish prohibitions, and the grave of Christ, than with the life-giving spirit of the new dispensation, and the crowning triumph of our risen Lord.

No. 2.

We regard Plutarch as one of the most favourable specimens of what heathenism, morally and religiously, can attain to. No stain, so far as we are aware, rests on his character, nor any neglect which can justly expose him to misesteem or reproach. His unaffected modesty contrasts well with the ostentatious humility of Socrates, as does his readiness to encourage inferior minds with that celebrated philosopher's willingness to mortify them. His virtue seems to have been the right philosophic medium between opposite extremes: temperate without austerity, liberal without profusion, conciliating without compromise, calm without frigidity. The nobler impulses of humanity beat healthfully within his bosom. Often as his observations on the treatment due to superannuated dependants have been quoted or referred to, they are too honourable to his memory not to receive partial transcription here. They occur as a criticism on the misplaced economy of the elder Cato.*

"To dismiss," he says, "in old age, or to sell, like cattle, domestics who have outlived their powers of service, I take to be the mark of a low-toned spirit,-of a mind which thinks that the sole tie of man to man is interest and utility. A good man will see to the sustenance even of horses grown too old for labour. The Athenians, when they had built the Hecatompedon, discharged such of the beasts of burden as they had observed to labour strenuously at the work, giving them the right of free pasturage thenceforward;

monument.

and the tombs of the coursers of Cimon, with which he thrice gained the victory at Olympia, are near to his own We ought not to deal with animate beings, who have become disabled or exhausted in our service, as we do with worn-out shoes or articles of furniture, which we cast away; on the contrary, we should be tender and indulgent towards them; and, if for no other reason, for the sake of our own humanity. For my part, I would not, to gain a few small coins, part with an old labouring ox, much less with an aged domestic, to whom long habit would render a change of diet or abode as great a trial as removal from the country, and who could be of no more value to the buyer than to the seller. Yet Cato boasts that he had saved the state the freight of his charger; whether such boasting is the proof of a lofty or of a petty mind, I leave for the reasonable to say."

The religious sentiments of Plutarch were much above the popular creed of his age and country. It is a just remark of Dr. Traill's, that we see in him a man who, by nobility of nature, rose as much above. his national faith, as Josephus, by his servility, fell below his. That Plutarch was a firm believer in Providence appears in almost every page of his works. He seldom loses an opportunity of pointing out the workings of retributive justice, tracing the sequel of the sin in the punishment. This he sometimes describes, by a very felicitous term, as coming round† to the wrong-doer. Among his minor moral pieces there is one

entitled, "On the delay which takes place in divine retributions," and it is no extravagant eulogy to say, that a more impressive tract of the kind does not exist in the whole range of ethical literature. It might almost pass for a designed discourse or comment on 2 Peter iii. 8, 9, with the very diction of which we are at times half-tempted to fancy the writer familiar. The observations first made are on our incompetency rightly to estimate the propriety of such delays, strictures on which the writer considers as much out of our line as would be those of a patient on the course pursued by his physician. He then goes on to shew how much more dignified a procedure is deliberate than speedy retribution, and how important it is that no divine punishment should wear the appearance of a gratification of revenge. What we esteem tardiness, is often, he argues, rather kind and magnanimous forbearance, the wisdom of which is not seldom attested by the reformation of the offender. Should this effect not follow, there may yet be reasons, he submits, for such forbearance in the offender's relations to others, sometimes as a recompense for their virtue, at others as a scourge to their depravity. He does not think that the self-punishing power of vice is at all adequately taken into consideration. He is inclined himself to look on every wicked man as a malefactor carrying his cross about him, so that it is less proper to speak of sinners as punished only when grown old, than as growing old under process of punishment. He concludes by maintaining the equity of the divine conduct in extending the punishment of transgression to the families of transgressors, for which purpose he alleges the essential unity, through successive ages, of communities and bodies of men. The principles which he here lays down are precisely those which divines are wont to use in defending the moral headship of Adam: and might perhaps, therefore, deserve the attention of any who are disposed to question that doctrine. Speaking, indeed, of the performance as a whole, we can conceive of few better adapted to repay the close attention of a theological student. It exhibits, most advantageously, the points of

contact and approximation of natural and revealed religion, suggesting, by easy inference, what unassisted reason can and cannot do.

As it regards our author's conceptions of the divine nature, they are, for the most part, such as befit a philosopher. It is much more common with him to speak of the divinity in the singular than in the plural number.* In a noble passage of his Life of Aristides,† he represents the Deity as distinguished chiefly by three things,power, immortality, and virtue. "While the first of these," he says, "calls forth only envy on our part towards its possessor, and the second only fear, the corresponding sentiment to the third is reverence." On the importance of cherishing reverential sentiments towards the Deity, and, in order to this, of forming worthy ideas of him, his whole piece "On Superstition" may be considered as a homily. "He had rather," he says, "that Plutarch should be held not to exist, or never to have existed, than that he should be deemed undeserving of confidence, inconstant, irascible, vindictive, fretful, disposed to resent slight neglects." Thus he deprecates, as most debasing, all associations by which the object of our worship is made the object of our contempt, and would have us either conceive worthily of the divine nature, or not conceive at all.

Living in the age in which Plutarch did, and entertaining religious sentiments such as the above, it might be thought a reasonable expectation that he would have found his way into the ranks of Christian discipleship; but it is singular that, though his writings are voluminous, not the most distant reference to the facts of Christianity, whether respectful or otherwise, occurs in the whole of them. The malignant hostility of Gibbon has not failed to speak of this as a contemptuous silence, and would found on it a presumption unfavourable to Christianity-unfavourable to its excellence, and to its alleged early success. This is unfair: at the same time, we are free to acknowledge the disappointment thus occasioned. It is simply as an alleviation of the difficulty, that we make a reference, first, to the geography of our author's

De Superstit. 29.

residence. We have no account, from any authentic sources, of the early spread of the gospel in middle Greece. The apostles and first evangelists, so far as our sacred records inform us, approached no nearer to Boeotia than Athens, and here they made but a trifling impression. In their journeys to and from Corinth and Macedonia, they do not seem to have proceeded by land. There is no evidence that any Christian church existed between Cheronea and the Isthmus, and thus no evidence that the gospel had been brought, so to speak, to Plutarch's own door. There is no evidence, certainly, that any accredited messenger of the truth had ever come into communication with him, much less, that he had ever seen any portions of the Christian scriptures. It is thus a possibility, that the claims of Christianity had never fully been presented to him, nor any just account of the life and miracles of its Author. If he had heard of a class of religionists called Christians, at all, he might hear of them only by rumour, and as an obscure and unimportant sect. He might hear of them only through parties who would present less a character than a caricature of them, and whose associations with their rise and progress might, very probably, partake as much of contempt as of any other feeling. Although, under these circumstances, his amiable nature would prevent his denouncing the new religion with asperity, it would not be likely to lead him seriously to examine its merits. Our opinion is, that the evidences and claims of the gospel had

never properly come before Plutarch; and that it is unjust, therefore, to tax him with deliberate rejection of either.*

The value of Plutarch's writings to a student of the original Scriptures, has not hitherto, we think, been adequately appreciated. More effective aid, as far as our own observation has gone, may be derived from them, for the elucidation of New Testament diction, than from many of the classical authors which have been collated for the purpose. The last biblical lexicographer much known in this country, Dr. Robinson, of the United States, would seem scarcely to have reaped a twentieth part of the field thus open. As in the case of Josephus, it is not merely in single terms that Plutarch throws light upon Scripture, but in points of syntax and construction; sometimes even by parallel sentiments. The following instances, chiefly of the latter sort, with which we conclude, will be sufficiently intelligible, we would hope, also, not uninteresting, even to English readers :

In his treatise on "Divine Retribution," our author says, "If God reserves the punishment of offences to the future, this is

not owing to any misgiving respecting the matter, or to any change of mind, but is the fruit of his clemency and long-suffering;" and farther on he remarks, that "the whole space of human life is as a mere nothing to the gods, the difference between the present moment and thirty years ago being no more to them than between morning and evening to us." These are the coincidences of sentiment with the apostolic thoughts

(2 Peter iii. 8, 9) to which we referred in a former paragraph.

In his treatise "On Fortune," he asks "whether Aristides remained in indigence, out of fortune and through fortune?" [or whether he voluntarily retained it ?] This may elucidate the double prepositional phrases occurring both in Rom. iii. 22, and iii. 30.

In his Roman Questions (§ 26), he speaks of a departed soul as having "fought a good fight." The three words used are almost identical with those of the apostle (2 Tim. iv. 7).

We have, in his disquisition on Isis and Osiris (§ 20), the same comparison of subtle and useless fictions to spiders' webs, which

the prophet gives us (Isaiah lix. 5).

The designed assonance of words employed by our Lord (Matt. xxi. 41), which is lost in our translation, but which might be represented by the terms "wretcheswretchedly," appears more than once in Plutarch.*

In the preface to the seventh book of his Symposiacs, he tells us that many call "graceful expressions" [literally, "graces "+] salt. Compare with this the exhortation of the apostle, Col. iv. 6.

*

We defer the analysis to which this and the former article are introductory, to the following month. Stepney College.

OUR STATE-CHURCH. 1. IN ENGLAND. 2. IN IREland. 3. IN SCOTLAND. 4. IN WALES. Pp. 112. London: British Anti-State-Church Association.

Four of the new series of tracts of the Anti-State-Church Association. Unitedly they furnish a great amount of valuable information on the actual condition of the Established Church in the British Isles. They are written in a perfectly calm and christian temper, and may be given, as they ought to be very extensively, by Dissenters to their Church friends, without fear of offence; unless, indeed, facts themselves be offensive. Yet it is impossible to peruse such a record of ambition, grasping avarice, and monopolizing of national property, for the more part by the most Popish of Protestant sects, and to moderate one's indignation. In England, the Church of England does not, we believe, number one half of those who attend public worship; yet it absorbs about eight millions annually of national property. In Ireland and in Wales it has not more than one tenth; yet these churches absorb oue million a-year. The Established Church of Scotland is almost vanished, except its paid officials and their dependants. So that for a small minority, the empire is taxed to this enormous amount-an amount which would pay three times over all the expenses of the empire, except that of a standing army, an institution maintained for precisely the same

purposes as the Church, namely, to repress liberty at home, and to create places for the aristocracy and its dependants. While glancing over these tracts,-while looking at the incomes of the Archbishops and Bishops, we could but exclaim, And is this avaricious, this over-gorged, this unchristianly wealthy hierarchy, to be protected by Dissenters against the assumptions of Rome! A grosser imposture can scarcely be imagined than that of the Bishops of London and Durham, or the Archbishops of London and York, with incomes of twenty-two, thirteen, fifteen, and twenty-one thousand pounds respectively, coming before the nation as christian ministers needing protection against the ambition of Rome. But we forbear on this point. Our readers must study the tractsthemselves, to see the whole of this marvellous abuse of christianity and the nation, in the name, too, of religion and of Christ himself! One reflection inevitably forced itself upon us, and that is, the necessity of liberating the politically enslaved, before the burdensome impositions of Church and army can be got rid of. Eight or ten millions a-year for the Church, and double that for military purposes, must the represented few and the unrepresented many consent to pay, while the majority of the House of Commons is virtually in the hands of our aristocratical tax consumers. With our immense police force, for what purpose do we need a standing army in time of peace?

For what, indeed, but to uphold its kindred abuse of the Church, and to prevent a Government being compelled, as Mr. Cobden expressed it, "to content the people ?" Meantime, such exposures as are furnished by these tracts will combine with those made in other departments, to produce an amount of general indignation which will, we trust, in due time, drive from the seat of power the selfish, mean, and unworthy aristocracy which has made even religion a means of grinding the people.

THE MOTHER'S FRIEND, A MONTHLY MAGAZINE, EDITED BY ANN JANE. Vol. III. London: Benjamin L. Green.

This third volume of "The Mother's Friend," does "Ann Jane great credit. We cannot open upon a page of it without meeting with something interesting and instructive. We know no Magazine which we can recommend with more confidence to mothers, especially to such as "have little time to read, and little money to spend on books."

THE CRISIS: A PRIZE ESSAY ON SENIOR CLASSES IN SUNDAY SCHOOLS. By HENRY HALL. Pp. 112. London: Benj. L. Green.

This Essay is intended to shew the necessity and importance of Senior Classes in Sunday Schools, and the best method of conducting them. The writer wished to make it a "practical book for practical readers." It contains many excellent suggestions, and could not be read by the Senior Class Teacher, without his deriving instruction and encouragement from its perusal.

THE LAST ENEMY, AND THE SURE DE-
FENCE: AN EARNEST CALL ON MEN TO
PREPARE FOR DEATH. By W. LEASK.
Pp. 174. London: Benj. L. Green.
The design of this little volume is suffi-
ciently apparent from the title-page. It is

solemn, earnest, and impressive. The difficulty will be in inducing those to read it for whom it is more especially intended and adapted.

THE PEW AND ITS RENT; OR, THE PRACTICE OF CHRISTIAN CHURCHES COMPARED WITH THE WORD OF GOD. By SAMUEL RICHARDS. Pp. 24. London: A. Hall & Co.

This little tract, which has been published some months, ought to have been noticed before now. Its object is to shew the unscripturalness of the common Pew System. It contains many weighty things, which well deserve consideration and attention.

Recent Publications.

Our Mighty All; or, Christ the true and living Way. By John Cox. (Pp. 36. London: Ward and Co.)

Joy in Believing: a Narrative of the happy Death of Mary Ann Wiseman. By the Rev. O. Winslow, M.A. (Pp. 16. London: J. Groom.)

Floriphania: an expressive Bouquet, gathered and arranged for Christian Ladies. By Anastasius. (Pp. 40. London: Houlston and Stoneman.)

Postscript to "The Introduction of the English Bible and its Consequences." By the Author of "The Annals of the English Bible." (London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co.)

Baptismal Regeneration: its Unscriptural Nature and Destructive Tendency.

By Hugh Anderson. (18mo. Pp. 20. London: Hamilton, Adams, and Co.)

Popery against the Pope: an Appeal to Protestants. By Joseph Drew. (Pp. 16. London: Benjamin L. Green.)

Common Sense to the People of God.. (Pp. 8. London: Benjamin L. Green.)

and happy, He gives. I trust you thank Him daily for his unceasing goodness and mercy. To fail to do this is deeply ungrateful and sinful.

It is very useful to think over the particular favours which God bestows upon us, and the more we do this, the more sensible