are all ascribable to superior might. To others, history is. governed exclusively by evil. The devil is absolutely the god of the human world. The whole lives and acts under the shadow of his dark wings. He is in the schemes of the

trader, the thunders of the orator, the edicts of the despot, the craft of the priest, the rage of the warrior. He inspires the activities of men, and shapes the destinies of the race. To others, history is governed by the mediatorial plan of God. The restorative purpose of Heaven, as revealed in the Bible, is seen running through the ages, stimulating, shaping, and subordinating all things. Even the bitterest sufferings of humanity are regarded as parturition throes giving birth to a higher order of things. Thus, then, through all human history it holds true that, as with Paul and his companions,> the same sounds and sights differently affect different men.

III. MEN'S LIVES IN RELATION TO THE INSPIRED ORACLE SHOW THIS. The Bible has wonderful "lights," and wonderful "sounds," but nothing is more true than that they differ ently affect different men. Ecclesiastical history, theological polemics, as well as the religious life of our own age, are fraught with illustrations of this. The sceptic and the believer, the Papist and the Protestant, the Calvinist and the Pelagian, the Socinian and the Trinitarian, the Churchman and the Nonconformist, are examples as to how the same “light” and "voice" of the one Book affect different men. What is the articulate voice of God to one, is mere hollow sound to another. And what is "a light," revealing even the Eternal Himself, to one, is either darkness, or stupefying brightness to another.

IV. MEN'S LIVES IN RELATION TO THE GOSPEL MINISTRY SHOW THIS. How differently the same sermon is regarded by various members of the congregation! The sermon which, as a Divine "voice," speaks to the conscience of some, has no meaning to others; or which, as Divine "light," flashes moral conviction, and reveals Christ to some, is either not seen at

all, or regarded as a mere glare of human genius, or a blaze of human enthusiasm, revealing nothing Divine.

CONCLUSION. First: This subject reveals a distinguishing attribute of human nature. Men have the power of hearing and of seeing with the soul all outward sounds and sights. Brutes have "the hearing ear and seeing eye," as we have, but all they see and hear terminate in the region of sensation. Souls have inner eyes and ears. Ezekiel, Isaiah, John on Patmos, our own Milton, &c., show what men can see and hear with those organs of the soul. Christ has told us that the pure in heart shall see God Himself. Man, in one word, has the power of receiving, modifying, and interpreting the impression the outward makes upon him. Secondly: This subject explains the great difference between spiritually and carnallyminded men. Society may be divided into two classes-the carnal and the spiritual; the one living to the flesh, and for the flesh; the other to the spirit and for the spirit. Why this difference? The one hears in the sounds, and sees in the sights of life what the other does not. The spiritual realizes the spiritual even here. He looks away from "the things that are seen and temporal." Thirdly: The subject presents an object of life after which all should strive. Each man should strive to get the eyes and the ears of his soul so quickened as to see and hear the Divine everywhere in life. When the servant of Elisha had his eye and ear open, he saw and heard the supernatural. So it will be with us. We are now in the spiritual world. Spirits innumerable crowd around us. God is present. The voices of eternity are here, and yet we are deaf to them!

2

Thinkings by a Broad-Bibleman.

(No. III.)

SUBJECT: Philo-Coptic Fallacies.

ALF a century ago Egypt was regarded as a stronghold of Infidelity. Its arts and sciences were said to belong to a period so remote as to leave us in doubt whether man had not occupied our earth many thousand years before Adam, and to dwarf into insignificance the majestic originality and revered antiquity of the Books of Moses. But further research has scattered these pretensions to the wind, and the wonder is, not that weighed in the balances of honesty and common-sense, they should have been found wanting; but that they should have so long been tolerated when the means of overturning them were so easy.

The savans who followed the French army into Egypt, were under orders, implied if not otherwise embodied, to revolutionize everything, and especially the religion of the Bible. When, therefore, they discovered the famous Zodiac, of Dendera, an astrological diagram painted on one of the ceilings in the temple at that place, their object was to fix its date at a period so very distant, that the Mosaic narrative of man's creation and early history, would be thrown into the shade, and the whole Bible narrative, if true at all, would dwindle into a very insignificant episode in the world's history.

Trading on their vast and admitted attainments in science, they published to the world a dim outline of the process by which they had agreed to assign to it an antiquity of about eighteen thousand years. Timid readers of the Bible were struck dumb, and the more courageous quailed before "the rigid and infallible geometry" of astronomers supposed to be the wisest in Europe. No one took the trouble to question this decision, on its actual merits, by looking narrowly into the facts and deductions through which it was said to have been arrived at, and thus judgment was allowed to go by default. It will scarcely be credited, therefore, that this theory rests on a series of assumptions, based upon a plain and palpable falsehood. But so it is.

It is well known to astronomers, that besides its daily and annual revolution, our earth has a third movement in relation

to the heavenly bodies. Its poles revolve once in about 26,000 years, round the poles of the ecliptic, causing what is scientifically called the precession of the equinoxes. If, therefore, an old map of the stars should be found in which the place of our poles was unmistakably marked, the inference would be fair enough that this map had been projected just so long ago as was indicated by the distance, reduced to time, between that place and its place at present. Such an indication, or its equivalent-a line drawn through the earth's pole and the pole of the ecliptic, and called a colure-these French savans would have us believe that they had found in the famous Zodiac of Dendera. But, in reality, they had found nothing of the kind: they had only supposed that if it had been there it would have run parallel with the sides of the little square chamber in which it was discovered. Far less shrewd than Mrs. Glass, they proceeded to dress their hare before they had caught it, and arguing on a basis that never had any existence, gave forth to the world that they had proved the vast antiquity of this temple, and demonstrated that many centuries before Adam, Egypt had its schools of science.

Although this was the theory palmed off upon the world, these learned pundits actually disagreed among themselves as to where these imaginary colures ought to be, some of them contending that they should run diagonally across, and not coincident with, the walls of this mystic chamber. And thus, like their brother antiquary who proved that the round towers of Ireland faced the four cardinal points (!), they propounded nothing but their own perplexity.

The ceiling has been removed to Paris, where any one may see it and judge for himself. But we doubt whether it will be worth his while, the whole affair being nothing but an astro-mythological picture, drawn with so little accuracy that the stars are not in their proper positions; and though the signs of the Zodiac are all there, they are so huddled together that the sun, in traversing the ecliptic, must have been, more than once, in two of them at the same time. But this solemn fooling of the French philosophers, has long since received its death-blow, the Temple of Dendera having been proved to belong to the age of Tiberius Cæsar, instead of to a period ten times as remote.

This leads us to remark generally, on the age of the palaces and tombs of Egypt, which in almost every instance has been ridiculously exaggerated. The subject is not, how

ever, so intimately connected with our present inquiry, that we should go into it at any length, so that we shall dismiss it with the remark, that, the pyramids alone excepted, none of the buildings described by Herodotus 2,300 years ago are now standing, or can at all events be identified, though he gives such exact information as to their situation, bearings, distances, and architectural details, as would make them readily recognizable by the most superficial traveller.

Very well, then, say our foiled Egyptologists, supposing we must give up these astronomical and architectural proofs of Egypt's early greatness, the mysteries of her hieroglyphics are now laid fully open, and we can read the writing on the walls of her, "chambers of imagery," her palaces, and tombs, and temples. Can we? Let us see. About half a century has gone by since Dr. Young conceived the idea that certain hieroglyphics were intended to represent sounds-that they were, in fact, ornate, or elaborately formed letters. It seems pretty clear that some one had conceived the same thing long before, for Misson, in his "New Voyage to Italy,” (vol. ii. part 1, p. 109), published in 1739, translates on this principle the name of Ramesses, mi Amun-" The well-beloved of the sun" "The well-beloved of Ammon."

This rediscovery was put forth modestly enough at first; its application being restricted almost entirely to the names of those sovereigns who held rule in Egypt after the Greek conquest of that country. M. Champollion the zealous colleague of Dr. Young, honestly confesses that the names of the older Pharaohs were not to be deciphered by it. Let the reader judge for himself. Here are the names respectively assigned to the builders of the four principal pyramids : Raoa-Suphis I. or Cheops; Rsho-Suphis II., or Cephrenes; Rmkkk-Mycerinus; and Ntsoktt-Nitocris. The Scripture names contrast rather advantageously-Ramses-Ramses; Shnshnk-Shishak; Zra-Zerah; Thrk-Tirhakah; Ncho Necho; Rebom-Rehoboam, and Joodamelek-Judah-melek, King of the Jews.

The ludicrous uncertainty which, according to Sydney Smith, applies to the ancient "biographical art," belongs to the dynastic annals of Old Egypt. Herodotus says that the great pyramid was built by Cheops; Manetho, that it was built by Suphis or Peroptes. The hieroglyphic reading of the name, as we have stated, is Raoa, according to all the accredited phonetic alphabets; but a special act of imagina