p. i. e. The Book of the New Covenant by Our Lord and Saviour Jesus the Messiah. Translated from the Greek into Hebrew. 32mo. and foolscap 8vo. Price 8s. London, 1831.

2. The Pillar of Divine Truth immoveably fixed on the Foundation of the Apostles and Prophets, Jesus Christ himself being the chief Corner-Stone: shewn by the Genuineness, Preservation, Authenticity, Inspiration, Facts, Doctrines, Miracles, Prophecies, and Precepts of the Word of God. The Whole of the Arguments and Illustrations drawn from the Pages of the Comprehensive Bible, by the Editor of that Work. 8vo. pp. 272. Price 6s. London,.

1831.

WE take shame to ourselves for never having noticed in our pages, the very valuable edition of the Authorized Version of the Holy Scriptures, with its multifarious apparatus of introductory disquisitions, chronological tables, indexes, and notes, which has probably, long ere this, become known to our readers under the somewhat quaint designation of 'The Com'prehensive Bible.' Considering it chiefly as a beautifully printed edition of the Scriptures, issued from the well-known depository of polyglot Bibles and Prayer-books, and which carried upon the face of it its own recommendation, we were really not aware of the extreme labour and pains that had been bestowed upon the work, or of the merit and value of the body of annotations which it comprises,-until our attention was directed to it by one of the most extraordinary instances of unprovoked and persevering determination to run down and ruin a work and its author, that the annals of criticism present. Some of the circumstances have been for several months before us; but we have felt strongly reluctant to embroil ourselves in a controversy which assumed at first the aspect of a simple personal quarrel. We have been moreover slow to believe it possible, that so much unfairness and so much malignity could blend with a zeal for orthodoxy and the purity of God's word, as we are now constrained to impute to some of the parties on whose conduct it has become our painful duty to animadvert. The shape which the warfare has now assumed, that of a gross attack, not merely upon Bagster's Comprehensive Bible," but upon its modest and, till recently, unknown Editor, and, through him, upon the Conductors of the British and Foreign Bible Society, renders it criminal for us longer to maintain silence.

It may be as well to premise, that we shall inevitably subject ourselves to the charge of being very personal. We know not how to expose personal delinquency without being so. If a man is guilty of a civil offence, it is very difficult to avoid

being personal in prosecuting him and bringing him to justice. If a man attempts to pick your pocket, it is becoming rudely personal to raise the hue and cry of stop-thief. As Reviewers, it is our duty, (alternately pleasant and painful,) to make remarks upon the talents, sentiments, and doings of all sorts of persons; and those remarks must, in one sense, be personal. Yet, we have always imagined that there exists a conventional law, unwritten, yet tolerably well understood, by which, in all such cases, we were at once protected and restrained; a law of obvious propriety, which distinguishes between the fair personalities of criticism or moral censure, and the low, dirty personalities of insidious calumny and private scandal. This law we have ever held sacred, and have at least never broken it wittingly.

We are well aware, however, that the Eclectic Review is charged, by some of our good friends in the North, with having begun the war of personalities which has rendered the Apocrypha controversy one of the most disgraceful exhibitions of polemical rancour that the Christian world ever presented to the scorn and derision of infidels. We have no wish to revive old quarrels, but the thing is still said, at Edinburgh and elsewhere; and upon our devoted heads are laid, not merely our own sins, but those of all whom we are charged with having provoked to indiscreet fury. It is true, say the admirers of a Îate eloquent Preacher and Controvertist, that the Doctor did go too far,-did exhibit a spirit not quite accordant with his profession,-did spurn too boldly the courtesies and decencies of religious debate; but then, he did not begin personalities. It is true, that, when provoked by that Eclectic Reviewer, he spared no one who opposed him,-that he stopped at nothing, that he aimed an assassin's stab at the moral character of Orme, that he almost destroyed poor Brown, and that he attempted to annihilate the respectability of Grey. But all this was the fault of that Eclectic Reviewer, who first provoked him. Orme, and Brown, and Thomson have alike gone from this world of strife; and had we ever been conscious of feelings of personal enmity against the last-named individual, they would, we trust, have been buried with him. Nay, we could be quite content that Dr. Thomson's memory should have all the benefit of any extenuation of his conduct towards others, that can be derived from the poor pretence of provocation from us. But, without saying one word more about him, we must, once for all, repel the falsehood industriously circulated respecting ourselves, by stating the circumstances and extent of the personal provocation which we are chargeable with having given. Our readers will see in the sequel, that the subject is not quite irrelevant to our present purpose.

When the Second Statement of the Edinburgh Bible Society

appeared, although, of course, every member of the Committee who had consented to its publication, had made himself responsible for its contents, it was well known to be the production of the reverend Secretary, and was, as such, freely commented upon in the Eclectic Review. The Committee were blamed for the 'sanction unhesitatingly given' to such a document; but the document itself was treated as the production of a pen accus'tomed to deal in acrimony, and which had been compelled to 'apologize for its own libels.' It has been said that the Reviewer had no right to do this ;-that it was beginning a personal warfare, to single out the real writer, and to treat it as his production, when it came forth in the name of a Committee. Had it been Dr. Thomson's avowed production, there would then have been no personality, it seems, in reviewing it as such. And had it been dealed with as the Statement of the Committee, there would have been no personality in the Reviewer's severest strictures. We must profess that this appears to us mere trifling. Our attack upon the Writer of that Statement was direct and open; was made on public grounds; had nothing in it of personal motive or personal feeling. It referred to no private circumstances, true or false; imputed nothing that could not be substantiated; hinted nothing that could not be broadly said. It arraigned a public character for public, though unacknowledged acts. It was moreover written under no miscalculation of the powers and prowess of the Coryphæus of the North. We cannot offer on behalf of the Reviewer, either the plea of inadvertence or the apology of repentance. We regret nothing, in the retrospect, but the occasion; and we confidently rest our justification with every impartial mind, on the contents, and spirit, and entire character of that most disgraceful document which provoked our indigna

tion.

We have, on the other hand, never complained,-we should feel ashamed to complain,-when, with a similar disregard of the thin veil of official plurality, any individual Writer in the Eclectic Review has been personally called to account for his real or supposed misdoings. Of such personality, we should deem it childish to complain. Among the forty or fifty contributors to this Journal, there is not one, we have reason to believe, who would court the dark, or fear to set his name to a single line which he had really written. But, should a writer's personality of observation recklessly intrude into the privacies of life, should it assume at once the boldness, the meanness, and the falsehood of libel; should it be that malignant and unauthorized kind of personality which imputes base and mercenary motives to men of high disinterestedness, sinister and corrupt design to men of unimpeachable integrity and sanctity;

which iterates and reiterates thrice confuted slanders with unblushing effrontery, and does all this as an auto da fe, in the name of Religion;-of such personality, it were still more idle to complain, but we will do our best to unmask the hypocrisy behind which it would conceal itself, whoever may murmur at our interference.

A systematic warfare of this unhallowed description has, our readers are well aware, been now for some years carried on against the Secretaries and Committee of the British and Foreign Bible Society, by men professing godliness. During nearly twenty years of unbroken unanimity, the Society had only had to contend against open enemies. But, in the year 1825, the haughty dissatisfaction which had been occasionally intimated by certain individuals of well-known zeal, wealth, and self-importance, found a pretence for its full display, and the Apocry pha became the watchword of dissention. By the majority of those persons whose pious and laudable jealousy for the integrity of the sacred canon led them to take part with the Edinburgh faction on that occasion, no hostile or sinister purpose was entertained. But Robert Haldane at that time openly denounced the whole foreign administration of the Bible Society, as, from the beginning, altogether erroneous in principle, and mischievous in result; he avowed his object to be nothing less than a total change of management; he deprecated the original plan and constitution of the Society *; and called in question even the propriety of its object, contending, that the preaching of the word preceded, at the beginning, the circulation and even the 'publication of the Scriptures,' and intimating the unlawfulness of reversing that order of proceeding. At the same time, he reviled every continental Bible Society, as mainly composed of Arians, Socinians, and Infidels; and in fact, his argument, which went to stop all further proceedings of the Society, except through the medium of the Continental Society and its agents, amounted to this: that it is a thing intolerably wicked, and not to be connived at, that the Scriptures should be delivered to the people of France and Switzerland by the hands of Arianized Presbyterians; to the people of Germany, by the hands of free-thinking Lutherans; to the people of Russia, by the hands

The declaration of the founders of the Bible Society, in their first advertisement, is as follows: The principles upon which this under⚫ taking will be conducted, are as comprehensive as the nature of the object suggests that it should be. In the execution of this plan, it is proposed to embrace the common support of Christians at large, and to invite the concurrence of persons of every description who profess to regard the Scriptures as the proper standard of faith. Appendix to First Report.

of the idolatrous Greek clergy; to the people of Mexico, Colombia, Peru, and Brazil, by the hands of monks, friars, and Romish ecclesiastics; and to the people of England, through the instrumentality of that motley and heretical body, the Earlstreet Committee. Yet, this frank avowal of rooted enmity to the plan, object, constitution, agency, and total operations of the British and Foreign Bible Society, and the sweeping calumnious allegations by which he sought to break up or overturn the whole system, all proceeded from sincere friendship to the Institution, and an earnest concern for its prosperity! Objections, statements, and prognostications which, when urged by the early enemies of the Society, had been imputed to highchurch prejudice, to the blindness of unsanctified bigotry, or to a Popish distrust of the Scriptures, suddenly acquired, with many persons, a claim to consideration, merely because they were put forth by the professed members of a Bible Society,by supposed friends to the cause. Had they come from Bishop Marsh or Mr. Norris, they would not have made the slightest impression. But so it was, and we can never help feeling astonished on the review of the circumstances,-that the very same slanderous and bitter opposition to the Bible Society, which had been deemed illiberal and disgraceful in those who kept altogether aloof from it, became sanctified by the unaccountable self-delusion or matchless hypocrisy with which it was now associated.

The Apocrypha controversy was, from the first, a strange delusion; and so we always considered it. With the parties who originated it, it was even then perfectly evident, that the circulation of the Apocrypha was a point of comparative insignificance; a mere stalking-horse, behind which they might prosecute their ulterior purpose. The great bulk, however, of those who joined in deprecating the continued toleration of the Apocrypha, were sincere, and simple-minded, and unsuspicious of the views by which the individuals who spread the alarm were actuated. Years have passed away; and still, the Apocrypha is found in the pulpit Bibles of English and Scotch clergymen*; still it is printed by University and King's Printers; is still appointed to be read in churches; and still circulated by the Society for promoting Christian Knowledge;without, so far as we have heard, an effort to get rid of the abomination, or scarcely a solitary remonstrance, on the part of those whose consciences revolted at the thought of conniving at its partial circulation in a foreign tongue. How can this be ex

It ought never to be forgotten, that certain individuals who were loudest in the cry against the Apocrypha, were at the very time citing the apocryphal books of Esdras as genuine and inspired!