survived, my hands laid hold of in the midst of the battlefield. The towns of Eltakon and Timnah [Tamna'ha]* I looked at, I captured, I carried off their spoil.

(To be continued.)

EDW. HINCKS.

XIII. REVIEWS AND NOTICES OF BOOKS.

English Puritanism and its Leaders: Cromwell, Milton, Baxter, Bunyan. By John Tulloch, D.D., Principal and Professor of Theology, St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, etc. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons.

THE doctrine that the history of the world consists merely of the biographies of a few great men, has been applied repeatedly during this century, and with more distinguished success than ever attended the writing of history on any other theory, if the measure of success be the number of interested and enlightened readers. The most celebrated exponents of the idea, both in theory and practice, are Emerson and Carlyle. It interpenetrates all their writings, receiving the most pure and popular expression in the Representative Men of the one, and in the Heroes and Hero Worship of the other. Without imitating either of these philosophers in any distinctly traceable degree, still less without swearing fealty to any of their heterodox doctrines, (unless great fairness, liberality, and love for truth be heterodox), Principal Tulloch has produced a most readable and masterly history of Puritanism, as unfolded in the biographies of four of its representative men,-its great soldier, Cromwell; its inspired poet, Milton; its casuistic, enthusiastic theologian and preacher, Baxter; and the splendid dreamer of the Pilgrim's Progress, Bunyan. Than the biographies of these four Puritans of all time, a novel could hardly be more entertaining, and few of the heaviest volumes of history will prove so full of instructive facts, the great and the small being happily and harmoniously blended; here touched into beauty by a fine though subdued fancy, and there piled into imposing dignity by the dexterous, elegant antitheses and reiterated strokes of a copious Ciceronian rhetoric. The large charity of the writer is one of the chief virtues of his work. He takes the most kindly view of everything, and states questionable truths and opinions with such gentlemanly forbearance and caution, as to give the "true critic" just ground of offence, because he has afforded so little excuse for correction or contradiction.

I have recognised the name of Timnah in the Egyptian inscriptions also (Sel. Pap. 1st series, pl. 56, 1. 3). The concurrence of these two names, as in Josh. xv. 57, 59, proves that the scene of the battle was Eltakon in Judah, not Eltakah in Dan. If, however, Robinson be right in his note 6, vol. iii. p. 19, it would be natural to suppose that these two names represented the same city, which lay on the line separating the two tribes, and belonged partly to one and partly to the other. It is evidently to the defeat of the Egyptians here recorded that Rab-shakeh refers in 2 Kings xviii. 21.

On the subject-matter of the volume, originality was scarcely possible. But in style, arrangement, judicial and judicious comment on facts, temperate and liberal exposition of principles, everything we could desire is achieved. No characters of the English past are better known than Cromwell, Milton, and Bunyan; their names are in every mouth, and the story of their lives is known to all who have the slightest tincture of curiosity or intelligence. Baxter, the author of the Saints' Rest, though known to the pious readers of his books, who are perhaps not so common now as they have been, is hardly a prominent character of history. We are not much disposed to dispute his title to be set up as one of the four representatives of Puritanism. We think it could be questioned, but we see sufficient reasons why Principal Tulloch should have made this election; and it would be a piece of dishonest critical pretentiousness were we to insinuate that we are half so well prepared to judge, in respect of information (competency aside), as he is; and the uniform calmness and fairness of his judgment would lead us to distrust our own, even were it more adverse to Baxter's fame than it is. One good reason for choosing him is, that his mind is, in one sense, the level from which the other three minds rise to greatness. That level is the narrow, arid, hair-splitting, dogmatic theological arena in which they were all trained. He did not rise above it. He was not an original genius, but to the last he fought over the sand of "thirty tongue sins," "eighteen necessary qualifications of lawful recreation," twenty questions for drunkards, seventeen for thieves, and one hundred and seventy-four for ecclesiastics (p. 383). He had abundance of combativeness like the rest, and in pertinacity surpassed Milton, who was the most wrathful of the four, and whose pen scattered fury enough to afford fuel for fifty battles.

Every true man's life is a warfare, a fighting against the evil without and within-or it may be the good sometimes-but a hotter warfare than has fallen to be the common lot was the lot of these four great Puritan fighters with quill and steel. How they comported themselves in their life-warfare may be not inadequately gathered from Principal Tulloch's narratives and comments, which we cannot abridge, as they are short enough already; and to crush the symmetry and the elegance out of them into synopses, would be to do indolent readers no good, to the disgust of other readers, who do not wish to burden their memories with the dead rubbish of Dr. Dryasdust.

The memory of Cromwell has been freed from the lies and delusions that lay thick over it by the labours of Thomas Carlyle. He will not pass for a hypocrite any more, or a canting schemer for his private aggrandizement. Most people have read Carlyle's Letters and Speeches of Cromwell, and in his view of Cromwell's character-of course, with a moderation and judicial reserve unknown to Carlyle -the accomplished and deliberative Principal of St. Mary's concurs; showing Cromwell in somewhat more human, if in less vehemently heroic lights, by the aid of other biographers, from "Carrion Heath" to Forster. The head of a private family, the affectionate husband and father, clear-headed and kind in the smallest family matters, is not

obscured in the splendour of the warrior who conquered everywhere, at Marston-Moor, Naseby, Dunbar, and Worcester, and the statesman who gave liberty at home, and rendered the name of England terrible abroad, especially to tyrants. As an unexpected exhibition of liberality on the part of the Puritan fanatic, and the Principal of St. Mary's College, St. Andrews, and professor of Presbyterian Divinity therein, we think the following worthy of extract

"No part of Cromwell's career is more exciting, picturesque, and instructive as to his character, than his Scottish campaign. His long letters to the clergy; the zeal and effect with which he criticises their arguments, and assails their position; his respect for the religious earnestness opposed to him, and yet his scorn for its narrowness; the wisdom of many of his remarks on Christian liberty and Church policy, are all deeply interesting. Presbyterianism, then and always, has shown but a slight capacity to see through its own formula to the living truth beyond. With what smiling yet strong irony does the great soldier try to raise it to a higher point of view! Addressing the Commissioners of the Kirk,' he asks, 'Is it therefore infallibly agreeable to the word of God all that you say? I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken. Precept may be upon precept, line may be upon line, and yet the word of the Lord may be to some a word of judgment, that they may fall backward and be broken, and be snared and taken.' Again, a month later, in a letter to 'the Governor of Edinburgh Castle,' who had written on behalf of the ministers: 'Are you troubled that Christ is preached? Is preaching so exclusively your function? Is it against the Covenant? Away with the Covenant if this be so! . Where do you find in the Scriptures a ground to warrant such an assertion, that preaching is exclusively your function? Though an approbation from men hath order in it, and may do well, yet he that hath no better warrant than that hath none at all. Approbation is an act of conveniency in respect of order; not of necessity to give faculty to preach the gospel. Your pretended fear, lest error should step in, is like the man who would keep all the wine out of the country, lest men should be drunk.' Yet again, in the same letters: We look at ministers as helpers of, not lords over, God's people. I appeal to their consciences whether any person, trying their doctrines and dissenting, shall not incur the censure of sectary. And what is this but to deny Christians their liberty, and assume the infallible chair? What doth he, whom we would not be likened unto, do more than this?''

To fit Milton into the Puritan mould has required from our Principal a little of the method of Procrustes, and after all reasonable paring and amputation, he finds and says that Milton is a great deal too big for it. His inclinations to polygamy form a very awkward protuberance, and his passionate love for music and poetry are extremely ethereal and incompressible. Indeed, Milton was, taking into comparison the whole compass of his nature with the Puritan part of it, less of a Puritan than many men of that age who have never been suspected of Puritanism; than, for example, old philosopher Hobbes, and the author of Hudibras, both austere men, who were hermits by nature, and aliens to the gaieties of life in spite of opportunity and temptation. They did not escape the contagion of their age, although they both looked upon it as a species of plague, and the one tried to cure it by philosophy, the other by ridicule. But Milton did not fight against the spirit of his time. He did, no doubt, despise its small fanaticisms, but its great sincerity he shared, and could not help admiring, if he had leisure and consciousness to admire, the spirit that possessed him. He shared also its vehemence of indignation due somewhat to

sincerity, and unhappily fell into the fashionable business of splitting theological straws into fibres, and then pounding the fibres into dust with the most mighty vigour. Even his genius cannot redeem from oblivion the details of this dance of chaos, though amid the confusion it here and there breaks out like a tongue of fire lightening the otherwise perpetual night. His prose, like his poetry, is equal to the highest themes, but his prose was wasted upon many of the smallest, and is lost while his poetry was given to the greatest, and is perennial. Beside the splendid Essay of Macaulay's youth, Principal Tulloch's estimate of Milton is sober and tame, but it is not without value on that account, for it is more complete. The austerity, high temper, and severe views of the thoughtless conduct of his girlish, "hoyden daughters," are treated with a manly fairness and sympathetic consideration, which, on these domestic and plain human matters, it was not in Macaulay's haughty nature to exhibit.

To us, the essay on Baxter is the most interesting of the four, because it is the newest, and because the author's limited space better accords with the dimensions of Baxter's character than with the characters of Cromwell and Milton. The eloquent fiery preacher, the eager controversialist, the untiring writer of no fewer than sixty folio volumes, the self-denying Presbyterian who declaimed impartially against the usurpation of Cromwell and the episcopacy of Charles I., and who, after the Restoration, of which he approved, refused a bishopric for conscientious reasons, conscious love of his people in Kidderminster, and unconscious contempt for the comforts of time, though not heroic in the highest sphere, was still a hero in spirit and in deed. And he was Puritan and Presbyterian from the centre to the circumference, which is one reason why his books lie on the little shelf beside the Bible in Scottish cottages, and are more prized in Scotland among the poor than those of any English divine. Other reasons for this partiality lie in his bold self-confidence in adventuring upon the profoundest mysteries; in his fearless dogmatism, in his passion for logical forms, and in his almost absolute exile from high philosophy and poetry. For one of the lower classes in Scotland who has read Paradise Lost, a hundred have read the Saint's Rest and the Call to the Unconverted. Among the old true-blue Presbyterians who lived before and with our grandfathers, these books were more popular than even Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, which many disapproved of as an improper conversion of the facts of the Christian life into a novel, or a fictitious story for children. With them, Cromwell was the ruthless conqueror of the very respectable General Leslie, and his staff of hortatory clergymen at Dunbar; Milton was an Arian, and an unintelligible poet, which was nearly as bad; and Bunyan was not quite correct about predestination and free grace, besides he wrote fictions about serious and sacred things; but Baxter was "sound" as sound could be. Those of this way of thinking still extant will consider Principal Tulloch's critical estimate of their favourite divine as somewhat too low and restrained, but we must confess that it has dispelled much of the suspicion with which, from the bigotry of his admirers and other men,

we had grown to look on Baxter, and has gone to justify the partiality of our forefathers.

The imaginative tinker has told his own story, and given an exaggerated account of his sins and of his religious experiences. We all know it, and we have a strongly-fixed idea also that it is difficult to separate the facts of his life from the fancies. His life has gone out into the Pilgrim's Progress and the Holy War, and in his books mainly the world has any interest. He was too much of a dreamer ever to have been an actor. Cromwell could have made little use of him, for he was more unpractical than Baxter, for whom the swift-seeing Cromwell could discover nothing to do, could only tolerate him and avoid him, and let him alone. We extract two paragraphs for obvious reasons:—

"This realistic character of Bunyan's allegories is of special interest to us now. We are carried back to Bedford and the Midland Counties in the seventeenth century, and we mingle with the men and women that lived and did their work there. It is in many respects a beautiful and affecting picture that we contemplate. A religion which could produce men like Greatheart, and old Honest, and Christian himself, and Faithful, and Hopeful-and of which the gentle and tender-hearted Mercy was a fair expression-had certainly features both of magnanimity and of beauty. There is a simple earnestness and a pure-minded loveliness in Bunyan's highest creations that are very touching. Puritanism lives in his pages, spiritually and socially, in forms and in colouring which must ever command the sympathy, and enlist the love of all good Christians.

"But his pages no less show its narrowness and deficiencies. Life, even spiritual life, is broader than Bunyan saw it and painted it. It is not so easily and sharply defined; it cannot be so superficially sorted and classified. It is more deep, complex, and subtle, more involved, more mixed. There may have been good in Talkative with all his emptiness and love for the ale-bench; and Mrs. Timorous, and even By-ends might have something said for them. Nowhere, in reality, is the good so good, or the bad so bad, as Puritan evangelical piety is apt to conceive and represent them. There is work to be done in the city of destruction as well as in fleeing from it. The Meadow with the sparkling river, and the Enchanted Ground, are not mere snares to lure and hurt us. There is room for leisure and literature, and poetry and art even, as we travel to Mount Zion. There is a meeting-point for all these elements of human culture, and the 'one thing needful,' without which all culture is dead, though Bunyan and Puritanism failed to see it."

But after reading this passage and all the book, the question still recurs,-What was Puritanism? Was it a system of theology? Baxter was one of the greatest Puritan theologians, and Cromwell was a Puritan, but he did not like Baxter and his theology. They met, and Cromwell looked through him, and found him intractable, narrow, and unfit for the broad world of God, fit only to work in a little sphere, and build up hard narrow theories. What is Puritanism? Is it asceticism, that spirit of self-abnegation which sent the hermits of other centuries to caves to feed on roots and water, and robed them in hair shirts and vermin to conquer the flesh, with all its healthy sensibilities and affections,

"In hopes to merit heaven, by making earth a hell?"

Is it a repudiation of the fine arts, of painting, of music (all except the most sepulchral), of sculpture, of poetry, of the stage, of the drama, of all amusements, innocent as well as harmless? Macaulay