We are told in the commencement of this chapter, that in his prison the Baptist heard of the works of Christ. The very word, prison, in connection with that child of the wilderness who lived beneath the open sky, and held converse only with Nature, suggests to us the physical irritations that must have tortured and clouded his faculties, and the morbid thoughts that must have eat into his soul. What misery greater to an impassioned reformer, whose spirit burns to do its work, than to have his hands tied, and plucked from the living world to whom his mission was, to be cast into the objectless solitudes of a dungeon! What mind could bear that heavy arrest upon its impetuous movements, that turning into contemptuous mockery of its nursed and much-loved schemes, without a bitter re-action? In this melancholy of spirit stray echoes are wafted to his dungeon of the preaching of Jesus. His heart grows darker and more perplexed as this contrast breaks upon him, of his own condition with that of Him whose way he prepared. Why should it be so? Why should he, one of the prime agents in the coming Reformation, thus be laid aside like a broken tool? Where were the signs of the Messiah's kingdom? Was there not unnecessary delay? Was Christ acting in the spirit of his mission? Why not take upon him, at once, his great office, and restoring the sceptre to Israel, set up at once that revival of the best days of Judaism, which was the Kingdom of God, in John's conception of it, that the Messiah was to establish? We do not believe that these brooding thoughts generated in the Baptist's mind suspicion or unbelief, for that is inconsistent with the character of the man, and with all the rest of his history; but we believe that owing to his Jewish apprehensions of what was the Christ's true Kingdom, they produced perplexity, disappointment, and impatience, and that this impatience found vent in his message to Jesus, " art thou he that should come, or must we look for another?" a message not conveying, we think, the language of unbelief, but the language of admonition and advice, a prompting of Jesus to use speed and despatch; an excited, impatient, perhaps querulous remonstrance against delay. How calm is the answer of Jesus! He asserts nothing of himself. He appeals to facts: let them speak for him. He does not declare himself to be the Messiah in answer to John's message, for with their misconceptions, he was more anxious to introduce new views of the Messiah's purpose, than to challenge attention to himself as the Christ, whilst they were yet unprepared to learn the true character which the Christ should bear. He cited his works, as vouchers for himself—they not only proved, -they did something to unfold the true scope and nature of his

mission. They were explanatory of its spirit and purpose, as well as demonstrative of its authority. They would do something to open John's mind to the true character of God's kingdom on the earth. They would unfold aims that looked farther than any resuscitation of Judaism :-" Go and show John again the things that ye do hear and see; the blind receive their sight; the lame walk; the lepers are cleansed; the deaf hear; the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them;" -and the answer is closed with that pointed admonition addressed rather to the feelings in John's mind that suggested his message than to any thing that the message itself contained, an admonition not of direct reproof, but sufficient to awaken John to new patience, thought, and faith, " and blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me."

When the messengers departed, Jesus turned to the multitude, and addressed them upon John's character, deeming it, perhaps, necessary to vindicate his consistency. John was not inconsistent but impatient, and his impatience arose out of his Jewish views of the kingdom of God, which, supposing to be in a great measure temporal and outward, he thought might be hurried on and precipitated. These two characteristics of John, Jesus brings into notice, his firmness and his unenlightened impetuosity. He appeals to the people for their sense of John's character. He was no undecided man, infirm of purpose, and wavering in his testimony that preached in the wilderness,-shaken like its own reeds, and yielding to every influence like the tall grass of the desert that bends and shivers in the blast. He who abode in the wilderness, because it was a type of himself, was not likely to go back from his faith. He was no courtier clothed in fine raiment, soft and silken, neither in mind nor body, to be open to seductive influences, or liable to caprice. The passed word of that lofty and rugged spirit would be, like the past itself, irrevocable. Such a man would be more liable to be obstinate and impetuous in an error than apt to change. The sterner class of minds are always the most uniform, and the reason is that they are not open to a wide range of influences. Sternness of temper accompanies contracted sympathies; it is connected with narrowness of thought, and John was narrow. thus by nature likely to be inflexible in his once delivered testimony that Jesus was the Christ; but narrow in his conceptions of the objects and purpose of the Christ, and therefore impatient and impetuous under his disappointed expectations. The source of this impatience Jesus plainly declares was in John's ignorance of the true aims of the Messiah's mission. He deemed that the kingdom of heaven might be gotten by violence,-that the violent

He was

might take it by force,-that the Christ might long since have taken unto him his great power and reigned. He did not know that the kingdom of heaven suffereth no violence, and cometh not by observation, for the kingdom of heaven is within the soul. Though the last and greatest of Jewish prophets, yet in the scope and vision of his spirit he was only a Jew; and in the knowledge of God and of Providence, the very least in the true kingdom of heaven would be more enlightened than he. This is John's mind laid open: and thus did Christ generously defend his consistency while he traced his querulous message to its

source.

That John was offended in him, suggested to Jesus' mind the melancholy recollections of past failures, and that the Jews were offended both in John and in him. They rejected alike the austerities of the one, and the human sympathies of the other. The one was insane and a fanatic: the other was too like themselves to be the great prophet of God. "But Wisdom is justified of all her children." John had his mission; and Christ had his. The world did not understand them; but they have conquered and changed the world. Each in his place was the instrument that Providence required. God fits the workman to the work; and the result has proved that his wisdom is justified.

We cannot read the record of sorrowful and depressing remembrances which this train of thought summoned before Jesus without a keen feeling of the painful trials and disappointments of that tender and sympathetic mind. There flitted before his quick thought the scenes where he had spent his strength for nought, the cities on whose homes and people his spirit had shed its best energies and love,-and shed them only to be like water spilt on the ground, and that cannot be gathered. Devoted to them, life and mind, there comes back to him no return but this recurring experience, that they were offended in him. "Then began he to sorrow over the cities wherein most of his mighty works were done, because they repented not." Nazareth, Chorazin, Bethsaida, Capernaum, are all before him, pressing their bitter memories on his fainting heart; all sought and lost; toiled for but not won; sought by works that might have averted heathen Tyre and Sidon from their desperate courses; and ministered unto by one, who if he had preached unto Sodom might have awakened even it to repentance, and stayed the fiery indignation of Heaven. But mark how Jesus calms and reassures this depression of a moment. "I thank thee, Father, Lord of Heaven and Earth, that though Thou hast hid these things from the worldly wise and prudent, Thou

hast revealed them unto babes. Even so be it, Father, since so it seemeth good in Thy sight." That retreat of the spirit to its God turns the whole currents of the Saviour's mind. They are no longer "sicklied over by pale" experience, but strong in the Lord, and in the power of His grace. He is again the Saviour, with overtures of peace from Heaven; the sent in love; the seeker of the lost. Depression might cross him, but he knew his Father in Heaven too well not to bear his heart out of these shadows, and place it beneath the brightness that ever beameth from Him. It was enough. To think of God was again to be revived, again to be His Christ, strong in hope. The Son knoweth the Father." Once more goes forth the thrilling appeal of undesponding love; "Come unto me ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. My yoke is easy, and my burden is light."

Of Mr. Milman's tendency to a rationalistic interpretation, we give the following indication:

"Now the dreadful earthquake which followed, seemed to pass away without appalling the enemies of Jesus. The rending of the veil of the Temple from the top to the bottom, so strikingly significant of the approaching abolition of the local worship, would either be concealed by the priesthood, or attributed as a natural effect to the convulsion of the earth. The same convulsion would displace the stones which covered the ancient tombs, and lay open many of the innumerable rock-hewn sepulchres which perforated the hills on every side of the city, and expose the dead to public view. To the awe-struck and depressed minds of the followers of Jesus, no doubt, were confined those visionary appearances of the spirits of their deceased brethren, which are obscurely intimated in the rapid narratives of the Evangelists."

The design with which Mr. Milman pursues the History after the death of Jesus, we must exhibit in his own words,and in addition we can do little more than assure our readers that they will find him a most impartial and instructive guide :

“As a universal Religion, aspiring to the complete moral conquest of the world, Christianity had to encounter three antagonists, Judaism, Paganism, and Orientalism. It is our design successively to exhibit the conflict with these opposing forces, its final triumph not without detriment to its own native purity, and its divine simplicity from the interworking of the yet unsubdued elements of the former systems into the Christian mind; until each, at successive periods, and at different parts of the world, formed a modification of Christianity equally removed from its unmingled and unsullied original: the Judeo-Christianity of Palestine, of which the Ebionites appear to have been the last representatives; the Platonic Christianity of Alexandria, as, at least at this

early period, the new religion could coalesce only with the sublimer and more philosophical principles of Paganism; and, lastly, the Gnostic Christianity of the East.'

There is often great ingenuity, combined with a most lively realization of the fleeting opinions and phases of a period, in the skill with which Mr. Milman discovers the causes of mysterious impressions and events in the characters and habits of thinking among those concerned. To account for the imputation to the Christians of the burning of Rome, under Nero, with the dreadful hatred and persecution of the Christians it excited, there is the following clever, if fanciful, suggestion:

"We have sometimes thought it possible that incautious or misinterpreted expressions of the Christians themselves might have attracted the blind resentment of the people. The minds of the Christians were constantly occupied with the terrific images of the final coming of the Lord to judgment in fire; the conflagration of the world was the expected consummation, which they devoutly supposed to be instantly at hand. When therefore they saw the great metropolis of the world, the city of pride, of sensuality, of idolatry, of bloodshed, blazing like a fiery furnace before their eyes-the Babylon of the West wrapped in one vast sheet of destroying flame, the more fanatical-the Jewish part of the community-may have looked on with something of fierce hope and eager anticipation; expressions almost triumphant may have burst from unguarded lips. They may have attributed the ruin to the righteous vengeance of the Lord; it may have seemed the opening of that kingdom which was to commence with the discomfiture, the desolation of heathenism, and to conclude with the establishment of the millennial kingdom of Christ. Some of these, in the first instance, apprehended and examined, may have made acknowledgments before a passionate and astonished tribunal, which would lead to the conclusion that, in the hour of general destruction, they had some trust, some security, denied to the rest of mankind; and this exemption from common misery, if it would not mark them out in some dark manner, as the authors of the conflagration, at all events would convict them of that hatred of the human race so often advanced against the Jews."(Vol. ii. p. 37.)

Ecclesiastical History is generally considered a dark record of crime, and passion, and blood. The influences of religion on individual feelings are matters of which history takes no note. It is the daring crime, the outrageous extravagance, the startling heresy, that summons the attention of the world. The kingdom of God, at all times cometh not with observation,for the kingdom of God is within us. "The most divine fruits of Christianity," says Tholock, "like those of the private Christian, blossom in secret. As Nature is noisy only when she