King Charles's days, drew up a form to be used by the dispersed members who met in holes and corners to worship the Lord; in which form the oblation and invocation are restored. In Bishop Wilson's Introduction to the Lord's Supper, there is this direction after "the prayer of consecration:"-" Say secretly,...... look graciously upon the gifts now lying before thee, and send down hy tholy Spirit on this sacrifice, that He may make this bread and this wine the body and blood of thy Christ." But the most remarkable witness is borne by the goodly scions of the church of England, the episcopal churches in Scotland and America, which were no sooner left at liberty to regulate their affairs for them selves than they both restored the forms of oblation and invocation according to the primitive model, as may be seen in the extracts which have been given from them above. And the only reason which can be assigned why a similar restoration did not take place at the last review, is that the temper of the times, and the clamour of the fanatics and schismatics made it inexpedient; for, from the restorations which were made, and from the known opinions of the eminent men who were engaged in that review, there can be little doubt of what they would have done if, under all the circumstances, it had been deemed advisable. A. P. P.

ON THE SITE OF PARADISE.

THE opinion that Paradise was situated in Palestine, or the land of Canaan, has certainly existed, and the traces of it may be met with, although not in any quarters entitled to our respect. Adam was, according to some, created at Hebron or Kiriath Arba, and buried in the same place.-Honorius of Autun cit. Malvenda de Paradiso Voluptatis, p. 84. Others supposed that he was created at Damascus, in the neighbourhood of which Cain slew his brother.-Peter Comestor cit. ibid, c. 54; Gerv. Tilb. Otia, 3, c. 23. Others have pretended that he was interred upon Mount Calvary. The tradition that God did not inundate Palestine at the time of the general Deluge, is of the same drift.-See Pseudo-Philo Jud. Biblic. Antiq. p. 8; and Bartolocci Bibl. Rabb. 3, p. 628. The Itinerary of St. Antonine, a work ascribed to the close of the sixth or earliest years of the seventh century, expresses itself in these ambiguous words :- "Jericho verò in oculis omnium ita videtur ut Paradisus;" by which I incline to think he meant, that Jericho was popularly considered as on the site of Paradise.-Itin. p. 11. But the notions in question are certainly anterior to what men term the middle ages. For the poetical works of Taliesin, a sort of gnostical mystic in the sixth century, contain allusions to it. He says, in one poem:—

The Creator did fashiont

On the land of the vale of Hebron

With His two bright hands

The apt form of Adam,

* And concerning the site of Jericho, see Brit. Mag. vol. iii. p. 662-6.

+ Awdyl Vraith, st. i. 16, 17.

The books of occult learning
From the two hands of Emanuel
The angel Raphael brought,

And gave them to Adam,
While he was in the stream
Up to above his gills
In the water of Jordan,
When he was fasting.

And, again, in another

I have been in the city of the grave of the Lord,*
[Whose name is] Tetragrammatou ;

I have conducted the bold ones

To the land of the vale of Hebron.

Whether these notions were in any measure attributable to the resemblance of the name Tŋwv (given by the translators of Jeremiah to the river of Egypt) to the Tew of the land of Eden, I cannot say; but I should rather think that they did not arise out of any such minute verbal correspondencies, but from a wish to effect general conformities, and, if I may so say, cyclic recurrences. The new Land of Promise was to be the same as the old, and the blissful residence of the Second Adam the same as that of the first; being the very idea which Milton has introduced, not by way of opinion, but of poetical figure—

loss of Eden, till one greater man

Regain it, and restore the blissful seat."

The language of Revelations was calculated, in some measure, to assist the advocates of this notion, for it styles the blissful seat in the kingdom to come, Jerusalem, "the new Jerusalem;" yet it states that it shall contain the tree of life, being that very tree of Paradise from which men were debarred by their fall in Adam. Jerusalem in the Holy Land being thus, in the language of prophecy, quite identified with the Paradise in Eden, was nearly sufficient for such critics as those among whom we find the opinions in question. But whatever source gave rise to them, we shall, I believe, find them to be utterly untenable, either on the ground suggested by Mr. Winning, or on any other.

With the text, as existing in our version and in that of the Seventy, they can have no connexion; they cannot, by any means, be brought into juxta-position with it, so as to raise up an argument. We must, for a moment, look to the popular notion (whence originating, is probably known to critics, but is unknown to me,) that the four rivers enclosed or surrounded Paradise. Upon that hypothesis, we

Hanes Taliesin, st. 6.

+ Some motive must have induced Milton to say, in the direct teeth of the English Bible, that the Garden of the Lord was situated in the country which extends— "From Auran eastward to the royal towers Of great Seleucia, built by Grecian kings."

He well knew that the heads of the Euphrates and Tigris were not there.

But by

what motive he and others have been induced to reject the published text, I repeat that I am ignorant.

shall see great obstacles to the Tnor of the Greek Jeremiah being the Γεων of Genesis.

Firstly, it is not doubted, so far as I know, that the Greek translation correctly renders "the great river Hiddekel" by Tigris.-See Gen. ii. 14; Dan. x. 4. But an irregular quadrilateral space, or any space whatever, which is enclosed and bounded by four rivers, two of which are Euphrates and Tigris, must be a portion of the Mesopotamia separated off by two other rivers running between east and west,-or this simple reason, that the Euphrates and Tigris are nearly parallel, running from north to south.

Secondly, this theory gives us two limits to our enclosure,-the river of Egypt, and (suppose the Hiddekel imperfectly identified) the river Euphrates. But those were two principal boundaries of the empire of Solomon in its glory. That empire could not be bounded by a river to the west, for the sea-shore is its limit from Rhinocerura to the northern bounds of Asher; yet I lay no stress upon that, because it is uncertain whether the Mediterranean Sea had its present shape, or any existence at all, before the Flood. Therefore, the Phison and Hiddekel must have flowed, the one somewhere on Solomon's northern boundary, and the other on the west of Palestine where the sea now is.

But is it not monstrous to say that the garden which God planted for man, to inhabit a short time, and never destined to multiply therein, was a territory rather exceeding all that Solomon possessed? The word paradise implies a small space, laid out for pleasure and recrea tion, and was specially applied by the Persians, from whose language it comes, to the parks which their kings had in many places, and in which they took their enjoyment. Nothing authorizes us to conclude, that it greatly exceeded in extent the grounds which we see enclosed for pleasure or magnificence by our monarchs and some of our wealthiest nobility. It was an enclosure accessible by one entrance only, because one guard only was set to prevent men from making their way to its centre. The tree of life was set in the middle of the paradise, which seems to imply its extent to have been so moderate and EvσvνOTTOV, that persons might be conscious of the central position even of a tree. A single tree in the centre of Solomon's empire!

Moreover, the garden of Eden was situated in the land or country of Eden; but if all the countries from the Euphrates and the defiles of Hamath to Rhinocerura were the garden of Eden, the land of Eden must have been all Asia, or an immense portion of it, in order to keep up any sort of proportion between a whole country and a park situated in it. These magnitudes become quite Rabbinical, and remind us of Behemoth and Leviathan. But they are objectionable on more specific grounds. "Certain of the children of Eden dwelt in Telassar, in the days of Sennacherib.”—Is. xxxvii. 12. “I will cut off (says the

St. John of Damascus opined that the whole terraqueous globe was Paradise, and that the ocean was the river in Paradise.-S. J. Damascen. cit. Huet de Situ Paradisi, p. 22. If so, the land of Eden must have been the universe, or, at least, the solar system.

Lord) him that holdeth the sceptre from the house of Eden."-Amos, i. 5. From these passages, it seems probable that a nation, certainly of very moderate celebrity, existed in Asia, whose rulers were the posterity of one Eden, and gave their name to it; and that, in the days of Moses, they possessed the territory in which the Garden of the Lord had formerly been placed. When Moses said that it was in Eden, he made use of a term perfectly unambiguous to those who had any knowledge of the geography of their time.

Thirdly, it is inconceivable that Moses should make use of a simile in which the same thing, under another name, is compared unto itself. But we read, that "Lot beheld all the Plain of Jordan, that it was well watered everywhere, even as the Garden of the Lord, like the land of Egypt as thou comest unto Zoar."-Gen. xiii. 10. From this it is evident that the vale of Jordan was topographically as distinct from the Garden of the Lord as it was from Egypt.

Fourthly, if the land of Canaan was Paradise, it is astonishing that all Scripture should be silent on so interesting and remarkable a fact, and that the memory of it should at any time, from that of Moses to this, have been lost by the Israelites. Yet so it has been. For the allusions to the subject are few and in obscure authors, and it is no general tenet even of modern Judaism.

However, these remarks are adapted to an hypothesis totally at variance both with the Septuagint and with our version, which offers no variation of sense in its margin. The tale there told is a very plain one:" A river went out of Eden (the land of Eden) to water the garden, and from thence it was parted and became into four heads. The name of the first is Pison-the name of the second is Gihon— and the name of the third is Hiddekel-and the fourth river is Euphrates." It is difficult to paraphrase it in any words more perspicuous than the original ones. A river flowing through Eden entered the garden of Eden; in that garden, the river was divided into four channels (as the vertex of a Delta), which, from that point of division, received the above-mentioned four names; or, rather, were the same rivers which, in the time of Moses, bore those names. The rivers Euphrates and Tigris have their sources at present not far from one another, but it is not true, as Justin and Boethius supposed it was, that they now have a common source. Comparing this fact with the unequivocal words of Genesis, we become aware of the very curious and complicated changes effected on the face of the earth by the great Deluge, and (as said by Malvenda) that although before the Flood the four rivers did flow out of Paradise per eluvionem fontes aliò translatos And by comparing the position of the sources of the Euphrates and Tigris, to which may be added, the closely neighbouring fountain of the Araxes, we shall perceive that the terrestrial paradise could not have been far removed from the surface now occupied by the lake of Van in Armenia.

esse.

Unless the translations of Scripture can be rectified by an entirely new version of the original, the case is much too clearly stated to be capable of being invalidated by the arguments, that the river of Egypt was called For by certain Alexandrian Jews, and that the Cushim of

Midian dwelt near it. Tnov is a different word from Tev. The rivers which the Persians called Oxus and Jaxartes, are called by the Tartars, Gihon and Sihon. The name Araxes was common to the Kur and the Volga or Ethel. Diversity of names is not uncommon in rivers. In respect of the Cushim, they were in Arabia, in eastern and in western Africa, in the parts of Assyria from whence the Son of the Morning marched to the relief of Troy, and I know not in how many settlements besides. H.

PRAYER FOR CHRIST'S CHURCH MILITANT.

SIR,-In your last Number there is a statement that the rubric, which enjoins the reading of the "Prayer for the whole state of Christ's church militant here in earth," is generally disregarded, and a suggestion that the rubric should be altered, so as to accord with the practice of the great body of the clergy.

Where a law cannot be enforced, or involves an impossibility, or even a very great and obvious inconvenience, there may be grounds for suggesting the alteration or repeal of it. But is this the case with the rubric in question? The utmost evil that can arise from obeying it is the loss of five minutes, though where there are two clergymen officiating, and one remains at the altar during the sermon to conclude the service there, the delay would be even less than this; and I would therefore propose to your correspondent, not to bring down the law to the practice, but to raise the practice to the law.

Since I have occupied my present cure, I have invariably concluded the service in the mode prescribed, and I can assure you, that so far from the congregation appearing wearied, or in any way inconvenienced by this addition to what is usual in almost all but cathedral churches, I believe they are as deeply impressed with this as with any portion of our ritual, and would be sorry to find it discontinued.

I should be glad to learn that any of your readers were induced by this assurance to attempt what might be done by a close adherence to the rules of our Liturgy; and I am satisfied, that as we revise our own practice, the less reason shall we find for revision in that incomparable manual.

I have reason to believe that the present bishop of this diocese, when an incumbent of a country parish, in more than one instance, restored the authorized mode of concluding the morning service, and that his testimony as to its good effect would accord with my own. I am, Sir, your obedient servant, CLERICUS HEREFORDIENSIS.

Rectory, Herefordshire,
Aug. 20th, 1834.

What must be understood by "compassing the whole land of Havilah" and "compassing the whole land of Cush," ò κvкλмv πаσav тηv ynv? A river may compass a district by dividing and reuniting itself, as the Rhine forms the Batavian island, or by making a delta at its mouth. But it is surprising if such was the case with two out of the four rivers.