provement of later Scriptural criticism, and the general power of Scriptural investigation.

Pilkington, Evangelical History, &c., Walchius, Bibliotheca Selecta, and Fabricius, Bibliotheca Græca, have given lists of these works. The Bibliotheca Græca has, by its last editor, continued the list down to 1795, and given the names of one hundred and seventy Harmonies-an immense number, yet still incomplete. Michaelis has added to the list; and Germany still teems, and will probably teem-till its undigested learning, its rabid love of labour, and its cloudy and extravagant mysticism, shall make books no more.

The Harmonies of the New Testament commenced in the earliest ages of the Church; the natural produce of a period, when the Christian Scriptures being fully published, but the writers, and first interpreters of them being passed away, there arose at once difficulties to solve, and the necessity of solving them by human means. Tatian, in the second century, Ammonius in the third, Eusebius in the fourth, and Augustine in the fifth, composed Harmonies. Those works are now of but little value, excepting as fragments of antiquity, and proofs that before the tyranny of Rome the Scriptures were the common study of the Christian world. But the sun of the Church was now hurrying down, and it soon set among storms of civil and warlike commotion. The purpose of Popery, first, midst, and without end, was the suppression of the public use of Scripture. Vigorous and salient minds sprang up, from time to time, to vindicate the common human right to the knowledge of those laws, by which our human nature was to be tried, and of those hopes, by which it was to be sustained. But they were fountains in the desert, soon absorbed by the sultry and blasted soil; and the feeble verdure round them perished with their disappearing.

The Reformation came, with the Scriptures in its hand; a mighty deliverance had been wrought, and the chain of Christianity, and of the human understanding, seemed to have been broken together. The intellectual blaze of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has long since exhausted all wonder. The restoration of classical learning, that august and legitimate dynasty, to its throne, there to sit for every future age, in antique pomp and sovereignty; the recovery of law, so long trampled on by the arbitrary violence of barbarians and idolatrous pontiffs; the new freedom and federal constitution of the European commonwealth; the sudden vigour of sciencegive that period the rank of almost a new creation, a glorious rising up of the world from the deluge of civil convulsion,

superstitious darkness, and frenzied tyranny, which had covered the wrecks of the ancient empire.

But among the most memorable changes of that memorable time, was the manlier mind of Christian enquiry. The old fri volous controversies of the corrupted ages were extinguished at once-men quarrelled no more for a letter or a date, a mystical conception, or a metaphysical subtlety. The reign of the schoolmen, and of the more hazardous and furious controversialists on the essence and attributes of the Deity, was over; and the controversies which have since arisen in the Reformed Church, have been, with few exceptions, raised on questions not incapable of human determination; and worthy, in the highest degree, of Christian solicitude.

In the course of this long pupillage to truth, the general mental capability improved. Genius had reached its sublime in the earlier ages; but if those intellectual splendours, which like the angels in the patriarchal day seem to have visited the nations oftenest in their remotest times, appear no more among us; their work has been done, and we have been delivered over to other influences less splendid, yet perhaps not less powerful.

No writer of our day would venture to load his page with the ostentatious, though rich and picturesque imagery of Taylor; no man, with the original vigour of Barrow, would impede his logic by the extravagant, far-fetched, and cumbrous quotation of that very eminent divine. We shall not pursue this generation further, through their various forms of diffuse and wordy eloquence, crude and misplaced jest, and unwieldy and inapplicable learning. Those styles, however, were fitted, to the time; their masters were the lords of popularity in their day. Mighty and bold, magnificently equipped with whatever. of weight or lustre was to be found in the armoury of elder times, they came into the field, giants, rejoicing in their strength, and trampled down all opposing controversy by the mere weight of their charge. But we live in an era when the system and the weapons of this ponderous warfare have been abolished together. The armour of our fathers must be hung up with their trophies in our halls. We have become a critical age; and no man can now hope to make an impression on the public mind, but by clearness and common sense, directness of argument, and accuracy. of investigation.

The "Harmonies" of that long period from the sixth to the sixteenth century, those thousand years given to the kingdom of darkness, the millennium of popery, the antagonist period of that kingdom which is yet to shine out upon all nations in an

illustrious efflux of knowledge, holiness, and Christianity; bear the native character of the middle ages-perplexed, subtle, and unscriptural. The names of Comestor, Cassia, Gerson, Ludolph, Perpiniano, even of Peter Lombard, and Aquinas, are now preserved only in the lists of useless and extravagant labour.

The first Harmony of any value to the student, is that of Osiander, a German Protestant divine. It is entitled, Andrea Osiandri Harmonie Evangelica Libri Quatuor, Græce et Latine, Basileæ, 1537, folio; subsequently published by Robert Stephens, at Paris, 1545, in twelves. This work is rare, but curious, even from its being the first public attempt of the Reformed Divines to illustrate the Scriptures. Osiander too hastily adopted the principle, that the evangelical narratives followed each a chronological order; and he is thus led into misconceptions as to the location of particular facts, miracles, &c.

The next popular Harmony was by Chemnitz, who gave the model to the principal writers on this subject, for the next half century. His work is entitled, Martini Chemnitii Harmonia Quatuor Evangeliorum; quam ab eodem feliciter inchoatam Polycarpus Lyserus et Joannes Gerhardus, is quidem continuavit, hic perfecit; Hamburgi, folio, 1704. Chemnitz took for his groundwork the earlier Harmonists, but with many corrections of their plan and principles, and with some important illustrations in the chronology of the Gospel narratives. The whole was originally printed at Geneva, in 1628. Mr. Townsend mentions the "Rules" of this work as peculiarly valuable to him.

A rapid succession then appeared:

The Harmony, Chronicle, and Order of the New Testament, by the celebrated Lightfoot, published in 1654, folio.

The Harmony of the four Evangelists, by Cradock, a work made remarkable by its being preserved from the great fire, in 1666, by Tillotson, (afterwards Archbishop) and revised by him; London, 1668, folio.

Lamy Historia, sive Concordia Evangelistarum, Parisiis, 1689, which, by a rare modesty in that age of colossal volumes, was first published in duodecimo. Its Commentarius in Harmoniam, however, distended into a quarto, in 1699.

J. Clerici Harmonia Evangelica, cui Subjecta est Historia Christi ex quatuor Evangeliis concinnata, &c.; Amstelodami, 1699, folio. This work was long held in estimation; it gave the arrangement of the four Gospels in chronological order, in parallel columns in Greek and Latin, with a Latin paraphrase at the foot,

Nicolai Toinardi Harmonia Græco-Latina; Parisiis, 1707, folio. A work honoured by the favourable opinion of the present Bishop of Peterborough, for its use in the verbal examination of the Evangelists; as this diligent Frenchman has paralleled in columns, not only passages, but words.

We now come to our own country, and the superior lucidness, accuracy, and learning of her Harmonists are honourable to English Theology.

The first two volumes of Doddridge's Family Expositor, appeared in 1739 and 1740. This work continues to be among the most popular and useful paraphrasts of Scripture. It has received of late years a testimony of which its author might well be proud. In a Collection of Sermons and Tracts, by the present Bishop of Durham, this eloquent and forcible character is given.

"In reading the New Testament I recommend Doddridge's Family Expositor as an impartial interpreter and faithful monitor. Other expositions and commentaries might be mentioned, greatly to the honour of their respective authors; for their several excellencies, elegance of exposition, acuteness of illustration, and copiousness of erudition. But I know of no expositor who united so many advantages as Doddridge; whether you regard the fidelity of his version, the fulness and perspicuity of his composition, the utility of his general and historical information, the impartiality of his doctrinal comments, or lastly, the piety and pastoral earnestness of his moral and religious applications. He has made, as he professes to have done, ample use of the commentaries that preceded him; and in the explanation of grammatical difficulties, he has profited much more from the philological writers on the Greek Testament, than could almost have been expected in so multifarious an undertaking as the Family Expositor. Indeed, for all the most valuable purposes of a commentary on the New Testament, the Family Expositor cannot fall too early into the hands of those intended for Holy Orders."

In 1747 Matthew Pilkington published his Evangelical His tory and Harmony, folio. Abandoning the customary arrangement in parallel columns, this writer has divided his work into chapters and sections, and given the facts and doctrines in the words of Scripture itself. It is looked on as a valuable performance.

As we draw closer to our own time, Biblical Literature as→ sumes a more accurate form. Macknight's Harmony of the four Gospels is still among the lists of study given by some of our leading Divines. Its use, however, is derivable less from its arrangement of the Gospels, in which it has unwisely

adopted the chronological ideas of Osiander, than from its accompanying and voluminous dissertations.

Archbishop Newcome's Harmony of the Gospels, with the original text, arranged after Le Clerc's manner, and Wetstein's Lectiones at the foot of the page, takes a high rank among those works, and has been the foundation of the chief subsequent "Harmonies." It was first published in 1778, folio.

In 1778 Dr. Priestley published A Harmony of the Evangelists in Greek, 4to., and in 1780 A Harmony in English. Priestley's natural acuteness, and indefatigable diligence, would have given him great advantages as a Biblical enquirer; but his habitual contempt of other men's opinions, and his rash adherance to every prejudice that started up in a brain busy at once with faction in politics, and innovation in religion, have degraded all his works into the rank of pamphlets, and given them but the use and the existence of pamphlets.

In 1799 White, the celebrated Arabic Professor, produced a work of a species, new, or almost forgotten from its antiquity: Diatessaron, sive integra Historia Domini nostri Jesu Christi, Greece. Ex quatuor Evangeliis inter se collatis, &c. 8vo.

In the Diatessaron the narrative is given, not in fragments and parallelisms, as taken from the separate Evangelists; but in succession, as it might have been formed by an original historian, who had the whole four laid open at once, as materials for his work. The Professor follows Newcome in the arrangement of his narrative, excepting with reference to the Resur rection, in which West and Townson are his chief authorities.

Four or five similar works have been since published, of which the latest before the subject of the present article is A Chronological History, or Diatessaron, in English, by the Rev. Mr. Warner, 1819, 8vo. There is a considerable number of Harmonies, &c. of portions of the New Testament.

The great body of these works is thus arranged under two heads :-Those which presume that the facts of the Gospels follow in chronological order; and those which take the order of one in preference to that of the others, or devise a new arrangement for them all.

The value of " Harmonies" is unquestionable. Scripture can find no safe exposition but in Scripture: the contrast of the the several writers explains their occasional difficulties of narration and phraseology; it supplies from each the facts omitted by the others; and it gives the additional and highly important evidence, that the Evangelists were not copyists of each other, nor of any one common original.

We now come to a performance which includes nearly all