God forbids himself to disturb the agent's uniform and perpetual acting according to strongest motive."-P. 320.

The second of these incompatibilities is really predicated upon our ignorance, and not upon our knowledge. We cannot understand how the Divine Intelligence foreknows all future events. To enable us to understand the exact manner in which an Infinite intelligence contemplates succession in time, it would be necessary that we should be infinite also. The fact that God foreknows all future events is all that is revealed to us; the manner of it he has left in darkness, and we can throw no light upon it by our verbal speculations.

Of one thing we may rest assured, that as perception precedes volition in the finite intelligence, so knowledge must precede determination in the Divine Mind. God cannot will or act in absolute darkness. Divine predestination must be conditioned on Divine foreknowledge.* His foreknowledge does not depend upon his will, or on the adjustment of motives to make us will thus and thus; but he foreknows every thing first conditionally, in the world of possibility, before he creates, or determines anything to be, in the world of fact. Otherwise, all his purposes would be grounded in ignorance, not in wisdom, and his knowledge would consist in following after his will, to learn what it had blindly determined.†

Another important principle clearly and vigorously maintained by Dr. Whedon is, "that the FREENESS of an act is NOT AFFECTED BY the consideration of its being FOREKNOWN.” First, because the Divine knowledge must always correspond to the reality. A free action must be known as free. "If there be in the free agent, ascertained by psychology, or required by intuition, or supposably seen by the Divine eye, the power of putting forth a volition with full power of alteriety, then God knows that power."-P. 273. Secondly, the occurrence of an event or act may be certain to Divine foreknowledge and yet perfectly contingent in itself. Foreknowledge renders nothing necessary; it is the consequence, not the cause of events.

If there be a necessity at all in the case, "THE NECESSITY LIES

NOT UPON THE FREE ACT BUT UPON THE KNOWLEDGE.

The

This is unquestionably the doctrine of Scripture, "Whom he foreknew, them also he did predestinate."

Bushnell's "Natural and Supernatural," p. 50..

foreknowledge must see to its own accuracy. Pure knowledge, temporal or eternal, must conform itself to the fact, not the fact to the knowledge. Knowledge, by its very nature, accepts the fact as it is. . . . The act is by no necessity bound to conform to or be connected with the knowledge. It is perfectly free to contradict the knowledge, and the knowledge must take care of itself. The act can be as it pleases, and the knowledge must conform."--P. 284.

The nature of the POSITIVE ARGUMENT for the Freedom of the Will will have been already suggested to the reader during the course of this discussion.

We are conscious that we possess a power of alternative choice. By the same faculty by which we know that we exist, do we also know that we have the fullest, freest choice. The universal consciousness of our race is revealed in the history of the past, in the languages which men have spoken, in the laws which men have enacted, in the institutions they have framed. And in all these we see that men, in all ages, have believed that man was the master and maker of his own actions, and responsible for them, and they have, in every age, praised or blamed, rewarded or punished accordingly. The idea of duty has been to every human mind an omnipresent reality, so that all languages abound with the correlatives of "ought and "ought not," of duty and obligation, of praise and blame. All this clearly indicates that freedom is a fact of universal consciousness. A divine command to make a contrary choice supposes adequate power to make that choice. There can be no responsibility, and no moral desert without power of contrary choice. Power underlies all responsibility. A created moral desert is an absolute impossibility. And upon no other theory can we establish God's non-authorship of sin, or vindicate the righteousness of his administration. Freedom is the only condition of a possible Theodicy. These are all common-sense propositions, and they are urged with resistless force by Dr. Whedon in Part III, to which we invite the reader's careful attention.

There are some chapters of extraordinary power and grandeur in this volume, to which we would esteem it a pleasure to direct the reader's attention, but we must forbear. The one

on the "Equation of Probational Advantages" is alike honorable to the heart and head of Dr. Whedon. The reading of that chapter is full of consolation to the Christian heart. It relieves the sadness which the moral aspect of the world induces, fills us with intense sympathy for our suffering race, and materially quickens our missionary zeal.

We should have been gratified by a more extended discussion of this great question in view of the Eighth of our Articles of Faith, together with some historical and critical notices of the Anthropology of Augustine, Anselm, and Arminius. Nevertheless we hesitate not to pronounce it the most masterly and exhaustive discussion of the subject in the English language.

ART. V. THE NIBELUNGEN LIED.

Der Nibelunge Noth. Urtext mit gegenübenstehender Uebersetzung, nebst Einleitung und Wörterbuch, herausgegeben von Dr. LUDWIG BRAUNFELS. 16mo., pp. 597. Frankfurt am Main: 1846.

Das Nibelungen Lied, herausgegeben durch FRIEDRICH HEINRICH VON DER HAGEN. 12mo., pp. 598. Berlin: 1807.

THE reader is invited to make with us a visit to the rude Gothic ancestry of many of our countrymen in a notice of the great German epic, the Nibelungen Lied. The admirers of the Iliad and its Latin imitation, among whom we desire to be classed, may deem a comparison of these poems an insult to the Greek and Roman, and so to all Christendom as the legitimate heir of the two latter. August Wilhelm von Schlegel, however, the distinguished German critic, the author of the best translation ever made of Shakspeare, has instituted such comparison, concluding rather in favor of the German work. We shall notice the poem more in detail than he has done.

The question has been much discussed whether the Homeric poems are the work of one mind. Even intelligent admirers of Greek antiquity once regarded this discussion as almost an impiety. In our school days we were among the zealous defenders of the unity of the, authorship of these poems, and

if Homer had been a personal friend, we could not have felt more indignant at a hint to the contrary. Now, however, without a reason more or less on either side, except the subjective conviction that it never lay in human nature to open the drama of the world's literature with a dignity and beauty which has seldom been attained in the nearly three thousand years of its progress, we deem nothing more absurd than this supposition. It would realize the fable of Minerva springing in full armor from Jupiter's head, and would make Homer not only without peers, but without analogies. It would present the literature of the world as opening with an epic which many still regard as peerless; as starting from a height which successive generations for nearly three thousand years have been vainly, as many think, toiling to regain.

The great rivers are formed from the union of smaller streams; these in turn are made up of murmuring brooks, which come from rippling rills, each of which is traceable to some bubbling spring in mountain or valley. The traveler chances to stand upon the banks of a noble river, broad, deep, and clear. It reflects with unwonted distinctness, from its smooth and glassy surface, a sky of purer azure, fleecy clouds of more beautiful whiteness than those of other lands, with cities and villages such as he could not have hoped to see, peopled by a race nobler in aspect and mien than any which he has met, as if belonging somewhere between our race and superior beings, with country diversified by hill and dale, clothed with pastures in which graze the finest flocks and herds. He attempts to trace this river to its sources, but meets with impassible obstacles, marshes and swamps flanked by inaccessible mountains. Does he, because he cannot trace it, conclude, that, unlike all other rivers, it is without these tributaries, and springs thus broad and deep out of the earth, at once a river?

As to unity of authorship, the Iliad and the Nibelungen Lied must finally stand upon the same ground. Whether there ever was such a man as Homer is doubtful. Few men have investigated so thoroughly or written so well on the Homeric poems as Mr. Grote, and he inclines to the negative. We shall all consent, however, to let the name remain. We must suppose some man—we may as well call him Homer as anything elseof greater genius than the rest of those who in successive ages

contributed to this work; a man capable of seizing the existing material and doing the chief work of moulding it into its present shape; for the opinion to which Grote leans, that many persons united their labors, each having his part assigned in the production of the Homeric epics, is too unlike the way in which authors act, not to mention the improbability of even two, much less a dozen or more, uniting together and possessing the requisite talents, unless, indeed, it can be shown that great poets were, at that day, a more natural production and more ready to co-operate with each other than they have been since. Emerson says, "Every novel is debtor to Homer," and the remark is noteworthy for the extent and pointedness of its truth; but Emerson says nothing of Homer's indebtedness. This lay beyond his or any other man's field of inquiry. The creditors' claims are outlawed, or their evidence is lost. If, however, the truth could be known, Homer would be found indebted to Ionic bards who preceded him and whose names and works have perished; and, what has seldom been true of others, he would be found still more deeply indebted to some who lived long after him.

The Iliad has come down to us with the name of an author: tradition assigns him a birthplace, Scio's rocky isle, though it tells us that seven cities contended for the honor of his birth. It gives him some marked physical attributes, as blindness, and gives other elements, unfortunately too many, from which we may form a person. Taking for granted this person's sole authorship of this epic, our admiration for him has become intense, has grown into a personal friendship which has foiled all our efforts to distribute this glory. This is a beautiful instance of begging the question. The poem proves that Homer was a wonderful man, and then it needs no proof that so wonderful a man could have written the poem.

This is our logic, but, like many German philosophers who destroy the foundations of faith in their philosophy, and are still devout in the Church, so we in theory renounce our faith in Homer, but do not allow him to be dislodged from his stronghold in the heart.

On the contrary the Nibelungen Lied comes to us without the name of an author. There is no blindness or other misfortune to excite our commiseration; no rocky isle to connect