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ART. VIII. - REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.

Ir has been a joyous sight to see Italy born again into the family of nations, and renewing her youth and strength; and every new sign of awakening life is a fresh pleasure. We have here a book which helps to increase our hope, that Italy will soon have a theology more suited to her needs than the mass of superstitions which has been her inheritance. Our author is a pioneer in the cause of liberal theology there, and has had, it seems, not only to write his book, but to pay for its publication.

He has done his work in a thorough and scholarly way. He shows himself acquainted with German, English, and French authorities. He is very successful in his treatment of the two great objections to the unity of the Book of Ecclesiastes, that is, the presence in it of so many disjointed sentences and maxims; and, secondly, the apparently contradictory statements in it in regard to a future life and judgment, and on some other matters.

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On the first point, our author, acknowledging his indebtedness to Ewald and Knobel for two suggestions at the basis of his view, considers the author of Ecclesiastes to have been an unskilful writer, who sometimes let his fancy wander outside the logical line of his argument, and afterwards did not correct and prune his work, as a more critical writer would have done. He points out, besides, that these disconnected sentences are mostly maxims of practical advice, -a common mode of teaching in the East, in which the accidental association of ideas in the mind of the writer would have freer play, and the connection of thought be less regarded, than in a theoretical treatise, such as the greater part of the book is.

Our author harmonizes the apparent contradictions in the book with its unity, by regarding the author of it as a "probabilist," as he puts it, or a sceptic, - not absolute and thorough-going, but one who

* Il Libro del Cohelet, Volgarmente Detto Ecclesiaste, Tradotto dal Testo Ebraico, con Introduzione Critica e Note. Di DAVID CASTELLI. Pisa: Tipographia Nistri, 1866. A spese dell' Autore. pp. 305.

"denies nothing, but acknowledges every thing, yet recognizes nothing. as true, but accepts every thing as probable,” one who," considering things in their multiform aspects, reaches contrary conclusions, according to the different ways in which he examines questions;" "yet forced by necessity to follow some line of conduct in practical life, after passing in review the different opinions which wrestle together in his mind, rests finally in that conclusion which seems to him the least improbable." Yet these considerations are not enough, our author thinks, to reconcile the doctrine of the last six verses of the book (xii. 9-14) to that of the rest of it; but we have not space enough here to give his rather complex view of this subject.

We hope that the Italian exegesis which is to come will show as much care and thought and acuteness, and be as clear in expression, as this book is. If so, it will help, not only Italy, but the rest of the world besides.

*

F. T. W.

AFTER what late events have taught us, we should hardly have gone to Palermo in search of a liberal or a rationalist; but it seems, from the book before us, that the spirit of free inquiry has penetrated even there. Our author belongs to a class of rationalists which we might expect to find in so backward a place. He is of the Voltaire and TomPaine school of Deists. To one used to a more modern mode of thought, there is something almost startling in this apparition from the past. It may be, however, that things are in such a bad state in Palermo, and in some other parts of Italy, as to give to Deism a strong excuse for being, and to call for the assertion of the great truth which this Deism contains, that the reason has its rights, which must not be trampled upon. And, so far as this book is an assertion of the rights of reason, it has our hearty sympathy. But our author, not content with this, strikes, in a rather vague but very bloodthirsty way, at all of us poor Christians, and attacks Christianity with a fierceness which seems more dictated by prejudice and ignorance than by that Reason of which he is so warm a worshipper.

Perhaps the strangest part of the book is found in the last chapter, where we are surprised, after the strong and indiscriminate abuse of dogmas in the chapters before, to read that "the programme of the rationalists" should be set out clearly in formulas, and spread abroad. Our author's attempt at a programme" of this sort seems

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* Il Razionalismo ed il Signor Guizot. Per il CAV. B. GALLETTI. Palermo: Tipografia di Gaetano Priulla, 1866. pp. vii., 105.

more fitted to excite surprise if not to cause a smile - than to touch the heart or to convince the intellect; and we think a wide change of base will be needed to make this one-sided philosophy into a religion.

Judged on its scientific merits, the book has very little value. Its tone is noisy, flippant, and conceited. It is chiefly of interest to us, as illustrating one phase of contemporary Italian thought, and from its bearings on the religious and political changes which are maturing so fast in Italy. And, despite all the faults of this book,—and they are many, we hail it as a sign of the great reform which is coming. It will help to swell the flood of indignation which will, ere long, sweep the Eternal City clean of its tyrannical and imbecile government, and which will do away with the sad and sorry comedy which has so long been played there.

*

F. T. W.

HEINRICH BRUGSCH is well known as one of the ablest living Egyptian scholars. The little book undernoted consists of the lectures which he delivered in Berlin at various times during the nine or ten years preceding his departure, as Prussian consul, to Egypt. The titles of the chapters are: A Day and Night in Cairo; The Nile Boat; A Journey over the Desert; An ancient Egyptian story, - the oldest in the world; Moses and the Monuments; The Revelations of the Stones; Germans and Persians,—all fresh and lively and clear, a happy instance of a German scholar being entertaining without ceasing to be learned.

The lecture upon "Moses and the Monuments" touches upon the relation of ancient Hebrew history to that of contemporary nations, which is one of the most interesting topics of modern investigation. The subject is still involved in much obscurity; but there are, nevertheless, certain points which may now be considered clear; and some of the results of recent discoveries in respect to the central figure, the commanding name with which the strictly historical records of the Hebrews open, are quite curious.

There is a difference among scholars of fifty or sixty years as to the date of the Exodus: but that the period intervening between the entrance and the exit of the children of Israel in Egypt comprises one of the most glittering epochs in the history of the kingdom of

* Aus dem Orient. Von HEINRICH BRUGSCH. Zwei Theile in einem Bande. Berlin, 1864. Verlag von Werner Grosse.

VOL. LXXXII. NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. III.

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the Pharaohs, is established beyond question by monumental evidence; and that this period corresponds with the first half of the fourteenth century before Christ, is also well settled. Two thousand years

had elapsed since the empire of the Egyptians, beginning in Memphis, and gradually extending its pyramids and its temples southwards to Thebes, had attained a great degree of splendor and power, when suddenly, as the traditions relate, a Semitic horde, hard pressed by the Assyrians, broke into Egypt across the Isthmus of Suez, and, having become well organized under able leaders, occupied the Delta, defeated the Egyptian armies, and, choosing their own kings, established their residence and camp in the city of Tanis, or, as it was called in Egyptian, Hanar (Avaris). By degrees they extended their domination to Memphis, and made the Egyptian kings in Southern Egypt tributary. The foreign domination lasted five hundred years; and the Egyptians found what satisfaction they could in designating them, in the inscriptions with which they still went on covering the walls of their temples and tombs, by the word Amu, which means "ox-herds," or with the epithet Aadu, which means "the despised."

But, as in many similar cases of contact between an inferior and a superior civilization, the latter triumphed at last: the nomadic hordes of the Semites yielded to the culture and the arts of the Egyptians. One of the Semitic kings erected a temple in Tanis to Sutech, the Egyptian conception of the Semitic Baal; and they came at last to use in their tombs the Egyptian mode of writing. But the warlike spirit of the Pharaohs still survived, and enabled the latter in the end to overcome their conquerors. Tanis was besieged and taken, and Egypt was again free. And from that time begins the brilliant period in its history, which covers the nineteenth and eighteenth and seventeenth centuries before our era. The Egyptian armies pressed into Palestine, and over the highway, by Gaza and Megiddo, to the banks of the Euphrates and the Tigris; an annual tribute was laid upon Babylon and Nineveh; and the Egyptian conquerors erected their pillars of victory upon the borders of Armenia, where, as the hieroglyphic inscriptions read, "the heavens rest upon four columns."

Thus, as Bunsen says, Africa took its revenge on Asia. Thousands of captives were brought back to labor on the Egyptian temples in Memphis and Thebes, on the walls of which they still stand delineated as bringing water and moistening clay, and making bricks and spreading them to dry in the sun, while Egyptian taskmasters stand over them, stick in hand.

A new dynasty, the nineteenth, followed presently the one that had thus shaken off the Hyksos, as the foreign Semitic kings are commonly termed; and at its head stood Ramses I., its founder, about the middle of the sixteenth century before Christ. About 1400 B.C., his grandson, Ramses II., began his reign, which lasted for sixty-six years; and it is then that the first monumental synchronism occurs with the records of the Hebrews in the Bible. On the eastern side of the Delta, Ramses constructed a series of bulwarks, from Pelusium to Heliopolis, against the inroads of Asiatic hordes, - bulwarks which served also to overawe the Semitic population of his kingdom. And among these fortified places were two, named Ramses and Pachtum: "And they built for Pharaoh treasure cities, Pithom and Raamses" (Exod. i. 11); the word for Pharaoh, which the Hebrews applied to the king, being merely a title signifying "the great house," as we say of the Sultan, "the Sublime Porte" (Gate). It was under this Pharaoh, Ramses II., that Moses was born and brought up, in the first half of the fourteenth century before Christ.

In one of the papyrus rolls preserved in the British Museum, the Egyptian scribe, Pinebsa, reports to his chief, Amenemaput, the condition in which he has found the city Ramses: "It is incomparable," he says, "and life there is sweet; the streets are filled with men, the ponds and canals with fish, and the fields with birds; fragrant flowers bloom on the meadows, and the fruits taste like honey; and the granaries are bursting with corn." And then he records the preparations which had been made for the reception of the king at his entry into the city; and adds that there was a dense multitude of people to greet him, but more especially to address to him, "great in victory," their prayers and complaints. On the back of this withered papyrus, moreover, there is a memorandum of the structures erected in the city, so that there has thus descended to us a contemporary account, indeed, of the cities described in Exodus as built by the Israelites for their taskmasters in Egypt.

We should naturally expect to find the children of Israel designated on the monuments by the term applied to them by foreign nations; and in point of fact this has been discovered to be the case, the foreign appellation of the Hebrews being found in their Egyptian designation, Apuru. In a papyrus roll preserved in Leyden is found the following writing from the scribe Kanitsir to his chief, the scribe Bakenpthah:

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