Mr. Ruskin, in his Modern Painters, has this striking passage upon what he terms “the Faithlessness of our Age:”
“A Red Indian, or Otaheitan savage, has more sense of a Divine existence round him, or government over him, than the plurality of refined Londoners and Parisians; and those among us who may in some sense be said to believe are divided almost without exception into two broad classes, Romanist and Puritan; who, but for the interference of the unbelieving portions of society, would, either of them, reduce the other sect as speedily as possible to ashes; the Romanist having always done so whenever he could, from the beginning of their separation, and the Puritan at this time holding himself in complacent expectation of the destruction of Rome by volcanic fire.... Hence nearly all our powerful men in this age of the world are unbelievers: the best of them in doubt and misery; the worst in reckless defiance; the plurality, in plodding hesitation, doing as well as they can what practical work lies ready in their hands. Most of our scientific men are in this last class; our popular authors either set themselves definitely against all religious form, pleading for simple truth and benevolence, or give themselves up to bitter and fruitless statement of facts, or surface-painting, or careless blasphemy, sad or smiling. Our earnest poets and deepest thinkers are doubtful and indignant.”
A Hint to Sceptics.
Reason is always striving, always at a loss; and of necessity, it must so come to pass, while it is exercised about that which is not its proper object. Let us be content at last to know God by his own methods, at least so much of Him as He is pleased to reveal to us in the Sacred Scriptures. To apprehend them to be the Word of God is all our reason has to do, for all beyond it is the work of faith, which is the seal of Heaven impressed upon our human understanding.—Dryden.
Bishop Mant, writing in a more scientific age than that in which Dryden flourished, says:
“Persons have, perhaps, been sometimes found who, from their attachment to pursuits of science, and to the acquisition of general knowledge, have appeared sceptical upon the subject of Divine revelation. But others, at least equally endowed with intellectual powers, and equally rich in intellectual acquirements, have been serious, rational, and conscientious believers. Amongst these may be ranked the great apostle, St. Paul, who has been rarely surpassed in strength of understanding, or in the treasures of a cultivated mind; and in connexion with him it may be added, that ‘Luke, the beloved physician, whose praise is in the Gospel,’ was professionally acquainted with the operations of nature, and the effects of secondary causes, and thus qualified to appreciate the miraculous and supernatural character of the works which he has recorded as foundations of our belief.”
What is Egyptology?
The object of Egyptology is to render it a sort of elevated standing-point, from which all the realms of ethnography and philology might be surveyed, and the most distant and isolated points brought within range of view. This undertaking has been attempted chiefly by Bunsen, who has completed in five volumes his work entitled Ægypten’s Stelle in der Weltgeschichte (“Egypt’s Place in Universal History,” Hamburg, 1845-1857), and has discussed some of the same subjects in a more general and miscellaneous book, or collection of treatises, called Christianity and Mankind, their Beginnings and Prospects (London, 1854). It is Bunsen’s theory that “the Egyptian language is the point in universal history at which the creative energy of language still shows its original form, just before it raises its pinions aloft, and assumes in the world-ruling nations an entirely different and more spiritual form; while in the other races, according to laws not yet explored, it sinks into the atomic and mechanical, or at best deflects into subordinate ramifications.”—(Ægypten, i. 338). Looking back over a period of more than twenty thousand years, this philological speculator recognises a time when the as yet undivided families of Japhet and Shem lived together in a civilized state in Northern Asia. From this undivided Asiatic stock Egypt, according to Bunsen, must be a colony, gradually degenerated into the African type; for the old Egyptian language claims affinity at once with the Aramaic idioms in immediate contact with it, and with the Indo-Germanic tongues, with which it has no direct commerce—(Report of the Brit. Assoc., 1847, p. 280; Ægypten, iv., Pref., p. 10). It must be owned that these sweeping conclusions do not rest upon philological inductions of the most accurate kind, and are supported by arguments which are sometimes as arbitrary as they are precarious.—Encyclopædia Britannica, 8th edition.
Jerusalem and Nimroud.
The greatest light which has yet been thrown upon the architectural character of the Palace of Solomon, Mr. Lewin (in his Sketch of Jerusalem, published in 1861) is of opinion is derived from the recent discoveries in and near Nineveh; Solomon having studiously copied the Assyrian style.