The Lenten season is peculiarly the time for religious books, and the publishers have not failed to take advantage of it this year. Among the most interesting and valuable of the new works is Dr. Gregory's examination into the reason for having Four Gospels.[11 ] Why there should be two, three, or any number more than one, or less than eleven, is a question that has been considered significant for many centuries. Why out of eleven faithful disciples, precisely four should be inspired to write the history of the founder of the Church is certainly a problem that must be worth examining. The first idea, and it is one that has not died out yet, was that the four Gospels were so many incomplete but supplementary narratives, and in the second century efforts were made to improve upon the Biblical record by the Harmonists, who tried to compile what they considered a consistent and progressive account of the acts of Christ's ministry. They were followed by the Allegorists, who took the vision of Ezekiel, with its likeness of a man, a lion, an ox, and an eagle, and applied it to the writers of the Gospels as an exemplification of the meaning each of the narratives was intended to have. Though they, and their modern followers also, have not been able to agree upon this symbolical purport, the four Evangelists have retained in art those symbolical figures. The lion and St. Mark, the eagle and St. John are indissolubly connected in ecclesiastical art and story. The other schools of interpretation are, according to Dr. Gregory, the rationalists and "the common-sense critics." His own answer to the question, Why Four Gospels? is, that Christ had a mission to the Jews, and Matthew presented that argument for his divinity which was best calculated to impress that people; and to the Romans, to whom Mark was an interpreter; and to the Greeks, to whom Luke spoke; and to the Church at large, for whom John wrote his gospel of gentleness and love. The Jew, the Roman, and the Greek then composed the world of civilization—the existing society of that day—and in the Bible we find one writer for each of these nations, and one for the whole Church. This is certainly a rational and unembarrassed explanation. Dr. Gregory enforces it with great force and learning.
Mr. Buchanan's "Shadow of the Sword"[12 ] has so many faults that it is a wonder he could have written it to the end without arousing his own disgust. It revives the long-neglected horrors of the time of the first Napoleon, and deals with them in a way that is brutal, not artistic. Its hero is a deserter, and he is so sharply followed by the gendarmes that for a year or more he lives the life of a burrowing animal, until reason itself is unseated. The only relief to a picture which the author strives vigorously to make revolting is the love of the hero's betrothed; but that too is so mingled with terror that it only throws a more lurid light upon the sufferings her lover undergoes. The style is as close an imitation of the French as the author can produce, occasionally varied, however, most ludicrously by an unguarded exhibition of English slang. The heroine has those eyes so rarely seen outside of novels, of "that mystic color which can be soft as heaven with joy and love, but dark as death with jealousy and wrath." For those who get near enough to gaze long into them, they reveal "strange depths of passion, and self-control, and pride." The individual who did this gazing is a tall, lusty fellow, and healthy as the average of fisherman's boys, but for all that he has the soul of romance within him. When his comrades are lounging on the beach, he is "walking in some vast cathedral not made with hands," or performing daring feats of strength. Unluckily forsaking his cathedral, to lounge on the beach with his true love, like common mortals, they are caught by the tide, and have to wade through the water to escape. She bares her legs for the bath without hesitation or blush, for "she knew that they were pretty, of course, and she felt no shame." But there is one thing this young lady would not for worlds reveal, and that is her hair, which is invariably concealed beneath a coif. But as the waters deepen, Rohan throws the pretty-limbed creature over his shoulder and wades thigh deep. As he lands her he looks up, "and lo! he saw a sight which brought the bright blood to his own cheeks and made him tremble like a tree beneath his load." Her hair had fallen down, and the cheeks and neck that bore unmoved the exposure of her knees, were now "crimson with a delicious shame." This incident "bared each to each in all the nudity of passion," and it certainly bares the nudity of the author's invention. He is nowhere prurient, and nowhere delicate. He describes the revolting details of the story with as much unction as if they were the important things, and he leaves his hero at the end a complete failure in life and love, wasted in strength, and ruined in mind.
We are glad to see Dr. McClellan persist in his study of the cholera question.[13 ] We know of no publications which are better fitted than his to awaken the people to a proper sense of the duty, and also of the efficiency, of personal providence against disease. He is an advocate of the Indian origin theory of the disease and its spread by personal infection only, and in this pamphlet maintains two propositions: 1st, that Asiatic cholera has never yet originated on the American continent, but in every instance has spread from a first case which reached its shores from some countries beyond the ocean; and 2d, that it is diffused by the migrations of individuals who are infected by the disease, a specific poison existing in their dejecta, which reproduces the disease in any person to whom it gains access. This is a theory of epidemic cholera which is rational, consistent with the constantly developing facts of scientific research, and which happily includes a remedy that is every way practicable and thorough. But it is a theory that is not yet acknowledged by all authorities. Telluric conditions, malaria, and other local influences are frequently pointed to as the cause of the disease, and the doctrine of specific cholera poison still demands strong partisan advocacy.
—An anonymous pamphlet on vivisection, which takes ground against that mode of obtaining knowledge, is not worth serious notice except for the odd argument that crime is likely to increase if the vivisectionists are allowed to experiment on cats and dogs, as the new English law proposes! Criminals, says the authoress, rarely have had pets, and therefore if we kill all the pets, and thus deprive ourselves of the refining influences of kitty and the ennobling example of doggy, we shall the more readily turn to criminal ways. Another powerful argument is that "the countries where vivisection has prevailed seem to have secured no lasting blessing, but to have been the subjects of peculiarly calamitous afflictions, direful disasters, unnatural internal tribulations, and other multiplied evils." This is theocracy with a vengeance.
For some years past the "North American Review" has been enriched by papers from the late Mr. Chauncey Wright on various subjects in the wide field of modern philosophy, but especially in the much disputed theories of biology. They exhibited such proofs of independent judgment and critical acumen as to give their author immediate standing among European as well as home savants. These critiques have been collected and published under the name "Philosophical Discussions."[14 ] Much as we admired these articles when they first appeared, we do not see that a republication of them is needed unless as a graceful monument to an enthusiastic student. In their permanent form they lose the immediate fitness to questions under universal discussion, which is the true raison d'être of such papers. The extreme wordiness which was Mr. Wright's principal literary fault is disagreeably manifest when his book is laid by those of other masters in positive philosophy. This is especially noticeable in the only strictly original discussion in the book, the one on the arrangement of leaves in plants. In this paper the editor has left out the "strictly inductive investigation" which contains the kernel of the essay! He has omitted the soul and given the "limbs and outward flourishes" of the author's discussion, and much to the latter's discredit. Aside from this tendency to sentences and words of philosophical length, Mr. Wright's style is extremely agreeable, clear, and strong. It frequently shines with unexpected felicities of expression, just as the author's argument frequently awakens the perception with its unusual keenness and depth of thought.