of a nature to carry conviction to the minds of candid readers. Such an analysis of books and chapters as assumes with an air of dogmatic confidence to point out a variety of authors in a single paragraph, and to furnish a detailed account of all the sources from which a historian of two thousand years ago derived his knowledge, is too wonderful for us. It borders hard on the supernatural. It seems also at times to have positive acquaintance, not only with all the ancient author knew, but even with all that he did not know! Certainly, more use is often made of what the writer does not say than of what he does say.

5. The notion that Ezekiel's highly wrought vision of the temple and cultus was the outline of a priestly Torah to be observed by the exiles at their restoration to Jerusalem, is beset with insuperable difficulties. The language cannot without violence be interpreted literally. The details were never observed by the returning exiles, and the idea that Ezekiel's prophecy, issued in his own name, became the basis of an elaborate code of laws issued in the name of Moses is really too great a tax upon the credulity of earnest seekers after truth. Add to this the assumption that Ezra and Nehemiah, who wrote so much of their own work in their own name, were parties to this fictitious legislation! Why should critics make no difficulty of conceiving Ezekiel, more than forty years before the restoration, planning an imposing ritual for his nation, and yet imagine it impossible for Moses to do it less than forty years before the conquest of Canaan?

6. Finally, the assumption that an elaborate ritual and ranks of priesthood come in the natural order of development after the more spiritual word of prophecy may be boldly challenged. History shows the reverse to be true. Forms of worship, especially sacrifices and oblations, belong rather to undeveloped and imperfect periods of religions life. The Mosaic tabernacle with its elaborate cultus was admirably adapted to serve as an "object-lesson" to instruct Israel when a child. But a theory which makes the tabernacle a fiction, the priest-code an invention of Ezekiel, and the minute account of boards, and sockets, and bars, and hooks, and pillars, and curtains, and loops, and taches, and pots, and basins, and bowls, and spoons, and shovels, and plates, and pans, the conception of Jewish priests, at the

time of the exile, ought to tell us how such "bondage of the letter" fits in a theory of religious development. Is not the survival of the fittest a fundamental law of such development? But behold! the lofty lessons of Amos, Isaiah, and Micah, who, according to these critics, denounced sacrifices as a vain thing, without divine authority, and hateful to Jehovah, are superseded and overgrown by a ceremonial of outward service, concocted by designing priests, and foisted upon the chosen people in the name of Moses!

This species of criticism creates more difficulties than it solves. Its advocates may, perhaps, like Ewald, admire in portions of the Pentateuch the vestiges of an Elohistic writer so lofty as to deserve the title of the Great Unknown. We prefer to call him Moses, and identify him with that ancient man of God. Majestic lawgiver of Israel! Faithful Shepherd, who wast ever ready, in that great and terrible wilderness, to lay down thy life for the sheep committed to thy care, we honor thy name and work, whose impress upon all after time is greater than that of any other prophet save thy heavenly Lord! And though hostile critics, some almost as bitter as Korah, Dathan, and Abiram of old, have been working a hundred and twenty years to diminish thy fair fame, and have disputed over thy writings more than Satan ever disputed over thy body, thine eye is yet undimmed, thy vigor unabated. The holy books which bear thy name are themselves thy best apology, and though thou wast but a servant in the house of thy God, thou knewest Jehovah face to face, and hast fittingly been glorified with that transfigured Prophet who, as Son over the house, is truly greater than thou.

ART. II. THE LAST DAYS OF JOHN WICLIF—

HIS DEATH.

"And when a great man dies,

For years beyond our ken,

The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the path of men."

Ar this season, five hundred years ago, John Wiclif was coming near his end. He was sixty years old, prematurely worn and weary, yet so bent upon his sacred labors that some reverent hand indorsed upon his last production, " Auctoris vita finitur et hoc opus ita" (The life that dropped so suddenly below the horizon bears rehearsal well.)

Of his earlier history almost nothing is known. He was born at Wiclif, a little parish on the Tees, near Rokeby. Of his ancestry, his parentage, his boyhood, nothing whatever is on record. Of his forty years' residence at Oxford only one incident is found: not a trace of his habits, not a personal allusion of any kind, can be found in all his writings. At forty he suddenly stands forth from Oxford, as Elijah stood forth from Gilead, without preliminary, to do his work, say his word, and then return to the invisible.

At sixteen he entered Queen's College, and, after a year as commoner, he joined Merton. Sometime before, Oxford had numbered 30,000 students, but at this time had not nearly so many. Since its founding by Alfred, five hundred years before, kings, prelates, and nobles had sought repose for their souls and honor for their names by endowing the various colleges of which the University was composed. Its aggregate wealth was great, and the yearly offerings to it were ample. Its income was spent upon lecturers, corresponding, in the main, to the modern professors; upon the fellows, resident graduates, who were its governing body; and upon the scholars. There was no recitation or routine of daily drill. All was done by lectures, by private study, and by public theses and disputations. The University was intensely religious; it seemed partly shrine and partly monastery. Its inmates, whatever their piety might be-and there was often a ragged edge of barbarism in their manners-were moved with zeal to learning as to a crusade.

Their studies were often trivial-this was before Bacon-but their minds were acute and their ardor noble. The student's success in rhetoric was proved by his use of rhetoric; his attainments in philosophy, by his actual presentation of philosophy. Wiclif early shone among these thousands. He became an authority in the canon and the civil law. A bitter opponent places him "in philosophy second to none, in scholastic exercises incomparable, struggling to excel all in both subtlety and depth of disputation." The truths of Scripture early occupied his mind, and his college friends, in a pleasant way, used to call him the "Gospel Doctor." In 1350 the black death swept over Christendom, and a third of the people perished. It destroyed in London one hundred thousand persons, and the city sat in sackcloth under the appalling scourge. How often in such times have men apprehended the coming of the final terrors! Wiclif was moved to write his first known work of which a single copy remains, "The Last Age of the Church," a commentary on the Revelation. In 1361, after twenty-one years of study, he was made Master of Baliol College and rector of Fillingham, on the Lincoln levels. He was also made Doctor of Divinity-a title meaning much in those days. His portrait gives us a slight body, a face too old for its years, with full, waving beard, lips firmly set, and an air of weariness; but under his Oxford cap beams a steady eye, there is a depth in the whole look of the man. We find at Lutterworth, also, his dark, carved oaken chair, more strong than handsome, and a few other relics of the greatest heart of a hearty period.

That was a great generation in England, the most telling between Alfred and Elizabeth, and the most trying to the souls of men. Foremost in politics was John of Gaunt, son of Edward III., uncle of Richard II., and father of Henry IV., himself through his wife (that Blanche of whom Chaucer writes in the "Boke") entitled to the crown of Castile-a title that cost him dearly. He was the sturdiest upholder of plain English liberty in Church and State. With him stood Percy, Earl Marshal of England, zealous for freedom as his son Hotspur was for "bright honor; a man so true and valiant that we doubly mourn when his fortunes went down in blood at Shrewsbury. The growth of liberty caused some excesses. Poverty and suffering from pestilence and Edward's wars were

great, and Wat Tyler's rebellion gave despotism some excuse thereafter. Still, the government of England was the best on which the sun was shining. The peasants were coming, from slaves, to be tenants of cottages and gardens at fixed rentals of money or service-a step in advance of the rest of the world. Thus began that growth of yeomanry that has given England its abiding power.

Among the literary men of this period is a queer identity of name. There has been but one John on the English throne. He was "of presence fouler than hell;" but his signing the Magna Charta gave his name an historic charm for English ears. Around the great Chaucer stood five illustrious Johns, Wiclif, Mandeville, Trevisa, Gower, and Barbour. The great Chaucer, now past the meridian of his years, was still rising toward the meridian of his power. A life-long association with the best society of England and of the Continent, personal acquaintance with the great writers "whose rhetorick so sweet enlumined Italie," and profound study of their works, a lively sense of the beautiful, a deep sympathy with every form of human feeling, and a keen discernment of differences among the mortal millions -these, with growing charms of utterance, were perfecting the author of "Canterbury Tales," the father of English poetry. He was four years younger than Wiclif. The commanding figure, the abstracted air, the courtly bearing of the great poet, who had spent his life in the most polished circles of the world, were in marked contrast with the slender form, the worn face, and keen eye of the great scholar, who until now had rarely gone from the cloisters of his college. One bond of bonds they shared--a love for the undivided Christ, whose honor each was in his own way seeking. (How sweet, like the swan's dying strain, are the last known words from Chaucer's pen: "To that life He us bring, who bought us with his blood! Amen!") They shine upon the sky of their century, differing in quality rather than in glory, and either might be called "lord of the ascendant." Together they shed upon their generation healing and gladness and splendor.

A humbler poet of the period was more closely connected with Wiclif's labors. William Langlande was laureate of the suffering and the poor. He sang from the heart and to the heart of English cottagers. He entered into the toil and