simplicity, in two tiny rooms about twelve feet by fifteen, and lighted by windows two feet square. I have just sufficient books to fill a little mantel-piece; and on wet days, they and my pen form my only resources. But I live on the banks of such a mountain stream, and at the entrance of such a glen, why, it is like stepping out of an Indian wigwam into Paradise, the moment I cross the threshold. This reconciles me to my lot, and to the absolute loss of society; for I hardly reckon my old host and hostess to be any. We seldom exchange more than five words at a time, and they are not such as to invite more.

I know not how it is that I have got the character of a very merry, sociable sort of person; for few people enjoy solitude more than I do, or have had more of it. I suppose it is because, going seldom into society, I enjoy it with all the more gusto from my customary hermit's life. Never was there a character, however, worse bestowed; for I fear there has seldom been a man more sombre, or that, on an average, has smiled or laughed less.

Such is the force of habit, nevertheless, that I cannot recollect that I ever left any company, however congenial and however merry, and felt solitude irksome; my quiet study, those silent friends, my books, have never seemed unwelcome. I believe I have spent more hours alone than any man of my acquaintance, or perhaps than any man who has not been condemned to solitary imprisonment for life; and yet, such is habit, that sometimes, and for many days together, I feel as if I could bear never to see again a "human face divine;"-certainly could dispense with seeing my own. Yet neither philosophy nor religion assent to this morose life not philosophy, for I should be forced to light my own fire and cook my own mutton; nor religion, for the Allwise himself has said, what all experience confirms, "that it is not good for man to be alone."

And yet Adam, I sometimes fancy, half doubted this truth by the time Eve had been in Paradise a few days, and made the serpent a morning call. I rather think he heartily wished he was munching his solitary peaches again.

A few days! why, some of the schoolmen doubted whether

Eve remained in Paradise a single day before she committed the faux pas; and they said so, I fancy, from sheer difficulty of imagining that a lady's frailty could hold out longer. But commentators were always an ungallant and churlish set.

For my part,

I confidently believe that Eve held out much longer; — three whole days, at the very least.

One wonders what would have been the condition of the world, if little Eve had eaten, and Adam had not; if he had politely handed her ladyship to the side door in the wall of Paradise; told her that "separate maintenance" would be her lot on the other side, amongst the "thorns and thistles ;" and so fairly turned the key upon her. If he had been as brutal a husband as a good many of his descendants, I can imagine him returning to his spade and dibble with great sang froid, without even throwing the poor creature a few apples over the wall.

But as it was- alas! the story reads profoundly natural, whether in the book of Genesis or Milton's Epic. For Eve, Adam "lost the world, and was content to lose it;" what an Antony and Cleopatra ! "All for love, and the world well lost!"

I fancy I hear some dubious lady say, "Who can doubt that the gentleman had a 'wee bit' of curiosity as well as Eve, and a sweet tooth of his own in his head ?"

Well, be it so but there is profound nature in the tumult of sympathy with which Milton represents him as acting:

"with thee,

Certain my resolution is to die;

How can I live without thee, how forego

Thy sweet converse, and love so dearly joined,

To live again in these wild woods forlorn!

Well might Eve be ravished by the compliment by which Paradise was forfeited and a world undone,

No doubt, like all of us millions of fools of Adam's sons, who have acted with similar folly to his own when we have yielded to

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temptation, Adam went as an ox to the slaughter,"-without thinking; but then that not thinking,-alas! it is his and our crime. Not less profoundly true to human nature is Milton's description, a little after, of the recrimination that ensues; and most of all, that which is given in Genesis. Any thing, it seems, rather than take a fault to ourselves! "The woman whom thou gavest me;" so that Adam upbraids God with His own gifts, as we all do when we have made a bad use of them. "The serpent beguiled me," says Eve; and I dare say if the serpent had been asked, he, too, would have said, that it was God's own fault for having put the "tree" in his way.

Any thing, the woman, - the child, the devil,- God himself, rather than man will ingenuously confess himself in the wrong! But I have been running on, and have not answered your question respecting the best way, not out of, but into this Scotch paradise. Tell your nephew to take the steamer from Liverpool, go up to Greenock, and he will find Clyde steamers hither twice a day which is to be taken, will depend on the time of his arrival in the Clyde.

:

I little thought my late badinage was to elicit from you so serious an expression of doubts, or I should have shrunk as much from writing in so playful a strain as from lighting a squib over a barrel of gunpowder. However, I will do my best, as you desire, to reply; so a truce to all nonsense for the present.

It seems to me that you have been a little touched with the

malaria of "Rationalism"-the neological Epidemic, so widely spread in our day. You have taken it mildly; but be assured that the virus is in your constitution, and may lead to more formidable symptoms, and a worse type of the disease; for there is, as I shall try to show you, no consistency-no principle-in your objections. You might as well carry them a thousand leagues further, and reject not only what you say you are inclined to reject, but every shred of the supernatural in the Bible history; nor stop there, but go on, if your logic be but consistent, to Atheism itself. I speak seriously; and though I am not in the habit of speaking defiantly, I do challenge you to justify yourself against the arguments which I shall employ against you.

You tell me frankly that you have no difficulty in receiving the Bible, generally, as a divine revelation; nor in admitting its history to be, generally, authentic, and its miracles, facts; but you ask — how can you receive "demonstrable discrepancies" and "grossly improbable legends " as true? counting among these last, it seems, the literal history of the Temptation and Fall, the history of Balaam's ass, and the history of Jonah.

Now, at the outset, I must beg you to distinguish between things that differ, and differ toto cœlo, discrepancies, in statement, and seeming improbabilities in the history. You speak of them as if they were to be treated alike.

As to those discrepancies which you say are "demonstrably contradictions," — if there are any such, do as you please I ask no man to believe "demonstrable contradictions;" only be sure they are so; for my part, I hesitate to say it. - I know of none such as yet; and I say so for these reasons: 1. I have seen so many of the alleged "demonstrable contradictions" reconciled, that I am rather chary of belief in them; and, with regard to those still unresolved, am willing to wait with patience for further light, before pronouncing absolutely. 2. I know that many "discrepancies" may be expected, without at all touching the original claims of the writers to inspiration, since, unless God has wrought multitudinous miracles every day on all the transcribers' pens and fingers, many must have crept into the text. 3. I see that a great part of

4.

the remainder (which cannot be so accounted for) may be fairly set aside, if we bear in mind that circumstances may be omitted in the narrative, which, if we but knew them, would prove the alleged discrepancies apparent only; and indeed, such circumstances, in by far the greater number of cases, may be imagined as will reconcile them. I know it is the fashion of a certain sort of critics, as blind as owls, to say that such criticism is conjectural only; but conjectural or not, they forget, that, where a contradiction is asserted between two statements, the mere showing that it is possible they may both be true, is sufficient (with any body who has five grains of logic) to neutralise that. If A swears that he has seen B in Manchester at twelve o'clock, and C that he saw him walking about in the fields forty miles off an hour or so after, it is quite enough to neutralise the apparent discrepancy, if it be shown that B might have got there by an express train within the specified time, though no proof whatever were offered, or to be found, that that is the mode of reconciling the statements. Though I admit there may be cases where I can suggest no solution whatever, I prefer waiting for further light before pronouncing them absolutely insoluble; for it may be that they may turn out errors of transcription, and not of the original documents. However, we are at all events agreed that the discrepancies, which can at all be supposed "contradictions," are, as any candid sifting of them will show, few, turn on trivial points, and are utterly insignificant compared with the weight of evidence which converges to the conclusion that the Bible, as a whole, came from God; so that even if they be supposed errors of the original writers, permitted for some unknown reason, perhaps to teach them and us humility, and committed in momentary obscuration of the preternatural light with which they were generally favoured, the passages in which such errors occur may be rejected with no perceptible deduction from the result. "I know not," says Paley, a more rash or unphilosophical conduct of the understanding, than to reject the substance of a story by reason of some diversity of the circumstances with which it is related. When accounts of a transaction come from the mouths of different wit

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