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His " System of Magic," "History of Apparitions," and "Dumb Philosopher" argue De Foe to have been to some extent a believer in spiritual communication with the other world. The present age would have been a fruitful one for his genius in this respect. He was particularly strong on such subjects as forebodings and presentiments; and had he lived now, his powers of delicate description would have shamed all modern necromancy.

As a moralist he is pre-eminent. Apart from his professedly religious works, as "The Family Instructor," all his writings bear marks of his seriousness and sincerity. His modest and humble tracing of the ways of Providence is the very reverse of cant. Each event points a moral, but it does so without affectation.

De Foe, though a patron of manly and athletic exercises, and by nature fitted for an active life, was also a hard student. But he gained wisdom by studying men; he dealt with the outer world, and was a lifelong learner in the school of human nature. So his lively imagination, experience in life, and powers of narration rendered him much sought after in society. He wrote rapidly, and sometimes hastily, from necessity. His pen was both quick and ready, and his application marvellous. His disconnected and separate works, in the aggregate, are quite voluminous. He is a natural story-teller, and excels in a microscopic detail and minuteness of description. He fixes the attention by slow, regular details, so unvarying and careful that the smallest incident is never omitted; and his fictions. therefore ape nature so exactly as to deceive the reader into a belief of their truth. He deals in feeling, and appeals to the heart by Saxon words, and hence writes as one talks.

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The style of De Foe is simple, clear, and emphatic. We may compare it to a mirror, lucid, and reflecting unchanged the images of his thoughts. His two great qualities are reality and minuteness. His English is homely, by which is meant that it comes home to the heart; and it does so from its Saxon purity and vigor. He evolves his ideas by slow, regular processes of argument or narration, and is calm, even, and single in thought.

His expressions may at times be rude, and his diction less

euphonious, than the critic would wish, but his style is forcible always. You see what he sees; you feel what he describes. His emphatic assertion and reiteration affect the reader as if he heard the tale from the lips of a witness of the occurrence. Other writers fail to record some minute circumstance or some trivial incident, the want of which at once betrays their art. Not so De Foe; for being so accurate, he seems so real that the deception is complete.

De Foe was democratic, almost plebeian, in his style and manners; graphic by simplicity and terseness, and in his tragical narrations leaving to horror its native hideousness, without any attempt at ornament or elaboration. He exhibits

the picture of a brave, self-reliant man, battling with the hostile world of criticism and party, and, though brought low at last by treason in his own camp, yet triumphant in death, and leaving an everlasting humiliation to his detractors in the immortality of his writings. Brave, honorable, generous, and just, as well as a genius, he was, in every sense, what he describes in Robinson Crusoe, "a broad-hearted man."

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Die Propheten und ihre Weissagungen. Eine apologetisch-hermeneutische Studie von A. THOLUCK. Zweiter völlig unveränderter Abdruck. Der Verfasser behält sich das Recht der Uebersetzung vor. Gotha: F. A. Perthes. 1861. 8vo. pp. 206.

WE have before us what we may call Tholuck's Apology for the Inspiration of the Hebrew Prophets. The design avowed in the Preface is to take the same ground as Hengstenberg's Christology, but to defend it by better weapons. Some doubts are, indeed, expressed about the candor, thoroughness, and acuteness of that edifying work. Tholuck admits that, in many critical questions, of the existence of which those who study only English literature seldom dream, he agrees with men whose theological position he opposes. It will be inter

esting to see how very rationalistic the latest, and by no means the least able, defender of the objective and supernatural powers of the prophets (objektiver übernatürlicher Eingebung) really is. Our Preface further tells us that the book is meant for all classes of readers, clergy, laity, and divinity students, and that the author intended it as a recreation after his long and weary labors in somewhat different departments. Compared with most of the works our German brethren send us, the Apologetic and Hermeneutic Study may fairly be classed among light literature.

So far the first Preface, dated at Halle, July 28, 1860. A second Preface, Nov. 1, 1860, informs us that the first edition is already exhausted, whence is argued the popular need of further instruction in a department about which Americans know incomparably less than Germans. The wisdom of the reservation of the right of translation is sufficiently evident.

The little pamphlet is divided into twelve sections, of very unequal length, each containing much that properly belongs in some other one, or lacking something which we may long search for, and will probably find where we least expect.

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The first of these sections is entitled, Die Montik, or Soothsaying." It is designed to show the existence of a faculty of the mind which, as Plutarch says, "bears the same relation to the future that the memory does to the past." This faculty is latent in all men and all ages. Its manifestations are rare and exceptional, but admit of physiological and historical demonstration. Thus the reality of the Delphic and other classic oracles is maintained, on the authority not only of Plato, Cicero, and Plutarch, but of such eminent modern historians and antiquarians as Hermann, Schömann, and Müller. So the fact of somnambulic and magnetic predictions is admitted by the destructive criticism of Strauss, the philosophy of Erdmann and Rosenkranz, and the medical skill of Carus. The great Carus, indeed, in page 341 of his "Physis," published in 1851, after speaking of the faculty of foreseeing change of weather and illness as resident in all men, but manifest only in the nervously diseased, says that this shows "that a dream or a magnetic vision, which pictures to us an event yet future, but necessarily interwoven into the

whole course of our lives, is as natural and comprehensible as the foreboding which the sickly, excitable body has of a change of weather yet distant in reality, but already preparing itself in nature; and so of all other appearances of clairvoyance." Carus remarks that such facts must first be carefully proved, but may then be referred to the "unboundedness of all operations," and the "totality, not only of the universe, but especially of humanity." This power of foreboding and presentiment Carus compares to the instinct of animals, incomprehensible but indisputable. Tholuck further shows how, both at the Delphic oracle and in Siberian Schamanism, predictions were made in a state of mental unconsciousness, under the influence of powerful narcotics. One of Admiral Wrangel's travellingcompanions furnishes the account of a Schaman or soothsayer who predicted the length and fortunes of the expedition, and that with a correctness which Tholuck strangely omits to state. The oracular savage, who knew nothing of Wrangel and his plans, announced to Matjuschkin, on August 31, 1820, that the expedition would last "more than three years." Wrangel reached his head-quarters whence his various explorations were made, Nischne-Kolymsk, Siberia, on November 2, 1820, and left it, November 1, 1823, for St. Petersburg, where he arrived on August 15, 1824.

This first section is intended to show the existence of an exceptional power of prediction, whence the inspiration of the prophets may be deduced a priori. Such inspiration called forth powers the existence of which the rationalist must admit on the authority of these nervous and narcotic manifestations. Tholuck later mentions,, as a distinction between the Delphic and the Hebrew oracles, that the former are based on political, and the latter on religious ideas and principles; the former are from physical, the latter from spiritual impulse.

Section 2 (Das Gottesreich in Israel und die Prophetie) commences the description of the position of the prophetic order in the Hebrew theocracy. "The prophets are the living supporters of the theocratic idea, the watchmen and the shepherds of the people." The prophet's office was to guard and defend the kingdom of Jehovah, both in the Hebrew nationality and in the hearts of all pious Israelites, from all assaults,

whether of foreign enemies or of private and public sins. Thus the prophetic utterances were intended to rebuke, advise, exhort, or encourage his contemporaries. Prediction was a means used for this end. The Hebrew prophet foretold future events, not to gratify curiosity or attest his inspiration to posterity, but to increase the force of his appeals to trust in God, and hatred of all sin, individual or national. We are too apt to forget that prophecy is something more than prediction. Prophet and predictor are not synonymous. Thus we object to the definition of prophet given in Webster's Dictionary," In Scripture, a person illuminated, inspired, or instructed by God to announce future events," and prefer the second definition given by Worcester: "One having supernatural power. 'What sayest thou of him, that he hath opened thine eyes? He said, He is a prophet.' John ix. 17. This word is frequently used in the Scriptures to denote one divinely influenced, whether he foretold future events or not." Minute prediction with no ulterior object was, as Tholuck says, rather the business of the false prophets. Of this, more hereafter. As examples of the true prophet are mentioned Bernard of Clairvaux, and Savonarola, powerful popular preachers and social reformers, of whom the former converted Louis VI. by the prediction that his first-born son, Philip, would die, and the younger brother, Louis VII., succeed him, and the latter brought the whole city of Florence to repentance by predicting, under the figure of a storm descending from the Alps, the invasion of Charles VIII. The reality of these facts, as well as of Bernard's other miracles, acknowledged by the saint himself, and we believe also by Neander, is considered indisputable. We have also an instance of a Moslem prophet, the Dervis Uweissi, who in the reign of Amurath IV., 1627-40, when the Turkish crescent was still in its terrific zenith, foretold, in the language of the Old Testament prophets, unknown to the Mohammedans, the downfall of Islamism, as the judgment-day of Allah dawning upon Constantinople.

Tholuck tries further to show that the priests were at first prophets also. He cites the case of the Urim and Thummim, and of the apparent union of priest and prophet in popular

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