in accordance with plans of their own. This must be regarded as one of the truths most indisputably established by a study of our problem. The day for hypotheses which undertake to discover the sources of the synoptic Gospels by a mechanical division, and thereby arrive at any number of supposed Aramean or Greek protevangels, and for hypotheses which look upon the Gospels as mere compilations, in any sense of the word, has gone by. The evangelists, though influenced in their form of expression by the form which oral tradition had taken, or by each other, or by common written sources, exhibit also the most marked verbal characteristics of their own. With what is furnished them they have blended what they, as persons, have furnished.

4. Admitting that the writers of the synoptic Gospels drew from both oral and written sources, which Gospel, in its present form, has best claim to priority? Quite clearly, it is Mark. To this view all our examination of the history of the question, and of the phenomena which the books present, has been leading us. After a long and well fought controversy, and with the fruits of this entire contest at hand, this is the opinion to which the best modern scholarship is tending. The view which DeWette, a few years since, thought scarcely worthy of a passing notice, has now gained respectability and credence, after the question has been so much more thoroughly sifted. We may be confident that the second Gospel will not again receive such treatment as it formerly had at the hands of the advocates of the hypothesis of Griesbach. The phenomena themselves, now very amply known, support strongly the same view which the history of their discussion suggests. In the present instance, little more can be done than appeal to them as they have been exhibited above. In brief, it may be said that the priority of Mark is proved by the extent of its contents, since it commences at the baptism by John, just where the older and more uniform cycle of evangelic narrative began, the cycle which was most useful and necessary to the wants of the early church, while the other Gospels furnish evidence that the tendency was

continually to widen the narrative, and carry it back further into the history of Jesus and John, and since no satisfactory reason can be assigned, if the second Gospel came later, why it should have omitted these sections. The priority of Mark is proved by the nature of its contents, since it avoids long discourses; by the whole style and cast of composition, with its lively circumstantial narrative, being, as Ewald has expressed it," a fresh jet from the apostolic fountain"; by its firmer and more natural sequence, showing an arrangement of material less artful than the one adopted by the other evangelists; by the nature of its Old Testament citations, giving no signs of Matthew's twofold method, with nothing added through reflection on the part of the author; by the absence of "doublettes," which in Matthew and Luke point to a complexity of sources; by the phenomena of verbal characteristic, which show that the peculiarities of Mark are, for the most part, the peculiarities of the common sections, and thus, that Mark, or some writing to which Mark was most intimate, was the common source; and finally, by the fact that the difficulties occasioned by the divergences in the common sections can, in general, be best resolved by taking Mark for the original type, though in all such attempts great caution should be used.

5. Granting the priority of Mark, what opinion shall we hold as best suited to account for the relation of the other synoptic Gospels to each other, and to it? We are to remember that any opinion must be held only as an hypothesis. The two views of Meyer and Holtzmann, as given above, seem to suit the phenomena better than other views, and between them it is difficult to decide. What are the objections to each, has already been mentioned. If we agree with the former, we shall believe that Mark wrote first, using no written sources that can be distinguished besides the Xóya of the apostle Matthew, and that Matthew made use of Mark, and Luke of both, though but superficially, and with additions from oral tradition and short written sources. We shall thus avoid positing unknown gospels, very like, though differing

somewhat from, the gospels which have come down to us. Our hypothesis may then be reconciled with the witness of Papias, since his words, où μévтoi Táže, do not prove that he, throughout the entire passage, was not speaking of the present Gospel of Mark,1 and since the Gospel which he attributes to Matthew must have differed from our first Gospel.

If we agree with the latter, we shall believe that the Gospel which was written où μévroι Táče, was somewhat unlike the present Mark, and formed the common source for the three synoptic Gospels, and that the present Mark conformed to it, while Matthew and Luke have supplemented it by material drawn from one principal source common to them only, and from other sources both written and oral. We shall thus have an intermediate term to explain discrepancies, and shall, perhaps, have less trouble with the testimony of Papias.

ARTICLE II..

JONATHAN EDWARDS.

BY REV. INCREASE N. TARBOX, SECRETARY OF THE AMERICAN EDUCATION SOCIETY.

WHEN a great man comes upon the stage the full sense of his greatness does not ordinarily dawn upon the world till long after his removal from it. Especially is this true when the man belongs, not to the sphere of outward action, but to the realm of pure thought. This is the secret of that obscurity which rests over the carly life of many of the great literary and intellectual leaders of the race. Had the generations to which they belonged seen them as we now see them, the minutest particulars of their childhood and youth would have been gathered up and faithfully preserved. When men had become fully awake to the fact that an im

1 Vid. Kirchhofer's Quellensammlung, p. 32; Meyer on Matthew, p. 38 sq.

mortal bard had been singing to them in the person of Homer, clouds and darkness had so gathered about his origin that different and distant cities could, with some show of reason, contend for the honor of having given him birth. One of the critics of Shakespeare, after reciting the facts, that he was born at Stratford, married and had children there, went to London and lived as play-actor and play-writer, returned to Stratford and died, says: "This is all that is known with any degree of certainty about Shakespeare.' And yet with another we may say: "Out of the cottage in which he was born has gone forth a voice which is the mightiest in modern literature."

We do not mean to imply that the like obscurity rests over the early life of Jonathan Edwards. The history of the child and of the man is known with a good degree of minuteness. It is true, nevertheless, that New England had no adequate sense of his greatness while he lived. Human life everywhere has its prosaic aspects, and by the men of his own generation, though they acknowledged his general power, he was seen mingled with passing conflicts and rude interests, and often laboring under depression and discomfiture, Though as far removed as any man from what might be called a contentious disposition, there were times in his life when he might with the utmost propriety have used the words of the ancient prophet: "Woe is me, my mother, that thou hast borne me a man of strife and a man of contention to the whole earth." It was not for the people of his own day to eliminate him from these untoward surroundings, to reach his true individuality, and behold him in his simple and majestic greatness. Though he has now been sleeping in his grave more than a century, the conflicts which he unwittingly set in motion in the great world of thought, are not yet ended. Still, through all these years, a juster conception of what the man really was has been silently growing upon us. In the back-ground of our New England history he moves, a figure of the stateliest proportions. But even yet we do not see this man as he has been seen by the

philosophic minds of the Old World: "A prophet is not without honor save in his own country and in his own house"; and to this day he suffers to some extent under the hinderances of our vision. We are too near him for the best view. We do not entirely disentangle him from passing strifes and from surrounding objects, so that we can behold him in his solitary pre-eminence. We are all ready to admit that he was unquestionably a great man, but it never has been the habit of writers on this side the water to speak of him as he is spoken of in England, France, and Germany. A native-born New Englander would not, self-prompted, have been likely to say with a writer in the Westminster Review: "From the days of Plato there has been no life of more simple and imposing grandeur than that of Jonathan Edwards." 1

It is not our purpose in the present Article to be critical. We are not about to undertake a learned review of Edwards's writings. This has often been done, and doubtless will often be done in the future. We are more concerned with the man than with his works. Whether his theories will stand the test of modern investigation we are not careful now to inquire. It will be our aim to look at him as a whole; to gain if possible an idea of his grand totality, rather than to survey him in detail. There is something in the way this

1 These words are found in an Article entitled, Retrospective Survey of American Literature, published in the Westminster Review in the year 1852. Vol. lvii. (or i. of the new series) p. 289. They are more remarkable as coming from an organ of the peculiar style of the Westminster. The passage more at length is as follows. The writer is a little confused about Northampton, and would probably have said Stockbridge with a better knowledge of the outward facts of the case. "Before the commencement of this century America had but one great man in philosophy, but that one was illustrious. From the days of Plato there has been no life of more simple and imposing grandeur than that of Jonathan Edwards, who, living as a missionary at Northampton, then on the confines of civilization, set up his propositions, which have remained as if they were mountains of solid crystal in the centre of the world. We need not repeat the praises by Robert Hall, Mackintosh, Stewart, Chalmers, and the other great thinkers of Britain and of the continent, who have admitted the amazing subtilty and force of his understanding."