coincident distinctness of nature; or this: vegetable life is always striving to be something that it is not; animal life to be itself. Hence, in a plant, the parts, as the root, the stem, the branches, leaves, &c., remain, after they have each produced or contributed to produce a different status of the whole plant: in an animal nothing of the previous states remains distinct, but is incorporated into, and constitutes progressively, the very self.

AUGUST 30, 1827.
Painting.

PAINTING is the intermediate somewhat between a thought and a thing.

APRIL 13, 1830.

Prophecies of the Old Testament-Messiah-JewsThe Trinity.

IF the prophecies of the Old Testament are not rightly interpreted of Jesus our Christ, then there is no -prediction whatever contained in it of that stupendous event-the rise and establishment of Christianity-in comparison with which, all the preceding Jewish history is as nothing. With the exception of the book of Daniel, which the Jews themselves never classed among the prophecies, and an obscure text of Jeremiah, there is not a passage in all the Old Testament which favours the notion of a temporal Messiah. What moral object was there for which such a Messiah should come? What could he have been but a sort of virtuous Sesostris or Bonaparte?

naturante Idea dicitur." " A more subtle limitation of the word may be found in the last paragraph of Essay (E) in the Appendix to the Statesman's Manual.-ED.

I know that some excellent men-Israelites without guile-do not, in fact, expect the advent of any Messiah; but believe or suggest that it may possibly have been God's will and meaning, that the Jews should remain a quiet light among the nations for the purpose of pointing at the doctrine of the unity of God. To which I say, that this truth of the essential unity of God has been preserved, and gloriously preached, by Christianity alone. The Romans never shut up their temples, nor ceased to worship a hundred or a thousand gods and goddesses, at the bidding of the Jews; the Persians, the Hindoos, the Chinese, learned nothing of this great truth from the Jews. But from Christians they did learn it in various degrees, and are still learning it. The religion of the Jews is, indeed, a light; but it is as the light of the glow-worm, which gives no`heat, and illumines nothing but itself.

It has been objected to me, that the vulgar notions of the Trinity are at variance with this doctrine; and it was added, whether as flattery or sarcasm matters not, that few believers in the Trinity thought of it as I did. To which again humbly, yet confidently, I reply, that my superior light, if superior, consists in nothing more than this, that I more clearly see that the doctrine of Trinal Unity is an absolute truth transcending my human means of understanding it, or demonstrating it. I may or may not be able to utter the formula of my faith in this mystery in more logical terms than some others; but this I say; Go and ask the most ordinary man, a professed believer in this doctrine, whether he believes in and worships a plurality of Gods, and he will start with horror at the bare suggestion. He may not be able to explain his creed in exact terms; but he will tell you that he does believe in one God, and in one God only,-reason about it as you may.

What all the churches of the East and West, what Romanist and Protestant, believe in common, that I call Christianity. In no proper sense of the word can I

call Unitarians and Socinians believers in Christ; at least, not in the only Christ of whom I have read or know any thing.

*

APRIL 14, 1830.

Conversion of the Jews-Jews in Poland. THERE is no hope of converting the Jews in the way and with the spirit unhappily adopted by our church; and, indeed, by all other modern churches. In the first age, the Jewish Christians undoubtedly considered themselves as the seed of Abraham, to whom the promise had been made; and, as such, a superior order. Witness the account of St. Peter's conduct in the Acts, and the Epistle to the Galatians.† St. Paul protested against this, so far as it went to make Jewish observances compulsory on Christians who were not of Jewish blood; and so far as it in any way led to bottom the religion on the Mosaic covenant of works; but he never denied the birthright of the chosen seed: on the contrary, he himself evidently believed that the Jews would ultimately be restored; and he says,-If the Gentiles have been so blest by the rejection of the Jews, how much rather shall they be blest by the conversion and restoration of Israel! Why do we expect the Jews to abandon their national customs and distinctions? The Abyssinian church said that they claimed a descent from Abraham; and that, in virtue of such ancestry, they observed circumcision: but declaring withal, that they rejected the covenant of works, and rested on the promise fulfilled in Jesus Christ. In consequence of this appeal, the Abyssinians were permitted to retain their customs.

If Rhenferd's Essays were translated-if the Jews were made acquainted with the real argument-if they were addressed kindly, and were not required to aban + Chap. ii,

* Chap. xv.

don their distinctive customs and national type, but were invited to become Christians as of the seed of Abraham-I believe there would be a Christian synagogue in a year's time. As it is, the Jews of the lower orders are the very lowest of mankind; they have not a principle of honesty in them; to grasp and be getting money for ever is their single and exclusive occupation. A learned Jew once said to me, upon this subject :- -“0 sir! make the inhabitants of Hollywell-street and Duke's Place Israelites first, and then we may debate about making them Christians."*

In Poland, the Jews are great landholders, and are the worst of tyrants. They have no kind of sympathy with their labourers and dependants. They never meet them in common worship. Land, in the hand of a large number of Jews, instead of being what it ought to be, the organ of permanence, would become the organ of rigidity in a nation; by their intermarriages within their own pale, it would be in fact perpetually entailed. Then, again, if a popular tumult were to take place in Poland, who can doubt that the Jews would be the first objects of murder and spoliation?

* Mr. Coleridge had a very friendly acquaintance with several learned Jews in this country, and he told me that, whenever he had fallen in with a Jew of thorough education and literary habits, he had always found him possessed of a strong natural capacity for metaphysical disquisitions. I may mention here the best known of his Jewish friends, one whom he deeply respected, Hymen Hurwitz.

Mr. C. once told me that he had for a long time been amusing himself with a clandestine attempt upon the faith of three or four persons whom he was in the habit of seeing occasionally. I think he was undermining, at the time he mentioned this to me, a Jew, a Swedenborgian, a Roman Catholic, and a New Jerusalemite, or by whatsoever other name the members of that somewhat small, but very respectable church, planted in the neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn Fields, delight to be known. He said he had made most way with the disciple of Swedenborg, who might be considered as a convert; that he had perplexed the Jew, and had put the Roman Catholic into a bad humour; but that upon the New Jerusalemite he had made no more impression than if he had been arguing with the man in the moon.-ÉD,

APRIL 17, 1830.

Mosaic Miracles-Pantheism.

IN the miracles of Moses there is a remarkable intermingling of acts which we should now-a-days call simply providential, with such as we should still call miraculous. The passing of the Jordan, in the 3d chapter of the book of Joshua, is perhaps the purest and sheerest miracle recorded in the Bible; it seems to have been wrought for the miracle's sake, and so thereby to show to the Jews-the descendants of those who had come out of Egypt-that the same God who had appeared to their fathers, and who had by miracles, in many respects providential only, preserved them in the wilderness, was their God also. The manna and` quails were ordinary provisions of Providence, rendered miraculous by certain laws and qualities annexed to them in the particular instance. The passage of the Red Sea was effected by a strong wind, which, we are told, drove back the waters; and so on. But then, again, the death of the first-born was purely miraculous. Hence, then, both Jews and Egyptians might take occasion to learn, that it was one and the same God who interfered specially, and who governed all generally.

Take away the first verse of the book of Genesis, and then what immediately follows is an exact history or sketch of Pantheism. Pantheism was taught in the mysteries of Greece; of which the Cabeiric were the purest and the most ancient.

APRIL 18, 1830.

Poetic Promise.

IN the present age, it is next to impossible to predict from specimens, however favourable, that a young man will turn out a great poet, or rather a poet at all.