cherished rights; but when at length the scepter of the Jubilee was stretched over its proud waves, the tide of power fell at once to its decreed level; and domestic, civil, and religious rights budded and blossomed with a new vigor, and a double increase. And where the dark waters of crime or misfortune rolled the deepest, there rose the noblest franchises. Once again, the poor had ceased from the land, debts had died, and crimes were expiated. Heathen and proselytes ceased to be "aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, and strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world; and became fellow citizens with the saints, and of the household of God." If Egypt saw a god in her river, and hailed his divine presence in the flow of its victorious waves, much more should we see a God in Hebrew servitude, and hear his voice in the silver notes of the Jubilee. When we look upon a water lily, we forget the slime and darkness out of which the divine chemist has elaborated its fragrance and purity; so when we look at the results of Hebrew servitude, we forget the servile processes by which the Jew and the pagan were blessed and sanctified; for we feel that the divine end always sanctifies, if it does not explain, the divine means. But for this very reason, in matters of so high regard, as disfranchising our fellow men, we should shrink from attempting God's method, without God's sanction; lest in sacrilegiously presuming to guide the divine chariot, we should set the world ablaze, and put man's double curse-American slavery in the place of God's double blessing-Hebrew servitude. [The conductors of the New Englander are quite willing that the learned author of the foregoing Article should express his views in all freedom, but they feel obliged to say that one point which he makes is doubtful. We refer to the view which he defends that foreign slaves were by the laws of Moses manumitted at the time of Jubilee. The point requiring attention in regard to foreign slaves is whether the passage in Levit. xxv, 45, 46, is so to be interpreted as to allow the application of the law of Jubilee to this description of persons. In that passage it is said of bond-men who are not Hebrews, "ye shall take them as an inheritance for your children after you, to inherit them for a possession; they shall be your bondmen forever." Now it may be very true, as our contributor affirms, that the words "forever" in themselves determine nothing; but the words "for your children after you to inherit them for a possession" are not so easily disposed of. What if the bondmen had been bought two or three years before the Jubilee: how could these words have been applicable to them? Is there not a marked distinction between the tenure of such bond-men and of Hebrew servants whose time of service expired by specific limitations in the law. If authority may be appealed to, we add that all the writers whom we have had leisure to consult, as Josephus Winer in his Realwörterbuch, Knobel in his recent commentary on Exodus and Leviticus, Mielziner in a work just published at Copenhagen on Hebrew servitude, and especially Saalschütz in his Mosäisches Recht, regard the foreign bond-men as held by a tenure to which the law assigns no limit. There is, however, a question which can fairly be asked, to which unhappily our scanty knowledge of Hebrew law and usage furnishes no certain answer. It is this: whether the foreigner or his posterity on a change of religion from idolatry to Judaism would not be ultimately absorbed in the Hebrew commonwealth? Would the status through generations in this case be that of foreigners, or was there a naturalization going on, of which we have no record? The analogies of other states of antiquity; the mild spirit of the law towards co-religionists; the fact that in the Exodus there must have been many foreigners included who seem to have been part and parcel of the people; (Comp. Numbers xi, 4;) the fact that foreign slaves sometimes married daughters of the family, (1 Chron. ii, 34-41,) and left children of full birth; and the fact also that certain persons were excluded from entering the congregation, implying that all others might so enter,—these considerations make it probable that some naturalizing process was going on, by which the foreigner who worshiped Jehovah and lived in the land could belong to one of the tribes and become to all intents an Israelite. We notice that Saalschütz inclines to accept such a naturalization as a fact, but it cannot be confidently affirmed. Such a usage would, f common, in the end put all slavery on the same ground, for it cannot be supposed that the foreign slave and his offspring would cleave long to their native religion, so long as the Jews themselves kept up their faith in their own.] ARTICLE V.-ARE THE PHENOMENA OF SPIRITUALISM SUPERNATURAL? Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World, with Narrative Illustrations. By ROBERT DALE OWEN. J. B. Lippincott & Co. Philadelphia: Ir is a striking illustration of the prominence gained by the modern school of Spiritualism, that its newly coined use of that term is recognized in the latest editions of the two rival Anglo-American dictionaries. Ten years ago the term Spiritualism was confined to a theory of mental philosophy, and was hardly known to the unscientific world. It was vaguely used as the opposite of Sensationalism, and more particularly to denote the Idealism of Berkeley, or the Egoism of Fichte. Cousin gives the term a somewhat wider range. He speaks of opposing the "modern Sensualism" of Locke, with the "modern Spiritualism" of Reid and Kant; and he characterizes the philosophy of Descartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz, and their successors, in general terms, as "the Spiritualistic school" of the seventeenth century.* Chalybäus speaks of Descartes,"the originator of a Platonizing view of the doctrine of innate ideas,”—as having adopted "the Spiritualistic tendency in philosophy."+ Cudworth styles those "Spiritualists" who "allegorize away the facts of Christianity." Brande limits the term Spiritualism to the idealistic refinements of Berkeley and Fichte. Thus restricted, and indeed hardly legitimated by usage, "Spiritualism" was, till recently, a technical term of mental science. Now, however, the new edition of Dr. Worcester's Dictionary authorizes the use of this word for "the doctrine that departed spirits hold communication with men." And the appendix to the new edition of Webster's Dictionary states * Cousin, History of Modern Philosophy, Sec. 11th, 12th, and 25th. that "this term is now often applied to the doctrine that a direct intercourse can be maintained with departed spirits through the agency of persons called mediums, who are supposed to have a peculiar susceptibility for such communications." A doctrine which has thus early won for itself a place in the vocabulary of psychological science, and which has given a new and almost exclusive meaning to a dormant term of philosophy, can hardly be treated as ephemeral or insignificant. Whatever pretensions and impostures may have been put forth in connection with modern Spiritualism, the system presents phenomena that demand thorough scientific investigation, and it has also theological and practical bearings that cannot be disregarded. The Mythical theory-which would resolve the miracles of the New Testament into popular legends, or into "unconscious fictions" of the Evangelists, whose imaginations were kindled by "religious enthusiasm,' -does not more directly assail the authenticity and authority of the Bible as a revelation from God, than does the tendency of modern Spiritualism to refer non-natural and unexplained phenomena to supernatural interference; or the mechanical theory of Supernaturalism, which regards such ultra-mundane interference as periodical, if not systematic, and in accordance with some law of variations, which, though it cannot be defined, is as real as that which appears in Babbage's calculating machine. The last is the theory that Mr. Owen favors in the volume which we propose to review. Mr. Owen's work is divided into six books, but consists really of four principal parts. Of these the first is devoted to the question of the possibility of "ultra-mundane interference," which the author argues with much apparent candor, but with more of subtle ingenuity, through a hundred pages. The second part consumes the next hundred pages in a discussion of certain phases of sleep, especially somnambulism and remarkable dreams. The third part consists mainly of narratives touching mysterious disturbances, hallucinations, and apparitions of the living and the dead, with their physical and * Strauss. |