party which specially clings to the special Protestant doctrine of justification; and that he arranged the texts that we daily see. And there is one which we may all remember to have often seen. Dr. Marsh asks the prophet Micah's question: 'Wherewith shall I come before the Lord, and bow myself before the high God?'[1] and he answers it with one short sentence from the New Testament: 'With the precious blood of Christ.' This is precisely the popular Protestant notion of the Gospel; and we are all so used to it that Dr. Marsh's application of the text has probably surprised no one. And yet, if one thinks of it, how astonishing an application it is! For even the Hebrew Micah, some seven or eight centuries before Christ, had seen that this sort of gospel, or good news, was none at all; for even he suggests this always popular notion of atoning blood, only to reject it, and ends: 'He hath showed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the Eternal require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?' So that the Hebrew Micah, nearly three thousand years ago, under the old dispensation, was far in advance of this venerable and amiable coryphæus of our Evangelical party now, under the Christian dispensation!
Dr. Marsh and his school go wrong, it will be said, through their false criticism of the New Testament, and we have ourselves admitted that the perfect criticism of the New Testament is extremely difficult. True, the perfect criticism; but not such an elementary criticism of it as shows the gospel of Dr. Marsh and of our so-called Evangelical Protestants to be a false one. For great as their literary inexperience may be, and unpractised as is their tact for perceiving the manner in which men use words and what they mean by them, one would think they could understand such a plain caution against mistaking Christ's death for a
