CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Authorized Version of the Old Testament Scriptures, Harmonized Classified, and Revised. By Alexander Vance. (Printed for the Author by G. Phipps.) This is a most extraordinary volume. Mr. Vance con- siders the Hebrew Scriptures to be the mere wreck of an extinct literature, to have been frequently re-written, largely interpolated, and the parts disarranged. He has, therefore, endeavoured "to impart some sort of intelligibility to the reliques of a generic, a fossil, and an extinct literature." The process was to withdraw the Levitical law, the genealogies, and all the other passages. "which the advocate of the Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, would very willingly consign to eternal oblivion." Then. he divided the residue into 'parts wherever he detected a break of continuity, "shuffled the whole together exactly as one would the letters of an alphabet," and, re-arranged them according to his own ideas. During these labours Mr. Vance was supported by a kind of semi-belief in his own inspiration, for he was "well-nigh prepared to
have staked his mortal body in the world that is, and his immortal soul in the one which is to come, that it were next to a moral impossibility a mind so uncontrollably, so instinctively running to truth, as that which he knew by secret, indivisible, incommunicable, ascertainment and assurance God Almighty to have intrusted unto him, how unworthy a receptacle soever of such a gift, ever could to any serious extent have erred in its deductions." The result of labour of this sort is not to be critically estimated, but whether it be from much learning or not, there can be little doubt what is the mental condition of the labourer.
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