A Supplement to the Old Testament ; or, an Endeavour
towards the Recovery of the Book of Alm. By Alex. Vance. (Printed for private circulation for the author, by George Phipps.)—As Mr. Vance has done us the compliment of sending us a copy of his work, we are bound in honour to express our conviction that the author is hopelessly crazy. "Knowing nothing of languages," as he admits, he feels that he has a duty to society which God has given him the brain and the will to dis- charge, and this duty is to persuade the nineteenth century that so mach of the New Testament as is genuine (which, by the way, is little or nothing) refers to John the Baptist. By leaving out all the historical part and all the miraculous part of all the four gospels, and dovetailing the rest together, Mr. Vance presents us with what he calls the Book of John, not "the author of the Platonic Epistle and Gospel bearing his name," but "a party whom there is some reason to suppose was named John." Mr. Vance farther states that the Jerusalem which John wept over was Rome, the Babylon of the Revelations, and that until "Jerusalem has been effaced from our Bibles, from the first page to the last, and Babylon substituted, it will be in vain to count on being able to bring all this matter within the reach of our more ordinary, or even tolerably endowed understandings." As a specimen of his mode of arguing, we may cite his dictum that the Forty-Eighth Psalpi most certainly must have been written subsequently to the foundation of Constantinople, for no other site could ever possibly have been pro- nounced with any sort of propriety "the joy of the whole 'earth." We have marked other passages and theories of equal value, but we refrain from further comment. Had Mr. Vance given a single authority ex- cept that of his own mission for his attempt to change the Whole aspect of the Scriptures, it might have been worth while eirtering.into details. As it is, we must adhere to tlio opinion we have expressed already, and we think the few lines we have quoted will bring our readets to the same conclusion.
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