equivalent of labour. This agreement, therefore, is now evaded in a variety of ways, some openly disregard it, others bid higher for the Saturday holidays of the labourers, and others supersede day labour by contract or task-work. For the first year, caprice was frequently manifested on the one hand, and a love of oppression on the other; but in this the third year of freedom, the records of the Police Courts show that both have materially decreased. The planters have little cause now to complain of love of change, want of industry, or irregular attendance on the part of their labourers; and the latter are less frequently annoyed by frivolous complaints before the magistrate. Freedom is "an evergerminating principle ;" its gradual and progressive operation rather than the amount of good, considerable as it is, which has hitherto been effected, marks the contrast in Antigua between the present and the past. teemed. Such is an imperfect catalogue of the evils of slavery. As far as a system can degrade man to the level of the lower creation, he is so animalized by slavery, that the most successful efforts of missionaries and teachers, and even of humane proprietors, can only palliate its inherent malignity. The Antigua negroes, as a body, are not elevated above the stage of moral and intellectual childhood. Their character is distinguished by shrewdness, by petty vice, great want of reflection, and above all by distrust. They are, however, in a rapid course of improvement. They are gaining prudence and foresight from the influence of newly acquired responsibilities. They feel the security of their property. They are acquiring domestic habits. Marriages are more frequent. Husbands and wives begin to dwell together, and mothers of families to withdraw from field labour to their household affairs, -germs of rising character, which contain most encouraging promises of advancement."-p. 77. A "To appreciate fully the results of emancipation, it is necessary to revert to the evils of the state it succeeded. At a distance, the "The state of Antigua, as regards the physical sufferings of slaves from direct cruelty public peace, would also be erroneously inand from the, exaction of oppressive labour, ferred from an unexplained statistical comare the most vividly realized by the imagina-parison of criminal calendars and police retion; but in the presence of an enslaved cords. There has been an apparent increase people, the consideration of these is almost of offences, owing to the fact, that Emancipasuperseded by that of their moral degradation gave_nearly thirty thousand citizens to tion. As a citizen, a slave has no existence; the state; and that the magistrate now takes and therefore, neither rights nor duties. As formal cognizance of offences which previously a private individual, he has no responsibili- were summarily punished by the master. ties, no cares for the present or the future; large proportion of the middle class in the nothing to stimulate his dormant intellectual towns, are people of color, many of whom are energies into life. He has no filial or paren- persons of intelligence, education, and true tal duties. His wife and children depend respectability. The standard of morals is far not on his exertions or his love for their com- more elevated among them, as well as the fort or subsistence; they belong not to him, whites, than in the other colonies, though but to their owner, whose care it is to pro- still in some respects lamentably below that vide for their animal wants. A slave has of the mother country. The Sabbath is, no power of self-protection, but his skill in however, more strictly observed than in lying and deception. He has no property England, and the attendance on public worbut by sufferance, and is therefore feebly im- ship very exemplary. Although the island pressed with a sense of the rights of property suffers from absenteeism, it has proportionin others. He is exposed to a continual ably a more numerous proprietary than any system of selfish fraud; no one keeps faith other colony, except Barbadoes. To this cirwith him, and he is therefore filled with cumstance has been attributed, with apparent suspicion and distrust. Labour, a great bless-justice, its adoption of the complete abolition ing in disguise to man, brings him no wealth, comfort, or honor. It is degraded in his eyes by associations of coercion and punishment. Domestic comfort is unknown. Husbands and wives are not helpmeets to one another; they rarely reside in the same hut, or even on the same estate; for a slave does not, more than an European, choose his partner from the females of his own village. They work in the fields without distinction of sex. The decencies of civilized life are to a most re volting and guilty extent unobserved. Wives and daughters are subject to the brutal caprice and absolute wills of their owners. The sacred character of the marriage tie is therefore little understood, or lightly es of slavery, in preference to the Apprenticeship; the legislatures of either islands being filled with attorneys, who form themselves a part of existing abuses, and whose interests are wholly identified with the maintenance of the present order of things."-p. 78. In the island of Jamaica, where our travellers remained several months, they met with a hearty welcome and zealous co-operation from the Baptist missionaries, of whom they speak in the most glowing terms. It would be pleasant to the personal friends of our brethren, and to others who have assisted in sending them to their arduous posts, if we could transcribe the details which are given copiously of their labours and successes. For these, however, we must refer our readers to the volume itself, giving only one general statement, which, from impartial witnesses, the authors being members of the Society of Friends, must be read with peculiar pleasure. "We are unable, within our allotted limits, even to attempt to render justice to missionary efforts in Jamaica. Representation cannot picture the happy results of those efforts; description can convey no idea of their excellence and magnitude. A few years ago, the negroes were heathen and benighted; now they are, to a great extent, enlightened and christian. The Sabbath, once desecrated, is now devoted to public prayer and thanksgiving, and to the enjoyment of christian communion. A few years ago, education was unknown; now it is making progress under many disad vantages, and waits but for freedom, to become more generally diffused than in our own country. The success of missionary labours among the servile population, has been general and striking; much has been done, yet more remains to be done. The work requires to be deepened, strengthened, and extended ; and we earnestly commend those benefactors of the human race, the missionaries, to the more earnest prayers, to the deeper sympathies, and to the yet more liberal support of British Christians." p. 380. These gentlemen bear testimony to the uprightness and humanity of some resident proprietors, some attorneys, some overseers, and some stipendiary magistrates. But the general deportment of these men of authority seems to have been but too accurately depicted by one of the apprentices, when he said, “The constable lock you up when him like; the book-keeper lock you up when him like; when the busha come, they tell him, and he fasten you in the dark hole better; when the magistrate come on the property, they bring you before him, and he know | all about you before you come; if you offer to speak for yourself, he hold his finger and say, 'not a word." Numerous illustrations are given of the diversified ways in which those provisions of the Abolition Act which were intended to relieve the negroes are evaded, and alterations which were never contemplated, have brought upon them new sorrows. The aged, the little children, and especially the women who have infants, appear to be the greatest, though not the only sufferers. We can only afford space for a small portion of the chapter on the Results of the Apprenticeship in Jamaica. "If the Abolition Act possessed a single feature which tended more than another to twenty millions, it was the advantages it apreconcile the nation to the costly sacrifice of peared to confer on the weaker sex, whom it professed, by exempting them from degrading punishment, to elevate at least one step towards that position which reason and humanity require that they should occupy. Widely different, however, is the law enacted by the Imperial legislature, from the same law as carried into effect by the executive government, and by which the oppression and degradation of females are sanctioned and aggravated. The Imperial act (c. vi.) exthe present volume contains proof, in addition pressly interdicts the flogging of females; yet to much that has already come before the public from other sources, that females have been, and still are, flogged upon the treadmill, and that the treadmill itself is an instrument of torture. They are publicly worked in the penal gang, chained to each other, and with ble to the punishment of 'solitary confinement iron collars on their necks; besides being liawith an insufficient diet, and to mulcts of time, by which they are deprived of the means of providing food for themselves and their children. All these punishments, women in a state of pregnancy, and others with infants at the breast, endure in their full proportion.” p. 364. "The practice on the part of the owners and overscers of punishing negroes by confinement at their own caprice, without any previous or subsequent reference to the Special Magistrate, is general in every part of the island. The planters have also perpetuated their irresponsible authority, by the exercise the slave allowances; destroying the goats, of indirect powers of coercion, in withholding poultry, and hogs of the apprentices; pulling down their houses; taking away the watchmen from the provision-grounds, and suffering them to be destroyed by the trespass of cattle; taking away the field-cooks; locking up the sick in the hospitals; and other acts of cruel ty and oppression, against which the apprentices have no protection. The amount of suffering and punishment inflicted in these modes, is placed on no record, reported to no authority, but it is not, therefore, less keenly felt. It affords us little satisfaction to turn from illegal to legal oppression. A limited and imperfect idea of the amount of punishment inflicted by the Special Magistrates, may be learned from the fact, that during the first two years of their administration in the colony, sixty thousand apprentices were punished to an extent, in the aggregate, of a quarter of a million of lashes, and fifty thousand other punishments, by the treadmill, chain gang, solitary confinement, and mulcts of time. We would repeat here the remark, that we have neither the power nor the wish to institute a comparison between the present and former system. To do this would require an unenviable faculty of imagination, or a personal acquaintance with slavery, during which, the mind should have become familiar, without becoming reconciled with its scenes of violence and wretchedness. We are not, therefore, in a condition to state how much the negro has gained by the substitution of the Special Magistrate for the negro driver, and of the discipline of the parish work house for the stocks and bilboes of the plantation; but we can and do assert, that the new system is efficient for the purposes of perpetuating the enslaving influence of terror, and rendering owners and overseers independent of the law of kindness and justice. Many of the treadmills, as we have shown, are instruments, not of punishment, but of torture. From their construction, they are not capable of their legitimate object, the enforcement of a species of severe labour. The prisoners are put upon them for one or two short spells in the day, for the sole purposes of torture, and to diversify the the horrors of the dark cell and the chain-gang. Another feature of the workhouse discipline, its demoralizing tendency, which is complete as if it had been devised for the purpose. The prisoners of both sexes, of all ages, and for all offences, are thrown together indiscriminately. At night, the males are crowded into one sleeping-room, and the females into another, their security being sometimes ensured by shackles. Of the temporary as inmates of the workhouses, thus associated together, besides young persons of both sexes, a fair proportion are members of churches, individuals of irreproachable conversation, who are sent for offences occasioned by accident, inability, or sickness, or for those of a fictitious and inconstructive nature, which, if true, fix no stain on their moral character, though they are thus visited by punishments, implying the deepest moral degradation." p. 367. This volume corroborates a persuasion, derived from other sources, that the time is come, when it is the duty of the British public to call for the immediate abolition of the apprenticeship. We are not unacquainted with the arguments against this course which are urged by some hearty and tried friends of the bondsmen. We are not insensible to the cry of dishonesty and breach of faith which will be raised by the avaricious colonists. The men who resisted formerly every attempt to abolish or mitigate slavery, will now proclaim their determination to adhere to the apprenticeship, and will call upon the legislature pact which was ratified four years ago. To all such appeals, however, three considerations furnish a complete answer. 1. This compact, if made at all, was made without the consent of the party welfare it was ostensibly designed. The most interested, the party for whose negro never agreed to the apprenticeship, is not bound by its requirements. He has an indefeasable right to the use of his limbs, and the liberty of his person, which no acts of a British legislature, or of his British friends, could take away. 2. To this compact, the friends of the slaves were not parties; they protested against the apprenticeship system at the time; they shortened its duration as much as they could; and divided the House of Commons in a vain attempt to shorten it yet more. When the British public desisted from the struggle, exhausted with long continued efforts, its acquiescence in the plan was not active: at most it was but silent, passive, and compulsory. 3. The compact has been broken by the colonists, and is thereby void. They have not fulfilled the stipulations to which they were bound, and cannot now fulfil them. They can no more claim the remainder of the payment, than the vender of a perishable article could claim full payment for his commodity, if he at the stipulated time. Deeds have been had failed to deliver it to the purchaser perpetrated which cannot be undone. Hours and days have been fraudulently taken away which cannot be recalled. Blood has been spilt which cannot be gathered up again. Many have sunk through hardship, and descended prematurely to the grave, whose lives cannot be restored. It is too late now to talk of the contract; it cannot be fulfilled either to the living or the dead. The apprenticeship has been tried, and has proved a failure; now let Britain determine that the oppressed shall actually go free. A New Version of the Book of Job, with Expository Notes, and an Introduction on the Spirit, Composition, and Author of the Book, by D, F. W. C. Umbreit, D.D., translated from the German by the Rev. J. H. Gray, M.A. Two Vols., being Vols. XVI. and XIX. of the Biblical Cabinet. Price 12s. The Book of the Patriarch Job, translated from the original Hebrew, by Samuel Lee, D.D. One Vol., p. 555. Price 12s. THE Book of Job is in various respects to maintain inviolate the solemn com- the most extraordinary composition of any age or country. It is also one of the most difficult books in the Hebrew Bible; hence it has had peculiar attractions for the labours and researches of the learned, and has not failed to draw from them opinions exceedingly various and discordant. Concerning the age, the author, the nature, the design, and other circumstances belonging to it, they differ; but they all unite in ascribing to it an unrivalled degree of excellence. No question can be more interesting than that of the age to which this book ought to be assigned. In a catalogue of the canon of the Old Testament, drawn up by Melito, Bishop of Sardis, near the end of the second century, the first Catalogue given by any Christian writer, the Book of Job occurs. It is cited by Philo, who was contemporary with the apostles. Long before this it was translated into Greek, together with the rest of the Hagiographa, by the Jews of Alexandria. The name is mentioned by Ezekiel; and some expressions occur in the Proverbs, and the older books of the Scriptures, which are to be found in this book. This contains the whole of its historical evidence. The most common opinion is, that it is the oldest book in the Jewish canon; at least, as old as the writings of Moses. Many ascribe to it a pre-Mosaic origin, placing it at the time which begins with Peleg and ends with Isaac; i. e., at that period of time when men lived rather more than two hundred years after their first children were born to them. Others have placed it among the most recent books of the Old Testament, and contend that it was not written until after the restoration of the Jews from the Babylonish captivity. Whilst others have assigned to it some intermediate period. Umbreit ascribes to it the age of the exile of Babylon. "The most simple explanation of its origin," he says, "is to suppose our sage to have been the companion of those suffering servants of God, whose sorrows are so beautifully shadowed forth in the prophetic strains of Isaiah. A pious Israelite in the land of the enemy, mourning under the willows of the Euphrates, on which he hung the harp of his native minstrelsy, feels in his manly bosom all the agony of unmerited affliction. But he belongs not to the class of those who, like David and Asaph, can breathe forth their sorrows in soft elegiac measure; and still less does he resemble that highest and holiest One of all, who, in mute submission, opened not his mouth, except in order to pray for his persecutors. The feelings of his severe and lofty mind find more natural utterance in the strains of philosophic poetry, wherein he perpetuates his patriotic grief." In accordance with this opinion, he supposes that "the name of our minstrel sage has perished in the oblivion of antiquity; but his brilliant genius, like a star of the first magnitude, points from the shades to that Almighty brightness, which spreads over all worlds the eternal light of divine love.' Among those commentators who ascribe to the Book of Job a recent origin, may be mentioned the names of Warburton, Heath, De Wette, Rosenmüller, with a whole host of infidel German Neologists. They rest their opinions very much on a few peculiarities of expression, apparently of Chaldee or Arabic character; from which peculiarities, be it remembered, some of the most profound oriental scholars, among whom are Schultens, Michaelis, and Kennicott, have inferred the remote antiquity of the book. Dr. Lee assigns many reasons for concluding that Job was born about the time of Jacob's third son, Levi. As a general corroboration of his argument, but without fixing the period at precisely the same date, we have only to suppose that Job attained the ordinary age of his contemporaries. It appears from Job xlii. 16, that he lived after his severe trial one hundred and forty years. From Gen. xi. 12-26, it appears that the young men in the patriarchal times, from Shem to Terah, the father of Abraham, began to marry, or to have their first children born to them, at about thirty-two years of age. Let us suppose this to have been the case with Job. It appears, then, from Job i. 4, that his sons, at the time when his afflictions came upon him, were old enough to have households. Let us suppose that his eldest son might have been at this particular time about thirty years old. Job, under these premises, would have been in his sixty-second year when his afflictions began. But he is said to have lived one hundred and forty years after this. He must have attained, then, the age of two hundred and two. And this was about the age (from 200 to 240) to which men generally lived, from the time of Peleg, in whose time the life of man began to be shortened, to the time of Jacob.* that those of our readers who cultivate Biblical literature, will procure the work for themselves. In the mean time, let them receive the candid testimony of this eminent philologist. "In Germany, therefore, where we find much to admire and to venerate, we also find much, very much, to deplore. A never-end If this probability be founded on truth, then what a noble depository of patriarchal religion does not this sacred book contain! It is precisely the work which completes the dispensations of God to man. It shows us what truths were being desire for something new is on the alert, lieved in the earliest ages of the world, before the law of Moses and the gospel which alone, were there no shallow and mischievous principles already adopted, could not but be ruinous to every inquiry after revealed truth. Under the influence of these ingenuity-will supply both root and branch, and these necessarily of a piece with the theory previously received and set up as ar biter." The introduction, which consists of one fifth part of the work, is exceedingly valuable, and contains essays on the question whether Job was a real person or not? The objections of Bishop Warburton and others, to the strictly historical character of the book of Job examined.-On the questions, Where, and at what period did Job live?-On the question, as to Who committed this book to writing?-On the language, of Christ. And hence we learn that the religion of fallen man has been substantially the same from the beginning; that principles, it can avail but little what their philology is; for a system being previously it is a revelation of hope through a determined upon, which will necessarily ride Mediator, at first obscurely intimated, over all subordinate consideration of this afterwards slowly, but gradually deve-sort, conjecture alone-in other words, human loped, then more distinctly typified in the Mosaic law, and at length clearly and fully brought to light under the gospel. We regard both of these works as valuable accessions to biblical literature. Umbreit's version, or rather, Gray's translation of it, is by far the most free and elegant. He adheres closely to the original, and by his adoption of short and genuine English words, has attained a dignified simplicity which is at once pleasing and forcible. Both works discover considerable philological research. Scarcely an important word, certainly not a difficult phrase, is passed by without evincing the erudition of the trans-usages, and general contents of the book lators. Both have drawn liberally from their stores of Arabic learning. Particularly Dr. Lee, whose notes bear ample testimony to the importance of the study of Arabic to every one who would be thoroughly conversant with the Hebrew scriptures. "The meagre system of German divinity, which tends to rob the Christian of his hope, by depriving the Scriptures of all their comfort and of half their beauty," has had its influence on Umbreit's version; though, as his translator justly observes, "He is less offensively imbued with it than many of his contemporaries." Dr. Lee, on the contrary, too often finds a truth peculiarly evangelical in some expressions and allusions, where a more sober and judicious theologian would pause. takes frequent occasions of exhibiting in its proper light the meagre, false, and miserable neology, to which so many of the Continental scholars are attached. Did our space allow, we might enrich our pages with some quotations; but this we deem needless, as He we trust * Clarkson's Researches, Ant. Pat. and Hist. of Job.-On the doctrines found in this book.-On the quotations, &c., found in this book, as made from former revelations, or pointing to them respectively; and also on those found in subsequent Scriptures, as taken from this book, or alluding to it.-On the translation and interpretation of Scripture generally, and of this book in particular, as adopted in this work.-And, on the scope and object of this book. The Choir and the Oratory; By JOSIAH Ir is an active, busy, exciting age in which our lot is cast, and we need to be very careful that piety is not lost in the prevailing bustle. Amidst the secular occupations which demand the attention of the most numerous classes, and the calls to benevolent exertion which are heard on every side, there is danger of our losing that devout and humble spirit, without which we can neither please Christ, nor render essential service in his D |