Then you will say, ' Has God parts? Do you think it is correct to say, 'The hand is a part of man?' No! for I can only speak of parts when they together make up a whole. But the sum of the members does not make up a man; for man is not a whole composed of parts. He is indivisible—an eternal unity! which does not arise from coherence, and cannot be thus composed. At any rate, you can only think of parts with reference to a picture or a corpse. God is like man-the 'I Am,'—not a whole (for that presupposes parts), but a true unity; in fact, THE TRI-UNE, for as such He has revealed Himself in His Son, who became man to save us from our sins. Not until you receive a new heart-not until you experience what it is to be again a little child, will you know what redemption is; and that the redeemed alone, and not the dead in sin, can regenerate the earth; and that those alone live in whom the eternal Messiah dwells; for He alone is the resurrection, and the life, and the truth; and to Him all nations must come, and Israel, too, will not much longer stumble at that Stone, and deny their Lord and King. May He who laid His hand on me also lay hold of you, that we may come to life. This is the most burning desire of your faithful brother, "ISRAEL." On the first of January 1854, Israel Pick was baptized in Breslau, in the presence of a crowded assembly of Jews and Gentiles. Immediately after his baptism, the young convert turned round and addressed his countrymen, some hundreds of whom were present. His standing and character were known; and his baptism occasioned an immense sensation amongst them. He addressed them for upwards of an hour; and as a hostile newspaper admitted, with "rare rhetorical power." This address was printed, and obtained a large circulation. To counteract the effect of it, a pamphlet appeared, from the pen of an unbelieving Jew; to which Pick wrote a reply. He now became actively employed in the defence and confirmation of the Gospel of Jesus. He refused, however, to identify himself with any particular church. It was proposed to him that he should go to Geneva and study theology for a season, under D'Aubigné. He declined to do this, though employment as a missionary, with a large salary, was held out as an inducement. He shrunk from being a paid agent. It was widely circulated amongst the Jews, that he had sold himself to the Christians, and he thought that such a course would be confirmation strong in their eyes of the malicious story. Though it should be in poverty, he preferred labouring free and unfettered, that he might preserve his influence among his countrymen. Besides, he did not conceal the dislike which he had to the ordinary methods of Christian missionary enterprise among the Jews. They wanted breadth of aim in his estimation-vigour and comprehensiveness of design. The object pursued seemed to him, simply to be detaching here and there individuals from the body of the Jewish people, who afterwards became lost to them. They became merged amongst the Gentiles, and identified with them; and thereby lost all influence over their unbelieving countrymen. To remedy this, he thought the formation of a Christian Jewish Church important. Between Judaism and Christianity, a church of Christian Jews might exercise much desirable influence-linked to the Gentile Churches on the ground of a common Christianity, and linked to the Jewish people on the ground of a common nationality. In connection with this, it appeared to him that higher ground ought to be taken in dealing with unbelieving Israel. They were, to a large extent, held in bondage and unbelief by the Rabbis. The Rabbis were the visible head and power of the evil. In killing a wild beast, the blows were aimed at the head-not at the feet or extremities of the body. Thus Rabbinical authority must be destroyed. "Letters to My People" was a pamphlet which he subsequently published, and in it made a vigorous attack upon the Rabbis. It is a singular production. It contains much of striking and original thought: and we propose giving some account of it in the succeeding Number of the Magazine. The independent position which Pick thus marked out for himself, involved the pressure of pecuniary embarrassments, which he manfully faced. He commenced the publication of a periodical, entitled-The Star out of Jacob. It was dedicated to the advocacy of the claims of Jesus to be the Messiah; anditspeedily attracted attention. Friends were raised up. Letters from different quarters poured in upon him. An association of merchants in some of the principal towns of Germany was formed for the sale of his periodical. Thus his prospects began to brighten. The Jews read everything he wrote. A movement seemed to be in progress. Pick's eldest brother became one of his converts, at least came under the influence of his testimony. His niece has recently been baptized. But an arrest has taken place. Pick went to Bohemia to see his mother, who had become ill. There the Austrian authorities laid hold of him, for circulating the Bible. The bishops heard of his Star out of Jacob, and other publications. They were collected and sent to the Archbishop for judgment; and the issue is his incarceration for breach of the ecclesiastical laws, and for heretical teaching. A recent letter from Germany, intimates that the King of Prussia, through reading some of his publications, has become interested in him, and instructed his minister at the Court of Vienna to make intercession in his behalf.* The story of this German Jew possesses many points of interest. It is eminently suggestive-particularly to those whose minds are exercised on the present condition of the Jews. The adoption into the Synod's ecclesiastical machinery of the "Scottish Society for the Conversion of Israel," widens the field of our sympathies in this direction. The resolution of the theological students to make a special effort in behalf of the New Jewish Mission, is one as full of promise as it is of interest. There is vitality still in the promise to Abraham, “I will bless them that bless thee." There is energy still in the election, which makes the Jews "Beloved for the fathers' sakes." There is meaning still in the pregnant testimony, "Though ye have lien among the pots, yet shall ye be as the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold." The Jew is the masterlink of the mysterious chain which binds us to that Eastern World, toward which all eyes are turning in the present day. Men's eyes throughout Western Europe are being turned eastward. Men's thoughts, purposes, and expectations, are more and more shaping themselves in that direction. The armies of France and Britain, fighting side by side in behalf of Turkey, was a singular spectacle. It was eastern. The present Indian crisis is another. The magnificent East is spreading out its vastness before us, and challenging consideration. The genius of British mercantilism is mingling with the warstorm, and spying out new pathways of development. The sites of fallen empires, and the fields whence they drew their immense resources, are being reconsidered; and surely, amid all this stir, the spirit of British Christianity will not fail to discover her own in the LIVING JEW. * Word has just arrived that Israel Pick has been liberated, on the ground that the medical men pronounce him "religiously mad." THE REV. JAMES BRYCE OF KILLAIG. NOTICES OF HIS LIFE AND MINISTRY, AND OF THE ORIGIN AND HISTORY OF THE ASSOCIATE PRESBYTERY OF IRELAND. THE means which God employed to prepare the subject of this memoir for the post he was to occupy, were so remarkable, that in order to make our readers understand the man, we must give a fuller account than would otherwise be necessary of the persons by whom and among whom he was educated, and of the influences by which his character was formed. His grandfather, Archibald Bryce, of Dechmont Hill, Lanarkshire, died suddenly, in the prime of life, about a hundred and twenty years ago. He had made no will; and what property he left, was wasted or appropriated by his grown-up children, so that John, his youngest, then only four years old, was left penniless. The widow married again. Her second husband (the last Hamilton of Bothwell-haugh) treated the fatherless boy with the greatest kindness during the whole period of childhood, but had not the means of doing more; so the youth, on growing up, sought a humble independence by the trade of a carpenter. He settled in Airdrie, and there married a worthy and highly gifted woman, whose family had experienced, like his own, the vicissitudes of this world. John Bryce was an elder in the Established Church, and bore the highest character for piety, and for a pure and holy life. He gave himself to the duties of his sacred office with such singular zeal, that he was generally called "the elder ;" and for the space of a whole generation after his death, he was remembered and spoken of in the village with veneration, as a being of almost superhuman excellence. His wife, Robina Allan, was an Antiburgher, decided and uncompromising, but not bigoted. Not less under the influence of Divine grace than her husband, she was of a very different natural temperament. He was naturally silent and reserved, and had been made still more so by the comparative solitude in which his strict religious and moral sentiments, his complete separation from his relatives, and perhaps a little pride, had caused him to live. She was fond of society, possessed great powers of conversation, and freely expressed all her feelings to her friends. He was grave almost to sternness; she was of that lively and cheerful disposition, which loves to look at the sunny side of things. Both possessed great dignity of character; but his filled younger people with awe, and kept them at a distance,-hers made them prize the familiarity to which her open and attractive manner invited them. James Bryce, the eldest son of this remarkable pair, was born at Airdrie on the 5th of December 1767, and baptized in the parish church of New Monkland on the 13th of the same month. The circumstance that his parents belonged to different communions, did not prevent them from co-operating most harmoniously in his religious and moral training. In his father he had an impressive pattern of all that is elevated in Christian character; while his mother's great powers of communication made her a most effective and attractive expounder of Christian duty. From both he learned the same sound views of saving truth, the same high standard of practical godliness, and the same unselfish devotion to the glory of God and the good of man. Though the stern Antiburgher sentiment of those days debarred his mother from ever crossing the threshold of the church in which her husband was an elder, yet they lived in perfect harmony, and hallowed their domestic intercourse with the sweetest Christian fellowship. Towards some pious relatives in Glasgow, who belonged to the old Scotch Independents, or “Glassites," she entertained the most cordial regard; and loved the society of God's people, wherever she met them, with the most thoroughly unsectarian spirit. This fine spectacle of fidelity to a denominational testimony, combined with the largest catholic spirit, produced its effects on her son. It emancipated him from the sectarian rigour of that generation, and fortified him against the danger of committing himself to the countenance of any doctrine or practice which might seem to undervalue the least portion of revealed truth-such truth as relates to the Headship of the Redeemer. Nor was his the mind to stop short with a good principle, at the point to which his instructors carried it ;-he improved on their liberality of Christian sentiment; and when he entered on public life, was half a century in advance of his cotemporaries, in catholicity of spirit, and an earnest yearning for Christian union. Yet not even to gratify that catholic spirit, or serve that much-desired union, would he ever compromise one jot or tittle of the royal honour of his Saviour. The strength of this last sentiment in his mind was in some measure due to the society and conversation of two maiden sisters of his mother's. Only two generations back, their family had thrown themselves devotedly into the great struggle for civil and religious liberty, which ended at the Revolution. Their paternal and maternal grandfathers had both fought at Bothwell Bridge for the good cause; to which the former was deemed of some value, being the representative of an old, though fast decaying family; and for which the latter was imprisoned, and would certainly have died on the scaffold, had not the fury of the persecutors been just then checked by the landing of the Prince of Orange. The venerable spinsters had a store of traditions about their ancestors, especially the two soldiers of the covenant, which they loved to recount, and their nephew loved as well to hear. These stories of hair-breadth escapes and heroic endurance cherished the martyr spirit, so necessary for his future work. Yet they might have had an injurious effect on the boy, had not his mother's practical wisdom come to the rescue. Tamed down by her strong good sense, and afterwards controlled by religious principle, the feeling which they awakened proved not only harmless, but salutary; they assisted in forming that high sense of honour, and that calm self-respect without assumption, which, sanctified by a lively faith, and an entire devotedness to God, sustained and guided him in the most trying moments of his public life. Such were the means by which the Great Master trained His handmaid's son in boyhood for the work to which he was in manhood called ;-the rest of his early history must be passed over more briefly. He was educated chiefly at the parish school of New Monkland, and made great and rapid progress, especially in the Latin language. On the 10th of October 1782, he entered Glasgow College, where he gained considerable distinction, especially in Greek. He completed the usual curriculum of Arts, but left college without graduating a practice then all but universal, and unfortunately but little less common even in the present day. James Bryce early and decidedly attached himself to the church of his mother; and his father, knowing well that she had used no unfair means to bias the youth's mind, offered no opposition, and manifested no displeasure. In the vacation between his fourth and fifth sessions at college, he entered (as was the usual practice) the Divinity Hall of the General Associate Synod; and as the Theological Session occupied only about six weeks, he employed himself during the rest of the year in teaching, of which he was extremely fond, and in which he possessed extraordinary skill. His last engagement of this kind was at Auchtermuchty, in Fifeshire, where he spent two or three of the happiest years of his life. In the families of the Rev. Mr Browning, of his own church, the Rev. Mr Frazer, the Burgher minister, and a few of their friends, he found a congenial society, which he highly enjoyed. To this little circle belonged Mrs Annan, a widow lady of decided piety, and, at the same time, of great vivacity and native wit, whose two youngest children, a boy about twelve years of age, and a girl about nine, were among his pupils. Mr Bryce soon found that these were no common children, and took the greatest pains in cultivating their minds and forming their characters. He foresaw especially that Catherine Annan would prove an extraordinary woman; and before leaving Auchtermuchty, he had marked her as his future wife. To many it seemed ridiculous that a man of five-and-twenty should fix his choice on a child of eleven; but the result vindicated his sagacity. On the 29th of October 1792, he was licensed to preach the Gospel; and on the 2d of September 1795, he was ordained over the congregation of Newton-Wick, in Caithness. On the 25th of April 1796, he married Miss Annan; and, after spending a short time in the south, returned to his charge, leaving his bride to pay some parting visits to her friends. In the summer she was conveyed to him through the Highland wilds by his only brother; and on the 1st of July arrived at her future home, the manse of Newton-Wick, from whose windows the wondering southland girl looked forth, over bleak fields and woodless hills, on the Pentland Firth and the distant Orkneys. She was soon followed by his mother, who had been for some years a widow; and now, in the midst of a people who loved him, and with the two objects dearest to him on earth by his side, he was promising himself years of pastoral usefulness and domestic bliss in his transalpine retreat, The world forgetting, by the world forgot. But these visions were soon to be dissipated. His first trial was the death of his mother, who was suddenly carried off, by an attack of gout in the stomach, on the 11th of March 1797. Little more than a year after this, his ecclesiastical troubles began. 66 99 66 The two ministers who had preceded him at Newton-Wick were both alive, and neither of them old; both had been loosed from the charge in consequence of dissensions got up in the congregation by a restless and litigious individual. Mr Bryce was a much better mark than either of his predecessors for the shafts of this man and his followers ;-his catholicity of spirit they could denounce as latitudinarianism. The exclusive divine right of Presbytery was in those days held by many in a spirit of intolerance, of which few now have an adequate conception. There were still many who grouped Independency with Popery and Prelacy as an Antichristian system, to be preached against as fiercely, and prayed against as fervently, as either of the others. In these days of evangelical alliances, we laugh at such ultraism with impunity. Mr Bryce laughed at it forty or fifty years too soon, and was accused of being a scoffer," an enemy to Secession principles," and "a rank Independent at heart." There were some among the clergy who were the more easily induced to give heed to these charges, because Mr Bryce freely criticised what he regarded as abuses in the practical working of the presbyteries and synods of his day. He thought that the Presbyterianism of the Church of Scotland had been grievously corrupted by her connection with the State; and that, by the undue predominance of the clerical element, it had become little better than a many-headed Prelacy, treading down the rights of the Christian people. He thought, too, that the Secession Church, in coming out of the Establishment, had brought with her too much of the same spirit. The presbytery of John Knox and the early Scotch Reformers, though he did not approve of some points in it (e.g., the annual election of elders), he regarded as a nearer approach to the scriptural model, and advocated a return to something like it. Further, he thought there was a tendency in some members of the Church to put her subordinate standards in the place of the Scriptures; and he warmly and indignantly advocated the paramount authority of the Book of God. And, finally, any power of the magistrate, either in sacris or circa sacra, he strongly disavowed. It is very possible that the young and ardent reformer may have been less patient and conciliatory than he ought in advocating his views; but the views themselves would not bring down very severe censure in the present day. In the formulas of the United Presbyterian Church the claim of Divine right is as temperately and modestly stated as he could have wished; and the twenty-third chapter of the Westminster Confession is placed in abeyance :-in her teaching, the relation of the subordinate standards to the supreme one is understood pretty much as he understood it; and in her practice, that lordship over God's heritage, which he complained of in the presbyteries and synods of the last century, has quite disappeared. Of the last-mentioned circumstance, Mr Bryce was a wondering and delighted eye-witness at the United Presbyterian Synod of 1848. In his public address to the Synod, he expressed these feelings in terms so delicate that the younger members hardly understood him, yet so significant, that some of the older brethren, who knew something of what church courts had been, were not a little amused. In private, to his friends, he expressed his joy and admiration in plainer terms and very frequently :-" What a prodigious contrast!" he would say; "no wrangling or domineering now; their minds earnestly bent on their missions, and other means of doing good; and all done in a religious, brotherly spirit; it is no more like the synods of old times than day is like night."* But however cordial his sympathy with the United Presbyterian Synod of 1848, Those who think there is still room for improvement in some of these particulars, will, nevertheless, be gratified by this testimony from a competent and impartial witness. |