stream or canal, either in Babylonia or elsewhere, and remains up to the present date an inscrutable puzzle.

Still, on the whole, it must be said that the geographic names connected with those of the Tigris and Euphrates in Gen. ii. 10-14, so far as they support any theory at all, tend to strengthen the view that the site of the garden was some portion of the alluvial plain through which the two great Mesopotamian rivers reach the sea.

Can we go further and say in what portion of the plain it was probably situated? Here two theories, and two theories only, meet us. One places the garden on the Shat-el-Arab, and finds the Pison and the Gihon in the Susianian rivers, which here mingle their waters with those of the two main streams. But it is conclusive against this view that the whole course of the Shat-el-Arab is of recent formation, the Persian Gulf having anciently reached 150 or 200 miles further inland than it does at present. And it is also conclusive against it that the Susianian streams are not branch streams from either the Euphrates or the Tigris, but simple tributaries of the latter, flowing into it from the Bakhtiyari mountains. In ancient times, moreover, it is most probable that they were not even connected with the Tigris, but reached the gulf by separate mouths.

The other theory, that of Calvin, Rask, Sir Henry Rawlinson, Mr. George Smith, Professor Sayce, and Professor Delitzsch, assigns for the site of the garden the upper portion of the alluvium, or the rich and fertile tract extending along the courses of the two great rivers from about lat. 33° 30′ to lat. 31°. This is the region described in such glowing terms by Herodotus and Theophrastus, by Zosimus and Ammianus Marcellinus. It is a region where streams abound, where they divide and re-unite, where alone in the Mesopotamian tract can be found the phenomenon of a single river parting

1 See Mr. C. H. H. Wright's article on "the Site of Paradise" in the Nineteenth Century for October 1882, p. 561.

itself into four arms, each of which is, or has been, a river of consequence. The Euphrates above Felujiyeh flows at a higher level than the Tigris, and about lat. 33° 23′ throws off an arm which reaches the Tigris at Baghdad, and sometimes threatens that city with destruction.1 Lower down, it throws off a second arm to the west, which, passing by Kerbela and the Birs-i-Nimrud, flows into Bahr-i-Nedjif, and thence pursues a south-eastern course, skirting the Arabian desert by Tel-el-Lahm, Abu-Shahrein, and Zobair, to the Persian Gulf, which it enters in lat. 30°. This branch was known to the Greeks as the Pallacopas, and, having been improved and straightened by human art, was reckoned as a canal. In the Biblical narrative it seems to be called " the Pison." The Tigris, largely increased by the waters poured into it from the Euphrates, divides at Kut-el-Amarah, and forms two streams of almost equal size, either of which may be regarded as the main river. The author of Gen. ii. regarded the western arm (now the Shat-el-Hie) as the true "Hiddekel "—the continuation of the stream which had "flowed before Assyria," of which, in fact, it retains the direction. The other arm, which is now considered to be the true Tigris, and which skirted Susiania or "the land of Cush," he called "the Gihon," and viewed as corresponding, in a certain sense, with the Pison, being the extreme eastern river, as that was the extreme western. He commences his enumeration from the west with the stream that skirted Arabia (Havilah); he then passes, by the law of parallelism, to the most eastern stream, that which skirted Susiania (Cush, Kissia). Returning westward, he comes to the Tigris (Hiddekel), which he consequently makes the third river, and he concludes with the great river of all (han-nahar hag-gadol), the Euphrates, which is thus first (ver. 10) and last (ver. 14) in his narrative.

1 See Loftus, Chaldæa and Susiania, pp. 7, 8.

G. RAWLINSON.

It is this fact which enables the author of Gen. ii. to view the Lower Tigris as, in some sort, an arm of the Euphrates.

THE EPILOGUE TO THE FOURTH GOSPEL.

THE chapter with which the Fourth Gospel closes is one of great and varied interest. The concluding note of attestation has a value of its own in reference to the question of authorship. The incidents enshrined in the narrative meet us nowhere else, and are such as we should not willingly part with. They are reported with a delicacy of touch and a vivid directness of description which commend them to most minds as worthy of the pen to which we owe so many of the holiest and most memorable passages in the Gospel histories. Their intrinsic worth gives them a still stronger claim upon our attention. It is easy to see that they have an important bearing on the final preparation of the Apostles for their ministry, as well as upon the particular position and destiny of two leaders in the band. It is perhaps not so generally. recognised that they occupy a no less important relation to the completed revelation of Christ Himself in His Risen Life, in the new order of fellowship into which He had now entered with His disciples, in the new conditions under which His work was to be continued in the world. And in this they seem to communicate something which we do not find elsewhere. It is but little at the best that is told us of what occurred between the Resurrection and the Ascension. We get hints of appearances to Peter (Luke xxiv. 34) and James (1 Cor. xv. 7), which we long to see described at length. We come across notices of expositions which He gave of the witness borne to Himself by Moses and all the prophets (Luke xxiv. 27). We light upon allusions to things which He spake pertaining to the kingdom of God (Acts i. 3). These give us to understand that much that must have been of the utmost

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consequence to the Apostles, in fortifying their faith and enlightening their minds, did take place during that interval. But over most of this the New Testament declines to lift the veil, and little as we know, we should know much less had we not this postscript to the Fourth Gospel. Each of the few recorded manifestations of the Risen Christ, therefore, becomes of inestimable moment. Each has something of distinct and peculiar meaning to convey as to this mysterious period and the new modes of life and intercourse then revealed as possible to humanity by the Christ who was so changed and withal so unmistakeably the same. We cannot be too thankful for the wealth of detail with which these incidents are related. cannot study them too carefully. They have so much to show us of the way in which the disciples were led to accept the fact of the Resurrection, of the different circumstances under which it was borne in upon the convictions of one and then of another, of the accommodation of evidence to different orders of mind. They have so much to show us, too, of the manner in which, when the fact was once taken in, its consistency with all that Christ had revealed of Himself in His previous association with them was apprehended, and its meaning realized. They help us to understand how this fact became the inspiration of their preaching, and the power by which they founded the Church.

But while this is true of all the appearances of the Risen Redeemer which illumined the forty days, a distinct position in the series may be claimed for those which are recorded in the present chapter. They are made to men who have already grasped the fact of the Resurrection. In the case at once of the Master and of the disciples, they look to the future more than to the past. Canon Westcott takes the entire scope of the Revelation of the Risen Lord to be changed here with the change of scene from Judæa to Galilee. He regards the appearance to Thomas as forming the point of transition from the manifestations of Easter-day to those by the Sea of

Tiberias. He speaks of that appearance as resembling the former in so far as it called forth faith by sensible signs, and as resembling the latter in so far as it indicated that Christ is "most truly with His Church by an invisible spiritual presence, by an abiding spiritual power." We do not see, indeed, how this can be said to be, in any singular or exclusive sense, distinctive of the manifestation to Thomas. The appeal to a "spiritual sense in man for the apprehension of the Lord's true nature," and the lesson that the spiritual presence of the Christ of heaven is a better and truer possession than the tangible presence of the Christ of Galilee and Judæa, are seen at least as clearly in the revelation to Mary. But it may be admitted that, so far as it speaks of a new beatitude, the beatitude of believing without seeing which belongs to the later generation, the revelation to Thomas does prepare the way for those reported in this appendix. And these latter seem meant for something more than merely to add so many of the same kind to those which preceded them. They are intended for the instruction of faith, not for its creation. They are links between what is and what shall be, rather than between what is and what once was. central thoughts," it is said, " are no more connected with the Passion and the Old Testament, but with the Return and the Progress of the Church." They mark somehow a new train of revelations, charged with an object distinguishable from that of the earlier series, and it deserves to be considered what this object is.

1

"The

Nor is this all. If the credibility of these narratives, by whomsoever written, is admitted, their apologetic value is by no means inconsiderable. They help us to a clearer and more consistent view of what happened between the Resurrection and the Ascension. They make a contribution of some worth to the removal of apparent discrepancies between the several accounts of the events falling within that interval, particularly 1 Westcott's The Revelation of the Risen Lord, p. 112.