_À propos_ of Calvin’s ‘draught of Deity,’ Buchanan gives in the course of the poem what seems to be meant for an explanation of the spiritual work of ‘regeneration,’ which, I am afraid, would not have been so satisfactory to Mess John Davidson as some others of his efforts to propitiate that sound divine. As the soul animates the body, otherwise a mass of clay--_sic animi Deus est animus_--so ‘“God” is the Soul of the soul,’ and when the _Numinis haustus_, the ‘draught of Deity,’ has been taken, the soul which before was ‘shrouded in darkness, illusioned by empty appearance, and grasping at mere shadows of the “right and good,”’ sees the ‘darkness disappear, the vain “simulacra” cease, the unveiled face of “truth” reveal itself in light.’ I may be wrong, but this looks to me more like a Pantheistic theory of ‘illumination’ than the ‘regeneration’ of the Calvinistic creeds! Besides, there is no word of ‘sin,’ and the change to at least an incipient ‘holiness’ only from ‘_illusion_’ to ‘truth’ (_verum_). If it be said that this must be assumed, then a new contradiction of Calvinism arises, since a divine Soul of the soul cannot will evil, and ‘sanctification’ is thus erroneously made out to be an instantaneous act and not a gradual process. Altogether, and as it stands, the passage might have been written by one of those later Stoics, including possibly Aurelius himself, who seem to have believed in the indwelling Divinity, and that the souls of good men at death were not immediately reabsorbed into the All, but lived with ‘God,’ in some cases a thousand years, in others for ever, or, at all events, until the ‘philosopher’s year’ was over, and the new cycle began to repeat the history of the old.