woman.

tween the New and the Old Schools: first, the freedom of the human will, to the extent of restricting accountability entirely to the voluntary transgression of known law; and, second, the innate ill-desert, sin, or culpability of every child born of The confession affirms, that "God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty that it is neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to good or evil." And this seemingly frank statement is balanced by this other, that "man, by his fall into a state of sin, hath wholly lost all ability of will to any spiritual good accompanying salvation: so, as a natural man, being altogether averse from that which is good, and dead in sin, is not able, by his own strength, to convert himself, or prepare himself thereunto." The difficulty was to adjust into consistency these two propositions. The man is yet to be born who can do that; and, when he is born, he will have to bring into being with him a system of logic unlike any the world has ever yet found applicable to either mathematical or speculative problems. The real old-fashioned Calvinism, or Augustinianism, hood-winked those who might have been puzzled by this problem, by a cunning play upon the difference between man and men. God had never created but one single man, namely, Adam. All his posterity existed in posse in his loins, like a nest of Dutch boxes; and were all stained, as by an ill color striking through them from the outside one. The one man whom God made was a free agent. All subsequently developed but not then created-men had lost something which Adam had. What was it they had lost? Old Calvinism was decided and plain-spoken on this point. Men had lost every thing. Humanity was a complete and hopeless wreck; and the fires of hell were all aglow, at best, only banked up, ages and ages before the birth of the successive generations of men who were to be the sure victims of them. It was difficult to decide by Calvinism who was the father of men. was only certain that God was not, and the paternity lay in doubt between Adam and the Devil. One thing, however, was certain, as the confession averred, that men were destititute from their birth of all "ability of will," and were

It

cursed with a natural aversion for all spiritual good. But Calvinism had somehow come to recognize, that God was the Father of men, and that he dealt with them as if he were indeed their Father; and therefore modern Calvinists were concerned to show how Calvinism consisted with fatherly and filial relations between men and God. Every child was born with an innate culpability: "ill-desert," as the gentle phrase is, "is innate;" and yet culpability can exist only where there is freedom of will. Both the Old and the New School were resolved upon holding to the former proposition; and so they tried their skill and ingenuity in playing tricks with the latter. The one party maintained, that, though the will was free by creation, [by the creation of whom?] its freedom was forfeited by the Fall; i.e., all men are born free agents, but lost their freedom before they were born. The other party maintained, that there was no such real, positive loss of freedom by the Fall, but only an acquired moral inabil ity, amounting, at worst, to an aversion to good; an unwillingness, indeed, to will to be good. The one party affirmed, straight out and unflinchingly, that men could not do any thing right if they wished to do it. The other party insisted, very gingerly, that men would not do any thing right, though they had perfect ability to do it. The struggle was like that in a tussle between two combatants in pugilism, one of whom tries directly to lay his opponent flat on his back, while his adversary seeks to hit him "in the wind;" acting on the reasonable probability, that, if so "hit," he will be likely to fall in the above-mentioned position.

Among the questions which keenly tried the wits of the scholastics in the interests of Nominalism and Realism in the Middle Age-and to as good purposes as many of our modern debates was the following: In whom vests the right of property to the shadow cast by a jackass, as he stands upon the ground? in the man who owns the jackass, or in the man who owns the ground on which the shadow falls? The only full decision of the question could be found in the seizure, by one party, of the contested prize; so that he might add the right of possession to the claim. It is clear, that the owner

of the jackass had the advantage here; though the owner of the ground might insist, that, as a condition of holding it, he must keep moving.

Had it been possible for the disputants in the ranks of Calvinism to have kept their temper during their strife, as the volumes before us show most signally that they did not, it might not have been unpleasant or unedifying to re-read the controversy. But many of those who engaged in it on either side were men of narrow spirits, having recourse to petty intrigue and backbiting. The worst of them are buried now.

Dr. Beecher bore his part in the strife, so far as we can infer from the record, and as the nobility of his character would assure us, with thorough integrity and manliness. Indeed, his real dignity and elevation of soul seem to have been drawn out more conspicuously under the slanderous persecution to which he was subjected, than by the ordinary experience of the common tenor of his life. We could wish that he might either have anticipated, or have had a lengthened life to have dealt with, the fundamental questions which vex our age. He was not a scholar, nor a philosopher, nor a man of the largest outlook, nor of penetrating vision. But he had clear common sense, much acumen, thorough fearlessness of spirit; and he was a hospitable entertainer of progressive ideas, even of those which concern the substance and the development of religion. He gave himself wholly to the working-out of what he regarded as a rectified philosophy of the old statements and tenets of Calvinism. The labor did not pay. It was on antiquated and musty material. All the men of mark and power now nominally ranked in the old fellowship are known to be heretics. They may insist upon their reception of the old formulas, yet it is because of something which they can make those formulas mean, or consist with; but not because they hold livingly, in their hearts and minds, what those formulas were designed to emphasize by the ancient believers who fashioned them. Any one of a dozen of the characteristic facts of life and experience and positive knowledge, which mark our own age, would hopelessly discredit and discomfit the fundamentals of Calvinism.

The Bible is not the book which Calvinism represents it to be, and once heartily believed it to be. The way of dealing with the Bible, which would draw Calvinism and authenticate Calvinism from it and by it, is now known not to be the honest or intelligent way of dealing with it. The phenomena of infancy, and of the first developments of character in Christian households, were the severest perplexities under which Dr. Beecher attempted a re-adjustment of the tenets of the system which he accepted. He did not venture upon the broader fields of the philosophy of human nature, even to the extent to which his daughter has, with an able pen, traversed some of them. Dr. Chalmers set himself with much of his zeal, and with all his rhetoric, to attempt a reconciliation between the dogmas of Calvinism, and the inferences drawn from the revelations made by the telescope, of the multitude of worlds to be cared for by God, and of the multitude of souls upon them—if they are inhabited by intelligent beings who have sinned-to be reconciled in the one only way,by the offer of an infinite sacrifice. But the extent and character and other phenomena of population of this single globe offer facts and raise questions which utterly confound Calvinism. Calvinism evidently never contemplated the actual phenomena of what it called Heathenism. It was wrought out and formulized under wholly different views and aspects of things human and divine, than are now most positively certified to the average intelligence of our time.

Dr. Beecher seems to have been wholly oblivious, or even happily unconscious, of all the results of the sub-soil ploughing which has penetrated far beneath the surface-fields which he tilled, hoping to get from them their old crops. Not a single intimation do we gather from all his writings of any apprehension on his part of the real drift of the age which presented unmistakable tokens of itself all around him. He could take the crude material offered to him in the piously inclined young men to whom the zeal and charity of the East had opened a Theological Seminary in the West, with free maintenance and education; and he, with his colleagues, could train them by the literalisms of the old, unquestioned

formulas of Bible and creed. He could quicken them into rivalry with the youths whom the Roman Church was training by a similar though different process, for "the evangelization" of the Great Valley of our land. But when the scholars of Lane Seminary set up for a company of antislavery Protestants and champions, in vain did the professors set up their discipline. The Seminary halls were vacated, and the cage was emptied. Dr. Beecher had one son, whose bold speculations led him, though happily not past the reclaiming, into godless realms. There are thousands of our youth who are daring the same ventures now. But Calvinism will never bring them back.

After a period of faithful and fruitful labor at the West, the venerable man, drawing reverence and love wherever he went, returned for a while to Boston, and thence removed to Brooklyn, where he died in his eighty-eighth year.

Poems by James Clarence Mangan. With a Biographical Introduction, by JOHN MITCHELL. New York: P. M. Haverty. 1859.

THE Volume which gives the subject to this article is one of the saddest in the history of literature, which it was ever our fortune to meet, even among the dark pages of the lives of those "who learn in suffering."

We shall first give a brief sketch of the life of the unhappy being called James Clarence Mangan, and afterward offer a few remarks with specimens of his poems. The only record, except a very brief notice in Daly's "Poets and Poetry of Munster," which we find, is the sketch in the volume before us, where the illustrious exile, now in Fortress Monroe, expatiates upon his own wrongs and the tyranny of the Saxon oppressor, in the style of which we had such choice specimens, for the last four years, in the columns of the "Richmond