shaped the vertebral column of the globe. If it be the naturalist's province to inform us how glaciers and earthquakes have ridged and rounded the planet, it is this spiritualist's function to account for the present condition of the human mind by the working of supernatural forces and laws; and a better authority or more satisfactory guide, in this line of investigation, our land or age does not present.

The style answers in gravity to the work. It does not flame or flow. It is built. But with architecture how splendid, foundations how solid, beams and rafters how trusty, and rooms how ample, the edifice ascends! Though seldom impassioned, a tender heart throbs through these transparent lines. As the softest grass is found on the mountain-side, peaks of not infrequent sublimity are neighbored by succulent growth of sentiment in these better creations. But the main impression is plenty of plenty of space, unbounded hospitality in the structure, which our master-workman occupies while he rears. We can get into no small place in this house. His folding-doors swing open to entertain the largest company. At an extension-table his guests sit, and there are always chairs for more. "And yet there is room" should be his motto, expressive of the feeling we have as we contemplate whatever is unconfined, like the starry heavens, and conclude there will be no lack of accommodation for the myriads of souls we hope will survive.

We speak of the positive traits in our author, more than the negative, which we should not care to define, even if they did not fade away before the lustre of his actual claims. Of the two elements of momentum, doubtless he has less velocity than weight. His blood is temperate, and seldom on fire. In his coolly classic pulse is no fever. Of exaggeration or wilful eloquence no particle can we detect, of affectation or pretension not a jot. When the popular orator's glow is over and his sweat wiped off, we have to abate the rage into which, as we say, he has worked himself up. The statements of Dr. Hedge expose themselves to no such deductions. There is a voice in them always of nature and

truth. A singular sincerity of intellectual conscience denotes his positions. He would be ashamed of over-emphasis or empty logic as a sin. It was once said of a senseless talker, that he was as hollow as a quill. In this discourser of ours, there is hardly husk or rind enough to hold the meat and kernel. We never have to take him with a grain of salt. The true savor is in the dish already, and has not to be added. If his style is no river, it is because it is too broad to rush. If he does not kindle, he sustains. Failing to excite, he gives us the peace better than any stir. Yet one, that can distinguish enthusiasm from gesticulation and rhetorical trick, will discover no defect of healthy warmth in his manner, which any throb of weak fanaticism appears never for a moment to have disturbed. By nature and culture our author is equally possessed of the spirit, and self-possessed. A Webster-like poise is in this churchman, though the statesman's was in a lower realm. The antinomies of fact and principle, ideas and institutions, business and the inner life, history and prophecy, earth and heaven, are steadily and uniformly reconciled in his musing mind.

We must praise this twofold power, this honest and consistent duplicity. The coinage of truth is doubly stamped on its diverse sides. If one face bear fresh emblems of everliving things, the other is inscribed with an old establishment and a date. On the issue from our author's precious mint we read intuition and tradition too. He is not less ready to receive what any one may bring from the mount of vision because he himself stands in the pulpit of instruction. He vindicates the function of teacher as well as seer. But no private whims can expect to pass for insights with this judge, who prefers a good outsight to a spurious apocalypse. Our cant term, of genius, he will restrict from the wide assumption or application it may have in the reckoning of the juvenile mind. With him all fancies of pretended originality fade before the "Reason in Religion" of which he is the unsurpassed advocate. The title has in it something subtile, as though pointing to that immense reality of being which no reason in us

fathoms or includes, but we can only bend to in awe, as we seek it with love. If he sometimes seems to speak of special dispensations, of Christianity itself as intervening or interpolated in the universal order, rather than unfolding in it, and no more distinct from it than a blossom from the stem on which it is held, we attribute this to the lowly wonder with which, even in him, intellect is ever chastened and subdued. Amazement transcends science. Far as our perception may reach, it will never sound to the bottom our own constitution, far less the constitution of things.

We refer our readers to the book itself for vindication of what thus in general we have said. But some extracts we must fain make. From the "Cause of Reason the Cause of Faith," we take a passage:

"Rationalism is regarded as in principle unbelief, in practice sacrilege. This abuse of the term, and consequent disgust to the thing, is partly due to the old association of the word with a class of theologians now extinct, and whose methods and conclusions rational criticism itself disavows. But the misapplication of a principle does not invalidate the principle itself, nor ought the mistakes of a Paulus or a Strauss to discourage the application of reason to religion. Rationalism means that, and nothing more. Reason may err in some of its conclusions; but reason is none the less the supreme arbiter in theology. Its errors can be consistently refuted by Protestants, only on rationalistic grounds. Only the Romanist can with consistency speak of rationalism in the way of reproach. Protestantism assumes the application of reason to religion as the basis of its ecclesiastical life. Whoever calls that principle in question, whoever finds or intends reproach in the word Rationalism, abandons the Protestant ground, and confesses himself in spirit and temper a Romanist. Whoever allows that principle at all, and allows it in himself, must allow it in others, and allow it without stint, while even rejecting the conclusions of those who adopt it. Reason or Rome, - there is no middle ground."

From the essay on "Miracles: "

"There may be errors respecting the nature of the light, and false theories there may be concerning its source; but what of that? As

on

tronomy may be mistaken in some of its calculations: is the sun, that account, less glorious or less dear? I need no astronomy to tell me what a blessing it is. And suppose we have not, in these biographies, unmixed historical truth; that some errors and misstatements have crept into the records, is the character of Christ, on that account, less noble, or his word less divine? The question is not whether Jesus said precisely this, or did precisely that, in each particular case; but whether Christianity, on the whole, is divine, whether this light, which for so many ages has irradiated the world, and given us such guidance as we have had in spiritual things, is God's truth, a ray of heaven conducting to endless day, or a meteor born of the night, and misleading the blind. And this is not a question of logic, but a question of experience, which every soul must answer for itself. Christianity is not a matter of records and parchments, but a light and a life: which, if a man has it not, no logic can reason into him; and which, if a man has it, no logic can reason out of him. Nay, if you could prove that this record which we have of the sayings and doings of Jesus is a fable and a myth, even then you would not have destroyed Christianity. In that case, I should say, Whether fable or fact, the mind that could conceive and give to the world such a portrait as that of the Christ, is itself the Christ. The product of that mind would still be the wisdom and the power of God. Suppose you could prove that no such person as Michael Angelo ever existed; that the name is not historic, but mythic; the tradition we have of him a fable, the Church of St. Peter's would still be the wonder of the world, and the mind that planned it a master mind. However we may speculate concerning its origin, the Christian Church, that stupendous fabric of which St. Peter's is a feeble type, that august temple in which so many ages have knelt and prayed, stands, and will stand, in spite of criticism. Christianity is it is a fixed fact, - -a part of the round world. And when I consider what it is, and what it has been; how many millions of believing souls have found peace in its doctrine, and freedom in its spirit; to how many it has been their guide in life, and their stay in death; and how it has changed the face of the world, it seems to me a small thing, in view of all this power and glory, to quarrel about the record, and fight against miracles, with this miracle of all time staring us in the face."

From the "Revelation of the Spirit: ".

"Pray for the Spirit; for who in this world can do without it, without its impulse, without its leaven, without its restraining and sustaining power? It has been affirmed that civilization and the progress of society are wholly and purely an intellectual product. To assert this is to forget the gift of God, and what it is that keeps the human heart from dying out, and all the powers from perishing through utter corruption. It is not our laws and our courts, not well-balanced constitutions and social devices, not science and steam and electro-magnetism, not these alone that have brought us thus far, and made this world what it is; but beneath all these, and above them all, a divine impulse, never wanting to the race of men; a divine Spirit for ever haunting them with those two radical and universal ideas, — truth and duty, without whose penetrating and creative power not one stone would ever have been laid upon another of all our cities, no tree ever felled, no human implement fashioned for its work. And, if God should now withdraw his Spirit, this proud civilization, with its gorgeous palaces and solemn temples; this shining and sounding culture, with its traffic and its arts, its stately conventions, and fair humanities, would tumble and dissolve; the wild beasts that are caged in these human frames, now awed and tamed by the presence of that Spirit, would creep forth, and rend, and devour; and the civilized earth revert to chaos and night."

From "The Spirit in the Letter:"

"The letter killeth in sacraments and rites, where rigid conventionalism precludes spontaneity, or where a low utility assumes to be the measure of sanctities, or where the symbol becomes a fetish; or where the ordinance is viewed as compulsory observance, instead of a free communication or free-will offering. Why sprinkle water on a baby's forehead in any other name, utility asks, than that of personal cleanliness, in any other way than that of physical ablution?. Why, indeed, if those sprinkled drops are all that baptism means to you? If you see in baptism nothing but ritual water, it is a dead and deadening formality. But fill your mind with the awful truth, that the infant, born this day into this phenomenal and vanishing world, as one of its phenomena and passages, rising like a bubble on the great world-stream to fill a place among the shows of time, and to act a part in its processes, is also a child and heir of eternity, and is born, at one and the same moment with its time-birth, into a