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After this lesson of tolerance he is suddenly thrown out vio. lently upon the college-steps, and is in terror lest he has lost his hold of the Master's robe by showing a too loving tolerance for those who make so lightly of his person and history. Under a sense of this possible loss he reflects upon the folly of wasting his energies in watching his

"foolish heart expand

In the lazy glow of benevolence,

O'er the various modes of man's belief."
"-Needs must there be one way, our chief,

Best way of worship: let me strive

To find it, and when found, contrive

My fellows also take their share!

This constitutes my earthly care."

He passes in thought to the moment of death, when the great question for him to answer will be:

"Soul of mine, hadst thou caught and held

By the hem of the vesture!"

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Rubbing his eyes, he scarcely believes that he has been out of it at all; but whether it has been a dream or a reality, he has come to his senses again, and has learned a lesson which reconciles him even to the worship and preaching of the dissenting chapel. This lesson he thus expresses:

"I, then, in ignorance and weakness,
Taking God's help, have attained to think
My heart does best to receive in meekness
That mode of worship, as most to his mind,
Where earthly aids being cast behind,
His All in All appears serene

With the thinnest human veil between,

Letting the mystic Lamps, the Seven,
The many motions of His spirit,
Pass, as they list, to earth from Heaven.

For the preacher's merit or demerit,

It were to be wished the flaws were fewer

In the earthen vessel, holding treasure,

Which lies as safe in a golden ewer;

But the main thing is, does it hold good measure?

Heaven soon sets right all other matters!"
"And let us hope

That no worse blessing befall the Pope."
"Nor may the Professor forego its peace

At Göttingen, presently, when, in the dusk
Of his life."

"When, thicker and thicker, the darkness fills
The world through his misty spectacles,

And he gropes for something more substantial
Than a fable, myth, or personification,-

May Christ do for him, what no mere man shall,
And stand confessed as the God of salvation!
Meantime, in the still recurring fear

Lest myself, at unawares, be found,

While attacking the choice of my neighbor's round,
Without my own made-I choose here!
The giving out of the hymn reclaims me;
I have done! And if any blames me,
Thinking that merely to touch in brevity
The topics I dwell on, were unlawful,—
Or, worse, that I trench, with undue levity,
On the bounds of the holy and the awful,--
I praise the heart, and pity the head of him,
And refer myself to THEE, instead of him,
Who head and heart alike discernest."

"I put up pencil and join chorus

To Hepzibah Tune, without further apology,

The last five verses of the third section

Of the seventeenth hymn in Whitfield's Collection,
To conclude with the doxology."

It will be seen that the theme of the two poems is substantially the same. Both writers are oppressed with the scepticism of modern thought and feeling. In the one case it takes the form of the antagonism of a refined taste to doctrines crudely conceived, and to the homely worship of uncultured souls. In the other, it finds weariness in all forms and acts of worship as necessarily inadequate and unsatisfactory, and a necessary contradiction between science and any revealed doctrine or supernatural history. Both poets take refuge at first in God as revealed in nature. The one rests there, but not content with the personal satisfaction which he himself receives, he puts on the airs of a fastidions dilettante who knows God by a faith more enlightened and earnest than that of those who see Him revealed in Christ and the "common place of miracle." The

other is so glad to find Him at all, and is so occupied with the love and tenderness of the Christ whom he worships, that he can feel satisfaction and sympathy with the humblest and most ignorant of his worshipers.

The one is for a moment moved to a relenting mood as he beholds a Christian, though a superstitious worshiper, but it is but for a moment only, for he relaxes into his wonted disgust at what he considers the necessary unsatisfactoriness of all verbal and formal worship.

The other is so entranced with the Christ of his worship, and so oppressed with the thought of his own unworthiness and need, that he finds occasion for tolerance and even for love and sympathy, in the humblest assembly that honors the Christ whom he trusts.

We hold that the conception of such a Christ, with attributes so exalted and claims so transcendant, who can condescend to assemblies so mean and worship so uncouth, is of itself an argument that goes far to establish its superhuman origin; and also that the power of faith in Him, to solve the problems and to adjust the conflicts evolved by human culture and science, confirms the argument. If this argument is valid, the moral force and poetic majesty of Christ's person can never fail in any age to fill and glorify

"The soul's east window of divine surprise."

ARTICLE VII.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

“THE PRIMEVAL WORLD OF HEBREW TRADITION."*-This book, by Rev. F. H. Hedge, D. D., Professor of Ecclesiastical History, and Senior Professor in the Divinity School, Cambridge, Mass., is put forth by the publishers as a "representative religious volume." It contains twelve discourses, professedly relating to the primeval world. The first is entitled "The World a Divine Creation." In this we learn that the world never was created. Notwithstanding some dozen pages are occupied in showing a progressive geological formation of the earth, covering unknown ages, the whole discussion incontinently swamps itself as follows: "God, in creating, did not bring into being a new substance foreign to himself. pendent existence.

in God, and in us."

* *

The material creation has no inde*The material creation exists only

We would inquire of Dr. Hedge, in the name of Science, how long a period it is necessary to allow for the above mentioned creation?

Then comes "Man in the Image of God;" and here our author flounders in difficulties.

"There was a first man. The question arises, whether one first man for the whole human family, or one for each continent, or for each of the various races, Caucasian, African, Malay, and others, into which the naturalists divide mankind. Whether the human family originated from a single pair, or has flowed together from different centers in different lands." But the nub of the difficulty is the great Simian, question, Was man originally an ape? Our author hates to believe it, but then there are very learned men who do believe it, and it is even more difficult to doubt their learning, than to doubt the apeish origin of man, and so a classification of the human races is resorted to under the principle of "divide and conquer." Some may have come from apes, and some not, though that does not prevent all being a band of broth

* "The Primeval World of Hebrew Tradition." By FREDERICK HENRY HEDGE. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1870.

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ers. The apes are coming up. The more advanced may have received souls. The historic races are some of them on the decline. The author is sometimes tempted to think the transformation may have been the other way-a change of type from human to simian. Such, for example, as jeer "at the great and serious truths of humanity" (like the above, perhaps), are evidently going down. "If anything can make an ape of a man," says our author, “it is that."

The period of Apeish gestation being over, we come to "Man in Paradise." The garden of Eden is doubtless an allegory, nevertheless, it has been properly located by Bunsen at the head waters of the Euphrates. At this spot, on the earth's surface, began the history of man, or, according to our author, possibly took place the transformation of an ape. Various questions in the political economy of a future Eden are here discussed, as to whether such robbery as property will exist, and kindred matters.

We then arrive at the brute creation. Here our author is free from theologic or scientific troubles and trammels. He has a theory of his own. Orthodox Spain, where there are bull-fights, is to him the representative idea of the relation of Christianity to brutes. This is in painful contrast with the spectacle of Hindu hospitals for the cure of sick animals, "in the interest of mercy entirely," says our author, "not for the sake of the owners, but of the animals." He might have mentioned, also, that this peculiar form of philanthropy has the added merit of family feeling. A lame cat, for instance, may be at the very moment a man's grandfather or a dyspeptic donkey his brother. Something should be allowed to filial tenderness. The author closes this chapter with a celebrated hymn to nature, by St. Francis of Assisi, which he says needs only a recognition of the brute creation to make it the best expression of Christian piety in relation to the visible world. We agree with the author, that David is not to be mentioned in this connection. Here is the hymn:

"Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and especially our brother the Sun, who brings us the day and who brings us the light; fair is he and shining with a very great splendor. O Lord, he signifies to us Thee!

"Praised be my Lord for our sister the Moon; and for the stars, the which he has set clear and lovely in the heavens.

"Praised be my Lord for our brother the Wind, and for air and cloud, calms and all weather, by the which thou upholdest in life all creatures.

"Praised be my Lord for our sister Water, who is very serviceable unto us and precious and clean.

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