poverty, toil, the contumacy of men who have money as he had once, suffering finally, and that undeservedly, the loss even of his Wall-Street reputation, yet laboring on for his dear world at home, and presenting a picture of domestic excellence equal to any that was ever drawn by the poet or the novelist. We have been greatly interested, fascinated we may say, with this most original, yet most ordinary, character of old Sol Downer. We should love to dwell longer upon it, but it would interfere with our main purpose. It is a very peculiar creation, all Mr. Kimball's own; for there is nothing like it in the whole range of fictitious literature. We would simply say, in passing, that the author might safely rest his literary reputation on this one admirable sketch, and the hearty, healthy, truthful interest he has succeeded in throwing about it.

We have expressed the conviction that our author is a religious man, and that his knowledge of human nature is sound, because grounded on those Scriptures which are no less a revelation of man to himself than of God to man. But this Mr. Parkinson, who is the hero, if the book had such a thing as a hero, does not seem commended to us for his piety. He has a serious fit now and then, but does not appear to be a very religious character; and there is no attempt, even after he has gone through all his hard discipline, and becomes subdued, and seems to have a new and higher life, to make him a very remarkable convert, detailing his experience and warning others. Moreover, there is something in him which looks rather irreligious. He is set in contrast with the pious man of the book, if we may so characterize him, from the stress that is laid upon his religious profession. Golding is a member of the Church; he is, moreover, an elder in the Church; he is a scrupulous attendant of the weekly prayer-meeting; he gives to missionary societies; and yet this Wall-Street representative of business and Christianity behaves very cruelly to poor Parkinson, who, though not a member of the Church, is an attendant, with his pious wife, in the same congregation. They hear the same sermons; their children go to the same Sunday school; all presents the appearance of religious and congregational respectability, until the non-professing world

ling fails, and his more spiritual co-worshipper hurries to his lawyer for an attachment against the bankrupt's assets, and a process which will consign him to a prison.

To a superficial view it might seem that the author had an irreligious purpose here, and meant to make a kind of Dickens caricature. But clearly this is not the case. Golding is not a foolish, canting hypocrite. He is no hypocrite at all. This character in the hands of Dickens is, generally, a very absurd and superficial one. Our author gives us a deeper chapter in human nature. Golding is no hypocrite, but a fair representative of numbers who sincerely profess religion, and think they have it. They are men who at some period of their lives have had much trouble about their souls; they have been converted, or supposed themselves converted; they pray sincerely, and even fervently, though with little or no self-knowledge; they mean sincerely, in some way, to serve God; they become zealous for all good things, very conservative in the state, stanch supporters of the ministry, lovers of social order, respecters of the Sabbath, warm opponents of infidelity, diligent in business, fervent in spirit, liberal to missions, yet counting as of the very essence of Christianity the precept which requires each man to provide diligently for his own. Such a man is Golding, full of worldliness, and, it may be, having no real Christianity at all. Yet, we do not hesitate to say it, amid all this mass of pride and worldliness there may be some true faith, even though it be but the thousandth part of a grain of mustard-seed. There may be some good grain taking root among these thorns, and on this stony ground; there may be some little religion, some heavenly grace, just living on in that deformed spiritual growth, and which may yet be to it, when disciplined and better brought out, the seed of everlasting life. He is no hypocrite; we do not think the author meant to paint him so. He is a very poor Christian,-perhaps no Christian at all, and yet a seeker of salvation in his poor, blind, selfish way. not be wholly self-deluded even, but a man whose native depravity, which he shares with all, had, through conventional circumstances, presented an unusually deformed appearance, while his grace, if he had any, had been greatly checked and

He may

stifled in its development. To take John Bunyan's panorama of the race, we might regard even Golding as some sort of pilgrim to the New Jerusalem, -as a man terribly diseased indeed, yet striving to get away from the city of the plague,stumbling when he cannot run, and crawling when he cannot walk, — making very poor work of it indeed, and yet better than the man who moves not at all, and who, while equally worldly, counts it as his great virtue that he makes no profession, that he is no hypocrite. We do not know that it is the emotion which the author designed to produce in his reader, but we must say that we feel sorry for Golding, without meaning to confess any sympathy with hypocrites. Perhaps, if he had had the failures and the discipline of Parkinson, he would have been nearly as good a man as he. We should like to have put in a supplementary chapter describing a meeting between the two, the hard professor and his non-professing debtor, the one, through the teaching of adversity, brought to see his wrong and make confession, the other led to feel that there might be some spark of a better life even in the man of whom his judgment had been so severely just. But this would have required the author's powers of painting to make it effective, and even then it might have deformed the plot and marred the artistic proportion of the work.

There is clearly no irreligious intent in the picture drawn of these two characters. Quite the contrary is evident, both in the management and the result. Parkinson, the man who makes no profession, is not set in contrast with the hard professor, with an attempt, constantly manifested, to represent the honesty of the one as better than the religion of the other. That is the way Dickens would have treated the matter; but Mr. Kimball does no such thing. There is one very natural scene, where the hard-pressed bankrupt stands before his exacting creditor in the prayer-meeting, and disturbs the placidity of his petitions. Parkinson's motive in this is not at all of the pious kind, and some may say that it has a very irreligious look; but evidently there is no such purpose. The injured man acts thus in a fit of desperation. It is done, not to show his hostility to religion, or to a religious profession, but to confound Golding. He becomes conscious himself that the

indulgence of such feelings is greatly hurting his own moral constitution, and the scene that follows, where his Christ-like wife so gently, yet so piously, reproves him for his moody vindictiveness, is one of the finest in the book. We may say here, in passing, that this picture, and the one that soon follows, of the wife's decline and death, possess the highest order of moral and artistic excellence. It is a Christian scene such as Dickens never painted, when with her dying breath she commends to God her poor bankrupt husband, concerned as she is for his loss of property, and the hard destitution with which she leaves him to struggle, but still more for the peril that may thence result to his moral and religious life.

“Charles, it is coming; we have little to say to each other, for our whole life has been rounded from day to day by love. I leave you to encounter misery and degradation, and what shall seem disgrace; but through all preserve your integrity, and at the last there will come a season of repose. God permits me to see this, and to tell you, O my husband!'..... After a pause, she continued: 'I have one request to make';- her voice trembled. Keep them together. Keep them all around you. Promise me you will not separate.'

....

"Never! while I have life, never!' I murmured. . . . . . "Kiss me: call the children!'.....

"She died that evening."

Like a master artist, the author gives the most simple and touching outlines. He does not spoil it by overdoing. He says just enough to make us linger over the page which is so suggestive, until it becomes absolutely painful through the desire it creates to enjoy, again and again, the fascination of its exquisite finish.

Parkinson is a very imperfect man. He is far from answering, or being intended, as the type of the moral in distinction from the religious man. But, with all his imperfections, there is one thing that attaches the reader to him, although at first we hardly know how it is, or why it is. It is not merely his hardships and his brave endurance. It is not his honesty in his Wall-Street business, for that is conventional, and sometimes questionable; it is about as high as prevails in the sphere he has chosen; and the author evidently claims no merit, and no great sympathy for him, in that respect. We would call it

his spiritual honesty. The term needs defining. By spiritual honesty, then, we may understand, not honesty in the business or social relations of life, but that state of soul which is honest to itself, which will not think of itself, nor seek to have others think of it, other than it really is, so far as it does and can know itself. It may be consistent with a very imperfect state in other respects. It may be a partner with many frailties, faults, and even sins, to which we would give a darker name. It may exist in the midst of much self-ignorance. Yet, if there is any one native trait in man pleasing to God,-in other words, if there be any native human virtue, it is this perfect honesty of spirit, in that it seeks not to cover from God, or from itself, anything in itself, be its moral condition what it may. It would have its being and its appearing the same, however much it might be dissatisfied with itself, or feel that its being ought to be something different from what it is. It would not be what it is not. But here we must explain again; for this is a department of our moral psychology that requires great carefulness of language. We ought to be what we are not. Let us amend, then, by saying, that a soul may seek to be what it is not, without the process of becoming it; it may be greatly averse to such becoming. It would pass from evil to good by some other road than that conflict which is inseparable from the passage. It would fancy the transition made, and, since there is in all men an abstract admiration of righteousness, it would talk to itself, and to its Maker, as though it were made, when really there had not been the movement of a hair's breadth from the old status. It wants the soft, melting feeling of humility, and so would fain think itself humble, without any humiliation; it wants the luxury of penitence, of which it has read in books of religious romance, without the pænitentia, the penance, the pœna, the inseparable pain that is in the idea itself, as well as in the etymology of the word. Such a feeling is the growth of religious sentimentalism; and the opposite of it, or the absence of it, whether the soul be conscious of its state or not, is what we mean by honesty of spirit,- dreading a false virtue more than a positive vice, fearing not only to act or speak, but even to think a lie. Parkinson has this spiritual honesty, not as we