some tangential tendencies at here and there a curve of his track, we regard him as one of the foremost thinkers of his day. He never wearies with a wordy dulness. Earnest, independent, devoutly Christian in his own soul, he puts life and power into other spirits. His long-lived vitality is surprising. In one of his early books he says, "that the imagination is the chrysanthemum of the intellectual garden." How beautifully this fall-flower is still blooming in his wellkept parterre. May it blossom far into the winter!

Text-Book of Church History. By DR. JOHN HENRY KURTZ, Professor of Theology in the University of Dorpat, &c., &c. 2 vols. 8vo. Philadelphia: Lindsay & Blackiston. 1862.

WHEN we began the study of ecclesiastical history some twentyfive years ago, Mosheim and Milner were our only accessible guides. What additional furnishing of this department has since been supplied to American scholars may be suggested by the names of Neander, Milman, Guericke, Gieseler, Hagenbach, Schaff, Kurtz, to say nothing of authors in this fruitful field who have not as yet been habited in an English dress. We read a century in Mosheim to get the skeleton, sinews, muscles of the age; and then the same century in Milner to get its soul of piety and true Christian life. Of nothing is the Apostle's word truer than of Church History, that the body without the spirit is dead; we think the deadest of all things "plucked up by the roots" and laid out to dry. We liked Milner best, for the unction which everywhere run down his skirts like Aaron's holy oil. And for this reason, among all the later masters in this department of sacred letters, Neander is our favorite. We cannot say (with one of our brother clergymen) that he is admirable for "light-reading;" but we have read his massive volumes from beginning to end, foot-notes and all, with a richer sense of substantial remuneration than ordinarily has been our experience among the doctors in the schools of the prophets. His sense of the presence of a devout heart in the individuals who require his attention, is wonderfully quick and accurate. His sympathy with Christ works like a magnet to draw towards him whatever really gracious affection is around him, though feeble and sadly buried beneath contemporary errors and follies. Neither is he free from these in forms of grave deflection from what we believe to be the "good old way;" but, while we should not accept him as a safe guide in sacred criticism at all points, and object to not a little of his reasonings upon special facts, preferring to draw our own philosophical conclusions sometimes, he is our primus inter principes as a narrator of

the grand and glorious fortunes of the kingdom of Christ thus far among men.

We would earnestly advise our ministers to take time sufficient to read and digest that princely work. It will give them sermons like an inspiration. But for purposes of seminary instruction it is too voluminous. Conciser and more elementary treatments of the subject are found in several of the authors whose names we have grouped above. The Andover and New York chairs of this department of instruction have each sent out excellent manuals translated and annotated from Guericke and Gieseler. And now we have another of these text-books, in the work named at the head of this notice, which worthily ranks with those just mentioned, as it quite closely resembles them, in certain points, yet with specific differences. It gives the main thread of events in a succinct narration, with copious references to standard authorities, to assist the student in separate and further research. This makes the subject look rather sterile and uninviting; but it is unavoidable in a class-book. The professor must fill in the color and shading, if he is fitted for this difficult service. We know of but few positions which demand an abler incumbent than these historical professorships. The chair of didactic theology is scarcely more important. Dr. Kurtz devotes a considerable share of attention to modern developments on the continent of Europe - Papal and Protestant and is rich in criticism of his own national authors. His sympathies are undisguisedly with the evangelical party of his country, though a Lutheran in polity. His book is a valuable introduction to the general range of Church History; but merely to read such a resumè without further and far more extended explorations, is to grasp but a very small fraction of the treasure which lies hidden in that field. We love our good Neander's five-volumed prolixity and minuteness, just as we prefer a quiet journey afoot or in the saddle through a land of wonders and of beauty to the fast driving of a rail-car.

A Text-Book of the History of Doctrines. By DR. K. R. HAGENBACH, Professor of Theology in the University of Basle. The Edinburgh translation of C. W. BUCH, revised, with large additions from the fourth German edition and other sources. By HENRY B. SMITH, D. D., Professor in the Union Theological Seminary of the City of New York. 2 vols. 8vo. Sheldon & Co. 1862.

THE doctrines of the Christian church run through the historic events amidst which they were developed, as the sinews and tendons of the human frame lie embedded in the muscular tissues of the body;

they consequently need these full historical elucidations in order to a thorough comprehension. This is another of the excellences of Neander, who gives us the growth of doctrinal Christianity just as it came forward from the early ages, with all the varying aspects and workings of the sharply contested conflicts which opposed and perverted, or shaped and confirmed, the faith transmitted by the apostles. We not only have the sequence,. in time, of the first age of the doctrine of the Divine Nature and Person; then, of Sin and Redemption; then, of Ecclesiasticism; then, of Scholasticism; then, of the Reformation of Doctrine and Polity, and so on: but we have the living genesis of all this re-creation in its order of the dawn and the meridian of each new day. Yet here, again, the whole is too much for elementary teaching. It is necessary to dissect out the complex organs and show the anatomy of the structure in separate parts. Dr. Hagenbach has stood at the head of authorities, in this department in our schools, since his able work was introduced to English readers in 1850, through the Edinburgh translation.

He divides the whole Christian age thus far into five periods, thus: (1). The age of Apologetics, A. D. 80-254. (2). Polemics, 254730. (3). Systematic Theology, 730-1517. (4). Polemico-ecclesiastical Symbolik, 1517-1720. (5). Criticism, speculation-the antithesis between faith and knowledge, philosophy and Christianity, reason and revelation, 1720 and onward. Under these sections, the learned

author collects and arranges a rich digest of processes and results in the field of dogmatic inquiry and controversy, with ample references to original and collateral authorities.

Like many other transatlantic works of the highest erudition, this History of Doctrines has largely gained by passing through the hands of an American editor. Our scholars show an admirable talent for this kind of labor- a common-sense idea of just what is needed in a given department of knowledge, and the ability to supply it when not adequately done by the learned men abroad. Prof. Smith has greatly enhanced the value of his author by these judicious and scholarly emendations and additions. The translation of Mr. Carl Buch has been revised, and several new sections on British and American theological history have been supplied, without which the work was seriously deficient. As it now stands, we see not why this important segment of historical science is not as nearly perfected as we can expect. Still, we never know what new suns may be coming up towards the horizon to pale the great lights which now rule the day. We also believe that all knowledge is always progressive" which does not rest in an authoritative supernatural revelation.

A Commentary on Ecclesiastes. By MOSES STUART, etc. Edited and Revised by R. D. C. Robbins, Professor in Middlebury College. 12mo. pp. 346. Andover: Warren F. Draper. 1862.

THE Book of Ecclesiastes is, substantially, a dialogue on practical philosophy. The reasonings and deductions are based on experience, and a general unity pervades the whole. It is not a book of miscel lanies, as the superficial reader may think. It has a theme, with opening, progress, and conclusion, and this theme is asserted a score of times in the book. Different speakers argue for and against it, and were their positions, objections, arguments, and rejoinders freely set off, as in a modern work, with the names of persons speaking, and with quotation-marks and dashes, much of the mystery hanging over the volume would be cleared up. A liberal use of inverted commas alone would be a good commentary on the Book of Ecclesiastes.

The theme of the book is the utter vanity of all merely worldly good. The digressions of the writer from his topic are only apparent; they are but illustrations, and so the work is no scrap-book. What seem to us as the untenable positions and objections of interlocutors, introduced to carry forward the discussions, Prof. Stuart regards as the different mental experience through which the author passed in going from a sceptical to a sound philosophy of life.

"The most natural account of the plan of the book seems to be this, viz. that the writer has given a picture of the struggle and contest through which his own mind had passed, when he set out on the road of philosophical inquiry." We think fancy aids to such a view. But be the theory of the plan of the book as it may, the sceptical doubts and arguments are not to be quoted as among the "proofs of holy writ."

All antiquity ascribes the authorship to Solomon, and almost all modern critics dissent from this view. The dissent is based mainly on these three points: The writer represents Solomon as speaking only occasionally; the state and condition of things when the book was written, as shown by the book itself, mark a later age than Solomon's; and the style of the book itself is foreign to his style, as seen in Proverbs, and later than his age. Idioms in it indicate later times. Who the author was Prof. Stuart does not pretend to know, but thinks it evident that, whoever he was, he introduces Solomon in the book as saying and suggesting many things in it. The time of the composition he thinks must have been between the return from the captivity, 536 B. C., and the time of Ezra, about eighty years afterward.

These views of the Book of Ecclesiastes and its author, Prof. Stuart

1

has set forth to some extent in his able, though somewhat irregular, introduction of one hundred and ten pages. With them he has interwoven other views from which we distinctly dissent. The Commentary casts much light on this difficult portion of God's word.

The Supernatural in relation to the Natural. By the REV. JAMES McCosн, LL. D., Author of "The Method of the Divine Government," &c. 12mo. pp. 369. New York: Carters. 1862.

THE flurry produced in the theological world by the issuing of the ill-starred "Essays and Reviews," has hurried this volume to its publication in a less thorough and completed form than a more leisurely treatment would probably have given it. It is, in fact, but the first instalment of the discussion projected under this title. The book is interesting, and in many places shows the hand of a master in philosophical analysis and reasoning. It lacks compactness and equal strength, and discovers much less mental toil in its elaboration than the brilliant and somewhat erratic work of Bushnell on the same general subject. We do not think it so able a treatise as the "Divine Government," which at once placed the Belfast theologian in the front rank of contemporary defenders of the faith. Possibly its defects may give it a more popular circulation. No writer deals with abstruse subjects in a more common-sense and comprehensible way. His mental habits keep his lines of argument and illustration within the ranges of the living and moving world. This gives freshness and practical grasp to his pages. We shall look with much expectation for the remainder of this investigation.

Leisure Hours in Town. By the Author of "The Recreations of a Country Parson." 12mo. pp. 457. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. 1862.

WE gave our views of this popular essayist's qualities, at length, in our last number. This volume of similar miscellanies includes one, at least, of the papers noticed in that review, as then going through the magazines. The Parson has a very prolific vein, and does not seem to be in special danger of exhausting it; yet we hope he will not feel it to be necessary to fill a new volume oftener than the shower of manna comes freshly and freely. Fecundity is dangerous even to the strongest mental constitutions. If he knows when to shut down the gate and let his grist fill up, he will show more wisdom than some of our ever-going mills which run an empty hopper oftener than a full.