The fully belonged, and appropriated these to their own use. old Cambridge Platform, and the principles of equity were ignored to sustain a system which stripped a divine Saviour of his honors, and turned him out of his own world. A generation has passed since these transactions. Many who took an active part in them have gone to their final account. There has been time for grief over injuries to be assuaged, for passion to cool, and an enlightened judgment to reach correct decisions; time also to test the strength and permanence of a system thus originated and started on its career. What, then, is its present condition - healthy and prosperous? or sickly, and sinking in decay? Errors, like thistles, are hard to be eradicated, especially when rooted in a congenial soil. Twenty or thirty years ago a friend's farm was nearly overrun by them. They intruded into the garden, the wheat, and corn-fields, and lifted their arrogant heads along and above the fences. The good farmer run the plough through their knotty roots, he mowed them on rainy days, choked them under a sturdy growth of clover, and so curtailed their pretensions that they are now comparatively a modest and harmless evil. Still they are thistles, noxious thistles, yet may be suffered to grow with the wheat till the great harvest day. As a whole, it is obvious that New England Unitarianism is neither increasing nor aggressive; and if Boston, its fountainhead, may be quoted as a true exponent of its quantity and power, it has lost much during the last thirty years. Instead of holding that city as formerly, it has been compelled to relax its grasp, and behold evangelical elements assert and maintain a power, more than quadrupled in the number of its churches, members, and influence. Its unity, so long its boasted tower of strength, is no more. While some have gone down Theodore Parker's inclined plane - facilis descensus- some into Universalism, and not a few been brought under the saving influence of a pure gospel, many have become dissatisfied with a system which does not meet their immortal wants. Their souls demand bread — bread from the hands of Him who fed the multitudes on the shore of the sea of Galilee. But how to get to him, to see him, to speak to him, whether by coming at night, or climbing a syca more, or some other way, is the question. How to overcome family and social caste, the pride of intellect and position, is the question. Conscious of their creedless, Christless wants, some are feeling after a positive theology; some would make more of the sacraments and symbols of religion, and some would find Him "of whom Moses in the law and prophets did write," in the liturgic forms and artistic music of Church vespers. Confessedly they want what they call "a more devout spirit," and acknowledge that they must re-crystalize before they can do much more; but where, and around what? that again is the question. It was not without some reason, a few years since, that they claimed the empire in the literary world. Harvard equipped men with Damascus blades, Andover with the sword of the Spirit, and they went forth; the former to contend for social culture, and the latter for the "faith once delivered to the saints." Since the contest died away, they have met on a common literary ground, and which are now the most eminent it may seem invidious to declare. Yet the friends of evangelical religion need not fear to place side by side the weekly, monthly, quarterly, and occasional literature of each, and let the competent and candid decide. Damascus blades even grow brighter and keener when burnished and sharpened by truth. ARTICLE III. RUSKIN'S LITERARY SPIRIT. THE "Oxford Graduate" is delightfully communicative. So true a genius could not be too much so for the gratification of his readers' curiosity, while a taste so faultless in its instincts is sure to retain this self-revealing impulse within the limits of strictest propriety. He always wishes to put us just at his own point of view, in feeling as well as position; and so he tells us how he comes by his convictions in art and nature, that we may see through his inner vision the things which he desires to make apparent. He does not indulge us with autobiographical details; but he kindly lets us sit beside him and look over, as, from some rock-girt valley, or turn of the road, he sketches the profile of an Alpine range; or, by the seashore draws a bold headland with the hungry surge dashing up against its gray clifts; or leads us through the dim aisles and cloisters of old. cathedrals, giving us not only his independent, first-hand criticisms, but also the interior processes through which he has arrived at them. When he has changed an opinion he is not content with a simple statement of the fact, but considers his reader entitled to know the reason and progress of this revision of his judgment. Any one carefully perusing his various volumes, and not omitting their copious appendices and notes, will thus come into acquaintance with no small measure of the intellectual and spiritual growth of this writer. It is pleasant not only to have books so uniquely rich as these, but with them to have so much of the mental processes which made them what they are. We honestly confess that this author has won our love as well as respect by the frankness and fairness with which he treats us; and none the less, because there is a dash of truth in the oddly paradoxical dictum of a Scotch reviewer — of some years gone by "the most mistaken, most unmannerly, and the best art-critic that ever wrote- Mr. Ruskin." We feel inclined to take off our hat and make a bow to the man, who, in an age of literary fashions like this, has the manliness to deserve the first part of this compliment, while possessing power to command the high eulogium of the second. The varied and accurate knowledge which these Ruskinian treatises display is wonderful. They spring from a brain which seems to have put under almost exhaustive tribute enough departments of study to fill up the researches of a half dozen lives. The volume of the "Modern Painters," which treats of mountains, shows this gentleman to be a practical geologist of thorough training. When he writes of plant-life, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar of Lebanon, one would suppose him a professional arborist. But he turns to the water, and now his observations and well-conned measurements of the forms and changes of the sea-wave would appear to have demanded an exclusive attention of years to this sole element. How less than the waking hours of a whole manhood, again, spent in art-galleries and churches, could have possessed this minute art-student with the countless details of pictures, and drawings, and architectural erudition which empty themselves as from an exhaustless storehouse into his pages? Nothing on earth which the five senses can take account of seems to have eluded him. Yet when he talks about the clouds you would fancy he had done little else than lie upon his back and note their shifting, beautiful, gorgeous shapes and colors; not, however, in a half-awake reverie of intoxicated pleasure, for he has learned the secret of their grouping, and how they marshal their fleecy cohorts, morning, noon, and even, in weather fair and foul. What the astronomer has done for the stars beyond them, he has essayed for the vaporous masses which drape the firmament; but not with the dry eye of the scholar alone, but with the religious feeling of the devotee. He has caught the sense of Bernard's idea in reading this book of nature to whatever page he turns: "Aliquid amplius invenies in silvis, quam in libris. Ligna et lapides docebunt, quod a magistris audire non possis." He seems to have been touched with the wand of the gentle fairy: "And I will purge thy mortal grossness so, His imagination and Christian fervor are alike stimulated by the heavy rain-cloud-emblem of intensest dreariness, and the billowy cumuli which float like islands of opal, or ridge themselves like the hills of God, along the blue expanse : "This, I believe, is the ordinance of the firmament; and it seems to me, that in the midst of the material nearness of these heavens, God means us to acknowledge His own immediate presence as visiting, judging, and blessing us. The earth shook, the heavens also dropped at the presence of God.' 'He doth set his bow in the cloud,' and thus renews, in the sound of every drooping swathe of rain, his promises of everlasting love. In them hath he set a tabernacle for the sun;' whose burning ball, which, without the firmament, would be seen as an intolerable scorching circle in the blackness of vacuity, is, by that firmament, surrounded with gorgeous service, and tempered by mediatorial ministries; by the firmament of clouds the golden pavement is VOL. II. NO. XI. 42 spread for his chariot-wheels at morning; by the firmament of clouds the temple is built for his presence to fill with light at noon; by the firmament of clouds the purple veil is closed at evening round the sanctuary of his rest; by the mists of the firmament his implacable light is divided, and its separated fierceness appeased into the soft blue that fills the depth of distance with its bloom, and the flush with which the mountains burn as they drink the overflowing of the dayspring. And in this tabernacling of the unendurable sun with men, through the shadows of the firmament, God would seem to set forth the stooping of His own majesty to men, upon the throne of the firmament. As the Creator of all the worlds and the Inhabiter of eternity, we cannot behold Him; but, as the Judge of the earth and the Preserver of men, those heavens are indeed his dwelling-place. 'Swear not, neither by heaven, for it is God's throne, nor by the earth, for it is his footstool.' And all those passings to and fro of fruitful shower and grateful shade, and all those visions of silver palaces built about the horizon, and voices of moaning winds and threatening thunders, and glories of colored robe and cloven ray, are but to deepen in our hearts the acceptance, and distinctness, and dearness of the simple words, 'Our Father, which art in heaven.'" Modern Painters, Vol. IV., pp. 84, 85. We have already devoted a paper to the religious spirit of this author; and, after a further study of his works, are glad to avow a deepened persuasion of the genuineness of his Christian sentiments. How unaffectedly beautiful, in the midst of a tenderly pensive description of the oldest of the Venetian cathedrals, the parenthetical sentence thrown in "for the actual condition of the exiles who built the cathedral of Torcello is exactly typical of the spiritual condition which every Christian ought to recognize in himself, a state of homelessness on earth except so far as he can make the Most High his habitation." These springs of pious thoughtfulness are bubbling from under wayside stones, and banks, and flower-tufts, and fragments of art-ruin, wherever among them his path winds and wanders. So far from anything forced about them, it would seem a violence not to find them just where we do. We have never read an author not designedly devotional, through whose pages, like a clear water-mark, the "Glory to God in the highest" of the Bethlehem angels shines so unmistakably and habitually. And this in no monkish or conventional way; but as naturally as |