in the German fiction. When he is on the platform of the Music Hall, hurling fire and wrath at the head of our national Moloch, he is one man — and a magnificently detonating one -a very mortar-boat of tremendous projectile force, albeit the markmanship is often of the wildest range. We turn to his " Wanderings of a Pilgrim"; his "Wanderings of the River of Life"; his "Lectures on the Pilgrim's Progress"; and his other life gleams mildly, richly forth, like the evening sun through the paths of the forest. How these diverse individualities can dwell in the same nature we have no reconciling theory. But they are there; and in these directly contrary lines they do their work with marked efficiency.

We suppose that some of these sweet tonings of his gentler mood have discoursed their music to his people from the pulpit of the church at Union Square. How wide their key-note from the hoarse thunder of his organ when all the anti-slavery stops are out! His hearers should have well-strung nerves to bear the transition without a twinge of spiritual neuralgia. Honestly, we like the minor melodies the best.. We never tire of his meditations among Swiss mountains, nor along the sacred river of Christian experience and divine grace, nor as he follows the muse of Bunyan up the heavenward path. And here he writes, under the same inspiration, of God's Method of Discipline ;. Contrast and Variety of Spiritual Experiences; The Trials of Faith; The Creed of Doubt; The Creed of Faith; The Reproof of Mercy ;. The Hope of Glory. The titles of these chapters are enough to show what honey out of the rock is here gathered for the use of the church.. It does not very greatly trouble us, in reading these pages, to remem-. ber the pamphlet-war of the New York Puritans', although it can. hardly help suggesting the truth-how much easier it is to preach. than to practise; but we learned that long ago from other sources.. We confess that we cannot feel that all of our author's pages, thus put before the public, are equally Christian. Those now before us, however, in this neat little volume, breathe the true spirit of the gospel.

The Testimony of Christ to Christianity. By PETER BAYNE, A. M.. Author of the "Christian Life," &c., &c. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 12mo. pp. 200. 1862.

MR. BAYNE gives us his quota of the debate now going on over the "Readjustment of Christianity" in this brief but cogent argument. It is a new "Short Method with the Deists"-pithy, pointed, effective. Fixing the historic truth of our Lord's earthly mission and works by classic, heathen authority, he demonstrates that Christ's tes

timony to his own religion, as recorded in the Gospels, was not false, nor mistaken; his moral excellence precluding the first, and his intellectual superiority preventing the second. The conclusion is irresistible that, strange as his miraculous acts undeniably were, they were literal facts attesting his superhuman commission to preach glad tidings to the world. The style of the writer is eloquent and forcible. His volume is much better adapted to counteract the scepticism of the day, than some much larger ones which have undertaken the work, particularly in connection with the popular mind. We hoped to have presented this subject of Christ's witness-bearing to his own faith, in a more elaborate way, in our present number. We shall return to the topic, in a somewhat different method to that here employed, in our

next issue.

Essays Historical and Critical. By HUGH MILLER. Edinburgh:

THIS writer's name, if not so often mentioned as once, is still almost a household word with us; at home it is this, with a fervency of love which hardly another of his countrymen has secured. The last years of his life brought him into close contact with the popular mind through the columns of the "Witness" newspaper, the organ of the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which he edited from 1840. These years also produced the remarkable series of scientific works upon which his fame as a naturalist rests. The present volume is a reprint of editorials from the "Witness." They furnish a surprising illustration of the versatility, strength, beauty of the mind which originated them, and of the noble, heroic heart which was its worthy ally. Hugh Miller was of the race of the giants. His splendid physical stature was a fair index of his stalwart, manly soul. A true vein of poetry runs through the whole amplitude of his rich nature. His Christianity was alike conscientious, magnanimous, and self-sacrificing. He was master of a style every way fitted to set forth his grand conceptions of truth and life. These papers do not, in one sense, do justice to his powers; for, written as they were, under the pressure of a weekly editorship, they have not the finish of a more leisurely composition. Yet, no amount of polishing could have made some of them more perfect; and, thrown off as they were, they exhibit the ready resources and force of his genius. For genius he had of a high grade. His country's scroll of gifted men is proverbially studded with brilliant names. But few of them will hold their brightness more purely and permanently than the stone-mason of Cromarty.

Stanley's Lectures on the Eastern Church; Clough's Poems; Edward Irving's Life; Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, among other books, are on our table for further notice. A large variety of pamphlets, also, have been received, for which the authors have our thanks.

ARTICLE X.

THE ROUND TABLE.

"And if it comes three times, I thought,

I take it for a sign."

We have seen two indications that fill us with joy. May the third soon appear, and "we take it for a sign" in the right quarter of the heavens. In the opening sermon of the General Association of New York, by Dr. Palmer, a good omen arose in the ecclesiastical sky. His subject was, "An Increase of Moral Power the great need of Modern Christendom." In the development of this subject, his first head is reported to have been as follows: "There is demanded a return to apostolic faith. A distrustful, dubious, half-believing spirit, is manifest in the church, and almost a Sadducean spirit outside of it. The faith of the present day is faltering." What could be truer or more important to be said? How could it have found a more fitting occasion, or an abler and more influential advocate? Just what we are contending for, and what we feel to be worth every sacrifice to obtain. It has lately been said that the one great need of the Andover Seminary is an earnest denominational policy. A new dress, or the old one renewed, is a good thing; we advocate it. But it is not of such vital importance as to lead us to send a constitutionally-sick man to the tailor rather than to the doctor. We would rather say, with Dr. Palmer: An increase of moral power is the great need of modern Christendom (Andover included); and that in order to an increase of moral power there must be a return to apostolic faith, and an abandonment of the distrustful, dubious, half-believing spirit in the churches. Henceforth we shall reckon the Albany seer as more than ever a colaborer.

A second token, almost as important, because of its appearance nearer to the hub of the universe, arose like a new star over Milford, September 4, when Professor Park, in his ordination sermon,

"showed, in a forcible manner, how a minister of the gospel may hold the attention of his people from Sabbath to Sabbath by doctrinal, diversified, cheerful, appropriate, and authoritative preaching, and thus make the pulpit the grand conservator and bulwark of the truth both in peace and war." No doubt it was an able and valuable sermon, and the great ability and wide influence of the preacher lead us to expect that many will turn their attention anew to this important topic. We have no fears for the result when regenerated men will look for fundamental principles, and look for them in the Bible. Such are the indications, and "if it comes three times," we shall confidently expect a large increase of subscribers to our Review.

AUTHORSHIP. We have a picture of Charles Lamb which represents him sitting at his study-table with two tall candles burning brightly on one side of it, and a decanter of something stronger than water on the other. The midnight lamp has been dear to scholarly persons from the immemorial times; the strong potations, too, have had an equal devotion among the gifted ones. Poor "Elia" sought not only inspiration, but rest from indescribable wretchedness, in the ruby cup. Others have sacrificed to the same mad god with but a small part of his not good-enough extenuation. Blackstone steeped his law-learning in old port; while Lord Byron admitted that "Don Juan" (and we fancy some others of his poems, as well) was fished up from a tumbler of gin-and-water, quite as much as from his inkstand and imagination. Pope was as fond of good living as Porson was of the bottle, or Thomson of lying abed. The author of "The Castle of Indolence" was so lazy that once he was found eating fruit from a tree with both hands thrust into his pockets. Such habits are a strange contrast to the power and brilliancy of genius which often have accompanied them. We wonder at a rich and charming writer of devotional poetry and prose making out his daily bill of luxurious fare before getting up every morning. But we smile and relish another good man's sacred meditations all the more, who, engaged upon a biblical study, was waited on by a business agent, to whom he sent (as he supposed) a card with his name, and an hour appointed for an interview; but when the visitor read the card, its only inscription (so absorbed was the student in his work) was "Acts ii. 2."

The harmless eccentricities of clever writers always please us. It touches the chord of our common humanity.

The pearl concreting slowly in the diseased oyster is the type of more of the intellectual successes which we enjoy than most readers suspect. We do not wonder, nor care, for a man's sickness who, like

one Sir John Hill, brought it on by trying to compose seven different works at the same time. But the pains of exquisite taste and culture, under the pressure of overwrought and unappreciated authorship, are among the saddest of mortal stories. Names rush along here in memory with a troubled sound - Cervantes, Collins, Otway, Chatterton, Logan, and a hundred others, victims of their own imprudence, but not of this only. There is no end to this chapter of authorial misfortune. With all of one's commiseration, however, it is hard to help laughing at the trials of the worthy lexicographer, Castell, a martyr to linguistic erudition, who, in an appeal for patronage to Charles II. says, that for seventeen years he had consumed at least sixteen daily hours upon his "Heptaglotton," had spent all his property, £12,000, ruined his health, made himself blind, and so utterly lost his native speech that he could scarcely spell a word of English. To cap the climax of his sorrows (but the poor scholar was dead then) the rats ate up nearly every copy of his book which remained unbought, some five hundred in all, the ruins of which a pile of mumbled paper were sold for about seven pounds. One would hope that the sad student found somewhere a better friend than the roué Stuart king.

We once measured with the eye the fifteen feet thickness of the prison-wall within which Sir Walter Raleigh wrote his 'History of the World.' Bunyan's immortalized cell we have only seen in fancy. Literature owes a great debt to dungeon-bolts, greater than, we trust, it ever will again. Here is one of the sweet things crushed out of a captive's heart a heart, one would believe, made purer, than in earlier womanhood, by its intense sufferings. It is attributed, and with probable correctness, to Mary of Scotland, during her last imprisonment. Its simple pathos hardly needs or permits a translation:

A DIFFERENCE and no Difference. It is one of the signs of the times in theological New England that there is no essential difference of faith among the Orthodox churches. At convenient times a perfect agreement is claimed and proclaimed. When some express fears that Arminianism is preached instead of Calvinism, and that frequent and significant changes of church confessions mark a departure from the faith of the fathers, it is declared to be only a natural vari