wonder that women of sense and spirit have believed that even they could attack it with success.

The work of Miss Cobbe is written with great earnestness and energy. It states what the writer conceives to be the present waning condition of religious faith in England. It then surveys the position of the two great parties within the church, which seek to save and defend it, the Historical and Rational, or the Palæologian, and the Neologian. Each of these, in her view, is sub-divided into two subordinate sections, the first into the High and Low Church, the second into the first and second Broad Churches. After considering these, their ill success and unfortunate predicament, she devotes another chapter to the parties outside the church. After pronouncing that they also have failed, she proceeds to develop what she believes to be the only remedy, the rise of a great school of sound theoretical and earnest practical Theism. The Theoretic Theism must be erected on certain fundamental intuitions—the absolute goodness of God, the final salvation of every created soul, and the divine authority of conscience. This Theism will of course reject with abhorrence every form of Atheism and Pantheism. The Practical Theism must believe in and practice prayer, repentance for sin, and an earnest humanity. This double form of Theism is to save all the good which Christianity embodies, and to out-grow and leave behind its defects and its errors. But with all the strength and earnestness of this book, its argument labors under one capital defect. It does not appreciate where the great strength of Christianity lies, and of course fails to see whence the great argument for its truth is to be derived. The power and necessity of Christ as a person to vivify and enforce religious and ethical principles of every sort, it does not apprehend, and of course a mythical, a legendary, or a human Christ, is just as good for the purposes which it recognizes as any other.

But how could it ever happen that Christianity should be so sadly misconceived in England, and of course so feebly defended. The answer is obvious. It is because the culture of theology as a science, or in other words, of a rational, a learned, a free and progressive Theology, has been systematically neglected in England for nearly two centuries. This brings us back to our first thought. The views of Christianity, both theoretical and practical, which are so distinctly portrayed in the life of Dr. Newman, are the only sufficient explanation of such a reaction as is personated by the author of Broken Lights.

It is not to be forgotten that the movement in the Church of England which Froude and Newman initiated was designed to oppose the so-called Liberalism of the times, and preeminently that which in Theology was denounced as Rationalism. Against this, those who should have contended with the heart and the weapons of men, earnestly but impotently strove by silly appeals to the traditions of the past, coupled with whining protests against the living demands of the present. Reasoning they would not employ, learning they would not liberalize and adapt to present necessities, but with a weakness that would be pardonable in women, but was contemptible in men, they invoked the spirit of Laud the martyr, and instead of defending the Christianity of John and of Paul, they preached the Christianity of sacramental grace and of priestly absolution.

That such a resistance to Rationalism should have provoked a bolder and more confident onset was to be expected. Christianity cannot be successfully defended when Christianity is grossly misrepresented-for she cannot be defended at all except as she manifests the truth to every man's conscience in the sight of God. It is in the relation suggested by this thought that these two volumes may properly and profitably be connected. When thus considered they furnish a significant comment upon the consequences of neglecting and a powerful argument for the cultivation of a vigorous yet rational Christian theology. Without such a theology the reviving of religious earnestness under the Wesleys and Whitfield did not bring forth the fruit which might reasonably have been looked for. Under the miserable traditionalism of the Church of England the earnestness of Wilberforce, the father, for lack of a manly theology to feed and direct the intellect of his sons, drove one to Rome, while from the same goal, the Bishop of Oxford, the other, was scarcely detained.

While John H. Newman, the one brother, is reluctantly carried to the feet of the Bishop of Rome, by the movement towards Catholicity, which his own irrational fright at Liberalism did so much to originate, Francis Newman, the other brother, rushes into the arms of that extremest Rationalism which abjures Christ in the name of the most sacred instincts which Christ alone has aroused into distinct consciousness, and which Christ alone can satisfy. Oh! it is mournful, though in it we see a divine Nemesis, to observe how the noble Church of England has been so fear

fully revenged upon by the Reason which she has sought to cast out of her universities and her ecclesiastical seats, and to observe how, at this very moment, it is by feeble and ill-directed efforts that she seeks to defend the faith on which she lives.

We in this country may take this serious lesson to heart. Our great religious denominations are, at this moment, seeking to be come stronger by organization, by compromises, by dogmatism, by denunciation, sometimes by mystic and cloudy phraseology, by any and every expedient except by a learned, a devout, and enlightened, and therefore a progressive and truly catholic theology. If the old and new schools of the Presbyterian church unite by any surrender of the freedom to reason, to think, and to utter what the new forms of knowledge and of thought demand, then they may expect to hear more than one shout of triumph over their discomfiture on the part of some American writer of "Broken Lights." If the Congregational churches, in their zeal for expansion and a vain idolatry of a mere form of polity, surrender the traditional freedom to think, which has ever been the watchword of the New England theology, or the confidence in the power of the Word which has been its strength, then the glory of this theology will have departed, and the power, the energy, and the value of Congregationalism itself will be sacrificed to an ecclesiastical phantom no better than the others which have cursed Christianity. The prophecy has ever proved true in the history of the Church of every organization which has been made an end, and not a means;-"The kingdom of God shall be taken from you, and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof."

SERMONS BY JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE.*-Everything which James Freeman Clarke writes is worth reading and pondering. Therefore we welcome the volume of Sermons which has been issued but recently, and the Essay on Prayer, which, though first published in 1854, has, in its third edition of 1859, but just come to our notice.

The Sermons are intensely practical, not exclusive at all of the duties of the heart, but devoted to the illustration of the applica

*The Hour Which Cometh and Now Is. Sermons preached in Indiana Place Chapel, Boston. By JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1864. 12mo. pp. 348. [New Haven: H. C. Peck.]

tions of Christianity in the way of duty rather than to the discussion of what Christianity is in its facts and truths.

They are written in a very familiar strain, the illustrations being drawn from a great variety of sources, and all the teachings being brought home to the comprehension of the simplest understanding. But there is no lack of freshness of thought, and there is nothing either in matter or form which is trivial, mean, or undignified. The raciness of manner and the vivacity of the illustrations are obvious on every page.

THE DOCTRINE OF PRAYER,* though adopted as one of the standard publications of the American Unitarian Association, has very little that is positively Unitarian in its teachings, and coincides in its subjective views of prayer very closely with the teachings generally received by evangelical believers. The treatment of the subject is eminently satisfactory in respect to the most important aspects of this doctrine, and controverts with great force and pertinency those views which many Unitarians have been supposed to hold very earnestly. It is quite obvious that Mr. Clarke does not hold these opinions. There is one serious defect, that he nowhere asserts that prayer is offered on the ground of what Christ has done and suffered. And yet so nearly does Mr. Clarke come to the adoption and expression of the universal sentiments of the Christian heart, even in this particular, that we wonder he does not go a singie step farther and find himself at one with the believing church in its theoretical acknowledgment, as well as its practical worship of the Son.

In both these volumes there are sides of the truth, as well as illustrations of its import, which orthodox Christians might consider with profit.

RELIGION AND CHEMISTRY.-These Lectures of Professor Cooke form the third series of the lectures which have been pub

* The Christian Doctrine of Prayer. An Essay. By JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE, Third edition. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1859. 16mo. pp. 313. [New Haven: H. C. Peck.]

+ Religion and Chemistry: or, Proofs of God's Plan in the Atmosphere and its Elements. Ten Lectures, delivered at the Brooklyn Institute, Brooklyn, N. Y., on the Graham Foundation. By JOSIAH P. COOKE, JR., Erving Professor of Chemistry and Mineralogy in Harvard University. New York: Charles Scribner. 1864. 8vo. pp. 348. [New Haven: Judd & White. Price $3.50.]

lished by the Brooklyn Institute. They were, however, fourth in the order of time; the lectures delivered by Prof. Agassiz not having, as yet, been given to the public. They are devoted, as their title imports, to the exhibition of the illustrations of the Divine wisdom and goodness furnished by chemical agents and laws. The field has not often been occupied. We recollect an interesting paper in the Edinburgh Essays, on final causes as exemplified in Chemistry, but there have been but few formal attempts to draw from this source contributions in illustration of the great principles of Natural Theology.

Professor Cooke brought to the preparation of these Lectures, first of all, the prime requisites of a profound and accurate knowledge of the science itself, and an enthusiastic interest in it as an investigator and instructor. To these were added an interest in and understanding of the researches and results which are proper to the other physical sciences which are affiliated with Chemistry. He shows, moreover, a familiar knowledge of the most recent metaphysical speculations, in both Physics and Theology. His familiarity with literature is also conspicuous; above all, there is exhibited, very prominently, an earnest religious spirit and an unquestioning faith in the great truths of Christianity. This last he takes no pains to conceal, but returns to it on every appropriate occasion. Indeed, if any criticism were required, it would be that his digressions of this kind are too frequent and too long.

The scientific illustrations are skillfully managed and impressively enforced. His style is clear, sufficiently diffuse, affluent in words and phrases, gracefully and easily flowing in its sentences, always warm and animated. His protests against the conclusions of Darwin, and the theories of Herbert Spencer, are the more interesting from the fact that he adopts, without the least misgiving, the doctrine of the correlation of forces, on which both so confidently rest, and refers with great frequency to the bold speculations and brilliant illustrations of Tyndall. We miss, occasionally, the exact appreciation which we looked for of the difficulties which these speculations have developed, and sometimes find general assertions and confident protests, rather than satisfactory demonstrations.

It is no slight, but a well merited praise, to say of the volume, that it deserves to be placed by the side of the two that precede it in the series of Lectures on the Graham Foundation.