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comments would be thought a libel, if they did not come from leaders in the Methodist Church. Their pungency is one of the best proofs that there is manly vigor enough to remedy the evil, if it has to be done by overturning the system. It is questionable whether the Presiding Eldership will not have to go, as being the main seat of the mischief. It is a comfort to know that the four episcopal names which are most familiar to New England ears are out of all supposable range of this vigorous cannonade. And as to the scandals of a certain episcopal election, notorious alike for the unblushing self-assertion of the candidate and the undisguised championship of a powerful family, as no such stain had ever fallen on the Methodist Episcopal Church before, it is to be hoped that none such will ever fall on it again.

Divine Rod and Staff in the Valley of the Shadow of Death, or Consolatory Thoughts for the Dying and Bereaved. By Rev. J. M. Anspach, A. M., Easton, Penn. Funk & Wagnalls: New York, 18 & 20 Astor Place; London: 44 Fleet Street. 1890. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States. Pp. xvi, 281. — An accumulation of devout and sound considerations of various sides of the heavenly rest and reward, and of the various relations which the toils and afflictions of earth, borne for Christ's sake, sustain to this reward. It is strange, however, that the author should have to prove to Christians that mutual recognition is an essential part of heaven. How irrationally loose many people's ideas float, as to the causal and essential connection between the two lives!

As a Pennsylvanian, the author bears a timely testimony to mill-owners, that though their exactions may be making heaven still more a matter of yearning to their overburdened operatives, they are preparing something very different for themselves.

One Man's Struggle. By George W. Gallagher.

"So let it be. In God's own might

We gird us for the coming fight,

And strong in Him whose cause is ours

In conflict with unholy powers,

We grasp the weapons He has given,

The Light and Truth and Love of Heaven."

Funk & Wagnalls. New York: 18 & 20 Astor Place; London: 44 Fleet Street. 1890. Pp. viii, 169. It can hardly be said that this little book fuses the moral end (the advocacy of prohibition) so thoroughly with the intrinsic interest of a story as that the latter floats and carries the former. But the catastrophe is dramatically tragical, and interest is sustained by the knowledge that we are reading facts under the form of fiction.

Seven Years in Ceylon. Stories of Mission Life. By Mary and Margaret W. Leitch. Missionaries of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. With Portraits and many Illustrations. London: S. W. Patridge & Co., 9 Paternoster Row. Pp. viii, 170. Full of life and cheery Christian zeal, and in their very diffuseness letting the reader the more perfectly into the inmost heart of both heathen and Christian life in northern Ceylon. The abundant and excellent illustrations of every kind light up the book throughout. It would be a beautiful Christmas present.

The Life of Bishop Matthew Simpson. By George R. Crooks, D. D. Illustrated. New York: Harper & Brothers, Franklin Square. 1890.

Pp. xii, 512.— This large and handsome volume contains a biography written with appreciation and animation, but with a dignified simplicity and moderation thoroughly corresponding to the character of its eminent, and more than eminent subject. The author well describes Bishop Simpson's life as a typically American one. Cheerful godliness was its stamp, and efficient godliness, entirely within the lines of our national life, to which he rendered such inestimable services during the Rebellion, when, as the biographer happily styles him, he was "an evangelist of patriotism" throughout the country. There was a great congeniality of spirit between him and Mr. Lincoln, and both Lincoln and Stanton valued most highly his intermediation in all the more spiritual aspects of the struggle. His thorough knowledge of the upper South, and the union of firmness and conciliation in his character, made his counsels particularly effective as to the treatment of the semi-rebellious districts and churches.

Bishop Simpson, though a cultivated and well-read man, did not pretend to be a great scholar or a great writer. The marvelous effect of his oratory, both at home and abroad, rested on the more important fact that he was a great personality, surcharged with Christian faith and love, and with the unadulterated Methodist enthusiasm. Simplicity, and unpretending readiness to do the day's duty in the day, seems to have been the ground-tone of his character from beginning to end.

His relations to his own denomination are not so easy to be apprehended except by the members of it. But his unflinching advocacy of lay representation, at a time when the alarmed itinerancy, in its fear of being thrown into the shade, muttered threats of trial and deposition, very well gives the measure of the man.

The accounts of foreign travel, and of the reception accorded by various ranks of Christians, from Prussian royalty down, give greater freshness to the book, though its main interest lies at home. The reading of it will be a reinforcement both of Christian faith and of affection to all that gives distinctive value to America.

Transplanted. By Fannie E. Newberry. Boston and Chicago: Congregational Sunday-school and Publishing Society. Pp. 391. $1.50. A bright and healthy story, romantic, but in such a way as to preserve the contact with reality. Its characters are full of that happy combination of youthful exuberance with true Christian purpose which is more abundantly realized in America than perhaps anywhere else. The book is full of incident, so arranged as to bring out in growing development the strength of feeling and of Christian benevolence in the young heroine who, restored from the world of poverty and degradation to her affluent and excellent kindred, devotes herself more and more to bring all classes around her to understand practically that the rich and the poor meet together: the Lord is the maker of them all."

Aztec Land. By Maturin M. Ballou.

The dust is old upon my sandal-shoon,
And still I am a Pilgrim.

N. P. WILLIS.

Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company. 1890. Pp. x, 335. — A jumble of useful and picturesque information respecting our picturesque neighbor. The position of the author in judging of her is that of a bitter Protestantism minus Christianity. There is probably

no Roman Catholic country as to which such a position would work less injustice. As a French abbé remarks, the Mexicans are Catholics, but they are not Christians. The author, however, is equally superficial and undiscriminating in his invectives against Spain. He allows, nevertheless, that even the Inquisition may have been a good exchange for the horrors of the Aztec religion. His representation of Mexico as the aggressor in the war with us is in the true old style of the Wolf and the Lamb. As to her present resources, except the precious metals, he holds them to be considerable, but by no means astonishing. He gives interesting descriptions of the capital, and of that Mexican paradise, Jalapa. It is not by any means an unpleasant book, and is particularly worthy of attention in its reiterated declarations of the entire untrustworthiness of the Spanish descriptions of Aztec civilization and history, whose splendors they enormously exaggerate. The late Professor Ferdinand V. Hayden once remarked to the present writer, that he was convinced that the Catholic mind of that time was wholly incapable of seeing anything objectively and of describing anything objectively. As to Mr. Ballou's notion (ratified by eminent names, it is true), that there was an early communication between Mexico and Egypt, we may, as at present advised, hold that to be a mere fancy. Similarity of conditions might easily induce similarities of development. And we may remember, too, that Dr. Brinton holds the Toltecs to have been merely mythologized Aztecs, the men of the Age of Gold.

The Baldwin Lectures, 1890. The World and the Man. By Hugh Miller Thompson. New York: Thomas Whittaker, 2 and 3 Bible House. 1890. Pp. 258. $1.25.-The animation of these lectures makes one wish that this could be combined with a little more dignity. The style is slightly bumptious," and bumptiousness under the mitre produces a peculiar and rather comical effect. But this superficial fault

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is about all the fault there is. The tone and breadth of view is thoroughly vigorous and manly. The Mississippian bishop is ready to have his own beliefs criticised, and glories in our iconoclastic age. This in equity involves his right to hammer away at the new idols and new superstitions which the irreligious abjectness of our age is so solicitous to introduce, and to sanctify under a cloud of uncouth unintelligibility of phraseology.

The foundation of the lectures is the Temptation of our Lord, whom he rightly understands to be here likewise the vicarious representative of mankind, not to release it from the necessity of temptation, but to assure to it the victory therein. The wild beasts of the wilderness are the children of the wilderness, and cannot go beyond natural conditions. Man is providentially brought into the wilderness, to be tested to the uttermost, but he is not the child of the wilderness. His business in it is to do what the lower creatures cannot dream of doing, transform it, and bring out all its hidden resources. He is to convert the stones into bread; to gain the dominion of all the various realms of material and immaterial power which he beholds from its heights; to enter into such unity of knowledge and consent with the laws of his Father's world, that he can commit himself through these to his Father's providential care. But the devil is always urging him to undertake these things by his short-cuts, with the help of his power, ostensibly, it may be, for the ends of God, but really for those of Satan, since the nature of the means will assuredly determine the nature of the result.

He

The Bishop pours out the vials of his righteous wrath upon Satan's Economics, and contends most valiantly that true belief in eternal life is impossible to those who do not believe in the possibility, and in the obligation, of anticipating it on earth, by banishing from the earth all evils which brotherhood and unwearied moral guardianship can remove. remarks, very piquantly, that, seeing no man, and no race, can ever be confirmed in the Kingdom and its various prerogatives of mastery over nature without being tempted to the utmost by Satan, it is our bounden duty to see to it that they are not tempted by the wickedness of man. He denies both sides of antichristian Economics, the laissez-fuire and the faisez tout, holding that we should reduce trial to its endurable point, but should recognize no good as confirmed to man or race which has simply been poured on it (like freedom on the blacks), and has not been thoroughly wrought into it, under the stress of effort. He maintains that it is in the end moral fibre, not mainly physical, which secures permanency. He highly approves the doctrine of "the survival of the fittest," in time and eternity, denying that the divine benignity implies a compulsion on the morally unworthy to survive the strain of trial, holding. of life temporal and eternal, that "few there be that find it." He highly approves the optimism of our American and of our wliole AngloSaxon race, with all its dangers, and all its weaknesses, holding it to be a rude expression of a deep-lying conviction-communicated, by refraction, even to those who may be doing little for it first, that the Kingdom of God is to be realized on earth, and secondly, that we are called as a double race though we may fail of being chosen to take

a large part in realizing it. The book is very fresh, and is all the time disclosing unexpected views. The author has drunk deep of the high idealism of the mitred saint of Cloyne," and no one who believes that the Visible is but the shadow of the Invisible can fail of bringing us to ever new glades and openings in the enchanted forest of Truth - that region of sane and wholesome magic, where there is neither poison nor illusion, and whose endless variety grows ever more home-like, as it opens out upon the broad plain in which we discern the City of the Twelve Foundations.

Bishop Paddock Lectures, 1890. God Incarnate. By the Right Rev. Hollingworth Tully Kingdon, D. D., Bishop Coadjutor of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. New York: Thomas Whittaker, 2 and 3 Bible House. 1890. Pp. vi, 252. The tone of this episcopal volume, in strong contrast with the one just remarked on, is Stateliness. The appearance of it is stately, and the style of it is stately. In the earlier parts of it there are a good many very pertinent quotations from modern writers, chiefly scientific, but it is by far the most heavily weighted with citations from the Fathers very edifying citations too, but enhancing the general impression of the book as a heavily embroidered piece of sacerdotal brocade. Of pliancy to the habits of modern thought, and of American life, there is perhaps the slightest possible suspicion. That profound truth, the Extension of the Incarnation, is handled, but the only instruments of it noted, so far as we discover, are the Sacraments and Sacramentalia. These, the Right Reverend author appears to hold, extend the incarnate nature by a purely mystical, or magical operation. That no rite can bring to us an indwelling power of the Holy Ghost farther than as it concentrates the ethical conditions whereby Faith and Love are kindled within us, would we should judge,

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be regarded by Bishop Kingdon as mischievous rationalism. We may do him wrong here, for his stateliness makes him hard reading. under submission, we should judge that his doctrine of the sacramental and semi sacramental operation would not differ much from the opus operatum, which requires no other condition of its efficacy than a present freedom from mortal sin.

The episcopal author expatiates at length on the importance and dignity of Confirmation, which he will have to be identical with the laying on of the Apostles' hands. He seems to feel that he is bound to magnify his office by magnifying this most widely used of its two reserved prerogatives. A valid Confirmation, he declares, is only possible in the Catholic Church, by which he means the aggregate of episcopal churches of unbroken succession left after shutting out the Monophysite and Nestorian. Cardinal Manning, therefore, in refusing to reconfirm some who had been confirmed by the Anglican, Dr. Mossman, on the ground that Mossman, though schismatic, seems to have obtained a valid consecration, would not meet with Bishop Kingdon's approbation. The latter would approve of the refusal, but deny the justness of the ground. He does not allow that the Holy Spirit abides among non-episcopalian Christians, though he is good enough to admit that He may breathe upon them, with salutary results. He speaks of the duty of enticing them into the constituted tabernacle of the Spirit. We doubt whether this part of a Churchman's duty has been in any great measure committed to him. We are inclined to think that the large human sympathies and deep ethical solicitudes of Bishop Thompson's book are more likely to have such an effect, notwithstanding that in one passage the latter flashes out into a High Church scornfulness of which there is no trace in Bishop Kingdon.

Our author does not miss a convenient opportunity of likening Calvinism to Moslem fatalism, and then makes a quotation which shows how profoundly different they are. The present writer is not a Calvinist, but he cannot help admiring how scornfully a good many Anglicans can protest against Calvinism, and then, like this author, extol Augustine to the skies, after Canon Mozley has shown so convincingly that Augustine, Calvin, and Jansen, all hold precisely the same doctrine of predestination. Perhaps these Churchmen do so by way of counteracting the present dangerous symptoms of reunion between Anglicanism and Presbyterianism. It may be that they would do well to include the bull Unigenitus among their symbols of the faith. They might find this great arsenal of Jesuit warfare very serviceable. Indeed, the "Guardian" does cite it approvingly to this end.

Bishop Kingdon repeats the never-dying slander against Edward Irving, that he held the human nature of our Lord to be sinful, an opinion which Irving always repelled with unspeakable horror, declaring unwaveringly that he held the humanity of our Lord, though under the conditions of the Fall, to have been, by the special operation of the Holy Ghost, held pure, from its very first existence, of the least taint of either actual or original sin.

ANDOVER.

Charles C. Starbuck.

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