defects. The facts so exactly stated, so skillfully arranged, and so eloquently appropriated, are not always so illuminated by the torch of philosophy as to show how and why they thus occurred, and not otherwise. The ties running through intervening events are not always so traced as to detect the vital relation between the near and the remote.

Though facts form the web of history, to skillfully group them is not the chief power of history. Facts alone are barren and voiceless; to have significancy they must be traced upward to their efficient causes, and downward to their final causes. Their meaning must be sought not in themselves, but in their vital relations; so that they furnish an index to what preceded them, and to what comes after them; to those influences both immediate and indirect, near and remote. This involves a double development, and involves the two classes of actors, divine and human, God and man; and two opposing principles, evil and good. Without observing this vital connection of events, how can their phenomena be legitimately classified? How can the historian determine whether they have flowed from individual passions, social impulses, or religious instincts? Whether each event be one of that series of which man is causal, or of which God is causal? Whether a given event has only been appropriated by divine agency, as are all events, or has also been caused by that agency? He may perceive, indeed, in the very conflict of events the repugnancy of their sources, but without a just assortment of them. How can he avoid confounding the real with the apparent? To preclude this error events of a class must be found morally homogeneous. No mind being constructed to consider anything alone, the danger lies not in treating events as fragments, but in arranging them in false connections.

Of the great law of association, Dr. Stevens has amply availed himself in one direction. In regarding Wesley as the central agency, it was facile tracing the remotest events to their source; grasping the thoughts, motives, and purposes of this master spirit, it was not difficult reaching the forces which operated on his subordinate agencies. The latter, therefore, must be studied in the former, and must be arranged and developed on the same principle. But in the Wesleyan revival the doctor found not only the great actor in the founder of Methodism,

but the central event of the age in the concentration of the personally pious into one living organism. This event he found parental to all subordinate events concurring to make this great movement. No mass of events, however huge, under such treatment, will remain chaotic, as this will serve as a clue through the labyrinth. With very slight exceptions, our history avoids the blunder of locating the near for the remote, and of substituting the trivial for the important, and also of finding the chief cause in a single element of the cause. Those, for example, that find the cause of the great Methodist movement in the closing of the church doors against Wesley, resemble such as refer the reformation of Luther to the wish of the reformer to obtain a wife.

The strictly scientific character which now pervades all classes of researches cannot be withheld from Church history. What is dead is alone can have nothing to unfold, can make no part of a living system-and should therefore never be obtruded into history to break its thread or mar its symmetry. As nothing can be tested without a rule, and the vitality of this class of events can have no rule out of the Scriptures, to ignore these as the underlying principle is a radical defect. This rule, then, is indispensable, for the double purpose of rejecting the erroneous and accepting the true. Indeed, we maintain that Church history in its utmost depth cannot be fathomed without ultimate reference to God's oracles as its underlying stratum. How, for example, can a key be found to the origin of tendencies, by which successive periods have been distinguished, without a knowledge of the various conceptions of scriptural doctrine? Thus, what rational account would be possible of those stirring events which have immortalized the third and fourth centuries, without an acquaintance with those keenly debated doctrines that were sifted and settled by the first four general councils? Though a mere record of facts is an indispensable element of history, such a narrative alone can never deserve the title of history. Added to this must be that vital tie which binds in unity every part of a living organism, and especially which will connect Church events with Christian doctrines. It is true that equal importance cannot be attached to the formal connection between Methodist history and Methodist doctrine; still we confess, in our view, such

connection more elaborately traced would have much enhanced the value of this history.

A brief but systematical development of Methodist theology in its causal relation to many of the most thrilling events of the great movements, would to many otherwise well-informed readers shed a startling light on the theology of our Church. The period of a century and a quarter has been too brief to convince such that the doctrines of the Methodists are not a series of crude notions too loosely connected to deserve the name of a system. Nor would the catholicity so gracefully exhibited in the history have been really less. While this symmetrical system of doctrines would shed its own unborrowed light on the history, it would receive a reflected luster from the great events it had generated; and thus would appear more strikingly the accordance of our theology with the primary intuitions of the soul, and with the most obvious import of the sacred oracles. But despite these apparent defects, this work, otherwise executed by a master hand, should be regarded as a priceless contribution to our literature, and as a standard book of its class.

This volume, with the two preceding ones, should not be confined to the minister's library, but should be read wherever the English language is the channel of thought. As we look for a fourth volume of Methodist history from the same able hand, which shall trace the great Wesleyan movement in America, we shall await its appearance with no common solicitude. Signal must be the skill which shall compress into a single volume the huge mass of materials which will crowd on the historian from almost a hundred years of stupendous achievements.

The agency by which Methodism has been developed on this continent is in some regards unique. In part it has passed from the stage, and in part it still survives; while the identity of aim unifies the dead and the living. Great questions, more or less vital to the common cause, have been earnestly discussed. Candor, almost morbid, will be indispensable in the historian to preclude the charge of partiality, to discuss partisan questions free from a partisan spirit. Should the gifted author succeed in this delicate task, the work will be a monument which ages cannot crumble, a book which generations shall read, a living voice of mighty utterances of the Gospel's saving efficacy.

ART. III.—THE TWO GREEK REVOLUTIONS OF 1862.

WHILE upon this western continent we have for months been called to witness the sad loss of human life and destruction of property which a gigantic rebellion has inflicted upon a people that until yesterday had enjoyed a prosperity rarely equaled in the history of the world, and political institutions, the envy of all liberal men, the hand of Providence has not failed to lend us encouragement, in the midst of circumstances so much calculated to depress, by pointing not only to those seasons of severe trial which in the past have visited every nation of importance, but yet more significantly to events occurring in our own times, which must convince us that we are but suffering the common allotment of mankind. The most firmly established of European monarchies have not escaped commotions that seemed to portend more serious conflicts in the future; and the little kingdom of Greece has experienced a civil war which awakened in the minds of the older portion of the population an apprehension of the re-enactment of such scenes of horror as took place thirty or forty years ago, in the days of their youth. In a former article in this Review, little more than a twelvemonth since, we endeavored to convey a correct impression of the present political condition of the Greeks, as the result of their past history, and especially of the policy of the government of Greece during the period that succeeded its revolutionary struggle. We were naturally led to point out some of those dangers which, in our opinion, seemed to threaten the stability of its peace. The record of the past year has lent to our fears the confirmation of fact.

Of dissatisfaction with the administration of Otho there has for a long time been no lack. The glowing expectations founded on his advent to the land of his adoption in the bloom of youth were wholly dissipated years ago. His selfish schemes, as shortsighted as they were permanently injurious to his subjects, disgusted alike, though on very different grounds, the unenlightened peasant and the enthusiastic philhellene. The foreigner came in contact with few persons, in the intercourse he held with the Athenians, who would attempt to uphold the admin

istration as deserving of respect, or to disguise their dislike of King Otho. The few exceptions were found to consist in general of the attachés of the court, or aspirants to offices at the king's disposal. With grief well-nigh amounting to despair, true patriots discovered that when a new cabinet succeeded one that had been overturned in consequence of the disclosure of flagrant malfeasance, or insufferable submission to the arbitrary demands of the sovereign, the new ministers were but the counterparts of their predecessors in everything but name. Nor was their faith in the future confirmed when the new deputies, returned to represent more liberal principles, proved no less open to the influence of the bribes or patronage of the court, so that the king rarely failed to secure a working majority in his favor. Yet popular commotions and abortive attempts at revolution, though frequent, were far less serious than might have been expected; for none were so dull as not readily to perceive that the same powers of Europe which had placed Otho upon the throne could assuredly either secure him in its possession, or supply his place with some other monarch, as much more oppressive as was King Crane than King Log, in the fable.

To the ordinary sources of dissatisfaction, which were of long standing, has of late been added the grievance of an unusual degree of interference with the freedom of the elections, and this of so marked a character as to elicit intimations of disapproval even from foreign governments. When the late Chamber of Deputies convened, it was found that there was not a single member elected by the opposition. The phenomenon was easy of explanation. In Greece the polls are almost uniformly held in the churches. A couple of soldiers posted at the door, on the days of election, gave ready admittance to electors known to be favorable to the administration; while the opposition vainly strove to gain access to the building, and were turned back with the announcement that their names were not upon the register of those entitled to vote. If by any accident the governmental candidate was discovered to be in danger of defeat, the prospect was readily altered by the insertion of additional ballots by the election committee and guard—all being men selected for their known devotion to the crown. To counterbalance this accession of ballots, the names of non-resi