the famous Plea for Christians, by Athenagoras, the Athenian scholar and philosopher, and his clear and logical treatise on the Resurrection of the Dead. His Greek is the best of his times; his arguments are manly and well put; his style is elevated and forcible. It is also remarkably well edited. The Notes, by Prof. Owen, are suited to the class-room. It would be a good thing to have such a book studied in all our colleges and higher schools. The college curriculum may as well be enlarged in this direction, as in conchology and entomology. The plan of the series is a commendable one and it will make its way.

Alwyn; a Romance of Study. By JAMES C. MOFFAT. A. D. F. Randolph & Co. We take pleasure in calling attention to this little volume, recently published by A. D. F. Randolph. Those who have read Song and Scenery: or, a Summer Ramble in Scotland, and have seen how much the writer's mind is imbued with the spirit of poetry, will not be surprised that he has adopted its distinctive form. The poem is divided into seven cantos, in the first of which the youth, Alwyn, brought up amid the woods and hills, revels in the charms of pastoral life, and is continually deriving lessons from animate and inanimate nature, rejoicing to give play to his imagination, until he finds himself questioning causes. Then his rest is broken. The succeeding cantos describe his earnest search for truth. Literature, ancient and modern, philosophy, deism, fatalism, all are investigated and argued, but his reasoning brings him no satisfaction. Even practical life is tried, but he is in darkness still. In early life he had smiled at the simplicity of his rustic friend, Norman, who believed and was happy. Long years have passed since then, and Alwyn, prospered in temporal things, after study and travel, finds himself again in his native land. In a lonely walk he finds the friend of his youth, afflicted and in abject poverty, yet believing still. Alwyn wonders, but devotes himself to relieving his necessities, and finding others who need help he assists them. In simple deeds of charity he experiences a joy he never knew before, and this joy comes from the faith that his labors are not in vain. In doing good to others, he is led to study the life and character of Him who " came not to be ministered unto, but to minister," and learned to trust and love Him. Reason's arguments are not answered, but they flee away, because supplanted by the stronger principle of faith.

Robert Carter & Brothers are bringing out new editions of several of their well-known works, and new volumes by some of their favorite authors. Their books are uniformly selected with the greatest care and judgment. We have received copies of the “ thirty-second thousand" of HUGH MILLER'S Testimony of the Rocks, and of the "twenty-second thousand" of his Foot-Prints of the Creator. The latter has a Memoir of the Author, by Louis Agassiz. By the Author of the Wide, Wide World, there are two volumes, The Rapids of Niagara and Bread and Oranges, both of them characteristic works, illustrating the qualities which have given her such a wide popularity and so enviable an influence for good. Nurses for the Needy; or, Bible-Women Nurses in the Houses of the London Poor, by L. N. R., author of "The Book and its Story," is a familiar record of devo

ted service among the poor, which may guide and cheer others in these pious labors. The Story of the Apostles, by the well-known author of Peep of Day," is a simple and pertinent explanation of The Acts, for children, well illustrated. There are also beautiful editions of DR. J. R. MACDUFF'S The Gates of Praise, and in one volume of his three works, The Mind and Words of Jesus, the Faithful Promiser, and Morning and Night Watches.

WORKS ON THE CURRENCY QUESTION.

D. Appleton & Company publish Currency and Banking, by BONAMY PRICE, Professor of Political Economy in Oxford University, who visited this country some time ago, and gave several public addresses on these subjects, particularly as related to the commercial crisis of 1873, its causes and effects. Similar views are more fully set forth in this volume, with more copious application and illustrations in relation to the Bank of England, and the other monetary institutions and developments in Great Britain. In substance, and aside of special application to later commercial phenomena, here and abroad, they reiterate the views advanced in his lectures on the principles of currency, delivered in Oxford, and published in 1869.

On this particular branch of economics Prof. Price has no superior, and the more carefully he is studied, the more fully will this be seen, and the more clearly will all who have any responsibility in determining practical measures in regard to money, banking, and currency, understand their duty.

He shows, very conclusively, what ought to be evident to all without such demonstration, that commercial crises, whatever may be the occasions, incidents, or sequences, arise from a destruction which exceeds the production of wealth; sometimes from providential visitations, oftener from unproductive consumption and expenditure in speculative enterprises, or extravagant living-frequently in all combined. So our late panic was due, in different degrees, to the inherited waste of an exhausting war, the great fires of Portland, Chicago, and Boston, the immense outlays in premature and unproductive railways, and other public improvements, and, probably, more than all, to that extravagance of living which infested all classes of society. What was thus spent is gone; and is not on hand to pay the debts contracted for it. We have been feeling our way for three years to find on whom this gigantic loss shall fall.. New bankruptcies every week are at once revealing the secret, and telling us the end is not yet, and that we shall only reach it when, by industry and its savings, we shall have replaced the wealth that has been lost.

In regard to our present inconvertible currency, Prof. Price strenously asserts the principles we have constantly maintained. The objection to resumption of the coin standard, that it will increase the burdens of the debtor class, he rightly holds to be greatly over-rated. But, at the worst, it should be no bar to resumption. Every change of legislation, demanded by the public honor and welfare, operates to the immediate prejudice of some class. This is true of all changes in taxes and imports, indeed, all public improvements. We never should have had a canal, railway, bankrupt law, or even gas and

water in cities, if such an objections were admitted to be valid. Besides, the ereditor class, including the widows and orphans, the aged and infirm have already suffered their losses in the inroads which the legal tender act made upon the pittance accumulated for their support.

But we take occasion here to say, that even Prof. Price and other advocates of resumption, seem to us to over-rate the amount of contraction which must precede specie payments, when they say that the excess of present currency is measured by the premium on gold, and that it must, therefore, be contracted in this ratio. We doubt it. We think the gold premium represents, in part, the discount on our currency, arising from the uncertainty as to its redemption, or time of redemption. We believe that, without any contraction, were it fully and universally believed that our paper dollar would be equal to gold as early as the year 1879, the gold premium would at once begin to go down.

Hon. E. G. Spaulding, of Buffalo, N. Y., Chairman of the Sub-Committee of Congress which framed and urged the adoption of the legal-tender act, in which originated our present inconvertible currency, has published a very useful volume, entitled Financial History of the War. It is replete with valuable information for all who may have any responsibility for the future legislation of Congress on the currency. He vindicates, as we think, unanswerably, the necessity of the legal-tender act when it was passed. And, in our judgment, he shows no less conclusively, that the financial necessity out of which the legal-tender act arose, and the difficulties to which it led, were greatly aggravated by one great blunder of the financial secretary which preceded it, and another which followed it. The first of these was the act of Mr. Chase, in insisting that the great $150,000,000 loan, made by the banks of the country to the government after the Bull Run disaster, should be drawn from them in coin, in conformity to old sub-treasury traditions, instead of taking it in the usual form of bills, drafts, and notes, and such small portions of coin as might prove necessary, according to the customs of all nations, in which credit forms a large part of the machinery of business. The effect of this was needlessly to break not only the banks, but the national treasury itself, which could not, in the nature of things, be stronger than the sources of its supplies. This made the legal-tender act a necessity. But for this the war could have been prosecuted much longer, perhaps to the end, upon the simple treasury notes of the government, made fundable into its gold loans, without this legal tender element.

The next blunder was near the close of the war, depriving these legal-ten ders of the fundable quality, which was originally given them, and certified upon the back of each. Had this been continued, even at a reduced rate of interest, as good faith required, the whole currency question would have taken care of itself. The necessary contraction would have gone on spontaneously, and they would long since have reached the coin standard. A similar act now making them convertible into a four, or four and a half per cent. stock, gold bond of long standing, and free of taxation, if only gradual in its operation, would soon solve the whole question of return to a coin standard, by making it a reality.

Two addresses on Money and the National Finances, by the Hon. Wm. D. Kelley, M.C., one delivered in Congress, the other before the citizens of Philadelphia, are before us. They aim to prove that a currency of coin, or convertible into coin, is a national curse, and an inconvertible paper currency one of the greatest of national blessings. Their pet scheme is an irredeemable paper currency, interconvertible, dollar for dollar, with a 3.65 government bond, payable, principal and interest, in such irredeemable paper, thus supporting one engraved sheet upon another, bubble upon bubble, and the whole upon nothing. It would require one whole number of this REVIEW to to unravel the ad captandum fallacies which crowd every page of these pamphlets. They are all branches of the one fundamental fallacy, that promises to pay dollars, which are not designed to be kept, are as good as, or better, than dollars. But it can hardly be needful to argue against one who denounces the law requiring the collection of customs and the payment of the national bonds, in gold, as a "crime perpetrated by the Senate of the United States, or blunder worse than a crime!" There is no common plane on which we can reason with such.

Art. VIII. THEOLOGICAL AND LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.

GERMANY,

Theologische Studien und Kritiken, 1876. Part II. W. Grimm examines the question of the nationality of the Galatians of Asia Minor, contending ably for their Celtic origin, contesting incidentally the views of Renan and Hausrath. Pastor Hermann Ohl, on the Justification of the Three Traditional Questions in Infant Baptism (as in the Lutheran form), takes the ground that they cannot strictly be defended as addressed to the child. Pastor C. J. Nösgen presents a clear view of the Plan of the Gospel of Luke. Mönckeberg defends the genuineness of Luther's famous words at Worms, "Here I stand," etc. Dr. Alois gives an interesting account of an autograph of Melanchthon's Loci Communes, in the German language, which is found in the imperial library of Olmütz. The longest article is a review, by Diaconus H. Schmidt, of Stuttgart, of the last vol. of Ritschl's Doctrine of Justification; its great ability and theological learning are fully recognized, also its unsatisfactory theory and conclusions. W. Hermann contributes a long notice of Superintendent Rocholl's (of Gottingen) recent work on the "Real Presence," meaning by that the mode of Christ's presence with and in his disciples. It is an attempt to construe the Lutheran theory of the ubiquity of Christ by the metaphysics of space and time-a somewhat difficult process, with the results of which the reviewer does not seem to be satisfied.

Jahrbücher f. deutsche Theologie. IV. 1875. 1. Kern, God and the World: or, Spirit and Matter; a contribution to the metaphysics of theism. 2. Wetzel.

the Time of the Creation of the World. 3. Witz, Stephen and his Defense; a new exegetical attempt. 4. Wellhausen, the Chronology of the Book of Kings, subsequent to the division of the kingdom. 5. Weizsäcker, David Friedrich Strauss and the ecclesiastical proceedings in Würtemberg about him. 6. Wagenmann, St. Anno, a German Imperial Chancellor eight hundred years ago. In the second article Dr. Wetzel states the different theories as to the time of creation, thus: (1) God creates when and where he will, arbitrarily; (2) Time does not exist for God, it begins with the world; (3) Creation is eternal; (4) The plan is eternal, but God determines to effect it at a given time; (5) The creation of the present world is not eternal, but there has been an eternal series of worlds. The author decides for the fourth, with the addition, that the reason why God did not create before was, that he would show that he could do without the world. Some of the above theories run into one another. The whole question is only one form of the general question, of the relation of the infinite to the finite, of the eternal to the temporal-which it is very probable we do not fully understand. The fifth article on Strauss contains all the documents in relation to the censure passed upon him at Tübingen, after the publication of his Life of Jesus. The letters of Strauss are given in full.

Jahrbücher fur Protestantische Theologie. 1875. 4 Parts. 1876. First Part. This quarterly Year-Book of Protestant Theology, edited by the Jena professors, Hase, Lipsius, Pfleiderer, and Schrader, was begun last year, and takes its place worthily by the side of its competitors. It is intended to embrace all departments of theology, and to encourage thorough investigations. One feature of it will be articles devoted to a general sketch of progress in the different departments of theology, Reviews and notices of new books, as a special part, are excluded. The Jena professors are to be aided by competent men from other universities, including Leyden, Strasburg, Vienna, etc. Among the most important articles published in 1875, were, Holtzmann, Theological Investigations of the Present Time, especially on the Philosophy of Religion; Fr. Nitzsch, the Historical Significance of the IlluminationTheology (Aufklärungs-theologie), two parts; O. Pfleiderer, the Question about the Origin and Development of Religion; E. Schrader, Semitism and Babylonism; or, the Origin of Hebraism; R. A. Lipsius, Schleiermacher's Orations on Religion, two, articles; Schrader, the Original Sense of Jahveh Zebaoth, as the Name of God, used especially of "the hosts of Israel;" H. Schultz, The Christology of Origen, in connection with his Theory of the Universe; C. Holsten, the Epistle to the Philippians, two long articles, to be followed by another, contending that this epistle is not Pauline; C. A. Hase, Bernardino Ochino of Siena, a very interesting sketch of this learned. and eloquent General of the Capuchins, who became a Protestant, fled from Italy, and led a wandering life in great trials (a full memoir of him, by Karl Benrath, has been published in Germany since Dr. Hase's article was written); Biedermann, an Address on Strauss and his theological influence, sympathizing with Strauss' earlier, while disapproving his later, position; O. Pfleiderer, on Herder and Kant; H. Holtzmann, a General Review of the latest works of New Testament Criticism, etc. The first part of this Journal for 1876, has a very interesting sketch of the First French Revolution and the Church, by the veteran historian, Dr. C. Hase, of Jena; Pastor August Trumpelmann discusses Darwinism; the Monistic Philosophy of Nature, and Christianity-contending against the mechanical explanation of phenomena-distinguishing between Darwin and Darwinism, and saying that though Darwin may recognize God, yet there can be no God in Darwinism, taken strictly as a merely mechanical explanation of the universe. E. Schürer illustrates the conceptions of the