others, the opportunity shall be employed to make their hearts better." And so he worked on, when to our apprehension he had nothing to do, harder than most of us. He was the sole instructer of his older children. He heard their lessons so covetous was he of his time — while he attended to the duties of the toilet; and so faithful was he in this, that they became adepts in languages at quite an early age. He wrote incessantly, and all the great moral movements of the day he aided by his tongue, his pen, or his example. He gathered about him a class of youth in the Sunday school, he spoke in temperance meetings, he wrote with all his heart against the abominations of slavery. There was not a subject which interested the public, that did not pass through his mind and in some way employ his hand. And considerable as was the amount which he published, he projected still more. His mind was constantly at work, and the plans of unfinished productions which he left — now a volume of essays, now his thoughts on various subjects, and now a touching tale-are almost without number. "My time for musing and meditation," he says, "is the night, after I have laid my head upon my pillow. Going to bed and falling to sleep are not simultaneous acts with me. Many a monk has fewer vigils than I. From my childhood, it has been difficult for me to go to sleep. In the early part of my life, spectres, ghosts, dreams, death-watches, and nightmare, kept me wakeful, till nature triumphed over superstition. When I came to manhood, I had got rid of these bed-fellows, but others stole into their place. Studies, weariness, cares, pains, ruminations on the past, anxiety about the future, kept me sleepless. It is so even now. I

fear not apparitions, I seldom dream; but Morpheus comes always with tardy steps to close my eyes. How often have I wished that one of Julius Caesar's amanuenses could sit by my bed, to give my night musings a visible and durable form! My night thoughts, like my dreams, are so dissipated by the returning light, that it is impossible to record them. There are some things which my memory holds with a giant grasp, but most things pass through my mind with such railroad speed that they leave me weaker, but not wiser."

With this extract we close. Mr Farr was arrested in the midst of his busy thoughts and ripening plans. The

1845.]

Mrs. Dana's Letters.

389

curtains of a longer night gathered around — a dreamless sleep fell upon him. He passed away to that world whose dawning light will not dissipate, but give surpassing distinctness to every good thought and right purpose - where The tide of intellect flows clear,

Strong, full, unchanging, and refined.

He died in Harvard, of a rapid consumption, June 14, 1845, aged 53. He died, having worked faithfully and well, and done somewhat to "burn up the sins, the errors and miseries of the world." We do not claim for him power or brilliancy of talents, or affirm that his works will long survive him. But we do claim that he felt deeply and spoke honestly what was in him; and when we add that he spoke to the wants of a class of his fellow-men and touched a chord in their hearts, we give no small praise. It was all he claimed to desire for himself.

A. H.

ART. VIII.-MRS. DANA'S LETTERS.*

ALTHOUGH numerous female Unitarians have adorned some of the fairest and most instructive walks of literature, yet we remember but few, who have ventured to grapple with the sturdy weapons of polemical theology and biblical criticism. Hannah Adams, in her "Letters on the Gospels," throws abundance of critical light on the pages of the New Testament, but contributes little to the stores of strictly Unitarian interpretation, except by those methods. of indirectness and implication, which inevitably lead to such a result, whenever an enlightened criticism of any kind is applied to the Bible. Harriet Martineau, in her theological prize Essays, establishes the leading truths of Unitarian Christianity upon impregnable grounds, but relies for the purpose principally on general considerations and popular argument, instead of an array or an examination of Scriptural texts. Joanna Baillie, in an admirable little

* Letters addressed to Relatives and Friends, chiefly in reply to Arguments in support of the Doctrine of the Trinity. By MARY S. B. DANA, Author of The Southern and Northern Harps, The Parted Family,' etc, Boston: James Munroe & Co. 1845. 12mo. pp. 318.

treatise published a few years since, sets the question between the Trinitarians and Arians, as appears to us, at a final rest. To these names, eminent as they are, is now without hesitation to be added that of Mary S. B. Dana, whose deeply affecting history, and very remarkable book under review, must stamp a memorable epoch in the progress of a cause, which seems destined, like some tree of God, to make growth against the pressure and opposition of every element.

Unitarian Christianity has achieved much for woman. It has come to fortify her, precisely in those departments of her constitution, which expose her to her greatest dangers; while at the same time it possesses resources which amply respond to the religious tenderness and generosity of her nature. Under other systems, the voice of usurped authority has found in woman a too unquestioning and unresisting subject; she has yielded submissively to arrogant pretension; she has trembled slavishly before unwarranted denunciation; she has surrendered her imagination and her affections to theatrical, fantastic, imposing forms, or extreme principles, of religion; she has prostrated her faculties in helpless despair before perplexing doctrines, which forbade and condemned the very use of her reason ; she has listened to too predominant exhibitions of the terrific, until distraction and suicide have hastened to close the scene. In these circumstances, the female nature has almost cried aloud instinctively for aid, and has found it more than anywhere else in the genius of Unitarian Christianity. There is a modesty and fairness in the very manner by which Unitarianism asserts its authority over the mind, which not only appeals to woman's delicate sympathy, but at once raises her from the dust, and awakens her to the fact of her own significance. It bids her to be calm to reflect to receive a revelation through the medium of her reason, as well as of her imagination and affections.

Yet whilst this system presents just enough of poise and negation to restore woman to her lost equilibrium, it retains, as we have hinted, sufficient positiveness and warmth to satisfy the demands of her earnestly religious constitution. It gives her, in the Eternal Father of spirits, an object of profound adoration, combining in himself

1845.] Adaptation of Unitarianism to Woman.

391

whatever glorious, awful, and endearing attributes or agencies can possibly be ascribed to the Trinity of the middle ages; while, by demonstrating the singleness and simplicity of his being, it quiets her harrowed faculties, fixes her distracted vision, and raises her faith from a state of helpless and abject prostration to a serene, enlightened, and confiding repose. In the innocent babe upon her knee, she no longer beholds a mass of total depravity, a viperous enemy of God, a vessel of eternal wrath and torment but a hopeful subject of the kingdom of heaven, whose immortal powers are in part to be unfolded by her own prayerful vigilance and faithful exertions. In the Scriptural view of the Atonement which she is now called upon to adopt, she is not bewildered by the dramatic representation of one Divine being possessing all the justice, and another all the mercy; nor is she baffled by the contradictions which incessantly spring up between the alleged necessity that a Divine being should be sacrificed, and the allowed impossibility that he could die, coupled with the freshly puzzling fact that after all only a human being endured the sacrifice required. She rather sees in the Atonement a great scheme of reconciliation—a series of healing and restoring influences, contemplated from eternity by a God whose justice and mercy well knew how to temper and co-exist with each other, and at length introduced by the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world - a scheme, thus truly worthy to be illustrated, and even prefigured, by the types and shadows of the Mosaic dispensation. In her prospect of the retributions of futurity, her imagination is no longer either pampered or revolted by presentments too over-powering for human nature; but it is wholesomely stimulated by that solemn indistinctness, yet awakening certainty of result, the heaven of happiness and progress all above her, the hell of darkness and misery all below her, which are everywhere characteristic of the moral government of God. In Jesus Christ, as presented by the same system, the chief among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely, the chosen of the Father from the bosom of a past eternity, she recognises the link which unites the human and Divine the realized ideal of her most exalted imaginings- the perfect archetype of her purely aspiring affections. While the perplex

ing metaphysics of a falsely styled orthodoxy had taken away her Lord, and buried his identity in a mass of contradiction and mystery, Unitarian Christianity has restored him to her in his original proportions; it has rescued from artificial clouds and darkness the great subject of the New Testament biography; she can now venture to approach him again as a being whose heart beats in unison with her own to bathe his feet with her tears, and to wipe them with the hair of her head.

Accordingly, woman in return has effected much for Unitarian Christianity. In the critical transition-period, when a change was in progress from a complicated and humanly devised to a purer and simpler faith-when the spirit of reform was necessarily more or less analytical, negative, and defensive when charges of coldness and unbelief rang from all the camps of Orthodoxy, - woman was found ready, in a full-proportioned representation, to partake of the enlightening process. She perceived, by her characteristic intuition, much that was positive and profoundly religious in the system that was unfolding anew, and she acted upon it by anticipation. The moment that Unitarianism respected, appealed to, and convinced her understanding, she accepted it with all its consequences — discerning and despising the hollowness of the spasmodic outcry raised against it. The Divine authority of Jesus and his religion she at once and honestly felt could be no cold negation, no isolated or empty fact, no dictate of infidelity or deism; but, from the very terms of the question, a principle deep as the wants, lofty as the hopes, and wide as the workings of the human soul. Therefore it has been, that in the darkest and most laborious periods of his career, the Unitarian reformer has been invariably cheered and supported by her countenance and adhesion. Part of his reproach her manifest faith and piety have turned away, and the rest she has cheerfully borne along with him. When, with an anxious heart, he has first spread the table of his Master, and invited the guests to come, she, if few or none else, was near, to partake of the speaking memorials. How often, in the hour of death, has her deliberate testimony and ripe preparation put to silence and shame the solemn but silly proverb, so widely circulated, that Unitarianism is a poor religion to die by! How often, in