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and work of the Messiah-very true, very edifying, and very rich in instruction. Nevertheless, we cannot think it successful as an exposition, because we cannot agree wholly with his fundamental view of the character of the Psalm. The exposition of Isaiah pleases us far better. As a whole, the work is a valuable contribution to the hortatory exposition and application of Scripture, and deserves a place in the minister's library.

(37.) MESSRS. CARTER & BROTHERS (New-York) have reprinted the "History of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, by REV. W. M. HETHERINGTON." (12mo., pp. 311.) It is a compact and elaborate work, prepared after a careful study of the sources of information; and is as impartial as could be expected from one who, to use his own language, does not hesitate to acknowledge that he feels deeply and warmly interested in everything that relates to Presbyterian principles and character. The book is published in a neat but cheap form, and should be read by every student of theology.

(38.) "Water from the Well-Spring for the Sabbath Hours of Afflicted Believers, by REV. E. H. BICKERSTETH," (New-York: R. Carter & Brothers; 1853; 18mo., pp. 254,) consists of a series of Sabbath meditations on select passages of Scripture, originally written by Mr. Bickersteth for the comfort and edification of his invalid sister. They are well adapted, by their brevity and tenderness, to the sick-chamber.

(39.) "The Difficulties of Infidelity, by GEORGE STANLEY FABER," (NewYork: Wm. Gowans; 1853; 12mo., pp. 216,) is a work which has done excellent service in its day. It has long been scarce; and Mr. Gowans has done a very acceptable thing in reprinting it in the beautiful form in which it now lies before us. Appended to the work are Robert Hall's great sermon on "Modern Infidelity," and a copious list of books on the evidences of revealed religion-both valuable additions.

(40.) “A Memorial of Horatio Greenough, by H. T. TUCKERMAN,” (NewYork: G. P. Putnam & Co; 12mo., pp. 245,) contains a brief memoir of Greenough, a number of selections from his manuscripts, and several tributes to his genius, by various hands. The memoir breathes not only a genial sympathy with art, but the higher sympathy of humanity. It is itself a beautiful work of art. The selections reveal Greenough's genius as more versatile than we had supposed, and show that he had, indeed, "larger gifts than belong exclusively to the practical artist." Had he lived, he would have done much, with his large endowments and his high and varied culture, energized by a strong public spirit, and employed with fearless independence, to form what is most sadly lacking in America, a taste for genuine art. As it is, we can only mourn over his large plans and high aspirations for the public good,-all unrealized.

(41.) THE seventh and last volume of Professor Shedd's edition of " Coleridge's Works" (New-York: Harper & Brothers; 12mo., pp. 702) is before us. An extended article on the work is now in type, and will appear in our next number. In the mean time we have to express our extreme surprise and regret that an edition, in many respects so excellent, and professing to be complete, should be sent into the world without an index.

(42.) FOR breeders of poultry who wish to know the best breeds, as well as the best methods of managing fowls, there is no better or more compact work than "Miner's Domestic Poultry Book." (Rochester: G. W. Fisher, 1853; 12mo., pp. 256.) It is the only book we have seen that gives a full account of the celebrated Brahma Pootra, or Burrampooter fowls—the largest, and in all respects the best breed that has yet appeared in this country.

(43.) "Summerfield; or, Life on a Farm,” (Auburn: Derby & Miller; 12mo., pp. 246,) is a very pretty set of sketches of the ordinary and extraordinary incidents of American rural and forest life-strung on a thread of narration pleasant enough to keep up the interest of youthful readers.

(44.) "History of the Mormons, or Latter-Day Saints," (Auburn: Derby & Miller; 12mo., pp. 399,) is a reprint of an English work prepared by a reporter for the London Morning Chronicle. It contains a good deal of information about the Mormons, but lacks discrimination and thorough acquaintance with the subject. As proof of this we may state the simple fact, that the writer leaves it as an open question whether Mormonism tolerates polygamy or not!

(45.) "Phaethon; or, Loose Thoughts for Loose Thinkers, by Rev. CHARLES KINGSLEY." (Cambridge, 1852; pp. 100.) The author of Alton Locke will find readers for anything he may write; it is therefore vastly important that what he writes should be good. There has been much outery about his Socialism. It appears that many good, conservative people think that any sympathy for popular sufferings-whether of white or black mankind-or any scheme for bettering the fortunes of the Pariahs of the race, must argue a man half an infidel. The present work will vindicate Mr. Kingsley's orthodoxy amply, and will testify that if he be a socialist, there can be such a thing as a Christian Socialist.

Phaethon is a dialogue after the manner of the Socratic. An American philosopher (!) visits England, gets an introduction to an English family of rank, flatters himself and them on his entrance into the "inner hearth-life of the English landed aristocracy," and doses them with Emersonian transcendentalism, usque ad nauseam. Never before had the respectabilities of Herefordshire been invaded by so "rampantly heterodox a spiritual guerrilla." He despises the Catholic creeds, contemns all ages but "our glorious nine

teenth century," and holds in still deeper contempt all in that glorious century who dare to believe there is "any ascertained truth independent of the private fancy and opinion of Professor Windrush and his circle of elect souls." He professes to believe in physical science, and argues that Christianity is in a fair way to be crushed by that science; but his spiritualism is more materialistic than his physics. His notion seems to be,

"-that it is the spiritual world which is governed by physical laws, and the physical by spiritual ones; that while men and women are merely the puppets of cerebrations and mentations, and attractions and repulsions, it is the trees, and stones, and gases, who have the wills and the energies, and the faiths, and the virtues, and the personalities." "He talks of God in terms which, every one of them, involves what we call the essential properties of matterspace, time, passability, motion; setting forth phrenology and mesmerism as the great organs of education, even of the regeneration of mankind; apologizing for the earlier ravings of the Poughkeepsie seer, and considering his later electicopantheist farragos as great utterances: while, whenever he talks of nature, he shows the most credulous craving after everything which we, the countrymen of Bacon, have been taught to consider unscientific-Homoeopathy, Electro-biology, Loves of the Plants à la Darwin, Vestiges of Creation, Vegetarianisms, Teetotalisms-never mind what, provided it is unaccredited or condemned by regularly educated men of science."

The author remarks on these ravings and their tendencies in language which many of our American youth, who stare in admiring wonderment at the bold balloonings of Professor Windrushes, would do well to heed:

"This contempt for that which has been already discovered-this carelessness about induction from the normal phenomena, coupled with this hankering after theories built upon exceptional ones-this craving for signs and wonders,' which is the sure accompaniment of a dying faith in God, and in nature as God's workare symptoms which make me tremble for the fate of physical as well as of spiritual science, both in America and in the Americanists here at home. As the professor talked on, I could not help thinking of the Neo-Platonists of Alexandria, and their exactly similar course,-downward from a spiritualism of notions and emotions, which in every term confessed its own materialism, to the fearful discovery that consciousness does not reveal God, not even matter, but only its own existence; and then onward, in desperate search after something external wherein to trust, toward theurgic fetish worship, and the secret virtues of gems, and flowers, and stars; and, last of all, to the lowest depth of bowing statues and winking pictures. The sixth century saw that career, Templeton; the nineteenth may see it reenacted, with only these differences, that the natureworship which seems coming will be all the more crushing and slavish, because we know so much better how vast and glorious nature is; and that the superstitious will be more clumsy and foolish in proportion as our Saxon brain is less acute and discursive, and our education less severely scientific, than those of the old Greeks."

It is not to be supposed that Professor Windrush passes in Herefordshire for a fair example of the American people :—

"God forbid that so unpractical a talker should be a sample of the most prac tical people upon earth. The Americans have their engineers, their geographers, their astronomers, their scientific chemists; few, indeed, but such as bid fair to rival those of any nation upon earth. But these, like other true workers, hold their tongues and do their business."

"And they have a few indigenous authors too: you must have read the 'Biglow Papers,' and the Fable for Critics,' and last, but not least, Uncle Tom's Cabin ?""

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"Yes; and I have had far less fear for Americans since I read that book; for

it showed me that there was right healthy power, artistic as well as intellectual, among them even now,-ready, when their present borrowed peacock's feathers have fallen off, to come forth and prove that the Yankee Eagle is a right gallant bird, if he will but trust to his own natural plumage."

The "new" philosophers of England and America-the Emersons and Parkers, et id omne genus, on this side the water, and the Newmans, Gregs, &c., on the other side-are well hit off in the following paragraphs:—

"The knot of hapless men, who, unable from some defect or morbidity to help on the real movement of their nation, are fain to get their bread with tongue and pen, by retailing to silly women,' ever learning and never coming to the knowledge of the truth,' second-hand German eclecticisms, now exploded even in the country where they arose, and the very froth and scum of the Medea's caldron, in which the disjecta membra of old Calvinism are pitiably seething."

"Ah! It has been always the plan, you know, in England, as well as in America, courteously to avoid taking up a German theory till the Germans had quite done with it, and thrown it away for something new. But what are we to say of those who are trying to introduce into England these very Americanized Germanisms, as the only teaching which can suit the needs of the old world ?"

"We will, if we are in a vulgar humour, apply to them a certain old proverb about teaching one's grandmother a certain simple operation on the egg of the domestic fowl; but we will no less take shame to ourselves, as sons of Alma Mater, that such nonsense can get even a day's hearing, either among the daughters of Manchester manufacturers, or among London working-men."

The main topic of the book is furnished by the theory started by Professor Windrush, that "if a man does but believe a thing, he has a right to speak it and act on it, right or wrong." Alcibiades and Phaethon, walking into the Pnyx early in the morning, find Socrates there, with his face to the east, in prayer. They touch him on the shoulder before he becomes aware of their presence. They soon enter into a discussion arising—

"from something," said Alcibiades, "which Protagoras said in his lecture yesterday-How truth was what each man troweth, or believeth to be true. 'So that,' he said, one thing is true to me, if I believe it true, and another opposite thing to you, if you believe that opposite. For,' continued he, there is an objective and a subjective truth; the former, doubtless, one and absolute, and contained in the nature of each thing; but the other manifold and relative, varying with the faculties of each perceiver thereof.' But as each man's faculties, he said, were different from his neighbour's, and all more or less imperfect, it was impossible that the absolute objective truth of anything could be seen by any mortal, but only some partial approximation, and, as it were, sketch of it, according as the object was represented with more or less refraction on the mirror of his subjectivity. And, therefore, as the true inquirer deals only with the possible, and lets the impossible go, it was the business of the wise man, shunning the search after absolute truth as an impious attempt of the Titans to scale Olympus, to busy himself humbly and practically with subjective truth, and with those methods-rhetoric, for instance-by which he can make the subjective opinions of others either similar to his own, or, leaving them as they are-for it may be very often unnecessary to change them-useful to his own ends."

The scope of the dialogue can be well apprehended from this passage, from a single quotation more:

and

SOCRATES. "But tell me now, Alcibiades; did the opinion of Protagoras altogether please you?"

ALCIBIADES.

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Why not? Is it not certain that two equally honest men may differ in their opinions on the same matter?"

S. " Undeniable."

A. "But if each is equally sincere in speaking what he believes, is not each equally moved by the spirit of truth?"

S. "You seem to have been lately initiated, and that not at Eleusis merely, nor in the Cabiria, but rather in some Persian or Babylonian mysteries, when you discourse thus of spirits. But you, Phaethon," (turning to me,) "how did you like the periods of Protagoras?"

"Do not ask me, Socrates," said I, "for indeed we have fought a weary battle together ever since sundown last night; and all that I had to say I learned from you."

S. "Let us see, then.

Alcibiades distinguishes, he says, between objective

fact and subjective opinion?"

A. "Of course I do."

S. "But not, I presume, between objective truth and subjective truth, whereof Protagoras spoke ?"

A. "What trap are you laying now? I distinguish between them, also, of course."

S. "Tell me, then, dear youth, of your indulgence, what they are; for I am shamefully ignorant on the matter."

A. "Why, do they not call a thing objectively true, when it is true absolutely in itself; but subjectively true, when it is true in the belief of a particular person ?"

S. "Though not necessarily true objectively, that is, absolutely and in itself?"

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Now, tell me—a thing is objectively true, is it not, when it is a fact as

Yes."

S." And when it is a fact as it is not, it is objectively false; for such a fact would not be true absolutely, and in itself, would it ?”

A. "Of course not."

S. "Such a fact would be, therefore, no fact, and nothing."

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S.

66

"Why so?"

Because, if a thing exists, it can only exist as it is, not as it is not; at least, my opinion inclines that way."

"Certainly not," said I; "why do you haggle so, Alcibiades ?"

S. 66

Fair and softly, Phaethon! How do you know that he is not fighting for wife and child, and the altars of his gods? But if he will agree with you and me, he will confess that a thing which is objectively false does not exist at all, and is nothing."

A. "I suppose it is necessary to do so. But I know whither you are struggling."

S. "To this, dear youth, that, therefore, if a thing subjectively true be also objectively false, it does not exist, and is nothing."

"It is so," said I.

S. "Let us, then, let nothing go its own way, while we go on ours with that which is only objectively true, lest coming to a river over which it is subjectively true to us that there is a bridge, and trying to walk over that work of our own mind, but no one's hands, the bridge prove to be objectively false, and we, walking over the bank into the water, be set free from that which is subjective on the further bank of Styx."

Then I, laughing, "This hardly coincides, Alcibiades, with Protagoras's opinion, that subjective truth was alone useful."

But rather proves," said Socrates, "that undiluted draughts of it are of a hurtful and poisonous nature, and require to be tempered with somewhat of objective truth, before it is safe to use them; at least, in the case of bridges."

We should be glad to continue our quotations, and to unfold the whole tenor of this beautiful and instructive dialogue; but we hope it will be republished in this country, that our readers may get it for themselves.

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