recommend to their attention the ensuing remarks; which, though they may seem to relate to points of subordinate importance, will be found to be intimately connected with the success of their ministerial functions, and the best interests of the Establishment. In the reading of the Liturgy it is of importance that your attention be ever ready, and your devotion ever fervent. The habitual repetition of public prayers, to those who give way to that worst of Sirens, Sloth, becomes irksome and fatiguing. They perform their duty, as it were an hard task. By an unimpressive tone of voice, cold manner, and disgusting haste, they render their hearers more attentive to their pastor's neglect of duty, than solicitous about the discharge of their own. Moreover, your industry must be shewn in the composition, and, occasionally, the selection, of your public discourses. Regard in them should be ever had to the comprehension and peculiar circumstances of your audience. Sometimes perhaps it will be found necessary to advert to the prevailing follies and errours of the times. And here, I should hope, it is superfluous to remark that, in censuring folly or vice, we must avoid, with scrupulous care, whatever may have the semblance of personality; and, in recording our dissent from errours in opinion, we must beware, lest we ourselves incur the blame of that worst of heresies, Intolerance.' The ninth sermon exhibits a perspicuous and attractive delineation of the duties in which true religion consists; and of those great essentials, without the presence of which it is only a vain shadow or an unprofitable ceremonial. The text prefixed to this discourse is that excellent summary of genuine unsophisticated religion which is given by St. James, chap. i. v. 27., "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this; to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself unspotted from the world." Those ministers of the Establishment, who have assumed the title of Evangelical, insist almost exclusively on what they call " Vital Christianity" by which they mean that kind of Christianity which they have woven into a variegated web of mysterious and uncertain doctrines, that have little or no connection with practical goodness, or with those duties which are included in the characteristics of true religion as they have been inculcated by St. James. Let it be remembered, as Dr. Maltby has said, that no apostle or evangelist could have had better opportunities of knowing what ideas ought to be affixed to the word "Religion" than St. James, since he learned all that he knew of the subject from the lips of our blessed Lord.'As the preacher infers from the express injunctions of Saint James, • Vital Vital religion cannot be separated from practical religion: and in vain will a man seem to be religious by the profession of faith, or the observance of external ceremonies; unless to that, which is done in honour of God, is superadded that, which is done for the happiness of man. Such, then, according to St. James, is true Religion, as uniting piety with benevolence; it is, to do good, and to be good; and whatever cannot be fairly considered as included in this definition, may be presumed to be by no means essential, and, under some circumstances perhaps, may be repugnant, to the spirit of true Religion.' The eleventh is an admirable discourse, and one of the best in the volume. It was preached before the University of Cambridge, in December, 1815. By an accurate delineation of the conduct and the tenets of the Pharisees, which Christ so pointedly reprobates, the author succeeds in throwing light on the genuine nature of that doctrine which our Lord himself taught, and on the real unalloyed righte ousness by which he exhorted his followers to be characterized. That ceremonious scrupulosity, ostentatious piety, and counterfeit goodness, which Jesus condemned in the Pharisees, he certainly could not approve in his own disciples. If the Pharisees were remarkable for spiritual pride, for devotional parade, for hypocritical beneficence, and for an affected nicety about minute and insignificant observances, it is clear that Christians ought to be distinguished by more humble qualities, more artless worth, and more undissembled charity. salu One of the qualities, which Jesus warmly reproved in the Pharisees, was the proselyting spirit by which they were animated, and in the attempt to gratify which they were impelled more by the desire of aggrandizing their own sect than by that of removing any vitiating error or diffusing any tary truth. The remarks which Dr. Maltby offers on this subject do him great credit; and the more, as they are in opposition to the opinions of a powerful body of religionists in this country, whose zeal in making converts is not always tempered by a sober discretion, and may sometimes be liable to the imputation of precipitancy and intolerance. At the commencement of the twelfth discourse, we find some very judicious remarks on the composition of the Gospels, and particularly on that of St. Luke. In the progress of this sermon, the author evinces considerable sagacity in shewing how particular facts and details in one Gospel are illustrated by circumstances that appear to be fortuitously inserted in another. These circumstances may be usefully employed to establish the chronological order, or the specific locality, X 2 locality, of certain occurrences in the Gospel-history; and, at the same time, they furnish an argument in support of the reality of those occurrences themselves, which a series of undesigned coincidences cannot fail to supply. At p. 242. the preacher makes a just distinction between that doctrine of a numerous and flourishing sect which denies the power of doing good without the operation of irresistible grace, and the opposite conclusion of the Romish church, that we may do more good than enough for ourselves, so as to leave a superfluity for the wants of others. The sixteenth sermon was delivered at the summer-assizes at Huntingdon, in July, 1818, on this text; "And besides this, giving all diligence, add to your faith, virtue." We entirely assent to the subsequent remark: • If I were called upon,' says the preacher, to state any single cause, which appears to have tended more particularly to diminish the practical usefulness of our religion, I would say that the mischief has originated in the controversial form, which that religion has been made so often to assume. Instead of regarding the whole as a system, calculated to explain the grounds, and enforce the obligations, of moral virtue,, the attention of those, who have stood forth as its advocates, has rested upon detached particulars; and they have enlarged upon them with zeal and ability, frequently in a proportion directly the reverse of their real value. Instead of stating what is clear, pointing out what is useful, and impressing what is important, Christian teachers have too often employed themselves in exploring what is obscure, in defending what is doubtful or even untenable, and in recommending what, if not worthless, is at least insignificant.' Sermon XIX. was preached before the University of Cambridge, at the Commemoration of Benefactors, October, 1804,' and is an eloquent and interesting discourse. The author expatiates, in an animated strain of reasoning, on the general advantages of intellectual cultivation, and on the peculiar opportunities by which it is favoured in a place appropriated for that purpose; where the genius loci is calculated to operate with such a propitious influence on the sensibilities of the youthful mind. Let the advocates for ignorance read the following passage with the attention which it deserves; and they will, perhaps, cease to be enemies to the diffusion of knowlege, unless they are also enemies to pure religion and rational liberty. Ignorance is the source of many of the most afflicting evils, under which human comfort and human virtue have sickened and even expired. Idolatry, with its train of ferocious, impure, and fantastic ceremonies, asserts her dominion over minds sunk in intellectual gloom. Superstition, racked by her own mental ter rours rours and hurling around her the firebrands of bigoted zeal and savage intolerance, derives her strength from views of the Divine nature, partial and obscure. Civil tyranny, whether arrayed in the imperial purple, or waving the banners of popular power, owes its origin chiefly to the blind passions, or misguided conceptions, of the multitude. To what cause can we attribute the prevalence of infidelity amidst the pure and luminous proofs, which accompanied the first promulgation of the Gospel, but to an ignorance of the language, the manners, the opinions, and other peculiar circumstances, to which the rational believer appeals? In minds, owning obedience to the authority of Revelation, when we see notions prevail, mystical, enthusiastic, most discordant from those truths which the blessed Jesus inculcated, how can we account for the wretched inconsistency, till we perceive a fixed attachment to certain erroneous interpretations which they, who adopt them, have neither patience to examine nor courage to correct? Tenets, absurd in speculation, seldom fail to produce mischief in practice. Many of these, although happily banished from a great portion of the civilized world, still prevail in other parts of the globe to a dangerous extent. The sons of Brahma reject with horrour the most salutary medicines; the disciples of Mahomet imbibe without fear the poison of contagion. Each is beguiled by confidence in his own mistaken opinions. We cannot therefore but recognize the superiour blessedness of a people, over whom the beams of knowledge have been generally diffused.' The enlightened author argues, with great truth, that habits of study and reflection usually generate moderation and forbearance. Those who know, by experience, the difficulty of developing truth in obscure and complicated questions, are least likely to entertain sentiments of intolerance towards those who differ from them in the opinions which they form, or in the conclusions at which they arrive. Here Dr. M. thus forcibly reminds us, as well as in some other passages of these Sermons, of the manner of his venerable tutor, Dr. Parr: Whoever has studied to any good purpose must have experienced the labour and anxiety which attend a search after truth; the thin and scattered gleams, by which the path is at intervals enlivened; the errours into which we stray and the obstacles over which we stumble, before we attain unto certainty; and the persevering pace by which we slowly, and almost imperceptibly, advance towards the object we have in view. He, who has this consciousness, may ultimately repose in the conclusions, which long and patient research has enabled him to draw: but (when the way is so much perplexed, and the view so often bounded) he will never wonder and still less be displeased that another should mistake the road, and arrive at a different result. Europe and Asia were split into factions by the metaphysical subtleties of the Nestorians and Eutychians. The blood of our own progenitors flowed in streams from the sullen dogmatism of Papists and the unyielding folly X 3 folly of fanatics. Surely we must allow that large additions may be made to the tranquillity of mankind by candour and moderation in the management of controversies.' The operation of the genius loci on the minds of the students in the University of Cambridge is thus briefly but forcibly expressed: Must not the youthful philosopher feel a tenfold spur to his diligence when he is trained in the schools where dawned the genius of Bacon and of Newton? The poet feels his imagination fired, while he wanders in the gardens consecrated by the muse of a Spenser, a Dryden, a Milton, and a Gray, The scholar and the divine are encouraged in their respective pursuits, while they meditate in the secluded paths once dear to Erasmus, to Joseph Mede, to Jeremy Taylor, to a Barrow, to a Pearson and a Bentley."' In the XXth sermon, preached before the University of Cambridge, on Whitsunday, 1817, Dr. M. contends that the Christian religion could not have been propagated with so much rapidity and success, without the supernatural aid which was vouchsafed to its teachers on the day of Pentecost. This argument is ably employed to support the truth of Christianity. The XXIVth and last sermon was delivered on the day appointed for the funeral of the late much lamented Princess Charlotte of Wales. It is impressive, and well-suited to the melancholy occasion: but Dr. Maltby excels more in the argumentative than in the pathetic, and is always more powerful in his addresses to the reason than in his appeals to the affections of his audience. Yet, as he is what we would call an earnest preacher, his earnestness will be sometimes found to supply the place of pathos; and it is such as to exclude all idea of insincerity or affectation, than which nothing can tend more to invalidate the authority of the preacher and destroy the effect of his admonitions. We are glad to observe that Dr. Maltby promises another volume. ART. XII. o the affairs of the East Indies we have frequently to invite the somewhat reluctant attention of the public. An important work on the subject was that of Colonel Mark Wilkes, noticed in our eighty-fifth volume, p. 386.; and the publication before us is a kind of episode to that majestic epopea. It is introduced by a summary of the Mahratta history, with a view to |