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places with the Deity. Our diversities of moral disposition and character place the ethics of the New Testament in the same category. Our moral institutions (so called) are a motley mixture of conscience, prejudice, and passion; they are the aggregate of our existing characters. They determine the right or the unlawfulness of resentment, the limits of forbearance and benevolence, the conflicting claims of the animal and the spiritual nature, not by an unvarying standard, but by the stage of moral progress at which we are for the time being. If left to shape our own religion from the materials before us in the New Testament, we must needs except those doctrines which coincide with our preconceived opinions, those precepts which accord with our previous standard, and shall lay all that transcends this measure to the account of Oriental exaggeration, or of the peculiar stress of that primitive age. Christianity will thus be a variable quantity, and the term Christian so utterly indeterminate, that self-complacency and a well-drugged conscience would be sufficient to entitle the wildest day-dreamer or the most abandoned sinner to appropriate it. Under this theory, progress is impossible; for, by its very terms, the religion of the New Testament must be pared down to the standard of the individual, instead of the individual's raising himself to the standard of the Gospel. This condition of things is admirably delineated by Harrington in the following paragraph.

"The miracles, then, and other evidence, not only play the part of equally supporting truth and falsehood, but what is still more wonderful, convert the same things, in different men, into truth and falsehood alternately. Miracles they must verily be if they can do that! A wonderful revelation it certainly is, which thus accommodates itself to the varying conditions of the human intellect and conscience, and demonstrates just so much as each of you is pleased to accept, and no more. No doubt the whole corpus dogmatum,' so supported, will, by the entire body of such believers, be eaten up; just as was the Mahometan hog, so humorously referred to by Cowper; but even that had not all its forbidden parts' miraculously shown to be unforbidden' to different minds! I do not wonder that such a revelation should need miracles; that any should be sufficient, is the greatest wonder of all; if indeed we except two;-the first, that Supreme Wisdom should

have constructed such a curious revelation, in which he has revealed alternately, to different people, truth and falsehood, and has established each on the very same evidence; and the second (almost as great) that any rational creature should be got to receive such a revelation on such evidence as equally applies to points which he says it does not prove, and to points which he says it does; these points, however, being, it appears, totally different in different men!"

p. 400.

Without the element of authority, we have no revelation; and the more ample the crude materials for the construction of our religious fabrics, the greater is our liability to essential error in selecting and arranging them. The question of the authority of the Scriptures takes precedence (and by a long interval) of that of the degree and mode in which the sacred writers were supernaturally inspired. Whether they were, by their personal intercourse with Jesus Christ, so placed in the very focus of spiritual light, that with no more than the ordinary exercise of their faculties, they could be his reliable biographers and reporters; whether their inspiration was a general illumination and elevation of their inward being, or whether they were specially endowed with reference to the books which they severally contributed to the sacred canon, it may be impossible for us to determine; and, even had we the precise formula for inspiration, our conceptions of the spiritual experience of the evangelists and apostles must at best be utterly inadequate. It is of no immediate practical concern for us to know how the Scriptures were written, while we do need and crave to know what they are to us, whether merely suggestive or of plenary authority. Now it is self-evident that, if the Christian revelation were designed for the perpetual benefit of the race, and not for the enlightenment of a single generation, there must have been some reliable mode provided for the transmission of its teachings and requirements. If it is incumbent on us to be Christians, it is no less essential to us than it was to the apostles, to know what Jesus was, said, and did; and it is of no possible concern or avail to mankind at large, that he had a company of personal followers, if they were liable to misreport him, by blending their folly with his wisdom, by ascribing to him their own misconceptions, by putting into his mouth their own unwarranted

inferences from the tenor of his discourse, or by representing his image as seen through the colored or magnifying media of their prejudice or their mavellousness. When we find reason to believe that we are possessed of such scriptures, we shall be ready to throw them aside, and shall deem it safer to feel our way in the dark, than to perplex ourselves with a light which we can never know when to trust.

We have indicated but imperfectly the contents of the volume under review. With a strict unity of plan and purpose, it discusses a great variety of theological topics, and shows a writer thoroughly versed in the multiform, yet shallow infidelity of the present generation, and in that deeper lore of sacred things, the neglect of which lies at the root of all the moral, social and political evils of our times. Among the subjects treated with peculiar ability, are the influence of Christianity on the condition of woman, its relation to domestic slavery, and the circumstances of its early diffusion in their bearing on the question of its divine origin,- on all which points the loose assertions of Newman are more than refuted, are thoroughly riddled, and scattered to the winds. We find it peculiarly difficult to make extracts from this work; for the separate conversations and essays are too long to be quoted entire, and too compact to be dismembered without doing them gross injustice. We shall be happy if what we have written should contribute to the wider circulation of a book which can hardly fail to profit those who read it, and cannot fail to edify those who stand in no need of its reasonings.

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respondence of the American Revolution; being Eminent Men to George Washington, from the taking Command of the Army to the End of his

Edited from the original Manuscripts. By PARKS. 4 vols. 8vo. pp. 549, 554, 560, 555. Bosttle, Brown & Company. 1853.

engaged upon his collection of Washington's writ

ks had in his hands a large mass of original

letters addressed to the chief by co-laborers in his public life. Mr. Sparks had copies taken, and availed himself of a portion for the illustrations of his great work contained in the notes and appendixes. There remained several thousands which had not been thus used. From these he has selected, for the present publication, about a thousand, from about a hundred and ninety writers. Appendixes to the first and second volumes, relating to the operations in Canada in 1775-76, those in Virginia and South Carolina in 1776, and those against Burgoyne and on Hudson's River in 1777, are made up of letters, about a hundred and fifty in number, which passed between the secondary actors of the time. These are principally copies from the originals, preserved among the papers of Generals Schuyler, Gates, Lee, Lincoln, Sullivan, Stark, Baron Steuben, and others.

There is no more delightful reading than such disinterred records of the thoughts and doings of the hour, in the correspondence of persons concerned in some great historical action, — with their resurrection of long perished loves and hates, triumphs and griefs, of hopes and fears, proved baseless afterwards perhaps, but calling the strongest passions into play, and daguerreotyping them in the letter written as they swept across the scene. Before our day, history has set down the great result. That stands, for the present and coming ages, a thing ascertained and unchangeable. But time was, when it was only one element possible to come into act among the infinite uncertainties of the future. When brought about, it was through complex labors, devices, and anxieties, and through a working and counter-working of a vast variety of agencies. There is an indescribable charm in being carried back to the time and place where the thought of some sage or hero seems to have determined some great issue for future ages, and sharing with him the privacy where the problem was wrought out.

As authentic and trustworthy contributions to history, documents of this description have an authority beyond all others. The public and accredited hearsay of the time of which he is writing must answer the historian's purpose, when he can do no better. The newspaper statements, weighed together,

and sifted with due caution, are worthy of his regard. Often, from peculiar circumstances, the journals and letters of private persons are entitled to full confidence; and oftener, they are good evidence of what was currently believed, and what is, therefore, more or less likely to have been true. But when Greene or Arnold writes to his superior officer that he has just fought a battle under such and such circumstances, or Morris communicates the state of the finances, or Jay the posture of a foreign negotiation, or Lee that of a question pending in Congress, there is an end so far to ignorance and doubt. The historian has nothing to do but to tell the tale as 't was told to him.

Such books are not only the best materials for history; they are a history more lively and fascinating than the more pretending compositions for which they provide materials. In them the writers appear, as they appeared and acted in life, not as wooden machines for grinding out the independence and prosperity of a commonwealth, but with the variety and human interest of individuals. The reader sees what he might reasonably have guessed, but what it is more agreeable to see, that the function of giving him freedom was not divided among men all run in the same mould, fortemque Gyan, fortemque Cloanthum,-but among men of the usual diversity of make, rash and timid, sanguine and saturnine, generous and suspicious, stern and affectionate, like any equal number of other people possessing qualities such as to bring them, at a critical period, into the front of affairs.

There is a beautiful dramatic variety of character in these volumes. Each writer is as different from every other as men in reality always are, but as formal history has not space to exhibit them, and as indeed history is not able to exhibit them, for the historian can draw no such spirited sketches as their own pens involuntarily trace of themselves. Here is a great gallery of portraits of historical men, self-delineated. The eye ranges over peopled walls. Near the entrance, it rests on a full length presentment of Hamilton, at twenty, beginning a succession of pictures of that rare genius, from the time when, an already famous boy, he became the favorite and confidential aid of the commander-in-chief, to that, when, having been

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