foretaste of the book, than by giving in their order the titles of its twenty-three sermons.

I. EVERY MAN'S LIFE A PLAN OF GOD.-II. THE SPIRIT IN MAN.-III. DIGNITY OF HUMAN Nature shown FROM ITS RUINS.-IV. THE HUNGER OF THE SOUL.-V. THE REASON OF FAITH.-VI. REGENERATION.-VII. THE PERSONAL LOVE AND LEAD OF CHRIST.-VIII. LIGHT ON THE CLOUD.-IX. THE CAPACITY OF RELIGION EXTIRPATED BY DISUSE.-X. UNCONSCIOUS INFLUENCE.-XI. OBLIGATION A PRIVILEGE.-XII. HAPPINESS AND JOY.-XIII. THE TRUE Problem of CHRISTIAN EXPRRIENCE.-XIV. THE LOST PURITY RESTORED.-XV. LIVING TO GOD IN SMALLь THINGS.-XVI. THE POWER OF AN ENDLESS LIFE.-XVII. RESPECTABLE SIN.XVIII. THE POWER OF GOD IN SELF-SACRIFICE.-XIX. DUTY NOT MEASURED BY Our Own ABILITY.-XX. HE THAT KNOWS GOD WILL CONFESS HIM.-XXI. THE EFFICIENCY OF THE PASSIVE VIRTUES.-XXII. SPIRITUAL DISLODGEMENTS.-XXIII. CHRIST AS SEPARATE FROM THE WORLD.

We quote also from the sermon on 'Regeneration,' pp. 121-22.

"No man will ever be united to God, except in and by a love that embraces or entemples God. No man ever will be changed in his ruling love, except in the embrace of God, and His revelation in the soul. The consequences therefore of the change will be such as belong to both. The soul is now entered into rest; rest in love, rest in God. It is flooded also with a wondrously luminous joy; its whole horizon is filled with light; the light of a new love, the light of God revealed within. It has the beginning of true blessedness. Because God himself, and the principle of God's own blessedness are in it. It settles into peace; for now it is at one with God and all the creatures of God. It is filled with the confidence of hope; because God, who is wholly given himself to a right love, will never forsake it, in life or death. It is free to good, inclined to good; for the good love reigns in it, and it would even have to deny itself not to do the works of love. It consciously knows God, within; for God is there now in a new relation, love present to love, love answering to love. There is no alienation, or separation, but oneness. If a man love me, says the Saviour, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him and make our abode with him. That abode in the soul is a new condition of divine movement; for it is in the movement of God. All things, of course, are new. Life proceeds from a new center, of which God is the rest and prop. The Bible is a new book, because there is a light in the soul by which to read it. Duties are new, because the divine love the soul is in has changed all the relations of time and the aims of life. The saints of God on earth are no longer shunned, but greeted in new terms of celestial brotherhood. The very world itself is revealed in new beauty and joy to the mind, because it is looked upon with another and different love, and beheld as the symbol of God.

"But let this one caution be observed. You are likely to be more attracted by the consequences of the change than by the change itself. But with the consequences you have nothing to do. God will take care of these. It may be that your mind will be so artificial, or so confused, as to miss the consequences for a time, after the reality is passed. But God will bring them out in his own good time, perhaps gradually, certainly in the way that is best for you. Let him do his own work, and be it yours to look after nothing but the new love."

We add another in a different strain, from 'Light on the Cloud,' pp. 160-61.

"In closing the review of such a subject as this, let us first of all receive a lesson of modesty, and particularly such as are most wont to complain of God, and boldest in their judgments against him. Which way soever we turn, in our search after knowledge, we run against mystery at the second or third step. And a great part of our misery, a still greater of our unbelief, and all the lunatic rage of our skepticism, arises in the fact that we either do not, or will not see it to be so. Ignorance trying to comprehend what is inscrutable, and out of patience, that it cannot make the high things of God come down to its own petty measures, is the definition of all atheism. There is no true comfort in life, no dignity in reason apart from modesty. We wrangle with providence and call it reason, we rush upon God's mysteries, and tear ourselves against the appointments of his throne, and then, because we bleed, complain that he cruelly mocks our understanding. All our disputings and hard speeches are the frothing of our ignorance, maddened by our pride. O! if we could see our own limitations, and how little it is possible for us to know of matters infinite, how much less, clouded by the necessary blindness of a mind disordered by evil, we should then be in a way to learn, and the lessons God will teach would put us in a way to know what now is hidden from us. Knowledge puffeth up, charity buildeth up. One makes a balloon of us, the other a temple. And as one, lighter than the wind, is driven loose in its aerial voyage, to be frozen in the airy heights of speculation, or drifted into the sea to be drowned in the waters of ignorance, which it risked without ability to swim, so the other, grounded on a rock, rises into solid majesty, proportionate, enduring, and strong."

No one who knows practically the value of books of devotion, can fail to have a high regard for the celebrated 'Imitation of Christ,' by Thomas à Kempis. We are glad to see a new edition* of it. In addition to the valuable treatise, printed with clear type on a fair page, this new improved edition' contains Dr. Chalmers' excellent Essay on the relation of this celebrated tract to the doctrine of Justification by Faith; an essay which is admirably calculated to prevent any misconception or misconstruction of the book in this particular. But most valuable is the Life of the Author-reprinted from Ullmann's Reformers before the Reformation.' Here we have presented the germ from which the book grew, and of whose quality it is the expression. As we peruse it we see more clearly than any essay can state, the one-sided and completely subjective view of life held by the author, and learn hence rightly to estimate his directions in regard to the cultivation of Christian character. We see moreover this side of Christianity, which is a

*The Imitation of Christ, by THOMAS & KEMPIS. With an Introductory Essay by THOMAS CHALMERS, D. D., and a Life of the Author, by C. ULLMAN, D. D. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 1856.

true, though not the only true one, beautifully exemplified in the life, and are incited by it to strive more earnestly to attain what his treatise shows us how to attain. This biography is therefore a most important addition, both as a means of exposition and a practical commentary, and renders this edition superior to any which has fallen in our way. In the busy life of this western hemisphere, mysticism is one of the dangers to which we are least liable. Our danger lies rather in the other direction. We are called upon so constantly to act, that we are in danger of forgetting to be. We may safely cultivate the meditative piety which Thomas à Kempis illustrated and expounded. If we had more of it, our Christian character would be far deeper than it now is.

Among the specialities in theological literature that demand a passing notice is one printed in Boston for the author, who dates his preface at Yazoo City, (Miss.,) and represents himself as not connected with any denomination.* Its ambiguous title might be still further extended by describing the conclusion reached as one perfectly satisfactory to those who reject the Abrahamic covenant and admit none but believers to the rite of baptism. The discussion is carried on in the form of a dialogue between a Calvinist, an Arminian, and the author, with a startling array of syllogisms and cross references, and even of mathematical propositions and diagrams; and the confidence with which the writer announces and re-affirms his views, reminds us of the remark recently made concerning a distinguished theologian, that 'his only heresy consisted in supposing that a thing was proved, because he had proved it.' In order to determine the question whether the Bible is for or against infant baptism, the interlocutors lay down certain principles in which they are supposed to agree, or which are admitted for argument's sake, and proceed to examine the argument derived from the rite of circumcision. The advocates of infant baptism are represented as conceding that our Saviour, in his conversation with Nicodemus, spoke only of the visible church, or the kingdom of God in this world; and hence, that those who are born of the flesh, whoever their progenitors may be, cannot enter into the church without a regeneration and another birth, which is a spiritual birth. On the ground, then, that the children of believing parents do not by virtue of their parentage sustain the same relation to the church of Christ as the children of Jewish parents sus

* The Tecnobaptist: A Discourse, wherein an Honest Baptist, by a course of argument to which no honest Baptist can object, is convinced that Infant Christians are proper subjects of Christian Baptism. By R. B. MAYES. Boston: Printed by John Wilson & Son, 22 School-st. 1857. pp. 172.

tained to the Old Testament church, the author argues, with great appearance of candor, and we are inclined to admit, with irresistible force, that one must be born into the church before he becomes entitled to baptism. And so he comes to "the belief that infants are proper subjects of baptism in the New Testament church; not, indeed, carnal infants, but only spiritual infants,-new born babes in Christ, begotten through the Gospel, born of the Spirit, nurtured with the sincere milk of the word." Such is the doctrine which he calls Tecnobaptism—from τεκνων βαπτισμα, baptism of children.

But the fatal defect in this process, by which the children of believing parents, as such, are forbidden to come to the baptismal font, is the denial of their birth-right by virtue of the Abrahamic covenant. The author, while expending many words upon the Old Testament church and upon circumcision as the outward sign of membership, seems to be in the dark in respect to that covenant and the blessings which it promised. And whatever may be the merits of his book, he certainly has not grappled with the arguments that go to show that the church now, as of old, includes believers and their households. We cannot find in those solemn words that revealed to Nicodemus the necessity of a new birth, anything inconsistent with the view current throughout Christendom, though rejected by the Baptists, that the children of professing Christians are to be enrolled in the visible church of Christ, as children of the covenant. And, indeed, the words of Jesus, in which he rebuked his disciples and welcomed the infant children that were brought for his blessing, cannot easily be set aside. "Suffer the little children and forbid them not to come unto me: for of such-of these, and such as these, the children of my friends-is the kingdom of heaven." Until we are convinced that the covenant that was confirmed before of God in Christ, has been disannulled and made of none effect, we shall not feel disturbed by any antipedobaptist arguments based upon the assumption that the children of Christians are aliens from the commonwealth of Israel and strangers from the covenant of promise.

PHILOSOPHY.

but a single book. The of that well known author,

In this department, we shall notice Messrs. Harper have sent us a new work Isaac Taylor, entitled the World of Mind.* into the field of psychology. Many years ago, in treating of the intro

This is not his first essay

*The World of Mind.* An Elementary Book. By ISAAC TAYLOR, New York: Harper & Brothers. 1858. 12mo. pp. 378.

duction of theories of the Will into the domain of Christian Theology, he gave us an essay towards his own theory of the Will. Still later, he published a small work entitled the Elements of Thought, which con sists of extended definitions and explanations of the leading terms used in the science of the mind. These definitions show reading and thought, but they are not always precisely conceived or exactly expressed.

The work before us is more ambitious than either of those described, and is more valuable. It is called an elementary book. It might better be entitled an introduction to the world of mind, by analytic or tentative researches. It has the advantages of this method in being more free and natural than the ordinary manuals for school and college instruction. The reader is carried forward step by step, through the transitions of thought which naturally present themselves. The way is enlivened by abundant illustrations, and the discussion is relieved entirely of the repelling form of abstract terms, and hard and formal definitions. A much wider range of thought is offered than psychologists usually allow themselves, and the handling of the themes is in the free and easy method of the essay, rather than after the positive and dogmatic laying down of the pedagogue. If one looks for a book which may be used in elementary instruction, he will be disappointed, but if & work is sought which may stimulate the thoughts, and liberalize and elevate the conceptions of the elementary or the advanced student, this book can be recommended as well worthy of attention.

The author is no copyist. He thinks and writes in his own way. He is always rich in suggestions, and he excites and interests even when he does not satisfy. But we have said enough to lead those of our readers who are interested in psychological studies to procure and read this volume.

BIOGRAPHY.

We have at length received the second part of Dr. Sprague's great work on the American Clergy,* which has been delayed for some months by the pecuniary embarrassments of the country. This embraces the Presbyterian divines in two volumes containing fifteen hundred pages; and extending from Francis Makemie, the father of the Presbyterian Church, who came from Ireland to America about 1590,

* Annals of the American Pulpit, or Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of various denominations, from the early settlement of the country, to the close of the year eighteen hundred and fifty-five. With historical introductions. By WILLIAM B. SPRAGUE, D. D. Volumes III and IV. Robert Carter & Brothers. New York: 1858.