them in their opposition to government. The defeat of the regulators by governor Tryon relieved the Moravians from their fears. He was highly gratified by the reception, which the brethren gave him and his army. In 1759 a deputation of conference was sent them from Germany. The annals of the interior incidents and progress of this unique and highly re spectable people, as here given, are of extreme interes, but too long and detailed to be given entire. Their simplicity, order, peace, industry and piety, are attributes, which are every where connected with great prosperity, and their intrepid and unboasting zeal, as missionaries, is well known to be above all praise. Salem is the chief town of the settlement, 110 miles S. E. of Raleigh, and 36 deg. 10 min. North. It is beautifully and regularly laid out, and has the customary proportion of public buildings, of the same neatness and beauty that characterize all their estab. lishments. But this place is best known to the public by its very flourishing school. The buildings are spacious and convenient; and there are few schools for young ladies in the United States, that have on the whole a higher reputation for imparting a sound, virtuous, religious and efficient education.

Bethabara, the next town in size to Salem, and distant from it 5 miles, is a pleasant, neat and regular village. Friedland and Hope are the other chief establishments; and the whole settlement exhibits the order, neatness and industry, which every where mark the settlements of this people, who seem to be pious without persecution or bigotry; and whose religion consists in living the gospel, rather than taking books and professions about it, and who have shown a simple disinterestedness and intrepidity, and contempt of danger and death, which were the distinctive marks of primitive Christianity.

Debate on the Evidences of Christianity, containing an examination of the Social System, and all the systems of scepticism of ancient and modern times; held in the city of Cincinnati, April, 1829, between ROBERT OWEN and ALEXANDER CAMPBELL. Reported by Charles H. Simms, Esq. 2 vols, in one. pp. 551. 2d Edition. Robinson & Fairbank, Cincinnati: 1829.

An enlightened book, written in the spirit of a Christian, a scholar and a gentleman, in defence of our common christianity, and in support of the broad and immoveable basis, upon which we all stand, is a work, which we hardly expected to see in these days, when theology seems retrogra ding towards the dark ages, reversing the order of history and time, and becoming narrower, and more puerile, and insignificant and denouncing, as the world is every day becoming more careless of denunciation, and viewing with more contempt every attempt to enforce opinions upon authority. The author of this work has a rich and well stored mind. His endowments are strong in the direction of fancy and the imagination. We believe he is lineally allied to a family, which has been prolific in the most finished theological scholars, and the blood of the Douglas certainly shows itself in the work. The book, as every reader must see, is the

fruit of an immense amount of reading and research. Paley himself probably had not turned over more volumes, to store his mind with the views, reasonings and facts of the friends and enemies of Christianity; and human wisdom and research might diversify the arguments, and present them in a new form, but can find little to add to the substance of this defence. It wants the severe retrenchment, the lucid order, the energetic compactness of Paley. The circumstances, under which the book was produced, forbade it. It wants, too, the verbal carefulness, the fastidious niceness in the choice of words, the ever vigilant attention to grammatical, rhetorical and logical rules, which seem now to be viewed, as the first essentials of writing. The long habits of the author in the use of extemporaneous speaking, in pouring forth, from the fulness of his mind, the arguments and the trains of thought, elucidated by the circumstances of the moment, may explain, and with us apologize for this. The brilliance, the readiness, the fancy, the imagination, the eccentricity, the oddly assorted and connected associations of his peculiar mind are more fitted for effect in such a polemic debate, as originated this book, than for a written work, in which the general proposition is unfolded by sequence after sequence, in mathematical order, and logical connection. The course of debate, too, was constantly drawing him away from the links of a concatenated chain. Nothing could be more unfavorable to close and severe method, than the desultory, yet stubborn assaults, sneers and quibblings of his antagonist. But, as we affirmed on a former occasion, there was no closing in, no coming to issue in the debate. Mr. Owen was as little fitted, as he was disposed to wrestle with such an antagonist. Each pursued his object in a parallel, but necessarily broken and discursive series of dissertations, each verging to a given point; but each drawn into many a devious and immethodical episode by the meanders of the other.

It is to be regretted, that there is such a copious admixture of the atheism, circumstances, and eternal twelve laws, of Mr. Owen. The book would have been better without it. People, who purchase to become acquainted with the arguments for christianity, will hardly desire such a penny-worth to be included in their bargain. But, perhaps, it were as well, that they should see the bane and antidote contrasted; that they should learn, what can be adduced against the faith and hope of Christianity, and be convinced, that after all, ridicule is the ultimate weapon, upon which sceptics rely. As it is, here are the harangues of an acute and ready dis putant, who has read all, that has been written for and against the gospel; who is more studious to bring forth all the strong reasons, than to bring them forth in the most polished and logical garb; who is rich to redundance, whose panoply is all of steel, though not of the most glittering polish, or classical form, and who has produced on the whole an admirable book in defence of Christianity, probably more calculated to benefit the ten thousand, than Paley's on the same subject; a book which does honor to the age and to our portion of the country; a book which will continue to to be read, and to do good, after all the adventitious excitements of the debate shall have passed into oblivion, and the author and his antagonist shall both have travelled to that mysterious bourne, where that, which is here matter of discussion, quibble and ridicule, shall stand forth in the clear vision of eternity.

One feature of this book, worthy of the highest praise, must not be pretermitted. It is one of broad, liberal and philosophic views. The mind of the writer was, probably, never cramped, within the narrow, enfeebling and obfuscating limits of a sectarian scheme, which considers God's universe, and his Christianity, and his best gifts, intended only for a few scores of the dwellers in a nook of his kingdom. The Christianity of this book is that intended for human nature, for all time, and for every description of human beings.

The reader is well aware, that the grand object, the ultimate illumination of Mr. Owen & Co., including his son and successor, and Miss Frances Wright, is to cut off all mental communication with e'erni'y--to stop up all the high ways, that lead from this narrow illuminated space of life into the invisible world-to bound our hopes, fears and desires by this brief and uncertain existence-to take from us all conviction, that an unseen, intangible, universal, omnipotent existence, an all-present spirit pervades all the visible spaces above and beyond us, filling all the infinite, into which thought and imagination can travel, all the eternal future, which the mind can image, with mere nihility-leaving no unseen spirit amids the luminaries above us, no hand to roll them in their orbs, no genial influence to return spring to the earth or the tomb-giving us instead, a universe of cold and blank and heartless nothingness. Man and woman become two legged, unfeathered animals-the only gods in the chill and leaden universe. Related to nothing invisible, coming from nothing, going to nothing, accountable to no being--the circle of their pleasures and duties, beginning with the first wail of infancy, and ending with the last sigh of worn out nature, admitted to have organs, and felt to have appetites, gloze the philosophy, as they may, king Lear, on such suppositions, gave the right award, in respect to the woman of pleasure. The system, reduced to its intelligible terms, is this: you are the beginning and the end and the measure of your duties in your own person. Pleasure is the end of our existence. Upon what principles can any of these self-called philosophers point to their own moral and reputable and decorous life,if we may take their own certificates for themselves in proof of it, and call us to behold in this fact that their system does not tend to libidinousness, and the perfect abandonment of reckless debauchery? Tell man, that he is a reasoning beast, with no other and higher duties and ends, aud convince him, that he is so, and on their own showing, he must become a mere animal by the irresistible law of circumstances. Appetites without restraints will as necessarily satiate themselves, as the the thirsty man drinks, or water descends. But they say, judge our system by our deportment. We know nothing of it, but the external. But we are not so easily beguiled, as thus to have dust thrown in our eyes. When was ever more burning and inordinate ambition, than in Miss Frances Wright? What child does not see in her case the devouring and unquenchable thirst for notoriety and display?— From her own native country, where circumstances probably forbade display, to the family of the amiable and unsuspecting Lafayette, who is not to be judged by his inmates, from France to America, from one extremity of our continent to the other, she encompasses sea and land for a mouthful of the moonshine of notoriety, and with a head exalted to giddiness with vanity and ambition, lectures most eloquently against them. Read

her first book upon our country, full of praises, as thick and as mawkish as treacle, in which every thing was right, and enlightened and republican, and particularly our schools, and read, or hear her lectures now, in which every thing among us is ignorance and debasement and error. Hear her in the last expedient for notoriety, making the last appeal of the Gracchii and Catalines of other times, to the envy, jealousy and ill-feeling of the poor and laboring classes. Any thing for a party. Any flag, that will gain followers; any course, that will make a noise. Such is the palpable desire of notoriety in those who should, according to their system, have none. Where can you find a man, who spoke with more complacency, than Mr. Owen, of his acquaintance with kings, ministers, the titled, the rich and the wise? Where are to be found people, who more pertinacious ly consort with what are called the people of the upper walks of society? Where are people more studiously careful in regard to their dress and equipage and appearance? Is it asked, what pertinence these questions have to our object? Let me answer-we do not deny, that the exterior of these people may be decorous. But we utterly deny, that their morals and decorum, more or less, are the result and acting out of their principles. We say, that these speciosities, are the fruit of their much abused, ‘old society. The morals, which they practise, the decorum, which they boast, as the fruit and tendency of this new light, is in truth, and fact, the fruit of that old light, which they are vainly, as we hope, attempting to extinguish.-It is wonderful, that they do not discover, that this fact must be obvious to the most undiscerning. People, who spend fortunes and traverse continents and seas for notoriety, must know, that they cannot outrage society in their general deportment. And yet, they would eradicate and destroy, root and branch, that religion, from which sprang these very morals, which they so triumphantly boast as the fruit of the system, which is to supersede it.— No. They must have a theatre for the display and the demonstration of the legitimate tendency of their system, which, we trust, they never will have, a theatre of a world of the whole assemblage of our race converted to their school. Then we should see, what the unsophisticated animals would be in this rotundity converted to a parallelogram, with no god, but their own right hand; with no hope, but between the glimmer of the first and last moment; without shame, fear, law, or guide, except appetite.— When philosophy will raise the curtain, and give us a peep into the soirees and promenades of these philosophers, when neither conscious moon nor stars nor all-seeing eye regard, then we shall have occular evidence of the morals, that grow from the doctrine of No God, and annihilation of our conscious being in death.

Imagination, taking its glorious walks in the infinite space, that surrounds us, faith and hope dwelling on unions with the great, good, endeared, beloved, and allied, that have gone before us, on the eternal hills; all those cheering and ennobling associations, vital to friendship, to remembrance, to every thing, in short, that raises us above animals, by teaching us that we are not mere animals, all beyond the tomb, and beyond the present, is to be swept away by this desolating besom with one fell swoop.→→ Man and woman are to stand forth, renouncing all, but what they can han dle with their two hands, measure with their two eyes, and enjoy with their five senses. Away, say they, with imagination; it bewilders. Away

with poetry; it is moon-shine. The worlds made themselves, for aught that appears. They roll, because they fancy to roll regularly. Man and woman sprang into life on the margin of a brook. The mother must learn, not to weep, as she lays her infant under the sod, and must sing the re quiem of annihilation over the image of a thing, which never had any fair claims to be dear. Thus would philosophy teach us to hang our harps on the willows of the river of Babylon. Thus should we learn no longer to consider ourselves connected with spiritual and angelic natures. Thus should we throw forever away the lyre, on which to beguile our short course through this region of shadows, and on which we were wont to strike up the song of Zion, and the anthem of triumph and deliverance from sorrow and death. No matter how reasonable, how educated, how philosophic you could make your illumined Owenite. He is an unsophisticated, unfeathered, biped animal, as much inferior to an ox, or a fowl, as instinct is more sure than reason, and appetite less bashful than conscience. Take from us the world of imagination, faith or hope, above and beyond us, compel us to consider ourselves as nothing but vile animals, to end in corruption and the transference of our being to the worm, that will feed upon us, and allow us nothing, but the chill, stale, flat and unprofitable actual reality of the present, and of what is in the grasp of our extended arm, and who would either wish, or endure existence? None at least, who feel with us; and least of all Mr. Owen and company. Take from the one the proud anticipation of going down to the generations to come, as the philosopher of New Lanark, not New Harmony; of quadrangles and circumstances; take from his successor his flippancy and impressions that he is a fine writer; and from Miss Wright every chance of future notoriety, and they would either drown, or study the evidences of a spiritual world, and a future life-in other words, Christianity.

To give an idea of the proposed outline of the debate, we quote Mr. Campbell's representation of the system, which he intends to refute, and the steps by which he proposes to advance to his proof.

"When by a philosophic exorcism he has cast out these indescribable spirits which haunt the cells of our crania, and emptied our heads of all their intellectual contents, we are then to make the body, and especially the abdominal viscera, the all-engrossing topic of life and death, and the capital item in our last will and testament.

Now let us glance at the method of argument by which this point is to be proved.

1. Man is to be detached from any relation to a Supreme or superior being. All debts of gratitude or obligation of any sort to an unseen or intangible agent are to be cancelled by a single act of oblivion; and when he is taught to annihilate the Creator, he is next to be taught that he is himself neither Creator nor creature, but a sort of self-existent particle of a self-existent whole.

2. Lest he should be too uplifted in his own imagination, he is to be taught that he is no more than a two-legged animal, as circumscribed by sense as a mole or a lobster.

3. That having but five senses, it is necessary that these should be analysed in order that he may be convinced that nothing can be known of which they are