availeth much." And here in the retirement of their cloisters might the sisters at home pray GoD to bless the labour of those who are away and at work. Their whole lives having been dedicated in a special manner to do GoD service, how much of that service would be completed by prayer! and who would be effecting the greatest good for the poor, diseased, and sinful? The sisters at home who are praying for them, or the sisters away who are serving them?

But both time and space compel us to leave this portion of our subject-incomplete as it is; yet sufficient perhaps has been said to suggest thoughts to our readers, which at their leisure it may please them to pursue more at length in their own minds. We shall conclude now with some very brief observations on the necessity of gentlemen aiding in this great work. It is for the most part true, that from those so called "gentlemen"-men of money and of education-come the "friends" of our poor outcasts. Generally it will be found that a "gentleman" has seduced, and that a gentleman" is supporting any such an one in evil, whose particular case happens to be inquired into. Now since those who possess the talents of gentle manners, money and education, are those who possess the power of deceiving and destroying our unfortunate sisters-so assuredly none below these, in rank and estate, should be called upon to lead the forsaken and betrayed from error to truth, and from sin to virtue. Persons who in sin have been habituated to gentler converse than their compeers, will require gentle persuasion, and gentle feeling to teach them pureness of heart, and truthfulness of word. If those who would save these lost ones, are unable to present to their external view, a sight as goodly as those who ruined them-the poor creatures have nothing to counterbalance the seeming superiority of their fiendish associates. We know of a House of Refuge to which a " scripture reader" is connected, for the purpose of endeavouring to bring the poor girls from the streets to its protection. And we are likewise acquainted with instances, in which some women were anxious to leave their course of sin, and had expressed their intention of entering a Penitentiary-to whom this missionary was sent, and we fear his persuasions to good, turned the current of their inclination to evil they refused to be reclaimed-and certain expressions that fell from the missionary, were given as the reason of their relapse. They had not drunk deeply of their bitter cup of misery-they were young, and "well to do"-and this state was better than the one to which this ignorant (though earnest) man had represented they should go to. We have not related this circumstance for the sake of argument, but merely to illustrate more thoroughly the meaning of what we have just advanced. Nor would we assert that the influence of such an individual is in all cases without advantage, -there may be many, who having become aged in their course,

might gladly follow any one who offered them food, raiment, and peace; all we assert is, that to the the aryoung and prosperous, guments of a " scripture reader" or "missionary" would in most cases be ineffectual.

Should there be individuals who would gladly proffer personal aid, were it not for the fear of pollution, or from fear that even the touch of the unclean might lead them into sin-we ask such to seek for strength in the prayers and ordinances of the Church. If in each large town there was a body of men, who united themselves in a brotherhood of love for the object we are now speaking of, and strengthened themselves for the arduous and dangerous work before them, by constant prayer, frequent reception of the Holy Eucharist, and regular Confession to some Priest acting as their superior, and dividing to each his appropriate work-GOD would surely prosper them, and their harvest would be an abundant one. When will the time be when the Church will have means enough at her disposal to forward this work to the uttermost? When will men realize the truth that their seed sown in this life, shall be reaped a hundredfold in the life to come? In this age of supposed religious advancement, and charitable institutions, the fact of many poor sinners, desirous of mending their lives, being turned from the doors of those Houses in which they sought the recovery of their souls, is enough to humble our pride. This age of piety is not one in which the sinner is to be sought, but one in which the sinner is ready to come, but cannot be received. May GOD pardon our shortcomings, and enable us to do more for His glory, and the wellbeing of His holy Church.

Hitherto we have spoken only of Penitentiaries for females. But why should not some Retreats be opened also for our male population? Every parish priest must know that there are drunkards in great numbers and others of unclean life, desirous of being reclaimed, but where can they find a Refuge? Again, every gaolchaplain must know that numbers pass every year from under their care only again to fall into sin, whom peradventure careful individual religious discipline might again restore to a life of usefulness and respectability.

The American Church, we observe, is organizing a system of Brotherhoods, by some of which peradventure more definite acts of mercy may ere long be undertaken. We note also with satisfaction (they will pardon us for adverting to the fact in this connection) that the Provost and Chapter of the College of the Holy Spirit at Cumbrae, offer to receive clergy who are invalided or otherwise incapacitated for work, for the purpose of a temporary Retreat. These are favourable signs.

TRENCH'S ENGLISH PAST AND PRESENT.

English Past and Present. By R. C. TRENCH, B.D., Vicar of Itchenstoke, Hants; Examining Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Oxford; and Professor of Divinity, King's College, London. John W. Parker.

THOUGH wanting in the freshness and interest of his lectures on the Study of Words, and though composed of less amusing materials than his work on Proverbs, Mr. Trench's present publication is more carefully and elaborately written than either of his previous contributions to what may be called English literature. Whether this arises from a growing familiarity with his subject, or from the Lectures before us having been twice delivered to different classes of hearers, it is of course impossible to decide. We can only point to the results, and say that the author has done very much to make rather a dry subject interesting to his readers, and that if patient investigation and careful arrangement of the different branches of it will insure acceptance and popularity, they are only what he deserves at the hands of the public.

The object kept in view throughout these Lectures will be best understood by the following passage, which is a fair sample of the rest of the volume :

"The love of our own language, what is it in fact but the love of our country, expressing itself in one particular direction? If the great acts of that nation to which we belong are precious to us, if we feel ourselves made greater by their greatness, summoned to a nobler life by the nobleness of Englishmen who have already lived and died, and bequeathed to us a name, which must not by us be made less, what exploits of theirs can well be nobler, what can more clearly point out their native land and ours, as having fulfilled a glorious past, as being destined for a glorious future, than that they should have acquired for themselves, and for those who come after them, a clear, a strong, an harmonious, a noble language? For all this bears witness to corresponding merits in those that speak it, to clearness of mental vision, to strength, to harmony, to nobleness in them that have gradually formed and shaped it to be the utterance of their inmost life and being.

"To know of this language, the stages which it has gone through, the quarters from which its riches have been derived, the gains which it is now making, the perils which have threatened or are threatening it, the losses which it has sustained, the latent capacities which may yet be in it, waiting to be evoked, the points in which it is superior to, in which it comes short of other tongues, all this may well be an object of worthy ambition to every one of us. So may we hope to be ourselves guardians of its purity, and not corruptors of it; to introduce, it may be, others into an intelligent knowledge of that with which we

shall have ourselves more than a merely superficial acquaintance; to bequeath it to those who come after us not worse than we received it ourselves. Spartam nactus es; hanc exorna '—this shall be our motto in respect at once of our country, and of our country's tongue."Pp. 1, 2.

For our own part, we can only say, that without attempting to compass such great designs as are set forth in these glowing words, that we can augur nothing but good from the study to which Mr. Trench invites us; it is an amusing and interesting study, which will never be pursued even superficially, without rewarding those who take it in hand. And sure we are that theological truth will not suffer from such investigations; the more the meaning and history of the various current terms in divinity are scrutinized and considered, the greater will be the hope that those expressions which declare the acts of our Blessed LORD towards His children, the acts of His HOLY SPIRIT in His representative Body the Church, will assume a reality, which few have sufficient faith and singleness of mind to attach to them.

We are, however, bound to express the conviction that the study of the English language is only important so far as it tends to throw light upon the more essential subjects of history, philosophy, and especially of theology. To make it an object and end in itself is allotting to it a degree of consideration that is disproportionate to its real value. This seems to us the danger into which Mr. Trench has fallen, and one is tempted to inquire whether such lectures as these will not lead the pupils in the Training School at Winchester, where they were delivered, to devote more time and pains than would be profitable to the investigations Mr. Trench recommends.2

We could not help feeling, as we read the book through, that the undue consequence which the author gives to his subject, has cast an air of exaggeration over his general views throughout.

There is a great deal of truth in the following passage, and we should be the last persons to throw any doubt upon the general correctness of the views advanced in it; at the same time they seem too highly coloured, and appear rather as the work of an advocate, than of an historian :—

"I do not know where we could find a happier example of the preservation of the golden mean in this matter," than in our authorised

1 A striking example of this tendency may be seen in the numerous etymological notes appended to Mr. Arthur Ramsay's Catechizer's Manual. By this kind of light to "justify" (e.g.) will be found to mean the making (not simply accounting) a person just or righteous, just as much as to sanctify is admitted to mean the making holy.

2 We fear that he is setting a dangerous example to such a class, by selecting the LORD's Prayer, or a passage in the Psalms (p. 14) as a subject of analysis, for the purpose of seeing how many Saxon and how many Latin words are contained in them.

3 The use of Latin and Anglo-Saxon words.

Version of the Bible. One of the chiefest among the minor and sécondary blessings which that Version has conferred on the nation or nations drawing spiritual life from it,—a blessing not small in itself, but only small by comparison with the infinitely higher blessings, whereof it is the vehicle to them,—is the happy wisdom, the instinctive tact, with which its authors have steered between any futile mischievous attempt to ignore the full rights of the Latin part of the language on the one side, and on the other, any burdening of their Version with such a multitude of learned Latin terms, as should cause it to forfeit its homely character, and shut up great portions of it from the understanding of plain and unlearned men. There is a remarkable confession to this effect, to the wisdom, in fact, which guided them from above, to the providence that overruled their work, an honourable acknowledgment of the immense superiority in this respect of our English Version over the Romish or Douay, made by one unhappily familiar with the latter, as once he was with our own. One of those who has forsaken the Communion of the English Church, has expressed himself in deeply touching tones of lamentation over all, which in forsaking our translation, he feels himself to have foregone and lost. These are his words:'Who will not say that the uncommon beauty and marvellous English of the Protestant Bible is not one of the great strongholds of heresy, in this country? It lives on the ear, like a music that can never be forgotten, like the sound of Church bells, which the convert hardly knows how he can forego. Its felicities often seem to be almost things rather than mere words. It is part of the national mind, and the anchor of national seriousness. The memory of the dead passes into it. The potent traditions of childhood are stereotyped in its verses. The power of all the griefs and trials of a man is hidden beneath its words. It is the representative of his best moments, and all that there has been about him of soft, and gentle, and pure, and penitent, and good, speaks to him for ever out of his English Bible. It is his sacred thing, which doubt has never dimmed, and controversy never soiled. In the length and breadth of the land, there is not a Protestant with one spark of religiousness about him whose spiritual biography is not in his Saxon Bible.'1

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"Such are his touching words; and certainly one has only to compare this version of ours with the Douay, and the far greater excellence of our own reveals itself at once. I am not speaking now in respect of superior accuracy of scholarship; nor yet of the absence of by-ends, of all turning and twisting the translation to support certain doctrines; nor yet do I allude to the fact that one translation is from the original Greek, the other only from the Latin, and thus the translation of a translation, often reproducing the mistakes of that translation. But, putting aside all considerations such as these, I would now speak only of the superiority of diction in which the meaning, be it correct or incorrect is conveyed to English readers. I open the Douay Version at Gal. v. 19, where the long list of the works of the flesh,' and the 'fruit of the Spirit' is given. But what could a mere English reader make of words such as these-'impudicity,'' ebrieties,'' comessations,' longanimity,' all which occur in that passage

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1 Dublin Review, June, 1853.

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