dences for Christian truth which modern opinion demands, and has that fairness of tone, that honesty of statement, that comprehensive and suggestive treatment, and to some degree that sympathetic power, which make it a reasoning and reasonable book for reasoning men. BOOK NOTICES. THE RELIGION OF THE CHRIST.-Its Historic and Literary Development considered as an evidence of its Origin. The Bampton Lectures for 1874. By the Rev. Stanley Leathes, M. A. 8vo. pp. 404. NEW YORK: POTT, YOUNG & Co. 1874. It is a significant fact that the first Church publishing house in this country considers the Bampton Lectures of sufficient importance to buy an edition for this country. Since Canon Liddon's celebrated volume on the Divinity of Christ they have steadily risen in importance and are rapidly becoming the accepted and standard teaching of the Church in theology. The ablest men in England have been invited to occupy this chair at Oxford, and the Bampton Lectures are known wherever men are interested in the defence of the Christian religion. They are beginning to constitute, in fact, a leading part of that defence; and no abler or better volume has been prepared in this way than Mr. Leathes' Religion of the Christ. Mr. Matthew Arnold in his Literature and Dogma, insisted upon the study and interpretation of the Bible as you study and interpret any new book. He would put away the vast system of commentary, and read the books as national and historical literature, and in this way remove the theological accretions of the ages and enable men to see that three-fourths at least of religion was conduct as distinguished from belief. Mr. Leathes, without saying it, has taken Mr. Arnold at his word, and endeavored to show that taking the natural historic and literary development of the Hebrew Scriptures, they contain the undeniable truths which are the facts and basis of the Christian religion. His method is precisely what the whole outcome of recent religious skepticism has demanded. He meets the critics on their own ground, and from this point he surveys the anticipations of the Christ in Heathen nations, the Christ of Jewish history, of the Psalms, of Prophecy, of the Gospels, of the Acts, of the Pauline Epistles, and of the other New Testament Books. His Lectures are really a comprehensive commentary on the Old Testament, with reference to the indications of the Christ to come, and on the New Testament with reference to the incontestable evidence that the man Christ Jesus was the true Jewish Messiah. He argues the case point by point, not by what other men have said, not by the "much learning" which makes readers "mad" if it does not produce the same effect in a different sense upon the writer, but by accurate investigations of the simplest and most obvious character, by the attempt to account for the fact of the Christ in any other way, by the process which goes to the bottom of the subject and meets even the unconscious unbelief of those who are not scholars. It is a work of singular clearness and well-digested argument. Very few foot notes encumber the pages, the style is flexible and easy, the words always simple and easily understood, and the whole work unites the highest literary excellence to an argument which meets all the modern skeptical critics on their own ground, without so much as even calling them by name. The preface is a marvel of clear, forcible, close, pointed, effective reasoning; and the book should go not merely to the tables of the clergy but into the homes of every man and woman who wishes to hold the Religion of the Christ without the uneasy doubts which books like Mill's Essays on Religion are calculated to create. We have never read Mr. Leathes' previous works, but if they are as good as this, he is a writer of the very first order on Christian Evidence, and as modest as he is able. We have no space for quotation or detailed criticism, for a careful reading has carried us with admiration and the author's glow of conviction through the entire work, and we find nothing to criticise unfavorably. He wears all his "weight of learning lightly like a flower," and yet never sacrifices the profounder parts of his subject for the sake of clearness or easy reading. We predict that this will be a very popular and most certainly it is a very useful book. RECOLLECTIONS OF A TOUR MADE IN SCOTLAND IN 1803. By Dorothy Wordsworth. Edited by J. C. Shairp, LL.D. NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS. 1874. This diary of a tour through the Scotch Highlands, made more than half a century since by Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Wordsworth's hardly less famous sister, is sure of some interested readers on both sides of the Tweed. In Scotland, it will find favor from its descriptions of local scenery-to true Caledonian eyes surpassing the very Alps. In England, it will be welcomed by the cultivated social circles in which the descendants of the great poet move, and by the limited school of poetry, in which admiration of Wordsworth is next to a religion. But outside of these special influences, and particularly in our own land, we are much disposed to question whether it will excite much interest, or indeed, to be candid, find a score of readers who will succeed in reaching the end. We have no doubt but that many enthusiastic lovers of Coleridge or Wordsworth, lured by the title and the charming preface of Principal Shairp, will open the book with a thrill of delightful anticipation— as, it must be confessed, occurred in at least one individual case. It is simply natural to expect that to travel in such high company will be the intellectual treat par eminence-the "deorum coena"of a life-time. Surely the communings of these kindred spirits, amidst the inspiration of Highland air and scenery-the talk of Coleridge, greater than his philosophy or poetry—the musings of nature's chief high priest from behind the outer veil-will not be without worthy chronicle at the competent hands of their admiring and sympathetic friend. But such expectation dies in speedy disappointment-if personal experience goes for anything. For aught to the contrary in the journal, the poets proved the dullest and most unsatisfactory of traveling companions. The sublime Wordsworth, as "William," appears only in connection with the pettiest incidents of travel—the steepness of a mountain road-the oversight of the old, overworked horse, to whom the heavy vehicle, with its poetic load, must have seemed the sorriest prose-the score and lodging of the country inn-while Coleridge, under a perpetual cloud of indigestion and low spirits, wanders off alone in most eccentric and inexplicable divergences, or lies, like a wet blanket, upon the enjoyment of his anxious friends. Once, looking at a noble waterfall in the mountains, indeed, he hears and repeats with approval the word "majestic," as specially fitting to render the effect and that is his solitary recorded utterance. Nor, we apprehend, will the disappointment be assuaged by the intrinsic literary merit of the journal itself, though that merit of its kind, is of the highest order. It must be confessed, that there are no more exquisite word-pictures in all the English Tongue than Miss Wordsworth's delineations of Highland scenery in her itinerary. Her mind, of childlike simplicity, yet to the highest degree both artistic and poetic, and her style, its verbal duplicate, (if the phrase is pardonable), reflect every varying aspect of nature, in sky or earth, with all the minute faithfulness of the silver lochs, whose grassy banks she loved-but with a fond tenderness-a lovingness of touch, that nature lacks that comes alone from the human heart, warm with the glow of pious devotion. As a most admirable study of English we can commend the journal, with all our heart. It is a model whose simple perfection should put to shame the affected fine writing, so characteristic of the modern tourist. Nevertheless, (having thus qualified our first expression of opinion almost to inconsistency), as the journey was a long one, and each day's scenery is verbally photographed in a very disproportionate and insufficient setting of incidents of travel, the effect of the endless succession of views, often only slightly varied, soon becomes confusing and wearying. In the course of fifty pages the mind, so to speak, is thoroughly color-blind, (as in passing through a long gallery, hung continuously with landscapes, though they come from the inspired pencil of Turner himself), and the book is at last thrown aside half read with a sense of painful bewilderment-a consciousness of having carried away from its pages a hundred views all mixed in confusion-too marked, not to stand ominously in the way of further perusal. The reader, who may possess the art of separating this long panorama into its distinctive views, and keeping them thus in his memory, will never regret having traveled from cover to cover, with his gifted guide-but such a reader, in this day of many books, is a rara avis. The thoughts which Wordsworth did not commit to spoken |