it; this has at times been shown me, and evidenced by so much and various experience, that not the least doubt is left.'

'Coleridge's suggestive hint,' it appears, did not carry Dr. Macleod quite so far as he had expected. It helped me, indeed,' he says, 'to develop memory as a record which might be used in the processes of the judgment; but somehow, when my lecture was finished, it was only the dark leaves of the record which had come out to view. It was not difficult to show how the guilt and sin in human life-the materials on which condemnation must rest-could be reproduced by memory. But the faith, the love, the goodness of the righteous, how could the reproduction of these by this faculty constitute a judgment book for them? Were good souls simply to remember that they had been good? It was against the whole spirit of the dispensation of grace that the mere recollection of good deeds should be appealed to as the evidence on which the awards to the righteous would be given. The speculations of the philosopher were good for a part, not for the whole; for the dark, not for the bright portion of the record.' Presuming that Dr. Macleod does not doubt that we must all appear before the judgment-seat of Christ, that every one may receive the things done in his body, according to that he hath done, whether it be good or bad,' we cannot but admire his simplicity in making a difficulty here, as if the disclosure were to be voluntary and modest, or as if the bright portion of the record could be in anywise hidden whilst the dark was being revealed. Later on, he himself, when treating of the opening of the books, says, 'The widow shall see her mite once more. The cup of cold water given in Christ's name shall not fail to reappear. Homes which were the abodes of virtue shall rise mysteriously from the depths of memory; and hospitals whose floors were trodden by the visitants of the sick. * * * And blessed thoughts, and deeds, and lives shall be remembered.' The older writer from whom we quoted explains, ia another of his publications, how, 'In a word, all evils, villanies, robberies, artifices, deceits, are manifested to every evil spirit, and brought forth from their very memory, and they are convicted; nor is there any room given for denial, because all the circumstances appear

together.' He says, 'I have heard also from the memory of a certain one, when it was seen and surveyed by the angels, what his thoughts had been during a month, one day after another, and this without mistake; they were recalled as he himself was in them in those days. From these examples it may be seen that man carries along with him all his memory, and that there is nothing so concealed in the world that it is not manifested after death, and this in the company of many, according to the Lord's words, "There is nothing hidden which shall not be uncovered, and nothing concealed which shall not be known; therefore the things which yo have said in darkness shall be heard in light, and what ye have spoken into the car shall be preached on the housetops." When man's acts are disclosed to him after death, the angels who are appointed as searchers look into his face, and the quest is extended through the whole body, beginning from the fingers of one hand, and of the other, and thus proceeding through the whole. Because I wondered whence this was, it was disclosed to me; namely, that as all things of the thought and will are written on the brain, because their sources are there, so also they are inscribed on the whole body; since all the things of thought and will proceed thither from their sources, and there terminate as in their completions. Hence it is that the things which are inscribed on the memory from the will, and from the consequent thought, are not only inscribed on the brain, but also on the whole man, and there exist in order, according to the order of the parts of the body. It is made evident from this that man altogether is such as he is in his will and consequent thought, so that an evil man actually is the evil that he has perpetrated, and a good man is the good that he has wrought.* From which, also, may be seen what is meant by the book of man's life, spoken of in the Word, namely, that all things, both such as have been acted and such as have been thought, are written on the whole man, and that they appear as if read in a book when they are called forth from the memory, and as if seen

The evil-doer becomes the evil which he does,' writes Dr. Macleod, unaware that he is repeating the words of the older philosopher. Is it not equally true that the gooddoer becomes the good which he accomplishes?

in

in effigy when the spirit is viewed in the light of heaven.'

But we must abstain from further quoting our quaint old author, of whose writings, however, passages in Dr. Macleod's book, which seem to him to be most original, continually remind us; and we will hasten on to indicate very briefly the contents of Dr. Macleod's volume. These occur in six parts. In the first we have 'The Sealed Book; or, the Book of Prelusive Judgment;' in the second, The Open Book; or, the Book of the Judging Word.' The third is entitled Discipline; or, Revelations of Wrath on the Way of Life; and the fourth, The Books; or, the Memories of the Judged.' 'The Book of Life' is dealt with in part fifth, and the sixth part is a sort of appendix on memory and conscience. The whole six parts constitute a treatise, with illustrations and corroborative quotations, expansive of Coleridge's suggestive hint,' expository of passages in the Book of Revelations, and supplying abundant considerations of solemn weight for the discouragement of sin and the promotion of religion. Dr. Macleod's vocabulary is varied and rich; his style vigorous, condensed, and vivid.

The Downhill of Life: Its Exercises, Temptations, and Dangers, with the Effectual Method of Rendering the Descent Safe and Easy, and its Termination Triumphant. By the Rev. T. H. Walker, Author of A Companion for the Afflicted,' &c. London: S. W. Partridge, Paternoster Row.

A BOOK intended to be useful, in a religious point of view, to those who are entering on the later stages of human life. The matter is divided into five chapters. In the first the descent into years is described; its temptations and dangers are pointed out in the second; the path of security is shown in the third; and the remaining chapters are occupied with consolations and supports, and joyous prospects and anticipations. The Age of Man Geologically Considered

in its Bearing on the Truths of the
Bible. By John Kirk, Professor of
Practical Theology in the Evangelical
Union Academy. Pp. 263. London:
Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, St.
Paul's Churchyard.

In this compact little treatise Professor

Kirk wrestles with no mean opponent, for it is Sir Charles Lyell against whom he plants himself shoulder to shoulder, and he does his best (and his best is no child's hug) to give his antagonist a throw. The animus for the contest is supplied by his zeal for the Christian revelation, which he imagines to be endangered by anything tending to prove that the human race has lived on the earth more than a given number of years. His assumption is, that numbers in the Old Testament have no ulterior meaning. He concludes that the nine hundred and sixty-nine years of Methuselah must mean so many literal years, although he allows that the six days of creation cannot be six literal days. And in dependance on a chronology founded by men on a mere literal interpretation of the series of figures in Genesis, he conceives that the truth of Revelation will have to stand or fall just as that mere man-made computation shall be disproved or established. It, therefore, seems a matter of vital importance to him to show the baselessness of alleged facts, and the illegitimacy of inferences from genuine ones, so that nothing may be held to confute the assumption that the human race did not live on this planet further back than some seven thousand years. For, as to this point of duration, Professor Kirk, forsaking the Hebrew, prefers the Septuagint, because this allows widest scope for the facts of geology to swing in. With Sir Charles Lyell, therefore, who has gathered into a bundle the scattered discoveries out of which doubts of man's so late origin have flown abroad, Professor Kirk measures his dialectic strength and skill. He follows him through bogs and beds of peat, takes a roll with him through mud, plunges with him into lakes, and down to the remains of the old lakedwellings; pursues him into his beds of gravel and sand; slides with him over the thick-ribbed ice through the glacial period; rises with him in the earth's upheavals, and sinks with its subsidences; disappears in caverns, and roots up the deposits in the bottoms of the caves; gives him no peace even amongst the trees; brandishes and rattles over his head the bones of extinct mammalia, buries him in seashells, pelts him with skulls, and, in fact, reduces poor Sir Charles to extremities in more instances than one, giving him a clever fall, and then

grimly sitting down on him. There are, indeed, several points on which Sir Charles, set right by Professor Kirk, will have to revise his conclusions.

Notes on Epidemics: For the Use of the Public. By Francis Edmund Anstie, M.D., F.R.C.P., Senior Assistant Physician to the Westminster Hospital. Pp. 179. London: Jackson, Walford, and Hodder, 27, Paternoster Row.

THE main object of Dr. Anstie in this work is to supply information to assist the non-medical public to do their part in the work of preventing epidemic diseases. For the purpose," he says, very justly, of ensuring that early isolation of patients which is absolutely necessary, if infectious diseases are to be cut down at the roots, it is necessary that a knowledge of the value of the principal premonitory symptoms should be widely diffused among the public.' Accordingly, he has endeavoured to supply this need in the work before us, and has done it in a brief yet very intelligible manner. As far as possible,' he adds, the descriptions have been limited to simple physical facts, and I have gladly availed myself of one important set of phenomena which especially bear this character-namely, the changes of animal temperature as tested by the thermometer, which have lately been found to furnish most valuable information.'

In the four chapters of this useful little book, Dr. Anstie, after preliminary remarks, gives a very clear account of the premonitory symptoms of epidemic diseases; he describes with careful discrimination the fevers of destitution,relapsing fever and typhus; then the epidemic diseases, typhoid fever, cholera, and epidemic diarrhoea, which are dependent on insanitary conditions not including destitution; and, lastly, the infectious epidemics which are comparatively independent of defective sanitary arrangements. He offers the public no advice as to the medical treatment of these various diseases, leaving that to be done by the physician when called in; but in endeavouring to place in their hands a simple and perspicacious account of the various maladies, he has produced a little book which we can recommend as of great value to such as find it desirable to be able to distinguish between different epidemics as they arise in the household.

Ernest Graham: A Doctor's Story. Pp. 354. London: Wm. Tweedie, 337, Strand.

THIS is another of the many excellent temperance tales of which the press has of late been unprecedentedly prolific. It differs from the major part of them, in having the temperance moral presented to the reader less prominently, though, perhaps, not less effectively. The life of a medical student is described by one who seems to write less from imagination than from recollection. The hero and heroine are brother and sister; the last a single-minded, purehearted Christian; the former a common-place young man, unable, till late in his experience, to resist the vulgarest temptations to evil, but coming all right ere the end. Other interesting characters are portrayed in the course of the tale, of which the style is lively and spirited.

A Commentary on St. Matthew's Gospel, Designed for Teachers, Preachers, and Educated English Readers Generally. By Eustace R. Conder, M.A. London: Elliot Stock, Paternoster Row.

WE have more than once noticed with pleasure this excellent Commentary, on its original appearance in numbers. Complete, as it now is, it forms a goodly volume of 480 pages. As a commentary on the natural sense of the first gospel, for the use of Sunday school teachers, it is a decided improvement upon Barnes; and its character is such as to adapt it to be a welcome aid to preachers and educated readers generally.

An Inquiry into the Reasons and Results of the Prescription of Intoxicating Liquors in the Practice of Medicine. By Dr. F. R. Lees, F.S.A. Edin.; Author of 'The Illustrated History of Alcohol,'Alliance Argument on Prohibition,' 'The Science of Symbols; a Fragment of Logic,' &c. London: Trübners, 60, Paternoster Row.

"THIS little work,' the author says, ' was originally announced under the illustrative title of "Doctors, Drugs, and Drink," because, in simple truth, these words denote the proper and peculiar subjects to be discussed.' 'I mean to prove,' he adds, and I think I shall prove, three things:-First, that doctors are not authoritative teachers; second,

that

that drugs are not the valuable curatives they are supposed to be; third, that intoxicating drink is neither food nor physic; but, on the contrary, is hurtful both in health and disease.'

In his preface, Dr. Lees further explains that he has written these chapters in the interest of the great Temperance Reform, after exercising much patience, and even painful reticence, in the hope that the medical profession would break the bonds of convention, and speak and act as freely and patriotically on the question of drinking as they had done on sanitary reform. With half-a-dozen brilliant exceptions, he says, he has been bitterly disappointed. Complaints are continually reaching him from every part of Great Britain and Ireland, from India, Africa, Australia, and North America, that the drink is chiefly sustained by medical opinions, and that weak-minded temperance people are being seduced from their practice, often to their utter ruin, by the careless or the insistent prescription of intoxicating physic. Hence this book. 'I could no longer decline,' he adds, to meet this disastrous evil, or refuse to assail the three-fold superstition in which it is entrenched; especially when the temperance societies that solicited me to publish the work also enabled me to do so effectually by their guarantee of twenty thousand copies.'

To establish his first point, Dr. Lees quotes a variety of medical authors, who themselves confess that, 'medicine is a chaos,' and he adduces cases showing what blunders they frequently make. He afterwards argues that the drugs and other supposed remedial agencies used by medical men often do much more harm than good. He includes both the great schools-allopathic and homeopathicin this sweeping censure; but his statements and reasoning tell with little force, to our thinking, unless against the former. The real object of the author was to prove, not that all drugs are medicinally useless, but that alcohol is; and the book would have had much wider

acceptance amongst the public had its aim been limited to this. It is in applying himself to his third point, -that intoxicating drink is neither food nor physic, that Dr. Lees signally merits the gratitude of the public. He ransacks the whole world of illustration to assist his great argument; he detects lurking antagonists, or challenges open ones, in all manner of authors; he cuts and thrusts at them with bright, sarcastic blade and point; and he so elaborately reasons out his position, that the reader, however much inclined to fancy that alcohol must be good physic at any rate, if it is not food, will find this fancy of his inclined to take its wings and fly away, leaving room for revised conclusions to occupy its place. The work, we have no doubt, will do very much good in fortifying the temperance public against the interested or mistaken prescription of alcohol by medical men.

Footsteps of a Prodigal; or, Friendly

Advice to Young Men. By William G. Pascoe. London: Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row.

THE parable of the Prodigal Son, as commonly understood, is here made the basis of a series of eight lectures to young men. The author says he has not written for theologians, but with an earnest desire to bring out and apply the great lessons contained in the chief of our Saviour's parables; so that young men especially may be won to a life of godliness. He expounds the parable with earnestness and with copiousness of illustration, and produces a course of lectures which he intimates he has reason to think had happy results on some during their delivery by himself. They would, we have no doubt, prove very widely useful if they fell into the hands of a large number of readers.

Stories for Sunday Scholars. No. 9: The Best Sunday Scholar. Price One Penny. London: Elliot Stock, 62, Paternoster Row.