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much-only the fewest have run a career of authorship so successful, or if as successful, so worthy and useful.

The present volume is full of interest, imparted alike by the subject and author; the former unsurpassed in the singular greatness of his powers, the varied and momentous vicissitudes of his life, the vastness of his services to our nation in birth and infancy, and his marvellous worldly wisdom. Doubtless he had no peer save Washington, chiefest of all, among our colonial and revolutionary statesman, in achieving and forming our national independence. If his religious character had been on the same plane as Washington's, he would have held a place no way inferior to him in the hearts of his countrymen. But when we come to the moral elements of his character, we find his religious creed never above Deism, and at times sinking to Fatalism, his ethical creed never rising above Utilitarianism, and at times not above "the sty of Epicurus," whether in theory or practice. His sagacity was always in the line of worldly wisdom and on the plane of expediency. He was a stranger to all the nobler moral sentiments and impulses, but a prodigy of worldly prudence. In maxims on worldly thrift and material prosperity, few men were ever more fertile or infallible. He has left his impress in this respect upon our people, in part for good, and in part for evil. This ethical standard kept him not from all vicious indulgence, but from wrecking his worldly fortune and standing upon it.

The reading of the life of this extraordinary man becomes fascinating when sketched in Mr. Abbott's graphic and racy style. He has taken due care not to be so dazzled by the greatness, as to be blind to the infirmities of his subject. In regard to these he gives his readers due warning. Without such cautions, his illustrious subject would be a dangerous model to present for youthful admiration and imitation. Mr. Abbott draws largely upon Sparks and Parton, especially the latter.

It is only a melancholy relief to our lamentations over the corruption and bribery that have so poisoned our legislation and civil service, to know that the former times were no better than these, at least in the old country. We find the following, pp. 228-9:

"Wraxall writes that Ross Mackey said to him, at a dinner party given by Lord Besborough, as the illustrious guests were sipping their wine: "The peace of 1763 was carried through and approved by a pecuniary dispensation. Nothing else could have surmounted the difficulty. I was myself the channel through which the money passed. With my own hand I secured above one hundred and twenty votes on that most important question to ministers. Eighty thousand pounds were set apart for the purpose. Forty members of the House of Commons received from me a thousand pounds each. To eighty others, I paid five hundred pounds a piece."

MISCELLANEOUS.

Popery, the Foe of the Church and of the Republic, by Rev. JOSEPH H. VAN DYKE, A. M., is issued by the People's Publishing Company, Phila., and the thousands of copies of it already sold show what can be accomplished by studious rural pastors, from whose studies in former times the greatest works of American theology were issued, and from which now come such works as

Dr. Burr's volumes on Apologetics and Practical Religion, Dale on Baptism, and this trenchant exposure of Popery by Mr. Van Dyke.

Dodd, Mead & Co. publish Familiar Talks to Boys, by Rev. Dr. JOHN HALL, four lectures given to the pupils of the Charlier Institute, New York. They are replete with those salutary counsels which are all the more likely to be heard and read, with due respect to their truth and importance, in view of the source from which they come.

S. C. Griggs & Co. of Chicago, publish Words, their Use and Abuse, by WM. MATHEWS, LL.D., a book of rare interest, whose purchase no one will regret. Almost every page is alike entertaining and instructive. Turn where we will, we find the fresh, vivid sparkle of genius, alike amusing and didactic. The following, from his chapter on nicknames, is a fair specimen : "A nickname is the most stinging of all species of satire, because it gives no chance of reply. Attack a man with specific, point-blank charges, and he can meet and repel them; but a nickname baffles reply by its very vagueness; it presents no tangible or definite idea to the mind, no horn of a dilemma with which the victim can grapple. The very attempt to defend himself only renders him the more ridiculous it looks like raising an ocean to drown a fly, or discharging a cannon at a wasp, to meet a petty gibe with formal testimony or el borate argument. Or, if your defense is listened to without jeers, it avails you nothing. It has no effect-does not tellexcites no sensation. The laugh is against you, and all your protests come like the physician's prescription at the funeral, too late.

"That prince of polemics, Cobbett, was a masterly inventor of nicknames, and some of his felicitous epithets will not be forgotten for many years to come. Among the witty labels with which he ticketed his enemies were Scorpion Stanley,' 'Spinning Jenny Peel,' 'the pink-nose Liverpool,' the 'unbaptized, buttonless blackguards' (applied to the Quakers), and Prosperity Robinson.' The nickname, 'Old Glory,' given by him, stuck for life to Sir Francis Burdett, his former patron and life-long creditor. 'olus Canning' provoked unextinguishable laughter among high and low; and it is said that of all the devices to annoy the brilliant but vain Lord Erskine, none was more teasing than being constantly addressed by his second title of Baron Clack.

mannon.

The "Great Conquest; or Miscellaneous Papers on Missions. By F. F. ELLINWOOD. New York: William Rankin, 23 Centre Street, 1876. This unpretending volume of 184 pages (12 mo.) contains thirty-one short papers on missionary topics. The name of the author is, to those who know him, sufficient guarantee that the papers are crowded with intelligent, suggestive, and stimulating utterances on these high themes. The principles, methods, and results of missionary work are vividly sketched, some of the popular objections and criticisms canvassed, some of the chief antagonists described: and in general, just those topics treated which, in a manual for pastors and laymen, are most in place. It meets a wide-spread and urgent want, and, if received according to its merits, will have a rapid and extensive circulation in our churches.

BOOKS RECEIVED.

Dodd, Mead & Co. publish the following, of which our time prevents more

than mere mention:

The Crew of the Dolphin. By HESBA STRETTON.

Free, Yet Forging Their Own Chains. By C. M. CORNWALL.

ART. XIII. THEOLOGICAL AND LITERARY INTELLIGENCE. GERMANY.

Journal for Lutheran Theology, etc., Zeitschrift f. d. lutherische Theologie, u. s. w.) II. 1876. The first short article, by Dr. Franz Delitzsch, is a "Talmudic Study" on the name of JESUS. The conclusion of his ingenious etymological investigation is, "that the name, Jesus, in all its component parts (three) is significant of salvation. The letters S U refer to the salvation itself; the Greek S appended signifies that the Saviour is for all mankind, the Jews especially, and also the Greeks; in the JE we have the all-holy name of the God of Israel, to whom every Christian, as often as he speaks then ame of Jesus, gives the honor." The second article, by H. Elster, is on "The Idea of Perfection, in its Importance for Christian Dogmatics." He contends that "the principle of Perfection" is in every believer, though it is realized only gradually. L. Grote reviews at length the critical work on Thomas à Kempis' Imitation of Christ, by Charles Hirsche (Vol. I.), in which the latter reviews all that is known about the book and its author. He is zealous for à Kempis, and has collected an immense mass of materials (520 pages, which is but a part of his labors). A second volume is to follow. A revised edition of the Imitatio is announced, "from the autograph of Thomas" himself. Dr. Voigtländer communicates various extracts from "Dissertations of Lutheran Divines in the 17th Century," to show the range of their studies, and their interest in theological learning. The editor, among his "Miscellaniæ," is severe against the Doellinger Union projects; he has not much confidence in the theological soundness of the Old Ca tholics. They are certainly not as orthodox as the Old Lutherans on Justification by Faith alone.

Journal of Scientific Theology. (Zeitshrift f. wiss. Theol.) 1876. II. The editor, Dr. Hilgenfeld, continues his investigations into the sources of early Christian history by a learned investigation (52 pages) of the remains of Hegesippus, died A. D. 180, at Rome, whose "Memorials" are preserved only in some fragments reported by Eusebius, and whose representations of the Jewish character of the early Christian church have been much relied on by Baur and his school, and also by the English Unitarians. Dr. Hilgenfeld collects all the fragments (about eight pages, also to be found in Routh's Reliquiæ Sacre), with a critical commentary upon them, avoiding the extreme inferences which the Tubingen school has drawn from them; although he concedes that the primitive Christian congregation in Jerusalem, full blooded

Jewish, was the ideal of Hegesippus, as long as the blood relations of our Lord were at the head of it; and the whole church remained, he thinks, a spotless virgin, as, long as the apostles and immediate disciples of the Lord were living. After them, the strict Jewish church was scattered by the second Jewish War. Yet still, he tries to find it, in a new metropolis-that of Rome-and in the episcopal succession. The second article is by Dr. Franz Goerres on the Martyrdom of the Abbot Vincentius of Leon and his companions-a tradition of uncertain date, rang. ing somewhere between A. D. 460 and 560, while the Arian kings ruled over the Suevi. H. Tollin, lic. theol., continues his examination of the character and opinions of Servetus, this time discussing his Pantheism-a charge not urged at his trial, but often made since. Tollin judges that the charge had better be of Dr. Koehler gives a valuable summary on Rabanus Maurus, the most learned cleric of the ninth century. H. Ronsch continues his valuable studies on the Itala.

Panchristism than of Pantheism.

Prof. Franz Delitzsch has brought out a revised text of the book of Job, on the basis of newly discovered manuscripts, from one of the Firkowitsch manuscripts, there is given a fac-simile of Job xxxvi : 1-11, with the Babylonian punctuation.

A new life of Christ has been prepared by C. Wittichen, on the basis of the three synoptical gospels, Mark, Matthew, and Luke; that of Mark being taken as the origi nal; it is called “The Life of Jesus as represented in the Original Documents." The question of celibacy among the Old Catholics is discussed by Dr. Schulte, one of the ablest canonists in Germany, in an essay on "Enforced Celibacy and its Abolition." The Old Catholics will take a decisive forward step when they can agree on this subject. Their long halt there has been unfavorable to their progress. Prof. Dr. C. F. Keil has brought out a second enlarged edition, partly recast, of his "Handbook of Biblical Archæology," with four lithographed plates. pp. 780, $5.

Ludwig Geiger has edited, for the Library of the Stuttgart Literary Union, vol. cxxvi, the Correspondence of John Reuchlin. He published, in 1871, the best life of Reuchlin. The present collection embraces all the letters from and to Reuchlin, including most of the humanists of the period.

Dr. Hausrath, of Heidelberg, is preparing a new volume of History of New Testament Times; it will cover the Post-Apostolic Period. It makes the fifth part of his work. It is promised for the end of 1876.

Dr. John Delitzsch, a son of Dr. Franz Delitzsch of Leipsick, died Feb. 3, in Italy, where he had gone for the restoration of his health. He was not yet quite thirty years old, but had already given great promise for the future. In 1872, he published a good monograph on the Doctrine of Aquinas respecting God. It was his dissertation for the doctorate. In 1872 he qualified himself as a teacher of theology in Leipsick by a Latin dissertation on the Inspiration of the Scriptures as defined by the Apostolic Fathers and the Apologists of the Second Century. In 1875 he published the first volume of a large work on the "Doctrinal System of the Roman Church," in which he unfolded the "fundamental dogma of Romanism, that respecting the church." The doctrine of the Primacy is fully elaborated. This first volume is a complete treatise in itself. In the Studien und Kritiken, 1874, he published a critica! essay on the earliest traditions of the Church about Simon Peter and Simon Magus. At the time of his death he was bringing out the Lectures on Symbolism by the late Dr. Ochler. Dr. Schuerer says of him, in the Theolog. Literaturzeitung, “that

which distinguished him as a man and a teacher was his complete openness and straightforwardness. Nothing was more abhorrent to him than a painful repression of his own deepest convictions."

Two ecclesiastical bills are at present before the Prussian Landtag. One provides for the supervision by the State of the management of the diocesan property of the Roman Catholic Church. This bill has been rendered necessary by the withdrawal by deposed bishops of the diocesan funds, the Bishop of Breslau taking with him to Austria £45,000 of the diocesan money. The other measure refers to the constitution of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Its purpose is to strengthen the position of the King as the head of the church. This is done by a provision which makes necessary a declaration of approval from the Cultus Minister necessary, before a law passed by a Provincial, or the General Synod, can be laid before the King for his sanction. Much opposition has been aroused by this measure. It is stated that Dr. Falk will resign if the bill is thrown out.

FRANCE.

The Faculty of Theology at Montauban is one of the best Protestant Faculties in France. The Revue Théologique gives a summary of the course of study, which may suggest some useful hints for our own theological schools. Professor Nicolas expounded (in the course 1873-4) the philosophy of Plato, giving an account of the different theories, and citing and discussing numerous important passages of Plato, that man was by nature a moral and religious and " sociable" being; and discussing three phases of moral theories: (1) The system of utility "well under. stood;" (2) The theory of the moral sentiment; (3) The so-called rational systems of ethics. Once a week, to a mixed audience, he discourses on the different phases of the religion of the Gauls.

Professor Pédézert read on several parts of the New Testament, especially the Apocalypse, and the first half of the Epistle to the Romans. He gave an exposition of two noted treatises of Cyprian, that on the unity of the Church, and de lapsis; also of the Epistle to Diognetus (one of the most remarkable treatises of Christian antiquity), the apologies of Justin Martyr, Tatian's Discourse to the Greeks, and the Plea of Athenagoras for Christians.

The new professor of Hebrew, M. Bruston, taught Hebrew and German, gave a history of the prophetic literature of the Hebrews, from its origin to the wreck of the kingdom of Israel, confirmed by the Assyrian inscriptions.

Professor Sardinoux defended the Fourth Gospel against its recent assailants, who attack it with so much violence because it testifies so powerfully to the supernatural, and to the divine origin of Christianity; and likewise discussed the history of the Canon of the New Testament until the fifth century.

Professor Bonifas expounded the history of the church for the first three cen turies, the conflict of Christianity with Paganism in the fourth and fifth centuries, the origin of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the history of worship and discipline. He also read on the history of the church from Gregory VII. to the end of the eighteenth century, attaining the summit of its power under Innocent III. (10931215), and followed by the reaction, preparing the way for the Reformation, which

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