maining harbors along her coast, useful to an enemy for landing men and materiel. The Commission refers to both of these cases as being excluded from their special consideration, and they are thus merely kept in waiting till the more urgent demands of the dock-yards and arsenals can be met. We ought to see in this fresh history a new and strong stimulus to hasten on this same defensive policy along our own immense and exposed ocean frontier. It is a powerful substantiation of the soundness of the principles on which our defensive system rests. It is, too, an admonition that our exposures to attack are genuine, and that the results would be most formidable should we be assailed while our panoply is incomplete.

ARTICLE V. DR. ALEXANDER'S LETTERS.*

Edited

Forty Years Familiar Letters of James W. Alexander, D. D. Constituting, with the Notes, a Memoir of his Life. by the surviving correspondent, JOHN HALL, D. D. volumes. New York: Charles Scribner. 1860.

In two

In one of the earlier letters of this correspondence, Dr. Alexander says:

"A letter, as the thought just now strikes me, should be as nearly as pos sible the transcript of one's common talk; or perhaps a better description of a good, that is an acceptable letter, would be, that it is a soliloquy in black and white, penned with the freedom of a private meditation, yet written for the eye of another, with whom the disclosures it contains are just as safe as in their native bosom."

This passage furnishes a key to the seemingly hasty and varied style of these letters, their abrupt transitions from one subject to another, and the freedom of their criticisms upon men and things. But it also contains a reproof to the friend who would lay before the public thoughts and feelings which were poured into the bosom of friendship with unreserved confidence. To whom can we give our confidence, if not to our friends?—and to what friend can we give it unreservedly, if, the moment the grave hides us from view, it is to be blazoned forth to the world? No amount of public interest felt even in the smallest sayings of a good or great man, should justify his friends in revealing what, from close association with him, it was their privilege to know of his inner man. The sanctuaries of friendship must either be religiously guarded from the scrutiny of those who do not stand within the portals, or they must be torn down at once and be forever demolished.

* In the last number of the New Englander we briefly expressed our views of Dr. Alexander's Letters: but the present Article, not written from a theological point of view, but coming from the pen of a lady who was a parishioner and friend of this honored divine, will serve as a complement of our criticism.— ED. NEW ENGLANDER.

Yet the character of Dr. Alexander shines forth from these letters as a Christian divine, a laborious and faithful pastor, a man of generous and discriminating mind, and an enlightened scholar. To the people of his charge they are full of interest, as they behold the pastor whom they loved, in every line. To those who were not privileged to come within the direct sphere of his influence, they are interesting, as, since his death, his fame has been in all the churches.

That ardent and intense love of souls, which was manifest in his preaching, seems to have thoroughly possessed him at an early age. He entered upon the work of his life with a joy and whole-heartedness which were not disturbed by the periods of profound melancholy to which he was always more or less subject. He describes these moments in an early letter:

"Forebodings of future pain or misery are not often the subject of my thoughts, but there comes over my soul, I can no otherwise describe it, a cloud, a blackness, a horror, which tinges every object without or within, with a certain indefinable, vague, and terrific darkness; which absorbs the powers of the soul, and seems to concentrate all the faculties upon some hideous something, or nothing, and waste the mental energy in empty musing." Vol. I, p. 44.

Elsewhere he says:

"I find religion and religious thoughts, not the causes or the concomitants of melancholy, but its surest remedy."

God undoubtedly suffered him to walk in these gloomy paths that he might be able to lead away others whose feet. were in danger of going astray there.

His humility was great. No man was ever more conscious of his own imperfections, or consequently more charitable towards the imperfections of others. Even when he was the idol of a large congregation in the Fifth Avenue, the love and reliance which his people felt towards him seemed only to make him more conscious of his awful responsibility towards them. He says:

"Some of the things which, I dare say, people think tend to elate me, have a quite contrary effect; especially the worldly increase of my cure. Seldom, if ever, have I had any private exercise more solemn, than in the whole progress of this matter."

He was eminently a Bible student in order to be a Bible teacher. His favorite method of studying the Bible he gives in these letters:

"I have just been reading over, at one sitting, the Epistle to the Colossians. I have done so many times within a month, both in Greek and in all the translations I have, which are more than ten. This way of frequent re-perusal, continuously, I learned of my father, many years ago. It is well to intermix it with critical study of the same portion. I like to confine myself to one book at a time, and, as it were, live in it, till I feel very familiar. I usually find great satisfaction during such a period, in preaching from such a book thus studied."

He was strongly in favor of much Bible study among the young. To his correspondent, then editor of the Sabbath School Journal, he writes, in 1834:

"Let me beg you to take it as a prominent, perpetual object of selections, &c., for your Journal, to hold up the great truth, that the Bible is the book to educate the age. Why not have it the chief thing in the family, in the school, in the academy, in the university? The day is coming; and if you and I can introduce the minutest corner of this wedge, we shall be benefactors of the race. I can amuse a child about the Bible; I can teach logic, rhetoric, ethics, and salvation, from the Bible. May we not have a Bible School?" Again-“ I am filled with enthusiasm about having the Bible more taught. Instead of a mere reading book in schools, it must be taught after the Sabbath School fashion; geography, archæology, and all. All our girls must read the Greek Testament. I mean to teach a few on the plan of Locke. By an interlinear version any merchant's clerk may learn Hebrew." Again-"I am a little wild on the subject of making the Bible the grand organ of mental and spiritual development. Suppose one knows the Bible, and from it as a center radiates into the thousand subsidiary knowledges, will he not know all he needs?"

He was also much interested in the work of Missions, and, indeed, his fertile mind was continually employed in seeking different ways to advance Christ's kingdom among all classes and ages of men. All the channels through which religious literature flowed in upon the public, were swollen by his pen:

"I endeavor to have as many plans as I can, thereby I find work for all moods of mind."

He wrote much for children, impelled to that work by an extraordinary fondness for them, which was one of the most

prominent traits of his heart. Those who have had an opportunity of witnessing his winning ways with children, could not fail to observe that his power of gaining their affections and confidence arose from that love which they are always quick to perceive. By that love, his grief, as four of his own children were one by one removed from him by death, and the strength of his Christian faith in its triumph over his intense afflictions, can be measured.

He was greatly opposed to acrimonious dispute on theological or other questions. In all the relations of life, both public and private, love was the principle which ruled him. He says, in one of these letters, "The greatest heresy is want of love." And again

"As to the Assembly, I really know not what to think, or to say, or even to wish. What would I have? Certainly peace; if possible, unity of doctrine; then unity of organization; if we cannot be rò airò ppovouvres, we may at least be τὴν αὐτὴν ἀγάπην ἔχοντες, and the way to attain this seems to be ἀλλήλους hyoúpevoι bzepíxovras tavrov. Alas! who does this ?--certainly not I; for which I desire to humble myself, and to seek greater measures of self-renunciation and self-neglect. My sentiments are changed since last Assembly; not so much as to men or measures, as spirit. I do not recognize in Mr. -'s denunciations the spirit of Jesus; nay, nor even of the ardent Paul. Mr. -, and Mr. —, I try to bless God for it, do not preach another gospel,' and I hope to meet them in heaven, where we shall wonder and smile (with new light) when we look back to see the time we have lost from a glorious work in comparing the trowels, and quarreling over the hods and mortar of the spiritual temple." Vol. I, p. 180.

Again" At times I am almost converted to the extreme doctrine of 'no controversy."" Again-"O for a cycle of peace! O for a breathing spell from these unnatural contentions! I feel as if I could join with any who would humbly unite in direct and kind efforts to save sinners, and relieve human misery. Cannot a poor believer go along in his pilgrimage heavenward, without being always on military duty? At judgment I heartily believe that some heresies of heart and temper will be charged as worse than heavy doctrinal errors. To you I may say this, because you understand me as holding not merely that the tenets of our church are true, but that they are very important. But I see how easy it is to 'hold the truth' in rancor and hate, which is the grand error of depraved human nature; yea, and of diabolism itself." Vol. I, p. 227.

We must not look in these letters for any adequate proof of his excellence as a pastor. That is to be found in the hearts of those who were the subjects of his labors. Many who have passed through the furnace of affliction can

tell of his ever