and matter of preaching, the subjects, composition, and classification of sermons, the aids and agencies of pulpit preparation, the proprieties and vices of the pulpit, and similar themes. The appendix on the Scholastic and Modern Literature of Homiletics, etc., is a very interesting portion of the volume.

Some things we might take exception to, as the scriptural quotations in chapter xxi. Do not the texts cited there relate to special, miraculous gifts of the Spirit, such as are not vouchsafed to preachers in these days? Does Dr. Kidder believe that, because the disciples "went forth and preached everywhere, the Lord working with them, and confirming the word with signs following," that preachers may now expect such help in answer to their prayers?

23. Over the River; or, Pleasant Walks into the Valley of Shadows and Beyond: a Book of Consolations for the Sick, the Dying, and the Bereaved. By Thomas B. Thayer. Boston: Tompkins & Co. pp. 272. $1.25.

Perhaps it will be allowed us to say that we think this volume fitted to do a kindly and beneficent work among those for whose comfort it was specially prepared. At least, we hope it will; and for this reason are desirous it should find its way to those homes sad with the sorrow of bereavement, and to those hearts that lie within the shadow of death. If it could find its way also to the wounded and dying soldiers, we believe its consolations would be welcome to them.

24. Visions in Verse; or, Dreams of Creation and Redemption. Boston: Lee & Shepard. pp. 282.

The poetry and the theology, or more correctly mythology, of this book are on a level, the one is unmixed doggerel, and the other unmixed nonsense. To be sure, it professes to be a dream; but if the author cannot dream something better than he has given us here, we advise him either to keep awake, or not to print his dreams.

PAMPHLETS.

1. The "Ladies' Repository"- A Universalist Monthly Magazine. Under the able management of Mrs. Sawyer, assisted by such talented writers as Mrs. Soule and Miss Davis, this magazine is fast becoming one of the most popular and attractive of our American monthlies. "The Soldier of the Republic," the "Mountaineers

of East Tennessee," and "A Thousand a Year" are equal to the best stories of our best literary magazines. The July number begins a new volume, and we bespeak for it a large increase of subscribers.

2. Second Annual Report of the New England Freedmen's Aid Society (Educational Commission).

If we had ten pages to spare, we would devote them to this most interesting Report. Let all who doubt the capacity of the Negro for education, or his ability to take care of himself, and to acquire and improve property, or his willingness to work, or his desire for freedom, or the value of the services rendered by the Freedmen's Association, obtain this pamphlet and study it. It furnishes the facts for a verdict on the question of the times," What shall we do with the Negro?"

3. Nineteenth Annual Report of the New York Prison Association.

A book, rather than a pamphlet, of over 500 pages, filled with statistics and most valuable details respecting prisons and criminals, and which should be studied by legislators and prison inspectors, and all who have to do with criminals. The "Report on the Sources of Crime," should be reprinted in tract form and scattered through all our towns and cities. We would call special attention to this from our benevolent societies.

SYNOPSIS OF THE QUARTERLIES.

2.

I. Bibliotheca Sacra. 1. The Genuineness of the Fourth Gospel. Charles Wesley and Methodist Hymns. 3. The Author of the Apocalypse. 4. Final Cause of Varieties. 5. Examination of Phil. iii. 11, and Rev. xx. 4. 6. Rise and Progress of Monasticism. 7. Egyptology, Oriental Travel and Discovery. 8. Recent German Literature.

The first and third articles are elaborate discussions, and are timely in these days of universal questioning. The fifth attempts to show that the passages reviewed teach a resurrection of " a part of the pious dead antecedent to that of the rest," and that it was this that Paul labored to "attain unto." The author contends for "grades of glory and happiness throughout eternity." And he interprets the phrase "every man in his own order," 1 Cor. xv., of the followers of Christ, and not of the righteous and the wicked,— that believers will come forth in succession, like the advance of the divisions of an army; every one in the band or company for which he has qualified himself while on earth.

II. Methodist Quarterly. 1. Moral Philosophy of Watson's Institutes. 2. Hagenbach on the Later History of the Church. 3. Our Lord's Prayer. 4. Arithmetic. 5. Schiller. 6. Early Methodism in America. Parsees. 8. Sir Thomas Browne. 9. The War for the Union.

7. The

The department of Foreign Religious and Literary Intelligence in this Review will soon compel the "Bibliotheca" to look to its laurels. The editor is in error respecting the "Universalist Quarterly." It has never been suspended since it commenced, twenty years ago.

III. Christian Examiner. 1. Victor Hugo. 2. Springer's Art in the Nineteenth Century. 3. The Freedmen and Free Labor in the South. 4. The Evangelist's Debt to the Critic. 5. The American War as an English Question. 6. The Christian Patriot of California.

The fourth article is a weak dilution of Germanism; a fitting companion of Mr. Frothingham's "Ideal Christ." The argument is, that just so far as the critic proves that the gospels are not history, he is doing Christianity a service! The writer says that "the old and common prejudice in favor of the gospels as histories, whose chief value was biographical, belongs to that literal and prosaic system of belief which we hope is passing away before purer and deeper views of religion." The surface argument and sensation style of this article compare poorly enough with the sound learning and calm statement of the articles on John's Gospel and the Apocalypse in the "Bibliotheca Sacra."

IV. Brownson's Quarterly. 1. The Giobertian Philosophy. 2. Stevens on Reconstruction. 3. Abolition and Negro Equality. [Some good sense, and more political heresy]. 4. The next President. [Some severe, and some true things respecting Mr. Lincoln.] 5. Reade's Very Hard Cash. 6. Military Matters and Men.

We agree with the editor on one point, that our President seems absolutely bewitched with the supposed miraculous efficacy of the oath of allegiance." He justly says, "All citizens are bound by an express or tacit oath of allegiance, and every rebel breaks it, and does so either because he does not believe in the sanctity of oaths, or because he does not believe in the right of the government to impose an oath that conflicts with his allegiance to his particular State. In either case the oath of allegiance to the Union has no binding force on the rebel conscience. Political oaths have never offered any real security for political fidelity. In all ages and countries they have been found worthless, as weak as cords made of burnt flax. The only men they would bind, who would not be bound without them, are precisely the men who refuse to take them. They are, as a rule, worse than worthless, and yet the President places his whole reliance upon them, and he has been a practising lawyer! If the rebels could be bound by oaths of allegiance to the Union, they would never have been rebels."

V. Congregational Quarterly. 1. "Theological Education in Connecticut seventy years ago," is a very pleasant article, and not without some useful hints. 2. Historical Sketch of the Theological Seminary at Princeton. 3. "The Essential Independence and Equality of Local Churches.” [This is an elaborate statement of the question by the editor, and is deserving attention in these days of centralism. The proposition defended is, that “ every local church is independent of all outward jurisdiction, whether from popes, bishops, synods, conventions, or councils."]

VI. Freewill Baptist Quarterly. 1. The Physician of the Body and the Physician of the Mind. 2. Life and Times of St. Paul. 3. The effects of the Fall on Creation. 4. The Elements of Error on Human Life. 5. GeGod among the Nations. 7. The Anglo Saxon

ology and Creation.

Church.

6.

VII. Boston Review. 1. The Responsibility of Educated Men to Christianity. 2. Greek Text in Acts xx. 28, 1 Timothy iii. 16, and 1 John v. 7, 8. [A strongly stated argument for the Trinitarian side of the question.] 3. The Serpent in Eden and the Fall. 4. The Chaos of Beliefs.

VIII, North American. 1. Theodore Parker. 2. Sanitary Commission. [Should be read by all the people in the land, and especially by those who ask, "What becomes of all the money given for the soldiers?"] 3. The Navy of the United States. 4. The Future Supply of Cotton. [Valuable for its facts, and showing, as we think, that the throne of "King Cotton "is not necessarily in the Southern States.] 5. Loyal Work in Missouri. 6. West Point. 7. Gen. McClellan's Report.

IX. Quarterly Review (English). 1. Prospects of the Confederates. 2. Pompeii. [A very interesting sketch of the recent excavations and discoveries in the buried city.] 3. The Empire of Mexico. 4. Our Foreign Policy. 5. The Privy Council Judgment. [A legal discussion of the question.]

X. Edinburgh Review. 1. Iluman Sacrifices and Infanticide in India. [A horrible revelation, and giving evidence of the need of English, or some civilized, rule.] 2. British Rule in North America. 3. Kirk's Charles the Bold. 4. Renan's Life of Jesus. [Discriminating, able, and destructive to the romancer]

XI. National Quarterly. (March). 1. Sources and Characteristics of Hindu Civilization. 2. Juvenal on the Decadence of Rome. 3. The Brazilian Empire. 4. Catiline and his Conspiracy. 5. Klopstock as a Lyric and Epic Poet. 6. Our Quack Doctors and their Performances. 7. Kepler and his Discoveries. 8. Ancient and Modern Belief in a Future Life,

XII. New Englander. 1. The Conflict with Scepticism and Unbelief, with Notes on Parker and Renan. 2. The Atonement as a Revelation. 3. Poland. 4. The Atonement. 5. What makes a Heretic? 6. America Vindicated by an Englishman. 7. Lyman Beecher's Autobiography. 8. Review of Weiss' Theodore Parker. 9. Charles Beecher's Redeemer and Redeemed.

ARTICLE XXII.

A Look into the Age of Man.

Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man. Sir Charles Lyell, F. R. S. Philadelphia: Geo. W. Childs. Smithsonian Reports. 1860-61.

FOR a long time, the chronology of the Old Testament has been in dispute. It is true that our common Bibles have a series of dates upon the lengthy margin of patriarchal and Hebrew history, affixed as confidently as the railway engineer nails his distances to posts along the line; and that the first of these declares that Adam began to live 4004 years before our Lord. But the Septuagint, when its ages are calculated, insists upon a change of this date to about 6000 years. Geology, however, claims to have a word o say upon this matter; and being, at present, in an age when the rack and thumbscrew are out of use, says openly that man has been digging into the dust of this planet more than sixty or even eighty centuries, and that both the contending parties are in the wrong. With more than one Rosetta stone taken from the bone-caverns of Europe, the ooze of Swiss lakes, the gravel of the Somme, the peat-bogs and shell-mounds of Denmark, and the meadow-mud of the Nile, it proposes to interpret the hieroglyphics of an antiquity before which the pyramids are only the masonry of to-day; 12,000, 50,000, 200,000, years are some of the smaller estimates of the age of man upon the earth.

Sir Charles Lyell is quite confident that this high antiquity of the human race has been proved from the contents of the surface-layers of the earth's crust. Now we wish to do full justice to the sincerity, industry, and scientific acumen of the observers who have been, for fifty years, exploring the soil of this " great cemetery for memorials of man," and whose toils and speculations are recorded in the volumes mentioned above. But we believe that the question is not yet entirely closed. NEW SERIES. VOL. I. 35