TRUE THOUGHTS. - True thoughts never come, as man comes into the world, naked; they have always robes, simple, but ever graceful and attractive. The man who lives in the substrata of truth, God's own sanctuary, feeling the vast and awful above and around him, will ever have more disgust than sympathy with all that is tawdry in the dress, manners, and language of popular life. THE INFLUENCE OF GRAND SCENERY UPON THOUGHT.--Philosophically, impressions are the materials out of which we build our mental world; but how different the impressions made by Skiddaw and a hillock, by Niagara and a brook. God made His own great book, the Bible, out of minds that tilled the mountain soil and breathed the mountain air. CHRISTLINESS is godliness; and Christliness is likeness to Christ; and likeness to Christ is the perfection of our being. FALLING INTO SIN.-The good man who falls into sin, is like the gallant bark that goes down in the mouth of the haven: it becomes more perilous to the sailor than if it had sunk abroad in the open sea. WORSHIP. Worship is not the giving of words in liturgies and songs; is not the giving of our property for religious and benevolent purposes; is not the giving of an occasional service; it is the giving of our being to the great God. Self surrender is worship. their circle, they rather warn their people against them than direct them to their more enlightened ministry. Great GREAT THINKERS. ideas have a power to close up the senses. St. Paul's clock might strike its loudest boom into the ear of the man who is busy in the realm of abstraction, and he would hear it no more than the dead that sleep beneath its majestic dome. You cannot always get great men to eat, drink, speak, and live by your chronometers. Great thinkers are never, perhaps, fluent. The superficial men of flippant tongue and verbal memorythe mere channels of other men's thoughts-are the fluent speakers. The man who thinks in theology is so conscious of difficulty in every point he touches that he moves with the slow and sometimes hesitant step of cautious reverence. are COUNTRY LIFE.-How charming is the green and glittering freshness of a dewy summer morning; when every blade of grass is decked with diamonds, sparking in the light of the rising sun; when the mower plies his task, and the fragrance of the new-mown hay scents the air; and the corn-fields wave in promise of the coming autumn; and the hills clothed with their appropriate trees and shrubs and herbage! How preferable such a scene to the dirty smoke and manifold pollutions of the crowded city! Custom and habit, it is true, and diverse associations of ideas, both form and change men's taste. But surely nature is on the side of the country:- 'God made the country, and man made the town.” Literary Notices. [We hold it to be the duty of an Editor either to give an early notice of the books sent to him for remark, or to return them at once to the Publisher. It is unjust to praise worthless books; it is robbery to retain unnoticed ones.] THE REVIEWER'S CANON. In every work regard the author's end, Since none can compass more than they intend. CRITICAL AND EXEGETICAL HANDBOOK TO THE GOSPEL OF ST. JOHN. By Translated by the REV. W. URWICK, M.A. HANDBOOK TO THE EPISTLE TO THE ROMANS. Translated by the REV. J. MOORE. H. A. W. MEYER, TH.D. Vol. II. We furnished our readers a few months ago with a sketch of the life of the learned and illustrious author of these volumes.* Few, if any modern authors equal, and none excel, Dr. Meyer in his philological attainments and discoveries, and his power of reaching the grammatical meaning of a text. Not a little gratified and encouraged are we to find the distinguished author giving forth the following judgment upon that Gospel of John, upon which so many assaults have been made in these modern times. "After all that has been said for and against up to the present time, I can have no hesitation in once more expressing my delight in the testimony of Luther, quoted now and again with an ironical smile, that John's Gospel is the only tender, right chief Gospel, and is to be far preferred before the other three, and to be more highly esteemed. In order to make the confession one's own, it is not necessary to be either a servile follower of Luther or a special adherent of the immortal Schleiermacher. I am neither the one nor the other; and in particular I do not share the individual peculiar motive as such which underlies the judgment of the former." This volume takes us on through the seventh chapter of John, and no Biblical scholar requires to be told how the author has done his noble work. The second volume is on the Epistle to the Romans. The first volume we noticed before. This, the second, is equal in every respect to it, and runs on to the end of the Epistle. Truly the enterprising publishers are laying Biblical students under a very heavy obligation on account of the services they are rendering in producing such works as these. *See vol. ix. Editor's Series, page 60. B B EXPOSITORY LECTURES ON THE EPISTLE TO THE HEBREWS. First Series, Chapters i. to vii. By ADOLPH SAPHIRE. London: F. J. Shaw & Son, 48, Paternoster Row. These are popular expository Lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews. They embrace the first seven chapters; and another volume, we understand, will be required to complete the Epistle. The Lectures being popular, are neither critical nor profound. The author's theology is of that stiff and Calvinian type which is fast passing into obsolescence. The dogma of legal substitution is very prominently set forth in these Lectures; and not a little is said about the harmonizing of the Divine attributes, as if the Almighty had a difficulty in managing Himself. The author's observations throughout are made rather to square with a system he has, than with the reason, conscience, and experience of modern men. Albeit there is much in the volume we admire, and much that will help a thoughtful and discriminating preacher in his work. By SCRIPTURE PROVERBS, ILLUSTRATED, ANNOTATED, AND APPLIED. FRANCIS JACOX. London: Hodder & Stoughton, Paternoster Row. In this volume, Mr. Jacox proceeds upon the same plan as he has in most of his other works. He takes a text and brings to it a number of passages from authors of all classes, countries, and times. In many cases the thoughts and utterances quoted are very poor, and fail to throw light upon the subject, or to enrich the book. It is easy for a man who has a large library, or who has time to visit the Museum, to produce volumes of this kind without number. But we question, in doing so, whether he renders much real service to mankind. We confess ourselves disappointed with this volume. We should like to have had a work from the author on the Proverbs, containing his own independent expositions and applications. We should prefer a great deal a chain of his own thinking to a long string of other men's thoughts. A POPULAR COMMENTARY ON THE NEW TESTAMENT. By D. WHEDON, D.D. Vol. II., LUKE, JOHN. London: Hodder & Stoughton. The expositions of this author on Matthew and Mark we noticed some time since, and heartily commended them to the attention of our readers. Dr. Whedon, without the show of learning or indication of great effort, seems to reach at once the ideas of the sacred text, and brings them out in clear language to the eyes of common men. It is a capital Commentary for Sunday-school teachers. FORGIVENESS AND LAW, GROUNDED IN PRINCIPLES INTERPRETED BY HUMAN ANALOGIES. BY HORACE BUSHNELL, D.D. London: Hodder & Stoughton. When this book was announced, we received the impression that Dr. Bushnell had renounced the theological opinions he had set forth in his previous volumes and gone back to cold, stiff orthodoxy again. But we were mistaken. He distinctly declares, "I recant no one of my denials, I only undertake to fill the vacant spaces made by them with better material." Although we cannot endorse all the author sets forth in this work, we can but repeat our admiration of the vigour, independence, and the reverence with which he prosecutes his inquiries. As a thinker upon sacred subjects there is no one in our day that excels him, few if any approach him. He is a man of that high mental power that amounts to genius. All his powers are highly cultured, and his understanding enriched with choicest knowledge. It is impossible for a thoughtful man to read his works, whether he agrees with him or not, without having his mind stirred with new impulses of thought and his heart made better. The only complaint we have, is with his style of expression, which is sometimes very hazy, and to us almost uninterpretable. Like most modern authors who have renounced the old view of the atonement, such as Campbell and Maurice, he is not always happy in making clear his thoughts. It is not, however, always or generally so; often he throws out a truth with great felicity and force of expression. Take for instance the following passage where he represents the works of technical theologues. "We put the bits of glass and crockery into our kaleidoscope, and turning it round and round we make theological figures that we call truths, and which, having no ideas in them, we think must surely stand because they look so regular and are milled in the scientific way of the scientific instrument. Thus we go on from age to age, trying vainly to fasten theologic notions that represent God by nothing in ourselves. Is it not time now, after so many centuries gone, to have it discovered that there is no truth concerning God which is not somehow explicated by truths of our own moral consciousness?" Elsewhere he speaks of the danger to which a legal atonement is exposed in these days from the rising sentiment of society. "A certain general momentum of thought is becoming every day more and more pressingly adverse on this particular side of what we call our gospel. It rolls in with a steady sea-surge motion, piling tides that ever threaten to overtop and completely drown out the so-called orthodox belief." Our ministerial readers will of course procure this book and give it a thoughtful perusal. GLANCES THROUGH THE GATES; OR, SKETCHES OF PARADISE. By Rev. A. BEANLAND, F.G.S. London: G. Lamb, Commercial Road. This book consists of two parts; the one entitled Paradise on Earth, and the other, Paradise in Heaven. The First Part contains thirteen chapters, which treat of the planting, the site, the primal pair, the trees, the law, the serpent, the temptation, the guilty, the Lord God, the doom, the cherubim, the loss, and the outcasts of Paradise. The Second Part contains eleven chapters, which treat of the recovery, the promise, the preparation, the people, the position, the beauty, the bliss, the society, the worship, the possession and the perpetuity of Paradise. There is much good and practical thinking in this book, and not a few passages of striking power; it is a book that will be read by most religious people with interest and profit. EARLY ROMAN CATHOLIC MISSIONS TO INDIA: AN HISTORICAL ESSAY. By JAMES F. TINLING, B.A. London: S. W. Partridge & Co., Paternoster Row. This is an instructive essay on a very important subject. It is learned, implies a large amount of research, and abounds with useful information. THE HOMILIST, VOLS. VIII. AND IX. EDITOR'S SERIES. London: Simpkin & Marshall. We call the attention of our readers to these two last volumes of the "Homilist," in order that they may procure them before, like many of the preceding volumes, they be sold out. No volumes contain such a vast variety of subjects as these two. The EIGHTH volume contains 120 original discourses, more or less elaborate, and most of them on texts that are seldom if ever preached from. Besides these there are articles on Chief Founders of the Chief Faiths, Biblical Criticisms, and nearly ONE HUNDRED Original Similitudes or Pulpit Illustrations. Vol. IX. contains 124 sermons, also for the most part on fresh texts. Besides articles on Chief Founders of Chief Faiths, Biblical Criticism, and a large number of Pulpit Illustrations and Literary Notices, also discussions in the Preacher's Confidential Council Room. Amongst the subjects we have the "Theology of Shakspeare," "Hours with the Lonely," "Personal Identity," the "Moral Murderer," the "Ideal Social Circle," "Moral Materialism, its Causes and Cure," "Three Temples of the One God," the "Wear, Tear, and Dissolution of the World," the "Divinity within us," "Man in Heaven on an Equality with the Angels," the "Superority of Moral over Military Force," the "Power of Retribution," the "Conventional Church," "Departed Martyrs," "Man made Divine," " Cheapness of Moral Redemption," etc., etc. Amongst the contributors we have Professor Von Oosterzee, D.D., Schleiermacher, Caleb Morris, W. Forsyth, Dr. Stoughton, Urijah Thomas, J. G. Hughes, W. R. Percival, W. Kelly, Thornton Wells, T. Barow, etc. They also contain some productions from Max Müller, Professor Plumptre, H. Murphy, LL.D., etc., etc. It is not for us to speak a word in favour of these volumes, but we sincerely regard them as equal if not superior to the best of their predecessors. Butler & Tanner, The Selwood Printing Works, Frome, and London. |