this abuse of kingship a judgment will as surely fall on us Gentiles as judgment fell on the Jew for his unfaithfulness in the priesthood.

Nor in subduing the earth have we been more faithful to our trust than in replenishing it. Bacon's anticipation of the arts and sciences becoming depraved to malevolent or luxurious purposes has been most exactly verified. Were it not for this, Rousseau would never have obtained the prize in the Academy of Dijon for preferring the savage to the civilised state. Man's moral renovation, it would sometimes seem, moves slower than his intellectual; in those ages, as at the fall of the Roman empire, and before the French revolution, a general dissoluteness of manners results from refinement progressing while religion is stationary. A temporary break up of civilisation itself must occur to restore the balance and keep down discovery within the limits over which religion can exercise some control; the condition of restitution evidently being, that till man can govern himself it is not safe to entrust him with entire kingship over nature.

We have considered man's history in the past in its two great divisions, as preparatory to a final restitution of all things. Towards this the movement of man in history has never been linear, but always spiral, the axis of that spiral is his ideal progress-the right line along which he ought to have moved. As it is, he has advanced along the development of the spiral, acted on by two opposite forces, Godward and sinward. But this is not always to continue; a catastrophe must overtake the world and put an end to this dispensation, as before to the Jewish. It is remarkable that our Lord's prophecy, descriptive of the one event, is made the occasion of introducing the other. The analogy between the two is precise and complete. As there are two advents of Christ, so there are two ends of the world spoken of in this prophecy. With the first advent of Christ came the end of the first stage of the world's history. With the second will come the end of the second stage. The two representative races, Jew and Gentile, having run their course, and wearied out the longsuffering of God, will be swept away, as by the Flood. And as Noah and his family were saved, so as by water, so the church of the first century was saved out of Judea by timely escape to the mountains, and lay hid among the rocks of Pella: and so the church of the latter days

* Nov Org., lib. i., Aphorism 129.

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will be saved so as by fire, lifted above the fiery flood which will overwhelm an ungodly world: and as Noah waited in the ark for the abating of the waters, so, at the first end of the world, when Jerusalem was destroyed, and so again, at the second end of the world when Babylon shall be destroyed, the church will wait till she can open the window and look out upon a new heaven and a new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.

Then will be the days of the restitution of all things, which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his holy prophets since the world began. Then in the last, and Sabbath, millennium of the world's history, the meaning of the six weary, waiting millenniums of the past will be understood. As man will be restored spiritually wiser than when he fell; so intellectually he will have been a gainer also. He will be both wiser and better for that knowledge of nature which he is now inductively acquiring. As he will have learned selfrestraint, so he will know how to rule. Redeemed to the privileges of the priesthood, he may then be intrusted with his kingship. The work of the Jewish dispensation, as well as of the Gentile, will each then fall into its place; and as the longsuffering of God is to be counted salvation, so the delay in bringing in restitution will only augment its glory when it comes. Between the two extremes, of those who think the world is getting better, and of those who think it is getting worse, there lies the midway opinion, that many are running to and fro, some getting better, and some growing worse, and all the while knowledge is increased, and a stock of experience is being accumulated, which those who stand in their lot in the last day shall enjoy.

We have long thought the Book of Ruth typical of this doctrine of restitution, or the twofold recovery of the church and the world, the Jew and the Gentile. We read of Naomi (the pleasant one) going forth from the land during a famine, losing in exile her husband and her two sons, and, as a woman forsaken and grieved in spirit, calling herself Marah, "seeing the Almighty hath dealt very bitterly with me." Of all her former blessings, one the least prized only remains,-Ruth, her Gentile daughter-in-law, the remembrancer only of the dead, a widow, and one as good as dead. But the hour of redemption was come for the two widows, the young and the old, the Jew and the Gentile. Boaz (the mighty man) to obtain the right of redemption of the land must redeem also the name of the dead; as husband to Ruth he undertook this twofold task of redemption, as

two sons.

well of the person as of the possessions of Elimelech and his Thus the woman said to Naomi, at the birth of Obed, that not only was Boaz the restorer of her life, and the nourisher of her old age, but also that her daughter-inlaw, who loved her, was better to her than seven sons. Thus man has wandered from his home. In the Fall he went out an exile, and in his history since, after the Flood, he has become like Naomi-Marah. As the simple redemption of the field was illegal without redeeming the memory of the dead family of Elimelech; so secular restitution, the civilization and cultivation of the earth's surface, cannot be unless the person of man be redeemed, and a new posterity of the second Adam be raised to inherit instead of the posterity of the first. Boaz has been willing to redeem the family, and he of right may inherit the field. Thus to Obed descends the double right both of purchase and inheritance. Man not only recovers all he has lost, but, such is God's abounding grace, compensation even as if he had been an innocent sufferer. Restitution is thus not simple, but compound. The ten years' exile, and the loss of her two sons, was counted to Naomi in the redemption of the inheritance. The interval between paradise paradise lost and paradise regained, profitless to man in itself, will be counted to him as time profitably spent. The attempt of the Jew to exhibit a theocracy after the flesh which failed, as it must; the attempt of the Gentile to overspread and subdue the earth, which must also fail of success in this dispensation; these two attempts, like Mahlon and Chilion, must die in exile; the old life in both dispensations dies, the germ of the new only survives, as in the person of Ruth. Meanwhile Boaz is laying up riches to tender back to Naomi all she had lost, and to make compensation as well for the loss. Thus plenteous is redemption, both in the church and the world. In restitution God will draw a draft on his own treasury, not only for what man has lost, but for what also he ought to have acquired. Thus He gives us back our own, and that with usury; our abuse of talents being reckoned to us even as of use.

In conclusion, the use of such reflections on the final restitution of all things, is not so much to throw light on our state hereafter" It doth not yet appear what we shall be," -as to enable us to understand and improve the present. It lends a dignity to life, and reminds us that what God has cleansed that we should not call common, when we reflect that every attempt to ameliorate man, to colonise and culti

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vate the world, is a link in the long chain of redemption. Though earth is not our rest at present, we are engaged burying deep in it seeds that will spring up after the flood of fire has passed over it to purify it for the last time. The benevolent Captain Cook, whenever he landed on any of the South Sea islands, used to fill his pockets with the seeds of common garden herbs, and scatter them as he went along. The plants soon grew up, rank and wild, ran to seed, and so propagated themselves. It was not till after these cannibal islanders had been Christianised that these plants came to use. Then gardens were enclosed, and the waste seeds carefully raised. So with the seeds of good now scattering through the world; they often spring up and then run to seed again, but their use is bye and bye. The reserve in store for the earth, and man its inhabitant, is the restitution of these things to their use, of which we have been only pained with the abuse.

ART. IV.-1. The Life of Peter Van Schaack, LL.D., embracing Selections from his Correspondence and other Writings, during the American Revolution and his Exile in England. Edited by his Son. New York: Appleton. 2. Journal and Letters of the late Samuel Curwen, Judge of the Admiralty, &c., an American Refugee in England, from 1775 to 1784, comprising Remarks on the Prominent Men and Measures of that Period. By GEORGE ATKINSON WARD. London: Wiley and Putnam.

THE present state of our relations with America invest with a renewed interest all memoirs connected with the times when that country first emancipated herself from the yoke of England. The various opinions which were held by men of rank and integrity; the steps by which many among them were led to embrace the cause of independence; all form a contrast, not less remarkable than interesting, to the maxims of polity which now seem to prevail on the other side of the Atlantic. The two works at the head of this article, small as are their literary merits, may be read with advantage at the present juncture, as throwing much light on the principles and practice of the first asserters of American independence.

The interests and fortunes of the subjects of these biographies were more or less involved during the American war.

The former has laboured under the misfortune of not finding, in his son, an editor whose judgment kept pace with his good will. After a careful perusal of the bulky volume before us, we feel that a work, at once interesting and important, might have been produced from such materials, for these "records of a good man's life," (and such they really are), will be totally unreadable to the million, who care not to spend their time in winnowing away the bushel of chaff, in order to secure the grain of wheat; and the error is the more inexcusable, as his son informs us in a note, that one of his "greatest difficulties in preparing the present work, has been to make a selection from a large mass of manuscripts where all was so good."

Thus, then, the reader had every reason to expect that “the biography of an eminent American of elevated character, of high integrity, and of honourable association, who in sentiment was opposed to taking up arms in the American revolution,-composed as it mainly is of original contemporaneous materials "(vide Preface), would prove at once a source of amusement and instruction; and that it must have proved such we feel satisfied, had justice been done to Mr. Van Schaack by his biographer. The peculiarity of his views, the solidity of his principles, his unmitigated nationality, his social reverses, his stern domestic trials, and his strong natural affections, placed him without the pale of ordinary men; while his profession, (that of the law), which he appears to have pursued with a scrupulous rectitude, perfectly accordant to his political consistency, a dash of pedantry as amusing as it is harmless, and strong powers of observation, gave valuable facilities to those about him of drawing a vivid and attractive picture of him, " in his habits as he lived." But what shall we say of an editor, who, in allusion to his exile in England, upon which it will readily be understood that Mr. Van Schaack must necessarily be more than commonly expansive in his strictures and comments, on the subject of both men and things, after assuring his readers that in the mother country his worth was recognized, and his good qualities and literary acquirements and inclinations gained for him an introduction to many valuable friends, which soon ripened into intimacy, and secured for him superior means of information, and such opportunities for enlarging his fund of knowledge as have rarely been enjoyed by Americans in England,"-appends to this assurance the following note: