Christianity, and the superiority of the supersensible over the sensible world. A silly employment this last (though by the way, radically identical with the other), will no doubt appear to us "practical Sadducees;" but it remains yet to be proved that studying animal magnetism, and concocting matter into mind, is a less ennobling employment than commenting on Jeremy Bentham, and converting right and wrong into mere pleasure and pain; and it may also be doubted whether collecting ghost stories be a less edifying employment than fabricating lies for newspapers, and political orations. Once and for all, every honest truth-loving man must make a decided unconditional protest against the one-sidedness of English Materialism; at the same time we are willing to confess, that the Spiritualism of the Germans is often a thing vague and unsubstantial, like the souls of the New South Wales savages, (as they say), coming from clouds, and going back into clouds again; also that the dew of watery tears is too plenteous; and that the soul of man is made to comport itself like a mimosa pudica—all nerve and no muscle-so that a German man seems less manly than a British child; there is also too much of old wives' gossip, of a morbid anxiety about small things, of a provincial importance given to trifles, and of a national, sometimes also a universal dignity, to petty domesticities, and specially we are willing to confess, and we forewarn the economical reader, that a great part of Jung Stilling's works can come under no better category than that of pious drivel. We have much that does not rank far above the vulgar style of street preaching; a great puff and a loud bark, but not a single tooth to bite. The "Home-sickness," for instance, is a very strange, but also a very wearisome freak of pious fancy; and no wonder; from a Germanization of John Bunyan, and a sanctification of Tristram Shandy (so the author himself explains it), something singularly fantastic, but at the same time singularly diluted and pithless, was to have been expected. It is a most singular imagination, an expansion and universalizing of Stilling's own singular existence; a jumble of real and ideal, of plain and allegorical; heaven and earth thrown into one lumber-room, and shaken so together that you know not whether the one has been solidified into stone, or the other evaporated into clouds. Then we have the book of the Revelations, and the number of the beast; and the Old and New Testament changed into the "The Tales of a Grandfather;" and pious hymus and prayers, and a "golden treasury" of meditations for every day in the year, and for every text in the Bible; and "a grey man" gliding quietly through the throng and glitter of this wicked world, and prophesying that in the year 1836 (now past)

the millennium is to commence, or the devil to be let loose-we forget which. The reader will excuse our going at large into the criticism of these works; they might have possessed--we believe they did possess considerable religious influence in their day; but they are altogether destitute of literary value,-and even in a religious point of view they are mere syllabub and whisked foam. The fact is, Stilling (like many greater men) spoiled himself by writing too much; and he was spoiled also by writing exclusively for a certain set of very amiable people, who looked up to him as a sort of god. Even in sensible Britain, these things take place daily; how much more in Germany!

But there is yet one work of this singular individual, not of a strictly religious character, that deserves special mention. We mean the "Theorie der Geister-Kunde;" a complete system of the supersensible world, wherein the rights of ghosts and spirits, the authenticity of visions, and extraordinary visitations of all sorts, are most nobly and manfully vindicated against the incredu lity of all gross, full-blooded men, who eat beef-steaks, drink porter, laugh loudly, and have their portion only in the material. It would be premature to enter into any serious examination of this matter, so long as the pretended facts (?) of animal magnetism remain uninvestigated. These facts, when ascertained and calmly and impartially looked into, may possibly throw great light on the whole philosophy of dreams, visions, and apparitions. The misfortune is that impartial juries, and keen, quick-witted barristers on each side, are seldom at hand to try the evidence on which such extraordinary occurrences rest. In the meanwhile Jung Stilling sets out from a transcendental principle, which we are afraid will not go far to conciliate his English readers. He borrows again a leaf from Immanuel Kant; he proves, from the first chapter of the 'Critique of Pure Reason,' that space and time have no existence except in the mind; they are mere ways of looking at things, not things themselves; they have no permanent reality; consequently the whole of the modern philosophy, which is founded on the relations of space and time-the mechanical systems, as Stilling styles them, of Copernicus and Newton-are equally phantastical, equally unreal. There is no permanent reality except in God, and in the world of angels and spirits, which the word of God reveals. But this supersensible world is independent of all vulgar relations of space and time, and cannot be legitimately judged of by the laws that regulate the co-existence and succession of material facts. The scoffs and sneers of the Sadducean merely prove his own ignorance. The empirical man is himself the shadow into which he would convert the

intelligible universe. Such is the wide and all-embracing basis on which Stilling proposes to rebuild the sacred temple in which ghosts and spirits, dreams, omens, and presentiments, were wont to be worshipped; and perhaps if the English nation were not so much accustomed to think by the same laws that regulate steamcoaches and spinning-jennies, the scheme might not appear altogether unreasonable. There is at least this advantage (as Kant says) in going beyond the limits of experience, that no experience can be brought to contradict us.

To conclude. Henry Jung used to say, that he had received more real Christian kindness from that one heathen, Göthe, than from all his brother Pietists at Elberfeld put together. Possibly, if we were to try the experiment, we might find that there is more of the spirit of true Christianity to be borrowed from one of these heterodox neologians, or anti-neologic German pietists, than from a host of our own most orthodox doctors. There is nothing strange in this. The mere novelty and contrast of the foreign mode of thought acts as a beneficial stimulus to the reflective faculties. But, independent of this, where shall we find such a sincere reverential love of truth, such a scrupulous conscientiousness of investigation, such a vital breathing in the atmosphere of all that is most holy, as amongst these Germans? It is high time that we should do them justice in the domain of religion, as we have already done in the more familiar walks of literature. Hitherto, in respect of matters theological, we have comforted ourselves too much like Penelope's suitors; we feed upon another man's substance, and call the master of the house a bravo. We furnish the shelves of our libraries with the fruit of their industrious research in classical literature and biblical criticism, and then we turn round upon them and denounce them as infidels and atheists, because those very habits of inquiry by which we profit have led some of them to doubt on some points, with regard to which we have never taken the trouble even to inquire. Is this Christian? Is this gentlemanly? Verily, if we can learn nothing else from German theology, we may learn toleration, aud that, though a mere negative thing, is a great deal, for it is negative of folly, and puts a gag upon the greedy maw of the allswallowing EGO of dogmatism. The virtue of religious tolerance, as we are accustomed to exercise it, is a mere material and outward thing. A man may preach as much nonsense as he pleases, and we will not incarcerate him. Very good. This is tolerating another man's nonsense; it is but one step above savage barbarity to do so; but how shall we learn to tolerate another man's sense? This is indeed a hard thing for flesh and

blood; for it implies the counterpart idea, that some nonsense may also be on our side. Practically, to tolerate the notion that another man may be right in some things while we are in the wrong, is a very difficult thing; a thing very different from the parade which it is now the fashion to make of religious toleration; a thing which many very orthodox people never learn at all; a thing which only the habitual spiritual application of that golden rule, "Do unto others," &c. can enable a man to attain to. If we are to pay any regard to the opinions of impartial foreigners, oftentimes repeated, we must confess ourselves, notwithstanding our gold and our machinery, to be bigots in some things. Let us go to Germany, and study toleration. Let us remember what Guizot says; "It is necessary, if religion is to accomplish its end, that it should become accepted by liberty,-that man should submit himself voluntarily and freely to it,-that he should be free, notwithstanding his submission. This is the twofold problem that religion is required to solve." Therefore let neology quietly work its own purification. "Erasmus has laid the egg;" God

will send some "Luther to hatch it” when the fulness of time shall come. And if the Germans have not laid any real egg in metaphysico-theological matters, they have at least started some new ideas, which we, with our broad practical understanding, may condescend to lay hold of and apply. Even this man, Jung Stilling-half woman as he unquestionably is may teach us much. He may teach us to unite the most zealous and jealous evangelism with a certain free latitudinarianism, that has not the least kindred with indifference. We may learn from him that religion is not theology, and piety is not church-going. We may learn to forego the letter which killeth, and seek after the spirit which maketh alive. We may learn even of ourselves-even by reading the depths of our own hearts-to know that which is right. We may arrive at the great and important conclusion, that the practical regeneration of the moral nature of man, which is the beginning and the end of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, is a very different thing from any local ordinance, whereby a man is tattooed and tabooed into the traditions of the elders.

ART. II.-Mémoires sur la Reine Hortense et la Famille Impériale, par Mademoiselle Cochelet, Lectrice de la Reine. (Madame Parquin) 4 tom. Paris, 1836-1838.

WHAT a crowd of half-forgotten sensations are called up by the phrase of the Imperial Family of France! Fear, admiration, wonder, expectancy, and depression, the energies of late vengeance, and active hostility, with the pulses of final triumph, of sympathy, and even sorrow for those who filled so long so splendid a place in history. Yet this downfal and desolation was as complete as their earlier felicity. The feelings that then filled our minds, and formed a material part of our every-day existence, as involving the very principle of our national, if not individual, welfare, now lie unnoted and overlaid by subsequent changes and events, or rise but as half-forgotten dreams amidst the long oblivion of the past. The very associations to which those days were attached, the circumstances that sprung out of them, the order of things to which they more immediately led, even these are but as the tale of yesterday, yielding their influences to those of the actual time. The system last formed is based upon their ruin, and its foundations are composed of their broken and jumbled components. The rising generation but knows them as the theme of history or a moral, while that which rose, lived with, and has survived them, recalls slowly and with difficulty the scenes of their domination. It is a drama at which they had once assisted, but whose pageants are closed and the dresses divested now; the audience has long retired, while the last expiring lights gleamed only on empty benches and naked boards, daubed canvass, the pulley, and the beam.

But names that could once so deeply interest can never lose all their power over the spirit. The charms of that acted romance were too closely interwoven with our own youthful thoughts, opening prospects, and panting aspirations not to retain for us who have outlived them, and who alone were conscious of their stern but gorgeous reality, the tribute which the human bosom pays ever to living truth and this it pays with a sincerity and simple sadness totally unlike all the ideal of fancy's boldest creations. These beings of recent history lived and breathed, felt, loved and hated, like ourselves. We grant the same fact theoretically in other instances, but we know it in this case of our own experience; and when the robes of pomp and tinsel with which circumstance invested them at the moment, have fallen and faded in the damps of decay; when the factitious glare of elevated station has died, and the sole light that haloes their