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subject to perverse tendencies and evil habits, with disordered moral perceptions, seared conscience, or enervated will, is in a condition of moral impotence, and, left to itself, could not recover from it. In this, no doubt, consists one of the severest penalties of sin. But it is for precisely this state of things that God has provided a remedy in Christ. Man thus circumstanced is lost, and Christ declares that he came "to seek and to save that which was lost." 13 He needs to be quickened; and the apostle tells us that "the last Adam-Christ-was made a quickening spirit;" Christ says that "as the Father raiseth up the dead, and quickeneth them, even so the Son quickeneth whom he will," (and he says, John, xii. 32, "I will draw all men. unto me;") and Paul says to the converted and believing, "And you, being dead in your sins, hath he quickened." 14 He needs to be strengthened; and Paul affirms that "when we were without strength, (morally impotent) in due time Christ died for the ungodly;" and we read of the converted Saul, that he "increased the more in strength," and find him subsequently saying, "I can do all things through Christ which 'strengtheneth me," and again, "I bow my knees unto the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he would grant you,.

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to be strengthened with might by his spirit in the inner These allusions will suffice to show what was the work which Christ came to do, with respect to men in this condition of bondage to sin, and of moral impotence into which they have fallen. He came to be "made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption;""the spirit of power and of love, and of a sound mind." 16 Through him, God set in operation a system of means to break up the suggestions and force of evil habits; to quicken and energize the will; to pour the tide of a new life and vigor into every vein and artery of our being, and to deliver us " from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." 17

Such being the fact, the only legitimate question in the case is, Are the means appointed sufficient? In other

13 Luke xix. 10. 141 Cor. xv. 45; Jno. v. 21; Col. ii. 13. 15 Rom. v. 6; Acts ix. 22; Phil. iv. 13; Eph. iii. 14-16. 16 1 Cor. i. 30; 2 Tim. i. 7. 17 Rom. viii. 21.

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words, has God been successful in the remedy he has provided? If he has, any argument for the doctrine of endless misery on the supposed continued force of base habit, of course fails. If he has not, then-let it be plainly said he has demonstrated that he is unequal to the exigencies of the government he has undertaken to administer, and we and the universe have no competent governor or guardian, and so are without a God. This is the issue; and however much effort may be made to avoid it, it meets us, inevitably and inexorably, whichever way we turn. Nor, happily, have we been left to answer the question unassisted. "As in Adam all die," Paul assures us, even so in Christ shall all be made alive; and "if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things have become new." And the testimony of the prophet seems also to have been given with express reference to this point, when he says, in God's name, "I have sworn by myself, the word is gone out of my mouth in righteousness, and shall not return, that unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear, surely shall say, In the Lord have I righteousness and strength." 19 Nor is it a record without significance, here, that the psalmist says, "Thy people shall be willing in the day of thy power." 20 If, then, any dependence is to be placed on these and like assurances of the divine word, it is certain that the means which God has appointed in Christ to strengthen the enervated will and to redeem it from its enslavement to evil habit shall be effectual; man's moral impotence shall be universally healed, and even the weakest be aided to say, "I will arise and go to my Father."

Here, then, we rest; though not without the wish that we could have had time to unfold especially this last topic more fully. And as the conclusion of the whole, we see that so far from furnishing any argument against the reconciliation of all souls, the doctrine of human freedom, like every other legitimate ground of argument on the subject, necessarily conducts us to this great result. God will violate no will; but under the operation of the means he has appointed, even the weakest and most enslaved shall be strengthened for the choice of the right; even the

181 Cor. xv. 22; 2 Cor. v. 17. 19 Isa. xlv. 23-25. 20 Psa. cx. 3.

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most perverse shall be attracted to the infinite beauty of "the first good and first pure; even the most stubborn shall yield to the persuasive and melting power of divine grace and so all wills shall finally be brought into harmony with God's, and "all things be subdued unto Him, that God may be all in all."

E. G. B.

ART. VII.

Literary Notices.

1. General History of the Christian Religion and Church: from the German of Dr. Augustus Neander. Translated from the last Edition. By Joseph Torrey, Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in the University of Vermont, &c. Volume Fourth: comprizing the Fifth Volume of the Original, &c. First American Edition. Boston: Published by Crocker & Brewster. 1851. 8vo. pp. 651.

We have looked with much interest, and with some anxiety, on the progress of this publication in our country. It is the largest work on the history of Christianity which has appeared among us; and the labor of translating must have been so great, and the prospect of an adequate pecuniary renumeration so small, that there were grounds to fear a suspension. But here is the fourth large and closely printed octavo; and the translator encourages the hope that, as soon as the only remaining and posthumous volume is published in Germany, it will be given to us in his version, bringing the history down to the era of the Reformation. Would that the lamented author had lived to prosecute his work through the great religious revolution of the sixteenth century, and through the succeeding periods, to his own day. But happily he had just reached the close of one grand series of acts in the Christian drama, when death palsied his indefatigable brain and hand. His work, such as it is, will ever stand a monument of his learning, comprehensive grasp of mind, liberality, and warm affectionate piety; and, though not without faults, as we have heretofore said, we still think it will mark the beginning of a new period in the form and character of church histories. The excellence of the translation has been universally acknowledged, in England, as in America.

The volume before us reaches from Pope Gregory the Seventh, 1073, to Pope Boniface the Eighth, 1294: a period rich in points of interest to the speculative as well as to the historical inquirer. The extension of Christianity among the Sclavonian race, and among

the Tartars, Persians, and Chinese; the Crusades against the East, and against the Albigenses; the noon-day of the Papal power; the Cathari, Waldenses, and other "Reformers before the Reformation;" the scholastic philosophy, and we may add the scholastic theology, the doctrines of Roscelin, Anselm, Abelard, Peter Lombard, Alexander of Hales, Thomas Aquinas, &c.—these, with the attendant matters of a more general character, are brought before us, often in new light, always with clearness and discrimination. To us, this fourth volume is by no means the least valuable of the whole work. We think that the next will prove to be equally important and interesting.

2. The Life of John Sterling: By Thomas Carlyle. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, and Company. 1851. 12mo. pp. 344.

The biography and writings of Sterling had already been published by one of his executors, Archdeacon Hare; but Mr. Carlyle, the other executor, feeling that more needed to be said of the life and character of the subject, entered on the work anew. He has performed it as none but he could perform it,—with considerable of his grotesque manner indeed, but with peculiar effect. He shows, rather than describes, the man and the very processes of his growth. This, it is well known, is Carlyle's favorite way of treating such matters. He shows us the young child in his often shifting home, together with the varying influences that come in upon him from his environment. We see the course of his training, or, more properly, his hap-hazard formation, under the combined agency of his own generous, active, and courageous nature, and of the circumstances amid which he was placed. We look in upon the somewhat irregular course of his education, at school, and subsequently at the universities of Glasgow and Cambridge; admiring, all the while, the noble disposition of the youth, but apprehending a thousand dangers in his almost total want of control over its lively and adventurous impulses. When he enters on the world with a blind, though at bottom philanthropic, radicalism, and with all confidence in capricious, illimitable speculation; when we see his mind unsettled, partly by skepticism, and partly by the habit of all his earlier life, and incapable of holding steadily to any one pursuit, there needs no gift of prophecy to foretell that he will waste his entire fund of energies either on impracticable, if not hurtful enterprizes, or in fitful projects, taken up with ardor, and laid aside with impatience. He is an undisciplined organism of power, a beautiful engine, in full blast, but unharnessed and without track. We follow him through his subsequent career, now a revolutionist, now a politician, now a clergyman, now a writer of prose fiction, and finally a poet; and his course is ended at the age of thirty-eight, after having borne up against disease and disappointment, with an heroic courage and hopefulness, that touch every

chord in our hearts. A brave soul, but without centre or circumference!

His case might have been presented so as to enforce the lesson of solemn warning, which it obviously bears. Carlyle has not done this; his sympathies have, on the whole, a lurking tendency the other way. Here is a noble mind, with affections and endowments naturally fitted for much good, but made of little avail by one prevading fault, want of system. Out of the infinity of possibilities in speculation, in faith, and in pursuits, he could fix on nothing long at a time. All was swimming around him, though he had an impression that higher up, among the clouds, not deeper down, there was firm land somewhere. He could gather out of the chaos no settled principles which he might call his own; could form, in the all-surrounding deep, no world of ideas that would hold their place, and become a genial environment in which his thoughts might live and thrive as in a home; nor could he found a standing-point on which to rest, and from which to act and put fourth his strength, as from a sure foothold. He made efforts enough, hastily determined, and as rapidly executed; but the power of a giant would avail nothing, if he got no basis to stand upon, and if he expended himself without definite and fixed aim. No sooner had he an idea, howsoever crude, than the world must have the benefit of it, as if the world were in starving need of crudities; all his tentative essays must be put forth on the broad open theatre, from the moment that he began to commit his part, and while he himself knew not what it was. Now, what business had such a man to come before the public, in his yet foetal state? Nature itself provides that the forming processes should be conducted in secret; if exposed, there is an interruption of the natural course, and the result is either abortion or a monster. We fear that the influence of some of his associates, of Coleridge in particular, and even of Carlyle, tended rather to encourage him in his discursive and self-prodigal mood. Carlyle says, I have known few creatures whom it was more wasteful to send forth with the bridle thrown up, and to set to steeple-hunting instead of running on highways! But it is the lot of many such in this dislocated time,-Heaven mend it! " Heaven never will mend it in this wise. No time is possible, in this world or the next, when such a course can lead, or ought to lead, to any thing but miscarriage,—or, are we to preach to the good people a golden age coming, when the laws of nature shall be reversed so as to meet the demands of absurdity?

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One of the saddest things in this book is Carlyle's sneer at the earnestness with which his friend Sterling always clung to faith in a personal God, at least. He had spiritualized Christianity, aerialized it, after some such transcendental fashion as Coleridge tried to set forth, and on this ground he had reconciled it with his conscience to take orders, for a while, as a clergyman of the English Church; but

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