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of the ancient republics, to the absence, in the midst of all their refinement, their literature and their arts-of moral light, the only guaranty against corruption and decay. Yes, the truth is demonstrable,-Greece and Rome died for lack of Bible. Intellectual culture may not conquer moral depravity; for Paul, the only infallible philosopher the world ever saw, tells of a "law of the members warring against the law of the mind;" and, though literature were ever so potent as a moral purifier, all experience shows that she has failed in her office, for she has ever followed, not led the sentiment of the times.

The inefficacy of political action to perfect the social state, and the tendency of men and nations to become corrupt and oppressive as they acquire power, and of majorities to tyrannize, are treated in passages of great strength. We must here indulge ourselves with a short extract from a portion on the encroachment and usurpation of republics.

"And the greatest, the most popular, the most perfect republic the world has ever seen; would to God she might be excused from the category of those free states whose power has been used to oppress the weak, and which have known no law but the law of the strongest! But can we pass her by? Is not the stain of a great national robbery upon her; on her public journals, on her whole history? What has been her course of policy towards the original proprietors of the soil; who held it by that highest of all titles, a charter from the God of nature;-the right of original and immemorial possession? By craft, by rapacity, by the repeated and flagrant violation of the faith of treaties, and finally by armed force, they have been hunted from forest to forest, and from river to river, through a period of more than two hundred years. Now while I speak, the miserable remnants of these once powerful tribes, are climbing the farthest mountains; carrying with them nothing but their household gods, and the bitter memory of accumulated wrongs.

"From yonder summits of everlasting snow, they turn to take a last look at the broad and beautiful land of their fathers. But the sword of the white man pursues them, as the sword of the angel pursued the exiles from Paradise. Beckoning a sad adieu to their ancient hunting-grounds, to the graves and glory of their ancestors, they descend the Western Slope into the wilderness which skirts the Ocean; and history, willing to do a late redress to an injured and exiled people, looks in vain for any memento of their race among the shadows of the setting sun."

Our author claims a perfect system of moral truth as the only stable and perpetual foundation of a republican government; and somewhere about here we have a morsel on the French Reign of Terror-a fearful painting of humanity, when conscience has swung from her moorings and tosses on a sea of passions.

"The world stood aghast at such a bold and shameless desecration of eveay thing pure, and venerable, and holy. Men's hearts failed them for fear; and they waited for the event in fixed astonishment, as they wait for the avalanche or the earthquake. Those who managed the vessel of State, had thrown chart and compass overboard, and madly put out on the sea of revolution. They had hailed the rising sun of liberty with joy: but now that the ocean swelled, and the air darkened, with what terror did they behold his broad blood-red disk climb a sky black with tempests, and sounding with loud thunders from side to side? It has not been left to us to record the horrors and crimes of that eventful period; when Paris, the seat of art, and elegance and fashion, became a great slaughter-house; and the throne and the altar floated in blood away from their foundations. When one executioner tired with his horrid work of chopping off human heads, another was called to stand in his place;-and another, and another. No love was left. Every man was an assassin; and the murderer of to-day, while his hand was yet upon the axe, was marked the victim for to-morrow. And thus the republic, drunk with blood, staggered on under her load of misery and crime, towards the gulf of military despotism; an abyss dreadful and profound as hell. Anarchy is always impatient for a tyrant: and in a State so fruitful of monsters as France had been, he could not long be waited for. There was a brief and fearful pause; when lo!-girt about with darkness and clad in complete steel, a stern and solitary figure, bred out of the seething mass of national corruption, the offspring and very image of the times,-rose on the highest wave of revolution, with the imperial Eagle in his hand! The Tribunate hailed him as the supreme head of the nation. The Senate entreated him to accept the purple. The army followed, and laid the glory of a thousand victories at his feet. The people shouted, "Vive L'Empereur Napoleon!” and— the French Republic was no more."

We then observe that the power of perfecting society lies not in wealth, the arts, physical improvement, philosophy, political freedom, or systems of government-(and the moral abominations of the ancient nations, in whose condition were

combined all these elements, are thoroughly dissected)-and are led to the final conclusion, that Christianity is the luminary, whose onward and upward progress is to graduate the refulgence of the perfect day." Its part in the Reforma, tion under Luther, and in the offspring of that convulsion, the Revolution under Washington, is dwelt upon, and the address closes, thus heralding the "beautiful feet" of the Millennial Angel," upon the mountains, who bringeth good tidings and publisheth peace."

"But Christianity herself moves in advance of her own civilization; and does not wait the tardy operation of philosophical causes. Conscious of her power over universal man, and that she holds the world's destiny in her hands, she has undertaken as a specific object, and as her own proper work, the reclamation, not of provinces or of continents, but of all nations; all the millions of humanity. Possessed by this august idea, an idea infinitely surpassing in the grandeur of its conception, every project of ambition, every dream of universal empire, she has surveyed the enterprize from all its points. She has marked out with an astonishing boldness and precision, her plan of operations, and moves to its execution with a fixed and steady eye; with boundless energy, and inextinguishable faith. Already she is in occupation of tho seats of power in every division of the globe, and speaks to its swarming multitudes in two hundred languages of the many-tongued earth. In Africa, she has taken up her line of positions from Cape Palmas to Port Natal; and in Asia, from Constantinople to Ceylon; and thrown a belt of moral light like a galaxy over either continent. She has touched the iron sceptres of Brahma and Mohammed, and they crumble from their hands like ashes. She gathers her school on the Acropolis of Athens, and works her printing presses under the shadow of the pyramids. She has kindled her lights among the islands of the Southern and Pacific oceans; and the Polynesian canibal comes running from his native woods, and sits at her feet clothed, and in his right mind; eats her sacrament, and worships at her altars. And wherever she moves over the world, she carries with her all the fruits of that civilization which she has spread over the face of Christendom;-its liberty and its literature; its arts and its opinions; commerce, agricul ture, knowledge and philosophy. Thus she is commingling and assimilating all the races of men; and by acting at the fountain of all social improvement, on the interior and moral life of man, she is building up a new order of society, and se. curing it on deep and imperishable foundations. The Spirit VOL. VIII.-28.

of Him who said "Let there be Light," is moving over the face of the moral chaos, and it will not return void. It will bring light out of darkness, and order out of confusion. It will summon into being a new world, more beautiful and glorious than that over which angels and the answering stars shouted on the morning of creation; a world of harmony and love; where humanity will hold fellowship with heaven; in which the Spirit of Truth will preside to guide into all truth, and over which it will reign with a serene and holy dominion forever."

Here ends our imperfect review of Mr. Eells. We presume our readers are satisfied that we have perused him and been gratified. For the style, it may be occasionally too gorgeous: there are too many good things, and no resting places, for one who starts fair with the author, and means to accompany him to the end. This imparts to it a kind of stilliness, which approaches the Sophomoric. We have now and then a metaphor, too; not quite so good as new; as for instance, now, a "Phenix rising from the ashes of his sire,”—a department of ornithology, whose feathers have been so worn off by frequent use that it can hardly soar. We would also record our humble protest against such phrases as "tempered up," "blended up," and the like, as inelegant redundancies; and, if we are right in supposing the word "beckon" to mean to call, with a motion of the hand, then "beckoning an adieu is decidedly inaccurate.

But these are minute blemishes on a broad, bright disc. The book is good. It teems with fine language, nervous thought and noble sentiment. It breathes throughout the spirit of freedom, ardent love for the unshackled soul, and manly scorn of the tyranny of opinion. Its governing principle is reform; contempt for that blind reverence of the dust and rottenness of the past, which neglects the present and despairs of the future,-which prefers the dead men's bones of antiquity, to the freshness and newness of modern life; and yet the lessons that it draws from the by-gone, evince any thing but a desire to "let the things that have been, run to waste." It is purely democratic; and yet its warning voice is loudly raised against radical ruin, the offspring of rashness, and in support of religion and virtue, the only bases of a popular government. It arouses in each man's bosom the conviction, which has slumbered undisturbed through so many boasted lives, that he was born, not to "ripe and ripe, and rot and rot"—and die and bear no trace; but that his single life may tell, with the power of an age's events,-a revolu

tion-a hundred battles, on the destiny of posterity. It nerves every heart with the dawning resolution, not to die and have lived in vain. We conclude as we began: the true test in modern criticism upon any thing is, "What is it good for?" We have applied it to this pamphlet; and the result of our examination is a belief that if its author, in his future lucubrations, but follows in the path he seems to have marked out, he may review his youthful thoughts (in the light of this query,) when time shall have added vigor and discrimination to their character, and find "no line which, dying, he could wish to blot."

R. R. R.

(From the German of Herder.)

INTRODUCTION OF THE GOSPEL OF JOHN.
JOHN I. 1-18.

(CONTINUED FROM THIRD NUMBER.)

14.

THE Greek Jews, especially in Egypt, had an easier access to these ideal theories of the origin of the world and of men. In Alexandria, where, since the building of the city, they had lived in great numbers in peace: In Alexandria, the confluence of all people and all modes of thought-the museum of all the then flourishing literature and science, which could be bought or even fabricated: here they could, they must of necessity, even without any hostility to the Jews in Palestine, put forth a new shoot. All earthly hopes of a Messiah for Palestine they had nearly given up: very slight traces of them appear in Philo, and in the Apocryphal writings from that country.* They turned the more therefore to a kind of Deism, compounded of Jewish and Heathen ideas. To be righteous and pious after the manner of their fathers, was their ideal in morals; but in theory they had another, which did not exist in Moses and the prophets, but was added to them; ideas from various Grecian Schools, especially from a new philosophy, afterwards styled the Pythagorean, NeoPlatonic. Since the works of the Jew, Aristobulus, are lost, Philo must be our authority on this point. He was from

*This monstrous fiction appeared late: at least we know it only from pretty late writers.

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