Sermons on Ecclesiastical Subjects. By HENRY EDWARD. American edition. Volume I. 12mo., pp. 438. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1872. Sermons on Living Subjects. By HORACE BUSHNELL. 12mo., pp. 468. New York: Scribner, Armstrong, & Co.

1872.

The sermons of Archbishop Manning, first-named above, are one of the many specimens of pulpit eloquence with which the Roman Church continues to adorn herself. The argumentative aim of each sermon, however clothed with fervid imagination, and expressed in semi-poetic diction, is never lost from view. One sermon paints the age of Thomas à Becket, when all power had floated to the hierarchy, in hues of rainbow radiance. Another sermon on "The Negro Mission," to our Southern blacks, makes humble confession of England's sin for sending slavery hither, but forgets all contrition for the sin of Romanism in doing its best to perpetuate slavery in America. The past political history of American Catholicism is a poor certificate for her to the American negro.

The sermons of the great pulpit thinker of Minnesota are in a different style. A series of sententious titles are but indexes of the deep wisdom unfolded in the productions they indicate. The brain of the great Congregationalist grows mightier with advancing years.

Discourses upon the Attributes of God. By STEPHEN CHARNOCK, B.D., Fellow of New College, Oxford. With his Life and Character. By WILLIAM SYMINGTON, D.D. Two volumes in one. 8vo., pp. 543. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers. 1873.

Sermons and Discourses. Вy THOMAS CHALMERS, D.D., LL.D. Now Completed by the Introduction of his Posthumous Sermons. Two volumes in one. 8vo., pp. 473. New York: Robert Carter & Brothers. 1873.

Charnock belongs to that class of old Puritan divines whose place is fixed, we suppose, beyond criticism. To us their works are magnificent structures of religious common-place. Subjectively, we catch not the slightest spark of inspiration from them, unless it be a powerful predisposition to somnolency. But, doubtless, there are others to whom they are a power, and to that cast of minds we abandon them.

Chalmers is a man whose reputation did not surpass his real greatness. His sermons were full of life and inspiring power. We hold him, as philosopher, theologian, and preacher, in intellect and grandeur of imagination the greatest mind the Scottish pulpit ever produced. Our objection to this edition is that its inferior material and avoirdupois solidity give to the book a look of crude heaviness that belonged not to the man, and belong not to the splendid thought overspreading the dull-looking pages.

The Foot-Prints of Satan; or, The Devil in History, (the Counterpart of God in History.) By Rev. HOLLIS READ, A.M. 12mo., pp. 557. New York: E.

B. Treat. 1872.

In a unique and trenchant form Mr. Read has arranged and arraigned the forces of Evil that now make war on the happiness of the world and the kingdom of Christ on earth. The various forms which Satanism puts on are analyzed and portrayed. The devil is detected in war, in intemperance, in the perversion of intellect, wealth, the press; and in false religions, of which Romanism is the specimen instance. Then comes the devil in man, arousing his lusts, desecrating the marriage relations, and spreading licentiousness, demoralization, disease, and death. The remedy for all is Christ's second coming, destroying the destroyer and ruling the world in person. Meanwhile the more immediate remedy, we think, is the waging moral battle with the weapons of truth and Christianity. Mr. Read's book may be recommended to the warriors in this battle as an armory of weapons.

From Atheism to Christianity. By Rev. GEORGE P. PORTER. 16mo., pp. 121. New York: Nelson & Phillips. 1873.

Having made the transition, Mr. Porter proposes to show the route for others. He does this in a series of progressive chapters full of sententious suggestions. So paragraphic is he, so impatient of over-fullness, that the reader might scarce be able to make the series of leaps of inference did not the table of contents furnish a clear clue to the line of thought. Thinkers will analyze his ingots with pleasure. He shows that God, the living God, is the demand of the heart and soul of man. Given humanity as it is, and the God of our Bible is a necessity.

Foreign Theological Publications.

Allgemeine Pädagogik, (General Pedagogics.) von Dr. E. BōнL. Wien: W. Braumüller. 1872.

Public schools are based on the assumption that pupils are numerical units of like capacities and wants. The assumption is only partially true. Pupils differ in many directions, and hence require different qualities in instruction and in instructors. But public schools are obviously indispensable. The question then arises, How can they be made most nearly to meet their end? How can their inevitable defectiveness be best complemented? The book before us is a conscientious endeavor to answer this question, and contains theoretical and practical views interesting

to teachers in all lands. The general positions of the author are these: Educative influencing should be an organic whole. All education that does not bear upon the whole destination of the pupil is dangerous. The end of education is not, as Rousseau taught, to make men out of Christians, but to make Christians out of men. Teachers can accomplish their work only in so far as they are genuine Christians. They must be of some positive religion, and all schools should be of some confessional type. No other profession requires such a thorough preparation. The fewer the pupils the greater the success of the teacher. He should be able to enter into sympathy with the peculiar wants-health, capacity, temperament-of each pupil. He should either be himself the parent, or at least stand in intimate relations to the parent. Children-schools are a modern pestilence. Until eleven or twelve years the child's vitality should go chiefly to building up its body. Until after this age the school should not seriously invade the family-life. The father is the sun and the mother the moon, and around these chief luminaries of the domestic firmament the children and servants should revolve as planets, each obedient in its proper orbit. But this divinely-ordered state of things is getting sadly interrupted. The school has largely arrogated to itself the functions of the family. Not only so, but it is slaughtering the innocents by thousands. On an average, one third of the volunteers for the Prussian army have to be rejected as physically incapable. The exhausting iron-rule of the schoolsystem is the cause. There is need here of reform. Ideal education is where the teacher is a perfect Christian, and where his influence comes in only as a complement to that of the parent.

The pedagogics of Dr. Böhl would not injure American pedagogues. Are not also our public schools verging on a pernicious system of secularism and high pressure?

Weltelend und Weltschmerz, (World-woe and World-wail,) eine Rede. von JURGEN BONA MEYER. Bonn: Adolph Marcus. 1872.*

Professor Meyer, formerly of Berlin, now of Bonn, is one of the most genial and wide-awake philosophical dilettanti of the day. He has recently published a volume of twelve lectures, in which he discusses, in clear popular style, and from a healthy moral stand-point, the most knotty "Philosophical Questions of the Day." The essay on Weltelend und Weltschmerz is an able refutation of the chief sophisms of the pessimism of Schopenhauer * This department of foreign Book Notices is mostly furnished by Prof. Lacroix. FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXV.-11

and Hartmann. The position of Schopenhauer was: All existence rests upon a willing to exist; now, willing is desiring, and desiring presupposes a want; but every want conditions a suffering; hence suffering is involved in all willing Only suffering, unpleasure, is positive; all joy, pleasure, is negative, is simply the absence of misery. Man is the neediest of all sentient creatures. As his walking is but a constantly arrested falling, so is his life a constantly arrested dying, and so is all mental pleasure simply an incessantly repressed ennui. Human life is a business that does not cover the costs. The true wisdom lies in the nirvana of Indian Buddhism. With Schopenhauer essentially agrees Eduard Von Hartmann, in his "Philosophy of the Unconscious," save only that he does not contest the reality of some positive pleasure in life. Hartmann's method is empirical. He examines and sums up, on the one hand, all the various joys of life, and, on the other, all the ills to which flesh is heir; and then, balancing the one sum against the other, finds that the joy-quantum kicks the beam. He concludes that life in general is so sad that no reasonable man would choose to recommence and live his life over again, and that it is only the deceptive hope of a better life that makes us prefer life to death, existence to nonentity. Professor Meyer not only shows, step by step, the fallacies of these pessimists, but attempts to account for the fact that so large a circle of political and literary journals have recently overabounded in laudation of the views of Hartmann. Schopenhauer's thoughts began to take root only in the years 1840-50, when the miseries of the German people were at their acme. The chagrin following in the train of 1848 drove them into still deeper hopelessness, and thus made them receptive for a philosophy of despair. Hartmann met the want, hence his popularity. Mr. Meyer thinks that, now that Germany has risen from her political paralysis, the public will lose its relish for pessimism, and turn its regards to the sunnier fields of a sane philosophy.

Die Entstehung der menschlichen Sprache, etc. (The Origin of Human Speech, etc.) von Dr. WEBER. Heidelberg. 1871.

Professor Weber, of Freiburg, desired two years ago to signalize the fiftieth anniversary of his philosophical doctorate by the publication of a mature work on the harmony of physics, anthropology, and philosophy. Hindered by failing health from his full design, he is endeavoring to carry it out on some of the chief subordinate topics. The essay above named discusses man's place in nature and history, and the origin and development of human

speech. It is pervaded by sound views, and forms quite a contrast to the turn of thought now in vogue among a large class of scientists. Some of Professor Weber's positions are these: Mankind forms a separate natural kingdom; as separate as the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral kingdoms. To overlook this involves the naturalist in absurd consequences. Man, shut out from society, learns no language-proper; he rises, like the animal, only to mimic sounds and signs to express his sensations. Man becomes man only among men. Man is never an animal; Metamorphoses of a

were he so he would never become man. limited character take place within each kingdom. Varieties arise within families. Genera, species, families may perish in telluric catastrophes, but are never changed into others. As little as a mineral can be changed into a plant, or a plant into an animal, so little can an animal become a man. It is astonishing that talented and versatile men, like Karl Vogt, can assume that man descends from the ape. It is only from a lack of philosophical training that such absurd views are to be accounted for. Essays such as this of Dr. Weber cannot fail of a happy influence.

Christliche Glaubenslehre vom Methodistischen Standpunkt. (Methodist Dogmatics.) von A. SULZBERGER, Dr. phil. Bremen: Tractathaus, Georgstrasse, 59. That vigorous young offshoot of the Methodist Episcopal Church, the Methodist Conference in Germany, is beginning to add intellectual to its spiritual fruitfulness. One of its sons gives us here the first installment of a system of Methodist Dogmatics. In Mr. Sulzberger's case the Dr. phil. is not an empty suffix. He came to it honestly, through sturdy work under great University lights. The work he has undertaken is greatly needed by our Church in Germany. As Dr. Sulzberger is a thorough Methodist in heart, and well versed in the requisite English as well as German sources, we have reason to hope that he will meet the demands of the case. He lays his work out on an ample scale, and begins it, in true German style, by laying the foundations broad and deep, and by abundantly fortifying them with the authority of precedent and great names. This "heft" of 189 pages contains only the Introduction (150 pages) and the Doctrine of God (39 pages). The Introduction gives evidence of thorough study, and contains (a) A characterization of dogmatics; (b) A discussion of the Scriptures as authority and norm; (c) A history of dogmatics ;' and, (d) The method of dogmatics. From a careful look into the work we are led earnestly to hope that the gifted young author may speedily bring it to completion.