Divine origin-the gift of God through the medium of an express revelation-is so perfectly adapted to the nature and necessities of fallen man, that when any of our race have more or less constructed religions for themselves, they have fashioned superstitious systems which sustain the same relation to the truth that a distorted shadow bears to the object, or a counterfeit to a genuine medal. "No religion," says Hooker, in a very pregnant sentence in the commencement of the Fifth Book of his Ecclesiastical Polity, "no religion can wholly and only consist of untruths." "Certain sparks of the light of truth are intermingled with the darkness of error." 66 Superstition," he further observes, "neither knoweth the right kind, nor observeth the due measure, of actions belonging to the service of God, but is always joined with a wrong opinion touching things divine. Superstition is when things are either abhorred or observed with a jealous, or fearful, but erroneous, relation to God. By means whereof the superstitious do sometimes serve, though the true God, yet with needless offices, and defraud Him of duties necessary; sometimes load others than Him with such honours as are properly His. The one, their oversight who miss in the choice of that wherewith they are affected; the other, theirs who fail in the election of him towards whom they show their devotion: this, the crime of idolatry; that, the fault of voluntary niceness

or superfluity in religion." And once more: "of that which is good, even in evil things, God is author."

Guided by these principles, we may safely review the various religions of the heathen world; and while our abhorrence of superstition increases, as we examine more closely its nature and effects, we shall yet be able to recognise amid its errors and corruptions much that is good, much that retains the divine impress of the religion of patriarchal times, much that answers to the nature and necessities of our common humanity.

We now proceed, with Dr. Pritchard, to consider, first, the psychological character of the aborigines of the New World. "The indigenous race of the New World," observes Von Martius-a writer who has devoted much time and thought to the study of American ethnography" is distinguished from all other nations of the earth, externally, by peculiarities of make, but still more, internally, by their state of mind and intellect. The aboriginal American is at once in the incapacity of infancy and unpliancy of old age,-he unites the opposite poles of intellectual life. The men of red race, it must be confessed, do not appear to feel the blessing of a divine descent, but to have been led, by merely animal instinct and tardy steps, through a dark past, to their actual cheerless present." To these and some further assertions by this imaginative writer, unfavourable to the original unity of the human race, Dr. Pritchard replies, by showing that the religious dogmas and sentiments of the old nations of America

harmonize with what we discover in other departments of mankind; and he supports his position by citations from Loskiel-an old writer, who resided for many years among the Delaware Indians. A survey of the condition and capacities of the Esquimaux leads to the same conclusion. "The mind of the Esquimaux has the same moral and intellectual constitution as that of other human beings. They have the same elements of moral feeling, the same sympathies and susceptibilities of affection, the same conscience, or internal conviction of accountableness, the same sentiments of guilt and self-condemnation, the same desires of expiation, which are common to so many other nations in almost every degree of mental culture. The most elevated of these principles are only recognised, in the natural or pagan state of these men, as mere rudiments of higher and better understanding, or as scintillations now and then shooting forth. When these doctrines and misrepresentations are opened to them, which have been found, in so many other parts of the world, to be congenial to the human mind, and as such, have been received by the most polished as well as by the most barbarous nations, they have produced their wonted effects upon the Esquimaux. The minds of these people appear to be, as to all essential principles of feeling and understanding, in harmony, and in strict analogy with those of other men. Such a mind can hardly be supposed common to different species of organized beings."

If from America we pass to Africa, we there are met by similar facts, all pointing to the same conclusion. The degraded Bushman,-who has been described, by an infidel and heartless physiologist, as the link between the genus homo and the genera of orangs and gibbons, has vindicated and established his claim to a place in the ascending scale of humanity. So has the Negro of Western Africa. In like manner, the barbarous tribes of Northern Asia and the savage islanders of the great Southern Ocean are further evidence that God hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth."

And now we have arrived at the end of Dr. Pritchard's valuable treatise; which he concludes in these terms: "We contemplate among all the diversified tribes, who are endowed with reason and speech, the same internal feelings, appetencies, aversions; the same inward convictions, the same sentiments of subjection to invisible powers, and, more or less developed, of responsibility to unseen avengers of wrong, and agents of retributive justice, from whose tribunal men cannot even by death escape. We find everywhere the same susceptibility-though not always in the same degree of forwardness or ripeness of improvement of admitting the cultivation of these universal endowments, of opening the eyes of the mind to the more clear and luminous view which Christianity unfolds, of becoming moulded to the institutions of religion and of civilized life: in a

word, the same inward and mental nature is to be recognised in all the races of men.

"When we compare this fact with the observations which have already been fully established, as to the specific instincts and separate psychical endowments of all the distinct tribes of sentient beings in the universe, we are entitled to draw, confidently, the conclusion, that all human races are of one species and one family."

For our own parts, we freely admit that we are not prepared to draw so positive a conclusion from the facts which mere Ethnography has amassed. Long before the very name of this science was invented, the Church was certified that all mankind are the offspring of Adam. If ever she gloried in her catholicity, as understood in its simplest and most obvious meaning-as expressing (not by construction) either her unity or her maintenance of the Truth, but her universality, and nothing moreit was when she beheld, in the prophetic mirror of the Apocalypse, the redeemed out of "every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation," the "great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues,""them that dwell on the earth, every nation, and kindred, and tongue, and people." She read, in the pure light of heaven, with the clear eye of faith, while her heart of love grew warm, and the elastic pinions of anticipating hope expanded for a heaven-ward flight, she read those simple words of the great Apostle of the Gentiles,-"As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be made alive." By these she was absolutely assured that all mankind are one:-one in origin, one in nature, one in destiny; although disunited for a while by sin, which has assimilated one portion of our race,-the Australian and the Bushman-Hottentot, to the orang and the chimpantzi; while even those who have been most exalted, betray that fierce independence, and that scornful glance, which stamp the Grecian face with the earthly mark of Paganism.

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Then she felt the secret inward stirring of her vast regenerating powers and while she is well content that a mere inductive philosophy shall refute its own objections, and, like certain of the inferior animals, shelter its offspring, in the hour of danger, by swallowing them; she acknowledges in every human being a neighbour," and stands prepared to receive him as a "brother." While she leaves feeble science to retrace her steps, or-if science is wise, to bend them, with the Eastern Magi, towards the cradle of the Son of Man; she herself labours on in the divine work of re-uniting and re-constituting mankind in that Image in which "there is neither Greek nor Jew, circumcision nor uncircumcision, Barbarian, Scythian, bond nor free: but CHRIST is all and in all."

Family Secrets; or, Hints to those who would make Home happy. By Mrs. ELLIS. 3 vols. London: Fisher, Son, and Co.

It is an old saying, that one-half of the world are ignorant what is done by the other half. The delicate beauty knows nothing (but for Mr. Paget) of the half-starved sempstress who labours in her service. The customers of Sheffield, or Manchester, know nothing of the amount of human misery which fills those gloomy ergastula. We ourselves are ignorant respecting the manner of life of those ingenious cooperators, through whose assistance our present thoughts are to find their way to the minds of our readers. As we sit at the window of our lonely study, looking forth upon the freshness of reopening Spring,-on the lofty mountain ridge, which closes our solitary valley, on the streamlet, which, issuing from its highest gorge, shows itself in occasional glimpses, till it subsides at last into the ample lake which lies before us, we are as ignorant of the close and stifling receptacles where our words will be transferred from our own careless autograph to the dignity of a printed memorial, as we are of the possible corruptions which the waters of our favourite stream may have to encounter, before they get quit of the town which lies beneath us, and attain their final resting-place in the boundless deep.

These circumstances impress value upon any work, however trivial, which reveals to us the secret life of our companions in this world of sorrow. Homo sum, nihil humani a me alienum puto. But much more is this applicable to revelations respecting what touches us most nearly, and most closely borders upon our own path. On this ground it is, then, that Mrs. Ellis's volumes have excited our attention. Though possessing little interest as narratives, they exhibit a phase of human society with which we are but slightly acquainted. An advertisement at the conclusion of the first volume, included within the limit of the gilded leaves, which we owe either to Mrs. Ellis's taste, or to that of her publishers, assures us that "the scenes and characters are, it is believed, portraits." The Autobiography of a Dissenting Minister, with all its strong internal marks of credibility, is of disputed authenticity; but in these volumes, we have a disclosure of "Family Secrets" by a lady, who openly avows her situation and origin, and whose discrimination and fidelity are attested by the circle in which she moves.

Mrs. Ellis, formerly Miss Stickney, the daughter of a Quaker, and wife of a Dissenting teacher, cannot be unacquainted with the life and manners of a large and important portion of the community Though not possessing the wit of Hannah More, nor the truthfulness of Sarah Austin, she is the accredited authoress of her party. The exhortations to wives and widows, to daughters and mothers, chase one another, in rapid succession, through the advertising pages of every Dissenting magazine. Though she is likely to know little,

therefore, of that larger and more liberal portion of Society, to which her connexions would not introduce her, yet for Life among the Dissenters," she must be considered as the standard authority.

The tale she unfolds, we regret to say, is singularly painful. Such an amount of gross coarseness, and unredeemed brutality, such total want of refinement, such lack of control over the lower portions of our animal nature, we were altogether unprepared to expect. That this should be the mode of life among those whose alienation from Christ's Church we were wont, indeed, to deplore, but to whom we gave credit for a certain average decency of conduct, is a most painful surprise to us. Yet how can we meet the evidence of a witness whose opportunity of judging has been so abundant? As new ourselves to the circle in which Mrs. Ellis has moved, as she is to the mode of life among Church-people, surprise and commiseration are the only arguments which we can oppose to her positive testimony to the "Family Secrets" of her associates. The matter

comes upon us as much by surprise as the confession of the Thuggs upon those who had been living for years in unconscious proximity with this band of murderers; but as it was justly asked from whom but a Thugg could you derive such disclosures, so we must fairly confess that Mrs. Ellis is a better witness than any Churchman can pretend to be, of what passes in the domicile of a Quaker, or round the fireside of a teacher of Dissent.

The painful confessions, then, to which we proceed to introduce our readers, and which our authoress, somewhat in the manner of the celebrated Genevese, states herself to make "as a duty," reveal the humiliating fact of an universal prevalence of the crime of drunkenness throughout the families of which Mrs. Ellis can speak from personal knowledge. Nor is the vice confined to one age or sex. Young and old, wives and virgins, farmers and apothecaries, all are tainted with this damning sin. The only cure for the Dissenting world lies in Total Abstinence; we had vainly fancied that it was only for the brutalized and ignorant Paddy that such a remedy was needed, but it seems that the Dissenting circles in our borough towns, and the respectable families of what Mrs. Ellis calls "Ministers of the Gospel," would afford as large a field for the exertions of Father Mathew. The opinion which this lady entertains of those among whom she moves, our limited acquaintance with the parties does not enable us to controvert. We observe, indeed, that she occasionally assigns her characters to other classes, and that her language is applicable to a wider sphere. This may result from her natural unacquaintance with those ranks which are removed from her own observation, or it may be designed to render her advice more palatable to her immediate connexions. In the first case, it will be a real gratification to a person of her benevolent mind, to be assured that, though faithfully derived, no doubt, from her own associates, the pictures she has drawn are as inapplicable to any