One secret of his success, which he does not seem to observe, is, that he had enlisted men and women as self-denying as himself in the work. So that, when not a penny came in for the orphans' supper, some nurse or matron offered her little sav-. ings; some good brother let a friend, perhaps, know the emergency, and while Müller was on his knees imploring aid, the aid came; and this simple "Great-Heart," as Bunyan would have termed him, overflowed in gratitude. For instance, under date of July 6, 1848, "two thousand and fifty pounds were received, the principal part towards the building then going up. This is the largest donation I have ever received. It is impossible to describe my joy in God. I was neither excited nor surprised, for I look out for answers to my prayers. believe that God hears me. Yet my heart was so full, that I could only sit before God and admire him, like David in 2 Samuel vii. At last I cast myself flat on my face, and burst forth in thanksgiving to God, and in surrendering my heart afresh to him for his blessed service."

I

Many a story of self-sacrifice grew out of this noble effort. One needlewoman, whose earnings were three quarters of a dollar a week, managed to give her five dollars at a time; and though she became entirely destitute before her death, yet was she generously provided for to the last, and through the sorest suffering "her mouth was full of thanksgiving."

A poor brother, in sending a fifty-pound note, remarked that no more must be expected, as all the rest was put out at interest; meaning that the whole of his property was given away. But he was unexpectedly blessed, probably by death-bed legacies, and other larger donations came from the same liberal hand; nor can any one doubt that the cup of charity, which he had presented so nobly to others, was offered at last in full measure to himself.

This Orphan-House was a continual growth. Begun with the occupancy of his own dwelling by twenty-six little girls, a matron, and a governess, in April, 1836, by the end of the year, sixty-six children were under Müller's charge, and seven hundred and seventy pounds was the income of the two establishments then in existence. At the end of the following year, the number of beneficiaries had enlarged to eighty-one,

under the guardianship of nine brethren and sisters; unpaid, we believe, except that their necessities were provided for, as simply, no doubt, as in any Catholic convent. At the end of the year 1850, there were three hundred and thirty-five inmates of the Orphan-House which Müller had then erected by these chance gifts; and his annual expense of thirty thousand dollars was promptly met, for it was the keystone of his building never to run in debt a farthing. For the quarter of a century during which he received no regular income, and owned not a particle of property, three hundred and seventy thousand dollars had been expended for his orphans alone, and a third as much more for other objects, besides garments and articles of household use; his disbursements having been to the very ends of the earth, as his "material aid " has been supplied sometimes from Quebec, sometimes from Australia, from Central Germany, and from Southern Africa. Encouraged by the blessing of Providence upon his enterprise, and moved by the cries of perishing children, his asylum has been made a new building by the erection successively of two wings, capable of accommodating seven hundred children more. At this time, he must have a thousand utterly friendless little ones under his care, preparing to go forth into society, Christian men and women after his own heart; some of them rescued from immediate suffering and peril of starvation, some delivered from temptations against which they could not have struggled much longer, and some, no doubt, prepared to become missionaries, philanthropists, sisters of charity, helpers of the helpless, like himself. By this time, he must have received more than half a million of dollars from all lands and all classes, from bankers less frequently than from those who never see the inside of a bank, from the dying, and from those born to a new life.

Nor is this all which this self-sacrificing genius has brought to pass. Twelve thousand children have been brought, by his instrumentality, under direct religious instruction, not perhaps of the highest order, but infinitely better than none; thousands of hearts have been quickened to benevolence by his simple story; the idea of God as actually living, present, and quickening, has done much to dispel that phantom abstraction which has chilled so many hearts to stone.

-

Müller must be naturally calm, or he could not live through such a pressure of diverse cares; must have been endowed with a noble constitution, or he could never have worked so incessantly and so energetically; must have had an ingrained spirit of trust, or his faith would have given way when sometimes his own table lacked bread; must have shared the Saviour's love for children, or their destitution would not have held him back from the heathen field, and anchored him for life in a community swarming with benevolent institutions.

His narrative has no other grace than that highest grace which the Spirit bestows; it has no eloquence but that of deep conviction; there is very little meditation in its artless pages, and yet few books prompt more. The incessant repetition of nearly similar offerings may weary, the childlike acknowledgment of entire dependence may seem superfluous. Yet no biography is better fitted to draw forth charitable effort than this; none, we believe, will contribute more to philanthropize Christendom, comfort suffering humanity, and build up that kingdom of good-will for which we all pray.

ART. VII. REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.

6.76.

*

THE pride of Reason nowhere shows itself in sublimer audacity than in the speculations of men as to the Divine nature and attributes; unless it is in their dogmatizing on the dealings of the Almighty with their fellow-men. Professor Park (though he writes hardly a line in his own name) must expect the public to understand him as indorsing the portentous body of theology which he has lately edited, when he speaks of the system it contains as "promising to become the prevailing faith of Evangelical thinkers"; and says that "they" (the writers of the school of Edwards) "have probably come nearer to the perfect standard of doctrinal belief or statement, than have any other class of uninspired men."

We fancy this last epithet to be a little emphatical. Not a phrase of devout awe and reverence, such as belongs to "writings profitable for

*The Atonement: Discourses and Treatises by Various Writers, with an Introductory Essay by PROF. E. A. PARK. Boston: Congregational Board of Publi

cation.

doctrine," and becomes the human intellect dealing with such a theme, - hardly a word implying any thought of human tenderness, or sympathy for the vast woe and grief of a perishing race, - have we found in turning over, one by one, these six hundred dreary pages. We have to thank the editor for keeping in judicious reserve the accumulation of vulgar horrors which it was the wont of the "Edwardean divines" to gather as the legitimate practical deduction from their theory. We must also do the volume the justice of saying that it captivates the reader by no glozing rhetoric, no alluring false lights of style. It is throughout as bare and cold and dreary a statement of its monstrous theory, as the severest critic of it could wish. Only two illustrations, we think, occur in the whole of it. In one, Zaleucus does manful service, as of old, through half a dozen pages, in the cause of vicarious suffering; in the other, a mythical "Benevolus" stands forward ready to be pilloried instead of his offending wife. Such is the nearest conception offered by the “Edwardean divines" of the relation implied in St. Paul's glorious words, "forasmuch as we are the offspring of God," or by the beloved disciple in recounting what his "hands had handled of the Word of Life," or in Christ's own teachings of a protecting and fatherly Providence!

Happily, the theory they teach is so nearly extinct, (unless within certain sharp sectarian boundaries,) that these Discourses will serve most readers as a repertory of curiosities in their own sort, very strange and obsolete. We mean such phrases as "the amiableness of vindictive justice" (p. 71); and the statement, "I cannot see why it [pain] may not be agreeable to God; it certainly is in the damned, and for the same reason might have been, and doubtless was, in the case of our Lord." The volume gives us a lively and grateful sense of the style of preaching from which mankind has been rescued by a liberal theology, and whose spirit is summed up in the quaint consolation of the assurance (p. 583), that God does not, on the whole, all things considered, determine to save all; because it is not, on the whole, best that all should be saved."

It

WE would speak only with respect of the eminent and beloved New Haven Professor, whose argument on his favorite class of topics is gathered as his memorial for his friends' and his pupils' sake.* contains even less than the volume we have just noticed to instruct or interest the general public. It is a very exhaustive and mostly very dry statement, in the elaborate style of our elder theology, of these three topics: - Moral Government in the Abstract; by the Light of Nature; and as illustrated or taught in the Scriptures. Several special essays follow in the form of an Appendix; from one of which we quote, as a curious instance of the style of thinking we have before spoken of, the following: "If God purposes that sin shall take place, either because he esteems it good in itself or as the necessary means of good, then if it does not take place, he must be painfully crossed and defeated in his purpose. [But] he purposes sin only for the sake of the

Lectures on the Moral Government of God. By NATHANIEL W. TAYLOR. 2 vols. New York: Clark, Austin, and Smith.

present system, of which it is to him an unavoidable consequence. The system does exist, and whether sin or holiness follow, God cannot be painfully crossed in any purpose respecting the existence of sin.” (Vol. II. pp. 352, 353.)

It is needless, perhaps, to add, that the orthodoxy of these volumes is vouched as authentic by the editor. Apart from this, we are bound to say that they exhibit many traces of the earnest, affectionate, and manly temper of the writer's mind, and that in some passages they glow with some approach to a genuine, devout, and Christian eloquence, 76.4

IN striking contrast with the self-confident and arrogant speculation that characterizes the New England Orthodoxy, we have the argument of Mansel's Bampton Lectures * already famous that all religious philosophy is impossible, and "thought cannot be a measure of belief." The effort of dogmatism on one hand, and rationalism on the other, he tells us, has been "to produce coincidence between belief and thought." Such an effort must always fail. The human mind is encompassed by a horizon of impossibilities. Follow out any statement you choose to its logical consequences, and it becomes absurd and false. You cannot reconcile destiny and freedom; infinity and personality; the attributes of God with the facts of Nature and Life. Philosophy contradicts itself in every attempt to define or establish any one of the first principles of religious belief- or disbelief. A reflex criticism, going over the ground which Metaphysics has sought to conquer, finds it a complete tabula rasa; nothing of all the proud theories that make the domain of speculative philosophy can be positively affirmed or denied. Scepticism, Pantheism, Atheism, as well as Dogmatism, to this complexion must they come at last.

Nor is philosophy any more sound or tenable on its subjective or human side. The laws of consciousness offer us the same contradiction, - push us on ever to the same alternative of opposite impossibilities. A rational theology cannot be constructed. Religious knowledge is regulative, not speculative; the mind must content itself with what is practically right or safe, despairing of what is theoretically true, at least despairing of its ability to prove anything as theoretically true.

Shall we take it as another of Mr. Mansel's "irreconcilable contradictions," when he turns round upon this, and insists on our accepting that very scheme of dogmatic theology from which we supposed he was hastening our escape, on the ground that nothing can be proved for or against it, and on the strength of evidence which he tells us is left defective on purpose to try our faith? We suppose Mr. Mansel is sincere ; but it is impossible that a man of his learning and penetration should fail to see that his argument is quite as convenient and as valid for a Romanist, a Buddhist, or a Mussulman as for an Oxford Churchman. That the contradictions he illustrates do in fact beset every track of metaphysical dogmatism, every attempted a priori construction of abso

* The Limits of Religious Thought examined. By H. L. MANSEL. Boston: Gould and Lincoln.