200, the only time when such a general corruption could have been made, there were by the lowest computation of known facts, three millions of Christians in the Roman Empire alone. Allowing one copy of the Scriptures to every one hundred Christians, there would have been 30,000 copies to have been corrupted in the very faces of their owners.

No records of ancient times can produce such overwhelming evidence for their authorship and integrity as the New Testament Scriptures.

G. E. E.

CLERICAL ECONOMICS.

Two pleasant little volumes have lately fallen into our hands, of which we will give some account. They relate to what we may term the economics of the clergyman's life-to the lesser matters of the law; lesser, however, only in the theological sense; greater in every other. For who will be so much a spiritualist as to deny that the body needs to be fed, and clothed, and sheltered, first of all; that learning, preaching, philosophizing, and even every form of neologism, must be held inferior to the necessities which subject us to the dinner and breakfast table, and the labor which brings the money that covers them with wholesome food. Man is primarily a body, a feeding animal; in quite a secondary sense a thinking, reading, and printing animal; and unless the first class of wants is well looked after, he will do little at thinking, reading, or printing. Yet, though these truths are so very elementary, they are but imperfectly considered, and many clergymen are seen to attend with very little intelligence and thrift, to the duties they imply. It may be very true that where the minister has failed to prosper in his temporalities, it has been because he has devoted himself too exclusively to the spiritualities; he has studied hard and preached well, but has died in poverty, and left behind him a dependent family; he has written sermons by the thousand, has visited faithfully his flock, forgotten neither his Greek nor his Latin, and added German or Chinese, but has

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never been able to make both ends of the year meet; has never paid a bill when it was due, and in a word, has never been out from under the harrow.' This self-sacrifice, as some will call it, is very commendable and virtuous, no doubt. Seriously, we give all honor to those, who, if one class of duties is to be neglected and forborne, if to attend to more than one be an absolute impracticability, choose that which concerns the welfare of others the most, their own the least are willing to go halfclad, or half-fed, to relinquish all the little luxuries and indulgences of life, rather than starve their minds for want of books; and unwilling to give their people poor sermons, old or new, because they must needs be abroad in the meadows, with hoe or scythe, that neither the dairy, nor the hay-loft, nor the vegetable bins, nor the pork-barrel may fail of their abundance, whatever else may fail. But what we should be inclined to doubt or deny is, the necessary divorce between the classes of duties in question. We cannot believe that there is any incompatibility between a well appointed, orderly, thriving household, an abundance of the good things of this world, taking our ministers' salaries as they rise, and a faithful discharge of the public functions of the pastor's office. It is owing, we imagine, rather to bad habits, false notions, foolish prejudices, than anything more creditable, that the humble duties of a wise domestic economy are so often foregone, that so many fail to devote the spare hours which fall to every one, especially to the country minister, to the various out-door labors which would give health to the body, and new vigor to the mind, at the same time it lengthened out the salary, and supplied larder and cellar with a larger provision, and of a better quality.

We do not mean to say that there are none who, in the best and wisest manner, to a right discharge of the sacred duties of their great office, add diligence and prudence in the affairs of the family, and manage to large profiting the garden or the farm, the poultry-yard and the pig-stye. There are not wanting among our country ministers men, who for the well arranged economy of their households, for their active industry, their power of accomplishing not only one, but many things, their early rising and late going to bed, their true piety and worldly thrift, their due mingling and proportioning of the things of heaven and earth, their Sunday preachings, their closet studies, and their garden labors, their well furnished minds, and their equally well furnished barns and houses, need not fear

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a comparison with that original genius, that truly devout man, and almost model-minister, Robert Robinson. Take them together, and we are persuaded the incumbents of the country parishes, in this part of the Union, are not only as pure and pious, but as industrious, and, according to their capital, as thrifty a body of men as can be found anywhere, either in or out of the ecclesiastical order. But all are not so. There are many who get along but in a slovenly manner, whose income never supports them, and never would though it were doubled, whose hands, if they sometimes hold a book or pen, never wield the spade or the hoe, whose gardens are not, or are wildernesses of weeds, whose outgoings are always, and incomings (save the salary) never and nothing, who see nature lying around ready to yield the richest returns for a little labor, turns that what with the garden, the pasture, the bee-house, the poultry-yard, and the pig-stye would add a quarter to their resources, and double the pleasures of life, yet never dream of accepting what she proffers, at least on the terms proposed. There are many, like these, absolutely insensible to the charms and advantages of their position, and to whom a better service could hardly be rendered than the sending, for their instruction, of a copy of the memoirs of the aforesaid Robert Robinson, in which they might see, as in a demonstration, how it is quite a possible thing to be a good householder, and at the same time a faithful steward and dispenser of the Word. The Memoirs of Robinson is, unfortunately, a book not to be had. But any book that revealed all the mysteries of the prudent management and successful cultivation of a small estate, and which, in an attractive style, a book that for gardening, and its associated cares, should be what Walton's angler is for fishing, should describe the methods, the pleasures, and the gains of the kind of life we are commending, would be a very valuable addition to a minister's library. The requisite information of every kind lies, indeed, scattered through many volumes; but we know not where to find it consolidated into a single treatise, adding to its science the charms of style, and a genuine enthusiasm for rural life, so as to constitute the Classic which we need. Does no one of our parishes furnish the poet-minister, the minister-poet, for a poet he should be, who can make such a book? He must be a practical man, or the work will want the interest that derives from the recounting of personal experiences; he must be a man of science, or it will want authority

and dignity; he must be a man of a devout mind, or the golden thread will not be present to bind the whole together; and a poet too, or the style will lack the graces of language and thought a poet's imagination alone can supply, and without which it will fail to win its way into that poet's-corner of the heart, where all good things make, not their burial place, but their home.

Why should not the World-life of the minister have its special Hand-book, as well as his Pulpit-life? For this last, the volumes are hardly to be counted that have been written; not one of them, however, that we have ever seen, possesses either the genius or the charms such a work is susceptible of, and quite deserves to be adorned with. Claude, with his fine-spun, tedious minuteness, notwithstanding his valuable thought in the text, and the occasional entertainment of the notes, is hardly a readable book. Burnet, wise and solid, is not absolutely seductive. Ostervald, Gerard, in his "Pastoral Care," and our own Dr. Miller, they are all excellent in their way, abounding in judicious and needed instruction, but there is not one that fills out the idea the mind readily forms, of a treatise such as the subject deserves. The quaint Eachard alone is read at a sitting; but though strong and witty he is coarse, and quite destitute of the tenderness and simple-hearted piety that should pervade such a work, not to add that his temperament is anything but the poetic. But such as they are, they abound, and some of the best minds in the church, and in every denomination, have tried their powers in their composition. They have undoubtedly been of great service, especially to the young divine, when he first assumes the heavy burden of his profession; they have lightened his burden, guided his steps, warned him of dangers, and, we may believe, saved many from shipwreck. But the minister's life, as a man, is not without its difficulties, and needs, also, its directory. In many respects, it is true, his difficulties and duties are such as are common to others, but in many, also, peculiar, and require a peculiar treatment. At least, whether peculiar or not, he, from his position otherwise, engages in the employments and cares which are extra-professional at a great disadvantage, and the wisdom which a wider mingling with the world gives to the man of the world, and which can be most perfectly obtained through such intercourse, can be obtained only measurably in the same way by the clergyman, and books alone, but imperfectly still, can supply the deficiency.

The books before us aim to supply the want to which we allude. The first is entitled the "Manse Garden,"* and is the work of a Scotch clergyman of Glasgow, Nathaniel Paterson, minister of St. Andrew's Church. The author has brought to the work many of the qualifications that are so desirable, and which we have indicated. It is written in a graceful and winning style, full of pleasant turns and touches of humor, that impart a constant charm to even the dryest and most minute detail. The humblest precepts for the lowest cares in the Georgics have, we know, their poetic charm. The thing enjoined is, it may be, naught, but the manner of the injunction reveals the mind of the poet, and taste and fancy are delighted. Virgil is in the coloring of the words, and makes it beautiful. We do not mean to say that the Manse Garden is either of the Georgics, or that Dr. Paterson is Virgil, but he has evidently written with those agricultural poems before him, and has caught not a little of their spirit. His fine manner makes us regret that he did not take a wider subject for his work. He touches no part of the minister's out-of-door life beside his occupation in the garden. The volume is strictly a garden book, of the most practical kind, containing the usual counsels to the ignorant, as to the cultivation and planting of fruits, vegetables, and flowers, which makes it the more remarkable, that so much can be said in praise of its general manner, for which a very fair scope would not seem to be afforded. But the Doctor's genius has surmounted his difficulties, and made the most and best of his subject and materials. Without a relish for the general subject, the book would still, we doubt not, be thought dry and dull; but with anything of rural tastes, with any love of nature in her secret processes, or her outward forms, her products, or her cares, it will be found instructive and deeply interesting.

We will now let the work speak for itself. The author thus writes in his preface.

"For the advancement then of a good cause, in which his brethren as well as the Author are concerned, may he not humbly hope that they will be pleased to offer and perhaps commend

* The Manse Garden, by. NATHANIEL PATERSON, D. D., Minister of St. Andrew's Church, Glasgow. "And he spake of trees, from the cedar tree that is in Lebanon even unto the hyssop that springeth out of the wall."-1 Kings. Fourth Thousand. Glasgow: William Collins, 7, S. Frederick Street. 1838.