were held with ordinary modesty. But to meet with this intolerance, this hatred of liberty, this virtual teaching that ignorance is the mother of devotion, from men who have themselves seceded and claimed the rights of conscience, and whose influence, whatever it is, depends on their education and their intellectual energy, this certainly so fills us with pity and indignation, that the mixture is probably very similar to scorn. But whatever of this sort has been said, is directed not against the mass of their followers (whom it is not possible to know in detail), but against those who suppose that by the sacrifice of their estates or worldly prospects, they purchase a right to lord it over the faith of their fellow Christians. The only excuse which we know for them is a poor one that they are so shut up among themselves, and hear their own thoughts so re-echoed, that they cease to be aware how magisterial is the place they have taken.

Art. VII. Lectures on Preaching. By EBENEZER PORTER, President of the Theological Seminary, Andover. London: Ward and Co. THE abundance of books in any particular department of study

is by no means a proof that the subject has attained its ultimate perfection. So far, indeed, from this being an index of such result, it may be and is more often the evidence of defect. The subject is not set at rest, it is more properly overlaid; and the repetition of instruction proves that the master-mind has not yet appeared: when such a mind once speaks all weaker efforts are useless. Neither have the ages which produced the most celebrated books on the theory of any art been renowned for the most finished specimens of its practice. Criticism did not become a study till long after the time when Homer had written; Quintillian composed his Institutes at a period when eloquence had forsaken the Roman senate; and it was amidst the din of the polemical strife of the Commonwealth, that Stillingfleet and Burroughs wrote their Irenica, and Peace Offerings' were placed on the national altar in such astonishing plenty. On similar principles we are perhaps warranted in believing that the very great number of elementary books on the eloquence of the pulpit which characterizes the age, is a correlative, if, indeed, it be not an index of the feeble and attenuated character of preaching prevailing amongst us: the ancient athletæ carried with them no rolls of strengthening plaster to the arena.

A mere catalogue of treatises of this nature would, we are per

suaded, astonish our readers, or at least that portion of them who are not accustomed to the melancholy observation, that in the prosecution of human affairs we are often at a loss to discover which of two facts is the most remarkable, the profusion of instrumentality, or the insignificance of result. In our own little collection besides the treatises of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintillian on the nature of oratory, we have a magnitude and variety of prædicatorial apparatus sufficient to give success to the labours of all the preachers in the world, if the best tempered weapons and the best instruction in the adroit use of them were the alone conditions of victory; but as we have painfully experienced in our own case, the silver handle and the embroidered scabbard of the sword give no pledge of the sharpness of the point; and the thrust of a most unpolished weapon, directed in defiance of all the rules of the masters of the noble art, shall often be successful when artificial exactness has utterly failed to teach.

Among the treatises on the art of preaching which were in the hands of our ancestors, there were three or four small works in Latin, which acquired a great and deserved reputation, and to which we the more willingly refer as they are little known to modern students, and their perusal might be beneficial in forming the habits of our junior brethren. The duodecimo of Gaussenus, entitled 'De ratione studii theologici,' the treatise of Crocius under the same title, the Manuductio of Frankius, and the work De pastore evangelico' of our countryman Bowles, are admirable preparatories to the more regular and critical study of theology. Our old divinity is rich in this department. That racy though antiquated puritan divine, Richard Bernard of Batcombe, whose Isle of Man' is the genuine ancestor of Bunyan's Holy War,' has left a tract on the pastoral office entitled The Faithful 'Shepherd,' 1621, which is by no means unworthy of perusal. Prince, the historian of the worthies of Devon, Glanvil, of witchbelieving memory, and the all-learned Wotton, have each written on this subject, and each has instamped on his book the characteristic features which even the smallest productions of original minds ever bear. Bishop Wilkins's treatise is too well known to need any mention, and the Gildas Salvianas of Baxter soars too far above the reach of criticism in the ardour of its unaffected piety to need any recommendation. The eccentric though truly respectable Manuductio ad Ministerium' of Cotton Mather, is chiefly known to the British public by a very injudicious abridgment which has contrived to omit all the racy originality of the original, and has effectually tamed the somewhat uncouth gambols of the high mettled courser of Massachusets into the formal amble of a young gentleman's poney docked of his tail and mane to bring him into the prevailing fashion. Fenelon's essay has

long been appreciated, and Campbell, great in his Philosophy of Rhetoric,' greater still in his work on the Gospels, and greatest of all on Miracles,' is generally approved in his 'Pulpit Elo'quence' by all who make this subject a part of their study. Of Claude we say nothing but that his English translator has so effectually buried his author under a farrago of often irrelevant though always interesting notes, that whatever may be the design of the original work, the English version is as far as possible from answering the design of instructing young ministers in the composition of a sermon. Whatever may be the merits of the more recent of these publications-and that they have merit we are abundantly willing to admit there is one error pervading all of them, an error we believe of the most fatal consequence, and one which must be opposed and successfully exposed if we ever expect to see the preaching of the gospel of Christ possess that high character of instrumentality for which it was intended in the designs of its great Author; and that error is the general and in many cases the entire omission of serious exhortation to young ministers on the indispensable necessity of acquiring the genuine meaning of that book which they profess to explain. We are deeply and painfully convinced that ignorance of the mind of God in the Scriptures, is the sin of a great majority of Christians; that our congregations are distressingly uninformed of the meaning of that language which God has addressed to their understandings, and that there are popular and eloquent discourses spoken in our places of worship on the Sabbath day, and which receive the plaudits of admiring crowds, which contain no attempt to explain the portion of truth on which they are professedly grounded, and which, whilst they abound in meretricious eloquence and in all the figures of artificial oratory, leave the hearers deplorably deficient in clear and enlightened views of that which is the alone work for which the ministry was originally appointed, the testimony of truth. We speak it in sorrow, and with a distinct conviction how disagreeable such an avowal must be to many whom we love but we give it as our solemn and heartfelt conviction the word of God is but rarely explained in the pulpit, and hence it is but little understood by our people. We have listened to much admired pieces of hortatory eloquence in the pulpits of the metropolis, to addresses in which the most jejune views of the word of God have been brought forth, and because they were brought forth in a cloud of sesquipedalian words and lofty imagery, the penury, or occasionally even the distortion of sense in the exegesis has been forgotten amidst the admiration which has been lavished on the medium of its conveyance.

In addition to the works to which we have already alluded, we have now another publication on this subject by Dr. Porter, the President of the Theological Seminary at Andover, in the United

States. Like the generality of the theological publications of our transatlantic brethren, the work is respectable. To originality it makes no pretension, but it is written with good sense and moderation, and is deeply imbued with the spirit of piety. Like all the publications, however, which have appeared in that country, it manifests a most deplorable deficiency in the knowledge of the best English books, and especially in the department of sermons. In the author's list of English sermons the names of Thomas Jackson, Donne, Farringdon, Bebington, Brownrig, Sherlock, Samuel Clarke, Horbery, Sanderson, and Stillingfleet, do not once occur. We should have thought that such omissions were beyond even the capacity of Anglo-American ignorance of English classics. Certainly it is not our intention to recommend either of these great men as finished sermonizers, but we are at a loss to understand how a preacher can be presumed to be prepared for regular pulpit exercise in the English language, without being made acquainted with the great authors to whom we have alluded; who together with Jewel, Chillingworth, Rainolds, Willet. Whittaker, Hooker, Carleton, Hakewill, and other men of the same time and the same spirit, will continue to be the glory of the English pulpit in all that regards depth and solidity of judgment and masculine energy of thought, when many of the men mentioned by Dr. Porter are forgotten. Our brethren are, however, becoming better acquainted with our older and truly classical writers, and ere long, we are convinced, those writers will occupy the place in the minds of the reading classes of the United States which their intrinsic merits deserve. A shade of melancholy, however, passes over our minds as we observe that these tests of our country's intellectual power are becoming daily more difficult to be obtained: we have reprints of every thing ludicrous and uncouth which antiquity in its strangest freaks has bequeathed us, but the theological folios which originally procured from the tongue even of foreigners the testimony so glorious to England, Clerus Anglicus stupor mundi, are suffered from year to year to become still more scarce, till at length, as some of us have painfully realized within a few days, there are many of them which are not on any terms to be procured

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Art. VIII. The Claims of Japan and Malaysia, Exhibited in Notes of Voyages made in 1837, from Canton, in the Ship Morrison and Brig Himmaleh. 2 vols. New York. 1839. London: Wiley and Putnam.

A MONG the remarkable features of the age, perhaps there are few more astonishing, certainly there is none so important in its connexion with the dissemination of those principles which are to bless the whole family of mankind, as the attitude in which the United States of America are beginning to stand towards the older sections of the world, and especially towards the east. It is now but little more than two centuries since the small band of English confessors, destined in the mysterious counsels of Providence to become the fathers of a new, and preserved, perhaps, hereafter to be the teachers and reformers of the old world, landed on the rock of Plymouth. Flying from that persecuting rage which attempted to destroy in their own country the spirit of free inquiry, and to substitute a blind vassalage to the pompous rituals of a Romanizing hierarchy for the spiritual and pure worship of the heart, they sought the shores of America to secure that noblest of all blessings under the wide canopy of heaven,—the rights of conscience. They issued forth into the wilderness possessed of little else but that hardy frame of body and mind which their native land had given them;-the head that could plan, the heart that could determine, and the arm that could execute a bold design: the healthy throb of English liberty beat high within their breast, and gave a determination to their resolves which none but freemen can ever feel, and these materials for noble bearing were directed and controlled by one principle-the best, the noblest, and the most elevating which man in this lower world can enjoy, the knowledge and the love of the truth. They carried with them the Bible-that sacred book was the ark which sanctified and defended their camp; to the worship enjoined in its pages were their earliest cares devoted; and from the principles it contained were derived the polity, the laws, the whole spirit of that government which they chose to be the guardian of their persons, their property, and their rights. What are the results that have followed that voyage? Let Europe behold the present state of the Anglo-American republic. To the philanthropist, the politician, the Christian, she presents a spectacle truly interesting, a problem before untried in the history of nations. She has demonstrated beyond the possibility of contradiction, that a free people will secure to themselves, by the unfettered exercise of their own judgment, that form of government which is best adapted to their wants, and that at the least possible expenditure to the public purse; and that voluntary efforts are the most efficient means of sup