us under circumstances very different from those which exist where there is really no ritual at all, and where, as is sometimes the case, bodies of highly cultivated and thoughtful men meet together, on an eclectic rather than a parochial discrimination, for speculative as well as practical religious instruction.

Of the sermons preached by Dr. Bushnell to such a congregation as this, twenty-three are collected in the volume now before us. Of one of these, that on "Respectable Sin," we wish we could give the whole; for it rebukes, with an energy of thought and precision of language only equalled by its fidelity of spirit, one of the great spiritual temptations of a community such as that which he addressed. We pass this, however, a discourse which can not be broken up without destroying its context, to give an extract from a sermon on the "Dignity of Human Nature Shown from its Ruins." The passage which we now insert, we can not but regard as a splendid vindication of the first point taken by St. Paul in his speech from Mars Hill:

"Consider once more the religious aspirations and capacities of religious attrac tion that are garnered up, and still live in the ruins of humanity. How plain it is, in all the most forward demonstrations of the race, that man is a creature for religion; a creature secretly allied to God Himself, as the needle is to the pole, attracted toward God, aspiring consciously or unconsciously, to the friendship and love of God. Neither is it true that, in his fallen state, he has no capacity left of religious affection, or attraction, till it is first new-created in him. All his capacities of love and truth are in him still, only buried and stifled by the smouldering ruin in which he lies. There is a capacity in him still to be moved and drawn, to be charmed and melted by the divine love and beauty. The old affinity lives, though smothered in selfishness and lust, and even proves itself in sorrowful evidence when he bows himself down to a reptile or an idol. He will do his most expensive works for religion. There is a deep panting still in his bosom, however suppressed, that cries inaudibly and sobs with secret longing after God. Hence the sublime unhappiness of the race. There is a vast, immortal want stirring on the world and forbidding it to rest. In the cursing and bitterness, in the deceit of tongues, in the poison of asps, in the swiftness to blood, in all the destruction and misery of the world's ruin, there is yet a vast insatiate hunger for the good, the true, the holy, the divine, and a great part of the misery of the ruin is that it is so great a ruin; a desolation of that which can not utterly perish, and still lives, asserting its defrauded rights and reclaiming its lost glories. And there fore it is that life becomes an experience to the race so tragic in its character, so dark and wild, so bitter, so incapable of peace. The way of peace we can not know, till we find our peace, where our immortal aspirations place it, in the fullness and the friendly eternity of God."

We add one more extract from Dr. Bushnell, that from his sermon on "Unconscious Influence :"

"And here I must conduct you to a yet higher example, even that of the Son of God, the light of the world. Men dislike to be swayed by direct voluntary influ ence. They are jealous of such control, and are therefore best approached by conduct and feeling, and the authority of simple worth, which seem to make no purposed onset. If goodness appears, they welcome its celestial smile; if heaven descends to encircle them, they yield to its sweetness; if truth appears in the life, they honor it with a secret homage; if personal majesty and glory appear, they bow with reverence, and acknowledge with shame their own vileness. Now it is on this side of human nature that Christ visits us, preparing just that kind of influence which the Spirit of truth may wield with the most persuasive and most subduing effect. It is the grandeur of His character which constitutes the chief power of His ministry, not His miracles or teachings apart from His character. Miracles were useful at the time to arrest attention, and His doctrine is useful at all times as the highest revelation of truth possible in speech; but the greatest truth of the Gospel, notwithstanding, is Christ Himself, a human body become the organ of the divine nature, and revealing, under the conditions of an earthly life, the glory of God! The Scripture writers have much to say, in this connection, of the image of God; and an image, you know, is that which simply represents, not that which acts, or reasons, or persuades. Now it is this image of God which makes the centre, the sun itself, of the Gospel. The journeyings, teachings, miracles, and sufferings of Christ, all had their use in bringing out this image, or, what is the same, in making conspicuous the character and feelings of God, both toward sinners and toward sin. And here is the power of Christ—it is what of God's beauty, love, truth, and justice shines through Him. It is the influence which flows unconsciously and spontaneously out of Christ, as the friend of man, the light of the world, the glory of the Father, made visible. And some have gone so far as to conjecture that God made the human person, originally, with a view to its becoming the organ or vehicle by which He might reveal His communicable attributes to other worlds. Christ, they believe, came to inhabit this organ, that He might execute a purpose so sublime. The human person is constituted, they say, to be a mirror of God; and God, being imaged in that mirror, as in Christ, is held up to the view of this and other worlds. It certainly is to the view of this; and if the divine nature can use this organ so effectively to express itself unto us, if it can bring itself, through the looks, tones, motions, and conduct of a human person, more close to our sympathies than by any other means, how can we think that an organ so communicative, inhabited by us, is not always breathing our spirit and transferring our image insensibly to others?

"I have protracted the argument on this subject beyond what I could have wished, but I can not dismiss it without suggesting a few thoughts necessary to its complete practical effect.

"One very obvious and serious inference from it, and the first which I will name, is, that it is impossible to live in this world and escape responsibility. It is not they alone, as you have seen, who are trying purposely to convert or corrupt others, who exert an influence you can not live without exerting influence. The VOL. VI.-15

doors of your soul are open on others, and theirs on you. You inhabit a house which is well-nigh transparent; and what you are within, you are ever showing yourself to be without, by sigus that have no ambiguous expression. If you had the seeds of a pestilence in your body, you would not have a more active contagion than you have in your tempers, tastes, and principles. Simply to be in this world, whatever you are, is to exert an influence-an influence, too, compared with which mere language and persuasion are feeble. You say that you mean well; at least, you think you mean to injure no one. Do you injure no one? Is your example harmless? Is it ever on the side of God and duty? You can not reasonably doubt that others are continually receiving impressions from your character. As little can you doubt that you must answer for these impressions. If the influence you exert is unconsciously exerted, then it is only the most sincere, the truest expression of your character. And for what can you be held responsible if not for this? Do not deceive yourselves in the thought that you are, at least, doing no injury, and are, therefore, living without responsibility; first make it sure that you are not every hour infusing moral death insensibly into your children, wives, husbands, friends, and acquaintances. By a mere look or glance, not unlikely, you are conveying the influence that shall turn the scale of some one's immortality. Dismiss, therefore, the thought that you are living without responsibility; that is impossible. Better is it frankly to admit the truth; and if you will risk the influence of a character unsanctified by duty and religion, prepare to meet your reckoning manfully, and receive the just recompense of reward."

The Reverend JOHN CAIRD, who comes next in order, is comparatively a young man. Born in Greenock, and attached to the National Church of Scotland, (the old "Moderate' Kirk, from which Chalmers, Candlish, and Guthrie seceded,) he was ordained in 1845, and is now not much over thirty years of age. Almost immediately after his ordination, he attracted attention and preferment. His first parish was at Edinburgh, where his comprehensiveness of intellect; his clear, simple, terse style; and more particularly, his fine metaphysical and psychological perceptions, which he used with great effect in the enforcement of Scripture doctrine, drew before him some of the leading minds of the Scotch metropolis. He now officiates as minister of the Park Church, Glasgow.

But Mr. Caird's present extra-parochial popularity is to be attributed to what would be commonly called an "accident." He had prepared, and had preached on several ordinary occasions of pulpit duty, a sermon on "Religion in Common Life." Occupying the same general ground as Melville's sermon on

"Paul the Tent-maker," it went beyond that celebrated production in denouncing asceticism; in proclaiming the sacredness of labor; and in pressing the truth that the work-shop and the study may, equally with the sanctuary, be made the altar of prayer. To this was added the more questionable position that "religion consists not so much in doing spiritual or sacred acts, as in doing secular acts from a sacred or spiritual motive." These points were vindicated with masterly power, but at the same time were left, we can not but think, without a due enforcement of that tremendous proposition which the subject so naturally leads to: WHAT EXCUSE HAVE YE, O MEN OF BUSINESS, IN NEGLECTING CHRIST, WHEN YOUR NATURE IS SO CONSTITUTED THAT THIS BUSINESS IS THE PLATFORM HE HAS ERECTED AS THAT ON WHICH YE MAY BEST MEET HIM?

Now it so happened that the Queen and her family being on a visit, in the summer of 1855, to her Scotch residence, attended a church where Mr. Caird was the preacher. He repeated there the sermon we have just noticed, and which at its former deliveries, had given rise to no very remarkable celebrity. But the Queen and Prince Albert were charmed. The latter is well known to sympathize with German latitudinarians, and the former, whatever may be her personal views, may be pardoned for giving a governmental approval to a system so satisfactory in an industrial light as that which Mr. Caird promulgated. No monastic waste of energy hereno pietistic or mystical simmering away of the juices of the heart and softening of the muscles! The manuscript was read by the Queen and the Prince aloud in their family; and of course was read, or at least claimed to have been read, by the whole court. Lord Palmerston, who had a short time before. told the Scotch Assembly, in answer to a request that he would appoint a fast-day to keep off the cholera, that they had better keep their streets clean, was delighted at receiving from a Scotch pulpit something that he might cite as looking in the same direction. The Times itself, the great organ of English business, thundered forth its approval, and followed up theediet by issuing the sermon in a broadside. Then came a series of editions, great and small, plain and gilt, adapted to

the boudoir, so as to teach the elegant to work when at their prayers, and adapted to the factory, so as to teach the laborer to pray when at his work. Hundreds of thousands of copies were sold. Five or six thousand dollars of copy-money were received; a sum, however, which was devoted by the author to the endowment of a female industrial school.

The sermon on "Religion in Common Life," was followed a few months since by a collection of eleven which are now before us. Of these, four are on the evidences of natural and revealed religion; and the best we can say of them is, that they are fair expositions of the arguments they undertake to unfold, remarkable more for perspicuity and felicity of statement, than for force. It is otherwise when we approach what we conceive to be Mr. Caird's particular forte, that is, psychological analogy and illustration. As an example of this, observe the power with which, in the following passage, the self-ignorance of the sinner is explained on the ground of "the slow and gradual way in which, in most cases, sinful habits and dispositions are acquired:"

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Apart from any other consideration, there is something in the mere fact of the gradual and insidious way in which changes of character generally take place, that tends to blind men to their own defects. For every one knows how unconscious we often are of changes that occur by minute and slow degrees. If, for instance, the transitions from one season of the year to another were more sudden and rapid, our attention would be much more forcibly arrested by their occurrence than it now is. But because we are not plunged from mid-summer into winterbecause, in the declining year, one day is so like the day that preceded it, the daylight hours contract so insensibly, the chilly feeling infuses itself by such slight increases into the air, the yellow tint creeps so gradually over the foliage—because autumn thus frequently softens and shades away into winter by gradations so gentle, we scarcely perceive while it is going on, the change which has passed over the face of nature. So, again, how imperceptibly do life's advancing stages steal upon us! If we leapt at once from boyhood into manhood, or if we lay down at night with the consciousness of manhood's bloom and vigor, and waked in the morning to find ourselves gray-haired, worn, and withered old men, we could not choose but be arrested by transitions so marked. But now, because to-day you are very much the same man as yesterday-because, with the silent growth of the stature, the graver cares, and interests, and responsibilities of life gather so gradually around you; and then, when you reach the turning-point and begin to descend, because this year the blood circulates but a very little less freely, and but a few more and deeper lines are gathering on the face, than in the last; because old associations are not suddenly broken up, but only unwound thread by thread, and old forms