too much, of what is called experimental preaching. The mere description of what some, or most, christians may feel, and chiefly with the view of affording to them consolation, is not what we mean, or at least only part of what we mean. The method of handling the spiritual sorrows and sufferings of saints is very often extremely injudicious and injurious, calculated to foster a morbid religiousness, and not the vigorous and healthy piety of the first christians. But whatever the method of doing this, there is a great deal more to be done in the way of experimental preaching. Ministers cannot enter too deeply into all the workings of the human mind upon the subjects of religion, cannot probe it with too much skill and courage. There are endless sophistries to be removed, false emotions to be detected and revealed, practices of self-deception to be exposed, and hidden germs of goodness to be nourished, which require a shrewd and searching application of the principles of divine truth. It is only part of a minister's duty to state those principles; he should point out their legitimate operation, distinguishing with every possible care and wisdom the constitutional from the spiritual, the natural from the supernatural, the wrong or excessive exercise of good feelings from bad ones, the form which true religion may take in some from the form which it must take in all. This is done now to a considerable degree, but often done loosely and unwisely. We have often trembled as we have heard things mentioned as signs of incipient godliness, which some kinds of sinners might possess without a particle of God's grace. If we might give an opinion as to the most serious deficiency in the pulpit ministrations of the present day, we should say it is in this; it is not familiar enough with the ten thousand religious processes that are continually going on in the souls of the righteous and the wicked. We say the wicked, for the religious experience of the wicked is as much a part of a minister's sphere, and presents as fine an opportunity for the skilful and forcible application of spiritual truth as the religious experience of the righteous. The handling of this is too coarse, the treatment too much by guess. Men do not feel that the preacher is fully acquainted with them, do not wonder that he knows so much of their secret life, do not tremble at the expectation of his next possible disclosure, are not conscious as of the searchings of an invisible hand, do not anticipate in the solemn scrutiny of the sanctuary the tests and trials of the last awful day. They are permitted to deceive themselves, thinking they have faith in the midst of unbelief, mistaking emotions for principles, approbation of right for righteousness. Sin is not destroyed in them, but made more secret, and therefore dangerous. The disease is driven in, not out, and its deadliness is increased. A ministry to be properly and powerfully

experimental must be based upon an extensive knowledge of the human mind and of the modes in which religious truth operates upon it in its various conditions. A minister should be a metaphysician as well as a theologian.

We cannot close our remarks without suggesting the importance of a wise selection and use of language to the effectiveness of preaching. It has not been without concern and grief that we have witnessed among many young ministers a grievous departure from what appears to us the fitting and forcible speech suited to the pulpit. It is not an affectation of philosophical refinement and scientific accuracy; it is not long words, long sentences, long thoughts; it is not German mysticism of conception and of style, that the spiritual interests of the present age require. The great demand is for force. The eternal circumlocutions of an Owen would send one half of our congregations to sleep, and the other half away, whatever they used to do. Language is but a vehicle, and when it has fully expressed the thought designed to be communicated, its office is fulfilled -it has nothing more that it can do. Whatever more of it there is, encumbers but does not help, and in proportion to the smallness of the thought is the danger of its being concealed and weakened by the accumulation of unnecessary words. It is not in oral discourses as in books; the latter present an opportunity of recurrence to preceding passages, the former do not, and therefore is it the more necessary that they should not fail to give full conveyance to each separate and successive idea. No doubt the temptation is strong, to a man conscious of the poverty of his matter, to stretch it out on the hard iron bed of unmeaning wordiness to the requisite dimensions, but the cure is to have matter enough without doing it. But want of care is as much a cause of a diffuse and attenuated style as want of matter. Strength and point are not to be acquired by chance. Great effort and self-control are necessary; it is a work of time and trouble. The best way to get it is to practise written composition. We would not, indeed, counsel the permanent adoption of the habit of reading sermons in the pulpit, although we have no sympathy with the foolish prejudice that prevails against it; but a man should write sermons or something else until he has formed a good and vigorous style. It is worth any minister's while to elaborate his style to the last degree of perfection, for the power of the sayings of the wise, their being goads and nails fastened, depends very much on the selection of 'acceptable words.' The arm may be strong that draws the bow, but is it nothing to have the arrow rightly and nicely feathered? Appropriate speech is the right and nice clothing of a man's thoughts, and no vigor or purity of intellect can make him independent of it. We

have said that the requirement of the present day is force, and we repeat it. Sermons should be practically metaphysical, free from the moonshine and mockery of scholastic quibbling, dealing plainly and energetically with the great facts and real philosophy of the human mind and state, making no distinctions where there is no difference, and always making them where there is; and of such sermons the language cannot be too strong and simple. Technicality should be as much avoided as verbosity. It is high time that men spoke of religion as God has spoken of it, that is, as they would speak of any thing else. Few things have done more to spread and perpetuate erroneous conceptions and weaken true ones than the prevalence of a set class of forms and phrases in religious discourses and religious literature. To many they convey false notions, and to many no notions at all. They are injurious as creeds are injurious, though on a smaller scale, to the progress and power of spiritual thought. To multitudes they are charms. In multitudes they inspire disgust. If there is one subject that demands more than another a free and liberal, an honest and direct, a various and natural mode of expression, it is religion.

As to the Lecture which we have placed at the head of this article, we shall say but little. We deeply feel the importance of the subject, as our remarks have proved, and we think Dr. Beman has treated it well, as well perhaps as the limits of a lecture would permit. Many of his observations are extremely good, all of them are true and solid. Whatever the Americans have or have not, they certainly have a way of preaching, and of speaking about preaching, which we greatly like. There is a freeness and reality about their representations of truth most refreshing and impressive. They treat religion as they would treat any other theme of deep and momentous interest. Much good has the British ministry derived from the American. Finney alone has done more to improve and quicken the ministry than any dozen other men. His warm, earnest, vigorous volumes we cannot but regard in some respects as a fine specimen of the right way of aiming at the conversion and sanctification of men. They may have their faults, but they are just the books to take religion out of the creed and put it into the conscience; and in our country, where the three creeds and thirty-nine articles have more or less to do with the religious conceptions of almost every man, such books are especially needed. Honor to the man who, though gifted with so fine an intellect, is content with doing good.

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Art. II. The Natural History of Society in the Barbarous and Cirilized State: an Essay towards discovering the Origin and Course of Human Improvement. By W. COOKE TAYLOR, Esq., LL.D., &c., &c. 2 vols. 12mo. Longman and Co.

AMONG the various branches of historical inquiry always inviting attention, there is assuredly none of higher interest than that which the author of the present work has selected. To man, the survey of his own race preserving its continuity through the long series of generations, and identifying itself in all the various stages of its condition, from the lowest barbarism to the highest degrees of refinement and civilization, cannot fail to prove instructive and exciting. The subject has accordingly engaged attention more or less in all civilized nations. But here, as in many other subjects, the conceit of riches has been the cause of poverty. Ignorance has assumed the guise of knowledge, and speculation has too often supplied the place of real history. The difficulty of ascertaining facts in the procession of nation from nation and race from race, the profound obscurity resting upon many questions of remote antiquity, and the natural propensity of inquiring minds in the absence of facts, to indulge in theories, for the sake of gratifying curiosity, have all contributed their quota of impediments to the acquisition of sound knowledge, and to the rational investigation of human history. It would not be unjust to add that infidelity, intending by that term the indisposition of philosophers to accept the testimony of revelation for knowledge, or their latent wish even to falsify that testimony, has tended greatly to the production and prevalence of theories which patient research has proved to be baseless, and to the authority of philosophic speculations which philosophy itself has refuted.

Time was when the belief of the scriptural narrative of man's origin and first state was contemptuously scorned by the wouldbe sages of civilized Europe; and that man was accounted unworthy of being esteemed a philosopher, who did not admit that his progenitor was an ape. The favorite maxim was that all nations now civilized had either been once in the lowest state of barbarism, or had descended from ancestors who had been so. The first state of man was determined to be savage, brutish, purely animal, and profoundly ignorant. At one period this primitive state had almost become an object of envy and emulation—and the philosophers, in their idolatry of simple nature, or rather, of their own idea of simple nature, were ready to subscribe to the despicable rant of Rousseau when he said, 'Education confines the natural parts, effaces the grand qualities

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of the soul, to substitute such as are trifling and apparent, but have no reality.'

Happily the dogmatism of philosophic speculation, by its own effrontery and extravagance, hastened the downfall of its authority. The world, little as it reverenced inspiration, was not to be persuaded that ignorance was preferable to knowledge, or savage life better than civilization. Gentlemen and ladies, accustomed to the display of courts or the amusements of the drawing-room, had little inclination to be restored to the honor of wearing the tail which Lord Monboddo said had been appended to their ancestors, and felt no desire that their young should be turned out to fraternize again with the ourang-outang. It is but just to say, that the whole list of notions and theories upon this subject emanating from the philosophers have, by succeeding philosophers, been repudiated as utterly baseless and absurd. Patient research, in every branch of knowledge connected with human history, has tended to the establishment of opinions precisely the reverse of former ones. Traces of early and of high civilization have been found in lands inhabited now by savages, and where no one ever supposed such traces could exist; the identity of the entire human family has been established by purely physical researches; the investigation of languages by the most profound scholars has shown that they constitute the branches of a single tree, having had originally but one root; while the history of all nations, their traditions, customs, commerce, and civilization, seem to point as uniformly to the east as the magnet to the pole.

The shallow sophisms which were founded upon the supposed discovery of the brutish origin of the human race, and which were designed to subvert the testimony of Moses, for a while prevailed among the learned, but have at length not only been thoroughly exploded, but have recoiled upon the character of those who either invented or upheld them. As far as our recollection serves us, a Dr. Doeg, in Scotland, was the first British author who contested, on sound principles of induction, the doctrine of the French theorists respecting the ascent of the human race from an equality with the animal tribes; insisting that, prior to improvement upon barbarism, there had been first deterioration, and that the natural tendencies of the human race, irrespective of external and exciting causes, was rather to decline than advance in civilization and refinement. His work was a small but original essay. It was well received, though it was deficient in what might be called complete scientific proof and elaborate research. This has since been supplied by writers of various nations, and upon every related and collateral subject.

The facts which have been accumulated incontestibly show that the human race, in its earliest history, was not in a state