when Dr. Miller wanted toleration for Hopkinsians in 1817, until the time when Drs. Miller, Alexander, and Hodge, in 1836, were brought into the movement for disruption, by a hint that in case of their continued hesitation, the means were in readiness to establish a rival Old School Seminary. The cautious reader will believe-as we believe most firmly-that those good men at Princeton, in their final adhesion to the Act and Testimony movement, as well as in their long reluctance, were actuated (to say the least) by no more selfish or less worthy motives than those which inspired the authors of the movement. As it was with all the Moderates, so it was with them. They held the old theology as they understood it; they were hearty in their special affection for that portion of Christ's church in this land which was called the Presbyterian Church, and in their admiration of all its peculiar arrangements; but, at the same time, they had catholic sympathies and aspirations. For a long while they were in a strait betwixt two, the catholic element and the sectarian being coördinate n their minds-which is about as much as can be expected of good men in the present condition of organized Christianity. At last, when they saw that the schism would come, which they had feared, and that there was no help, they succumbed to the sectarian tendency, and went (where else could they go?) with the Old School party.

The moral of the long story is not very recondite. Can Presbyterianism, as constituted by the Presbyterian Book, be really catholic? Can the disunited Presbyterianism be reunited without including Dr. Baird and the rest of the Immoderates? Can Presbyterianism, just as it is just as it will be after the proposed reunion-cease to breed and bring up men of that sort, narrowly sectarian, contentious, litigions, men to whom a fight in an ecclesiastical assembly is a high religious enjoyment, and who are always desiring to excommunicate somebody for some dissent from their theological traditions? If there is to be a free, harmonious, catholic Presbyterianism in our country, must not its builders dig deeper and clear away more of the rubbish ?

ARTICLE VII.-NOTICES OF NEW BOOKS.

THEOLOGICAL AND RELIGIOUS.

LIDDON'S BAMPTON LECTURES ON THE DIVINITY OF CHRIST.*– This book has already passed through several editions, and has received great praise from the religious press. This praise is partly just, and partly not. The writer has respectable, though not first rate, qualifications as an exegete. He is well read in the literature pertaining to his subject. His pages swarm with citations, references, and sometimes with episodal observations. A great amount of interesting information relating to modern theology, especially the German schools, is interspersed in his discussion. The discusion itself, we must confess, has somewhat disappointed us. It is unnecessarily drawn out. It attempts to be exhaustive, and becomes rather exhausting. There is not a strong, manly grasp of opposing systems and opinions. There is too much of the slightly solemn, gently patronizing, churchly tone, for our taste; and too much of it for the best effect of the book upon those outside of the author's ecclesiastical and theological fold. No minister can read this volume without receiving from it much instruction; but he will have good reason to regret that, being so good, it is not better. The late Dr. Robinson was once asked if Ellicott was not an excellent commentator? "A good commentator," was the reply. "But is he not a devout commentator?” "Yes, devout," replied the blunt Doctor, "after the English fashion he begins all the designations of God, and all the pronouns referring to God, with capitals." There is a species of Anglican, ecclesiastical devoutness which is easily marked in not a few productions of really excellent men, but which wears a provincial and not wholly pleasing aspect. We observe that Mr. Liddon, who is censorious respecting all works of the class of "Ecce Homo," is very deferential and laudatory in his remarks upon Mr. Gladstone's eulogistic essay on the last named book. Mr. Liddon is evidently on the track towards a bishopric.

The Divinity of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ; Eight Lectures Preached before the University of Oxford, in the year 1867, &c. Second Edition. Rivington, London, Oxford, and Cambridge. 1868. 8vo. pp. 535.

SMEATON ON THE ATONEMENT.*-This is the first installment of an elaborate treatise on the Atonement, exegetically considered. The writer is possessed of a fair amount of critical and historical learning; but he is unhappily so far destitute of the critical and historical spirit that dogmatic prepossessions constantly sway his interpretation. The desperate task of proving the theology of the covenants, and the dogma of limited atonement, by the philological, scientific exposition of Scripture, is confidently undertaken. Of the character of much of this exposition, the reader may judge by one instance. He insists that the phrase, "gave His only be gotten Son " (John iii., 16), means, "gave to a sacrificial death" —that is, he reads his doctrine between the lines of the text; but we do not see that he has any comment on the term "world" in the clause, "He so loved the world;" a clause which, fairly considered, utterly overthrows his theory of restricted atonement. There is much in this volume that is deserving of attention, and in parts it is entitled to commendation. But it is written with the Scotch diffuseness, and might be compressed into half its present compass without the loss of anything material to the discussion. More than this, it is disfigured by the old Scotch dogmatism, and a certain supercilious asperity of tone towards the schools of thought which the author considers latitudinarian. He deserves thanks for affixing to his book good indexes.

NEW TRANSLATION OF MULLER ON THE "CHRISTIAN DOCTRINE OF SIN."-We are thankful that this is not the "former translation," even though it were "diligently revised." A more nearly worthless translation than that which Mr. Pulsford made of Müller's great work, it would be difficult to find. Yet the translator took great pains. He failed partly on account of the inherent difficulties of his task, and partly on account of his special inaptitude for the peculiar business of a translator. Perhaps we ought not to call his translation worthless, for we believe that the mean

The Doctrine of the Atonement, as taught by Christ himself: or the sayings of Jesus on the Atonement, exegetically expour.ded and classified. By Rev. GEORGE SMEATON, Professor of Exegetical Theology. New College, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1868. 8vo. pp. 460.

The Christian Doctrine of Sin. By JULIUS MULLER, Professor of Theology in the University of Halle. Translated from the German of the Fifth Edition by the Rev. William Urwick, M. A. In two volumes. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1868. pp. 417, 440.

The

ing of his author was seldom directly misapprehended. trouble was that his rendering was barbarous, and frequently unintelligible to all except those whose knowledge of the German tongue enabled them to conjecture what must have stood in the original work. The Messrs. Clark have shown a praiseworthy degree of enterprise in procuring an entirely new translation of this invaluable treatise. Mr. Urwick has succeeded pretty well in his very difficult labor. Of course, the thought must lose something of its freshness and force, and, not unfrequently, the shade of meaning vanishes, in the process of being converted into English. But we have compared the translation with the original in various places, and have found it to be in the main correct, at the same time that it is perspicuous and readable. It is gratifying that a translation which is, on the whole, entitled to confidence has at length been produced. We notice one strange and unlucky omission. Says Mr. Urwick in his preface: "Instead of the long, dreary table of contents at the beginning of each volume, he (the translator) has divided each chapter into sections," &c. This "long, dreary table of contents " is a full, thorough analysis of the contents of the work, written by Dr. Müller, and in the highest dedegree serviceable to his readers. To leave it out was a sad blunder.

GROPINGS AFTER TRUTH.*-This is a book very instructive in respect to several points. First of all, it is instructive in respect to the amiable weakness of the author, who seems to have possessed from childhood a sort of stubborn discontent with the faith of his parents, without the capacity wisely to appropriate what was good in it, and to reject what was defective or bad. Whatever was over-stiff in the theological system in which he was nurtured, or over-severe in its practical views of the Christian life, or over-strained in its views of conversion, or over-driven in its views of revivals, is set down as Calvinism or Protestantism, pure and simple. Every feature of it must be received with equal confidence, if any are accepted, and, if any are rejected, the whole system of doctrine and duty must fall. Second, it is instructive in regard to the singular logic which Catholic reason

* Gropings after Truth: A Life Journey from New England Congregationalism to the one Catholic and Apostolic Church. By JOSHUA HUNTINGTON. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1868.

ers allow themselves. That a sect among Protestants, say the Congregationalists, should labor under peculiar defects, ought not to surprise a liberal-minded Catholic who is acquainted with the history of the past, or the actuality of the present, in his own church. He knows there is bigotry, and narrowness, and superstition, and asceticism, and even revivalism, in his own communion, and that many a Catholic youth, for one or all these causes, is darkened, perplexed, bewildered, and staggered with doubt, as young Huntington confesses himself to have been. That Huntington's sponsor, Rev. Augustine F. Hewit, should allow his neophyte brother to draw the inference, that because of certain excrescenses or errors Protestantism is false, when a similar inference might as properly be derived from similar errors among the sects and schools in the Catholic church-is, to us, surprising beyond explanation. To argue, or even to intimate, that in the "One Catholic Apostolic Church," there are no such errors, because, according to its theory (it having an infallible head) there ought not to be, is to be guilty of a still grosser weakness.

Third; this book is very instructive in respect to the weakness of its positive reasonings from the Scriptures with which the author (more likely his reverend father in his name) seeks to support his newly accepted faith. These reasonings are too unnatural to have been suggested by the writer's own thinking, and too forced to have been derived from any other source than his newly accepted interpreters. The gratuitous character of the assumptions which underlie these interpretations, in respect to the nature of the church and the necessity of an infallible dictator of the true faith, and the unexegetical and violent character of the interpretations of individual proof-texts, are very conspicuous. The moderately thoughful and scantily instructed Protestant who studies this argument, will be moved with any feelings rather than those of respect for these arguments, or for the intellects of those who propound or accept them.

Fourth this book is well fitted to lead serious Protestants to reflect on the one sided excesses to which their own system is sometimes carried by over zealous, narrow minded, and uninstructed teachers. While we cannot but pity the mental sufferings of the ingenuous but "groping" youth described in this volume, we ought to be none the less alive to the useful lessons taught in his account of the doctrinal and practical aspects of Orthodoxy, as he found or rather as he interpreted it. It is the glory of Protestant