suffering. The idea of God in their system is, that he shows forth his glory in heaven by making men happy there; and shows his glory forth in hell by making others miserable there; that they were foreordained to punishment. It still stands upon the records of the Church; there are sentiments like these which have been recorded for years and years, and the paper upon which they are written has not yet rotted; that God made human hearts and strung them with affections, and feelings, and sentiments, and said, I am making these on purpose for happiness, and all heaven rejoiced in the sweet melodies; and he made another heart with affections and feelings and sentiments, across which, when he swept his hands, all hell reverebrated with woe. It is said that God did that before men were born, in eternal ages, and on purpose to show forth in their sufferings and sorrows the fitness of his glory. Now if that be God, I defy casuist or logician, or sage or speculating philosopher, to create a devil, beside; I do not know room for one. The capacity of malignity is filled up by such a notion as that; there are no other elements out of which to create a devil that would not be merciful in comparison to that."

Can it be necessary to say to our readers, that this is caricature? We deliberately pronounce it an atrocious libel upon a large portion of the Christian Church. If there is anything in the writings of Theodore Parker which surpasses it in cool, mendacious effrontery, it has escaped our notice.

What did the listening multitude suppose the preacher to mean? As he is fond of shooting at things very far away, did they suppose he was discharging his peculiar thunder at something quite unknown, almost never heard of hereabouts? something existing away down south, or, perchance, in England, or on the continent of Europe? They thought no such thing. They knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that their minister was dealing with the doctrine of election, which is taught in our Catechisms, and set forth in the Confessions of Faith of our Churches, and preached by our Alexanders, and Shedds, and Adamses, and Albros, and Lords.

This sermon brings forcibly to mind a passage in the religious experience of Jonathan Edwards, who had the same early struggle which Mr. Beecher has elsewhere described, but came out of it in a widely different way.

"From my childhood up," he says, "my mind had been full of ob

jections against the doctrine of God's sovereignty, in choosing whom he would to eternal life, and rejecting whom he pleased; leaving them eternally to perish, and be everlastingly tormented in hell. It used to appear like a horrible doctrine to me. But I remember the time very well, when I seemed to be convinced and fully satisfied, as to this sovereignty of God, and his justice in thus eternally disposing of men, according to his sovereign pleasure. But never could give an account, how, or by what means, I was thus convinced, not in the least imagining at the time, nor a long time after, that there was any extraordinary influence of God's Spirit in it; but only that now I saw further, and my reason apprehended the justice and reasonableness of it. However, my mind rested in it; and it put an end to all those cavils and objections. And there has been a wonderful alteration in my mind, with respect to the doctrine of God's sovereignty, from that day to this; so that I scarce ever have found so much as the rising of an objection against it, in the most absolute. sense, in God's showing mercy to whom he will show mercy, and hardening whom he will. God's absolute sovereignty and justice, with respect to salvation and damnation, is what my mind seems to rest assured of, as much as of anything that I see with my eyes; at least it is so at times. But I have often, since that first conviction, had quite another kind of sense of God's sovereignty than I had then. I have often since had not only a conviction, but a delightful conviction. The doctrine has often appeared exceeding pleasant, bright, and sweet. Absolute sovereignty is what I love to ascribe to God. But my first conviction was not so." (Edwards' Works, vol. 1, p. 33.)

Verily it is a fearful thing for the God of Jonathan Edwards. to fall into the hands of Henry Ward Beecher !

[TO BE CONCLUDED.]

ARTICLE IV.

MRS. BROWNING AND CHRISTIAN POETRY.

THERE is no field so rich in poetic thought and inspiration as Christianity. It is true that hitherto the great majority of the world's poets have gathered their fragrant flowers in the shady nooks and picturesque walks of Nature, and have sung their thrilling lays around the salient angles of epic narrative, or

along the hot, beaten road of natural and unsanctified passion. With a few noble exceptions, to whom the Church is deeply indebted, and whose rich, harmonious notes will grow sweeter and more precious as time glides on, poets have drank their inspiration at the shallower streams of sentimental morality and naturalism, if not even at the muddy pools of the sensuous and the sensual. Surely it is not always to be so.

So certainly and rapidly as the promised dawn of millennial day approaches, the time will come when the grand themes and events in Christianity will stir the Muse to her highest and proudest achievements. The end of poetry, it has been said, is to produce intellectual pleasure by exciting emotions either of the elevated or pathetic order. Where, aside from religion, can be found themes so elevated and pathetic? Aristotle defines poetry to be "imitation," in the sense that it finds its models in Nature; or, as another philosopher has said, "poetry doth raise and erect the mind by submitting the shows of things to the desire of the mind."

Religion fathoms the lowest depths and the sublimest heights of Nature; it is the reality of "things," "the shows" of which the rectified soul longs to have exhibited to it. The themes of religion connect us with the infinite God and his eternal plans; with sin and woe, and their glorious remedy. What other contemplations are calculated so to stir the mind with pathetic and elevated emotions?

These themes are yet to take an absorbing and controlling hold of the public heart and mind; to move men as they move the angelic hosts. There will be a day when the exciting intelligence that shall come along the wires, and over the seas, shall not be of stocks and markets, but of the triumphs of the Redeemer's kingdom. There will be seen to be, in Redemption and its kindred truths, such a fitness to man's need, that, when it comes to be grasped, will cause it to stir the souls of the millions as no other themes ever did or ever could. Then will there be a new age of poetry, and poetry of such melting pathos, and of such ennobling, glorifying power, as shall cause men to loath the maudlin verse, and tinsel mimicry of all the Nature-worshipping, or the sensuous and sensual poets.

Mrs. Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a great, Christian poetess.

Her style and range of thought are so scholastic, requiring so much deliberation, thought, and culture in the reading, that, unfortunately, she can never write for the millions. But as to genius she certainly stands in the front rank of female poets; and perhaps her wide and strong grasp, her towering imagination, her deep pathos, her power of exact, condensed language, place her at the head of the list. Mr. Bayne deliberately assigns her "the same place among women as Shakspeare occupies among men." His testimony as to the deeply and pervasively Christian character of her poetry is so much to my purpose that I shall invite him to take the stand, claiming only the privilege of italicizing some of his words.

"Mrs. Browning is in the highest sense, and always, a Christian poetess. She has drunk more deeply into the spirituality of the Gospel, and, it may even be, looked with greater earnestness and amazement upon certain of its most sublime facts, than Milton . . . . not ethically, not sentimentally, not alone in spirit, far less for artistic purposes, but in the strictness and literalness of actual belief . . . . all those central truths of Christianity which have been accepted by the mightiest minds of the era, Paul, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, Edwards, Neander; and once more it has been demonstrated that the bure facts of Christianity transcend in sublimity any counterfeit, and more powerfully stimulate a really great imagination than any other theme whatever.

Over all the domain of her poetry, over its central ranges, its quiet gardened valleys, its tinkling rills, falls a radiance of Gospel light. Ever, as her music rises to its noblest cadence, it seems taken up by an angel harp; the highest tone is as the voice of spirits. It would, I cannot doubt, be to their own sincere enjoyment and real profit, if the Christian public pressed boldly into the temple of Mrs. Browning's song. She is a Christian poetess, not in the sense of appreciating, like Carlyle, the loftiness of the Christian type of character, not in the sense of adopting, like Goethe, a Christian machinery for artistic self-worship, - not even in the sense of preaching, like Wordsworth, an august but abstract morality, but in the sense of finding, like Cowper, the whole hope of humanity bound up in Christ, and taking all the children of her mind to him, that he may lay his hand on them and bless them."

Her appreciative, and evidently experimental, valuation of the Atonement is delectable. Christ is "the chiefest ameng ten thousand" to her. In her dedication to her father, she

speaks of his holding, with her, "over all sense of loss and transiency, one hope by one Name."

It is a significant fact, and highly corroborative of the opening sentence of this paper, that Mrs. Browning's greatest poems are the two which are chiefly Christian. Their one aim seems to be the pure and vivid exhibition of the grand, distinguishing truths of evangelical religion. "The Seraphim" is a conversation between angels as they view the crucifixion of Christ.

We shall have space only to make brief extracts from the "Drama of Exile," which presents, in stronger coloring than we have anywhere seen, both the terrible nature of the apostasy, and the grandeur of the recovery of man. It opens in the lurid glare of the waving sword-flame, just outside of Eden, where, in the distance, Adam and Eve are seen flying, silent, all day along the wilderness. Lucifer stalks upon the stage, and, in the most fiendishly triumphant shout, calls upon his infernal legions to exult, and to "taunt the white heavens" with the irreparable woe which he has accomplished.

Then follows a dialogue between Lucifer and Gabriel, in which the opposite characters of the contending parties is drawn with a startling vividness. The Satanic motives and emotions are truly and deeply devilish.

Gabriel.

Do I dream?

Alas, not so! this is the Eden lost

By Lucifer the serpent! this the sword

(This sword alive with justice and with fire)

That smote upon the forehead, Lucifer

The angel. Wherefore, angel, go— depart —
Enough is sinned and suffered.

VOL. I.-NO. II.

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