and shop-worn stock in trade of sceptics in every age; or awful mysteries of God, before which a man should stand with uncovered head; and so, when alleged as objections, not less superficial and frivolous, as if a man should refuse to eat till he understands how bread is converted into blood. But mainly, reassert the prerogative of conscience, God's vicegerent in the breast, and demand implicit submission to its decisions. Insist on the completeness and sufficiency of arguments addressed to the conscience. Tell men, with all plainness, that the suggestions and questionings of the speculative understanding are the result, not of superior intelligence, a profound and philosophic habit of mind, or the caution of a wise and acute analyst in admitting conclusions in a matter of vast and eternal concernment; but of intellectual pride, vain conceit, and a heart in wicked rebellion against the authority of God. This is the plain truth, and shall the preacher of righteousness, God's ambassador to men in revolt, involve himself in a complicity with the wickedness, by helping men to cover it up? Helping men to cover it up! We will venture to assert that that is about the amount of all that was ever accomplished, or ever will be, to the end of the dispensation, by labored replies, with respectful air, to the perverse disputings of the speculative understanding. Did anybody ever hear of a single instance of genuine conversion, as the result of such a process? Or did anybody ever perceive that a man seemed a single hairbreadth nearer to repentance when his speculative objections had been answered, and he silenced?

We incline strongly to the belief that most conversions take place at an earlier period than the speculative understanding comes fully into play; while authority is paramount, and truth is received traditionally, and the conscience is still quick and powerful, as compared with after years; that is to say, in childhood. This subject is one of very deep interest. If any of our readers wish to pursue it, they will find the whole matter treated with great ability in "THE CRUCIBLE; OR, TESTS OF A REGENERATE STATE;" by the Rev. J. A. Goodhue; a volume whose careful study would be most beneficial, as we conceive, to the whole religious community.

What if it be a mere passage at arms between a minister

and an intelligent hearer; exciting mutual respect and admiration on the part of the preacher, that his hearer is so intellectual and philosophic, and, withal, so ready to listen to his reasonings; and, on the part of the hearer, that his minister is so appreciative, and so scholarly in replying to what he plumes himself on his cleverness in suggesting. How much good has been done, in that case, on one side or on the other? We greatly fear that the whole effect lies directly against the chances of that man's conversion. Indeed, it appears to us abundantly plain that the first step in the direction of his submission to God, must be of a widely different character. Nor are we at all sanguine as to the conversion, by any means, of men who have surrendered themselves to the perverse and tortuous guidance of the speculative understanding. It is a most dangerous experiment, or rather it seems to us to furnish strong presumptive evidence of having already passed the point beyond which God will seldom go to bring a man back. Even in such a case, however, preaching to the conscience is by no means in vain; since one part of the grand purpose for which the Christian ministry was instituted is, to restrain the wickedness of men whom God does not design to save; so that the world may be tolerable for the elect, and, lest, through the superabounding of iniquity, they should fall away. This binding of Satan is effected only by flashing God's naked truth into the conscience.

How directly, and with what a regal authority, the Bible brings the great facts of God and his law, sin and its condemnation, Christ and his redemption, death and the judgment, home to every man, of every race and nation, Jew or Gentile, Greek or Barbarian, wise or unwise. "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God." "Now commandeth he all men everywhere to repent.' "He that believeth shall be saved, but he that believeth not shall be damned." In these brief pregnant sayings all is comprehended; and let it be considered whether, in the face of these grand and overwhelming appeals, all that the speculative understanding can suggest in a thousand years is not the most pitiful drivelling - "hollow poverty and emptiness."

How far we have drifted in this untoward direction is matter for grave inquiry. It is too early to have forgotten what was

the great peculiarity of the extensive revival of 1858. That there was a characteristic absence of deep conviction of sin, was the occasion of universal remark, and no small perplexity and debate. Is any other explanation required save the obvious fact that, to a very great extent, it was a work wrought in the speculative understanding, rather than in the conscience? The result was inevitable. Conversion through the understanding is not the work of the Holy Spirit. It needs no deep self-abasement for sin, admits none. Nor can ten thousand such conversions yield the very smallest fruits of spiritual life. Self-righteousness and spiritual pride are the legitimate fruits. When the Spirit of God comes, it is to do, always and everywhere, substantially the same work, to convince of sin; and that work is done, in every instance, where alone it can be done in any instance, in the conscience.

The subject is vital. It involves the true Scriptural character of the pulpit, and the spiritual life of the churches. Paul and the mocking Grecians of Areopagus were not farther asunder than are really and ultimately the two classes of preachers we have been considering; - as inevitable tendencies. and ultimate results are even now demonstrating, on our right hand and on our left. Let the churches look to it, for it is peculiarly their concern. If the Schools of the Prophets,— recreant to their high responsibility, and incompetent to train preachers, who shall have skill to shoot the arrows of the Almighty, with sure and unerring aim, into the conscience of men, make it their grand vocation to send forth rhetoricians and dialectical experts, you may just as well write on their walls at once that fatal word which tells to every passer-by that the glory is departed.

Philosophy is good, and rhetoric is good. Every faculty of the human mind hath its appropriate place and ministry, for the glory of Jesus Christ, and the enlargement of his kingdom on the earth. But whoso will prove the divine power of the Christian pulpit, as it was proved by Jonathan Edwards, and Whitefield, and Paul, or at least follow on in their footsteps, must take for his motto Paul's own words, "Therefore, seeing we have this ministry, as we have received mercy, we faint not; but have renounced the hidden things of dishonesty, not

walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God." (2 Cor. iv. 1, 2.) The best learning of all for this high calling, and absolutely indispensable, — is that which comes, not of the Schools, but of the teaching of God's Spirit. If we cannot have both, give us, by all means, the latter,- fishermen of Galilee, tinkers and cobblers, in preference to the highest culture of Greek and Rabbi, so that what the great John Calvin noted with sorrow as an occasional fact in his day, become not the leading characteristic of our own; "We see even at this day some, even of those who profess the Gospel, who would rather be esteemed subtile than sincere, and sublime rather than solid, while in the mean time all their refinement is mere childishness."

ARTICLE II.

ONE OF TENNYSON'S POEMS.

OUR modesty is not affected. A critique of the Laureate as a composite unity would put us under bonds for a tribute to "Riverside" in a larger amount than we care just now to honor. A cabinet of gems is very beautiful to look upon; far more so than any single flashing jewel of them all: but then it is much. more difficult to handle, in the way of a description, than that single precious stone. The crown jewels of London Tower are a magnificent ensemble; but it should hardly be charged to a visitor's want of appreciation, if, instead of essaying an account of their combined splendor, he prefers to write a few paragraphs to a friend concerning good Edward the Confessor's staff of beaten gold, or the baptismal salt-cellar of the same generous metal. Very like to this is our mood regarding this elegant little volume in purple covers, to the contents of which "Alfred Tennyson" asserts proprietorship, and from near the middle of which we cull a few pages for a brief review.

"Locksley Hall" is the birth, if not of a rarer genius, yet of a riper culture and a more vigorous purpose than the brief "swallow flights of song" which precede it, the delicate wordfinishing of which reminds one of the perfect chiselling, ad unguem, of the smaller statues of the old masters; as if this exquisite verbal beauty were the accomplished author's main ambition. While others of them slumber in the delicious Indian-summer haziness of the shore where the "Lotos-Eaters " moored their bark :

"In the afternoon they came unto a land

In which it seeméd always afternoon.

All round the coast the languid air did swoon,
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream."

One begins to feel, in turning these earlier, gilt-edged leaves, that a cataract before long in the mellifluous stream of music would be a pleasant relief; possibly to wonder if the smoothvoiced lute could give a really stirring note. There would indeed be no occasion of such wonder, if the reader should commence at the terminus of the book, and wend his way backward, as we have known some abnormally constituted persons commonly to do in a fragmentary work like this. The "Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward;

All in the valley of death

Rode the six hundred".

would sufficiently dissipate that doubt: or, what it might fail thus to do would find a full enough completion amidst the actually tremendous battle-dashes of the martial "Maud." No one, too, who has thoroughly sounded the solemn, dirge-like prophesyings of that peerless threnody "In Memoriam," will question whether Tennyson's muse is equal to the grasp of the most subtile and weighty poetic themes. But these, with the strong-minded "Princess" as well, are after-revelations. Nor is it to be supposed that the most of readers pursue any such crab-like course as just now intimated. We, at any rate, do not. We like to begin at the beginning, title-page, preface, chapter first, and so on. We take a volume like this as indicating the mental growth of its author,-youth, manhood, age; spring, summer, autumn; and peruse its successive accretions