privations and discomforts of life in the camp or in the hospitals of the border.

It has been remarked by one who has himself been a prominent actor in this great work of active philanthropy, "that this war has been worth all that it has cost, both in blood and treasure, for the ennobling and elevating influence it has had on the women of our land." Thousands who before the commencement of the war were leading lives of frivolity, with no lofty aim, no fitting mission to purify and elevate their natures and convince them of the blessedness of an existence of usefulness, have found in the duties they have assumed in the hospitals, the aid societies, the ministering to the wounded at the front, or the civilization and elevation of the freedmen, the very stimulus which has given life its highest zest, and filled the aching void in their hearts.

There has doubtless also been developed in the minds of these gifted women, with more or less distinctness, the feeling that this conflict was one in which they had a special interest; that the contest was one between the civilization of the North, with its lofty and almost chivalrous regard for the rights, the elevation, and the progress of woman in all fields of noble and holy endeavor, and the civilization of the South, with its utter disregard of womanly purity, its brutalization of the women. of the servile race, its degrading lusts, and its denial of all true womanly culture of brain or heart.

Impressed, consciously or unconsciously, with this conviction, the women of the North have made the costliest sacrifices, and have accomplished the most heroic deeds ever recorded of the sex in the world's history. The dwellers in the mountains of New England, who, by hoarding their scanty earnings and the severest thrift, have managed after weeks and perhaps months of toil to make a hospital shirt, a quilt, and a pair of socks for some wounded soldier in the hospital, (their own loved ones who had volunteered for the war meantime lying low in soldiers' graves at Bull Run, or Fredericksburgh, or Stone River;) the poor lone sister in northern New York, who twice a month made a toilsome journey of twelve miles on foot to procure from an aid society clothing to make up for the hospitals; the school-teacher at the West, who, abandoning her position as principal of the female department of a

large city school, gave her services for year after year without compensation in the management of a soldiers' aid society; the fair, accomplished ladies, moving in the highest circles of society, who day after day for three years and more have gone amid winter's snows and summer's heat to their work of procuring, preparing, and forwarding hospital supplies, as regularly as the banker or merchant goes to his daily business; the refined and cultivated women who at Cedar Mountain, at Centerville, at Antietam, at Fredericksburgh, at Vicksburg, Chickamauga, and Chattanooga; at Gettysburgh, at Morris Island, amid the burning sands; at Belle Plain, and Fredericksburgh, and City Point, and in the vast temporary hospitals, have toiled night and day with a zeal which knew no weariness, and a skill which fully met every emergency, in those ministrations of love and mercy to which so many thousands of our brave men owe their lives; and those other heroic souls who at Hilton Head, and Beaufort, and Fernandina, at Vicksburg and Milliken's Bend, at Helena and at New Orleans, have trained the children of the freedmen and taught their mothers all womanly virtues and housewifely skill; all these, and others too many to be even reckoned by classes in our enumeration, are deserving of a record which shall transmit their names to the latest history. Many daughters have done virtuously, but these have excelled them all. In this personal consecration of so many of our noblest spirits to the work of a holy philanthropy, we see grounds of hope for the triumph of a grander and more self-sacrificing Christianity in the future. The order of Beguines, the predecessors of the Sisters of Charity, had its origin in the necessities and sufferings of Europe in the time of the crusades; the order of Sisters of Charity was called into existence by the exigencies of the wars of the continent in the sixteenth century; the first great development of modern Christian missions in Europe was one of the results of the French Revolution. The development in this country of that "Inner Mission" founded in Germany by Wichem and his coadjutors within the last thirty years, which has for its objects the education of the ignorant and degraded, the reformation of the vicious, the improvement of prisons, the care of the sick, and the presentation to the sorrow-stricken, the wearied, and the woe-worn, the consolation of the religion of Christ, is des

tined to be the first-fruits of the discipline of war which our nation is now undergoing; and if there shall be in the magnificent future before us any other work requiring the unblenching zeal of the martyr, or the entire self-consecration of the Christian heroine, there will be found, depend upon it, no lack of willing candidates for that work, even though the tortures of the rack or the flames of the martyr's stake should rise in full view as the goal of their career.

With a spirit so cultivated to sacrifice, to hardship, and to toil for the luxury of doing good, we may justly expect to see a new impulse given to the foreign missionary enterprise; and some already on the stage may live to see the earth subdued to the dominion of the King of kings as an indirect result of the terrible civil war which has so devastated our land.

ART. V.-HIBBARD ON RELIGION OF CHILDHOOD. The Religion of Childhood; or, Children in their Relation to Native Depravity, to the Atonement, to the Family, and to the Church. By F. G. HIBBARD, D. D. Cincinnati: Poe & Hitchcock. 1864.

WE regard this book as a valuable contribution to the literature of our Church. It discusses a theme which belongs to the times, and especially to the adherents of the Wesleyan theology. Till the present century began, there was, in this country at least, little chance for the discussion of the relation of infants to the atonement and the Church. The theology of Calvin, cold, stern, inexorable, held sway, enthroning almighty self-will, and attributing to it alone all the events of history, and the destinies of all souls. In his Institutes he asks the significant question, "I inquire again how it came to pass that the fall of Adam should involve, without remedy, so many nations with. their infant children in eternal death, unless because it was the will of God? A horrible decree, I confess." The Westminster Confession, with some ambiguity of speech, affirms that "Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit, who worketh when, where, and

how he pleaseth. So also are other elect persons who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word. Others not elected, although they may be called by the ministry of the Word, and may have some common operations of the Spirit, yet they never truly come to Christ, and, therefore, cannot be saved."

Thus Calvin asserts, and the Confession hints, that some who die in infancy are doomed to eternal death. We heard a Calvinistic minister, not six years ago, preach at the funeral of a little child, and we remember well one remark which he made, to this effect, that when an adult dies we can look back at his character and conduct, and thus arrive at an opinion of the probable state of the soul after death; but that when an infant dies there is nothing upon which to base an opinion, and consequently he had in this case none to offer; he knew not whether the child was saved or lost.

It is evident that these sentiments, not only held in theory, but made a basis of reasoning and action, must affect the whole doctrinal scheme in regard to little children and our duty toward them. If, as Calvin declares, "All are not created with the same destiny; but to some eternal life, and to others eternal death, is foreordained," and this applies to infants, living or dying, as well as adults, no system of doctrine, no plan of Gospel labor, is sound and reliable which fails to take it into account. If the Genevan theory be scriptural, the predestined number will be filled up, no matter what we do or what we fail to do for the souls of others. It is true that the means are appointed as well as the end, but the decree so secures the whole that there can be no failure in the result; and the fortunate soul destined to eternal life will be saved, too, when the set time comes, not a day sooner or later, no human agency sufficing either to hasten or retard the hour.

There was a time when these unscriptural theories really affected the views with which the Church regarded souls. If a man sinned long and boldly, the probability that he was a reprobate grew stronger as the years increased. If he professed penitence and faith, a probability of his being elect was established, and increased in strength as he persevered in the way. But in regard to the infant all was uncertain. Whatever her fond hopes might be, the mother could never know whether

she held on her bosom a future angel or a predestined devil; but whether the one or the other, the matter had been determined from from all eternity, as Calvin says, "alsque remedio." With this iceberg resting upon the Church, there was no call for an inquiry into the "Religion of Childhood."

Nor will any genuine Calvinist now feel much interest in the investigation. The subject belongs, of right, to those who hold a general atonement and a free salvation; and outside of their ranks our author, we imagine, will find no open sympathy, and yet, perhaps, encounter little criticism. We, indeed, regard the remorseless system of Calvin as a defeated theology. It still remains in the old formularies, we admit, and is duly subscribed by candidates for the ministry, but the tendency to interpret its terms more and more mildly is universal and irresistible. The mind revolts at the harsher features of it, and anxiously seeks relief. Some go about to defend its arbitrary giving and withholding of saving grace, on the supposition that man, without divine aid, can repent and believe, (though they tell us that it is absolutely certain that without grace he never will,) and thus they fancy that they clear the character of God from the charge of cruelty. Others, wise and learned men too, take the strange position that both Calvin's absolute election and reprobation, and Wesley's free salvation, are taught in the Scriptures, and that we are to believe both, leaving it to God to reconcile the contradiction. Meanwhile, the preaching, the prayers, the labors of all the orthodox denominations of Christians, the whole system of Gospel activities whereby the Church seeks to reach and save the world, are such as can logically grow only out of the conviction that every soul may be saved; that Christ died for all, and that those who die eternally perish not by God's neglect, but their own. Sometimes the minister, feeling in his heart a divine compassion for souls, and at the same moment remembering his theories, employs ingenious forms of speech, which, to his own mind, seem to save the creed, while they leave the appeal to the sinner in full force. But these niceties do not reach the multitude. The people pronounce the sermon "real Methodist doctrine," and receive it and are saved by it, and herein do we rejoice. The ingenious Calvinistic wad falls down at the muzzle of the