is not complete; but so far as it goes it is very well done. It is a book evidently made up to a degree from one's own experience, but many portions, as "The Parsonage," "Trout-Fishing," "After Meeting," "Facem, non Pacem," "The Poor House," and "How Two Young Persons read Eschylus," have a beauty and charm quite independent of personality. They touch the deep and solemn things of life; and very often through the book there are those broad general truths thrown out which put on a new vitality, when put forth as the result of personal observation. It is a work to be read not continuously, but now and then as the spirit moves you. There is in it enough to make the fortune of many books, but the author has erred, we think, in the proper disposal of his material, and has not always distinguished between gold and pinchbeck. The style is too uniformly labored for ease; it is rather the spoken than the written style; and the author often speaks out in full, when only a hint which the imagination may seize upon is enough. Yet with these abatements, we recognize a decided talent and power in many parts of the book, in its deeper meditations, and its often passionate enunciations of religious emotions.

10. The Christian Year. Thoughts in verse for the Sundays and Holydays throughout the Year. By the Rev. JOHN KEBLE. 16mo. pp. viii, 352. Boston: E. P. Dutton & Co.

1865.

THIS work has been received by all bodies of Christians as a religious classic. Time was when its author, in the Oxford movement of 1840, was accused of Romanizing tendencies, and the Christian Year was by many, including the late Archbishop Whately, charged with an influence in that direction. We notice that his successor, Dr. Trench, has removed it from under the ban. Ever since Christopher North recognized its excellence in Blackwood, it has held a place in the closet of all Christians, as a collection of rare and passionate breathings of religious feeling. Dr. Newman in his Apologia, pays a beautiful tribute to these poems: "When the general tone of religious literature was so nerveless and impotent, as it was at that [1827] time, Keble struck an original note and woke up in the hearts of thousands a new music, the music of a school long unknown in England. Nor can I pretend to analyze in my own instance, the effect of religious teaching so deep, so pure, so beautiful." Similar tributes may be found in periodical literature representing all shades of opinion during the last thirty years. This is the first edition, whose mechanical execution is equal to the poems themselves, that we have ever seen in this country. It is beautifully

printed upon fresh, sharp type, and like the edition of Milman's History of the Jews, the binding, type and paper harmonize with the chaste and touching strains within. Hereafter, no lover of sacred poetry will buy any but this edition.

ARTICLE X.

THE ROUND TABLE.

This so

That

OUR ROUND TABLE AND THE IOWA NEWS LETTER. uniformly courteous and Christian co-worker of the West must have added a new pen to its editorial corps. We know of but one, moreover, that ever writes such sentences of us as the following, found in their February number. "That non-responsible, secret-police Round Table at which we think no high-minded Christian man would sit." "May this Review ... gather strength to roll that unmanly piece of furniture down to the dark ages, whence it was borrowed." This of us, who publish under our names, and from a "non-responsible, secret-police" paper, published anonymously, is rather cool. we four ministerial editors and publishers should be said to be not "high-minded," nor "Christian," but "unmanly," is cooler still. And that a minority of one man should so write of our Round Table, (for to our best knowledge and belief only one man has so written,) is the coolest thing of this cold winter. On which side the highmindedness, Christianity and manliness lie, we cheerfully leave others to judge. This outburst would "strike us with the but-end of astonishment," if we did not know whence it comes; but knowing this, we order the unsavory dish away, brush its crumbs from our Table, and welcome the waiting and most acceptable viands. We did not think we should so soon be called on to practice under our own preaching in the Round Table of January about "Pint Cups."

QUOTATION MARKS RESPONSIBLE AS MORAL AGENTS, UNDER THE NINTH COMMANDMENT. He who prepares a critical notice of a book is morally bound to make that notice truthful as far as it goes; and he fails to do this if he directs attention only to the good or the evil, the excellences or defects of the volume. A candid critic will speak of the book as it is. Now the use of the book notice should be equally truthful. We have been surprised and pained to see how some of our "Notices" have been garbled and perverted to say

what we never said.

view.

"has

Our critique on "The New Atmosphere been so abused by a religious paper. A solitary sentence of commendation for certain things in the book is separated from our general reprobation of it, and quoted as the opinion of the Boston ReWhat is this but moral counterteiting? Our one dollar bill is altered to one thousand. The suppression of our main opinion perverts us. Sometimes, and longer ago, parts of our sentences have been taken, breaking the quotation even where there was no comma, and so turning our words directly and intentionally against us. It would be no more truly a breach of morals to take our syllables apart and reconstruct a new sentence. Quotation marks are moral agents, and responsible under the ninth commandment.

BULK VERSUS WORTH. From the earliest known period nature has been reducing the size of her works in order to increase their intrinsic excellence. She long since rejected the avoirdupois system in estimating worth. The material of this earth was at first gaseous, and so vastly extended. It was improved by reduction in compass to a small solid; and in the ten or twelve geological changes or re-creations that it has since gone through, closing with the Adamic, the flora and fauna have been carried toward perfection in the line of diminution. The coarse growth of mosses, twenty, forty and seventy feet high, have been perfected in our present delicate structures of a few inches. The huge, rough-made and monstrous lizards of sixty feet, birds as large as elephants, like awkward and overgrown Shanghais, mastodons and various megatheria, were found to be ungraceful, lacking in exquisite finish, and wholly unfit to be companions of man, the perfection of all organic creations. As the sculptor begins on a coarse, huge block of marble and cutting the most away as worthless, ends with the small, graceful, beautiful statue, so nature has worked downward from bulk to beauty, from giant proportions to compact and skilfully finished merit.

Nature has been working out the same problem by reduction descending in the human race. There were the giants of Old Testament times; Og, whose bedstead was fifteen feet long; the tribes of Anak, before whom the Israelites were as grasshoppers in size; Goliath, nine or ten feet high, and Saph his overgrown child, who added to his giant deformity "on every hand six fingers and on every foot six toes." But they were too large, and that pattern of men was thrown aside, the youngest and stripling son of Jesse aiding in the laudable and improving work. Later still, as remnants of an obsolete race, we had in the times of Augustus, Idusio and Secundillia, each ten feet high, and yet later Josephus' Eleazer,

larger still. And now and then in our own day we see one whose size shows him to be behind the times and hostile to the improvement of the race.

We do not mean to blame those giants for being large. They were made so in the way of experiment, and so innocently shared in a fault of the times, that later ages are outgrowing. So now when we see a very large or tall man, we do not blame him for his size, for he can not help it. He is simply born behind the times, and is physically fogyish.

But it is noticeable how moral deformity has been coupled with tall men. Goliath and the whole tribe of Anak were towering in their sins as well as stature. So, by the by, our Southern rebels in the army are found to average a greater height than our loyal and northern soldiers. And we think it significant that Milton gave vast extension to the body of Satan, as he saw him tossing in the fiery billows of the under flood. There the arch enemy of all good,

"extended long and large,

Lay floating many a rood."

And what a moral enormity was that Cyclops, Polyphemus, his wickedness and size being well matched!

Monstrum, horrendum, informe, ingens; cui lumen ademptum.

A horrid monster, ill-formed, huge and sightless. Our conclusions are that Zaccheus and other little men can take no little comfort from

this reductio ad maximum policy of nature. This notion of mere bulk and avoirdupois greatness looms up with a vast deceitfulness. Nature has been undermining and setting it aside these many ten thousand years, and the men of small stature are the leaders off in the reform. There is a good time coming for some of us, if we do not get ahead of our age by our progressiveness and commit the error that Coleridge ascribes to Milton: "He stood so far before his contemporaries as to dwarf himself by the distance."

" AND ABRAHAM JOURNEYED, GOING ON STILL TOWARD THE SOUTH." Beginning at Washington about four years ago he undertook this journey, and by short stages, though not so easy, has moved along. The region proves to be a vast one and parts of it an “unexplored country." Some opposition by the inhabitants of the land and the wild, uncivilized state of society, with the lack of good roads and bridges and many lingering inconveniences of a past age, have made the journey a slow one. But Abraham has continued "going on still toward the South." Some peculiar institutions, called patriarchal, have been found to be not Abrahamic, and so have been set aside by the true Abraham. Latterly the travellers

have made a detour to the sea-shore to refresh themselves with seabathing, sea-breezes and the scenery, and are just now moving inland again as a kind of miscellaneous and scattered company, but "going on still toward the South." When Abraham finishes his Southern tour and publishes his travels we shall give an extended notice of the work.

INCREASE OF THINGS "SACRED" IN THE CITY OF BOSTON. Boston is becoming very religious, in a sense. For some time it has had lectures, addresses, discussions and mass meetings on purely secular themes, and yet so good that they were good enough for Sunday evening. They were "Sacred." Then came musical entertainments. They were amusements and to be enjoyed by "Tickets to be had at and at the door." Parts of the "Messiah" or of "The Oratorio of David," or something else very "sacred," was to be enjoyed by the devout. The inexperienced would almost expect to hear "David's harp of solemn sound," or what might be equally an aid to spirituality and a proper observance of holy time. Later still"Sacred Readings" are offered, "for a consideration." Shakespeare and the Scriptures, Robert Hall and Milton, and other spiritual writings, are reproduced with marvellous religious effect on the religious audience, hungering for the means of grace. Two sermons are too many, one short one is too long often, and yet they crave something "sacred" in the evening.

The religious proclivity of Boston is becoming quite distinguished, and if it goes on strengthening, as it has for a few years past, our goodly city must become very devout on Sunday. We see no limit to this "sacred" extension, till it end in perfection by making all secular and profitable amusements good enough for Sunday. Why not have "sacred" fishing parties down the harbor on Sunday? We have the parties now, and all they lack is the name. Did not Peter go afishing. Why should a few amusements monopolize the word "sacred," and take in all the religious people? Why not have a 66 sacred" theatre? We can dramatize Paul before Agrippa, and so get his sermon in full into ears that can not bear modern preachers. Why not have a "sacred" horse-race on the Sabbath? Of course we would not take secular and worldly horses, such as those trained for the turf. But some deacons own good ones. Even ministers have been known to own those of splendid bottom, wind and speed. Why not put them on the track of a Sabbath afternoon, with a good religious intention, just as Robert Hall's sermons are put over the course? A "sacred" horse race, why not? There can be nothing unconstitutional in it, for the first amendment to