ARTICLE IX.

THE ROUND TABLE.

OUR CONTRIBUTORS.-Much has been said on the question of our publishing the names of our Writers in connection with their contributions. The question has two sides, and many things can be said. on both. It would be gratifying to us personally, and complimentary to the Review to publish them, for it is a worthy list. With the close of the third volume we numbered more than forty writers of leading articles, and in our fourth volume we shall add many to this number. We already include contributors to our prominent Quarterlies and Monthlies. But we think we favor most the fair and full discussion of many topics, and send forth the discussions in the best hope of a candid judgment on them, to withhold the names of the authors. It leaves the articles to be read without preference or prejudice, to be judged on their own merits, and to carry an influence according to their own inherent worth.

THE WAR.-We enter again on our pages our hearty endorsement of "the powers that be" in the struggle to suppress the rebellion and sustain the government. Should we prove recreant or fail in this, we should be ashamed to die and go to our revolutionary fathers. It is with a thankful heart, as the year closes upon us, that we are able to make so happy a record of our progress in suppressing the huge national semi-organized mob. There is a majesty, an awful sublimity in that steady, irresistible pressure with which we are crowding, compressing and crushing the outbreak. The movement of our armies is like those vast ice floes of the Arctic of which Dr. Kane speaks, extending for hundreds of miles. To a careless observer there appears to be little motion or force, but wo to the object that stands in their way, or lies between them when their grinding edges come together. We see vast progress, and we have nothing but the fullest confidence in the success of our arms, and we think we can see almost to the end of battles. Then will arise questions for the profoundest statesmanship.

UNION AMONG CONGREGATIONALISTS.-Next to truth and purity, the Congregational denomination should labor to promote union above everything. We need union among ourselves far more than union with other evangelical denominations. We cannot enjoy the

peculiar excellences and advantages of our free and liberal form of polity without the constant danger of controversy and division. Hence it is the more important that charity and harmony be sedulously cultivated. We are to be bound together, not so much by bonds of government as by the cement of grace. If this becomes chilled and frost-bitten the whole frame breaks, crumbles and falls to pieces.

We need union among ourselves, and there is a firm, broad, basis on which it may be built and maintained, which it is the object of this Review to define and establish. That basis is kind, conciliatory, but careful and firm adherence to the substance of clearly revealed truth. It supports neither extreme. It is the high beaten road of those great positive truths which the church have found by experience to be in the highest degree promotive of piety. It turns not to the right to countenance any blind or obstinate adherence to narrow schools and fastidious distinctions; nor does it turn to the left to encourage or tolerate the radical changes, the new theories and presumptuous speculations of men claiming peculiar originality. Unity in substantial truth requires limits. The boundaries must somewhere be set. It is only indifference to truth that requires no limits.

It will be found that in a thinking and educated denomination like our own, union cannot be maintained where a high standard of truth is not firmly held, and where novelty and speculation in matters of faith and practice are allowed. The confidence of the right-minded will be shaken. If a company of singers allow some of their number to drop out or change any one of the notes of the scale, how soon trouble must arise. The careless singers, the lovers of noise may not be troubled. But the true lovers of music will be pained. Cultivated ears cannot tolerate the discords. Some simple tunes might be enjoyed, and for certain occasions and purposes they would be well. But not so for the main purposes of organization. The most valuable members will remonstrate earnestly for awhile; but they are not the kind that contend long, or clamor until they are heard. Tell us not that the way to broad and firm union lies in dropping, or being indifferent to a part of the notes, even those of the chromatic scale. Union is promoted only by adhering to the fixed laws of music. True, extreme taste, fastidiousness should not be allowed to divide on the one hand, nor neglect of the distinctions of the human ear on the other.

So is it in the system of the Gospel. The leading truths and distinctions are just as marked and just as inexorable as are the tones and semitones in the musical scale. The union of a denomination

can only be promoted by a common love of, and adherence to these divinely constituted distinctions. Undoubtedly there must be theological controversy. Our rights in the truth must be maintained, as in most other interests, by opposition to invaders. The many and diametrically opposite sects in doctrine make controversy as necessary as it is inevitable.

But while every sect feels compelled to it, each controversialist may and should set limits and a tone to his own action that he will sacredly preserve. Minor points of difference may and should be held much in abeyance for the sake of the greater good of a general unity. The broad Evangelical church has now enough of common interest under a common Master to make light of any internal divisions that lie somewhat in a different use of terms, and somewhat in a philosophical spirit that has risen up in the place of the Evangelists. It is perfectly proper to like just thirty-nine articles of faith, or one hundred and seven, or either of these two sets with the addition of a residence "in Enon near to Salem." Yet while that held in common by all evangelical men is immeasurably more than that in which they differ, how eminently Christian that they make the less yield to the greater, and count it all as worthless for Christ's sake. Schools of philosophy have an important place, and they should confine themselves to it rather than institute schools in an Evangelical church. In the philosophy of our religion the profoundest, nicest distinctions should be made, but not in our religion itself. The former belongs to scholars, the latter to the people. These want what they need, religion. Those are set apart from the people to philosophize, analyze and synthesize, in the regions of the obscure.

The proper limits of religious controversy being observed, it is productive of good in proportion as its spirit is good. A cordial, genial controversy, full of fairness and gentleness, with a broad margin for mutual misunderstanding, a quick and appreciative perception of points of agreement, and a motive above all others that Christ and his Gospel may be honored, is one of the highest exercises of a Christian scholar. And the Evangelical church, that in the absence of revivals and in the presence of the war has become somewhat at variance within itself, needs much to be baptized with and bathed in the spirit of him who did "not cry, nor lift up, nor cause his voice to be heard in the street," and who gave his back to the smiters and his cheeks to them that plucked off the hair, while he went quietly forward with the great work of saving men.

CRITICS AND CRITICISM. Who should know the intention of any craft better than those initiated into its mysteries? And, knowing so many piquant things, it wonld be asking too much of human nature to expect the men of the quill to tell no tales out of school. On the whole, the critical art does not seem to suffer much through these disclosures of the weaknesses of its professors. One may be vexed at the collisions, and amused at the blunders, of the literary Rhadamanthuses; yet there is a singular power in judgments about books when dignified with types and printer's ink. And few are the authors or readers who are not more or less influenced in their feelings by the editorial verdicts, whether more or less elaborate, of the managers of the periodical press, albeit the satire of the poet may be oftener true than said managers might like to admit :

"Like trout pursued, the critic in despair,

Darts to the mud, and finds his safety there."

Professor Craik thinks that contemporary writers are hardly the proper subjects of the labors of the critical profession, as being too near in point of view for a correct estimate. One would be apt to extend to more than these the benefit of this opinion, remembering how saucily and savagely many famous wits have treated each others' productions. Cowley the artificial made sport of Chaucer the simple child of nature. Marivaux the exquisite despised the easy familiarities of Moliere. Fielding never had done laughing at Richardson's faultless proprieties of sentiment and expression; while the author of Sir Charles Grandison was sure that his rival's fame would be only another rocket. Johnson could see no merit in Gray's elaborate letters, and allowed his royalist narrowness to eclipse the radiance of Milton's great glory. Corneille is said to have advised Racine not to write tragedy after the appearance of one of the latter's noble dramas and Fontenelle told Voltaire that he had no dramatic talent, when the Brutus of this versatile author was brought out in Paris. Johnson once said (his bile must have been badly disturbed) that he would hang a dog that read the Lycidas of Milton twice. Every one knows how long it took to teach the world that there was any special merit in the Paradise Lost. And the Vicar of Wakefield never had much success till Lord Holland, recovering from illness, read it accidentally, and commended it to his friends. So people differ. It is indeed difficult to account for these conflicting conclusions. One is almost ready to doubt if the critics have any better standard of judgment than Malherbe, who measured prose authorship by its effect in reducing the price of bread, and regarded a poet of the first class as no more to be lauded than a skilful player at ninepins.

It might be a question whether natural good sense and mother wit are not about as reliable judges of authorial excellence as that sort of bookish culture which is ordinarily relied on as a test of literary compositions. When Thomson's Seasons first came out, a Scottish laird handed a copy of it to his gardener, who at once discerned the genius which inspired its descriptions of nature, and pronounced it "a grand book." We would stake such a judgment against even the leviathan Rambler's dictum that if every other line of the "Seasons" were left out, the poem would be as good as it now is; that is, good for nothing, of course. This is a fine anecdote told concerning Burns' Cotter's Saturday Night. A lady who much admired and kindly befriended the poet, had an old housekeeper to whom she, on a time, showed that perfect poem. When the mistress, a while after, asked the servant her opinion of the poem, she replied: "A weel, madam, that's vera weel." "Is that all you have to say in its favor?" asked the mistress. "'Deed, madam," she answered, "the like of your quality may see a vast deal in it; but I was aye used to the like o' all that the poet has written about in my ain father's house, and at weel I dinna ken how he could have described it ony other gate." That criticism was worth more than praise from the Edinburgh professor of belles lettres. Burns used to say that it was one of the highest compliments he ever received.

Critics and authors are not always the best of friends, which is not very surprising. Now and then a libel suit for damages, on account of too sharp a point to the reviewer's pen, diversifies the monotony of the bench and the bar-rather an evidence of weakness in judgment and temper on the part of the flayed book-maker, gathering our conclusion from the history of such appeals to Themis. We should not counsel the Irishman's resort to individual justice, though much more direct and effective undoubtedly. The incident occurs in the memorabilia of Robert Southey. He had severely cauterized a volume from the hand of a son of Erin. Soon after, while talking with a friend in a public resort respecting the ambitious Emeralder's abortive attempt, the identical author walked into the circle. He was a powerful specimen of his race, and having just read his literary decapitation, was full of wrath. "If he could find the malicious reviewer, he would bate him sure, indade would he," swinging a huge fist unconsciously in perilous nearness to the offender's physiognomy. Southey kept close and dark, not fancying such a settlement. of accounts, reserving his laugh over the adventure to a safer moment.

After all, the critics are not so far wrong as disappointed authors are prone to think. If they are justly chargeable with a large