The second part traces the growth and administration of this spirit of Christian charity through the period of conflict with the dominant heathenism, and the third portrays its working and various organization after its nominal though still partial triumph. The relations of the Church to industry; its methods of organized relief; its teaching as to wealth, dress, marriage, slavery, alms, sanctuary; the spirit in which it founded asylums, hospitals, schools, monasteries,- all are here exhibited; and the large degree in which the Church, under its great bishops, became a refuge for the oppressed of all classes in the wild ages during which northern barbarism was destroying the more corrupt and cruel rule of the decayed Roman civilization is clearly made manifest. "The Church could not save the old world; but she sat at its death-bed with help and comfort, and lighted up its last hours with such an evening glory as the old world had never known in the times of its greatest prosperity." The limitations and abuses of these new institutions and agencies are also carefully portrayed, and the rise of the institutional and ecclesiastical spirit, which stiffened and dwarfed the Christian charity of the Middle Ages until the Reformation brought a great though as yet partial influx of its earlier spirit. The representations concerning property and industry in the Apostolic Church are far saner, we believe, and more nearly veritable, than those we sometimes hear of late; and the wise and discriminative administration of charity is shown to have been far different from that system of pampering mendicancy and encouraging improvidence which some recent critics of the social ethics of the New Testament describe. Dr. Uhlhorn well points out that an apostle who frequently and urgently enjoins "working with the hands as the alternative of stealing and idling," and as the means of charity and honorable living, and who makes tents that he may preach the gospel and not be burdensome, cannot justly be said to ignore or despise the "industrial virtues," or to teach an ideal of the kingdom of heaven which does not require earthly diligence and fidelity, because he also held, as every system of ethics must hold, the possession of property a peril, tending to become a wickedness, unless regarded as a stewardship for humanity and the good ends of civilization, which are but the modern translation of Paul's and Christ's phrase, "kingdom of God." The service of monasticism in organizing industry and pre serving learning, as well as in furnishing a refuge for human misery, is also shown; and the contrast between Eastern and Western monasticism in these respects is clearly portrayed. Kadesh-Barnea: The Story of a Hunt for it, including Studies of the Route of the Exodus. By H. Clay Trumbull, D.D., editor of the Sunday School Times. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Many a minister will think it "love's labor lost," this large octavo volume, the thorough study of a mere geographical puzzle, besides the peril of running the gauntlet of a hostile Arab tribe. Kadesh-Barnea was not a station on any Roman road, not even an ordinary pilgrim's rest on the way from Sinai to Jerusalem, not even a fortified city like its neighbor, Petra. Nor did any Christian army ever force through this well-watered spot into Palestine. It was simply the many years' encampment of the Exodites on their flight from Egypt,- a fertile, pleasant, fruitful hiding-place for a multitude. And, against Edward Robinson and many other authorities, Dr. Trumbull follows John Rowlands in fixing Kadesh-Barnea west, a little north of Petra : first, by the similarity of its name, Kades to Kadesh; second, by its fitness of condition for subsistence of a multitude in a space of six miles by ten of pasture; last, by its handiness to Syria, by several easy roads. It hardly seems needful that so small a subject, one not having any important relation with other points, not even being a part of Palestine proper, should be encumbered with such an array of learning, especially as many maps already give this location on the thirty-first parallel of latitude, in a region almost inaccessible through Arab jealousy, and visited hy no travellers but this clergyman for many years. F. W. H. Truro, Cape Cod: or, Landmarks and Seamarks. By Shebnah Rich, Member of the New England Historic-Genealogical Society. Boston: D. Lothrop & Co. The history of a sea-faring town in New England is in some sort a history of all the world, since sailors come and go and mingle with all peoples, bringing something of their products and of their lore to temper the intense provincialism which still subsists in such a community. This book at once exhibits and illustrates the cosmopolitan and the provincial interest referred to. It is discursive to a degree, crammed with observations and quotations of various sorts, often of the remotest connection with the topic in hand, yet showing wide reading and intelligence. It is the temptation of an author with his first book to put into it something of everything he has ever read or heard of. But the limits of a local annalist are elastic and undefined; and the breeziness and the spice of other salt than that of Cape Cod airs will whet the appetite of Mr. Rich's readers for the somewhat thin and musty quality of some of his local traditions, and refresh them through the bare and sandy regions of family record, and the history of local magnates and events, which must to the general reader be sometimes suggestive of the flat and luxury-lacking landscape of the Cape. Yet are they for the most part records and traditions worth preserving, for their interest to those to whom that landscape, social as well as actual, is or has been familiar and dear, as well as to the antiquarian and student of local manners; and the author has banished dulness from his book so completely as to make it certain that it will have not only such, but many other readers. It is a pity that it was not corrected and sifted by a thoroughly competent proof-reader. BOOKS RECEIVED. From George H. Ellis, Boston. Martin Luther. A Study of Reformation. Price $1.25. By Edwin D. Mead. From the American Unitarian Association, Boston. The Works of Orville Dewey, D.D. With a Biographical Sketch. New and complete edition. Price $1.00. From Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston. Tennyson's In Memoriam. Its Purpose and its Structure. By John F. Genung. Price $1.25. The Works of Virgil. Translated into English Verse. A Study. With Variorum and other Notes and Comparative Readings. By John Augustine Wilstach. Two volumes. Price $5.00. From the Universalist Publishing House, Boston. The New Covenant, commonly called the New Testament. Vol. I. The Four Gospels. By J. W. Hanson, D.D. Price $1.00. From Charles Scribner's Sons, New York. Kadesh-Barnea. Its Importance and Probable Site. With the Story of a Hunt for it. By H. Clay Trumbull, D.D. Price $5.00. Among the Holy Hills. By Henry M. Field, D.D. Price $1.50. Where did Life begin? A Monograph. By G. Hilton Scribner. Price $1.25. John Bull and his Island. By Max O'Rell. Paper. Price 50 cents. The International Commentary on the New Testament. Vol. VI. The Paper. PERMANENCE IN RELIGION AND IN PREACHING: ORVILLE DEWEY'S AUTOBIOGRAPHY, LETTERS, AND COLLECTED WORKS. What a man once selfishly said to himself of his attraction to a particular woman, It will not last, is by not a few in our time affirmed of all we mean by religion. Gods as well as men die in Assyria, Canaan, Greece, Egypt, and Rome, and leave but their names. "Pan is dead," writes the poet. Jehovah is a sound among the sepulchres of the past. Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, unlike the third in a composer's scale, make a musical chord no longer, save to sectarian or theological ears. The terms are not co-equal. The interval is incomplete. Forms of worship change, and doctrinal creeds are a dissolving view. All the old denominational lines are rubbed out. Rome, boasting that like God she is always everywhere and forever the same, cannot hold her own, but retreats as she fights. Is there aught in piety or preaching that can stand? In dwelling on what is transient, what is permanent may be overlooked, as gazing through a kaleidoscope takes off our eye from the features of the world. Man has not ceased to be a religious creature, nor can, till the species is extinct. That religious sentiment, which is the deepest of passions, is coeval with intellectual curiosity and with the love of beauty and harmony. Could the human faculties all decease, that of wonder and admiration were the last to go. Sentiment will survive argument, as the great rivers, Mississippi and Danube, hold their course to the sea, while hill and plain waste and crumble into the waters as they run. Imaginative pictures and logical schemes of supernatural things vary; but the realities remain, like traits of the landscape or layers of the earth at which geologists pick or successive artists try their hands. The sceptic errs by exaggeration or disproportion, as he satirizes alteration in the plans of salvation which controversial ecclesiastics construct. The saints are caricatured by him, not portrayed. The basis of prayer is beneath the granite of the globe. There is a chord stretched in our bosom, the heart's master-string, which cannot be broken or unscrewed. It vibrates whenever it is struck. The man who has lived for seventy years will say that the music now differs not from the sweet resonance in his childish years, whatever discords have been scored out or variations, as in some familiar air, it may be of "Home, Sweet Home" or "The Last Rose of Summer," are introduced. Sin is but the shadow of sanctity. We paint the devil blacker than he is, as did James in his Epistle, and Goethe in Faust, though Burns did not; and, with rhetorical extravagance, we overstate the gloom of the ancestral faith. Our sires had a way to creep out of their dogmas; for, despite the pessimists, human nature has not in any age either found or considered life to be a curse. The poor culprit, doomed to hell, averred that God would fix that fire so that he could stand it; and mankind is a child that will play on the edge of the pit. Dr. Dewey, in his autobiography, tells of a theatrical representation in a meeting-house, and of an evening ball after the raising of a church-building in his boyish days; and I remember that the only time I tried to dance was at a school my parents sent me to, from my |