DEAN STANLEY.

The Church Universal could not have lost one whose death will bring such a sense of vacancy, such profound regret, as that of the Dean of Westminster; and, notwithstanding his activity and prominence in the theological world for so long, it comes as a surprise, as if it cut short the labors of one we looked upon as in the vigor of life, and from whose ripened scholarship, catholic temper, and sweet spirituality we longed for still richer contributions. We remember some years since an English chaplain at Heidelberg asked us what clergyman of his country was most esteemed or most widely read in the United States. We said Robertson. "Oh!" was the reply, "he is a horrid rationalist!" Then came the question, "Well, who comes next?" and we answered, we thought Dean Stanley. "Oh!" was the response," he is another horrid rationalist!" Rationalists these great Christian leaders surely were in the noblest sense. They were applying the reason to the solution of the questions which were so seriously disturbing the Church of England; Robertson more with the spiritual, Stanley with the historical, insight; Robertson the greater preacher, Stanley the more diligent scholar; Robertson the persuasive speaker, Stanley the remarkable writer. We say remarkable writer, because we know no one who has had greater power to bring the decisive theological struggles of Christendom so vividly and so charmingly before the present age; and at his touch the driest bones of ecclesiastical controversies were clothed with flesh and spirit. This gift was nowhere more marked than in his Life of Arnold, whose pupil he was; and his affectionate tribute to that wonderful teacher remains as a model to all biographers. We have always regarded it as a great loss to the world that Dean Stanley did not also prepare the Life of Robertson. He was the first choice of the family, but, in the pressure of his duties, felt that he could not accept the grateful task. Not that we are finding fault with the work as it has been done; but we believe that the intimate friendship of Stopford Brooke with Robertson was in the later years of his life, when persecution had thrown a shadow of despondency over him, so that the volumes give us the picture of a somewhat morbid, gloomy, dispirited, and broken life; while, for the most of his life, Robertson was surely a person of the most brilliant and exalted spirits, the brightest of every social circle,

full of wit and joyousness; turning, indeed, into that soberness. which a sensitive nature takes upon itself as it finds the world so poorly ready to accept its higher insight and revelations, but still of this brighter side of Robertson's character we get hardly a glimpse. And, if it could have been set before us with the picturesque power and the spiritual kinship of Stanley, we feel that we should have had a biography of unequalled beauty and inspiration.

The descriptive faculty of Dean Stanley appears most favorably, perhaps, in the account of the Council of Nicæa, in his History of the Eastern Church, where the place, the characters, the questions, the oriental characteristics, are all set before us with the vividness of a modern assembly:

The chestnut woods, then as now green with the first burst of summer, the same sloping hills, the same tranquil lake, the same snowcapped Olympus from far, brooding over the whole scene.

We seem to be in the Chamber of the Council, and to join in the applause which greets Constantine as he enters:

His towering stature, his strong-built frame, his broad shoulders, his handsome features worthy of his grand position. There was a brightness in his look and a mingled expression of fierceness and gentleness in his lion-like eye, which well became one who, as Augustus before him, had fancied and still fancied himself to be the favorite of the sun-god Apollo.... His long hair, false or real, was crowned with the imperial diadem of pearls. His purple or scarlet robe blazed with precious stones and gold embroidery. . . . We may well believe that the simple and the worldly both looked upon him as though he were an angel of God, descended straight from heaven.

In his Sinai and Palestine, the same power of description puts us right among the company of the old Bible characters. But through all the works of that busy life, whether descriptive, biographical, or historical, there runs that same broad spirit of liberality for which he will be forever and tenderly remembered by the best heart of Christendom. Most of us can see little to praise or fellowship with beyond our own sectarian limits; but Dean Stanley saw the life of the spirit wherever it was manifested, and was not afraid to recognize it. All the efforts and aims of his life were to teach men to separate the essentials from the non-essentials of religion, to emphasize the moral obligations, and to bring the sects together by the higher bonds of the spirit.

He was not disturbed by the researches of the scientists nor of any earnest, reverent investigations after truth in any realm; and there could be no more fitting tribute paid to him than to accept his last faltering words as the secret of a modest and noble life which has left Christendom bereaved, "I have labored amidst many frailties and much weakness to make Westminster Abbey the great centre of religious and national life in a truly liberal spirit."

A CORRECTION.

Our attention has been called to a statement in the Harvard Book i., 156, that the Harvard Observatory was established on its present site in Mr. Everett's administration. This is a mistake. In 1839, Mr. W. C. Bond was appointed Astronomical Observer to Harvard University. In 1842-3, the munificence of President Quincy's friends among the capitalists, chiefly of Boston, enabled him to purchase several acres of land in Cambridge, and to found thereon the Sears Tower and house for the observer, and to order a great equatorial telescope, the complete purchase of which he finished before resigning his office in August, 1845. The observatory and the equatorial telescope belong, therefore, to his administration.

THINGS AT HOME AND ABROAD.

IN MEMORIAM.

During the last month, we have been called upon to part with two revered and beloved men, true representatives of quite distinct types of the Christian minister to be found in the Unitarian Church of to-day, and, we may say, of the Universal Church.

Unlike, we say, these two men were; and yet they were alike in their entire consecration to their profession, their perfect faith in its power and dignity, and a living consciousness of the reality of spiritual things.

Richard Metcalf was feeble in body, with a soul too strong, too active for its tenement. He undoubtedly obeyed the laws of health, he was too conscientious to sacrifice the body for the soul, too wise to use up his forces rashly,— and yet, probably, with all his care, his body could not keep pace with the aspirations of his soul. And so we have in him one more of those men to be found among us, able, nervous, alert, practical, self-forgetting, who see the fields all around them white for harvest, know just what to do, are not troubled with morbid misgivings, are ready to jump at the work with the cheer of a lover, and know not how tired they are until the Master lays his hand on them and says, "Come."

We have read in the papers of Mr. Metcalf's early life, his first aspirations for a theological education, his final acquisition of it his success as a preacher, his valuable published lectures, and his unwearied and noble labors in his last parish at Winchester. There, on his dying bed, he answered the call of his brother ministers, and sent to the Alumni of the Divinity School his latest and ripest thoughts for another to present,- thoughts which. bear the impress, the stamp, of the man's whole life upon them; thoughts which had been born and fructified in his pastoral experience; truths which had been lived out in his daily life among his people.

If we could have looked in upon his work in his parish, we might say it was only a minister's routine of duties; but, if we were privileged to examine closer, we should see that the enlargement of his church came from that vivifying power, that zeal with which he stimulated his people, that enthusiasm for the best methods, that self-sacrifice and faithfulness in little things, that gift of himself, which always wins a people and leads them onward to new and better things. He has gone, but his presence will remain with them, and be a cheering light to the household of faith which he helped to build up among us. And so, with grateful tears, we give him back to the Father of his spirit,- to the higher work in the elastic air of heaven.

Strong, vigorous, age; not because

George W. Hosmer was of another type. apostolic, serene, he passed away in ripe old he was baffled and wearied with the ails of the flesh, but because his full time had come. The harvest-hour of his being drew near: his spirit was mellowed and ready for heaven, his venerable form must gently fall away, to let the benignant spirit free to soar to the place of his love.

Dr. Hosmer was a true representative of the commanding dignity, grace, and unction of the pulpit. A priest, a bishop, in every sense of the word: an Ambrose, a Borromeo. A father in the Church; a kind of man which the Protestant Church cannot do without any more than the Catholic, the Unitarian any more than the Orthodox, if it is to live. He was courtesy and forbearance itself, to all men and doctrines; and yet he never yielded a hair's breadth of his convictions in regard to the right of his own church to exist, and the necessity of it to the world. He was never dogmatic; but he would not surrender an iota of his faith in the verities of Christianity. But we remember once, in a conversation with him, his saying that, although he had often differed painfully from the thought of some of the young ministers of the present day, when he came to know these young men, he was rejoiced to find that their lives and work made him forget all theories of belief, and feel the oneness of their aims and spirit with his own.

Dr. Hosmer had a most remarkable power of expressing, at any moment when called upon, the fulness of religious emotion and brotherhood. We know not if this power belonged to him in youth, or if it was the gift of mellow age, the privilege of an