After so long a strain of praise,—which, the reader may be assured, is no less earnest on our part than long, no less hearty than strong, we should rather like to spend some time in finding fault with the gifted and learned Professor. For the reader may also be assured, that while we find in the work many things that seem worthy of almost unqualified approval, we also find some that seem justly open to no little censure. There is at times a too trenchant air about the book; and there is too much of repetition, and too much of verbal and logical stress, perhaps growing, in part, from the author's burning intensity of thought. But, all together, the work is a grand and noble performance. And if, by the remarks we have made, any of our readers should be led to acquaint themselves with the book, and to master its arguments, we feel sure that our labours will not go all unthanked; which will be enough for us.

NOTICES OF BOOKS.

The Church Identified, by a reference to the History of its Origin, Perpetuation, and Extension into the United States. By the Rev. W. D. WILSON, D.D., Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy in Hobart College. New York: T. N. Stanford.

We have been used to thinking that a good deal of not very wise teaching had been put forth by Churchmen in regard to what is called the Apostolic succession. Not but that the matter might be right enough in itself; but that the use made of it was very apt to generate misapprehensions, and therefore unseasonable and injudicious. For, to those who did not and could not view the thing from the right stand-point, it seemed to imply some magical and mysterious virtue in a direct lineal series of the ministry; as though the truth of CHRIST must be spoken by certain peculiar lips, else it would not be the truth to us, nor have the proper effect of truth upon us. What such people

need is, to be got off from their ideal and speculative grounds of the Church on to grounds that are historical and practical; that is, they should be induced to seek the order and form of the Church, not in their own minds, but in the facts of history, in the great external world where she was built up and established, and where her life has had a visible and traceable course and manifestation.

It is not, ordinarily, by urging the claims of the Apostolic Succession, that this is to be done. The people in question have got utterly entangled in a false method; and the urging of those claims serves rather to knit faster that

entanglement than to extricate them from it, because their vision is nowise configured to the real nature and import of the matter; they cannot choose but see it otherwise than it is, and understand it otherwise than it means. Thus their false method is that of searching after God's truth and God's law in their own thoughts, and not in what He has Himself said and done. They therefore take their measure and scope of Christianity from its working in themselves, not from its objective form and pressure in the broad domain of historic operation. Beginning, it may be, with one or more ideas gathered from Scripture, they assume it as a germ, and proceed to construct from it an ideal system of their own by a course of logical evolution. And when, as is too often the case, Churchmen in like manner treat the Apostolic succession as an egg out of which a system is to be hatched, they are but using the same false method in a new application. Such a way of doing things is essentially sectarian; and it is equally so whether used by sectarians or not; and therefore can never be effectual against sectarianism.

The true way, then, it seems to us, is, by gradually turning the minds of men away from their own little narrow world of the Christian life to the great and common world of that life. If we can get our own thoughts to work wisely and proportionably in this latter world, we shall insensibly plant and foster in others objective and inductive habits of thought; inducing them to leave off "tumbling up and down in their own reason and conceits," and to bend their faculties outwards to the collective reason and experience of mankind. In this case, they will come naturally to think of the Church, and to inquire after her, as a continuous historical fact, and not as an ideal scheme that different men or bodies of men are to excogitate and project for themselves; a thing that has propagated itself from age to age, and from nation to nation. by its own innate laws and powers, not an artificial manufacture gotten up from time to time, after some humanly-devised pattern; in a word, a thing of GOD's making, and not of man's. Moreover, they will be led to conceive of the Church as being truly and emphatically an organic structure, not as a mere aggregation; a vital growth like a tree, not a mere collection of individuals like a heap of sand. And, having once fairly grasped the idea of the Church as an organization, and not a mechanical aggregate, they will no more think of getting up or fabricating a church for themselves, than they would of fabricating an oak or a horse. They will understand at once that an organic structure is a thing which God and Nature alone can produce; that as such the Church is to be kept up and extended in the world by the methods of propagation from within, just as a vine propagates itself by the motions of its indwelling life; that the utmost men can do towards such work is to get up imitations of it, which cannot propagate, though they may be repeated; and that such imitations, however they may deceive the eye, and perhaps for a time answer the purpose of the things imitated, yet cannot last, because they do not really live, and have no vital power or principle within, to keep them from gradually crumbling up and wasting away.

The great fault, then, of all sectarian imitations of the Church is, not that

they are not the means of saving those belonging to them, but that they cannot save themselves. They may do good while they last, but they have no principles of endurance bound up in their constitution. Being things of human mechanism, and not of the Divine organization, they have no innate self-repairing and self-perpetuating energy or force. Nay, on applying the historic method to them, we find that within a moderate lapse of time they perish by their own work, fall by their own weight; and that the larger they become the weaker they are all which is exactly reversed in the case of the Church. Thus the same history which traces the onward growth and rising strength of GoD's organization, traces the downfall and decay of Man's imitations of it. Begotten and born in schism, they must needs inherit from their very origin a certain divulsive energy or virulence, in virtue of which they sooner or later schism themselves to death. Thus, ever since the founding of their great Original, they have from time to time risen into being, had their day, and passed out of being; whereas that Original itself, being designed for all coming time, was endowed with powers of life that should carry her through that time, and therefore grows on unweakened from age to age. For, indeed, the Author of Christianity was alone competent to organize and institute it in such a way as to do the work whereunto it was sent into the world. How should any but He who made the soul, be able to build the soul into a fitting body? We might just as well think of transferring the soul of a man into a body of our own making, as of embodying Christianity in a new church.

The foregoing remarks, if we have not failed of our end in making them, will suggest to the reader what may be called the Historical Method of identifying the Church. They are but a few of the thoughts that have grown up in our mind while reading Dr. Wilson's book, where the historic method is brought to bear with great force and effect in tracing and approving the identity of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States with the Church as originally founded by the Apostles of our LORD, acting under His special guidance, and in pursuance of His command. The author's plan is, to make out a threefold identity, of structural order, of doctrine, and of spirit. And the Apostolic succession is not here regarded as the principle of the Church, or as in any peculiar sense her constitutive element. That principle stands in the broad fact of historic continuity and progression, so that each later branch of the Church comes along as the outgrowth of the older vine, by the working of its original life and law. The Apostolic succession is but one of the elements in this fact, and as such may serve as an available sign for tracing the course of ecclesiastical propagation as distinguished from any abrupt or arbitrary ecclesiastiastical formation. But such succession, so far from being or making the Church, is itself subject to the deeper law of organic integrity. A leading item of this law is, that, the Church being already planted in a given place, all subsequent ecclesiastical action and growth must be in and through the existing organization; so that any rival or separate planting in the same place is essentially schismatical, whether it have the Apostolic succession or not.

Of course we cannot stay to follow Dr. Wilson through the particulars of his argument. The book is full of calm, clear, strong thought, set forth in admirable order, and in such perfect logical coherency as to form, all together, one of the clearest and most conclusive pieces of historical demonstration to be met with on the subject. Throughout the work we have indubitable marks of a mind bold and independent, yet, withal, abundantly cautious, circumspective, and considerate. Then, too, the spirit of the book is thoroughly amiable; a smooth and kindly temper pervades it; there is not a breath of anger, nor a word of vituperation in it: if at any time it bears hard upon the sects, this proceeds clearly from the reason of the thing, and not from the disposition of the man. The author is eminently qualified, both by nature and by experience, for such an undertaking. He exemplifies in a high degree that union and interpenetration of the inductive and the dialectical powers, which enables one to deal with history in a philosophical manner; taking facts as exponents of ideas, and ideas as the life and soul of facts, so that his thoughts are never whirled away and swamped by either half of the philosophic whole. And, as our readers may be aware, his membership in the Church did not come to him by inheritance: on the contrary, he inherited the ordinary stock of New England prejudices against her. He studied and thought his own way into Church, and therefore is with her because he understands thoroughly what she is, not because he is ignorant what other churches are. In a word, he knows perfectly where he stands, and why. And his book, besides its clear theologic insight, and its large grasp of philosophic principles, contains a rich fund of historical matter, wisely chosen, and densely packed.

We would fain add something further towards inducing our brethren to cultivate a close acquaintance with both the matter and the method of the work in hand; believing that they will hardly find elsewhere so good a source from whence to arm and equip themselves for the specialities of our American field. Perhaps, in the space at our disposal, we cannot better do this than by drawing together the main points of what is said touching the alleged apostacy of the Church before the Reformation.

That, at the time referred to, gross darkness and corruption covered the Church, admits of no denial. Some hold the Church to have been so far gone in this way, that she ceased to be the Church of CHRIST. If so, then any connection with the past through that channel is of no avail. But the Church cannot be justly regarded as apostate, or extinct, so long as she has within herself the powers of recovery and reformation. If she have the ministry and the Scriptures, she is competent for whatever functions are necessary to life and vigour. Now, that the Churches in the Roman Obedience were capable of reformation, has never been denied.

Our LORD declares that "the gates of Hell shall not prevail against" His Church. And again, evidently meaning the Church which His Apostles were to establish, He promised to be with it "always, even unto the end of the world;" which implies at least that the Church should not become extinct. It is sometimes said that the promise has been fulfilled in the springing up of a

new church when the original one became apostate. That the Albigenses and Waldenses came into being as the Church was dying of apostacy; and that as these sects went out, the Baptists and others arose in their place. But in the forecited passages our LORD referred to the self-same Church which His Apos tles were to establish. So that the promise could not be made good by those sects rising up after the Church had become apostate. Nay, it was to guard Christians against admitting that the Church could become apostate, or that she could be replaced by any sects, that the promise was given. The promise implies the identity of the Body to which it was made; and cannot be transferred to any other without overthrowing our LORD's language.

It is clear, from the state of the Jewish Church in our LORD's time, and from His course respecting it, that apostacy is not merely a great declension in doctrine and manners. It implies a total falling away from the Christian estate, or covenant with GOD. And so Hooker defines it to be "willingly casting off, and utterly forsaking both profession of CHRIST, and communion with Christians." But the Church, at the time in question, had not professed to reject the Scriptures as the Word of God. Baptism and the Lord's Supper were not repudiated, though the use of them was overlaid with abuses. The Faith, though thickly encrusted with human additions, had never been abjured. The original order and constitution of the ministry, however disfigured with excrescences, had been carefully preserved. But perhaps the strongest argument lies in the consciousness of errors and corruptions, and the earnest desire of reformation, so often and so forcibly expressed. When a people are apostate, they have forsaken GOD, and He them: their prayers are no longer heard ; their sacraments are empty of grace; their discipline without authority, and the ordinary presence of the SPIRIT withdrawn. But the grace to repent and amend is always proof that the SPIRIT has not ceased to strive with a people.

The Testimony of the Rocks; or, Geology in its Bearings on the two Theologies, Natural and Revealed. By HUGH MILLER. With Memorials of the Death and Character of the Author. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. 1857. All our readers, no doubt, have heard of Hugh Miller: many of them, we hope, have much more than heard of him; have made his acquaintance: if any have not, they may rest assured that they will certainly find their account in doing so. He was indeed a very rare and remarkable piece of manhood; hard of hand, warm and brave of heart, clear and strong of head; with a cast of intellect at once highly practical and highly imaginative; equally at home in the slow but sure processes of scientific induction, and in the harmonies of philosophical discourse; a devout Christian, a shrewd and diligent observer, a profound and original thinker.

Mr. Miller was born at Cromarty in 1805, of humble but respectable parentage, his father being a seafaring man, who, together with his vessel, perished in a terrible storm when Hugh was but five years old. To his mother,