are studies which very much interest the young; the unexpectedness of the derivation of a word, and its lurking affinities of meaning, seem to attract those mental faculties which in childhood are applied to games of chance and puzzles. This little work must be read in connexion with the writer's previous publication, On the Study of Words.'

The Seven Ages of a Christian's Life, (Rivingtons,) is a meditation of a very common-place character, on the different stages of human life, connected, in some way which we are unable to discover, with Shakspere's Seven Ages. It is by the Dean of Norwich. Speaking of youth, Dr. Pellew observes (p. 11),— The Church justly concludes, that at the age of 'fifteen or sixteen years the children of Christian parents become... en'titled to a nearer approach, &c. after receiving the holy rite of con'firmation.' We are unable to discover this conclusion of the Church. The Church requires children to be confirmed, as soon as they can say three short formularies; and although this order is by some of our Bishops construed to mean at the age of sixteen, yet the construction is a very recent one. Nicholas Ferrar was confirmed at the age of six years; and, as we find from Bishops Hacket and Taylor, it was the custom of those days to admit children at a very early age to confirmation and communion.

A second edition of 'Lent Readings from the Fathers,' (J. H. Parker,) compiled by Mr. Bennett, and recommended by Dr. Pusey, will, perhaps, if ever reasonably read, teach gainsayers what depths of spiritual and practical religion are to be found in writings which they are disposed only from ignorance to condemn and disparage.

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Of a like tendency, that is, to simple edification,-we welcome Mr. H. Dunwell's Lectures on the Psalms.' (J. H. Parker.) They are composed chiefly of the thoughts and running commentaries of S. Augustine, and the early Fathers and they embrace the first twenty-four Psalms, the xlv. and cx. By the way, Theodoret has no claim to the title of Saint.

The Golden Spell, and other Poems.' (Exeter: Holden.) This collection has reached a second edition, and exhibits considerable thought. The writer would, we think, do well to cultivate simplicity: there is a depth of meaning in many of his poems which exhausts the attention, and we are free to confess that we cannot always fathom him. He composes on a theory, which, if we are sometimes unable to appreciate,-perhaps we had better say, to understand,-we can award him our conviction that it has enabled him to give us a volume which is on the whole of high promise.

Dr. Townsend, of Durham, has taken some pains to accomplish a work which some of our readers may believe might as well have been left undone. In his Flowers from the Garden of the Church,' (J. H. Parker,) he has turned all the Prayer Book Collects into verse. We suppose there is something in the air of Durham which makes this sort of ingenious labour indigenous. Sir George Wheler, who turned the English Communion office into heroic verse, &c. was a prebendary of Durham; and Dr. Tye, the organist, who did the Acts of the Apostles into English metre,' was, we think, connected with the same church.

• The third, and, as it turns out, the concluding part of the work, undertaken, we believe, by Mr. Isaac Taylor, The Restoration of Belief,' (Macmillan,) has appeared. It hurries to a conclusion; and presses as a summary argument against modern infidelity, the argument from the Miracles. It confronts unbelief, changing as it is in character and vacillating in purpose, on a single issue, that of the Miracles of the Gospel. The present writer does not consider the argument from the Miracles in its common aspect, as a mere series of supernatural events, isolated in their purpose, and unconsequential beyond a single object, that of 'launching a new religion in the world, and for giving it an initial impulse' on its first and unwilling hearers; but he considers that the Miracles have a permanent and prolonged purpose, and have special and eternal relations with all the objects of the scheme of salvation. Superficial readers might, and not unreasonably, be alarmed at the somewhat meagre enumeration of these objects of the Saviour's mission, in which that of propitiation for sin and His sacrifice as a vicarious atonement, appears to hold a very ill-defined if even a palpable position. But Mr. Taylor's object must be borne in mind: he takes up disbelief at its own account of itself; and at p. 318, he plainly professes his distinct belief in all the articles of the Nicene Creed. We do not share in the writer's anticipations, but his view has not often been better expressed than in these words :—

I look forward to a time when national distinctions of race, language, and geographical location shall continually be melting away, at least so 'far as they may ultimately be obstructive of the brotherhood of the human 'family. That centralization—apart from universal empire—which a true ' understanding of the conditions of social well-being tends to bring about, ' and which it is now in the course of bringing about, is, I think, embraced ' or implied throughout the prophetic writings. On the same grounds I look 'for a future time when Right for the many, or, better expressed, when RIGHT for ALL, shall be the sovereign and irresistible principle in every community. As to Right for the many, it has taken to itself a conventional meaning, which differs little, if at all, from a periodic overthrow of society, such as may give the undermost class their time of plunder. But 'RIGHT for ALL, means social stability; and this one idea of STABILITY, as opposed to anarchy and to periodic convulsions, meets us everywhere on 'the prophetic pages. Then, as the consequence of this my first anticipation, I look for a time when the material welfare, or, as we say, the earthly and daily comfort and enjoyment of the many-or let us rather say of all, so that we may exclude that banditti meaning which radicalism clings to-when this well-doing for all-this secure holding of the most 'needful things of life, shall be so much thought of as shall in fact realize ' it in a continually more and more complete manner. Between the two 'cooperative influences of an iron sense of right and justice on the one hand, and of humanizing and soft-hearted sympathies on the other, an 'intense feeling shall pervade the social mass, under the operation of ' which, want-still incident as it must be to man—and squalor, and house'less discomfort, and, what is worse, cellared wretchedness, and disease'the child of filth shall always be in process of sublimation, and shall be 'driven off, as one may say, from the social mass, by its high internal

' temperature. A strong feeling of uneasiness at the sight or thought of 'privation and bodily misery shall be always ridding the world of these ' ever-recurrent evils. I look for a time, not fabulous and impossible-not 'rosy and celestial, but earthlike and sunny, when every man-absolutely 'secure from violence, and moderately at ease, shall sit in home style 'under, or near to, as he likes best, his vine and fig-tree, none daring, or ' even wishing, to make him afraid. I do not look for a time on this earth ' when there shall be no surgeons' work-no hospitals, no infirmaries, no 'police; but I do believe in an age of individual and domestic bliss, such 'as is pictured in some sweet odes and stirring paragraphs of my Bible. I believe in a time yet to come, when HE who-eternal shame upon 'Manichees, upon Ascetics, upon Fanatics of all sorts-" manifested His 'glory" first, by being a willing guest at a wedding, and then and there showing that Creation is His own-when He shall bless the world by 'bringing at once His iron sceptre of righteousness and His law of love 'to bear upon the temporal good of all men. I look for a time when He 'who is " King of Peace" and "King of Righteousness,” shall rule the 'nations under both titles; and when, as a consequence of the establish'ment of uncontradicted Truth and of Reason, safe from sophistry, and of 'Right, bowed to and enforced, there shall be abundance of earthly felicity, 'to last until this planet has wound up its destined story.

In the course of those events that have marked the years of this current century-that is to say, those ostensible matters which history takes ' account of-I scarcely discern any indications of the coming on of such an era of mundane welfare. One may imagine, to-day, that things are ' taking a turn in this better direction; but to-morrow (as so many past to-morrows have done) will perhaps scatter every supposition of the sort, and break it up as a dream. But though the evolving fortunes of 'nations do not clearly, if at all, foreshow the golden age at hand, yet it is 'true that those who have been watching the unrecorded movements of 'the human mind-in Europe, throughout these fifty years, and who have 'been used to let down a line into the under-current, and have noted its shiftings, have come to think that those preparations-intellectual, moral, and political-which would be the proper precursors of a new and better era, have not only had a commencement, but have been making progress ' at a rapid rate.'-Pp. 208–311.

Here, too, is a fine passage on the belief in the Resurrection from the dead:

In the first place then, an unhesitating belief of the resurrection of Christ-if I allow the meditative faculty to dwell upon it-leads me forth 'from a region of interminable surmises that are comfortless, appalling, or worse; and it brings me upon a ground that is firm to the foot, and 'where those objects that are already familiar to me, stand out distinctly, ' and are sharply defined; and they show themselves, not in the glimmer or in the blaze of a vague phosphorescence, but in the every-day sober sunlight of this present world. If I carry myself back, as I may easily do, to that Garden under the walls of Jerusalem wherein was a sepulchre, or ' enter an upper chamber, within the city, or go on to a house a Sabbath

'day's journey, south of it; or travel so far as to the shore of the lake of Galilee; if I go thither taking with me no haze of exaggeration, I there 'find HIM who is at once the Representative of the human family, and its Sponsor; and I find Him such after the suffering of death, as He was 'before it-save his recent scars. The immortality, therefore, which is 'held before me in the Christian scheme, is no such a thing as a nucleus of 'conscious mist, floating about in a golden fog, amid millions of the same 'purposeless, limbless sparks. It is an immortality of organized material 'energies;-it is the same welded mind-and-matter human nature-fitted 'for service-apt to labour, and capable of all those experiences, and fur'nished for all those enterprises, and armed for those endurances, which, seeing that they are thus provided for, and are, as one may say, thus 'foreshown in the Christian resurrection, put before me a rational solution '-hypothetic indeed, and yet not illusory-of those now immanent trials, ' of those hard experiences, of those frustrated labours, and of those fiery sufferings, the passing through which so much perplexes and disheartens me now; but which at once find their reason when I see them in their 'intention, as the needed schooling for an immortality in the endless for'tunes of which this mind-and-matter structure shall have room to show 'what things it can do and bear, and what enterprises of love it shall 'devise, and shall bring to a happy consummation, it may be, cycles of 'centuries hence.

"The Lord is risen indeed!" said those simple souls, one to another, in that dim morning hour-which was the morning of a Day Eternal to 'human nature; and He so rises as to throw forward upon the path of 'this human nature, to the remotest range of an endless existence, a steady light of reality.

Over against this reasonable and conceivable CHRISTIAN IDEA of the future life, as it is set before me in the instance of the Resurrection ' of Christ, I will put the dreamy Elysium of classical antiquity—I will put 'the sensualisms of the oriental beliefs-I will put the wearisome and ' vapid inanities of modern poetical or philosophical surmises :-yes, and over against this genuine belief I must put those more consistent sup'positions which, at this present time, are presenting themselves, in a whisper, as probable, if we are to follow the guidance of psychological 'speculation, and if we are looking to such a future existence as the ' analogy of things around us might suggest. As compared with all such 'anticipations—more or less consonant as they may severally be with 'facts known to us-I find that my Christian Belief is more consistent than any one of them, is more realizable—is more cheering, is more • animating, and that it is of a tendency (when rightly considered) the most ' healthful, as to the moral and the intellectual faculties.'-Pp. 341–344.

In some respects on the same subject, but with less of a philosophic spirit, and yet with considerable practical shrewdness and plainness of speech and language, Mr. R. W. Morgan publishes his Christianity and Modern Infidelity compared.' (Rivingtons.) Mr. Morgan, we think, had better have avoided the dialogue form, which Mr. Rogers, in his celebrated Eclipse of Faith,' has treated with such skill. In Mr Morgan's hands,

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the dialogue is not conducted with that deep Socratic irony which refutes an opponent by his own admissions, and which compels his reluctant witness to the truth. The Infidel' in Mr. Morgan's book only stands up to put his worst and most assailable arguments. However, Mr. Morgan writes in a clear and popular way; and his arguments are always intelligibly and intelligently put. His own principles are sound; and for general purposes he has furnished a useful manual, which is highly creditable to his argumentative powers. From the same writer we have received two other publications-we decline to specify them-one relating to his own grievances and alleged wrongs; the other consisting of a very stirring appeal against the sins and errors of the administration of the Church in Wales. Whether the latter protest is not the result of Mr. Morgan's own position we shall not here say; and with respect to his case we must decline to give an opinion on an ex parte statement. This much, however, we can afford to say, that the state of things which permits either the charge made by Mr. Morgan, or the charge made against Mr. Morgan, to stand as it appears to stand, merely as a charge uninvestigated, and therefore of course unrefuted, is the heaviest possible censure of that system of clerical discipline which Dr. Maitland is so surprised that we are Quixotic enough to think that even a body so ineffective as Convocation might mend; or at least try to mend.

It is not often that we see the sermons of English Churchmen in French. We have, however, had forwarded to us a very good French Sermon on the Conversion of Zacchæus, by the Rev. F. Godfray. It was first printed in 'L'Ami de la Religion, ou, Messager Evangélique des Iles de la Manche,' (Jersey: Gosset; London: Masters,) which we have already taken occasion to commend.

Mr. Claude Magnay has published a volume of Sermons, (Masters,) which he designates as Practical and Suggestive.' All that they suggest to us is the question, why they were printed. As we looked through the volume we had hopes of the writer: the Sermons are certainly not so bad as the Preface.

Mr. Harvey Goodwin's Four University Sermons,' delivered during the present spring, (Deighton,) make us thankful that such really sound and impressive cautions should be addressed to undergraduates from a Cambridge pulpit. This is the valuable part of the sermons: in their doctrinal aspect we see, or fancy that we see, the amiable object of conciliation somewhat overruling the sterner and more rigid duties of the preacher. It is with something like naïveté that on one occasion Mr. Goodwin expresses great surprise that, with reference to some of his speculations on the Temptation, no trace of it is to be found in such of the Fathers as I have been able to consult.'-P. 146. Mr. Goodwin, however, falls back on the countenance which his views receive from Mr. Farmer, a dissenting minister, and a pupil of Dr. Doddridge. We are surprised, in the fourth Sermon, to find the preacher arguing that the petition in the Litany, 'In all time of our wealth,' referred to temptations from being rich in silver and gold.'