mitted for a while to the magicians of Egypt. But this time, those agents were to look on, and forbear! The people also looked on, with intense interest! There were Israelites waiting to see who was their God! Some of those beguiled sinners would wonder at Baal's delay. Some would feel doubt coming on their minds, and some would begin to feel scorn. Elijah, too, long looked on; he could give them time. He knew he should

want little himself. Let all their gods be invoked, by all their names and titles! Let all their incantations be expended! Let their last tribute of idolatrous zeal be fully paid! Let the deluded miserable populace see how tenacious their spiritual tyrants were of their enslaved souls!

6

"It was in silence that the prophet had thus long looked on. When he did speak, what would you have him to have said? a gentle dissuasion? - that would have been no fit language to the insulters of the Almighty, and the destroyers of the people! -a loud denunciation of vengeance?—that was to be executed, and needed not be spoken. It came to pass that Elijah mocked.' We are not to imagine this as said in a light, bantering tone of pleasantry; as if the prophet would amuse himself with their unsuccessful impiety; but as an austere and bitter rebuke in the form of sarcasm, and it had in it a propriety and truth, without which sarcasm and ridicule have no point. Some such thing as he in mockery suggests was to be supposed by them to account for their failure. He is a god,'' as you assume, and favorable to you. There must therefore be some occasional cause of this his inattention. Is he not talking, pursuing, on a journey, or asleep? Now this was quite pertinent, because the heathens did suppose such things might happen, to prevent the gods hearing them. Le Clerc illustrates from Homer Jupiter had a bed, and sometimes went to sleep — Thetis could not obtain a desired boon from Jupiter, because he was gone on a journey to Ethiopia, and was not to return for twelve days. Baal's worshippers were not less gross in their notions; and therefore such things were justly thrown in their teeth. Will any one say this was too harsh, and almost cruel, when Elijah saw the wretched men thus laboring in vain? What! in the land of Israel?-among a people perishing under the effects of the abominations which these men had promoted among them? What! after these wicked men had doubtless abetted Jezebel in killing all the teachers of the true religion that could be found?

"After hours of vain invocation, they had recourse to their most wild and barbarous rites; leapt upon the altar-cut themselves. Now, this was no newly invented expedient of theirs,

prompted by despair. These were customary rites in the worship of several heathen deities. It was like a judicial doom, that those who would worship false gods should do it at the cost of plaguing and torturing themselves. Miserably exhausted many of these priests must have become, but the will was resolute, inflexible, and invincible; they went on till near the time of the Jewish evening sacrifice.' Still no voice, no auspicious sign, -no fire. The great assembly that witnessed this long process had to make their reflections. The great majority had to reflect that these were the personages to whom they had long surrendered their judgments, their consciences, and the religion of the God of Israel; that these had been their accepted intercessors with invisible power. They had to consider in what degree themselves might be involved in the consequences which now would seem to impend. It was too much to hope that justice would entirely dissever the retribution.” — pp. 221 - 224.

John Foster was the contemporary, associate, and friend of Robert Hall. Ornaments of the same denomination, preachers in the same chapel, writers for the same public, they are naturally brought into comparison with each other. Hall was the most eloquent writer; Foster the most cogent reasoner. The one was mighty in persuading men to act as they believed, and in dressing up the merest commonplaces of truth and duty with glowing words from a fervent heart; the other loved to run athwart men's settled judgments and opinions, and never went his way so rejoicingly as when loaded down with paradoxes. The mind of the one teemed with beauty, and his heart with love; while the other's tenderest emotions were acts of ratiocination. The two were as unlike as law and gospel; and, had they occupied rival pulpits, the competition would have been between Mount Sinai and Mount Zion. Each was needed in his place and for his work; and they both wrought for truth and man with conscientious fidelity. Both have left honored names and a luminous track where they disappeared. Would to God that the championship of the most sacred interests of our race might ever fall to equally valiant hands and loyal hearts!

ART. VII.-The Miscellaneous Works of THOMAS ARNOLD, D. D., late Head-Master of Rugby School, and Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Oxford. First American Edition, with nine additional Essays, not included in the English Collection. New York: D. Appleton and Co. 1845. 8vo. pp. 519.

In a recent number of this Journal, we noticed at some length the Life and Correspondence of Dr. Arnold, by his friend and pupil, Mr. Stanley. We have now before us the fourth English and the first American edition of that work. The appearance of this interesting biography has been naturally followed by a desire to know more of the character and opinions of so vigorous a thinker and admirable a man. The demand for new editions of his works has been immense; and within only a few weeks, his biographical and historical contributions to the Encyclopædia Metropolitana, which constitute the germ of his Roman History, have been republished. In the eagerness to save every relic, his occasional and even his fragmentary productions have been deemed worthy of republication; and the volume of miscellanies which we have now under review contains a series of treatises, pamphlets, and articles collected from a great variety of sources. We are indebted to the American publishers for several additions to the contents of the English volume which bears the same title; and although the volume has thus already reached a goodly size, we should have been glad to meet with two or three more of the Introductions and A ppendices to the Sermons, one only of which do we find in the present collection.

No one, who knows any thing of Dr. Arnold, will expect to find in him the qualities of a modern essayist. For mere literary criticism, and the graces or the artifices of style, he had little time or taste. The fragments of leisure gathered out of the cares of a laborious vocation were too precious to be spent upon the amusement of an idle reader. The lighter moods of authorship he willingly left to those who could afford to indulge in them. For himself, he found life too serious a pilgrimage for these wayside diversions. He could not play with the pen; he had more work for it than he could find time for. And even when he enters upon some

weighty subject, he seldom thinks it worth while to be very nice about the expression of his thoughts. His early writings have the hard and homely manner of one who is busy only with the substance of the subject in hand, and is much more anxious to instruct, than to please or amuse. As he grew older, indeed, his style became more easy and flowing; yet he was always very indifferent about the mere art of composition and the graces of rhetoric. The great warmth of his nature, and the zeal with which he set about all his undertakings, supplied in a great measure this neglect. As he threw his whole soul into every thing he wrote, there is a freshness in his works which more than atones for their occasional want of finish. The bold honesty of his nature spared him the necessity of that second thought which is often needed by the lukewarm and insincere to perfect the disguise they have assumed.

We sometimes wonder, indeed, that the singular boyishness of his nature, breaking out at times into the most exuberant spirits, should have infused so little liveliness into his style. His letters afford ample proof of the possession of a bluff English wit, of which hardly a trace appears in his other writings. But devoid as these writings are of wit and sprightliness, there is, especially in his Lectures and the closing volume of his History, a kindly seriousness in his manner, which is highly attractive. And when, under the sting of manly indignation, he assumes the grave vehemence of his sterner tone, the reader feels that nothing but charity and truthfulness stood in the way of his becoming one of the most formidable polemics of the day. It was fortunate, perhaps, that his other occupations were too pressing to allow him many opportunities to engage in the controversies raging around him. He had such a hatred of all shams and "parrot-like phrases," that he could hardly write on any of the agitating questions of the day, without giving serious umbrage to some of those to whom an old sham is a reality, and parrot-like phrases have all the charm of current coin. It was not his way to mince words; and his distance from the busy world may sometimes have blinded him to the startling vehemence of his own expressions. Had he been more in the habit of trying his phrases on other men before he published them, perhaps he would have seen, that, though his own charity could distinguish between the opinion and the

man, the vanity or ignorance of an opponent might not. His attack on the Tractarians, for instance, notwithstanding the careful reservation at the close, might naturally disturb men who were not the most unlikely to identify themselves with their doctrines. The keen contempt with which he stigmatizes "the Oxford Malignants" (an appellation, by the way, for which, it should be remembered, he is not responsible) as men of the Hophni and Phinehas school, formalists, fanatics, Judaizers, and nonjurors, was not likely to be easily forgotten by those who were the subject of the picture. That they were thus noted only in their character as members of a party would help the matter but little with such violent partisans. The severe, but not harsh, manner, in which, at the close of his pamphlet on the Catholic question, he exposes the shallowness of the current plan of theological education, might sting more deeply than he supposed. He felt keenly all the odium which he incurred; yet so persuaded was he of the need of bold words to arouse sleeping men, that we question whether he would have retracted a line, even if he could have foreseen the treatment which it brought upon him. There are times when prudence finds her occupation gone, and the unvarnished truth is the best wisdom. And, indeed, he may have found it so; for the world came round to him at last. Nothing in his whole life is more striking than the change from great unpopularity to the other extreme, and that without compromise or concession on his part.

As an author, Dr. Arnold is best known by his historical labors; and the more we read of his other works, the better are we satisfied that his peculiar talents fitted him best for that department. There is hardly one of his occasional essays, in which more or less of the historian's faculty does not appear. His power of analyzing states of society and dissecting the complex relations of parties is quite remarkable. Those who have read his Lectures on History well remember the great skill with which he has sketched the condition of the parties in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The essay on the Social Progress of States is distinguished by the same facility. He had studied. history with the eye of a classical scholar and that of a churchman at the same time. Hence the happy manner in which he brings civil to bear on ecclesiastical history; and hence also his profound acquaintance with English history,