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itself by exhibiting credentials more certain, and winning an empire more sure over nature and human destiny. Learning, which she cherished once, has opened paths she dare not follow. The free conscience she strove to chain with creeds and trammel by rules of priestly discipline reacts upon the sources of her inward life. Distrust of the natural reason and conscience which she pronounced evil and accursed, so as to play into the hands of her ghostly policy — returns upon her in a deep, hollow, interior unbelief, that, with multitudes of her more enlightened subjects, saps the very foundation of piety and morals. We cannot fail to see that, with all the show and sincerity of devotion in Papal countries, with all the signs of affectionate and confiding piety among the humble and sincere, that hearty, intelligent conviction, that bold, confident grasp of truth, that downright, honest, believing, cultivated thought, which takes in the life of the present and the strength of the future, is no longer the patrimony of Rome. She is no longer the sovereign and guide of the world's intelligence; and the sceptre of her august dominion slips slowly, yet surely, from her grasp.

It would be interesting, in this connection, to consider the nature of that sway-more wide-spread in space, and in some regards more imposing to the imagination, than that of Hildebrand or Innocent- which modern Romanism has in part retained from the ancient dominion, in part wrested from the conflict, and ripened by the experience of these last three hundred years; and to compare it with that authority over man's beliefs and lives which modern Protestantism has endeavored to set up in place of that which it had assaulted. But this, although the proper sequel of the remarks now made, our limits at present will not allow.

It would also be interesting to sketch the group of remarkable men who from time to time bore the standard that Martin Luther first set flying,—whether in the field of bloody battle, in the cabinet where the plots of despotism had to be undermined, or in the war of creeds that followed out his brave search of truth. Melancthon, the gentle, scholarly associate, the clear and refined intellect, whose feebler personality is so dominated by the intensely vitalized will of the great Re

former; Carlstadt the radical, who takes at one grasp what he can take of the new doctrine, and goes about, with blunt and blundering good faith, to put it to its plainest uses, blind to the gentle pietisms and nice distinctions that made the master so reluctant to tamper with the ancient faith; Calvin, ascetic, dyspeptic, and an exile, who first brought something morbid and morally wrong into the Reformed faith, which he would follow out with a certain hard and sad consistency, yet true as steel when the creed must be proved by any act or suffering of his own; the more subtile and daring thinkers, like Servetus and Socinus, who turned the current of the revolution so early into forbidden paths, and revived heresies for a thousand years under the ban of all good Christian souls; - how rich and how full of dramatic life is that history of the Reformed dogma which the mention of these names recalls!

Then the marshalled champions of despotism on the one hand, and liberty on the other, in that age all crowded with strife the most tragic and desperate, perhaps, that human history has to show. The young Emperor, growing prematurely old in the warfare that welcomed him, a precocious boy of nineteen, as he leaped to the shining goal of his ambition, and preserving through his near forty years of shifting fortune a stately gravity not unworthy of his century and his birth; the wary, unscrupulous Maurice of Saxony, playing like a gambler the great prize of his people's liberty into the hands of their oppressor, only to make more sure and ruinous the stroke of strategy by which he foils him at last, and then, his task done, suddenly and ingloriously passes out of sight; Coligny, the great Admiral, the purest, truest, noblest, of the sons of France in her most heroic age, who "with the genius of a warrior combined the fervor of a religious reformer," whose religion was the religion of a patriot, a devout Christian, and a free-hearted man,-the first victim of St. Bartholomew, stabbed treacherously in his sick-bed, and his mutilated body made the ghastly merriment and mockery of a Paris mob; William of Orange, by marriage allied with both Saxon and Frenchman, of more heroic life and more tragical fate than either, serene in that high ambition which aimed singly at his country's liberty from oppression and freedom of soul, so princely

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in the devotion of his treasure, his singular accomplishments, and his glorious life to that service,-so patient and wary in the long game of diplomatic mining and countermining he must play against the crowned conspirator of the Escorial,- so highminded, resolute, and true, through the years of that terrible warfare, and the dark web of treachery he must unravel, and the long-baffled malice which at length achieved his assassination; "the three Henries," whose portrait Motley gives so admirably, in whose lives were gathered up the threads of destiny that France had been spinning through her cruel half-century of religious wars, the pitiful, effeminate, priest-ridden king, for once roused to a vindictive energy strong enough to strike down with an assassin's hand his cousin of Guise, the wicked, resolute, scarred leader of the League, and the greater third, the hero of Navarre, whose life embodies all the romance, the passion, and the tragedy of the time; the Tudor sovereigns of England, father and daughter, whose troubled reigns-in these late years first rightly interpreted to us-represent so much of the hardy bravery, the wise, bold statesmanship, the proud, stanch nationality of Britain in its grandest era; Maurice of Nassau, and John Barneveldt, representing in their alliance, that had so cruel and unjust an end, the victorious strength and constitutional freedom of the great Republic; Wallenstein, whose name, looming and ominous, stands for all the horror and atrocity of the Thirty Years' War, the dark, implacable chief of a hundred thousand bandits, the would-be founder of an empire of lawless force, prince-general of a state of soldiers, with the one vein of visionary superstition that fascinates our imaginative sympathy, and the one delicate thread of human love that, through the first of historic dramas, binds that stern heart to ours; the good and great Gustavus, fair, ruddy, of large Scandinavian stature, and with veins pulsing with the valor of the hardy North, the champion of Order in front of that dark Princedom of Misrule, hero and martyr of humanity, whose costly blood ransomed the nations from their dismal threatening doom; Richelieu, the great Cardinal, to whom country was more than Church, the first master of modern state-craft,-lean, austere, tormented by the malady that cut at his vitals like a knife, yet always of wake

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ful intellect and unbending will, who subdued the proud provincial nobles to the inexorable centralism of his policy, who hunted the Huguenots implacably as rebels, yet granted them equal justice as humbled and loyal subjects, the truest and sincerest representative of a system that carried with it all that is worst in the despotism of modern Europe; and, lastly, the Puritan chieftain, the Lord Protector of English freedom, in whom we know not whether the fervor of piety, or military skill, or statesmanship, or sturdy Saxon sense, is plainest to be seen in the character he plays in the great drama,—now, as its last scene closes, holding in his pitiless grasp the courtly, treacherous monarch, victim of his own falsehood, and martyr of that system of tyranny which his death was impotent to save;- what age, what period of human annals, has the group of names that shall stir recollections vivid as these,-recollections of passions still warm to our touch, of struggles whose fervor calls up answering pulsations in the heart and the life of to-day!

We should overcrowd our pages if we were to refer, even by name, to the writers of these late years who have undertaken to illustrate the great epoch of which we write. Besides, the religious histories of the Reformation, its biography and its theology, we have a singular wealth and vigor of general history brought to the task of portraying the period and the men. The recent volumes of Michelet, imperfect and disappointing as a connected story, abound in admirable sketches, throwing vivid light on passages of the Huguenot era of France. Froude, with patient, thoughtful, gentle, conscientious partisanship, is presenting a view of the Tudor period of England, which, with whatever faults of reticent partiality it may be charged, is infinitely valuable as a contribution to our knowledge of the time and the people, as well as for its vindication of historic names from old and vulgar prejudice. Of our countryman Motley's admirable histories we have spoken already, if not as fully as we would, yet enough to show how clearly we perceive in him the finest appreciation of any historian we can name, of the temper of the period, and the unparalleled interest and importance of the issue at stake in it. And to no promised work do we look forward with such eager

interest as to that story of the Thirty Years' War- for which may his present honorable mission afford him the fit material and opportunity that shall close worthily the grand gallery of pictures illustrating the century of convulsions from which our modern liberties had their birth.

We have mentioned these names, the first that occur, simply to illustrate the sort of filling out which the meagre outline needs that we find in any historic "text-book." We close by expressing again the very great satisfaction every student will feel, who can revive his faded recollections, or make his first studies, of the Reformation period under guidance so able, so candid, so learned, and so complete as that of Dr. Gieseler.

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Memorial Volume of the First Fifty Years of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions. Boston. 1861.

It is not without a tender reverence that we could wish to turn to the history of half a century of missions, to a fit record of those hearts of fire and faith which have lived and died "for the conversion of the world." To nurture upon the simple and sincere conceits of a child's heart, through many years of patient silence, an enthusiastic dream of a dying life on the darkest Afric shore, will make the whole heart forever kind to the true enthusiast of redemption. That meeting of the American Board in which it became a cruel certainty to us that hardly any even seemed to believe the world's peril from God's wrath, we could not indeed forget, but we hoped to find in this "Memorial " such a history of the fervent few as would amply justify the intense sympathy which we felt impelled to offer. We are utterly disappointed. Rev. Rufus Anderson has produced a cold and calculating official report, - a painful blue-book. The spirit of the official stifles the heart of the historian. We were instantly reminded of the

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