effort to throw them off." The year 1842 furnishes an example. Letting our figures represent thousands, from 1836 to 1856 the receipts were (about) 176; 252; 236; 244; 241; 235; 318 (in 1842); 244; 236; 255; 262; 211; 254; 291; 251; 274; 301; 314; 305; 310; 307 (in 1856). These figures show that the great advance of 1842, when the second largest debt the Board has had was removed, was not at all permanent. The only "great permanent advance" to be found was made in 1837, under the quickening influence of commercial disaster and distress. The method of this advance sufficiently explains why it was not permanent. After repeated sessions to provide for the debt at the meeting in 1841, no result was reached when the time for adjournment for the year arrived. The Committee and Secretaries had almost threatened to resign, a Secretary had reminded them that it was for them to "say whether this or that soul should have eternal life," and every means had been used to awaken feeling. A special session was held, and a pledge obtained from every member to "increase his own subscription for the coming year at least twenty-five per cent above that of the last year," and to use all fit means to induce others to do the same. By sheer force of this pledge, extended as widely as possible, the money was raised. The other case of great advance was in 1860, in the culmination of a severe struggle to throw off debt, extending from 1857 to 1860. The old style of force could not be used, and the struggle dragged along to the year of the Jubilee meeting. Then came "a well-planned effort to remove the debt, suggested by a mercantile friend in Boston. The plan was,' continues Dr. Anderson, "to raise sixty thousand dollars among merchants and others, by subscriptions of one thousand dollars each. It was somewhat modified, but the result was secured by comparatively a small number of persons." It is manifest that this was a desperate resort to free the Board from debt before the Jubilee meeting. The state of the case is sufficiently indicated by the fact that the Board expressed the "hope that the Prudential Committee will see their way clear to appropriate" for 1861 a sum sixty thousand dollars less than the amount raised in 1860. Those who attended the meeting know that strong protests were uttered against getting so

much ahead of the churches. They are not prepared for rapid progress."

We had hoped to discuss in connection with this "Memorial Volume" the principles and working of the missions themselves, their interior policy, and the service which they may perform, especially the kind of agencies which they should make use of; but we find almost nothing in regard to the matter in this volume. Dr. Anderson does say, that "the civilizing agencies, as they have been called, have been found the most expensive, the most troublesome, and the least productive," and there are indistinct references to "the relinquishment of schools," "suspension of a seminary," a "new order of things," &c., but we get no definite information. We are precluded, therefore, from giving distinct evidence of the fact, which the meetings of the Board have sufficiently indicated, that narrow means have conspired with narrow notions to establish the policy of procuring technical conversions without adequate effort to improve general morality and social welfare by means of education and other civilizing agencies. Beyond this, it is still less the aim of the Board to co-operate with the course of events, the progress of discovery, and the movements of civilization, in securing the redemption of the dark lands to order, intelligence, and prosperity. We must leave these most interesting features of the work, therefore, and limit ourselves, in conclusion, to some brief suggestions touching the appeal to the public in behalf of any scheme of organized benevolence.

It is not wise or right to attempt to sustain organizations for benevolent work, like that of missions, by the support which can be gleaned from merely sentimental movements of religious activity. If the end is not one of definite and decided service, dictated by the soundest reason and the wisest charity, pointing to some good which clearly can and ought to be done, no such organization should meddle with it. The American Board is very largely the organ of an indefinite sentiment. It does not stand in the attitude of doing a distinct and real work. It has a large number of missions, for the most part almost, if not wholly, unproductive. A communication to the New York Independent of June 6, 1861, considers the Turkish missions as, "it might almost be said,

the only really productive and progressive operations of the Board," and proposes to reduce the expenses "simply by giving up the unproductive missions, say those in India, Africa, and China." The Board is sustained by the minimum of contribution adequate to vindicate the professors of godliness, not by the application of principles to a distinct and certain work. The attitude of the Board seems to us to no small extent an instance of unconscious "false pretences." With ample piety, it pieces the incidents of success in isolated and often exceptional cases into a cover for the entire operations of the Board, and so maintains a certain hold upon the religious community embraced in Orthodoxy. The fact that the Board is really supported so stingily and grudgingly is itself an evidence that it does not present a good opportunity for investing money in doing a speedy and sure work of love. We must indeed ascribe this in a large measure to the secret protest of common sense against the pretence that God's care of his own offspring will not bring salvation unless man's Board procures "conversion,"-to the secret consciousness of every sensible man that this "conversion" is mere wood, hay, and stubble, still leaving the real work of Christian civilization to be done; but a chief reason for the unquestioned ill-success of the Board is in the fact that it does not present evidence that it can make a good use of means, as such a use is estimated, not by sentimental piety, but by sober common-sense, wisely judging of the duty which is first. It is an error to say that missions as such are made obligatory by the law of the Gospel and the words of Christ. They were in the time of the Apostles, and we are bound to fulfil the whole spirit of that command. And when a work is within our reach,- in India, in Hayti, in Liberia, - then we must do it. But to assume that money must be raised, and a mission undertaken at random, or beyond the sphere of clearly defined good opportunity, simply that we may think that we have done our duty in the matter of missions, is the serious error of many good men. Place a given church in the midst of a heathen community, and it must become, like the early Church, a missionary organization. Not so placed, it cannot as readily undertake the work of missions; and by the law of what it can well do, or do best,

it must choose or decline this work. The Board assumes that a certain attempt at missions is in itself a Christian duty, and it thus stands on a false basis in its appeal to the benevolent, to a great degree failing of good work, and almost wholly failing to engage the means and men of the Orthodox churches to an extent at all consistent with their professions of faith and duty.

We will add here but a single remark, that benevolent organizations like that of the American Board should confine their operations to gathering and administering funds in aid of those enterprises which can support their appeal by clear evidence of a good work already begun, and sure to be done to some extent even if no aid is rendered. We do not believe in throwing away help on a work that has taken no hold. It may display the benevolent, but it does not help the needy. It would be a noble enterprise to goad this eminently pious Board into a vigorous application of common sense to their operations, though we fear that it will not be undertaken soon enough to save the institution from a forced contraction which will be fatal to its support. Properly done, it would give for the first time a genuine vitality to its existence, a life deeper than sentiment. We do not forget that this basis for organized benevolence implies many new modes of Christian labor and enterprise, especially in the initiation of missions; but we think the growing sense of the Christian world will demand, and the course of events under Providence provide these. Although we may seem to deny the duty of seeking the lost, it would appear upon fuller consideration that we would rather improve the method of this search, that we would especially conduct it in the channels really opened by Providence. This may be truly called the Missionary Age upon which we are now entering. The wave of sentiment has rolled by, and its record is before us. The time to apply principle, to direct the forces of civilization to the work of redeeming peoples and lands, is now at hand. The laws and prospects of that work will engage the Christian and the statesman, the scholar and the saint, and prove by their hold upon governments and peoples with how great a joy in all hearts the day of redemption draweth nigh.

ART. VII. REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

Furn

THEOLOGY.

WE welcomed the first volume of Dr. Stevens's work in the Examiner for March, 1859. It is now brought to a close. The third volume,* now before us, continues the history of the Methodist movement in England, and sketches of the Methodist missions from England, after the death of Wesley in 1791, down to the great Jubilee in the hundredth year from the public or social beginnings of the movement, — the year 1839.

The author takes up the period in five divisions, making the first two about seven years each, the second ten each, and the last fourteen; and in each he gives, in successive chapters, the doings at the Conferences, and general progress of the cause, the lives, successes, and deaths of remarkable preachers, and then a review of the period.

If we were compelled to make comparisons where all is so interesting, perhaps we should single out as the most instructive portions the narrative of the slow and careful steps by which Methodism resigned the hope of reforming and regenerating the National Church while remaining in it;-the Conference, in 1792, deciding by lot to forbear giving the sacrament for a year, and forbidding Methodist service during church hours; in 1793, voting to grant the sacrament where unanimously desired, at the same time abolishing "all distinctions between ordained and unordained ministers"; in 1794, determining that the Lord's Supper should not be administered where the union of the society could be preserved without it; in 1795, that it should not be administered in the chapels on Sundays on which it is administered in the national churches. Next we should name as of rare interest the biographical portions of the volume; —for instance, the sketches of the scholars, Watson, Benson, Clarke; of the " village blacksmith" and the "Yorkshire farmer"; of Jonathan Saville, the poor little cripple, who made many rich and straight; and of many other eccentric and edifying spirits. And, finally, we should instance the narrative of the missions, the self-sacrifice manifested in the repeated invasions of Africa, just trembling on the verge of Quixotism, as full of affecting interest.

We are struck with two things, among many others, in reading these quaint and feeling accounts of the experiences and successes of converts; first, what a happy illustration they afford of the influence of the heart in the culture of the head, seen in the development of the faculty of interpreting Scripture and man; and, secondly, the extraordinary revelation made of the susceptibility of human nature to be impressed through sympathy, by the narratives of the effects of

The History of the Religious Movement of the Eighteenth Century, called Methodism By ABEL STEVENS, LL. D. Vol. III. New York: Carlton and Porter. 8vo. pp. 524.