sympathies and profoundest religious convictions cannot but give to this wonderful collection of writings-to the divine spirit of beauty, power, love, moral earnestness that breathes through it is hardened into a mere theological homage to the letter; even to the letter of a particular text, of a particular translation; the text being known all the while to be partly fraudulent, and the translation to be considerably erroneous; yet both text and translation zealously maintained, that people's faith may not be shaken. We worship the Bible. We allow of no religious truth except biblically deduced opinions; no religious education without Bible, whole and unmutilated, for reading and spelling-book; no religious instruction for grown men and women without a Bible-text for motto and preface; no religious worship even, without a Bible-chapter interpolated at the right time and place between prayer and hymn. Morality, religion, theology, must all be biblical. Religion is not in ourselves, but in the book; the sense of which is to be got at by hard reading. Inspiration is a thing that was once; that is now past and distant, external to us, and to be brought near by 'evidences.' Christianity is a congeries of opinions to be proved; the materials of the proof lying in the Bible, or in books proving the authenticity and inspiration of the Bible. The end of all which is, that the Bible is not understood, is not appreciated, is precisely the least understood and appreciated book that men read." pp. 40-42.

Early days in the Society of Friends, exemplifying the Obedience of Faith in some of its First Members. By Mary Ann Kelty. London.

The Protestant Exiles of Zillerthal; their Persecutions and Expatriation from the Tyrol, on separating from the Romish Church and embracing the Reformed Faith. Translated from the German of Dr. Rheinwald, of Berlin, by John B. Saunders. Second Edition. London.

Des Ameliorations Materielles dans leurs Rapports avec la Liberte, par C. Pecqueur. Paris. 12mo. pp. 363.

Cours d'Histoire de la Philosophie Morale au dix-huitième Siècle, Professè a la Faculte des Lettres en 1819 et 1820, par M. V. Cousin, Premiere Partie. Ecole Sensualiste, publieè par M. G. Vacherot. 8vo. pp. 354.

Euvres completes de Platon, traduites du Grec en Français, accompagnées d'Argumens philosophiques, de Notes historiques et philologiques. Par Victor Cousin. Tome XIII. Appendice.

This volume completes the great enterprise of M. Cousin, to which he has devoted the labors of nearly twenty years. Every student of modern literature can now find easy access to the thoughts of the Athenian master, as they are here clothed in the enticing and graceful style of one of the best French prose writers. This admirable translation is not the least service, which M. Cousin has rendered to the interests of philosophical learning. The reception, which it has found among us, is a good omen for those who believe that the highest truth is not the ex

clusive privilege of the scholar. May it help to diffuse more widely the pure love of beauty, the spirit of contemplation, and the clear perception of moral good, which alone can save our age!

Ueber Shakspeare's dramatische Kunst und sein Verhältniss zu Calderon und Goethe. Von Dr. Hermann Ulrici. Halle. In this work the author gives a succinct history of the English Drama up to the time of Shakspeare, thus putting the reader in possession of the poet's point of sight; a picture of the age in which he lived, when the pomp of the middle ages acted strongly on the mind set free by the Protestant Reforma. tion. Then follows an account of the poet's life, and the greater part of the book is devoted to "a development of Shakspeare's poetic vision of the world." This book is spoken of in the Halle Allgemeine Literatur Zeitung in terms of high commendation. The author has the "Philosophic depth," which we vainly look for in Schlegel's criticism of the great poet.

Geschichte des Urchristenthums durch A. Fr. Gfrörer, Professor Bibliothekar in Stuttgart. I. Das Jahrhundert des Heils. 2 vols. 8vo. II. Die Heilige Sage. 2 vols. 8vo. III. Das Heiligthum und die Wahrheit. Stuttgart. 1838-1840.

Professor Gfrörer is the author of another work, "Philo und die Alexandrinische Theosophie," which he regards as the vestibule of his present edifice. In the early volumes, as we understand, he attempts to derive Christianity from the Essenes, but in the latter, obeying the public cry against Strauss, he attempts to find its origin in Jesus. It appears to be a work of great pretensions and little merit, if we may judge from two able articles upon it, one in the Berlin Jahrbücher, and the other in the Halle Allg. Literatur Zeitung.

Rabbinische Quellen und Parallelen zu neutestamentlichen Stellen mit Benutzung der Schriften von Lightfoot, Wetstein Meuschen, Schöttgen, Danz etc. Zusammengestellt von F. Nork. Leipzig. Svo.

This is the last production of a writer formerly hostile to Christianity. His real name is Korn; he has been a Jewish Priest, but has lately come over to Christianity.

Der Somnambulismus von Prof. Friedr. Fischer. in Basel. Vol. I. Das Schlafwandeln und die Vision. Vol. II. Der thierische Magnetismus. Vol. III. Das Hellsehen und die Besessenheit. 8vo.

Historische Entwickelung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel. Zu naherer Verständisgung des wissenschaftlichen Publicums mit der neuesten Schule dargestellt, von Heinrich Chalybäus. 2d edition. 8vo. Dresden. Moritz.

THE DIAL.

VOL. I.

JANUARY, 1841.

No. III.

MAN IN THE AGES.

THE ages have presented man in a two-fold aspect, as man, as not man. Human things, constitutions, politics, laws, religions, all have gone, either on the fact, rather we might say, have grown out of the intrinsic reality of man's individual worth, or else, and contrary to this, on the tacit assumption of man's individual worthlessness. With the one, man, the living soul, the individual in his sole being, is more than king, noble, hierarch, church, or state; not he theirs or for them, but they nothing save for him; with the other, state, church, hierarch, noble, king, each is more than man; he theirs and for them, he little or nothing save as a fraction of the general order, a part and instrument of the whole. Lactantius has preserved to us a quaint illustration, which he refers to an earlier antiquity than his own, in which the course of each man is compared to the letter Y, and as he comes forward into action, through the point whence it divides itself into two branches, he passes either in the direction of the one, or in that of the other, through sin to death, or through holiness to life. The ages of our race have presented a like divergency. They have parted off in a direction congruous to man's true nature, or into a direction incongruous and contrary to it, verging and branching out, now toward hell, now toward heaven.

These divergencies, whence are they? Not out of time, which rolls over man as a flood; not out of place, which surrounds him everywhere; not out of any outward power

pressing on him by laws of adamantine necessity; not out of such things exterior to his being. They are of himself, tendencies in his own nature to the high and the low, the true and the false, the free and the servile, the divine and the demoniac. The ages of man are not centuries of time or chronological periods of fact-history. They are the garments spun and woven out of man's own nature to clothe him with, which he wears till they are outworn, then drops off for a new robe, likewise self-evolved. Their quality is of course one with the nature out of which they grow. The robes are as the filaments, these latter as the interior life, out of which they are drawn.

The Fall of Man-that first great evolving of the lower nature, wherein his essential worth is lost in admiration and pursuit of something exterior- a mystery, which all nations hold in uncertain tradition, and of which the earliest records, even those of the Hebrew Scriptures, give but a very general notice is indeed his fall; his fall from a spiritual preeminence over outward things into a vicious servitude to nature and outward things. The highest transcendentalism, reviled as it is, for soaring so far above the reach of humanity into the midst of remote skyey vapors, has never yet been able to soar up to the level of man's true height and destiny. It is the pure etherial region of spirit, spirit that quickens and reduces to one all that exists, wherein man has his true life and abode. There spirit is all; phenomena of sense are but phantasms. The man lives within, and the inward life communicates itself to all without. God is first, dwelling in the soul, making body and nature his temple and his vesture. The soul converses first with God, through him with the world and itself. His fall is from this high state. He sinks from God under the world, from faith to sight, from spirit to flesh, from freedom to servitude. The ancient Grecians had an expressive mode of representing such servitude in any of its instances, saying that the man is less than pleasure, less than money, less than whatever it be which enthrals him. In his fall, we may likewise say, man becomes less than nature, less than the world, less than the body. Now, the very moment this depression of the true manhood begins, that moment begins the merging of soul, of individual worth, in exterior worthless appendages. The

tree of knowledge of good and evil-call it what you will; the whole wonderful narrative symbolizes this one thing, free spirit enslaved to sensual nature, soul lessened below flesh. The permanent I subjects and enthrals itself to the changeful MINE: all which can be brought within the compass of this same MINE is sought rather than the being and growth of the MYSELF. Such Man's first debasement, fountain of all his reputed worthlessness, in the successions of the ages.

In an Abel we have a type of the rise and return of the soul to its true dignity. He is the man, the soul living in faith; that is the highest to be said of any man. But he stands almost solitary. Cain and his sons, morally his sons I mean, predominate as examples of all who prefer man's appendages to man, that is, sight to faith, nature to soul, flesh to spirit. Plato proposes as a fundamental principle of political institutions, that the soul shall be deemed of highest worth, the body next, property third and least. With reason, for soul alone is absolute being, the other two but relative contingencies, body least remote, property farthest off. Those men and those human things, which have Cain for their prototype, reverse the Platonic maxim; with them body or property, we can hardly say which, is first and second, soul third, and either least, or, as some improvements of these later ages have taught us, nothing. Now and then, as in an Enoch or a Noah, man develops himself in his manhood above its appendages and accidents, strong in the strength of an inward life. But Noah is left alone. Universal corruption, unchecked, nay, cherished, diffused, is in the severe phrase of Tacitus, the sæculum, the age, the morality of the times, into which others thrust themselves to be festive, frolick some beasts, spending their mirth or rage upon the dreaming bigot, who fancies there is such a life as spirit, and dares to preach the obsolete doctrine of righteousness. The age ends, as we might look for, in violence filling it. Other end it could not have. Truth, Good, Rectitude; this is infinite, and infinite to each and all. Thing, property, appendage, this is finite, and can come but in crumbling fragments to each and all. The more perfectly the inward self is developed in forms of faith and love and uprightness, the better it is for all; the infinite of right and good is as boundless and