being generally and generously read. The registry of his name or productions on the Index Expurgatorius would only insure him a brisker sale and a wider audience. Commingled heterodoxy, mischief, and fun put up by a skillful hand, and served in sweetened or gilded doses, are sure of a very general swallow. He is evidently endowed with that sense of enjoyment, without a very poignant sense of responsibility, which enables him to smile genially over triumphs viewed by many of his opponents as unfavorable to human well-being.

The large share of the present volume embraces a powerful onslaught upon Homeopathy. And yet in the perusal we are tempted to suspect that his ostentatious and extended harangues against that system are but a pretext for certain brief but very fatal admissions against the Materia Medica of which he stands professional advocate. He admits that said Materia Medica entire, with the exception of a brief catalogue of specifics, might as well be sunk in the ocean. If so, then the adoption of Homeopathy is but the substitution of a fraus pia for a fraus nefanda. Our own use for the first half of our life, and disuse for the last half, of the whole catalogue of pukes and purgatives, both for our own case and for all whose health is under our care, have rendered us permanently sus picious that the entire system is a superstition as noxious as it is nasty. We have not the slightest doubt that the disappearance of disease, of either acute form or mild, is as frequent, to say the least, and as marked, in the hands of the dispenser of the glob. sac. as of the calomel and jalap. Whither we tend we are unable to say; but we are evidently in a bad way. Perhaps glob. sac. and pilulæ farinaceæ are the half-way house to nothing at all! That result the Parkman Professor apparently anticipates; and he has carefully provided a full page of assurance that after medicine has pretty much ceased to exist, the necessity for a Hygienic profession will none the less fully remain.

The main value of the volume lies in the article on Vital Mechanics. The Professor here discusses, with the exactness of a savan and the brilliancy of the poet, some of the deepest questions of philosophy in a bold yet reverent and serious spirit. The main question is, Can the phenomena of vitality be accounted for from the general laws of surrounding nature without a special vital principle? He argues the question by both an ascending and a descending process; by the former he attains an affirmative reply, a reply which, however, is subsequently invalidated if not reversed by the results of the latter process. Starting from the lower ground, he

finds for every vital process a parallel out of the sphere of life. Life itself is found to be but the assemblage of phenomena scattered through inorganic nature. But then comes the great question of the first origination of the living organism. He excludes, under this question, the theory of spontaneous generation; not as dangerous, but as proofless. He excludes the theory of development, and, by parity, of natural selection; for the geologic record clearly shows, through successive periods, the uprising of new forms of full organic life without parentage or immediate ancestry. For this sudden high organization there is, by the ascending process, no accounting. He, indeed, draws up an imaginative programme, showing how it might be effected so far as vegetation is concerned. In the proper conditions, vegetation, like crystallization, may be flung out into form, and once begun, may be continued by the ordinary laws of vital action. But coming to the origination of the higher forms of organized life, the Parkman Professor furnishes a reply consisting essentially of a dexterous collapse. Ascending from the grounds of material nature, there is no fairly imaginable method of accounting for the sudden uprise of complex forms attested by the revelations of geology.

He next, assuming the Creator, institutes the descending process. He begins by making a fine generalization, distinguishing the objects of nature into two classes, namely, those to which the Deity sustains active relations alone, and those to which his relations are passive as well as active. The former objects simply operate as actuated by divine power; the latter have a portion of self-action, to which the Deity stands neutral. The latter are super-material. Ascending, material nature cannot attain their height. There is nothing in inorganic nature that can parallel the phenomena of self- active thought. This can be furnished only by the descending process from God to nature. The act of introducing such a self-actively thinking being into nature is equivalent to the miracle of Theology. But soul being accepted as from above, a new and easier light is poured down upon the vital phenomena. The rigidity of the vital operations, as borrowed from surrounding nature, is fused, and they become more truly lifelike.

We could wish that not merely one article but the whole volume had been in this grand field of thought. Dr. Holmes is little bound by prescriptive authority, by fear of logical or moral consequences, or by foregone conclusions. He is neither a timid nor a noncommittal, but a positive and outspoken thinker; and as such, his results possess something of the reliability of a fresh authority.

Liberalistic as appear some of his views of conversational veracity, he has evidently a most serious reverence for absolute scientific and moral TRUTH. He is not amusing his readers with mere beauty or ingenuity of speculation. He abjures all fancy-colored haziness and all sham profundity. He shows no propensity for dreamy pantheism, or for a degrading materialism. He recognizes the spiritual nature of man as a soul, the free nature of man as an agent. His deity is not a Nature, of feminine gender, but a personal, ever-living God. And he clothes his philosophy in a style vivid with the fancy of a poet, but a fancy subdued to the severest subserviency to the clearest, freshest, most forcible expression of the thought.

History, Biography, and Topography.

History of Latin Christianity, including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicolas V. By HENRY HART MILMAN, D. D., Dean of St. Paul's. In eight volumes. Vols. 4-8. 12mo., pp. 555. New York: Sheldon & Co. Boston: Gould & Lincoln.

We have repeatedly called attention to this great work. It has been put through the press by the enterprising publishers at the rate of a volume a month. It is now completed. It is an honor to English authorship, and it is presented to the American public in a form honorable to the American publishers. At a time when public affairs have so much diminished the number of issues from the press, this noble publication is specially entitled to the notice of scholars and the general religious public. To its breadth of philosophic view, its lofty judicial tone of historic impartiality, its pictorial power of narration, its eloquent, transparent style, we have borne ample testimony.

Henry Hart Milman is the son of Sir Francis Milman, Physician to George III. He was born in 1791, was educated at Eaton and at Brazen Nose College, Oxford. He subsequently became a Fellow at that University. In 1815 he produced his drama of Fazio. He took orders in 1817, and afterward published "Samor, the Lord of the Bright City," a heroic poem possessing a high order of poetical finish, founded upon some passages in the history of ancient Britain. After the publication of the “Fall of Jerusalem," a dramatic poem, he was appointed Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford. In this position he published three other dramatic poems, "The Martyr of Antioch," "Belshazzar," and "Anne Boleyn." The poetry of Milman is characterized by an elevated imagination and a chaste style, yet it is wanting in an

intense poetic spirit. His genius is more rhetorical than poetical. His imaginative faculty transferred to prose, exerts its full power in giving to his historical productions a rich pictorial and living interest.

His first production in the historic field, published in 1829, was his "History of the Jews." This was reissued in this country by the Harpers, and forms three serial volumes of their Family Library. It placed the results of modern research before the public in popular form. Some complaints have been uttered against it as too much tinged with naturalism; but Milman cannot be ranked with the Neologists. His second and greater historical work was issued in 1840, namely, a " History of Christianity from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire." This work, embracing three volumes, was republished by the Harpers in a single large octavo. Some traces, perhaps, the style of this work exhibits of the author's study of Gibbon. It is elaborate, graphic, philosophical, leading the reader captive in its stately march. It takes full issue with the mythicism of Straus, then scarcely known in this country. It accords full faith to the evangelical miraculous history of Jesus in a complete life of the Saviour, with which the work commences. There is little, if anything, indeed, which ought not to meet the demands of the most uncompromising orthodoxy. Like the "History of Latin Christianity," it is complete in itself, and yet one is the appropriate chronological successor of the other. This last must be pronounced his greatest, his truly monumental work. Milman is at present Dean of St. Paul's, to which position he was preferred in 1849. He has be sides contributed numerous articles to the "Quarterly Review," has published a sumptuously illustrated edition of Horace, and an annotated edition of Gibbon.

We can adorn our page with but a single specimen of the work under notice.

The essential inherent supremacy of the spiritual over the temporal power, as of the soul over the body, as of eternity over time, as of Christ over Cesar, as of God over man, was now an integral part of Christianity. There was a shuddering sense of impiety in all resistance to this ever-present rule; it required either the utmost strength of mind, desperate courage, or desperate recklessness, to confront the fatal and undefined consequences of such resistance. The assertion of these powers by the Church had been, however intermittingly, yet constantly growing, and had now fully grown into determinate acts. The Popes had not merely claimed, they had established many precedents of their right to excommunicate sovereigns, and so of virtually releasing subjects from their allegiance to a king under sentence of outlawry; to call sovereigns to account not merely for flagrant outrages on the Church, but for moral delinquencies, especially those connected with marriage and concubinage; to receive kingdoms by the cession of their sovereigns as feudal fiefs; to grant kingdoms which had no legitimate lord. or of which the lordship was doubtful and contested, or such as were conquered

from infidels, barbarians, or heretics: as to the empire, to interfere in the election as judge both in the first and last resort. Ideas obtain authority and dominion, not altogether from their intrinsic truth, but rather from their constant asseveration, especially when they fall in with the common hopes and fears, the wants and necessities of human nature. The mass of mankind have neither leisure nor ability to examine them; they fatigue, and so compel the world into their acceptance; more particularly if it is the duty, the passion, and the interest of one great associated body to perpetuate them, while it is neither to the peculiar function, nor the manifest advantage of any large class or order to refute them. The Pope had, throughout the strife, an organized body of allies in the camp of the enemy; the King or Emperor none, at least none below the nobles, who would not have preferred the triumph of the spiritual power. If these ideas are favored by ambiguity of language, their progress is more sure, their extirpation from the mind of man infinitely more difficult. The Latin clergy had been busy for many centuries in asserting, under the specious name of their liberty, the supremacy of the Church, which was their own supremacy; for several centuries in asserting the autocracy of the Pope as Head of the Church. This, which was true, at least on the acknowledged principles of the time, in a certain degree, was easily extended to its utmost limits; and when it had become part of the habitual belief, it required some palpable abuse, some startling oppugnancy to the common sense of mankind, to awaken suspicion, to rouse the mind to the consideration of its groundwork, and to decompose the splendid fallacy.

Splendid indeed it was, as harmonizing with man's natural sentiment of order. The unity of the vast Christian republic was an imposing conception, which, even now that history has shown its hopeless impossibility, still infatuates lofty minds; its impossibility, since it demands for its Head not merely that infallibility in doctrine so boldly claimed in later times, but absolute impeccability in every one of its possessors; more than impeccability, an all-commanding, indefeasible, unquestionable majesty of virtue, holiness, and wisdom. Without this it is a baseless tyranny, a senseless usurpation. In those days it struck in with the whole feudal system, which was one of strict gradation and subordination; to the hierarchy of Church and State was equally wanting the Crown, the Sovereign Liege Lord.-Vol. iv, p. 460.

Memoir of Nathaniel Emmons, with Sketches of his Friends and Pupils. By EDWARDS A. PARK. 8vo., pp. 468. Boston: Congregational Board of Publication. 1861.

It is a great man, Mr. Professor Park, whose biography needs so big a book! Near five hundred octavo pages between covers assure us at a glance of a magnificent subject of narration or a magnificent display of waste paper. Such were our anticipations at taking this massy volume from our table, and proceeding, in violation of Sidney Smith's rule, to read a trifle before reviewing. The result predicted by Sydney from so preposterous a course actually followed. We contracted a "prejudice," perhaps we may say rather a decided passion, for "old Dr. Emmons."

Whoso sails, or rather steams, down the Connecticut river, nigh unto Middletown, will find himself involved, unless very careful, in a snarl of "Haddams" as numerous and almost as perplexing as the intricacies of "New England divinity." There are, if we mistake not, East Haddam and West Haddam, Old Haddam and Young Haddam, Middle Haddam and Haddam Neck, besides, perhaps, others too tedious to mention and more tedious to inhabit,