fitted for his place and for future effort. D'Aubigné is evidently a student and a learned man. No one can read his History of the Reformation, without finding it, and feel ing it, on every page. Wherever authorities are wanted, they are sought out and given, until the reader can not doubt that the truth is with the historian. The number and variety also of references and quotations, evince the same fact, and secure for the historian that confidence on the part of the reader, which is so agreeable to the reader himself, as also highly necessary to give any permanent effect to the effort of the historian. This volume evinces the same thing. From its character, it has less to do with authorities; yet no one can fail to see, in the very thought, and even mode of thinking peculiar to the author, that he is a wide read and deep thinking man, in connection with the subject on which he discourses, and which is so dear to his heart.

Again, d'Aubigné is a French

man.

We mean by this he seems to possess the volatile, airy temperament and earnestness, which is not the earnestness of a regular John Bull, and this, we think, fits him for his place. By an airy temperament, no one will think we mean a light and trifling one; but a sort of buoyant, pleasant enthusiasm, which any one can see in the writings of Saurin and others of the French clergy, and which is a sort of national growth or spontaneity of French character. There are two kinds of powerful enthusiasm in this world-one which drives through a mountain, and another that can scale its summit-and d'Aubigné's is the latter of these. The first may be needed in very great exigencies. Luther lived when men were wanted to drive through a mountain, and Luther was the man. We never think of him, far off amid the storms of the Reformation, but we think of Atlas towering up and holding the

The story opens

D'Aubigne, also, is a genius. He might write a poem-perhaps a great one. What a dramatic power is seen summoning up and guiding the several characters that are made to pass in review before us in the History of the Reformation, till the men, good and bad of that age, stand out with a distinctness, like the Patience and Faith of old John Bunyan, or Gabriel and Satan of Paradise Lost! The history of Luther, as given in these volumes, is a perfect and great drama. like one. Every thing works towards the development of the character of the great hero. Things gather around him for the final close. At that point--his standing before the Diet at Worms, in 1521-the one thing which more effectually than aught else broke Rome's power-we see him towering up like some lone hill, around whose awful breast the storms close and mutter, threatening death; yet still with a light touching its beautiful summit far off in a higher atmosphere, where the storms of this world could not intercept the blaze from the eternal sun. That sun was the light of truth. It came from Heaven on Luther; and, being from Heaven, it dispersed the fearful darkness about him at Worms; and showed all Germany, and with it the world, the awful errors, with the horrible foulness of the mistress of abominations, against which Luther warred. We know of no one in this day, who can possibly be matched with d'Aubigné in this respect, except Carlyle. Dif

fering in every other respect,— as wide asunder as the poles, save in their love of what each esteems truth, Carlyle, in his French Rev. olution, and in his Past and Present, makes the past, with its living, breathing men, stare upon you, like actual, touchable realities. His characters stream along like a moving diorama in a picture gallery. There they are. You see them feel you have facts before you. So it is with d'Aubigné. One knows who and what lived, when Luther stood and grappled with and throttled the full grown portrait of Romish sin! The same vivid, breathing mind is in this volume of miscellanies. Here are no characters to rise up and stalk along over the stage; yet the power is there to conjure them if necessary, and you feel it.

D'Aubigné is also a man of judg. ment. We mean large capacity of common sense. In a man of his apparent mind and temperament, such as we have supposed his to be, there would be likely to be a deficiency in this respect. Ardent, earnest minds see not always the plain land-marks of common sense-but shoot along, valuing more the speed than the accuracy with which the path is kept, in their course of progression. D'Aubigné has this earnestness. He shoots along with great rapidity. Sometimes the movement is so rapid, that we shut our eyes as in a rail car, actually afraid to see where we are going. Yet it will be found on re-reading any portion of d'Aubigné's great work, and comparing it with veritable history, that the author has a something in him which balances his mind, keeps him with the truth in the midst of prejudices, lets him see facts clear and distinct when the heart is in an earnest and fiery glow, and thus enables him to present a historic period with liveliness and warmth, at the same time that it preserves the actual verity and broad exhibition of a Hume or a Mackintosh.

Let those who would doubt, test d'Aubigné by this method, and the result will fully sustain our commendation.

But, above all, d'Aubigné's heart is in the right place, and this gives him at once the warm sympathies of the whole Christian world. He began life, and he has lived, where error could be seen, and was seen, just as it is. He has lived, too, where error has put on the most perfect and fascinating garb it can possibly assume. It pleased God, however, to exhibit to him the system of evangelical truth,—that truth he embraced-and grace has evidently engrafted it into his soul, with a power only possible to grace. He is one who has drank deep, and still drinks, of the life stream that lives forever. From Christ he has drawn, and still draws, all that is good in himself, that is useful in his teaching, that is the basis of his hopes for future usefulness. No one could dream, while reading him, of any other than a Gospel, whose first and whose whole doctrine was salvation by grace. Out of it are the issues of life. It flows from the fount fast by the throne of the liv ing God. Whoever would drink of this stream, he would have to look here.

Who would teach it to others, should look here. That stream is a river, wide and deep, offering life to millions. He would do his part, both by what he has writ and may write, to disseminate truth as it is, that others with him might see its salvation. Those who read d'Aubigné will catch this spirit, and say there is a man evidently raised up by God, to do no inconsiderable share in saving a world.

There is perhaps one other particular in which we would express an individual opinion of the mind of this author-it is the utter absence of a something or other, easi ly seen, but not easy to describe, yet which may perhaps be characterized as a subtle infusion of the Ger

man mind. However much others may value, in this country, the writings of evangelical men in Germany, so many of which have been translated into English within the last few years, we hold them in less es teem. There is, through the whole German mind, a sort of indistinctness, as if most of its philosophical opinions were loosely held; a sort of grasping after what is not, and a guessing of what may be-which, as it seems to us, is not natural to the plain, straight forward, common sense Saxon blood and stock of New England, and which seems not in all respects favorable to rational religion. Actual revelation becomes intermixed with what may be true, yet still is not revealed, until the actual line between the two is not easily seen or is forgotten; and hence one of the greatest of all dangers to the evangelical system of truth-viz. : that its friends shall fall into the habit of not drawing all their tenets from the Bible itself. Those who have read some of the most evangelical of these books, have perhaps caught themselves wondering at the thoughtlessness with which this or that author mixed up, in the life and character of some Bible worthy, what was revealed with what might be true. The story is made out with all the minuteness of a Dante describing a scene in purgatory, and the picture filled up with a fullness that puts to shame one of Hogarth's pictures. Now, this may be defended on the score of probability, of its necessity to give distinctness to facts and scenes, and that such scenes and facts are useful to stimulate and assist devotion;-but we must answer, that things probable, if not revealed, may be false; that if the picture received but a few strong strokes from the pencil of Heaven, man can not improve it; and that it is both unphilosophical and false in fact, to say that minuteness in painting, either by words or the pencil, gives force to a whole picture. What we need,

to give effect to a fine scene in Bible history, or the character of an apostle, is a few life-like strokes, given with a pen of truth; the Bible has done this for us; and it is an act of presumption to attempt to go beyond this, and fill up with a human pen what was left untouched by that of inspiration. In the writings of d'Aubigné nothing of this kind forces itself on the attention. It is a wonder that this is so, placed as he may be said to have been, in the very midst of it. Yet, like a common sense man, he addresses common sense men, and seems to have drawn his philosophy and inspiration from the plain letter of the Bible. This gives a distinctness to his conceptions, which is one of the chiefest charms of his books, and is probably one of the great secrets of their extensive popularity.

Entertaining these views of the character and writings of d'Aubigné, we can not but survey him, in his present exposed and remarkable position, with an interest such as we award to few living benefactors of our race. If performing a work for the intellectual and spiritual good of man, such as is performed by few, does not entitle him to the name of benefactor, then the name is misapplied; but we should like to be pointed to some of the great men in the world's estimate-either on the battle-field or in council-who have done, or are doing, so much for which the world should be thankful, as this same humble minded, spiritual teacher of the word of Christ. God, by his providence, has placed him in a most eminent sphere. He is where Europe, and the world, are looking at him. He is in the midst of the very sources of truth in history he is investigating, and he seems to have discovered many things never heard of before. Yet what he has discovered, seems but the filling up of the known outline of history; and his filling up has that verisimilitude with the outline, that

carries conviction along with it. He is also performing a work as teacher, second to none. Fifty young men, well instructed at Geneva, will do more for France, Switzerland and the states of Germany, than four times that number raised up in other countries. They are part and parcel of the soil they stand on; and they acquire from this fact, and the feeling it brings with it, a power to do good, such as can be gained from nothing else. Holding the position he does, he becomes, with his school, an object of interest to Christians abroad, and a stimulant to double exertion. Is it nothing, when demands are made on the churches for the purposes, for instance, of the Foreign Evangelical Society, that God has his teachers in the very regions we wish to reach, and men of powers that command, as well as win, respect? The churches want faith, when these demands are made-here they have the proof of what God is willing to do, and is doing, right before them; d'Aubigné, therefore, in his position, cheers the heart of Faith, and opens the hand liberally, which else

perhaps were closed on its gold, from the convulsive graspings of a doubting heart.

Entertaining too the views we do of this man and his writings, we would see these writings in every hamlet and dwelling in the land. There is nothing in them but what harmonizes well with plain, genuine New England piety. The humblest spirit among our hills or in our val lies, as well as the most gifted in our cities, may read these books and gain wisdom,-wisdom from the beautiful spirit they exhibit-as well as gather a fund of information, which can be obtained from no other source. He speaks as one whose eye-sight has been purged by the pure beam that comes from the eternal one-feels as one whose soul scems to have been baptized in the fountains of eternal love,-those who read him, we think, will find their own spiritual eye brightened, and the heart brought into a fuller and completer sympathy with the heart of the governing Power over all-Christ! - the Redeemer and King.

STODDARDEANISM is a name given by common consent to the peculiar views respecting the admission of persons to the sacrament of the Lord's Supper, which were first publicly advocated by the Rev. Soloman Stoddard of Northampton. He was ordained pastor of the church in that town in 1672. He is said to have been on other points a decided Calvinist, and was a man of much learning, of fervent piety, and held a high rank among the New England clergy.

A Historical Sketch of Stoddardeanism, with some account of its effect upon the churches in Old Hampshire County,

Mass.

In order to understand the origin of the peculiar sentiments advocated by Stoddard, it will be necessary to mention some historical facts, to show that the public mind was prepared to embrace his views, and that he himself was made desirous of finding arguments to support his doctrines.

In 1631, the General Court of Massachusetts Bay passed an order that "for time to come none should be admitted to the freedom of the body politic, but church members," and none were received to the churches in those days unless they gave evidence of having been renewed by the power of the Holy Ghost.

By this law all unregenerate persons were cut off from the priviliges of freemen. It will be readily seen that the spirit of liberty that existed in the hearts of non-professors as well as professors, would naturally lead to one of two results; to a lowering of the terms of admission to the churches, or to the repeal of the law. In 1657, the Legislature recommended to the churches, to call a council of ministers to discuss questions relative to membership. The council convened in June of that year, and continued in session more than two weeks. It was decided, that those parents, who had been baptized in infancy, if moral and respectable, were bound to own the covenant and have their children baptized. By so doing, we suppose they became so far members of the church, as to be eligible to civil offices. This was called the half-way covenant. Those who owned it, brought their children to baptism, but came not to the communion.

There seems to have been two reasons, that operated upon the minds of the council, and lead them to the result we have named; one was the political reason already mentioned; the other was the fact that so many children were growing up without baptism. Having come out from the Episcopal church, where almost all the adults of the congregation were communicants and the children baptized, it was shocking to their feelings to see so many grow ing up without bearing the seal of the covenant. The influence which the institutions of the mother country still had over them, made them feel, as if all were heathen, over whom the name of the Trinity had not been pronounced.

In 1688, at the accession of William and Mary, the law that required church-membership as a test of citizenship, was repealed. The churches however still continued rigid in the examination of members for full communion. They were

required not only to regard themselves as regenerate persons, but to give evidence of it amounting as near to absolute certainty as the nature of the case would admit. It is probable that through fear of admitting some who were not Christians, they excluded some that were. In the latter part of the seventeenth century, and in the first part of the eighteenth, it appears that many persons who were regarded by the community as regenerate, were kept back from offering themselves for admission to the church, because they were not themselves so fully satisfied of the reality of their piety, as they supposed they should be. The latter part of the seventeenth century, was a time of great religious declension; the churches. diminished in numbers, and some believed that a change in the terms of admission would have a favorable influence upon the cause of religion.

Such was the state of public sentiment respecting the admission of members to the church in the early part of Mr. Stoddard's ministry.

In 1704, Mr. S. preached a sermon from Ex. xii. 47 and 48, which was published in 1707, in which he avowed his belief that unregenerate persons might come to the Lord's supper. The substance of his argument was this, that regeneration was not a test of fitness for eating the passover, and should not therefore be a test of fitness for the sacrament of the Lord's supper. The following skeleton of the sermon may be found in the life of president Edwards.

1. "It is not to be imagined that John the Baptist judged all that were baptized by him to be regenerate."

2. "If unregenerate persons might not be baptized, the Pharisees would not be blamed for neglecting baptism."

3. "The children of God's people, who were usually unregenerate, ought to be baptized."

4. "A minister who knows him