to the men of the 17th century; but it is very questionable whether he would have preached as well or as much to the men of the 19th century as he now does. Here then is a class of writers, in whose history God seems to have made special provision that they should be trained to become effective as the practical writers of the church, bringing to the experience of the pastor all the leisure of the scholar, and grafting upon the meditations of the study all the unction, the simplicity, and the popular tact of the pulpit.

In addition to these peculiar preparations for general usefulness, the writings of the Puritans and Nonconformists come to us, as Americans, commended by considerations of singular force. The fathers of New-England were of that class of men. The Adam and Eve of those regions were fashioned of Puritan clay; and many of our peculiar institutions and our distinctive traits of national character may be traced, through that NewEngland ancestry, to the character of the Puritans of England. We have an hereditary right in their works and memory. Their writings are moulded by peculiar influences, that have yet left their traces upon our mental idiosyncrasy as a people. Connected then as the Puritans of the mother country were with our progenitors by every tie of piety and blood, their voice comes upon the ears of American Christians like a testimony from the graves of those revered forefathers, who planted upon our rugged northern shores the germs of our freedom, our knowledge, and our arts, while seeking only in the desert a refuge from persecution, and freedom to worship God; but who left, where they sought merely a shelter, the foundations of a new empire, stretching its territories already from the Atlantic to the Pacific, and shedding the influence of its commerce and its freedom over either continent.

The second of these eras, which have contributed to the Christian literature of this Society, is that of the great revival of religion, under the labors of Whitfield and the Wesleys in England, and the elder Edwards and the Tennents in our own country. It was a great religious movement, awakening from lethargy and recalling from perilous errors a portion of the English Establishment, infusing a new life of piety into the English Dissenters, as in our own country it supplied the destitute and awakened the formal from Georgia to New-Hampshire. It was an era, both here and in the parent country, of bitter controversy. The truths, recalled from their long con

cealment and urged with new zeal, were to be defended from the press as well as from the pulpit, or the open field, where so many of those preachers delivered their testimony. To this day it is that we owe the works of Doddridge and Edwards, that work of Venn which the Society has very recently republished, and the memoir of Edwards's disciple and friend, the glowing, suffering David Brainerd. In the necessities of that time we see, though to a less extent, a combination of the same causes which made the Nonconformists' writings what they were. The preacher was grafted on the student. Had not Edwards had the experience of those glorious revivals God permitted him to witness and to record, he could perhaps still have written the work "On the Religious Affections;" but it would have been a very different book. Without the resources of his rich pastoral experience it might have been as profound as the immortal Analogy of Butler, and as little fitted as that work to be generally popular with the great mass of readers.

The third of these memorable eras may be designated as the era of modern Christian enterprise. We know no fitter epithet to describe its varied activity, and its aggressive action on the ignorance of nominal Christendom and the wide wastes of heathenism. It began shortly after the breaking out of the French Revolution. It was an age when God seemed for a time to allow a new" hour and power of darkness," akin to that which brooded over the world when its Redeemer was about to suffer. Then boiled up from the lower deeps of the human heart floods of corruption, that, in ordinary ages, slumber on, dark and unseen, in their quiet concealment. Then steamed up, as it were from the nethermost abysses of hell, strange and hideous errors, that generally avoid the light of day, and the world was aghast at the open appearance of atheism, and the rejection by a great nation, as in mass, of their old ancestral faith. But, as if to illustrate his own government of the universe, then, to meet this revolt, rose up, from quarters the most distant, and some of them the most obscure, designs for good and enterprises of benevolence, of which the world had long seen no parallel. The Foreign Missions of the Christian church, the Sabbath School, the Tract Society itself, and the Bible Society, burst up, as in quick succession, and ere the carnival of the pit was ended, and while Satan seemed yet triumphing in his anticipated conquest of the world to impiety, the Christian faith received a fresh impulse, and the cause of the Saviour assumed an aggressive energy

it has never since lost. To this period belonged Buchanan and Pearce. In this period Wilberforce published that View of Religion in the higher classes, which was, in the judgment of the commentator Scott, the noblest protest in favor of the gospel made for centuries-a book that consoled and delighted that eminent statesman Burke on his dying bed, and gave to the church of Christ the lamented and beloved author of that immortal Tract" the Dairyman's Daughter," Legh Richmond. Parr, who could have, unhappily, little sympathy with its spirituality or its orthodoxy, pelted it with learned Greek, as a book, the beginning of which he had forgotten, the middle of which he could not understand, and to which, as a whole, he could not assent. Belsham assailed it, amongst other reasons, because its excellent author had spoken of Unitarianism as a sort of half-way house between orthodoxy and infidelity." But the attacks thus made upon the work of the Christian senator, proved comparatively powerless, and the book held on its way of widening and enduring usefulness. Its influence was most decisive, under God, in aiding the great work of reform, the effects of which are visible in the middle and higher classes of England. Then, too, wrote and labored Hannah More, and to the same period may be added Henry Martyn.

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All these three were periods of conflict. In the first and in the third, political contentions were intermingled with religious controversies. Wars and rumors of wars exasperated the fierce collisions between rival sects, or the strife that was waged between Christianity and those who cast off all fear, and mocked to his face their Maker and Judge. The second was indeed exclusively a period of religious controversy; but the points at issue were so momentous, and the zeal exhibited so ardent, that England and America were filled with the noise of inquiry and dispute, as the Gospel went on winning new and glorious triumphs amid fierce opposition. There was, as in the apostolic history, a wide door opened, and there were also " many opposers," and both Whitfield and Wesley were more than once, in Christian Britain, on the eve of a summary and ferocious martyrdom.

All these three eras were then eras of moral revolution. It is a familiar fact that revolutions produce great characters. Their great emergencies, awaken feeling and develop talent. Some mighty crisis paralyzes the weaker crowd, and summons forth the master spirit who can meet its demands, and reveals thus to the world his merits and his powers. And it is also

true, that, although the highest works of science do not issue from such times, the most stirring and popular books are often the progeny of such an age of turmoil and conflict. These orgasms of feeling, that shoot through the whole frame of a nation, may bring out much that is crude and extravagant, but they also lead to exertions of more than wonted power, and results of more than vulgar splendor. The best efforts of the best writers are sometimes traceable to the excitement of some such stirring era. Pascal's Provincial Letters, in which wit, argument, and eloquence are so splendidly blended, and, leaning on each other, group themselves around the cross of Christ, could not have been produced in the holiday leisure of some peaceful era. It needed the fierce controversies in which Jansenism lay bleeding under the feet of triumphant Jesuitism, and struggling as for life, while it testified, as from the dust, in behalf of many of the great truths of the Gospel--it needed, we say, such a conflict and such a peril to draw out a production so powerful even from the mighty heart and the massive intellect of a Pascal.

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There are works that seemingly can exist only as the birth of the throes and death-pangs of some great era of change and moral renovation. Such were the three eras to which we have alluded, and their character was imprinted on many of the works they produced, and which this Society reprints and disseminates. No other age, no lighter emergency could have called forth such intellectual strength and such depth of feeling, and made the volumes so well fitted as they are to tell upon heart of an entire nation. Works then written have the energy of the conflict and breathe for ever its strong passions. Their words are often battles. Had Bunyan never inhabited a dungeon, there to pore over the martyr annals of Fox's Acts and Monuments, we question whether the Pilgrim's Progress would have had its beautiful pictures of the Land of Beulah, a land of freedom, light and beauty, and we doubt whether that allegory had ever existed. Had Baxter never been an armychaplain, who must talk strong truths in plain terms, we question whether his works would have had all their passionate energy and their strong simplicity.

With regard, therefore, to those portions of the Society's publications which proceed from American authors, their origin is some evidence in favor of their adaptedness to our peculiar wants. With regard to all those works of British origin that

came from either of the great eras upon which we have remarked, we have in favor of their influence not only the character of the writers, but the character of the age in which they wrote and did battle for the truth of God as they believed it.

Taking now the literature of the Society, as prepared for this country in mass, we find in it evidently a variety and fulness of subjects that would seem to meet the varied demands of the church and the nation. For missionary literature, it has the memoirs of Brainerd, Buchanan, Schwartz, Henry Martyn, and Harriet Winslow. Does a pastor seek to train his flock to higher devotedness, where could be found a better manual than Baxter's Saints' Everlasting Rest, written, as it would seem, under the golden sky of the Delectable Mountains, and in full sight of the Celestial City? Where better companions than the biographies of Leighton, and Payson, and Pearce, and J. Brainerd Taylor? Against infidelity we have Bogue, (the work that was read, and with some considerable impressions of mind, by Napoleon in his last days,) and Morison, and Keith, and the treatises of Leslie and Watson, while others, on the same subject of Christian Evidences, commend themselves as the works of writers who were themselves recovered from infidelity, as the writings of Lyttleton, West, Jenyns, and our countryman Nelson. There is provision for every age. For the child, the Society has furnished the touching biographies of Nathan Dickerman, John Mooney Mead, and Mary Lathrop, with the juvenile works of Gallaudet, and some of those by the Abbotts. For those who love profound thought it has Foster, and for the lovers of brilliant imagination and glowing eloquence, the German Krummacher. Of the Nonconformists and of the cotemporaries of Edwards we have already spoken. Few writers of our time have caught so successfully, on some pages, the spirit of Baxter as J. G. Pike, three of whose works the Society re.publishes. As models of usefulness in the various walks of life, and in either sex, we have the biographies of Normand Smith, the example of the Christian tradesman; and of Harlan Page, the private church member laboring for souls; of Kilpin, of Hannah Hobbie, and of Caroline Hyde. The child just tottering from its cradle is met by the Society with the half-cent Scripture Alphabet, while, for the last stages of human life, they have Burder's Sermons to the Aged, printed in type that suits it, for the dimmer eyes of old age. Furnished at every variety of price, and in every form and size, as are the Tracts