union of each with the living vine. Let him who reads the New Testa ment in its spiritual and sublime simplicity, without the blind guidance of early tradition and the corrupting glosses of the Fathers, judge for himself which of these theories is scriptural.

One question more may help to put the subject in a still clearer light. How does a man become a member of "the body of Christ," and therefore a member of that 'church' which is his body? What child that reads the Bible, and has not been diligently taught to misunderstand it, can fail to answer this question aright? Is it by the ordinance of baptism that a man is united to Christ? Simon Magus was baptized; and the validity of his baptism was never called in question. But Simon Magus was not a member of Christ's body. Is it by any formal and complete connection with a particular assembly or visible society of Christ's disciples, that a man is united to the Redeemer, and is made a branch of the true vine ? Where is the scriptural evidence that the Apostles received any man to baptism-much more, where is the evidence that they "confirmed" him, or by any form received him to complete and permanent membership in an organized society of Christians-unless they first had reason to believe that Christ had already received him as a disciple, and thus that he was already reconciled to God by virtue of a personal union with the Redeemer ? The man who intelligently and honestly offers himself for membership in a society of Christians, does so not in order to become a Christian, but because he is a Christian, and as such desires the benefits of Christian communion. His presenting himself there, if it is done intelligently and honestly, implies that he comes as one of Christ's disciples to join himself to the company of his fellow disci

ples, and to unite himself in outward relations with those with whom he is already one in the fellowship of the Spirit, and in a living union with the Redeemer of sinners. How then did he become one with Christ, a partaker of the pardon and the spiritual life which Christ has purchased with his own blood for all penitent and believing souls? Sim ply by the personal acts of repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, to which he has been led by the grace and power of the renewing Spirit. Repentance toward God and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ, preached as the conditions of union with the Redeemer and of acceptance with the Father-this is the Gospel. Baptism is the formal declaration and recognition of a fact-the fact, that the person baptized belongs to Christ, and has a right through grace to the benefits of the great salvation. Union with a visible church by confirmation, or by whatever form may seem more scriptu ral, is the profession and recogni tion of a fact, the fact of a union with the invisible and universal congre gation of Christ's redeemed. This we say is the gospel of the New Testament. But there is another gospel, the gospel of tradition and of "catholicity." It proposes to unite the sinner to his Redeemer, and to make him a member of Christ-by baptism. It proposes to give him the Holy Spirit, and to seal him an heir of heaven-by confirmation. It proposes to make the blood of Christ's atonement efficacious to the cleansing and the life of his soul-by the eucharist. It proposes to make him one of the general assembly and congre gation of the first-born-by making him a member of its own schismatic

ward affection which is to be professed. It is the same system which in its more full development, puts penance in the place of repentance, and the pattering of Latin forms, with the counting of beads, in the place of prayer.

These are two gospels, not one in different aspects. In proportion as each is developed, and brought into full consistency with itself, it departs from the other. At one of the New York anniversaries last May, the antagonist position of these two gospels was spoken of as the great religious controversy of the age. The speaker sketched the character of two editions of Christianity. One deals with men as individuals; it makes every man stand alone before God as a sinner -alone before the cross, to believe and be forgiven, or to reject the atonement and perish. The other takes men in masses, and proposes to save them as connected with a visible organization. The one puts nothing between the sinner and his Savior. The other puts the priest there, and the church, and the sacraments. The great idea of the one is individual responsibility and spiritual freedom. The great idea of the other is organized unity and spiritual dominion. These two gospels are now in conflict, not here and there, as factions, for ascendency in a parish, a city, or a nation; but every where, as principles and systems of thought, for dominion over the world. The world's destiny is to turn upon the issue of this conflict.

The author of the charge before us quotes from that speech, and virtually acknowledges that the question was fairly put. He tells us, that "individual responsibility' separated from organized unity,' becomes a fearful source of danger, a snare and an undoing, to those who thus virtually put man out of Christ, to stand before God

•

alone.'" He says, "the difference" between these two systems, "is real. It is immense. It has been not untruly characterized, as being all the difference between spurious and true." This charge then helps us to understand on which side, in the conflict between these two gos. pels, the American branch of the Anglican church is likely to be found. One of the oldest prelates of a church which in this country calls itself "Protestant," a prelate who had given but three charges in a quarter of a century, has been moved by "the errors of the times" to take his position, in his fourth charge, against the principle of individual responsibility, or the right of private judgment and the sufficiency of the Scriptures alone as a rule of faith and practice-against the idea, that the Gospel deals with men as individuals and not as members of an organization-and against the doctrine of a renewal by the Holy Spirit as the beginning of holiness in the soul of man. That charge we are told by an official organ, was received as it were with acclamation by every one." And in the charge now before us, we find another prelate, the most learned of his order, and, if we may judge from this specimen, one of the most eloquent, declaring ex cathedra that the body of Christ is a a visible organization, united and sealed as Christ's body by sacraments; and that membership in that organization is the revealed plan of salvation; and this charge is "published by order of the convention."

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We know there are Episcopalians-laymen, ministers, bishopswho have no sympathy with these anti-evangelical teachings. But what can they do? Time will show whether they can counteract the tendency which in their half reformed communion is developing itself so rapidly.

THE author of this little volume is one of that numerous class of matrons who were "born and brought up" on the hills of New England, and who have, on reaching more mature age, helped to swell the mighty tide of emigration, which flows and will continue to flow towards our western borders. And grateful in deed should that portion of our country be, that, amid the throng of hairbrained speculators, and lazy, rest less, or impoverished men, of all ages and professions, who wend their way to the El Dorado of the Mississippi valley, there are mingled such as our author, persons of strong hearts and sound heads, who take their position upon an eminence, and looking down on the turbulent movements of society about them, with an honest purpose and a judicious selection of means, do their part to "calm the angry storm," to cherish in their growth the seeds of freedom and true happiness, and to repress or eradicate whatever is in its natural tendency disorganizing and hurtful. It is by this class of persons that the already teeming population of the west, which, in the expressive language of one of her most eloquent divines, is "rushing up to greatness," is to be molded aright, and made to assume a true and well-founded greatness; a great ness arising from honesty, liberty

and truth.

In this view, we hail with delight every token of the working of the healthy mental and moral materials of our western states and in this view, we greet with special joy the volume before us. It makes its appearance in an unassuming form

*The Mayflower: or Sketches of Scenes and Characters among the descendants of the Pilgrims, by Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: Harper and Brothers,el 843.

and bearing an unassuming title. But no less a person than Dr. Johnson once said, "Books that you may carry to the fire, and hold readily in your hand, are the most useful after all. A man will often look at them, and be tempted to go on, when he would have been frightened at books of a larger size and of a more erudite appearance." We remember, also, that the most valuable goods often come to us in the smallest packages, and that puffs and recommendations are too often, like bolsters and swathing-bands, the indications of weakness rather than of strength.

We have so much to say in praise of the Mayflower, and so little in the way of fault-finding, that we shall notice at the outset some things which have seemed to us to be blemishes, and then trust to make our way to the end of this article in perfect harmony and good humor with the author.

A serious fault, yet one by no means uncommon in writers of this age, has sometimes exhibited itself, as we have turned over these pages. The fault in question is that of employing words of uncommon usage, or those which are derived from the less known languages, as the Latin and Greek, rather than those of Sax. on origin. This we regard as deci dedly the most glaring blemish of the volume before us. We have said that this is no uncommon fault in writers of our time. So far is this true, that it is already a matter of serious complaint on the part of readers. Nor is this complaint confined to the lower class of readers in point of refinement and classical learning. If these dislike, when pe. rusing an off-hand tale or sketch, or a political squib, to be knocked down or stumbled by a long jaw-cracking word of ten syllables, which has

been raked up from the charnelhouse of Grecian or Latin antiquity; so, on the other hand, does the scholar and the man of ripe and polished accomplishments find something in such a use of words, which violates propriety and shocks his taste. Our mother tongue, it should seem, is rich and copious enough to accommodate all the wants of the writer or speaker. Such, it is found by the best masters of style in our own time, and such any one will find it ever to have been, who will take the trouble to turn over such authors of a former age as Addison, South, Jeremy Taylor, Barrow, and numerous others. That brilliant review. er, Macauley, speaking of Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," and passing judgment upon its style, says :— "There is no book in our literature on which we could so readily stake the fame of the old unpolluted English language, no book which shows so well how rich that language is in its own proper wealth, and how little it has been improved by all that it has borrowed." No : our own "well of English undefiled" is enough for our wants, and to display under such circumstances the fondness which many do for terms of foreign use, renders them, as to this subject, justly obnoxious to the apostle's charge of being "without natural affection."

While we are upon this fault, we will take the liberty to dwell for a little space upon one which is akin to it, although not one of frequent occurrence in the book which we have made the subject of the present notice. What we mean here to condemn, is that propensity so often exhibited in nearly every kind of writing, and upon almost every subject, to make numerous quotations, not only from the ancient and dead tongues, but from the modern languages of the west and south of Europe. Hardly any popular writer, much less any writer who is below mediocrity, is exempt from this fault.

In some cases, as in common newspaper and magazine stories, it really seems as though the writer had re-. sorted to a dictionary of quotations, and hunted its pages with a diligence worthy a better direction, in order that he might, if possible, spice up his vapid stuff with an air of learning or classic nicety. To such an extent does this charge lie against the authors of the present day, that it has become necessary, if one would fully comprehend a writer of English, so called, that he should make himself acquainted at least with the French, German and Italian languages, to say nothing of the Spanish and Dutch, the gibberish of the Northmen, or the works of the masters of hoary antiquity. Indeed a distinguished living writer of England, in treating the subject of female education, declares it is requisite that ladies should be able to read French and Italian, and assigns as the reason, that they may be able to understand their own writers! Such writings as we have now under contemplation, remind us, by the variety of materials used in their composition, of Virgil's description of one of the thunderbolts of Jupiter, as manufactured by the Cyclops:

"Tres imbris torti radios, tres nubis aquosæ Addiderant, rutili tres ignis et alitis Austri. Fulgores nunc terrificos, sonitumque, metumque

Miscebant operi, flammisque sequacibus iras."

We have always supposed that the great object of writing is conviction. Certainly it may be said to be conviction or amusement. But how is one to be convinced by words which he does not understand? The endeavor to convince by such means, is as judicious and as likely to succeed, as an attempt to check the fury of a wild bull by a long chain of syllogistic reasoning, or to govern the whirling planets by the ten commandments. Or, how is a man to be amused by quotations from Dante's Inferno, Moliere or Rochefoucauld,

Cervantes or Homer, when he knows nothing of the languages of those authors? True, at times these quotations are little else than graceful expansions of the thought which has just been expressed in homely English, and in such cases we can not say that we are unable to comprehend the writer. But sometimes the very pith and meaning of a paragraph is made to hang on some quotation from a foreign author, in which case the poor reader, if he is not master of a dozen tongues, is left to beat his brains in vain for the writer's meaning.

Now this fault of our writers is really

-"most tolerable and not to be endured."

The great mass of written productions are for the unlearned,-for those who have been initiated into the mysteries of their mother-tongue alone, and to the apprehension of this class of readers the mass of writing ought to be adapted. It is only a waste of time and learning on his part, and a waste of time, patience and good temper on the part of the reader, when a writer cuts up his piece to intersperse it with extracts from foreign works. In a professed essay, oration or review, which is not aimed so exclusively at the common and lower stamp of mind and education, a spice of the authors of antiquity, as they have come down to us mellowed by age, is not amiss. It gives a richness and freshness to the discourse that effectually secures the attention, and prevents any feeling of tediousness. It sends back the mind of the hearer or reader to the times of old, and brings before him once more the memorable scenes which have been witnessed in the world's history, and causes him to live over again with pleasure his school-boy days. It places him perhaps at the table of the suburban villa of Horace, or makes him one of the guests in the banqueting-hall of the princely Sallust, or his heart

is thrilled again with the sound of the martial strains which swell from the hosts of Cyrus or Alexander, as they go forth to battle against the world; or his soul is subdued and melted by the same high and solemn chorus which enchained the "fierce democratie" of Athens.

When such as these are the effects produced by the use of quotations, no one can object to them. On the contrary, they become a high embellishment of style, adding not only elegance and interest, but real and permanent value to the writings which they adorn. But no such reasons as these can be alledged in defense of the practice of making quotations upon subjects and occasions which make their appeal not to the classic mind, but to the comparatively uneducated alone. In the latter case, instead of rendering the topic treated of more plain and intelligible, writers too often but make "confusion worse confounded." Like the common cuttle-fish, they make use of their ink only to darken and obscure what was before clear and transparent.

With the two above specified, we dismiss the faults of the book before us, and take pleasure in coming to a part of the subject where we can speak in terms of the highest praise.

The great characteristic of Mrs. Stowe, in a literary point of view, is her descriptive power. Though we doubt not that her pen would be extremely felicitous in other departments of authorship, yet we deem this peculiarly her proper field. She has, in the present volume, confined herself more particularly to the delineation of New England character, manners and scenery. In this our author stands without a superior, and with no equal, if we except perhaps Washington Irving. In the description of scenes in "Yankee land,” Mrs. Stowe seems to be emphatically "at home," and treads the soil of her native hills with a step as free as that with which Sir Wal