miniature world, which could be contained in a thimble, could not find a better guide than this work of Sir David Brewster, whose name alone is the highest recommendation. Edited by the Right Reverend New York: 1838. Swords & 5. Sermons. By HENRY MELVILL, B. D., Minister of Camden THESE Sermons deserve to be honorably distinguished from the mass of contributions to this department of Christian literature. It is not our purpose to give an analysis of the contents of the volume, nor even to notice particular discourses or passages containing opinions and sentiments, which we think not quite correct. There is considerable variety in the topics treated; the general strain of the discourses is in harmony with the scheme of christian doctrine taught by the Church; and the volume is one likely to be read with interest and edification by the more cultivated class of readers. The author is a distinguished popular preacher in the suburbs of London; and these sermons give abundant evidence of a clear, acute, and vigorous intellect, and of a rich fancy generally controlled by good judgment. Without any thing new or very striking in the matter of the thoughts presented, they are yet original in best, if not the only good, meaning of the word, especially as applied to sermons-they are the author's own thoughts, and the combination and utterance is his own. There is much eloquence, too, and many passages might be cited as the perfection of eloquence of a certain kind; but it is not the highest kind; it is of the artificial or merely rhetorical kind - often speaking more to the ear and to the fancy, than to the imagination and the heart. The style is clear and forcible, though at the same time somewhat stately and ambitious, and deformed by frequent mannerisms, of the sort so often met with in the sermons of Chalmers. The following passages from the sermon on the "Power of Religion to strengthen the human intellect" is interesting in itself, and may serve as a favorable specimen of the author's manner of thinking: "But if it be for the enlargement of the mind and the strengthening of its faculties, that acquaintance should be made with ponderous and far-stretching truths, it must be clear that the knowledge of the bible outdoes all other knowledge, in bringing round such result. Wedeny not that great effects may be wrought on the peasantry of a land by that wondrous diffusion of general information which is now going forward through the instrumentality of the press. It is not possible that our penny maga zines should be carrying to the workshop of the artisan, and the cottage of the laborer, an actual library of varied intelligence, without producing an universal outstretch of mind, whether for good or whether for evil. But if a population could be made a bible-reading population, we argue that it would be made a far more thinking and a far more intelligent population than it will ever become through the turning its attention on simplified sciences and abbreviated histories.... And thus believing that efforts to disseminate knowledge may cause a general calling forth of the mental powers of our population, we have no other feeling but that of pleasure in the survey of these efforts. It is indeed possible and of this we have our fears -that, by sending a throng of publications to the fireside of the cottager, you may draw him away from the bible, which has heretofore been specially the poor man's book, and thus inflict upon him, as we think, an intellectual injury, full as well as a moral. But in the argument now in hand, we only uphold the superiority of scriptural knowledge, as compared with any other, when the alone object proposed is that of developing and improving the thinking powers of mankind ... ... .... Living, as we do, in days when intellectual and scriptural are set down, practically, as opposite terms, and it seems to be admitted as an axiom, that to civilize and christianize, to make men intelligent and to make men religious, are things which have no necessa ry, nor even possible connexion, it is well that we sometimes revert to the matter of fact and whilst every stripling is boasting that a great enlargement of mind is com ing on a nation, through the pouring into all its dwellings a tide of general infor mation, it is right to uphold the forgotten position, that, in caring for man as an immortal being, God cared for him as an intellectual; and that, if the bible were but read by our artisans and peasantry, we should be surrounded by a far more enlightened and intelligent population than will appear on this land, when the schoolmaster, with his countless magazines, shall have gone through it in its length and in its breadth."- pp. 140-146. We have mentioned the name of Chalmers. There is much in the reading of Melvill to remind one of Chalmers. Besides the mannerisms of expression common to them both, they are somewhat alike in the full, stately, and sometimes timid and ambitious movement of their style, and in the richness of their amplifications. Yet there is a difference between them: Melvill is, we think, the better writer; Chalmers, the superior mind. Melvill has fewer faults; his language is more direct, his style more clear, and there is a higher rhetorical finish about it. You will find, perhaps, also, a greater number of distinct thoughts, combined and brought out in a due co-ordination and sequence, in a sermon of Melvill's, than in one of Chalmers's; but in Chalmers's, the thought is richer, more original, more profound, more comprehensive awakening a higher activity of the intellect. Both abound in amplification; but the amplification of Melvill is chiefly rhetorical-often, indeed, merely verbal repetition, and at the most, seldom showing any thing higher than the aggregation and association of images by the fancy in Chalmers, the intellect continues grappling with the thought, putting it in new, more striking, and beautiful lightsthe fancy not only bringing her accumulation of images and illustrations but often the highest exertion of the imagination is seen combining, fuzing, and giving life to the whole. We can easily believe that we should have listened to one of Melvill's sermons with a high degree of pleasure; but having heard it, we should possess it all; we should never care to read it. After hearing a sermon from Chalmers, we should feel that we had possessed ourselves, indeed, of all the positions, all the thoughts; but we should still wish to read it once, for the pleasure of noting more calmly the richness of his combinations, the gorgeous amplitude of his illustrations, and the singular blending in the play of the faculties, of Intellect, Fancy, and Imagination. But we are reminded of one other great preacher of this age, whose keen, polished, and powerful intellect-cultivated, elegant, and classical taste - compact, vigorous, and beautiful logic, fuzed together, and vivified by a fervid imagination, produced results of eloquence which we should not only have heard with pleasure, but may recur to as studies, with perpetual delight and improvement. this was Robert Halla man who, if happier circumstances had favored, would, we believe, have left more enduring monuments of intellectual greatness in certain departments of production, than any that the age has bequeathed to us. 6. Notes, Critical and Practical, on the Book of Genesis, designed as a general help to Biblical reading and instruction. By GEORGE BUSH, Professor of Hebrew and Oriental Literature in the New York City University. New York: 1838. In 2 vols. Vol. 1. pp. 364. THE favorite object of Professor Bush is to produce commentaries, not unworthy the scholar, but which will be also practical and instructive enough, and cheap enough, for readers at large. His aim is high and difficult, but worthy of all praise; and to his general execution of it, we are ready to bear the testimony of decided approbation. He has, of course, a more trying task in Genesis, than in Joshua and Judges; his notes upon which we commended in our last number. Genesis is, if we may so say, full of the premises of revelation, and the character assigned these premises naturally governs and determines every system of theology. Genesis, also, is a domain in which the natural as well as moral philosopher, has largely expatiated. Professor Bush must be an adroit pilot, to guide his reader unharmed through all the perils and temptations of such a book of destiny and speculation. In the main, we are happy to say, he is unusually fortunate; escaping Scylla, without falling into Charybdis. More real learning and genuine common sense will not be found in any condensed commentary on Genesis, in the English language and especially will no commentary of its pretensions be found, united with more freedom from system-worship, and un doubted reverence for scripture as the actually revealed will of God - the will of God so revealed, as to be an original and divine authority, and not poor man's reflections on it, according to the most improved Socinian theory of inspiration. Such freedom and reverence are, in our view, the two very foremost requisites of an interpreter of scripture; and we give Mr. Bush no more praise than we think his due, when we say, we know no one, among our American interpreters, who possesses them more fully. If he is in danger of erring occasionally, it is, perhaps, in not speaking out with a strength, in which most orthodox theologians would cheerfully sustain him, and in an unasked and gainless complaisance to philosophers. For example, we find him abandoning "Elohim," and " us," (Gen. i. 26,) as not bearing upon questions about the Godhead. True, these are not palpable proofs of a Trinity; yet we are quite inclined to the belief, that they are forms of phraseology which would not have been employed, if the Godhead were such an absolute unity, (or rather unicity,) as the Socinians make it; who seem to try to refine the Deity down to a very point. Then we find him saying, (on p. 26,) "It is a matter rather of rational inference, than of express revelation, that the material universe was created out of nothing." We had always thought that "of Him, and through Him, and to Him, are all things," and things which are seen were not made of things which do appear," amounted to something more than a "rational inference." We e are sorry to see our author, (as on p. 184,) again merely recommending an improvement in the punctuation of our common English Bibles. Why not let us have his own punctuation at once? for be the words of our common version never so invariable, the points, and the italics of it, have been undergoing modifications ever since 1611; and we do not understand how there can be any presumption in approaching them, with a critic's hand. We hope Professor Bush does not mean to keep stereotyped prefaces ready for his volumes, as they severally appear. A por tion of the preface to his volume on Joshua and Judges is transferred to this, and with it his former claim, "that, after every abatement, much will be found in the ensuing pages, not to be met with any where else." We trust he does not intend to make this claim a standing one; for we have formed an impression of his modesty and candor which we are anxious to prolong. * Rom. xi. 36. + Heb. xi. 3. 7. Carver's Travels in Wisconsin. From the third London edi. tion. New York: 1838. Harper and Brothers. 8vo. pp. 376. THIS work contains the record of a tour made through the region of the northwestern lakes seventy years ago. Its author, Jonathan Carver, was born in 1732, at Stillwater, then in "the province of Connecticut, but now in New York," and was descended from William Joseph Carver, of Wigan, in Lancashire, who was rewarded for his services in the British army in Ireland, with the first government of that "province." Having served as a captain in the English provincial army, which was disbanded after the treaty of Versailles, in 1763, by which the northwestern territory was surrendered from France to England, he commenced his journey through the northwest for the purpose of discovery. Impelled, at first, by a spirit of adventure, he gained, during his sojourn among the then powerful tribes of the Chippewas and Sioux, such an influence, by his prowess and address, that he was constituted a chief, and received an extensive grant of land, which has been since well known as the "Carver Grant," and the foundation of a claim now pending in that quarter. In common with the pioneers of that day, he had endured extraordinary hardships, and encountered perils in the public service; and having prepared his journal, he embarked for England in 1769, with a view to obtain reimbursement from the English government, for individual expenses which he had incurred for its benefit. In this, however, he was disappointed, and, lingering through a life of deprivation, he finally perished from actual poverty, in the city of London. The journal of Carver contains a topographical description of that country, and an account of its natural history, and the Indian tribes, which is the result of his personal observations. It is written in a plain and quaint style, without the incredible statements which abound in the work of La Hontan, or the flowing and graceful eloquence of Charlevoix. Carver was a modest and truehearted man. Some of his facts, however, we should be inclined to discredit. These he recites on the authority of the Indians, which, by the way, is in many instances no authority at all. Among other things, he alludes to a storm of ink, which rained on the town of Detroit in 1762, a portion of which was bottled and used for writing. This was said to have been ominous of the Pontiac wara kind of shower which would seem better adapted to our own age of scribbling and printing. The work is, however, in the main, as satisfactory as could be expected, considering the circumstances under which it was prepared, and gives us an interesting account of the northwest, when under the dominion of Great Britain. The English editions were inscribed to Sir Joseph Banks, the author's friend and patron. It is well printed, and embel |