inside and outside thy Church-and then we shall be teachers indeed. The spirit of a prophet, the heart of an evangelist, the soul of a pastor, the mind of a teacher-these are the high qualifications which ought to characterize the Christian minister of to-day. Who is sufficient for these things? Thanks be to God who makes us sufficient, as ministers of a new covenant; not of the letter which killeth, but of the spirit which giveth life." The whole address, or sermon, is strong, clear, stimulating.

PHILOSOPHY, SCIENCE, AND GENERAL LITERATURE.

Meditations of an Autograph Collector. By ADRIAN H. JOLINE. Crown 8v0, pp. 316. New York: Harper & Brothers. Price, cloth, $3.

Not a few people have the passion for autograph collecting which Ik Marvel in his American Lands and Letters refers to as "that dreadful fever." Others have called it "an amiable folly." It may sometimes annoy persons of prominence, whose signatures are sought, but it is an innocent pastime for the leisure intervals of a working life. Who was it said, "Man is an animal which collects"? The author thinks "it must have been Andrew Lang, for he says most things nowadays." There was a distinguished Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States who used to collect almanacs, even those of Ayer and Josh Billings. To the autograph collector this is one response: "Dear Sir: Mr. Weller's friend would say that 'autographs is wanity;' but since you wish for mine, I subscribe myself faithfully yours, J. A. Froude." Russell Lowell spoke of the autograph album as "an instrument of torture unknown even to the Inquisition," and adds: "I am thinking seriously of getting a good forger from the State's prison to do my autographs; but I suppose the unconvicted followers of the same calling would raise the cry of 'Convict Labor.'" The vivacity and sprightliness of Mr. Joline's Meditations are reflected in his own words concerning them: "It is the privilege of age to be garrulous and unmethodical. One loses the capacity to be consecutive and orderly. When I was in Princeton I was taught to be precise and regular in the matter of composition, with my introduction, my proposition, my discussion, and my peroration. It is a blessed privilege now to be able to throw the introduction into the fire, dash the proposition out of the window, cast the discussion into the wastebasket, and toss the peroration after it. I scorn to be fettered by rhetorical regulations. There is not the slightest consecutiveness about these Meditations; that, to my mind, is their only justification." The author's free and easy method has made an entertaining book. This notice of an unconsecutive book may also take the liberty of being disorderly. Sir Walter Scott said that "a lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these he may venture to call himself an architect." Somebody said of Lord Brougham, "If he had only known a little law he would

have known a little of everything." General and Governor and Senator John A. Dix, scholar, soldier, and statesman, spent most of his life in public office. Of him Chauncey Depew once said, "He came to America in the Mayflower, and threatened to go over to the Indians if the Pilgrim Fathers would not elect him to an office." Governor Dix's translation of the sublime hymn Dies Ira is one of the best. A jovial aid-de-camp to Dix, being asked what the general was busy about, answered, "The general is writing a Cicero." Hawthorne is said to have written concerning George IV: "This king cared as much about dress as any young coxcomb. He had taste in such matters, and it is a pity he was a king, for he might otherwise have made an excellent tailor." Here is an oft-quoted saying of De Quincey's: "For if once a man indulges himself in murder, very soon he comes to think little of robbing, and from robbing he comes next to drinking and Sabbath-breaking, and from that to incivility and procrastination." Leslie Stephen calls De Quincey "one of the great masters of English in the department of impassioned prose." Our author says that Sterne's Sentimental Journey, like Boswell's Johnson, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and Don Quixote, belongs to the immortal library which all men are believed to know by heart, but which no one ever reads entirely through. It is here declared that the atrocious scandal fomented concerning Byron, and preserved by the folly of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was without any real foundation. Leslie Stephen calls it a "hideous story, absolutely incredible;" and Mr. Joline believes that if Lord and Lady Byron had been left to themselves, free from the interference which outsiders so often inflict, there would never have been any serious trouble. "The noble art of minding one's own business is not cultivated as generally as it should be. Byron was not a saint, but a little tact and wisdom might have preserved harmony between him and his wife." Of that much-recited and strenuous poem, "The Charge of the Light Brigade," Tennyson said, "It is not a poem on which I pride myself." Young Tennyson was nicknamed by his fellow-students, "Miss Alfred." When the good Prince Albert died Thackeray cruelly and somewhat vulgarly exclaimed, "Poor, dear gentlewoman." Our author thinks that Tennyson was rather caddish when he called Bulwer

The padded man-that wears the stays,

Who killed the girls and thrilled the boys
With dandy pathos;

and that the Laureate descended to billingsgate in this unpardonable

verse:

What profits now to understand
The merits of a spotless shirt,
A dapper boot-a little hand-
If half the little soul is dirt?

On this the author comments: "I cannot resist the feeling that an affectation of clean linen and neat footgear has as much to commend

it as that of long cloaks, long beard, brutal brusqueness, and persistent chanting of one's own poems. Bulwer must have been a pleasanter man to meet than the flattered singer, the peer of the realm, the unmannerly autocrat, whose personal vanity was almost equal to that of General Winfield Scott, and I cannot compare it with anything more colossal. I yield to no one in my admiration for Lord Tennyson's poetry, but I refuse to concede him the right to be inexpressibly rude and offensive to his innocent fellow-beings." Charles Lamb wrote: "I never read books of travel, at least not farther than Paris or Rome. I can just endure Moors because of their connection as foes with Christians; but Abyssinians, Ethiops, Esquimaux, Dervishes, and all that tribe I hate. I am a Christian, Englishman, Londoner, Templar." Napoleon let all letters lie unopened for six weeks, in which time most of them had been answered by events; and S. J. Tilden, "that most modest, attractive, and unselfish of American politicians," is reported to have followed the same custom. Coleridge is said to have had an even simpler method, answering none and opening none. But the amiable Southey replied to letters often without a moment's delay. His kindly nature shows in his remark that a house is not perfectly furnished for enjoyment unless there is in it "a child rising three years old and a kitten rising six weeks." Dowden says that some of Southey's letters read "as if his whole business were that of secretary of feline affairs in Greta Hall." Referring to human gullibility, of which we have all heard much and furnished some, the author speaks of "poor M. Chasles, the foremost geometrician of France, who let Vrain-Lucas palm off on him as genuine a multitude of fabrications, including three letters from Cleopatra to Cato, one from Lazarus after his resurrection, and one from Judas Iscariot to Mary Magdalene-all on paper and in the best of French." That liberty-loving German soldier, Baron von Steuben, who turned the desolate winter camp at Valley Forge into "a military training school, teaching, what our troops had never known before, promptness and precision in the manual of arms, in mass and ordered movement, in the use of the bayonet, and mastery of the charge and of fighting in the open field," wrote home once to an old soldier-comrade in Prussia: "You say to your soldier, 'Do this,' and he doeth it. In America I am obliged to say to mine, 'This is the reason why you ought to do that,' and then he does it." The American is a man and not a machine. On one page of Mr. Joline's entertaining Meditations Edmund Gosse tells of his methods of literary work: "I must use both day and night. Official business for the government takes the central part of the day, so that my books have been mainly written between 8 and 11 P. M., and corrected between 9 and 10 A. M. I find the afternoon an almost useless time, the physical and mental clockwork of the twenty-four hours seeming to run down about 4 P. M. I make no written skeleton or first draft. My first draft is what goes to the printers, and commonly with few alterations. I round off my

sentences in my head before committing them to paper. I can work anywhere if I am not distracted. The waiting room of a railway station or a rock on the seashore suits me as well as the desk in my study. I cannot do literary or any other brain-work for more than three hours on a stretch. I believe that a man who works three hours of every working day will achieve a stupendous result in bulk. But, then, he must be rapid while he is at work, and not fritter away his resources on starts in vain directions." On this our author remarks, "This is rather funny, for many men of brains work continuously many more hours than three each day. Gosse's labors are mere dalliance compared with the brain-work of a host of men, statesmen, lawyers, journalists, and others, who work hard every day for three times three hours." Our readers have now a fair idea of the lively variety of these Meditations of an Autograph Collector.

The Psychological Elements of Religious Faith. By CHARLES CARROLL EVERETT, D.D., LL.D., Late Bussey Professor of Theology in Harvard University. 12mo, pp. 215. New York: The Macmillan Company. Price, cloth, $1.25. Here is the substance of the argument which Dr. Everett embodied in the introductory course of lectures by which he led his students to the longer course and main body of his instruction in which he dealt with the really great questions of religious belief, such as the being and attributes of God, human freedom, sin and salvation, immortality, and the organization of religion in human life. These introductory lectures deal with the elements of religion, the various definitions of religion, definitions of the supernatural, the place of intellect, and feeling in religion, and similar related topics. The most significant conclusion is that which gives the primacy to feeling as the most essential element in religion. "What is religion? It has been defined as identical with morality, but neither this definition nor the modification of it, 'morality touched by emotion,' satisfies us. If a man is indignant at some wrong does that make him religious? Is a man eager for justice necessarily a religious man? Religion has been defined also as man's effort to perfect himself, but a man may try to perfect himself without religion; and some religions do not aspire to perfection. Religion implies a relation between us and some Being beyond ourselves. ... Where in life does religion find its seat? Religion is of the spirit. The elements of the spiritual nature are few. Intellect, feeling or emotion, and will-these are the elements of the inner life. Does religion belong primarily to the intellect, or to feeling, or to the will? . . . The first person to put theology upon a purely psychological basis, Schleiermacher, reached the result that feeling is everything in religion. Over against him, Hegel, while not denying the reality and need of feeling, yet gives it a subordinate place as compared with intellect. These men are the two Pillars of Hercules that mark the entrance through which one passes into modern theology. They supplement one another, each contributing a share of indispensable truth. We may note that feeling which has the

primacy in religion has the same primacy in life generally. Intellect brings to man his materials, feeling is his response to this material. Intellect is analytic, feeling is constructive. Intellect tries to explain and justify, yet never reaches that in which feeling rejoices. A picture may be all that the intellect can demand, and yet not excite feeling; the last touch and spell of genius cannot be described, though it may be felt. Intellect cannot explain why you love your friend. What you love is not the aggregate of his good qualities, which may belong equally to others whom you do not love. It must not be lost sight of, however, that feeling needs the intellect, not only to provide materials but to preserve a sane balance, and also to develop feeling. The working of the intellect stimulates the growth of feeling. A man's feelings are like an organ; the intellect is like the player whose touch brings out the music with manifold variations. Yet feeling has the primacy. What we do is done for the sake of feeling. In science and philosophy feeling is the beginning, the middle, and the end. The desire to know or to explore. the charm of mental activity, the hope of discovery, the desire for eminence these in both science and philosophy stimulate the student. Feeling in one form or other first prompts to study and then sustains him in his work; and at the end of any study there is the feeling of joy in success and in an enlarged horizon.” In another connection we find the following: "We often speak slightingly of what is known as deathbed repentance, and assume that the murderer, for example, who dies on the scaffold expressing repentance for his crime is necessarily a hypocrite. Yet there is no reason why such repentance may not be real. The man is taken out of the temptations and all the usual relations to which he has been accustomed; he can see good and evil without bias; he can see clearly where he has done wrong. At such a time a man's nature is like the compass that has been lifted to the masthead, above any interference from surrounding influences. His better instincts are free from perverting attractions. Of course, if the compass is brought down to the deck again, it will vary as before; and if the man who has been at the point of death is allowed to live and comes back into the accustomed relations, old attractions and temptations may again influence him, but this does not argue his repentance insincere. Now, religion aims to make repentance and the abhorrence of sin permanent; it seeks to raise the man to a higher level of life where low influences shall have less power, and the higher instincts be free to control him." The definition of religion at which Dr. Everett arrives at the end of his reasonings is this: "Religion is a feeling toward a supernatural Presence manifesting itself in truth, goodness, and beauty." These lectures lack the literary charm which we found in the volume of the author's essays lately noticed in these pages. But literary grace and elegance are scarcely looked for in treatises on psychology, philosophy, or any scientific writings. The desiderata are lucidity and precision.