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their own truth. They can manage it. They need no pastor, no divine Doctor. They and it. Write it, speak it, leave them alone. There is a preacher who says, "I sow Sabbath morning, and reap my harvest at night." His harvest. Will the Lord think it fit for His granary? There is another preacher, who, it is said, has large collections of photographs, fac similes of the souls he has saved. He studies them well that in Heaven he may recognize his "jewels," and say, "Here Lord, am I, thy unworthy servant, and the souls Thou hast given me." What a parade-ground would he make of the Kingdom of Heaven.

FOR a few years back we have heard various rumors of an effort to introduce into the Constitution of the United States, a recognition of the being of God, and of the divine authority of the Christian religion. The other day we read in the Church Union a paragraph stating that Rev. Mr. Craven, of Newark, New Jersey, is engaged working up the subject, and that the interest therein among professed Christians (of whom there are 5,000,000 in America) is rapidly increasing. It adds its own mite to the cause by saying, "It is difficult to comprehend how a nation with such an infidel Constitution can expect the blessing of God."

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Well, Mr. Craven and Co., no doubt the tottering fortunes of your religion need this Constitutional prop. But, if we mistake not, you come upon the stage too late for more than a farce. You are a number of centuries too late; three or four at least. Had providence ordered your birth with more seasonableness for the work you have at heart, you might have achieved something of a success. But here you are thrust into the last half of the nineteenth century, five million strong, all told men, women and children at that, and the whole bent of the new civilization against you to a dead certainty. Better try your fortunes at some less hopeless task. Pray consider that the fathers were right in this matter. Understand that the political constitution of a country has nothing to do with forms of religion, nor with affirming the being of a God. God and religion are private property. Let your Constitution provide for establishing justice among men, and then its function will be exhausted, and the blessing of God fairly earned.

But, proceed if you must. Perhaps the question needs airing. At any rate, the Christianity you represent needs to make but a few more such pretentions, to expose it to universal contempt.

EDITOR.

BOOK NOTICES.

A WOMAN'S SECRET. BY MRS. CAROLINE FAIRFIELD CORBIN. Chicago: Central Publishing House, 1867.

This is a "Woman's Rights" book. The story is decidedly interesting, the characters are drawn with vigor and no little felicity. In the characterization there is a fine impartiality: men and women are portrayed as they really are; some noble, self-sacrificing, self-forgetful; some mean, selfish, cruel. The most loveable character in the book is Dr. Gaines; the most odious is Mrs. Gladstone; and the fact is noticeable when we take into account that the prevailing purpose is to write man down and woman up. Rebecca, the heroine, engages one's interest, and seems rather finely delineated, until she begins to dispute, when at once the tone becomes so dogmatic, and has such a hard, disagreeable argumentative snap, that the effect is quite spoiled. She goes off like a disputing machine; round turns the crank, the cogs fit well into each other, the wheels revolve, buzz, buzz, grind, grind; no wooden performance could be better.

It is a pity; for Mrs. Corbin came near to making an excellent novel. She has earnest moral feeling, a good womanly sentiment, when she does not commit herself to the machine,- and she has almost a genius for characterization. Her book contains fine observations, has indeed many merits.

And yet it is spoiled. She deals in theory somewhat liberally, and the theory is shallow, flippant, and every way poor to a degree. Her theory of man is that he is distinctively selfish, and fit only for the lowest functions; of woman, that she is an angel, and that all high interests are committed to her hands. And yet this angel has no inward control or strength unless that selfish brute loves her! It is not merely that she needs his muscular power, as one needs that of an ox; her felicity depends upon his love. Titania is happy only when Bottom, with the donkey's head on his shoulders, brays affection. How any woman, with a hundredth part of Mrs. Corbin's fine sense and fine feeling, can commit herself to this disgusting conception of the relation between the sexes, passes our compre

hension.

Again, woman is angel, but she has no character of her own! She is what man makes her. She may be as bloodless an incarnation of selfishness as Mrs. Gladstone is shown to be; but she is not in fault, man makes her so; and if he will make her so, she cannot help it! This attempt to make women, like babies, irresponsible, this making her an angel without a particle of character, an angelic nose of wax, ought to be more offensive to any woman who respects herself and her sex, than any direct censure could be. Surely no woman will serve her sex by preaching this skimpole gospel. Make women believe, as Mrs. Corbin would have them, that they must be whatever the other sex would have them that they must continue to fill up the hells of our cities until there is nowhere a

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lewd man; and Heaven help them! Nay, Heaven itself could not then help them. And precisely this, and in direct allusion to the "social evil," is what this writer would have them believe. We remember to have heard Lucy Stone make to woman a direct moral appeal, the most moving we ever listened to. She believed that they had character, and could do something for themselves. No Skimpole there. But all this is to be changed. No use to address woman; speak to man; he carries the whole character of woman, as it were, in his pocket! Now, the sexes do indeed act and react upon each other, and the man is to blame for much shortcoming in woman; no donbt of it, and much shame to him; but this angelwithout-character doctrine of the sex is the worst slander upon it, and is fit to make one's stomach queasy.

Once more, Mrs. Corbin indulges herself in a sort of talk, to which Mrs. Farnham first gave currency, to the effect that woman is superior to man, because her body has more organs. What a wonderful age is this we live in an age when, with such a purpose, refined ladies challenge the other sex to such comparisons! "I am your superior sir; for you Spare! spare! We retreat, we fly the field in utter rout! Sauve qui peut!

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Let us, however, muster courage to remind Mrs. Corbin that in all which distinguishes the physical organization of human beings there is no such difference between the sexes as is pretended, but only in organic arrangements common to the mammalia in general. The argument is ludicrously invalid, and we beg leave to think it indelicate. Meanwhile the spirit of bold self-assertion in which it is employed is ungraceful, and is certainly not peculiarly feminine.

Woman is in some respects superior to man; and because she is so, great promises of the welfare of humanity are committed to her hands. No man ever truly loved a woman without feeling this partial pre-eminence, feeling it with equal humility and gratitude. But on the one hand no true woman ever deeply loved, without feeling that she was mating superiorities with superiorities, and with such as are of equal dignity. The notion that woman can only love downward, and therefore degradingly, is one that should be summarily dismissed. If it be necessary to balance the selfassumption of one sex with a like indulgence for a time on the part of the other, we are quite willing to give women their turn; but pray, let us get through with all this as soon as may be. Man and woman are each superior to the other, and superior in faculties of like dignity, and because they are so, there can be between them a true marriage, a union that constitutes for both of them a higher and more perfect life. Both will suffer while al this is misunderstood, and therefore we have no cordial welcome for books, which, in the unintelligible desire to exalt woman, rob her of all proper character, and make the supreme experience, save one, of her life a degradation. We say so much in the present case with pain, for, we repeat, Mrs. Corbin's book has decided merit. Her conception of the maternal relation is very noble indeed. She is always good when she writes from her own mind; it is only when she falls to her borrowed themes, largely due to

Mrs. Farnham, that she fails. Will she not leave this trash of physiological irrelevancies, not to say indelicacies, aside, with all the crass stuff that belongs to it, and try again, writing only from her fine woman's heart? There is much to be said on the topic she has at heart, and a certain portion of this she is able to say, and say well, even beautifully, if she will write what she feels, and let Farnhamisms alone.

D. A. W.

NATURE AND LIFE. Sermons by ROBERT COLLYER, Pastor of Unity Church, Chicago. Boston: H. B. Fuller, 1867. pp. 313.

No statements of doctrine, results of an intellectual method or of scientific thinking, no positing of naturalism or of supernaturalism, are to be found in this volume. It seems to be entirely destitute of any theological forethought, and appears quite unconcerned whether the writer be ranked with one party or another. We can draw our own inferences, if we choose, but the volume does not go out of its way to help us.

Perhaps we might urge that, in the present tendency to distinguish sharply between the old and new schools of liberal belief, when it is no longer a matter of indifference to which side a man belongs, and when no man, except the merest pulpit rhetorician, ought to be content with neutrality, or to cover up all issues in loose statements of the superiority of true living to right thinking, a few pages might have been devoted to an uncontroversial but frank and manly statement of the writer's anti-supernaturalism. For he ought not to think that, because he is a fine, bold, healthy sympathizer with men and women, and with all great causes, he can afford to be misinterpreted, or to give occasion to interested flattery. He should tell his whole thought plumply upon all grave points, without dread of being labelled by this or that party. A man of poetic gifts and sensibilities, who is disposed to wrap his ideas in fine appeals to the general feelings in which all men agree, and who loves to tell how he appreciates our human nobility, is very likely to be misunderstood upon a point that ought not to be blinked, that cannot be ignored. Mr. Collyer would leave no one in doubt as to his republicanism, his hatred of treason, love of equal rights, and of all high morals. He ought to have sentences equally Saxon and sinewy to record once for all whatever theological radicalism he sincerely cherishes. This would save him from the disgrace of being continually button-holed and patted on the back by the didactic brethren who want to make capital out of his fine gifts. And a man who is so capable of standing alone, and doing his great work, need not be afraid if some radical should try the button-holing game. As it is, what with pulling and hauling, Mr. Collyer will not have a button left upon his coat. We suspect he will say that any dogmatic string will serve to hold his garments on while he does the real work which God has put into his hands. This failure sharply to discriminate, showing a carelessness upon the point of an intellectual method, and no great interest in the historical order of creation, cannot be urged as a fault against a volume which so plainly sets out to talk about those matters of prevailing interest, faith, hope, love of nature, and senti

ments connected with home and the affections. And we never expect that Mr. Collyer will clear up this generality of tone. It must always pervade his speaking and writing, and remain, in such healthy hands, very quickening and effective.

We are disposed thus to pay the highest compliment that we can to our impression of the man, by actually criticising a volume that the sectarian newspapers sufficiently bespatter with fine epithets. We do not mean to tell how many touching and lovely pages have arrested our attention, what capital phrases clinch his thought, what simplicity of style and feeling he has, how thoroughly in earnest he appears. By this time he can do without any more general allusions of that kind. Will he thank us for telling a private fear we have that his sympathy with the domestic features of our homes and people will run into sentimentality, as it does, for instance, in the sermons entitled "Ascending and Descending Angels," "Healing and Hurting Shadows," and "The Hither Side?" We know that his heart is not a flabby organ, with all its tenderness, but his pen cannot entirely cure itself of paddling about in the feeling. Oh, let us all shun this trick of manipulating and nursing the home-stock and average softnesses of the people. Leave all that business to be done by eloquent pulpit orators whose ministry consists in rehashing the congregation and protecting it from thought.

Mr. Collyer's sense of humor ought not to be overlooked in estimating

these discourses.

What a pleasant shock it gives to the nerves when this great quality pervades the sermonic form. The meeting-house, communion table, font and sexton disappear, reabsorbed in nature, if indeed they ever came thence, and the audience gets the tonic of its own health and laughter. Mr. Collyer can make you weep, yet, with no violent transition, you find the tear dried by the sun-burst of a smile as it flits across the countenance. There is no art in this; it is the most unaffected play of his noble natural power. The courage to speak the mind, and the mind to be charmed by the incongruity that dissolves in a deeper congruity of feeling, has given Mr. Collyer this inestimable advantage in addressing men. And as often as he throws himself unreservedly upon man's craving for bold, spontaneous speech, his writings will meet the welcome which has already been accorded to this volume, whose spirit, good-nature, and devotedness, will be the delight of many a house.

J. W. THE MISTAKE of ChristendOм, Or, Jesus and his Gospel before Paul and Christianity. By GEORGE STEARNS. Boston: Belah Marsh. The purpose of this book is to distinguish between the natural religion of Jesus and Christism — that religion of Paul which all Christendom after the apostle has mistaken for the Gospel of Jesus." The author exclaims "Behold the man!" but not as a more modern and popular writer has done to implicate Jesus in the claim for an official position among his

*The Mistake of Christendom was first published by Mr. Stearns ten years ago.

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