happen-either the Parliamentary system of government will fall into universal contempt, and cease to have any real efficiency; or the pressure from without will accumulate in such force as to break down the established parliamentary barriers, and renovate the executive by the infusion into it of new ingredients. Upon the whole, it is the second of these alternatives that a prudent mind would prefer; and it is as a means of increasing the so-called "pressure from without," and of improving its character before the final crisis shall come, that one would seek to encourage to the utmost that peculiar species of literature which has recently made its appearance amongst us, and stimulate that rapprochement between men of letters and the proletariat, which is its necessary condition and concomitant. It is for this reason that we do not hesitate to pronounce what we have called Sandy Mackayism to be a hopeful tendency of our time. Let our literary men, therefore, consent for a little to look favourably on it, and even, as a class, to abate their purer forms of activity, their excursions on the Pacific, in order to promote it. "Oh! that the highest Thought concentrated Could, godlike, woo this mortal maiden Now,

So she might bear some new and lusty Future!"

For many, we know, this is an uncongenial aspiration. There is no element so sure after a little while to afflict the soul of a truly thoughtful literary man with intolerable weariness, as this element of social strife, social wrong, endless clamour after social remedies. "Let me away, let me away, out of all this, into some calmer air, some quiet wood of my own meditations. This investigating of crime and misery; this coddling and coaxing of the working classes, as if they alone had any thing to complain of; this petty chipping at the huge indurated mass of social evil-this, whatever it may be, is not my function, is not real literature. A few short years and this life on earth will be wholly over; to walk, therefore, serenely through it, with my eye fixed on what is beyond the veil, dealing with the present and the actual only in so far as they may provide me with matter and body for the conceptions that rise within me; to create, as far as in me lies, perennial forms of truth, of dignity, and of beauty, and to throw these abroad into the contemporary atmosphere, believing that they will affect men, but not knowing especially how they will do sothis, surely, is my task, as a devotee of the unseen and the ideal." Such, almost inevitably, must be the feeling of a genuine man of letters, provoked into momentary impatience by the result of any slight attempt he may have made to dabble in the business of social reform or political controversy. Nor would such a feeling be necessarily selfish or epicurean. True, there is a higher view and aspiration than this, a view which would recon

cile a habit of energetic activity in human affairs, with all possible devotion to the poetical, the abstract, or the transcendental. Let the spirit but wing its flight far enough in the direction of the mysterious and unseen, and it will be met half way by an angelic messenger dispatched to conduct it back again to Earth, with the intimation conveyed gently, but convincingly, that there only, for the present, the service of the supernatural and the Divine is to be fulfilled. Nevertheless, in one sense, even the impatient feeling we have described is connected with what is just and noble. Of all modes of thought that can be entertained, the most wretched, the most impious by far, is that which hopes to abolish misery and crime by new arrangements of the external circumstances of human life. Against such modes of thought there ought to be a loud and ceaseless protest. And unfortunately at present such modes of thought seem to have it all their own way. We hear much of reorganizations of society; we scarcely hear at all among our literary men of the necessity of any inner process of change in the nature of the individual. The socialism of our day is, in this respect, half brutal; and till it learns to be something else, little that is essentially good will ever be derived from it. It seems to be forgotten, that though man faces a world of visible and palpable conditions, amid which he lives and moves on earth, there is a spirit within him tracing its origin to a far other world, still connected with that world by unseen ducts and chains of golden conveyance, and capable of receiving from it power and sustenance. It is forgotten that all without a man may be set right, and yet all within him may remain wrong. We hear much of improved conditions of life, and of new social forms. We hear little of the new heart and the right spirit. But until these phrases shall be revived in our literature and in our public opinion; until the conceptions which they embody shall cease to be accounted illusions of fanaticism, and shall become known and familiar, as representing real and significant facts, all our efforts for the good of mankind must be mean, physical, and partial. If the world is ever really to be ennobled and benefited by the exertions of our professed Social Reformers, the time must come when, not ceasing to advocate their special schemes of external improvement, they shall yet hold in due reverence the immortal truth couclied in those Divine words,-" Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and His righteousness; and all other things shall be added unto you."

ART. V.-1. Neander-Das Leben Jesu Christi in seinem Geschichtlichen Zusammenhange. Hamburg, 1845.

2. Geschichte der Pflanzung und Leitung der Christlichen Kirche durch die Apostel. 2 Bände. Hamburg, 1847.

3. Allgemeine Geschichte der Christlichen Religion und Kirche. 8 Bünde. Hamburg, 1825-47.

4. Julian und sein Zeitalter. Hamburg, 1812.

5. Antignosticus, Geist des Tertullianus und Einleitung in dessen Schriften. 2 Bände. Berlin, 1849.

6. Der Heilige Johannes Chrysostomus. 2 Bände. Berlin, 1849. 7. Der Heilige Bernhard und sein Zeitalter. Hamburg, 1848. 8. Denkwürdigkeiten aus der Geschichte des Christlichen Lebens. 2 Bände. Hamburg, 1816.

9. Zum Gedächtniss August Neander. Berlin, 1850.

10. Neander's History of the Planting and Training of the Christian Church under the Apostles. Biblical Cabinet, vols. 35, 36. Edinburgh.

11. History of the Christian Religion and Church during the Three First Centuries. Translated by JOSEPII TORREY, Professor of Moral Philosophy in Vermont, U.S. Vol. I. Bohn's Library. London, 1850.

THE name of Neander is familiar to most of our readers. Many of them, we believe, have already learned to reverence the man, and to appreciate the value of his labours, as the chief author in these times of the development of Church History as a science, and as one of the most influential leaders of the reaction which is going on in Germany in favour of apostolic or spiritual Christianity. He lived in a land where learning is followed and honoured as a profession, and where he was accounted one of the most learned of men. In the heat of controversy, the piety of some of his contemporaries, as Hengstenberg and Tholuck, had been held up to frequent ridicule; yet all Germany continued steadily to revere the piety of Neander, as of an Israelite indeed in whom was no guile. He shared, till his death in July last, the honours of the most learned city on the Continent with men like Schelling and Humboldtthe living patriarchs of philosophy and science. With all this there were moral elements in the homage paid to Neander which are not to be found in the homage paid to merely intellectual greatness. All his life long he stood aloof from the business and conflicts of the world, and indeed had no aptitude for mingling in its affairs. His world was his study, and his companions were his books; and thus he maintained during a long career the character

of the student, with something of the habits of the recluse. His life began with the storms of the first French Revolution, and it has closed amidst the struggles of that fierce democracy which has now, as then, proclaimed war against society and the Christian Church. Neander's researches into the history of the past did not keep him from obtaining a minute acquaintance with all the great movements of his own age, both in the Church and in the world. At the same time, the very circumstance of his singularly retired and peaceful life enabled him to exercise the greater sway over the thinking and active Christianity of Germany. The teaching and Christian life of which he is the type have already begun to influence the Churches of Great Britain, and must continue to impart a healthful vigour to their system in doctrine and practice. In this belief we proceed, after a few personal notices, to give some account of his literary labours.

Johann August Wilhelm Neander was born in Göttingen on the 16th January 1789. His parents were poor, and belonged to the Jewish faith. He received the first elements of education in Hamburg, where Judaism has long retained a firm footing, and where the Christian religion was long disgraced by the worst Rationalism of the pulpit and the press. He entered the University of Halle in 1806, when Schleiermacher lent it the lustre of his name and influence. He became Professor in Heidelberg in 1811, and in 1813 began his course as Professor of Theology in the University of Berlin, where he continued to labo ir till his death. It is recorded of him, when previously a student at Halle under Vater, that the first circumstance which brought him prominently into notice was his answering a question in Church history which had puzzled the whole class. This he did in such a way as at once to reveal his hidden powers, and to make him a favourite with the Professor and the students. Neander is one of the many illustrious men who have been successively brought by the Government of Prussia to Berlin, that centre of German scholarship and intellectual life. The Prussian capital has fewer natural attractions than any other great European city. It has, besides, few historical associations beyond the days of Frederic the Great; and yet the collective fame of these men, and their influence on the researches or controversies of the day, have given it much of the interest which attached to ancient Athens with its schools of learning.

The personal history of Neander is an impressive illustration of the truth of Christianity, and an instance of its Divine power. He himself assures us that he had to grope his way from the venerable ritual of ancient Judaism onward to the visions of the Platonic philosophy, until he at last found repose in the doctrines and the death of Jesus of Nazareth. We accordingly see him wandering

His Early Life and Personal Appearance.

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at first among the types and symbols and prophetic utterances of the Jewish Church, then seeking relief in the schools of the world's philosophy, and finally retracing his steps to discover the pathway of truth in following the faith of his childhood to its glorious issue in Christ. Here he found the symbolical language of Judaism deciphered, while at the same time he found that his spiritual wants were satisfied, and that a practical solution was given to the mysteries of a world of sin and death. With a nature so earnest as his, he must from the first have been impressed with the representations given in the Old Testament Scriptures of the holiness of God and the guilt of man, and the need of reconciliation between the sinner and the eternal Judge. These meditations must have fostered in him that spirit of moral thoughtfulness which Arnold somewhere speaks of as the leading element in all true greatness of character. While scepticism, disjoined from a pure life, may keep the heart for ever away from religious truth, as in the case of men like Voltaire or Byron, all true earnestness of thought and purpose is in the direction of the Cross as its final landing-place. We see in the spiritual history of men like Neander, and Chalmers, and Foster, and Arnold, that truth and holiness bear a family likeness, having the same heavenly ancestry, and bringing the same dowry of eternal life. The examples of men like these, in their search for truth, form an impressive testimony to the divinity of that faith in which knowledge becomes one with life, and the highest soarings of man's reason harmonize with the deepest experiences of his soul.

Before proceeding to speak of Neander as an author, we must present a picture of him as a man. It may surprise some to be told of his personal appearance. One might often pass him in the streets of Berlin, and little dream that the grotesque figure, so illfavoured and oddly attired, and so seemingly heedless of the whole outer world, was the greatest living church-historian, and one of the chief leaders of the mind of Germany. Nature certainly did not lavish on his person many of her graces, and art seemed to undo the little that nature had done. His features bore the mark of the most ungainly Jewish type; while his dress was not unlike that of a well-known tribe of his Jewish brethren, the dealers in old clothes in the back-lanes of London. No one who ever saw him in his class-room can forget the place or the man. There he stood behind a table nearly as high as himself, with his sunken eyes all but closed, or twinkling below his shaggy eye-brows, and with his thick black hair covering the greater part of his ample brow. He wore a long surtout carelessly buttoned over a spotted vest, with outside boots which reached nearly to his knees. Such was the bizarre figure that, to the stranger's surprise, entered the class-room, itself the