American Journal of Education. 6. The National Council of Congregational Churches. 7. The Foreign Delegations to the National Council of Congregational Churches. 8. Life of Julius Cæsar, by Napoleon III. 9. Defense of the late Professor Kingsley, of Yale College, from the Attacks of President Sears. 10. Importance of the Pastoral Office. 11. The Council and the Creed.

English Reviews.

BRITISH AND Foreign Evangelical Review, July, 1865. (London.)— 1. Anschar, the Apostle of the North. 2. Plymouthism and Dr. Whately. 3. French Evangelical Criticism. 4. The Broad Church and Moral Law. 5. George Calixtus. 6. David Hume. 7. Principles of Church Union. 8. Herbert Spencer's Philosophy. 9. Rambles in Italy-Ascent of Vesuvius.

BRITISH QUARTERLY REVIEW. July, 1865.-(London.) 1. Earl Russell on the Constitution. 2. The Elizabethan Poetry. 3. Geneva. 4. Magic. 5. The Great Governing Families of England. 6. The Two Newmans. 7. Recent Parliamentary Proceedings. 8. Church and State in France since 1798. 9. The Universities and the Nonconformists. CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER, July, 1865. (London.) 1. The Catacombs of Rome. 2. Dwellings and Food of the Laboring Classes. 3. Le Maudit. 4. The Church of England under Edward and Elizabeth. 5. Biographies-Religious and Secular. 6. The Ultramontane Essayists. 7. The Bishop of Oxford and the French Interdicted Priests. 8. Bishop Torry and the Scottish Church. 9. Revision of the Prayer Book. EDINBURGH REVIEW, July, 1865. (New York: Reprint.)-1. Watson's Life of Bishop Warburton. 2. Idiot Asylums. 3. Early Italian Art. 4. Revision of the English Bible. 5. The Tunnel through the Alps. 6. Street's Gothic Architecture in Spain. 7. China and Japan. 8. Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon. 9. Lady Duff Gordon's Letters from Egypt. 10. Munro's Lucretius. 11. Dissolution of Parliament. JOURNAL OF SACRED LITERATURE AND BIBLICAL RECORD, July, 1865.— (London.) 1. Early English Religious Poetry. 2. A Voice from Egypt. 3. Buddhism. 4. Ethiopic Prayers, etc. 5. The Historical Character of the Gospels Tested by an Examination of their Contents. 6. Exegesis of Difficult Texts. 7. Dr. Pusey's "Daniel the Prophet." 8. Georgian Version of the New Testament. 9. Metaphysical Schools among the Jews since the Times of Moses Maimonides. 10. The Metonic Cycle and Calippic Period. 11. Brief Notes on Romans i-iii. 12. The Preposition ΕΙΣ.

LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW, (Wesleyan.) July, 1865. (London.)— 1. Perowne on the Psalms. 2. La Fontaine and his Fables. 3. Dartmoor. 4. Julius Cæsar. 5. Brittany, her Ballads and Legends. 6. The Codification of the Law. 7. The Kingdom of Italy. 8. The Judgment in the Colenso Case. 9. Modern Criticism on St. John's Gospel. The Ninth Article presents an able general view of the modern attacks on John's Gospel. Save by the contemptible little heretical sect of Alogi in the second century, the authenticity and genuineness of this gospel were unquestioned until Evanson, in England, commenced to query, followed by Bretschneider in Germany, in a gentle and scholarly way, and afterward by Bruno Bauer in a fierce and un

critical style. Then the Tübingen school of skeptics, with Ferdinand Christian Bauer at their head, commenced an entire reconstruction, by a very original and autocratic method, of the entire primitive apostolic and post-apostolic history. John's Gospel is attacked upon the ground, among others, of contrariety and contradiction to the first three gospels; of its own so-called metaphysical and mystical character; and especially, of the perfect conformity of the style of Jesus's discourses with that of the Evangelist himself. Our reviewer answers this last difficulty on the ground that the Lord's discourses are translations by the evangelist from Jesus's Aramaic into his own Greek; that all the evangelists, so far as regards words and phrases, report his discourses in their own style, and yet that the divine Spirit presided over the whole process. Thus we have a spirit-guided, yet free and individualist report of the teachings of Jesus.

The reviewer, after analyzing the work of Hengstenberg on John with mingled eulogies and strictures, finally concludes that the Commentary on John is yet to be written, and that an Englishman is bound to be its author. And who should that author be, we may add, but the scholarly editor of this Quarterly, the Rev. William B. Pope?

LONDON QUARTERLY REVIEW, July, 1865. (New York: Reprint.)— 1. Grouse. 2. The Appian Way-Pagan and Christian Sepulchres. 3. Browning's Poems. 4. The Close of the American War. 5. North Polar Exploration. 6. Gleanings from the Natural History of the Tropics. 7. The Church in her Relations to Political Parties. 8. Carlyle's Frederick the Great. 9. Sanitary Reform in the Metropolis. 10. The Elections.

1. Later

WESTMINSTER REVIEW, July, 1865. (New York: Reprint.) Speculations of Auguste Comte. 2. The Antislavery Revolution in America. 3. Mr. Herbert Spencer's Principles of Biology. 4. Political Economy. 5. Imperial History. 6. American Novelists: Theodore Winthrop. 7. The Principles of our Indian Policy.

The last two numbers of the Westminster Review contain an exposition of the philosophy of M. Comte, by the great leader of that school at the present day, John Stuart Mill. The Methodist Quarterly Review was perhaps the first American periodical to present a full view of the formidable philosophy of Comte to the public. But as that statement was drawn up by a writer more remarkable for his powers of acquisition than of exposition, his presentation, as many think, failed to give a clear view of the nature of that philosophy to the great body of our readers. Meantime, inasmuch as the system itself has been making bold advances toward a predominance over the philosophic thought of France and England, a brief statement of its points, based upon Mr. Mill's

exposition but performed in our own way, will, we trust, present it with desirable clearness to the minds of our readers.

Divide all human notions into Knowledge and Guess: knowledge is worthy alone of our attention; and what amounts to mere guess is worse than worthless, and should be abolished from our habitual thought. Positive knowledge, or science, embraces the phenomena of experience and their sequences: phenomena, whether observed as existing externally or in the mind; and sequences, embracing the order of events; which order is regulated by Law, namely, the Law of invariable succession. All Positive Knowledge, then, is embraced within the domain of Phenomena and the Laws of their succession, All notions besides these are futile and fanciful guess.

The so-called inner essences of phenomena, or of things, are, for instance, matters of mere guess; and similarly all so-called cause, over and above the uniformity of sequences, is equally nothing. Herein Comte merely coincides with Locke in deducing all our knowledge from experience; and with Hume in reducing all causation to invariable sequence. Thus far in what is the more positive part of the system Dr. Thomas Brown is the best expositor of Comte's doctrine, or rather denial, of causality, and the best preparer for his philosophy. It is in the vigor of his positive statement and in his demonstrative negation of the validity of all thought outside of positive science, that Comte is most original as well as most positively destructive. That illegitimate outside embraces all so-called intuition, all transcendental ideas, all metaphysics, (taking that word in the sense of ontology,) and all theology. The notions of a personal god, an immortal soul, of inspiration, revelation, and miracle, are shadows in the land of guess.

Thus much states the gist of Comte's philosophy. Yet Mr. Mill declares that Comte did not personally deny that an original Intelligence is the best supposable hypothesis to account for the existing system of things. But the hypothesis is based upon mere analogy, and as being a mere guess, can form no part of a positive science. It is invalid, and in some respects worse than worthless.

Comte's demonstration of the invalidity of all notions outside positive science takes the form of a theory of mental human history, verified by him in two of the massive six volumes in which his system is recorded. The three stages of human development are, according to his theory, the Theological, the Metaphysical, and the Positive. In the Theological stage all classes of movement for which there is no visible cause are popularly ascribed to an invisible personal cause, a god. Hence the earliest form of Theology is polytheism. Lotal gods, gods over specific operations and objects, everywhere spring up, and, finally, national gods. As the uniformities of nature's operations

are, as time advances, more extensively comprehended, mankind arrive at Monotheism. Meantime, during this process of advancement, the Metaphysical solutions of particular sorts of facts in nature are supplanting the personal and theological, and rising into the ascendant, and these introduce the second or Metaphysical stage. A series of small struggles takes place, in which the Theological disappear, and the Metaphysical for a the Metaphysical for a while conquer. Thus, for instance, vegetation grows not by a special god, "but by a vegetative principle;" and life flows from a "vital principle." Things consist of their " essences;" and "nature abhors a vacuum." Flame and smoke ascend, because up is "their natural place;" and medicine is effective by a "curative force." And this is the reign of metaphysical guess.

We may here express a doubt whether our philosophers do not herein make a hard and unsuccessful strain to furnish a class or stage of Metaphysical solutions which is of a magnitude or extent sufficient to stand in rank or co-ordination with the stupendous genus or stage of the Theological. We venture a doubt, for instance, whether a "vital principle" is anything more than the assignment of false cause; which cause may be as truly physical as metaphysical. Such a cause may be considered as introduced provisionally in the immature state of science, to disappear as fuller observation renders the science complete. A gravitative "vortex," an electric “fluid,” a “luminiferous ether," may all be imaginary bases of natural phenomena; but how are they metaphysical more than physical? When the world is said to be borne by an elephant based on the back of a tortoise, .the theory is physical; when the sky is said to be sustained on the shoulders of Atlas it is personal; when the earth is made to whirl by a mystical vortex, the solution may, for aught we care, be called metaphysical. Either of these causes may be fabricated at the earlier or earliest age, or they may all coexist at the same age. To what, then, does all the talk about this "Metaphysical stage" amount more than this: as science advances, false causes are often temporarily assigned-causes variously, natural, supernatural, physical, personal, or metaphysicalwhich disappear as science detects the real causes. They are the stagings necessary to the erection of the building, to be thrown down as the structure towers to its summit.

But the human mind, according to Comte, by its own necessary advancement, tends to a perfect consummation in the third and final age of Positivism. Comte's demonstration of his negative results consists in his verification of this historical progress. Polytheism has given place to monotheism; monotheism equally giving place to metaphysical causation; and metaphysics vanish as science advances to the

completion of her task in reducing causes to laws, and in making the uniform sequences of nature consist of observed and systematized facts, which reject all attempts to be accounted for. And that is the finality. This ultimate Positive age is the Millennium of Atheism.

Thus far the philosophy of Comte. It will be seen that it expels religion from within the bounds of reason. His American pupil, Dr. Draper, holds to a larger number of advancing stages; placing the age of reason after the age of faith, and adding a discouraging appendix, consisting of an age of mental imbecility to complete the whole. Against this philosophy, Kant would have erected his counter work of the practical reason; Hamilton and Mansel (and Dr. Hedge) would have raised the banner of faith; and M'Cosh inaugurates his system of intuitions. The great philosophical issue between them is, What is the validity of our intuitions ?

The true theory of the effect of science upon theism we take to be this: Man's reason, apart from revelation, demands a Supernatural sufficient to account for and to control the entire amount he knows of nature. When his knowledge of nature is local and fragmentary, the deity he demands is local and limited. As his comprehension of nature enlarges, his demands for a higher and wider Providence are commensurate with all the nature he conceives. And when astronomy and conception grasp a limitless universe, his reason demands a one limitless God. And at that unsurpassable point science and monotheism agree forever.

It is a curious fact that in Comte's own personal history an age of pseudo-religion succeeded the age of positivism. Having no religion to fill and satiate his soul, he patched up a tatterdemalion superstition! This his great pupil, Mill, fully details in his second article, with repeated confessions of shame for his great master. His god was the Human Race, past, present, and future; for whose worship he constructed an elaborate ritual, and in whose behalf he preached an overstrained theory of morality-a morality whose exaggeration rendered it immoral. Professing himself wise, he became the prince of fools. Let his followers take warning by his example.

German Reviews.

DORPATER ZEITSCHRIFT FUR THEOLOGIE UND KIRCHE. (Dorpat Journal of Theology and the Church.) Second Number, 1865.-1. VOLCK, On Eschatology. 3. HALLER, Missions among the Jews. 4. BECKER, Paul Gerhardt and his Struggles for the Lutheran Church. 5. OETTINGEN, Review of Harless's Christian Ethics. 8. LUTKENS, Review of Fabri's Letters against Materialism.