The Tree bore his fruit in the Midsummer glow:

Said the girl," May I gather thy berries, or no?"
"Yes; all thou canst see,

Take them; all are for thee,"

Said the Tree, while he bent down his laden boughs low.'

Views and Opinions By MATTHEW BROWNE. London: Alexander Strahan. 1866.

The Gentle Philosopher; or, Home Thoughts for Home Thinkers. London: James Blackwood & Co. 1866.

We ought to be a wise and understanding people. We receive, between the four Seas, some twenty thousand sermons weekly, and few days elapse without many well-meaning, and some highly-gifted men lavishing upon us good advice. Everybody seems bent on making others find light in their light, see evil in their curse, and discover beauty and excellence in their choice, their moods, or their ideals. The two volumes before us are very much akin with the quiet, though rather exhausted spirit of the Country Parson. At all events, they seek to give permanence to some of the fleeting but savory meditations which have amused our leisure, or arrested our attention, when they casually appeared in the journals of the day. They do not profess to go very deeply into any subject, or to give much information, or to guide to new sources of intellectual wealth; but they strike chords and sound keynotes of excellent fantasias, and at times play through overtures to unwritten but yet possible dramas which excite curiosity and provoke admiration. Matthew Browne cares little for criticism, and seldom goes out of his way to avoid it. He chats and coos and nods confidentially at his reader, at times wearing a very heart of hearts upon his sleeve, and satisfied that the public will be profoundly interested in his ways and moods and fancies; and at other times he garrulously runs on, implying that he has not time to cross the room in order to rectify a quotation or justify an epithet, and that his 'view' and his opinion, as such, unrectified and unjustified, or not defended, are for the nonce worth our pondering. Perhaps they are; we have been beguiled into reading the volume through, and shall probably repeat the experiment more than once. There is a very encyclopædia of fancy, crotchet, anecdote, quotation in the author's soul that makes one envy those friends round St. Paul's, who are held by him in sweet remembrance.' A man who can trace recurring ideas through Tennyson with patient care, and prove that he has studied him as old divines studied their Bible, who can nevertheless go utterly mad about the colour of love,' (!) and then defend street preaching, the ballet dance, the sanctity of Sunday, and nervous agitation, and, moreover, can say new and 'rich' things about every topic he touches, may be pardoned some of his impertinence and extravagance and oddity. There is a high tone and thorough novelty about this viewy book,' which gives it a charm and fascination even to jaded critics.

"The Gentle Philosopher' moves in a humbler region and more beaten track; and though some of his brief essays appear to us essentially weak and prosaic, many of them are noble and well meant, and an hour will be often won amid the hurry of the busy world to listen to the flow and ripple of the burn, beside which the Gentle Philosopher' has guided our steps.

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Days of Yore. By SARAH TYTLER.

Strahan.

London: Alexander

'Let the dead past bury its dead' is not the motto of modern novelists, many of whom are smitten with a passionate love of the olden time, and labour hard at archæology and history to galvanize the remains of buried generations into seeming life. Miss Tytler is evidently ambitious to contribute to such a result. We do not think she has succeeded in her effort. She has tried her hand on many epochs and various scenes, but the stories strike us as anything but interesting. She often makes an elaborate preparation for an insignificant and feeble narrative. The dramatic incidents are commonplace and without any true feeling; eminently artificial and constrained, and fail to bring before us with any living power the characters and scenes which she endeavours to reproduce. Adam Home's repentance appears to us, upon the whole, to be the best conceived and most interesting of the tales, but its extreme unnaturalness gives it this distinction. This story, even more than the others, is disfigured by an amount of Gaelic words that render many parts quite unintelligible to an uneducated Southron, and suggests the wish that the authoress had appended a glossary.

Lynton Grange. A Novel. By JOHN R. S. HARINGTON. Pitman, Paternoster-row.

This is a very good novel, especially regarded as a first attempt. It evinces a profound acquaintance with human nature, and a power of depicting its several types, in fictitious characters and scenes, which is not often surpassed. The story is very simple, yet the manner in which it is told, the incidents which fill it with life, and the variety of scenes into which it carries the reader, render it intensely interesting. Here are some of the most graphic descriptions of natural scenery and phenomena, and of London life, which we remember to have read. The book, besides, breathes throughout an air of freshness and reality which we do not always find in the productions of the greatest writers. But, above all, it is morally pure and healthy in its tone, and, without parading religious opinions or sentiments, is deeply religious in its spirit. The author has endeavoured,' as he tells us in his preface, 'to indicate, beneath the interest and amusement of fiction, the profound 'lesson of human experience, that evil, if fought with and subdued, ⚫ becomes an ennobling and purifying agent; but if yielded to, issues in ' utter darkness.' It is high praise, but it is not going beyond the merits of the author, to say that he has succeeded, and produced a book which may be as useful as it is interesting.

Wealth and Welfare. By JEREMIAH GOTTHELF. 2 vols. London: Alexander Strahan.

A simple tale of Swiss life, intended to illustrate the contrast indicated by its title-page; the representatives of which are the families of two well-to-do Bernese farmers. There is but little incident in the story, but its interest is sustained by the light which is thrown upon the customs, ideas, and feelings of Swiss life. To English readers this is a world of which they know but little-it is a little idealized, perhaps, in this tale, but it has about it the charm of more primitive society than

our own. The story is told in an interesting manner-the preaching and the moralizing a little too prominent and prolix, perhaps-but otherwise, lightly, gracefully, and skilfully; the religious feeling is throughout. excellent: the book is admirable for family reading.

THEOLOGY, PHILOSOPHY, AND PHILOLOGY.

The Tripartite Nature of Man, Spirit, Soul, and Body. By the Rev. J. B. HEARD, M.A. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.

The subject of the present volume, though long ago fully discussed in Germany by philosophers and physiologists, by moralists and theologians, has not hitherto been systematically handled in this country. English readers have had to depend for their knowledge of it upon scattered hints found in sermons, hasty notices in critical and theological reviews, and disconnected remarks in such commentaries as those of Olshausen, Alford, and Ellicott; all of which are necessarily imperfect, and many of them decidedly incorrect. We heartily rejoice, therefore, at the appearance of goodly volume devoted to the systematic treatment of such an important subject. Taking into consideration the novelty to many of our readers, of the topic discussed and the speculative nature of many of the details, we think that the best service we can render is to present as full and as faithful a statement as our space allows, both of the subjects treated and of the author's method of treatment. The Bible, as a revelation of man to himself, must not only issue the command of duty, it must also furnish us with a key to self-knowledge. It must tell us of our inner nature, that it is made in the image of God, as well as indicate the duties which such a God-like nature has to perform. The former belongs to Christian psychology, the latter to Christian ethics. The mistake of Christian psychologists has consisted in attempting to amalgamate the psychologies of Plato and Paul. In consequence of which they have either fallen into the heresies of Apollinaris and Origen, or, following the lead of Augustine and Jerome, they have rejected the distinction between Psyche and Pneuma, a feature which characterised the theology of the West. But Plato cannot be harmonised with Paul, for, of the pneuma of the apostle the divine Plato is totally ignorant; and his false spiritualism has proved more detrimental to Christian truth than the pure intellectualism of his most renowned pupil and rival. The psychology of Aristotle, too, though more correct than that of his master, lacks all knowledge of the pneuma, the distinctive feature of Biblical psychology, Science, as well as the schools, has treated copiously of the relation and distinction between soul and body; but with regard to the spirit or pneuma, it, too, is mute. But where science and the schools are silent, the Bible is vocal; and while it tacitly assumes the relation of soul and body, it is distinct in its utterances with regard to the relation of soul and spirit. We are not, however, to look for an explicit statement of the true trichotomy in the Old Testament. Just as under the old dispensation, the personality and operations of the Holy Spirit were not distinct, so the distinction between soul and spirit was also latent; the ruach and nephesh of the Hebrews are only distinguished from each other as the pneuma and psyche of the Greeks, and the animus and anima of the Latins; they are used only to distinguish the animal from the intellectual, and not the intellectual from the spiritual or pneumatical. Their nephesh referred to what we should now call body, and

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ruach to what we call soul. But, with the development of the Divine nature, that of the human keeps pace; therefore with the approach of the dispensation of the Spirit, the nature of the human spirit, as the sphere of its operation, became more clearly defined. Hence, in the utterance of Christ, though the distinction between soul and body, as the first step towards a complete trichotomy, is emphatic and distinct, the pneuma has not yet emerged out of the Old Testament obscurity. His teaching forms a transition period in the history of Biblical psychology. With the descent of the Divine Pneuma, the trichotomy is completed. In the teaching of the apostles we find the pneuma not merely in its contrast with soma, but also with psyche. It is to the writings of the apostle, then, that we are to look for the essentials of Christian psychology in their developed form. In these documents we find it explicitly stated, that man consists of body, or sense-consciousness; psyche, or self-consciousness; and pneuma, or God-consciousness. By this, we are to understand, not the union of three separable and distinct natures, but so many separate manifestations of one and the same nature. These parts are ideally distinguishable, but not actually separable. The will or personality has these three forms of consciousness, but the personality is ever the same, whether it acts through the body, soul, or spirit. In the Trinity there are three persons in one nature or substance, in man there are three natures in one person.

As regards their origin, the soul and body are the work of the Divine Creator, but the spirit or pneuma is an emanation from Him, and consubstantial with Him. The pneuma is the organ of divine knowledge and fellowship. It is the true presence-chamber of the Almighty. Rational intuition can tell us about God, but it is by the pneuma alone that we know God. The soul is the nexus between body and spirit. In the soul of man the animal and spirit so combine, that their separate existence is destroyed. It is probable that neither soul nor spirit is, by itself, capable of a separate entity, but that they can combine, and thus form spiritual life and spiritual consciousness, as soul and body do to form animal life and animal consciousness. Adam was probably created an adult physically and psychically, but pneumatically or spiritually an infant. He was in a state of actual innocence, and of possible spirituality and immortality, by the native powers of his own pneuma. By the fall, not only was his innocency lost, but the pneuma lost its hold of God. The reign of anarchy began. The soul rebelled against the spirit, and the body against the soul. All these were seriously injured; sense-consciousness became depraved, self-consciousness darkened, and God-consciousness dormant. The pneuma, after the fall, though not absolutely destroyed, became dead to all the higher exercises of faith, hope, charity: as conscience, however, it still disapproves and condemns, but has not the power to control. Adam, when he fell, lost not only the pneumatical for himself, but also the power of transmitting it to his posterity. He lost the power of propagating a spiritual progeny, ex traduce, and handed down to all his offspring injured somatical and psychical powers, and a ruined pneuma capable only of discharging its lowest functions. Man was henceforth born into a state of anarchy, and a harmonious unaided development of his nature became impossible. Since the fall, the psyche is the governing faculty in unregenerate man. The work of God's Spirit, in regenerating man, therefore, is to quicken the pneumatical, purify the intellectual and moral (psychical), and to control the animal. Henceforth the spiritual must come to man from his spiritual head by the instrumentality of the

Spirit, as the psychical comes from his psychical head. With the loss, by the fall, of the God-likeness, man lost also the immortality contingent upon its possession. Death ensued. Now death in its entire form must have involved not merely the separation of soul and body, but a dissolution of the link which binds the three together. This process of dissolution was prevented by the mediatorial work of Christ, and through him death has become a kind of suspended animation.

Of the soul, or self-consciousness, we cannot predicate mortality or immortality. Life is not an essential property of mind any more than of matter. Since the soul can exist only through its union with spirit or God-consciousness, the proofs of its immortality must rest, not on the nature, the psyche, but on the gift of eternal life to the pneuma, when quickened and revived in the image of God. The immortality of men and of angels seems to depend upon their possessing and continuing in the Divine likeness. Whether the devil and his angels are immortal, and whether unregenerate men are immortal, are questions which lie beyond the horizon to which Scripture bounds our view. The second death may mean not life in death, but the 'death of death and hell's destruction.' It may be only one awful means of destroying death. All observation of the connexion between soul and body is in favour of the psycho-pannuchist theory of the entire unconsciousness of the intermediate state; all Scripture intimations are against it. But since, according to our theory, two of the forms of consciousness can exist without the third, we can easily perceive how the psycho-pneumatic life may be one not merely of consciousness, but of far higher form than when united to sense. This may be a means not simply of perfecting and completing the sanctification of the psycho-pneumatical, but also one of God's ways of quickening the dead, by making it a state of probation to the psychical. As the death of Christ was destined to repair the losses of the fall with regard to the entire nature of man, the redemption through Him cannot be complete until the body is reunited with the soul and spirit. With regard to the resurrection of the body, there are two extreme views,-the Egyptian, which was also handed down by the schoolmen, that the same sarx would be raised again; and the Greek theory of the resurrection of the disembodied spirit; neither of which accords with the statements of Paul. One makes too much of the body, the other too little. At the resurrection there will be the transformation of the natural into a spiritual body, which will be the final one in the history of man. Then will disappear the sarx with all its influences, and a new soma or organism will be given him adapted to the wants of a nature altogether spiritual and God-like.

Such, are the principal topics discussed in this volume. We have given their outline in our own order, but, as far as we could, in the author's expressions. Our aim is not now to criticise the work, but to call attention to the subject, to state the writer's opinion, rather than express our own. The subject is one of immense importance to the right understanding of Scripture, and the author is a most learned sincere Christian man. The book manifests a vast amount of theological and philosophical reading, of historical and critical research. All sources of information have been consulted, and an earnest spirit pervades the whole. The volume is distinguished from the German works upon the same subject by carrying out Biblical psychology into all its applied metaphysical details; while the Germans have generally confined themselves to pure psychology. We cannot help believing that the work will be of great service to the truth, and we therefore strongly recommend to our readers a careful perusal of its contents.