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a Revelation from God, and the need of it; the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Bible, its Inspiration, its general Characteristics, the Agreement and Consistency of all its parts. He also vindicates the peculiar doctrines of the Gospel, and explains those texts which have often been the occasion of frivolous objections and opposition to the truth.

The book was not written for learned theologians, but for the people. It ought to be in every family library; the young would find in it a satisfactory answer to many questions, which unanswered, at the proper time and in the proper way, have induced the first step towards infidelity and scoffing impiety. We regret the necessity of pointing out a single

error.

Dr. Cumming, in alluding to the fulfillment of Prophecy as evidence of the inspiration of the Scriptures, speaks of the prophetic words of Noah in reference to his children. We think he mistakes both the prophecy and the subsequent facts relating to it. He says it was foretold that the descendants of Ham should be slaves to the latest posterity; and this prediction has been fulfilled to the letter, for we find the descendants of Ham slaves at this day in the West Indies,' &c. By referring to Gen. ix, 25, it will be found that the prophecy was uttered respecting Canaan, in these words: "Cursed be Canaan; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." There is here no intimation that the descendants of Ham should be slaves to the latest posterity. The prediction began to be fulfilled when the Israelites, descendants of Shem, subdued the Canaanites, and occupied their country. It had a farther fulfillment when the remnants of the tribes in Canaan were driven out by David, and fell under the dominion of the Romans, the descendants of Japheth. The idea that this prediction is now having its fulfillment in Negro Slavery does not appear to have the least foundation in Scripture. It ought not to have found a place in Dr. Cumming's book. We doubt if the system of slavery, now prevailing, has even the doubtful apology of a doubtful prophecy for its continuance.

Twenty Pictures from Switzerland. Sketched from Nature, then arranged and finished. By Rev. CESAR MALAN, D. D., Geneva. pp. 192. 1855. Robert Carter & Brothers, New York.

This is substantially a narrative of events which occurred several years ago in some of the Cantons of Switzerland, in connection with oppositions of the civil authority to private meetings of dissenting Christians. Many precious truths of the Gospel are familiarly illustrated in this little volume; and many proofs presented to show that God's faithfulness to his people never fails.

The Footsteps of St. Paul. By the Author of "Morning and Night Watches," "The Words of Jesus," "The Mind of Jesus," "The Great Journey," &c., &c. pp. 416. Robert Carter & Brothers. New York: 1855.

We know not the author of this work; but the eminently practical and evangelical character of his writings have rendered them deservedly popular with Christians of all denominations. The memoir of no living man is in any respect equal in real interest to this of the Great Apostle of the Gentiles. His character is indicated by a beautiful and graphic recital of his personal experience; in which his remarkable career, as Scholar, Persecutor, Convert, Missionary and Martyr, is invested with romantic interest. It was the design of the author to combine historical and biographical interest with religious instruction, hoping thus to attract the youthful reader to a more careful and devout study of the Word of God.' "What nobler model could be selected in this respect for the youthful mind-what history more replete with stirring interest, and nobler, spiritual lessons than the life of the Scholar of Gamaliel !" We heartily commend this book as one admirably adapted to interest, and instruct, and benefit the reader. It ought to occupy a prominent place among the "religious books" of the household.

The Christian Retrospect and Register: A Summary of the Scientific, Moral, and Religious Progress of the first half of the Nineteenth Century. With a Supplement, bringing the work down to the present time. By ROBERT BAIRD. 1855. pp. 436. New York: M. W. Dodd. For sale by F. T. Jarman, New Haven.

This is a very needful and convenient book of reference, full of valuable information respecting political changes in the last half century, the progress of Science and Art, of Education and Christianity. The volume is a republication of the edition of 1852, with a Supplement which presents the latest statistical information on the material and religious advancement of the world.

Uncle Nathan: or Striet Agreement with God in His Word. Ballou & Loveland, Montpelier, Vt., 1855.

This work is well suited to arrest the attention of a certain class of sceptics and errorists, who would never read a more labored and abstract treatise on the same subjects.

Art, Scenery and Philosophy in Europe. Fragments from the Portfolio of the
late Horace Binney Wallace, Esq., of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Herman
Hooker, 1855.
PP. 346.

The high intellectual character of Mr. Wallace, his natural superiority, and extraordinary attainments, called forth from

his personal friends the warmest praise. Daniel Webster, Chief Justice Gibson, Professor Dod, and others, men not accustomed to speak hastily, or for the mere purpose of compliment, ascribe to him the qualities of a rare genius. The proofs of mental power, of singular aesthetic and scientific culture, clearly appear in this posthumous volume. And but for his untimely death, the opinions respecting him, of intimate and discriminating friends, would doubtless have been justified and generally adopted.

Mr. Wallace was born in Philadelphia, in 1817. His early education was carefully superintended by his father, to whose enlarged and thorough training may be traced the early distinction of the son in classical taste and learning. At the age of fifteen years he entered the University of Pennsylvania, from which he was transferred at the end of two years, to the College at Princeton, and was there graduated in 1835. He commenced the study of medicine, which he soon abandoned for the study of law, which he pursued in that thorough and systematic way which marks the best school of professional training. He very early established his reputation among lawyers as a first rate legal writer. Of his professional writings it is said, "that no books of late times have received so extensive and so unsolicited commendation from the highest courts of nearly every state in the American Union; and their reputation increases, as it is likely to do the more widely they are known."

In 1849-50, Mr. Wallace traveled extensively in Europe, devoting himself to the study of art, as it appears in the old world, in sculpture, painting and architecture. In 1852, while engaged in literary labor, his health was impaired, and he sought relief and restoration by foreign travel; but the improvement which he anticipated he failed to receive, and a few weeks after his arrival in Paris, he died suddenly at the age of thirty-five. That he was a man of rare gifts and accomplishments, and promised far greater distinction than he attained, may be justly inferred both from the testimony of friends, and the literary and artistic papers which came from his pen. Though the contents of this book are called fragments;" all unfinished-immature buds and blossoms shaken from the tree, and green fruit; yet will they evince what the harvest would have been."

The first subject discussed in this book is "Art, an Emanation of religious Affection." In the history of Art, as this power or faculty has appeared, Mr. Wallace discovers "only four special displays of artist-inspiration so undefective in their

completeness, so exalted in significance, so absolute in splendor, as to fill every susceptibility that our nature can conceive to be the subject of an emotion." These are Greek sculpture, Italian painting, Gothic architecture and Greek architecture; of which only the three first remain in such entireness of preservation, that their power can be appreciated and felt. His idea is that the Art-faculty is nothing else than earnest religious feeling acting imaginatively, or imagination working under the elevating and kindling influences of religious feeling; and that "there is no instance of supreme excellence in Art being reached, excepting where the subject of the artist's thoughts and toils,-the type which he brought up to perfection,-was to him an object of worship, or a sacred thing immediately connected with his holiest reverence." In accordance with this idea, he finds the unapproached excellency of the Greeks in sculpture to be intimately connected with the character of their theology, which was anthropomorphous. Their gods were represented in the likeness of men, so that the human form was to them an object of worship; it was a representative, and in its imaginative conception, the very identity of divinity. To glorify and exalt this image was for the Greek artist a work of religious enthusiasm. And so, "from the fervent mind of the Attic Sculptor, to whom the augmentation of beauty was a service of piety, sprang forth a throng of shapes flashing with all the luster that the soul's idolatry could lavish upon them."

Artist inspiration and power appeared also in Italian painting, "in direct association with a great increase and action of religious feeling; and all the subjects of the painter's toils were to them objects of adoration, the Virgin, the Saviour, the Saints." Without an increased intensity of a peculiar kind of religious devotion, Mr. Wallace thinks the display of Art could not have been produced, which appeared from 1220 to 1500. "It was in representing, visibly, the mythology of the Romish church, that the Art-inspiration of medieval Italy worked itself out. But it was especially in the pictorial deification of the Medonna that creative genius then reached the standard of ideal perfection, which makes the glory of these schools."

Another illustration of the principle that Art is an emanation of religious affection is presented in Gothic Architecture. "The sense that the building to be fashioned was to become the home of the Spirit of the All-Holy; and the enthusiastic design to raise it to a divineness worthy of the shrine of his worship, and to stamp upon it a symbolism of the greatness of

his power and the beauty of his love, became the actuating instinct of this earnest Art. Devotion was the expanding and exalting influence that wrought within their imaginations." The historical relation between religion and this development of art, is indicated in the spiritual enthusiam and holy zeal which marked the period of the crusades, and the establishment of monkish orders. Cotemporary with this great and general increase of religious enthusiasm or fanaticism, was the budding forth of Gothic architecture; showing it to be a direct emanation from a living element of religious fervor.

From such a view of the origin and progress of Art, it is natural, perhaps, that Mr. Wallace should find the Reformation the great social monument, which marks the diminution of that peculiar religious feeling, and the extinction of that artinspiration, which appeared in the previous ages. He states also that "Protestantism has never produced a great artist. The last of the heroic race of painters were Rubens and Vandyke; and both were Catholics. The loftiest school of our own day, that of Munich, is composed either of Catholics or of persons who being Protestant at the outset, became Catholic in the process of becoming artists."

If the principles here stated respecting Art are correct, the inference must be that high Art cannot be the growth, or outworking of a pure religious affection; and that a man must part company with real spiritual religion, supplying its place with a kind of idolatry of visible things, in order to be a true artist. At the risk of being written down among the Huguenots, whom Mr. Wallace regards as the "savages of spiritual life," we are disposed to think that the sensuous influence of Sculpture, and Italian painting, and Gothic architecture, has been very powerful in accomplishing the gross formalism and spiritual debasement of the Roman church. If " Art fell like lightning from the heaven of its divineness," at the dawn of the Reformation, we are persuaded that the world could better do without art-inspiration, than without the Word of God and the Monk of Erfurt to interpret it.

"Art, Symbolical, not Imitative," is the subject of another paper, in which Mr. Wallace declares the law of the origin and development of art to be as follows: "It sets out with a symbolism chiefly mental or conventional. Next, it discovers and works out the inherent capacity of natural forms, where idealized by the imagination, to symbolize those spiritual sentiments which form the subject of art. Finally, in its last and lowest stage, it forgets its prophetic and mediatorial function,

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