as a part of a well considered series. There may not, even in the end, be found much brilliancy, or any uncommon depth; but there will be found much well considered fitness to the high and blessed end in view, leading these youth to Christ, and building them up in faith and manly virtue.

Dr. Wayland and his writings need no introduction to our readers. Confessedly one of the master minds in our American Israel, he is characterized by strong thoughts and lucid utterance. As tutor and professor in one of our principal American colleges in early life, and subsequently for nearly an ordinary lifetime the President of the venerable University at Providence, he knows young men by this long and intimate intercourse as very few have the opportunity of knowing, and the highest expectations are naturally awakened by a volume from his hand, culled out of the sermons which he has delivered to this interesting class of hearers. Twentyone discourses are embraced in this publication, the first threefourths of which pertain to the common salvation. Of the later ones three are on obedience to the civil magistrate, and two on the then Recent Revolutions in Europe. At present we have to do only with the earlier portion of the volume, and it will be found eminently worthy of careful study in its adaptedness to the topic of present consideration.

The first sixteen sermons have the following titles: Atheism, Theoretical and Practical; The Moral Character of Man; The Fall of Man; Justification by Works impossible; Preparation for the Advent of the Messiah; Work of the Messiah; Justification by Faith; A Day in the Life of Jesus of Nazareth; The Fall of Peter; The Church of Christ; and Unity of the Church of Christ.

The discourses are imbued with a noble Catholic spirit,*

* In what other institution in our country could there be found a more true liberality than the President of Brown University evinces, when, in his sermon on the Church of Christ, he thus declares his sentiments and his practice. I speak here as the advocate of no sect, but as I believe, in the Spirit of Universal Christianity. In addressing you, young gentlemen, I am of no sect. Never since I have been an instructor, have I uttered a word with the conscious intention of proselyting you to the denomination of which I am a

and can scarcely fail, wherever read understandingly to promote the intelligence, the devout zeal, and the spirituality of the readers. The learned doctor is fond of original speculation. He dearly loves to analyze what to other minds may seem simple and elementary, and his own habits of thought and philosophizing may have unconsciously led him in some few instances to a depth and abstruseness of reasoning, into which the young minds of undergraduates would scarcely follow him. We have understood, indeed, that these assemblies in the University Chapel were often made up very largely of the elite of the educated and devout men and women of the city, quite as much as of students. Hence, very probably, the scope and method of many of the sermons. The only serious objection which we have heard offered to these discourses, is the lack of sufficient simplicity in the subjective presentation of Christ as the direct and only hope of perishing sinners. It is not doubted that Dr. Wayland cordially believes in this. Evidence enough may be gathered even from this volume to convince any one that such is the

member. I have no right to use what little influence I may possess as an instructor for such a purpose. You have all your own religious preferences, as you are connected with the different persuasions of Protestant Christianity. We would have you enjoy these preferences to the uttermost, and in this institution you have, from the beginning, enjoyed them to the uttermost, not as a favor, but as an inalienable right. We would say to you all, Search the Scriptures each one for himself, and by the exercise of your own understandings, ascertain what is the truth which Jesus Christ has revealed to us. ing done this, unite yourselves, if you have not yet done it, to that sect whose belief and practice seem most in harmony with the teachings of the holy oracle. Understand what you profess, and be always ready, as intelligent men, to give to others a reason of your faith. But guard yourselves against the notion that your sect is, in any exclusive sense, the Church of Christ, or that in any spe

Hav

cial sense it embodies the heirs of heaven or the favorites of God. Reverence and love and imitate real piety wherever you may find it. Your great distinction is, not that you are a member of this or that sect, but that you are a child of God, and an humble, self-denying disciple of the bessed Saviour." This is real Rhode Island doctrine and practice. It belongs to the era and the region of Roger Williams, and soul-freedom. This, too, it seems to us is the proper course for all University Sermons in this country, where students are gathered from all the multitudinous sects to be trained in common. such liberty and freedom there may be perfect union.

In

author's full and deep conviction. Perhaps, after all, the defect, if there be one, is more in manner than in matter, and not unlikely the gifted author would now somewhat more warmly and directly press upon the conscience and the heart of his hearers the infinite urgency-not merely that Christ should be conceived of rightly as an almighty and adequate Saviour, but specially that He should be formed in each one of them the hope of glory, than he did fifteen or twenty years ago, when these sermons were delivered. That kind of philosophical dissection to which his daily duties in the class room accustomed him, handling the abstruse and metaphysical subjects connected with our mental and moral natures, and their various recondite phenomena, may have insensibly led him more to speculation in preaching than he would now think altogether the most profitable for the ardent and often impatient minds of average young men in student-life. Such may, perhaps, seem some of his speculations in the second sermon, on the Work of the Messiah, where several pages are devoted to a consideration of what the Redeemer may have done for us in his grand propitiation, between the time of his death and his resurrection, of which, as the Dr. admits, the Scriptures have not informed us. Something of the same character may be found in the next sermon on Justification by Faith, where a long discussion occurs as to the nature of faith, leading to this summary enunciation:

"Faith is the exercise of filial love, successfully resisting the pressure of things present, sensual and unholy. It is acting as God would have us, not when all things incite us to obedience, but when all things around us incite us to sin. It is the temper of mind which thus gives to things unseen

* The characteristic excellence of Dr. Wayland as a teacher and writer, strongly biasses him to the objective presentation of whatever can be grasped and handled'; can be viewed in different lights and analyzed into its component parts; can be logically stated and fully explained. Nor is it any marvel, or on the whole to be regretted, perhaps, since all excellencies cannot be found in any one, that with a habitual horror of anything approaching to mysticism, he less considers and insists on the other or subjective view of the reception of Christ, and his incorporation into the believer so as to be mysteriously but truly one with him.

their appropriate mastery over things seen; it is the overcoming of the world by the power of holy trust in God, reliance upon his perfections, when every dictate of human wisdom would lead us to distrust Him."

Now this is sufficiently comprehensive for a definition; but is it not confused also, grouping together faith and its fruits or results, as well as its concomitants? Further on in the same discourse, remarking upon the Apostle's enumeration of examples of faith in the patriarchs, as stated in the xith of Hebrews, he says: "It is not necessary to suppose that they were persons of real piety, though they may have been really pious." This sounds strangely to our ears, accustomed as we have always been to regard the exercise of true faith as of itself the best evidence of piety: specially a faith so comprehensive as Dr. Wayland above defines it. Then as to the office of faith in our justification, the Doctor thus teaches: "The very disposition, on account of which we are justified, insures by necessary consequence that change of character without which we could never be acceptable to God." If we mistake not, the wrong of this is that it founds our justification on the manner of our believing, and not on the object of our faith-Christ only. It turns the eye of the anxious inquirer inward upon himself, and makes him over-scrupulous about some qualification in his own bosom: when his whole duty is to look away from himself to Christ, the only Saviour. What if the bitten Israelite in the wilderness had been lectured for half an hour on the nature and concomitants of right-looking to the brazen serpent, and in the midst of the learned homily had died! Were it not better, then as now, to urge every bitten and dying sufferer at once to look, as bidden, to the source of healing?

There are, indeed, delightful exceptions to this untimely philosophizing, in these discourses. We have to read, again and again, the simple pathos of " A Day in the Life of Jesus," and "The Fall of Peter." Nothing can be farther from these, and some others among these sermons, than any undue abstruseness. They show us how a great mind, accustomed to verse itself in the deep things of God, of man, and of eter

nity, can unbend, and in its simply sublime utterances, can allure and melt and bless us by an artless simplicity, as rare as it is beautiful. More of such preaching, we are confident and less of Systematic Theology in its profounder depths, would better subserve the religious welfare of young students in the important years of college life.

Dr. Huntington's connection with Harvard University as chaplain and preacher-if we have been correctly informedproved a turning point in his theology, both theoretically and practically. He was selected for the place by the Unitarian President and Fellows of that institution, as one who probably approached nearer to what are reckoned evangelical sentiments, than most of his liberal associates. While there fulfilling his official duties, and ministering to the spiritual wants of the young men under his pastoral care-whether from the conviction of their need of something higher and deeper than Liberalism furnished, or from his own wants, or from continued study of the sacred Scriptures, or from all combined--he became not only almost, but altogether orthodox, both in creed and in the messages of divine truth which he ministered to others. The sermons here published, called "Christian Believing and Living," were selected probably from the more evangelical kind, which he had delivered in the University Chapel. While not Unitarian at all, so far as we can discover, they do not indicate such extreme views as one just breaking away from fundamental errors long held and defended, might naturally be expected to set forth. For, too often the weakness of human nature shows itself by oscillating, like the pendulum, far across the perpendicular line from one point of departure to the oposite extreme. Happily for him, and for those committed to his spiritual charge, he has been preserved from this common error; and in these sermons evinces a wise adaptation to win over to sounder views those who before had been little favorable to them. They are not controversial, but eminently practical. Still, if one would be convinced of the wide difference between real Unitarianism, and evangelical instruction, he may readily find the difference by comparing the scope and general spirit of this volume with that which fol