me more trouble than any two of my longer ones.' Perhaps it would have been better if, by a little self-restraint, Mr. Faber had devoted himself more than he did to the writing of uncontroversial books, even at the risk of not leaving behind him so great a number of volumes. The book just instanced as being an exception to his general taste, has passed through many editions, and has established a position far in advance of his other writings. The nature of the controversies in which he was engaged, is indeed little calculated to give them any lasting interest: they were not undertaken from any practical idea of aiding his Church in developing and bringing to the surface, by her own struggles and her own divine power, the great mission entrusted to her. Mr. Faber was too fond of mystic speculations, to devote much time or thought to the daily work of the Church immediately around him. His ingenuity and labour were expended in crushing foreign theories and errors, while he too much overlooked the urgent need of his own Church to be raised up, by powerful constructive efforts, for the great home work that was before her. All, however, have their tastes and vocations, nor do we quarrel with Mr. Faber for pursuing that line of study, which he felt most congenial with his powers; but the fact that he was, by his own choice, much removed from the practical business of the Church, must essentially weaken his authority on some questions of the day, about which, in the latter part of his life, he expressed very strong opinions.

On many points we have to regret that Mr. Faber's influence was exerted with considerable energy to the hindrance of the Church's true interests. The boldness and independence for which he was always noted were brought to bear in their fullest development against what he denominated Tractarianism. This indeed was, according to the acknowledgment of his biographer, who admits it with evident regret, the characteristic of his declining years. Circumstances in his own family connexion were indeed naturally calculated to inflame his mind against what seemed to him the prevailing spirit of modern Oxford; and it was no doubt deeply mortifying and wounding to him, that a favourite nephew should actually join that Church against which it had been the mission of his whole life to hurl unceasing thunderbolts. But such is all human controversy; it is no uncommon thing for a long series of imagined victories to be all at once succeeded by some partial but irritating advantage on the part of the enemy whom we had with too much self-complacency thought to be utterly conquered. Mr. Faber's retaliation was, however, too wholesale: brilliant as were some of the present converts of Rome when pursuing their respective academical careers in Oxford, they were not the whole of Oxford, and the

number who yet remain within her walls, actively and faithfully engaged in serving the cause of their mother Church, will bear comparison with any former age of her history, in spite of all deserters. Mr. Faber's grievous complaints of Oxford arose, indeed, from the querulousness of an irritable temper on seeing the progress of events outreaching his own ideas. Yet we cannot be angry with him, for he was always honest and independent, even at the price of consistency, of which no greater proof can be given than many eccentric statements and sentiments in the book before us, which do not claim their origin from any general principles of the school he so warmly supported. We excuse him for saying, at eighty years of age, that he had only been regenerated sixty of that number; though doubtless the Vicar of Calverley duly brought him to the font of his parish church long before he could freely select his own religious course; we overlook this, because the present book is the best illustration of the extravagant results that may follow from such erroneous ideas, and such a loose way of talking.

After the space we have devoted to the biographical portion of the book before us, we cannot dwell on the work itself; nor, as a whole, do we consider that it is worthy of any lengthened review. It was a sentiment of Dr. Johnson's, that if an author has any special affection for one part of his writings more than another, it will probably be to his future credit that he should immediately destroy his pet child. We are not sure that an illustration of this sentiment is not afforded by Mr. Faber's Many Mansions in the House of the Father.' That it was a pet child is clearly shown in the following extract from the Memoir :

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'This work, as has been remarked, appeared in 1851, and Mr. Faber lived to see the issue exhausted. The edition to which this memoir is prefixed, was called for in the last year of his life, and an interesting note which is here subjoined, was written by the author to the publishers, on hearing of it.

"Dear Sirs,

""Sherburn House, Feb. 7, 1853.

"I have to thank you for your very satisfactory letter. "They say that an author is not the best judge of his own works; and peradventure, I might have a sort of special affection for my Many Mansions, as the child of my old age. But I am much inclined to rate it higher than any of my former writings. In it, except occasionally in new editions, I take my leave of the public: for a man, who is rapidly approaching to eighty, may well think it time to bring his labours to an end.

"I shall certainly be very glad to hear of another edition: and all the rather because I do not recollect that the former requires either correction or alteration, which is more than I can say of most of my former works.. "Believe me "Yours truly,

"To Messrs. Royston & Brown."'—Ibid. p. lii.

"G. S. Faber.

A reference to some passages in this favourite work-which was so perfect that it required neither correction nor alterationwill, we think, in the opinion of our readers, complete the lexicographer's inference. But even if we had formed the design of noticing, as a second part of our article, the substance of this work, we should despair of our task. Amid the multiplicity of sciences, of localities, of times, of living and inanimate existences, of things known and unknown, past and future, natural and revealed, we lose that fixedness of mind and that comprehension of a main idea which are pleasant, if not necessary, in the construction of a review, however humble in design. If we rush, for the clearance and arrangement of our ideas, to the table of contents, we only find ourselves in a labyrinth, sixteen pages long, of subjects discussed, questions proposed, difficulties started, without any of the various solutions supplied ready to hand, or in such a form as at all to simplify the body of the work.

Mr. Faber delighted in mysticism, in the secrets of prophecy, and the great unknown speculations suggested by the depths of the past, and the furthest anticipations of the future; by fathomless divings towards the right and left, the above and below, of human thought, and therefore he approaches not seldom on what are altogether irrational subjects of contemplation. His love of the mystic was the affection of a combatant for his foe, or of a sportsman for his game: he delighted in it, not as a serene subject of meditation, but in order to pursue and destroy it; he thought it his vocation to solve all doubtful and confusing assumptions into plain and tangible facts, whether they refer to the past or are prospective. The world, as it were, stood before him, together with the sun, moon, and stars; he also beheld human beings, and the various productive functions of nature; invisible beings also were revealed to him, both good and bad, on authority which he credited; prophetic announcements also were given on the same authority, while human instinct and the light of science had much to reveal, all of which he was anxious to include in any system which he formed.

All these things then were his material, and the task which he undertook and imagined to be feasible was, to sort the various elements and beings before him into their proper places, and apportion to each his definite and tangible abode. În the pursuit of this laborious task he is neither carried away, from its gradual and steady progress towards solution, by any rapturous anticipation of glory on the one side, nor by the most gloomy and terrific pictures of eternal ruin on the other. A stern work was commenced, and must be finished with logical exactness, come what would; nay, even at the risk of almost exciting a smile by the sudden transformation, in the

mind of the reader, of things and ideas, hitherto altogether mystical, into the plainest and most intelligible scenes, described with the dry phraseology of science, and the most simple-minded enthusiasm of purpose. The Many Mansions in the House of the Father' form a subject of speculation which Mr. Faber is unwilling to pass over, as many do, under the general idea of the word heaven, with all the vague hopes and misty ideas of a future life; to define which is often thought presumptuous. Perhaps indeed it has been too much the tendency of Protestantism to discourage all attempts at judging of what is unseen by the seen, at forming ideas of the future by analogy with the present, or indeed at fixing any definite images on beings which are spiritual. Matter itself is almost pronounced evil, by a resuscitated gnosticism apparent in modern times. It is considered to be carnal-mindedness when visions of the future are framed out of anything that is connected with our present experience: all that we now see or do must be obliterated from the soul's recollection; and the reward which is to come at the end of the world is to be of a nature wholly different from any conceptions which the existing order of things is calculated to suggest, even in way of type. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body has thus become vague and confused; the intermediate state is solved by the simple process of sleep; so great has been the reaction from the Romish system of active communications between the living and the dead in purgatory, that the presence of spirits and angels surrounding our earthly life, either for good or harm, is made a topic of mere sentiment or even of hilarity, rather than a part of our real conviction as Christians. Mr. Faber was distressed at this hazy outline in that western horizon of life, which he saw before him as the great future of his own existence; he must have better defined objects of faith, or he could scarcely feel the splendour of that great consoling truth that death is swallowed up in victory.

With such convictions on his mind, he inquires first, what is meant by the 'Father's House.' This, he concludes can be no less than the great celestial universe, comprehending all created worlds. He has little difficulty in deciding on the mooted question as to whether there are inhabitants in other worlds besides our own. To imagine these spheres created for no purpose but to twinkle in our eyes, appears to Mr. Faber like the ȧvýpiμov yeλaoua of Eschylus. Each star, then, and planet is a mansion created for the residence of blessed and happy beings, forming part of the one great House or Temple of the uncreated Deity. From two passages in the Epistle to the Hebrews, Mr. Faber conceives that he has established a strong argument for the

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similarity of all the celestial bodies with our own world. Unless he can have some assurance that this is the case, his idea of there being various mansions in one great house is materially injured. The expression, By whom also He made the worlds,' and also, By faith we understand that the worlds were framed by the word of God,' are supposed to allude to the same material worlds, which are the mansions of the one great heaven. The moon and the stars, together with the earth and the sun, are the host of heaven, and that which we know of one out of this host, viz. the earth, we may, in some sort, predicate of the others. We may indeed; but what impartial critic could for an instant lay any weight on such a construction?

Among other instances of wild assertions and loose arguments, Mr. Faber claims a material body, though, as he wisely adds, of a highly attenuated nature, for the state of existence through which we pass between death and the resurrection. Scriptural proof is adduced under this head, and what will our readers imagine this consists of? The whole statement is made chiefly to rest on the appearance of Samuel, when called by the witch of Endor. Another proof is, however, added which we cannot omit. The vision which appeared to Eliphaz, the Temanite, described as an image before his eyes,' is supposed to have been a disembodied spirit (probably of Abraham, it is most strangely asserted,) with a visible and material form.

Another absurd specimen of the materialistic ideas, which seem to have haunted Mr. Faber's brain, is afforded by the analogy which S. Paul describes between the grain of wheat and the doctrine of the resurrection of the body. The statement made in the following passage we must hand over to the consideration of physiologists:

'Now, unless the whole of this illustrative explanation be quite wide of the mark and nothing at all to the purpose, there must be in every Human Body a material germ, analogous to the material germ in a grain of wheat: a germ, I apprehend, so small, as to elude the search of the most skilful anatomist; yet a germ, absolutely indestructible, and, on the known principles of Matter, capable of Indefinite Extension and thus even of Visibility.

From S. Paul's illustration, so much, I think, is clear and certain. But, whether the indestructible germ, be or be not, associated with the Disembodied Spirit; and whether, in a state of great expansion and consequent rareness, it does, or does not, constitute the subtle clothing or vehicle of the Disembodied Spirit: it would, I suppose, be presumptuous to determine positively. We may, however, say; that, if it be thus associated, we should possess a physical mean of accounting for the scripturally recorded Visibility of more than one Disembodied Spirit.'-Pp. 99, 100.

Mr. Faber's great aim and object in thus establishing the material character of man under every stage of his existence is, to prove the necessity of a future material residence, and to throw