supply the place of every lower incitement.

When this is

effected, man must have cast off the shackles of mortality, and the race have escaped the conditions of its earthly existence. New heavens and a new earth must have been evolved from the elements of the present. Then, and not till then, will the gospel have done its work. Then, the perfection of spiritual science being attained, the second elementary book will be cast away. Then, and not till then, the will of God being an object of intuitive perception, the process of inference will be superseded, the application of principles will be involuntary, and their influence unerring; and the truth of the gospel, having been assimilated by each individual mind, will lose its separate existence.

It is scarcely necessary to intimate my dissent from some hypotheses which Lessing has intermixed with his speculations. His opinion that the Jews were ignorant of the strict unity of Jehovah till their captivity, has already been questioned. It will also have been observed that his supposition of the gospel being an elementary book, destined to give place to others, is not admitted into my exposition of his system, such a supposition appearing irreconcilable with the inferential nature of the Christian doctrine and law.

Some hypotheses which are presented as the close of his speculation, are yet more inadmissible, and need only to be mentioned to be rejected: I refer to the evolution of the doctrine of the Trinity from a speculation on the mode of divine conception, which in Lessing's opinion, might originate a duplication of Deity. How a triplication is possible we are not informed; - probably by a duplication of the duplicate. I also refer to the hypothesis that each individual of mankind must go through the whole process to which the race is destined not at once, but by successive appearances in the world by a transmigration of the soul. Whence these notions were obtained, it is needless to inquire, for it

is certain that they were not derived from either of the repositories of truth to which we have access, reason or revelation.

My recapitulation will again be chiefly in the words of Lessing.

The Christian doctrine and moral law are to be inferred from facts, and not learned from explicit declaration. This method affords a proof that the development of reason is the object of revelation.

The doctrine of a future life of retribution could not have been learned with certainty from the natural course of events. As to other doctrines, "mere rational truths may be, and have been long, taught as immediate truths of revelation, in order to spread them more rapidly and establish them more firmly."

"Let us examine whether these intermingled doctrines were not a new impulse for the reason of mankind." After these truths of reason have been embodied in revelation,

they must become truths of reason before the race can be benefited by them. At the time they were revealed, they were, to the recipients, no truths of reason; but they were revealed in order that they might become so.

"For more than eighteen hundred years, the Scriptures have employed the understandings of men more than all other books, and more than all other books enlightened them, were it only by the light which the human understanding put into these books.

"It is impossible that any other book could have been so generally known among such various people; and that such different modes of thinking should be busied over this same book, has indefinitely advanced the human understanding.

"The understanding absolutely requires to be exercised on spiritual objects, in order to attain its full clearness, and bring forth that purity of the heart which makes us capable of loving virtue for its own sake.

"Education has its final end with the species not less than with the individual. What art succeeds in effecting with the individual, shall not nature effect with the whole ?

"The period of completion will assuredly come, in which man, however his understanding feels convinced of the continually better futurity, will still not be necessitated to draw motives of conduct from this futurity: when he will do good because it is good; not because arbitrary rewards are set on it, which were formerly employed to strengthen his volatile sight for the recognition of internal and better rewards."

DODDRIDGE'S CORRESPONDENCE AND DIARY.*

"Do not you think Biography a very delightful study, and as useful as it is interesting?" is a question asked by all intelligent young people of their sensible seniors; and there is no difficulty in anticipating the answer, for it is always in the affirmative. There is perhaps no department of literature which affords such varied instruction and entertainment to different orders of mind. Young and old, grave and gay, the learned and the simple, the scientific man and the moralist, all have some high example before their eyes, some patron saint, through whom their homage is paid to a supreme object of pursuit. The young sailor who despises all other books delights in the Lives of the Admirals; the embryo statesman pores over the Lives of the Chancellors. Every page in Plutarch is familiar to the best boys in the highest form; while members of the ad

*The Correspondence and Diary of Philip Doddridge, D. D. Edited 2 vols. 8vo. from the original MSS. by J. D. Humphreys, Esq. London, 1829. Colburn & Bentley.

ministration, and the orators of Parliament, are acquainted with the minutest circumstances in the lives of their predecessors and models. In one or two of our religious denominations, the lives of the pious are almost the only books circulated besides the Bible; and in the nursery, the child's absorbing interest in Robinson Crusoe is caused by the belief that it is true. And yet in no department of literature, perhaps, is there so much imperfection; in none so much error and deception. The causes of this imperfection are so obvious, and so many curious discoveries have been made here and there, that a pretty general distrust of the fidelity of biographers now exists; and few but children and the wilfully credulous now believe all that is told them of the great and good and wonderful people whom they long to resemble. This distrust, however unavoidable, has a very demoralizing effect; and it is worth a serious inquiry whether there is any probability, or at least whether there is not a possibility of its being removed.

The liability to deception of which we complain relates solely to the character of the person whose mind and whose deeds are set forth, and therefore it is of more material consequence in some kinds of biography than in others. The value of some histories of eminent men depends on the character of their external actions more than of their internal constitution. When we read of scientific men, for instance, it concerns us more to know what were their discoveries and inventions, and how they made them, than how they controlled their tempers and their families; and with respect to these inventions and discoveries, we are not in much danger of being deceived. In forming an acquaintance with an eminent statesman, we follow his schemes from their origin to their completion, and watch the progress of measures on which the welfare of millions depends, without being so anxious to attend him into the retirement of his

thoughts as in the case of the philosopher or the saint, whose mind and not whose fortunes, is the subject of our inquiry. Yet an acquaintance with the fortunes and achievements of eminent men is of little importance, in comparison with the knowledge of the internal machinery by which those achievements are originated, and those fortunes modified; and in proportion to the dimness of our insight into this internal constitution does biography lose its interest and its value. The histories of pious men and moralists are worth almost nothing at all, if the structure of their minds is hidden from the reader; and as long as the revelation is partial, and the representation defective, the effect on the mind of the inquirer cannot be purely beneficial. Has such a thing as a tolerably correct delineation of any one mind ever been offered to the public? Have we ever met with a representation of character supported by facts, at all approaching in fairness to those discussions of the characters of our friends which are held in conversation while they are alive and active? For ourselves, we can answer, never. In the longest, the most fair-seeming narrative of a life, we have always found something deficient, something unsatisfactory, something which we cannot reconcile, or which it is impossible to believe. Much as we grieve, we do not wonder at this; for we see where the difficulties lie; and these difficulties are so various and so nearly insuperable, that we consider the position of a conscientious biographer one of the most perplexing that can be conceived. Did he know intimately the character he is going to describe? If he did, how can he bring himself to notice the weakness, the follies, the peculiarities, which he desires should be forgotten in the grave, and which, to the eye of friendship, have already faded away into shades. too slight to be caught ere they vanish? If he did not know him, how is he qualified for the task he has undertaken ?