sel and of knowledge," and it smites the oppressor with the rod of its mouth; it slays the wicked with the breath of its lips. What can standing armies do against such an antagonist? How shall ignorance and superstition and all injustice escape from being slain by the breath of its lips? Nor need we use the language of the sacred word altogether in the form of appropriation to suit our purpose. It is the Spirit of the Lord, the sole spirit of wisdom and of power, that is carrying on this work of revolution, overturning and making all things new, progressively subduing all the resources of the material world of nature conjointly with the moral world of man for the accomplishment of the great enterprise worthy of a God-the intellectual and spiritual regeneration of a whole race. As we can trace the "footprints" of the great Builder upon the successive stages of his material creation, so may we reverently observe the successive steps of advance by which he goes on making a new heavens and a new earth wherein shall dwell righteousness. We can see the successive instrumentalities which he summons to bear a part in the work. Now, he discloses new powers and resources which he had treasured up thousands of years before in the bosom of the earth against the time of need for the subsistence and comfort of man. The desired progress in some direction meets new obstacles, and the work pauses;-then he directs the mind of the wise inventor and the hands of the cunning workman, and the new obstacles are overcome by devices or discoveries as new. Again, different nations and different parts of the same country are disposed to regard each other with distrust and hostility, and thus hinder the introduction of his promised reign of peace. And then he draws them into the embrace of each other by double bands of iron over which the intermingling tide of travel and transport moves swift as the wind. He binds them inseparably together with electric wires, along which the fire of newly awakened thought and the thrill of sympathetic feeling traverse with immeasurable speed. Nations are still disposed to decide their differences by the strong arm of violence, and he gives them such a terrible mastery over the elements of destruction, as that a conflict must inevitably destroy both. And they of necessity refrain from a struggle in which both must lose all, and gain nothing. In proportion as men are disposed to employ life for right purposes, he teaches them the means of increasing its duration and diminishing its evils. As rapidly as men are prepared rightly to employ the increase of their power resulting from unity of action, he increases their facilities for union, removing by degrees the grand cause of the ancient dispersion, by reducing the number of languages and

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And how

preparing the way for the universal diffusion of one. ever material and mechanical" may be many of the instrumentalities which we thus see the divine Builder employing in his work of new creating our world, still we are bound to reverence the selection which he makes of the means, and to rejoice in the result which he accomplishes.

ART. II.-DR. ISAAC BARROW.

The Works of Isaac Barrow, D.D.: To which are prefixed, a Life of the Author, by ABRAHAM HILL, and a Memoir, by JAMES HAMILTON, with the Notes and References carefully revised, and Indexes prepared expressly for this Edition. In three volumes. New York: John C. Riker, 129 Fulton street. 1845.

IT has been often remarked, in substance, that the great wealth of English thought may be compacted into a comparatively small space; a shelf of no great length will contain it nearly all. It is true, the scholar needs many books; rather, however, as tools and material, by and upon which to shape his thought, than as aliment to the thought itself; but the works which afford leading ideas, and abound in those productive hints that become the sources of thought in others, are not many. And yet it is upon this fruitful and fruit-making few, that the great labor of any one, who aspires to become a thinker, should be expended. Probably one great defect in the courses of reading and study usually pursued by American students is, that we neglect the masters, and apply ourselves to popular, and of course diluted expositions of thought.

One quality, worth almost all others, which is possessed by the greatest writers, and seldom to any considerable degree by those of an inferior order, is that of suggestiveness; the power of scattering intimations of deep truths along the path of their discussions. The object more directly aimed at, may be local and temporary; but the argument constantly alludes to far underlying principles, and the writer, like a great military tactician, brings the whole art of war and the utmost stretch of reason to bear upon a skirmish of hundreds, hardly less than he would upon a battle between hemispheres. Of this, Milton's Areopagitica will always remain an eminent instance. Respectable thinkers bring you good thoughts, well coined, and enough for your pre

sent use, if not for your wealth; but the Great Few show you into the mine, into the thought-world itself.

Now it cannot be claimed for Barrow that he belongs emphatically to this high class of elect thinkers. He is not the peer of Bacon, of Milton (considered simply as a prose writer), no, nor, in our estimation, of Hooker either. It would be enough to shut him out from these, that he does not possess the property of suggestiveness in any eminent degree. He gives, it has been often said, an exhaustive treatment to every subject; and this is high praise; but it is the characteristic of great thinkers to make every subject inexhaustible, by overpassing the limits that ordinarily inclose it, and showing us to what an infinite distance its relations and congruities extend.

Barrow seems to us to display the very bloom, vigor, and, as it were, eloquence of common sense. He is a man of capacious, rather than creative mind; he has many thoughts, weighty, sound and good; but has not that subtle, penetrative faculty, which constitutes one pre-eminently a thinker. As a writer, however, or deliberative rhetorician, he exhibits rare excellences; for he is what so few can be, at once amazingly copious and truly forceful throughout; he possesses the singular power of compressing the sense while he spreads out the expression. No man gives you either better words, or more of them; and his words. are good because they have a solid meaning in them, and do most effectually bring it out. The thought itself, though always of right genuine and unmistakable worth, has, however, no surpassing richness dwelling in it, like that of some few that might be named in English literature; but the language, as in all truly vigorous and masculine writing, has often a noble picturesqueness, a wholesome flavor, which makes it relish wonderfully to a healthy and manly taste. But, perhaps, we shall easiest come to a nearer and more specific consideration of him, if we begin by enumerating some of the classes who will not readily make him a favorite. We name

1. Those who are of a strongly dialectic turn of mind. There are minds which have a natural and insuperable fondness for subtle, we do not say useless, distinctions; which like always to see the lines of difference sharply drawn and defined. Such, by eminence, was the native bent of Baxter's genius. Now though this tendency indulged to a great extreme runs out into scholasticism and vain hair-splittings; yet such minds have their proper work to do, and it is often a work most needful to be done. But it is easy to see that such men will be apt to read Barrow with a degree of dissatisfaction, perhaps of displeasure, and sometimes with a disposition to think him an over-estimated writer. For

he ever takes things in their broad scope and bearing; his strokes are all large and weighty, looking towards the general effect upon human conduct. Every subject represents itself to his eye in a certain general and common consistence, and is represented by him in like manner; so that, without any clear-cut precision in the arrangement of the parts, he seems always, even under different heads, to be dealing with it somewhat as a whole; but all this, be it understood, without any confusion; his thought is large and unprecise, but not confused. So in the composition of his sentences there are no nice balancings of opposites, no precise exactitude of meanings mathematically set over against each other in sharp antithesis; but the members branch out like the limbs of a tree, abundant, irregular, waving.

2. We name also those of the very opposite tendency; those who love above all things to discover subtle and interior resemblances; these may not readily take to Barrow. We do not speak of men of wit, unless the word be used in a very large and now unusual sense; for though wit is said to consist in the perception of unlooked-for resemblances, yet the resemblance there intended is one opposed to congruity; and it is in this opposition that the wittiness consists. The persons whom we here mean are those who possess a superior faculty of discerning hidden affinities, and who, by consequence, are always delighted when they have discovered an interior oneness where is the greatest outward dissemblance. It is a noble faculty; and when existing in large measure, and combined as it may be with a good degree of its opposite, constitutes an intellect right excellently endowed. This is one of those great gifts, which Bacon possessed beyond almost all others; as will appear to any one who, having read the "Advancement of Learning," remembers what is said upon the "Philosophia Prima;" indeed will appear to one who has closely observed his style of thought anywhere in his writings. And, whoever has a faculty like in kind to his, however it may fall short in degree, will always find a delight in reading Bacon. But Barrow exhibits no eminence in this kind, more than in the former. He stands in the broad middle ground between the two; takes about the same view of things as is taken by sound-minded men at large, only sees more of it, apprehends its interior relations better, and gives it a more energetic expression.

3. Those who are possessed with admiration of the modern smart style cannot be expected to relish Barrow.

These care not so much what sort of Pegasus a writer mounts, or whither he journeys, to Heaven or to Hades; provided only that when he does mount he puts the creature into a clattering gallop,

and tears along with an immense demonstration of speed. This is the taking style of writing at present; perhaps was measurably so in old times; only it happened then (as it does now) that there were some who had the good sense not to fall into it, and also happened (as it will again) that those who did fall into it were a little while cried up, and then vanished out of the world, works and all, perhaps with no loss to the world; leaving the truly great and sober writers to come down to our time. This style of writing, we say, is much in vogue now; and many of our young men, whose native tastes would have taught them better, are misled by the rage for it, and the applause that awards success in it. We consider it the especial bane of American literature. There are among us a number of writers, who mounted their steed too early, rode him too hard, and broke his wind before he was fairly grown; and now, though they do not cease to urge him on, the miserable animal cannot accomplish a sorry canter without hoarse pantings and agonizing sobs. The school of smart writers, indeed, embraces many varieties; of which the French generally are the most vicious; indeed so utterly vicious that, in our estimation, there are few of them who are less than contemptible, and even that few are no favorites with us. The author of "Á Discourse of Matters pertaining to Religion" exhibits the smart rhetoric in a somewhat forcible and effective phase. But it is in Macaulay that this style has reached its perfection; freed from all the faults that are not inseparable from it, united to the utmost of such beauties as it admits, and grounded upon the genuine British sturdiness and sense. Macaulay is what all such writers are forever trying to be; and no man looks down with more contempt upon the unfortunates who are jerking their limbs out of joint in the endeavor to do as he does, and to gain the applauses that are lavished upon him. He is a master in his way; his sentences come off with a crack like a coach whip. It is this, in our judgment, which gives him twothirds of his popularity; and it is this which insures his writing against ever becoming classic English. His thought, too, is no less smart than his style; indeed must in the nature of the case be so, else it could never accommodate itself to such a style; and this after all is the great objection to that manner of writing. Johnson's "rolling and sonorous diction" has been sufficiently . censured, in part justly; and yet that has considerable scope and sweep; but this short, sharp, pert style is utterly unfit to bear the burden of a large and generous thought.

Now persons who are greatly carried away with admiration of this modern smartness, coming to Barrow will certainly find him a very heavy, cumbersome and unpleasing writer; they will not