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Half way up the mountain, Eric stopped | This world has nothing to offer, its enjoyat the road which led to the Major's. He ments are only an illusive show, which looked down at the villa which bore the tempt you hither and thither, therefore turn proud name of Eden, and the Bible story away from them. came to his memory. In the garden are two trees, the tree of life in the midst, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil; Eden is lost for him who eats of the tree of knowledge. Is it not always so?

Like a revelation the thought came to him, There are three things given to man upon earth, enjoyment, renunciation, and knowledge.

Sonnenkamp yonder what does he wish for himself and his son? enjoyment. The world is a spread table, and man has only to learn to find the right means and the right measure of enjoyment. The earth is a place of pleasure, and brings forth its fruits that we may delight ourselves therewith. Have we no other calling than to drive, to eat, to drink, and to sleep, and then to drive again; and is the sun to shine just for this?

What does the priest want? renunciation.

And what do you desire? And what ought those to desire whom you wish to make like yourself? knowledge. For life is not divided into enjoyment and renunciation, and knowledge rather includes both in itself, is the synthesis of both. It is the mother of duty and of all beautiful deeds.

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In the old times, the combatants received out of an immeasurable height a protecting shield from the hands of the gods; Eric received no shield, and yet he felt that he was concealed from and protected against all foes, and he was so happy in himself that he felt no desire for any human being, no desire for anything beside; he was upborne by the wings of knowledge.

He went yet farther on in the way. Peaceful, and enjoying an internal satisfaction, he came to the Major's in the next village. He knew that here he should have to stand no examination.

We find the following hint to ladies given in | Hibberd's Gardener's Magazine, by "one who frequently dresses up épergnes and vases for the table":"In a hot room a vase dressed in the ordinary way usually changes quickly from the brightness it had at first to the deadness it will have at last. If we could be sure of every scrap of the vegetation remaining in its full beanty for (say) only three hours, we might be content, for the appearance (say) next morning is not of much consequence. Just fill one of the Marchian épergnes in the usual way, taking care to lay a delicate gauze of maidenhair fern over the flow

ers,

and no matter how careful you may be to fill the horns, bowls, &c., with water, it is very likely that before the feast is over the ferns will be shrivelled up and the freshness of the whole scheme gone forever. Now for a valuable wrinkle, the result of observation in the writer's household. If the fronds of ferns, more particularly of that favourite for this purpose, Adiantum cuneatum, are plunged into water for an instant and then gently shaken dry, they will continue fresh twice as long, no matter how they are placed in the decoration, than if inser ed without being dipped. When a frond of adiantum has been dipped and gently shaken it appears to be as dry as before, but of course it is not; a certain amount of moisture is entangled in the texture of the frond, which enables it for a long time to resist the killing properties of the air of a room heated and dried by fire and gas. trial will prove the fact."

One

Notes on the Island of Corsica in 1868. Dedicated to Those in Search of Health and enjoyment. By Thomasina M. A. E. Campbell, of Moniack Castle, Scotland. (Hatchard & Co.)

is

THOUGH it must always remain famous in history as the birthplace of Napoleon Buonaparte, the island of Corsica is very little known to travellers. The air is supposed to be malarious and the country to be rugged, monotonous, and uninteresting. Miss. Campbell, who has resided in the island for some months, disputes the accuracy of both these opinions. She says the scenery beautiful and picturesque, and the climate extremely agreeable and healthy warm, yet not overpoweringly so, in summer, and mild, yet bracing, in winter. In the latter season, the temperature, she asserts, is far more equable and genial than that of Nice, Cannes, Mentone, &c. The island being in the possession of France, the language of that country is spoken by the upper classes, which is more convenient for English travellers than if Italian were exclusively used. We are indebted to Miss Campbell for writing a very pleasant little guide book to this almost unknown spot. The volume abounds in lively descriptions of scenery and manners, and in prac tical information on those points with respect to which a visitor would be glad to receive some hints. London Review.

DR. NEWMAN'S OXFORD SERMONS.*

As this reissue of Dr. Newman's

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paro

chial and plain" sermons preached at Oxford is now nearly completed, only one of the eight volumes remaining to appear, it seems the right time to say something of their adaptation for the wants of the gener ation which only knows him as the greatest of the Roman Catholic converts. We do not pretend to have read as yet all or nearly all

the sermons in these seven volumes. With

some we

From The Spectator. | fact and nature, distinctions which could not be excluded from operating their inevitable consequences, whether a particular decree of revelation had been proclaimed or not. He is a realist in the sense of believing that all religious distinctions are distinctions not created either by our minds or even for our stitution of all moral beings. He is so far minds, but deeply rooted in the moral conthoroughly scientific in his conceptions of theology. He regards the moral constitution of the universe not as a sic-volo, sicwere familiar long ago. With jubeo of the Almighty's, but as a chain of many we have made acquaintance for the causes all in the closest connection, of first time in this reissue; but each of them which one could not be separated from is a separate work in itself, and in all there another without a general overthrow of the are a set of common assumptions and com- the very first sermon of this long series, moral foundations of human life. Thus in mon features which reappear so frequently Dr. Newman aims at showing that there is that, for the purpose of estimating their general character, tendency, and influence, nothing arbitrary in the law which makes it is impossible to regard them as if they holiness here the necessary condition of that it is not a law were chapters in a continuous treatise. happiness hereafter, The Rector of Farnham (Essex) who has of the divine Will, so to say, so much as a republished them has, we think, done well. law of the divine Nature. Dr. Newman, Certainly no sermons representing so vividly miserable an unrighteous and unholy man with his usual force, impresses on us how the real inner scenery of the preacher's would be if he could be admitted into closer mind have been preached in our generation. With the most perfect and unaffected sim-in his inner nature; how he would find in communion with God without any change plicity of style, they combine every other trace of coming from a mind filled to over-which he had disliked or despised, nothing the divine world "no pursuits but those flowing with the faith and thoughts they which bound him to aught else in the uniexpress. There is none of the 'made eloquence of Church dignitaries, nor of the verse, and made him feel at home, nothing which he could enter into and rest upon.' dry monotone of priests officially rehearsing "A careless, a sensual, an unbelieving a lesson. It is a life, and an intense life, and not merely a creed, which speaks in mind, a mind destitute of the love and fear these volumes. That it is, however, not aims, a low standard of duty, and a beof God, with narrow views and earthly only a life, but also a creed, and in many respects, as we hold, a false creed, false nighted conscience, a mind contented with chiefly by its misinterpretation of and comitself and unresigned to God's will, would parative contempt for the new intellectual feel as little pleasure at the last day at the forces of our own day, - is the chief, though does now at the words Let us pray.' words Enter into the joy of thy Lord' as it 9.99 No

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a great, deduction from their value. Let us make some attempt at separating those elements of thought in Dr. Newman's sermons which have given him so singular a power over his own day, from those elements of thought which have separated him from it and driven him out of sympathy with, we do not mean merely the noisy, but the most sincere and earnest of those of his countrymen who have most cared not only to know truth, but to live for it.

On the first side of the account we must note that Dr. Newman has never treated

revelation as a mere expression of the arbitrary or even purely inscrutable will of God, but always as expressing the deepest

and most immutable distinctions in moral

* Parochial and Plain Sermons. By John Henry

Newman, B. D., formerly Vicar of St. Mary's, Oxford, eight vols. New edition. Rivington. 1868.

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thing could more forcibly illustrate than that, the joylessness of divine life to those unprepared for divine life, the divergence of moral desires, of hopes, and fears, and longings, between the mind which seeks

God and the mind which does not. It is

not a mere decree of God's that the latter must suffer; it is of the essence of its own nature, no less than of His. Dr. Newman says in another page of the same sermon, tion of nature that straw ignites and burns that, as it is part of the physical constituaway at a heat which leaves iron unaltered in form and substance, so it is of the moral

of minds must be simply inflamed and thrown into suffering by the very influences which are perfectly in harmony with the

constitution of nature that certain orders

nature of others.

Nor is Dr. Newman only a realist in treating religious truth as the outcome of distinctions so deep in nature that no mere decree even of the Divine Will could change them. He is also a realist in treating human faith, and human thought and language on religious subjects, as worthless, unless they mark out and point to spiritual causes and tendencies infinitely deeper and more full of meaning than any mere acts and thoughts of ours. Just as the scientific man trusts not to the signs by which he reasons, but to the forces of which those signs are the mere calculus, Dr. Newman constantly teaches that faith is the act of trusting yourself to great and permanent spiritual forces, the tidal power of which, and not the power of your acts of faith, is commissioned by God to carry you into the clearer light. He uniformly speaks of faith as a "venture," an act of the soul by which it throws itself on what is beyond its own power, by which it gives itself up without either the power or the right to know the full consequences, gives itself up to some power higher than itself and beyond itself, as a man trusts himself to the sea, or to a railway, or to any natural power beyond his own control. He speaks uniformly, just as a writer of a very different school spoke in a very remarkable parable in the Pall Mall Gazette of Thursday week, of faith as action, not feeling, but action which is taken in light "neither clear nor dark," as a venture of which we cannot count the consequences, and yet a venture for the highest end of life. To use his own words, it consists in risking "what we have for what we have not; and doing so in a noble, generous way, not indeed rashly or lightly, still without knowing accurately what we are doing, not knowing either what we give up, nor, again, what we shall gain; uncertain about our reward, uncertain about the extent of sacrifice, in all respects leaning, waiting upon Him, trusting in Him to fulfil his promise, trusting in Him to enable us to fulfil our own vows, and so in all respects proceeding without carefulness or anxiety about the future."* And as Dr. Newman is a true realist in speaking of acts of faith as ventures made in the dark, at least as to results, for the highest end possible to us, and in reliance upon forces which are not our own and to which we implicitly trust ourselves by our acts of faith, so again he is a true realist in speaking of human language. In the very fine sermon on "Unreal Words," he points out almost in the same strain as does the author of the fine parable above alluded to, how much unreal * Vol. IV. p., 299.

language men use, and how specially un real it is on religious subjects, and how worse than worthless, mischievous, so far as it is unreal, i. e., without resting on a basis of facts. But Dr. Newman goes farther in his realism than this. He recognizes that no words on the subject of religion can be wholly real, any more than words on the subject of half-discovered forces in physical nature. They are as real as they can be, if they rest on facts, though they quite fail to express the full force and bearing of those facts. Dr. Newman points out that words may be, so to say, more real than those who use them are aware of. They may be the indices of powers and forces far beyond what those who use them suspect, because those who use them have only got a superficial glimpse into the action and heart of those forces. Just as weight meant a great deal more than Newton himself knew when he first began to suspect what the moon's weight really meant, and as the idea of which the word was the index carried him far beyond his own meaning when he first used it, so Dr. Newman points out that moral professions often mean far more than those who make them know, and thus commit the soul to the larger meaning, not to the less, embarking those who use them on enterprises far beyond their immediate intention, nay, far beyond their immediate strength. In this way words express powers outside the speaker, powers which have, when he speaks, only just taken hold of him superficially, but which, being divine powers, strengthen and tighten their grasp, till they carry those who half carelessly used them whither they had no intention of going. "We ever promise things greater than we master, and we wait on God to enable us to perform them. Our promising involves a prayer for light and strength." In all these respects Dr. Newman's teaching in these sermons seems to us realist in the truest and most modern sense of the term, in that sense in which modern science has taught us to understand the full depth of realism. And it is by virtue of this intellectual sympathy with the sincerest teachings of modern times, that Dr. Newman, applying the same spirit to moral and religious subjects, has exerted so great and so wholesome an influence on English theology.

There is, however, as a matter of course, in one who has become a Roman Catholic, another side to Dr. Newman's teaching, by virtue of which he has separated himself from all which is sincerest and best in the intellectual teaching of the day. And the Vol. V. p. 43.

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root of all his errors seems to us to be this, that he practically applies his theory that faith, the act,- -is a venture,' i. e., that we are morally bound to do much, of the consequences of which we are necessarily kept in the dark, to the intellectual side of faith, not simply to the act of trust, but to the belief of creeds. Now here, as it seems to us, is the beginning of all sorts of insincerities. In action you may and must trust yourself to the highest motive which God puts into your heart, at a risk. But in intellectual belief there is no such thing legitimately as silencing a doubt. If you risk pain to do right, you do not play any tricks with yourself; you know that you are incurring a risk of suffering, and prefer to do it for the sake of the motive. But to risk error, in order to believe right, is a contradiction in terms. You cannot believe right unless you open your mind fully to all the risks of error, and look your uncertainties, your insoluble difficulties, in the face as fully as your certainties. Dr. Newman seems to us to make obedience the root, not only of moral and religious action, but of moral and religious thought. But in order to do so, he has to assume that we all have an intellectual authority over us as clear and articulate as the moral authority which speaks to our conscience. He speaks of dissent* as necessarily sin, though not always conscious sin. He speaks of the right to differ from the Church as very much the same as the right "to damn yourself"; he identifies the submission to Church authority with the submission to God's voice, and even makes the reliance on the sacrament of ordination a duty of the same order, and resting upon the same sort of foundation, as the duty of prayer. In other words, he sets out with a complicated Church organization as set over the conscience in the same sense as God's moral law, and assumes that a churchman may verify for himself the moral validity of apostolical succession just as truly as an ordinary soul may verify for itself the value of prayer, or as a chemist may verify for himself the significance and value of the laws of chemical affinity.† All this network of assumptions strikes us as having its root in the notion that obedience is even more the root of our intellectual than of our moral life, since Dr. Newman would not ask us to obey any moral command which does not appeal to our conscience, whereas he imposes on our intellects a ready-made ecclesiastical system of the most complex kind, which it is quite impossible for any

Vol. III. pp. 203, 217. † Vol. III. p. 195.

rational being to accept as a whole without knowing that he is going on a mere probability or possibility, and, as it seems to us, on a strong improbability. And in thus rooting the intellectual act of belief in obedience, he has done what his great intellect could never have done if it had once been imbued with any sympathy with the science of the day. No wonder that in the striking sermon on "The Religion of the Age (Vol. I.), he tells us at once that man can find out nothing about himself by studying the outward universe, and that he himself would think the religion of the age much better than it is, if it were less merely amiable, and had more of the zeal and fear which, in excess, give rise to bigotry and superstition, than it has. The truth is that Dr. Newman has no sympathy at all with that latitudinarianism which arises from a genuinely scientific spirit of doubt carried into the region of ecclesiastical authority. He may be quite right in saying that the study of the material universe can never teach man his duty, but it can teach man his ignorance and the mistakes of intellectual theory to which his intellect is liable. It is the spirit of science much more than the spirit of selfishness and self-will that has made it impossible to the present age to accept the intellectual authority of any church organization. We know that in point of fact the principle of "obedience " to such authorities has led the intellect into all sorts of pitfalls. We know that we are on the track of physical laws which are inconsistent not only with the physical assumptions of Churches, but with the physical assumptions of many of the writers of revelation. We ought not to accept a mere intellectual guess out of obedience to anybody. Obedience is no duty except in relation to a moral claim. An intellectual conviction may come through obedience to a moral claim, but it cannot come from any act of intellectual obedience, for the words have no meaning. You may feel confident that a special authority on intellectual subjects is right, through having usually found him right, but you cannot obey him intellectually, you can only be convinced and persuaded by him. This assumption of Dr. Newman's, that obedience is at the root of our intellectual faith, seems to us what vitiates a wide vein of reasoning in his sermons, and what has led him into the Roman Church, where there is at least an authority with some intellectual prestige to obey.

We have said nothing of the exquisite manner of these sermons, the manner of a mind at once tender and holy, at once loving and austere, at once real and dra

matic, at once full of insight into human no depreciation of the result. Indeed, the nature and full of the humility which springs from a higher source; but the following touching and musical passage will say more for Dr. Newman's manner than any words of ours. It is from a sermon called "Christ Manifested in Remembrance":

deliberate scrappiness of the book is not a bad idea on the part of the author. There being no continuity of subject, the reader can dispense with continuity of effort in reading it; he can take it at odd scraps of time, until all the paragraphs are consumed, “Let a person who trusts he is on the whole though the probability is that he will read it at two or three sittings. A preliminary serving God acceptably look back upon his past life, and he will find how critical were moments question for us to consider is, whether Mr. and acts which at the time seemed the most in- Zincke has brought home anything new. different: as, for instance, the school he was As it would have been a miracle if he had, sent to as a child, the occasion of his falling in it can hardly be a demerit that he has not, with those persons who have most benefited him, so that such a fact cannot altogether deterithe accidents which determined his calling or orate the interest of his volume. One prospects, whatever they were. God's hand is thing in favour of Mr. Zincke, and of all ever over His own, and He leads them forward tourists who venture to select America by a way they know not of. The utmost they wherein to spend a lengthened holiday, is can do is to believe, what they cannot see now, the comparative freshness of the country as what they shall see hereafter; and as believing, a field of observation. Europe, with perto act together with God towards it. And hence haps the exception of Russia, is an old perchance it is, that years that are past bear in story-old and furrowed with wrinkles of retrospect so much of fragrance with them, though at the time perhaps we saw little in them every imaginable kind of glory. America to take pleasure in; or rather we did not, could may be said to be acting only the prologue not realize that we were receiving pleasure, to her story, the substantial body of the though we received it. We received pleasure, play being still in vulcano-artistic preparabecause we were in the presence of God, but we tion behind innumerable unlifted curtains. knew it not; we knew not what we received; we She has a magnificent stage, on which the did not bring home to ourselves or reflect upon furies of civil strife have already torn each the pleasure we were receiving; but afterwards, other in tragic conflict, and on which she is when enjoyment is past, reflection comes in. now busy practising the arts of peace, and, We feel at the time; we recognize and reason after- so to speak, mending the shattered pillars wards. Such, I say, is the sweetness and soft- of the State. Talking of this subject reness with which days long passed away fall upon minds us that Mr. Zincke has several dethe memory, and strike us. The most ordinary tached paragraphs regarding the effects of years, when we seemed to be living for nothing, the late war. Sitting at table in Richmond these shine forth to us in their very regularity with two Virginians, one of them, knowing and orderly course. What was sameness at the time, is now stability; what was dullness, is now a soothing calm; what seemed unprofitable, has now its treasure in itself; what was but monotony, is now harmony; all is pleasing and comfortable, and we regard it all with affection."

From The London Review.
AMERICAN SCRAPS.*

our author to be an Englishman, said.

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Sir, you have come to a God-forsaken country. Those who lately had riches are now in want; and the whites are now ruled by the blacks." Another gentleman said to him that he and many others wished that they were living under a king of the English royal family; and that Virginians deeply regretted that they had ever separated from England." Others WE have here a mass of table-talk; and were so stung by the sense of defeat that as that kind of thing consists of bits of they were even wishing themselves dead." conversations, we may say that Mr. Zincke" But," says the tourist, "I never heard has simply given us his American scrapbook. That is truly the fact of the matter. The volume is divided into twenty-three chapters; each chapter is made up of several paragraphs; and each paragraph treats of a different subject. That is the author's adopted plan, to describe which can imply *Last Winter in the United States. Being Tabletalk collected during a Tour through the late Southern Confederation, the Far West, the Rocky Mountains, &c. By F. Barham Zincke, Vicar of Wherstead, and Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen.

London: John Murray.

from their lips one word of disloyalty to the Union, to which they have returned in perfect good faith. Their bitterness was only for those trading politicians who, being, as they thought, incapable of understanding honourable men, had sent a Freedman's Bureau and an army of occupation to oppress and torment those who were now quite as loyal to the Union as themselves, and if they were not, yet were utterly incapable of moving a finger against it." There is, no doubt, a great deal of distress in the

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