selves in the present life, we destroy the natural connexion between our social duties and religion. If there be such a difference between divine and human justice, it is impossible that our various social relations should derive from religion that sanction and strength, which we justly consider as the invisible and eternal security of the life of man in society. How can the just man trust in God, how can the unjust fear him, if justice and morality are not essentially the same in heaven and on earth? It is vain to expect that the prospect of the life to come will induce men to conform their present condition to the dictates of justice, if they suppose that God will judge men without regard to the ability of each individual to perform his obligations, and the degree of his merit or guilt; or that he will reward or punish them for any other purpose, or in any other manner, than what is calculated to do justice to the moral nature of his immortal children. The ancient Greeks and Romans, while their public affairs were regulated, in a great measure, by principles of justice, continued to worship a host of gods, charged with actions which would have banished them from the sacred

home of civil freedom. The gods they worshipped could be no longer to them standards of conduct or models for imitation; and this want of a rational faith in the existence of sovereign justice, proved a more fatal enemy to the freedom of the ancient world, than all the successful craft and violence of its great tyrants. Such has been, and such must be, the fate of every nation whose ideas of the character of God and the duty and destiny of man are not more exalted than

their own actual state of improvement; whose practical and living creed is not founded on the belief that God is just, and will do justice to the free and evergrowing nature and the moral character of man.

Is it said that the Scriptures frequently speak of divine justice in terms which do not agree with the essential requisites of perfect human justice? The Scriptures establish and enforce the eternal principles of retributive justice; but they are often clothed in figurative language, calculated to render them plain and impressive, particularly to the primitive hearers and readers of the word. But these figurative illustrations were surely not intended to be taken for the eternal truths themselves, and thus to become instruments of a strange idolatry of Scripture words and images. The race of Greece was run when those noble pioneers of knowledge and freedom, instead of consulting the revelation of truth and of glory in the inexhaustible resources and endless strivings of the soul, worshipped their own greatness and the idol representatives of their passions and fancies. And the doom of Christendom is sealed, if Christians, instead of grounding their faith upon the simple principles of moral and religious truth, which are promulgated alike in nature and Scripture, insist upon worshipping the imagery of Scripture language, and their own creed, tbus setting up the temporary result of their own investigation, or indolent assent, as the unalterable, universal, and infallible platform of faith and practice.

These are some of the fundamental provisions of

that charter of freedom which God has established in human nature. High in the firmament of the human mind, he has placed the sun of righteousness, to rise and to set at our own bidding. He has intrusted us with the great seal of our own destiny, with the power to establish our own perpetual misery, by continuing in wickedness, or to lay hold on eternal life by perseverance in well doing.

nature.

In the foregoing observations on the future state of man, I have endeavoured to consider all the constituent powers and most important manifestations of his It was my intention to enter, and to lead my readers more deeply, into that revelation of the future state of man, which every one possesses in his actual being. If our views of the life to come are founded what is real and essential in our present being, upon there is little danger of running into unprofitable dreains of a passive state of rapture or torment, without a moral object, and, consequently, without a satisfactory influence upon our present conduct. I have spoken separately of the body and of the mind of man, with its chief faculties, the intellect, the affections, and the moral powers. I have spoken first of the future state of each faculty by itself, and then of the attainments we make by exercising it in this life. This separate consideration of the various constituents of human nature, seemed necessary in order to be definite and distinct on each subject. But it is impossible to form a correct view of any part or power of man, without considering it in connexion with all

the other faculties and attainments which centre in each human being as one immortal self.

I have not expressed in this article the opinions of any sect or party, but simply my own particular views.* However I may have failed of doing justice to the subject, I am conscious that my only object has been that which was expressed in the great question of Pilate. I now commit this humble effort to that spirit to which Christ committed the solution of that question.

* The principles contained in this article I first advanced in a treatise "On the Destiny of Man," published in 1823, in the first two numbers of the "Literary Journal of the University of Bale."

HISTORY.*

1. HISTORY OF THE STATES OF ANTIQUITY, from the German of A. H. L. HEEREN, &c. Northampton, Mass., 1828. 1 vol. 8vo.

2. HISTORY OF THE POLITICAL SYSTEM OF EUROPE and ITS COLONIES, FROM THE DISCOVERY OF AMERICA TO THE INDEPENDENCE OF THE AMERICAN CONTINENT. From the German of HEEREN, &c. Northampton, Mass., 1829. 2 vols. 8vo.

In judging of an historical work, it is necessary to keep in view the general requisites which constitute the historical character of a narrative, as well as the special purpose for which it is composed. The work of Heeren, which Mr. Bancroft has introduced into our literature, is intended to exhibit an outline of the most important events in ancient and modern history, and to be used particularly as a guide in studying, and as a text-book in delivering lectures on history; for which purpose it is commonly employed in the universities of Germany. It is the object of the following remarks to show what we consider the general requisites in an historical work, and the particular

* American Quarterly Review; Vol. V. No. IX. Art. 5, March and June, 1829.