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It is less firm than specious. We are suspicious of our author's understanding of the elements of this great social and spiritual problem what light is, and to what he would have it conduct us. He says

"The work of the eighteenth century is sound and good. The encyclopædists, Diderot at their head; the physiocratists, Turgot at their head; the philosophers, Voltaire at their head; the utopists, Rousseau at their head; these are four sacred legions. To them, the immense advance of humanity towards the light is due. They are the four vanguards of the human race going to the four cardinal points of progress: Diderot towards the beautiful, Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards the just."

In no

A "glittering generalization" emphatically, but a decoying lantern, too, into the defiles of the dark mountains. sense is this statement correct. Three of these men, at least, were anything but the ministers of the beautiful, the true, the just. These terms are insulted by such an association. Nor was the work of "'93" a sound and good work, but horribly atheistic and wicked, notwithstanding social benefits may have come from it. The world has small need of such light and progress, in either hemisphere. Yet it does need a right illumination, and this is its guide out of the shadows. History will not reverse its verdicts at the dictation of even so able a special pleader as this, demanding the men of September and the tumbrils to be accepted as the pioneers of the world's "Edenization," and because "this holy, good, and gentle thing, progress, was pushed to the wall," then they turned themselves into savages," terrible, half naked, a club in their grasp, and a roar in their mouth." It is fanciful to write of those demidemons: "They proclaimed the right furiously; they desired, were it through fear and trembling, to force the world into paradise. They seemed barbarians, and they were saviours. With the mark of night, they demanded the light." This is an extravagant idealization. We are not yet far enough from the fell triumvirate, Marat, Danton, Robespierre, nor from their philosophic sympathizers, for distance to lend any such enchantment to that view.

A naturalistic illumination is not sufficient to clear the bats

out of that old cavern of Ignorance. Here is where this theory fails. There is not Christianity enough in it to save it. That kind of enlightening leads to Voltairism in politics and religion. Grace must use wisdom to restore humanity; else pride, presumption, infidelity, heartlessness, destruction. Our author, in a single place, seems to feel it, and to recoil from his positiveness as a mental illuminator. "But he who says light does not necessarily say joy. There is suffering in the light: in excess it burns. Flame is hostile to the wing. To burn and yet to fly, this is the miracle of genius." It is more than this. Genius does not insure this safety. It did not in the Voltaireans. It does not in any school of intellectual illuminati. It cannot, in humbler seekers after rest. An earnest, spiritual faith in Christ alone performs this miracle. This was Valjean's trouble. There was a thorough ethical regeneration in the old convict's nature. His conscience wrought well and was purged by the action into exceeding rectitude. But no peace possessed his spirit even to the last moment. He was all his lifetime subject to the inner bondage as well as the outer. Love, in its Christian holds and hopes, as connecting the forgiven sinner, through the one Redeemer, to God, was what he needed to cast out fear and torment. All that a mental and legal renovation could do for him was done. His moral transformation needed to be touched with Christ's holy chrism. So does society's, to secure to it repose. That would have rid him of the secret monster, the disease which he fed, the dragon which gnawed him, the despair which inhabited his night.' If one, then many, then all.

We have not exhausted our material, but our space is lessening. M. Hugo disports himself with evident satisfaction in several important political questions, the study of which has formed a large part of his life-work. He is at home in the philosophy of revolutions, which he calls a vaccination for people-quakes,' a disease which taken naturally is apt to be fatal. He is precise as to the difference between an insurrection and an émeute, the first being a success, the last, an abortion; the first bordering on the mind, the second, on the stomach. "Gaster is irritated, but . . certainly. ways wrong." He is yet more witty upon the philosophy of

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political reaction, as in the pausing of the revolution of 1830 to seat Louis Philippe on the throne. It is of the nature of a "compromise." It is the pleasant not-too-fast of a cautionary moderation. "Between cold water and warm water, this is the party of tepid water. This school, with its pretended depth, wholly superficial, which dissects effects without going back to the causes, from the height of a half-science, chides the agitations of the public square.' "Sometimes the stomach paralyzes the heart." The work of 1830 was a halt midway in a march. The nation sat down to rest and take refreshments. The people-giant must be wrapped in flannel and hurried to bed, under a mild, anti-febrile diet. Hercules must be medicated. The point is finely made, and is sharp and long enough to puncture in other spots as well. He is caustic upon our current utilitarianism, less patriotic and chivalric than cunning and thrifty. "The modern spirit is the genius of Greece with the genius of India for its vehicle; Alexander upon the elephant."

We should like to have brought into our survey the masterly and damaging exposition which this writer gives of the deteriorating and demoralizing tendencies of conventual life. The picture is delicate, tender, appreciative, but full of the dark, dismal, deathlike, nightmare repulsiveness of that most unnatural mode of existence. Valjean escaping from Javert finds a safe shelter in one of these Parisian solitudes. The passage

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among the most thrilling of the story. This opens the way to an analysis, searching and repellant to every human instinct, of the cloister-community. Not the least striking part of it is, Valjean's comparison of it with the unlike yet similar life of the galley-slave. The parallels are run with telling effect. Sentimental young ladies might do well to study this section of the novel before taking that particular kind of veil. It is a sad story of puerility and servitude, wherever it finds its repetition-an utterly abnormal violation of humanity, and robbery of God, under pretence of his especial honor. It is only another form of Les Misérables,' and not the least miserable of them all. This book is rightly named. It is a chronicle of misery, every day ploughing its furrows through society to sow

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new harvests of sorrow; still there is sunlight enough in it to remind us that,

-howsoe'er the world goes ill,

The thrushes still sing in it.

We wish that the author had opened to us more adequate sources of hope and consolation. We take what he offers, but are glad that we are not limited to these. We close, indorsing his own trust for an eventual deliverance from these scourges of mankind:

"Must we continue to lift our eyes towards heaven? Is the luminous point which we there discern of those which are quenched? The ideal is terrible to see, thus lost in the depths, minute, isolated, imperceptible; shining, but surrounded by all these great black menaces monstrously massed about it; yet in no more danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."

ARTICLE V.

THE SIXTH DAY OF CREATION.

As Orthodox reviewers, we cannot admit the claim of some geologists, that the Mosaic account of the creation is to be set aside as inconsistent with some of their alleged facts. We readily admit that, where inspiration has given us a mere outline, geology, or any other human science, may fill up that outline with well-ascertained facts, if it can; and the details thus supplied, though they cannot become articles of religious faith, will have all the certainty that belongs to them in science, and an additional presumption in their favor, in proportion as they naturally and perfectly fit into and fill out the inspired outline. We also concede, that where inspiration uses terms which logicians call general, and which are equally capable of either of several specific meanings, geology may, if it can, show us in which of those specific meanings the general term is to be taken. In all this, there is no inconsistency between the inspired decla

ration and the geological showing. We will even concede that geology may, without impiety or irreverence, ask us to reconsider an old and generally received interpretation of a passage of Scripture, which it knows not how to reconcile with its apparent discoveries; and that it may be lawful, and even a duty, to comply with the request; and if the old interpretation is found to rest on erroneous or insufficient grounds, and a new interpretation presents itself, equally justified by the language of Scripture, and in harmony with the discovery of geology, we may receive it as true. But in such a case, the new interpretation must be one which we might receive and defend if geology had been silent. In no case can geology be allowed to contradict the words of the Sacred Record rightly interpreted, or to force upon them an unnatural interpretation by its own authority. Wherever there is an actual contradiction between the facts of geology and the words of inspiration properly interpreted, geology is wrong, and needs to reconsider its facts.

But facts recorded by the pen of inspiration have an authority, such as we cannot accord to the alleged discoveries of geology. When we have in Scripture, a statement in general terms, and then the particulars given, the particular facts have a right to control our interpretation of the general terms. We cannot send them back, like the facts of geology, to be reëxamined. We must take them as true, and interpret other passages so as to harmonize with them.

We propose to rely on such facts exclusively, and not on geology at all, in our inquiry concerning the length of the sixth day of creation.

Evidently, the word day is not used in one definite and uniform sense throughout this account of the work of creation. It is first used, Gen. i. 5, to designate the period of light, in distinction from the period of darkness with which it alternates. "And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night." It is again used in the same sense in verses 16 and 18. It is also used, repeatedly, as including "the evening and the morning." This occurs at the end of the account of each day's work. It is used in a third sense in Gen. ii. 4. "These are

the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the

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