perished from the cold, and had not been committed to the earth, the following reports were transmitted by the governors of the different provinces:

"In the government of Minsk, up to the end of January, 18,797 dead bodies of men, and 2746 of horses, had been burnt; and there still remained to be burnt, of the former 30,106, and of the latter 27,316, the greater part of which were found on the banks of the Berezina. In the government of Moscow, up to the 15th of February, 49,754 dead bodies of men, and 27,849 of horses, had been burnt, besides a number of others that were buried. In the government of Smolensk, up to the 2d of March, 71,733 dead bodies of men, and 51,430 of horses, had been committed to the flames. In the government of Wilna, up to the 5th of March, 72,202 dead dead bodies of men, and 9407 of horses, had been put under ground. In the government of Kalouga, up to the 11th of March, 1014 human corpses, and 4384 dead horses, had been burnt. The number of the whole was 213,516 human corpses, and 95,816 dead horses, exclusive of many others, either burned or buried, of which no account was taken. The strictest measures have been taken for destroying, before the approach of spring, the dead bodies that may be found in the rivers and woods." p. 109, 110.

The loss of more than 250,000 men in this campaign must undoubtedly be charged to the unhallowed ambition of Buonaparte; but to impute all the late bloody scenes in Europe to him, as Messrs. Gibbon and Allen do, is in our opinion unjust. The truth is, England contended for sovereign dominion over all the seas, and France by way of self-defence and retaliation, attempted to unite all the continental powers under the government of her Emperor in opposition to the naval power of Great Britain. England's ambition to rule the ocean had quite as much influence in producing the bloody wars of the last twenty years, as the desire of Napoleon to subjugate the continent. The late Emperor of France has sins enough to answer for, without the exclusive imputation to him of evils which England conjointly produced. Give him his due: he is a great warrior, a great politician; a great sinner, who makes no pretensions to vital godliness; and who is in every religious respect, but not in natural qualifications for

empire, if we except a benevolent disposition, inferior to the Restorer of Peace to the nations. At the same time, the private and public character of Napoleon is every way superior to that of the present Prince Regent of England. We wish all the chief magistrates of the nations might learn from Alexander to read the Bible, and publicly acknowledge the Lord Jesus Christ to be the only legitimate source of government.

Could we search the heart, we might perhaps find, that the solemn league in which Alexander binds him. self to make the laws of Christ the rule of his conduct towards nations, proceeded from ambition; but until we know the thoughts of his soul, it is ungenerous; it is unjust to attribute it to any thing but a conscientious regard to moral obligation. The adoption of that solemn Covenant corresponds with his general deportment in office. It must give the Christian unfeigned pleasure to hear him saying in his Ukase which forbids the persecution of a sect of Dissenters from the Russian Greek Church;-"Does it become a Christian government to employ harsh and cruel means to bring back into the church those who have gone astray? The doctrine of the Redeemer, who came into the world to save the sinner, cannot be spread by restraint and punishment. True faith can only take root, with the blessing of God, by conviction, instruction, mildness, and above all by good example."

No man of his age ever received more unbounded applause than Alexander; and most rulers are willing to appropriate all the improper adulation which their subjects or constituents are disposed to give; but the Emperor of all the Russias would not, like Herod, be eaten of worms. We take delight in closing this brief notice of a man who occupies no obscure position in the religious world, by transcribing his

"Address to the Legislative Synod at Moscow,

"Dated from Moscow, Oct. 27, 1817. "During my late travels through the Provinces, I was obliged, to my no small regret, to listen to speeches pronounced by certain of the Clergy in different parts, which contained unbecoming praises of me-praises which can only

be ascribed unto God. And as I am convinced in the depth of heart of the Christian truth, that every blessing floweth unto us through our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ alone, and that every man, be he whom he may, without Christ, is full only of evil, therefore to ascribe unto me the glory of deeds, in which the hand of God hath been so evidently manifested before the whole world, is to give unto men that glory which belongeth unto Almighty God alone.

"I account it my duty, therefore, to forbid, all such unbecoming expressions of praise, and recommend to the Holy Synod to give instructions to all the Diocesan Bishops, that they themselves, and the Clergy under them, may, on similar occasions, in future, refrain from all such expressions of praise, so disagreeable to my ears; and that they may render unto the Lord of Hosts alone, thanksgivings for the blessings bestowed upon us, and pray for the out-pouring of his Grace upon all of us: conforming themselves in this matter to the words of Sacred Writ, which requires us to render to the King Eternal, Immortal, Invisible, the only wise God, honour and glory for ever and ever. ALEXANDER."

ARTICLE VIII.-Sermons on various subjects and occasions. By George Stanley Faber, B. D. Rector of Long-Newton. Vol. I. Philadelphia: printed and published by M. Carey and Son. 1817. pp. 424. 8vo.

THE Publishers of this volume are liberally minded Roman Catholics, willing that the public should read even the arguments of the Protestants against the superstitions of the Romanists, or these pages would never have issued from their press. They deserve thanks for having given the community many good books; and more than eighty editions of the best quarto Bibles that have been circulated in America. Faber's sermons we like so well as to regret that the second volume, to which he refers us, has not been published. To what can this be owing? Certainly Faber is a very pithy writer; and his dissertations on the prophecies were read with avidity. People might have presumed, we should think, that his sermons, whether sound or unsound in the faith, were worth reading, for the ingenuity which

they might discover, and the good sense which he must very generally express, even in spite of some false theory, should he have the unhappiness to maintain one. Why then have not these sermons been honoured with a rapid sale in, our city? No other reasons suggest themselves to us than the following: Mr. Faber is an Episcopal writer; most readers of other denominations would therefore be apt to think his sermons dry morality of Arminian texture, because the modern Episcopal sermonizers generally produce nothing better; the Calvinistic churchmen would have similar presentiments; and the Arminian readers of the Church of England, whether in Great Britain or America, generally think they have sermons enough on Sunday to last all the week."

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Should any one enquire of all the booksellers in Philadelphia, what part of the community, in proportion to their numbers and wealth, purchase the most religious and moral books, they would not give the honour of intellectual avidity to the Episcopalians or Quakers. The former purchase elegantly bound Bibles for their pews, and the latter, the Journals of their own Public Friends, but neither of them many other books, unless it be for legal or medical libraries.

Could it be generally known, that these sermons are ingenious, argumentative, and frequently evangelical in no ordinary degree, while they are also occasionally erroneous, they would not long want readers and purcha sers. They are worthy of attention for the sake of the orthodoxy of some of them, the heterodoxy of others, and the candour displayed in all. The author informs us, (p. 256,) that he is not a Calvinist; and we learn from the 416th page that he is not an Arminian; for "to a certain extent at least," he says, "we now find ourselves beaten away from the Arminian hypothesis, and thence seem compelled to view the Calvinistic system as more agreeable to Scripture." He adopts for himself this canon, to admit no conclusion in any system to be valid, unless the conclusion itself, as well as the

thesis, from which it is deduced, be explicitly set forth in holy scripture. p. 390.

"This, I will be bold to say, is the sole mode in which we can ever arrive at certainty in matters of religion. We must prove all things by Scripture; and hold fast that which is good: regardless of the even opposite conclusions, which might seem by a train of abstract reasoning to be legitimately deduced from our several articles of belief. By adopting such a plan, we may forfeit the honour and glory of a proud systematic concinnity; and, what has not unfrequently been the case with our venerable mother the Church of England, in the mortal tug of theologic war we may very possibly be deemed Calvinistic by Arminians and Arminian by Calvinists: but, rejecting each theory as a whole, and determining to call no man master save Christ alone, we shall have the comfort of knowing, that we believe nothing, but what the Bible unequivocally teaches us to believe. It may not perhaps be the most philosophical, but it is probably the wisest, opinion which we can adopt, that the truth lies somewhere between the two rival systems of Calvin and Arminius; though I believe it to exceed the wit of man to point out the exact place, where it does lie. We distinctly perceive the two extremities of the vast chain, which stretches across the whole expanse of the thological heavens; but its central links are enveloped in impenetrable clouds and thick darkness. After all, whatever metaphysical difficulties there may be in the matter, these difficulties are no way peculiar to Christianity: they are, if I may so speak, inherent in the very nature of things themselves. As mere deists, we should be equally perplexed, if we were determined to excogitate a compact moral system, with the jarring points of fate and free-will, divine prescience and human contingency. This was felt long before the promulgation of the Gospel: and, if men continue to dispute and draw out fine trains of metaphysical reasoning even to the very end of the world, it requires not the gift of prophecy to foretell, that they will be just as wise at the close as they were at the com mencement." Predestinarian Controversy, p. 418-420.

If the reader should think from these expressions, unfavourable to trains of metaphysical reasoning, and fifty more like them in the book, that Mr. Faber attempts nothing of the nature, he would find himself in a mistake, for our author's sermons are metaphysical dissertations from beginning to end. We are of opinion too, that the truth lies between the systems of Calvinism