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can strongly recommend as a suitable class-book for the upper classes of our High Schools. When shall we have any real study of our mother tongue?

Hurd & Houghton advertise another famous English classic, the Arcadia of the celebrated Sir Philip Sidney. There is an undying interest attaching to the name of Philip Sidney. No less than three modern lives of this knight, sans peur et sans reproche, have been written, one by an American lady, but by far the best that by Mr. Fox Bourne, an extremely interesting volume. His poems and miscellaneous writings were published not many years ago, in Boston, and now comes the famous romance perused by so many bright eyes in the days of old Queen Bess. We fear that it will possess fewer attractions for the bright eyes of to-day, but to the student of literature it possesses a great and permanent interest. Mr. Friswell, to judge from English criticism, is not much of an editor, and the book is considerably abridged; but in the English edition it makes a very pretty volume.

A new and cheaper edition of Prof. Haldemann's excellent work on English affixes, is in the press. This is a learned and valuable book.

The five hundred and eighty-seventh edition of Hamilton's Instructions for the Piano, is advertised in London. It seems a tolerably popular work.

Geographical text-books are announced by M. F. Maury. This Maury is an unusually despicable traitor and an utter scientific humbug.

Scribner & Co. announce Language and the Study of Language, by W. D. Whitney, Professor of Sanskrit in Yale College. We do not need to see the book to know that it will be of the highest value. They also announce The Art of Composition, by Prof. H. N. Day, which we hope will be better than the current works on that subject. Nichols & Noyes in Boston, announce Our Birds Illustrated a book for young readers, by E. A. Samuels, author of the valuable and much needed Ornithology of New England, which we recently noticed. And finally, Ticknor & Fields promise us in November A Journey in Brazil, by Prof. and Mrs. Agassiz, fully illustrated, 1 vol., 8vo.

THE ADVANCE, Vol. I, No. 1; Chicago, September 5, 1867.

This is a weekly sectarian organ, established to represent the views and promote the interests of the Congregationalist or so-called "Orthodox" denomination, as a substitute for the Independent, which has become unsectarian. Believing as we do that the progress of true religion is fast doing away with the narrow fences which sectarianism sets up between honest men, we cannot but think the title of the paper a misnomer, and that the real advance is made by that paper which throws off the trammels of party organization and welcomes every sincere and earnest man to its platform. Certainly there is no reason why any body of men who feel that their views on religion are of vital importance, should not endeavor, by all fair and honorable means, to convert their fellow-men to the same way of thinking: it is their duty so to do. But we should think that this would best be done by the fullest and freest discussion, the fairest and most generous comparison of all possible views. This, however, is rarely, if ever the spirit of a sectarian paper; and the very first number of the "Advance" contains an article respecting its neighbor marked by all that impertinent assumption of infallibility which is so offensive in papers of its kind. The editor of the Independent has been "guilty of such grievous shortcomings, as proved to intelligent Christians, etc.," ,"" has sounded the praises of those whose orthodoxy was most suspected," has praised "men of extreme and known unsoundness." But what is this orthodoxy, and what is this unsoundness, and who are these Christians who know they are right and their fellow-men are wrong? We do not understand that they believe in an infallible Pope, and if they did, we should be obliged to ask for his infallible credentials. They are, doubtless, worthy men, who have great faith in their own opinions, or in those of Calvin, or some other theologian; but who gives them the authority to monopolize the name of Christian, or the epithet, "orthodox"? We saw, the other day, in a Romanist news

paper a bitter complaint that Protestants would not call their church by its proper name," Catholic." The writer did not see, or, not knowing the derivation of the word, did not know that the title assumed the whole point in dispute between Romanists and Protestants, and that it was most unreasonable to expect the latter to call them the "church universal." So it is with orthodox, · ὀρθὴ Sósa," the right opinion; " given originally in derision by opponents, the title really seems to be claimed by certain sects as their legitimate birthright.

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We think the time for this sort of narrowness has gone by. Nowadays men and women read and think for themselves, and no longer believe it necessary to salvation to belong to a sectarian organization. Good and earnest and thoroughly religious men are to be found who do, and equally good and religious men who do not, believe that a whale swallowed Jonah, or that Jesus turned water into wine; good men who believe, or think they believe, in the everlasting damnation, and good men who believe in the universal salvation of their fellowmen; good men who believe in the five points of Calvinism, in the thirty-nine articles of the Church of England, in the mystical interpretations of Swedenborg, and in every other variety of intellectual belief. Advance, nowadays, means a doing away with narrow party divisions and baseless assumptions of infallibility, in looking upon religion as a life, not a belief in the articles of a creed, and in hearty fellowship with all honest and sincere men. The sermon of Lady Gordon's Mahometan friend* might well rebuke the Pharisaism of many Christians.

The subject has the most intimate connection with the cause of true education. Nothing has had such a baneful influence upon its progress as the narrowness of sectarian bigotry. In Great Britain, sectarian quarrels have postponed the education of the people half a century, and have rendered nugatory half the effort that has really been made. The cartoon in Punch representing a portly bishop, of the Church of England and a hungry-looking dissenting parson at a bout of fisticuffs, while a ragged little boy, the prize of the contest, stood by, a shivering spectator, was hardly too severe a satire on the results of what were called the efforts to give a Christian, that is, a sectarian, education to the English poor. When will men learn, that beyond leading a Christian life themselves and uttering boldly and frankly their own opinions, they are not responsible for the religion of their neighbors?

The attempt to defend the dogmas of antiquated creeds against the advance of modern science is, as has been recently well said,† like the efforts of Milton's "gallant man who thought to pound up the crows by shutting the park gate." The fears of the encroachments of modern science upon antiquated thought, are worthy only of the descendants of the persecutors of Galileo. Yet, to their shame be it said, no opponents of real progress can be found so bitter as the believers in the infallibility of Scripture and their own infallibility in interpreting it. It seems as if they were the only people who cannot learn that God will take care of his own Truth without the help of their narrowness.

We trust the new organ will exhibit all that liberality and willingness to look at both sides of disputed questions, which is so conspicuously absent from most sectarian papers.

A BRIEF GREEK SYNTAX and Hints on Greek Accidence: with some reference to Comparative Philology, and Illustrations from various modern languages: by the Rev. Frederic W. Farrar, M. A., F. R. S., one of the Masters at Harrow School. 16mo, pp. 204. London: Longman, Green & Co.

This is a delightful book. Our readers will perhaps be surprised at the application of such an epithet to a Greek grammar; but if they had had to handle dead Greek grammars as much as we have, they, too, would call a live one delightful. Mr. Farrar is not a pedant who looks upon a language as a set of dead

* Sce ante, p. 346.

† Christian Examiner, for September, on the Cambridge Divinity School.

vocables to be ground in a clattering grammatical mill, but a live scholar, who considers it as the organic expression of human thought, and therefore partaking of the life of the beings who employ it. He is therefore acquainted with the modern science of Comparative Philology, and can illustrate a peculiarity of Greek phraseology by a corresponding or a contrasted one in German, Hebrew or English. He gives a meaning to the parts of speech as the articulate members of an organic whole, and not only illustrates their normal use, but their idiomatic peculiarities by contrast with other languages. His management of the subject of the tenses is especially excellent, and the way is smoothed through that thorny wilderness, as it proves to be in so many grammars, the chapter on the use of the moods in Greek. We know nothing like his book except the little Greek Syntax of the Scotch Professor, Clyde, but we think that Mr. Farrar excels him. It is just the sort of book to interest a bright lad in the study of Greek; and unless we can abolish pedantry, and interest some of our boys in classical studies, we do not know what is to become of classical learning. Getting utterly disgusted at a Latin school and then riding through college on a "pony" are not just the ways by which a respect for classical, learning is to be maintained in this country.

Mr. Farrar is the author of one or two popular college stories, and of two other extremely interesting books, one On the Study of Language, epitomised from the delightful work of the learned Orientalist and famous heretic, Renan; the other, entitled Chapters on Language. We recommend them, as we do the present work, to all classical teachers who wish to keep up with the times.

It cost us to import our copy of the Syntax about $2.

THE JOURNAL OF SPECULATIVE PHILOSOPHY. St. Louis: E. P. Gray.

1867.

This publication is understood to represent an association of gentlemen in St. Louis, who have at heart the dissemination of the Hegelian philosophy. It is devoted "exclusively to the interests of speculative knowledge " and hence puts itself in marked dissonance with our prevalent intellectual tendencies. We have nothing in our heart but words of welcome wherewith to greet its appearance; but at the same time we are at a loss to understand why its projectors should ever have thought it worth their while to take the public into their counsels. If there is anything to which the faith of this country is religiously plighted, it is to the actual in place of the ideal; to the results of experience rather than the forecastings of the reason. We have popularly a great belief in knowledge, but it must be à posteriori not à priori knowledge; knowledge after the fact, and not before You may shower upon the people any amount of "speculative" science — science which ends in itself— and you will not attract so much as a gracious wink from them; while if you show them an invention whereby labor is cheapened, or any of the arts of life promoted, in the general, they will honor you with cordial admiration. Now our St. Louis friends disdain the limitation thus put upon knowledge as knowledge, and insist upon showing us that there is an absolutely valid or right knowledge apart from any practical determination of it.

Certainly no harm can come to the world from this serious endeavour on the part of the new Gnostics, and we, for our part, shall gladly welcome any à priori light they may be preparing to shed for example upon the interests of education. But we frankly confess that our hopes and expectations of what they will be able to accomplish in this or any other practical direction, are not very high, for the simple but sufficient reason that their starting-point is irredeemably vicious. They begin in idealism, and idealism means for the intellect not progress towards some grandly objective form of truth but endless, ineffectual gyration about itself, or absorption in its own subjective processes. The idealist who is consistent and Hegel is eminently so holds existence to be absolute or uncreated, and hence resolves us, subjectively considered, or in so far as we exist to our own consciousness, back into nothingness: for with Hegel being and nothing are identical. Thing" is contradictory of being, because it limits it,

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and being is necessarily unlimited. But no-thing relieves it of this stigma, restores it to the bosom of its own chaste infinitude, so that no-thing may be called the alter ego of being, or reckoned identical with it. This philosophy practically bids us unthink all our thoughts, un-feel all our feelings, doubt all our dearest beliefs, undo all our choicest deeds, in order that we may creep back in that clandestine way into the lap of an imbecile or inhospitable Absolute, which yet incessantly repugns us. We are not in the least created beings for being is one, and creation would double it, or leave it no longer absolute but relative. Properly speaking, indeed, creation is impossible and inconceivable as an actual fact; what we call by that name being only a process of eternal becoming on the part of the pretended creator himself; a process, moreover, into which, singularly enough, nothing ever enters, and from which, therefore, nothing ever proceeds; or in which nothing is primarily involved, and from which, consequently, nothing is finally evolved. To common, unperverted sense creation means, the making of himself over by the creator to the creature. To Hegel, it never means anything half so simple and honest as this. It means, on the contrary, the merciless absorption by the creator of all created existences in himself. In a word, by Hegel's showing, creation means the perpetual objective going forth of the creator into a consummate or accomplished egotism; and hence the perpetual subjective consumption of the creature.

Now we submit, that if the end of culture be, according to idealism, to make men disavow their deepest intellectual instincts, and give the incessant lie to their physical and moral consciousness, instead of reverently accepting it as the sole practicable basis of their conjunction with infinite goodness and truth - we may be fairly excused, if we indulge no high hopes of the incidental services to be rendered by the idealists, as such, to education, or indeed to any of the practical interests of life. H. J.

[Our respected contributor may be right in regard to the results of Hegelian idealism: we never penetrated its obscurities as he has. Certainly the practical results as exhibited in his politics, do no credit to his principles, though, on the other band, we never saw anything so good as the glimpses we have been able to obtain of his philosophy of art. Nevertheless, we are glad of the appearance of our philosophical contemporary, and hope for good results from his teachings. We are glad that this form of thought should have found a representative and interpreter among us. Right or wrong, it will be a good offset to the materialistic tendencies of the "Positivism 39 now so much in vogue, and of the sublimated utilitarianism of John Stuart Mill. We are glad that an organ for such speculations should have appeared, for the very reason that they are strange, and that our reading world is averse to them: it is evidence that it needs them. We believe in following out all possible lines of thought to their legitimate conclusions, in “ proving all things," for it is only from the fair conflict of opinions that truth will emerge at last."-ED.]

MENTAL AND SOCIAL CULTURE: A Text-Book for Schools and Academies, by Lafayette C. Loomis, A. M., M. D., President of Wheeling Female College, 12mo, pp. 118. New York: Schermerhorn & Co.

Ninety-eight out of 118 pages of this little book are an abridgment of good Dr. Watts' venerable and very flat" Improvement of the Mind." With this are combined" maxims and rules of conversation and politeness, from Chesterfield's Letters to his Son," a truly portentous combination; and we hope, for the sake of the students at Wheeling Female College, that the selection of the latter has been conducted carefully. Except in regard to this point, the responsibilities of the President of Wheeling Female College, whose name appears on the title-page as author, are not heavy. If any one can still derive mental nutriment from worthy Dr. Watts,- -we should think the admirers of Tupper might they have him, or a part of him, here, on clean paper and in modern type.

MISTAKES OF EDUCATED MEN, by John S. Hart, LL.D., Principal of the New Jersey State Normal School. Fourth Edition. Philadelphia: J. C. Garrigues. 24mo, pp. 91.

This is really an admirable little book - fresh, original and vigorous. We never saw in so small a compass more really sound advice to young men. RUDIMENTS OF THE GERMAN LANGUAGE; Exercises in Pronouncing, Spelling, and Translating. by Dr. F. Ahn. American edition, improved and enlarged. New York: E. Steiger. 16mo, pp. 89. Ahn's books are held in great esteem by good teachers. "In the present Rudiments' the elements of the German language will be found reduced to their utmost simplicity.” AN INTRODUCTORY SCHOOL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, arranged on the catechetical plan; by John J. Anderson, Principal of Grammar School No. 31, New York. 16mo, pp. 153 and 37. New York: Clark & Maynard. A SCHOOL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, on the same plan, by the same. 16mo, pp. 310 and 37. A PICTORIAL HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES, by the same. 12mo, pp. 363. Mr. Anderson's histories have the great excellences of brevity and clearness. We should select them in preference to more bulky volumes if we were introducing a new text-book into grammar schools. We all condemn cramming, and yet do nothing to check it. Let the first step be to substitute small for large school books for the children, and throw the teachers on their own resources to supplement them by reading and oral instruction.

THE NEW DOMINION MONTHLY, Vol. I. No. 1. Montreal: John Dougall & Son. A neat miscellany of selections, sixty-four pages double columns, for the very low price of ten cents in silver.

FREEDOM is breathing new life into the schools of the City of Washington, as is evinced by the Twenty-second Annual Report of the Board of Trustees, which we owe to the courtesy of the Hon. WM. J. RHEES, its chairman. We wish we had room for some of the good matter it contains. We will venture to say that none of our readers who will give out the three words varioloid, aeronaut, and scurrilous to their pupils to spell, will get so many queer answers as are to be found here. The document has an engraving of the noble new Franklin Schoolhouse.

HARPER'S WRITING BOOKS. We hope our readers will make trial of these books. They not only teach a very handsome hand and are made of very good stock, but they have one entirely original feature — they contain in the margins a whole system of neat little drawing copies, and on the cover a set of simple directions for their use. We believe, with Horace Mann, that "a child will learn both to draw and write sooner and with more ease than he will learn writing alone;" and with Prof. Morse, that "the time will come when ignorance of drawing will be considered almost in the same light as ignorance of writing." So highly do we value the least degree of skill with the pencil, that we gladly welcome drawing-lessons, even on the margin of copy-books, rather than not have them at all. They will pave the way for something better by and by. Let our enterprising teachers try these pretty copy-books and allow the children to occupy some of the heavy minutes of school-time in acquiring what, even in a small degree, may prove to them in after life an invaluable acquisition.

COLLEGE LIFE: ITS THEORY AND PRACTICE, by Rev. Stephen Olin, D.D., LL.D, late President of Wesleyan University. New York: Harpers. 12mo, pp. 239.

The great fault we have to find with Dr. Olin is, that he is dull; we suppose didactic books, unless written by very great geniuses, must be dull. The book seems to contain excellent advice, though we have not read it all. For we may as well confess it, before we got through, it was a warm day,—and we fell asleep. Nevertheless we believe it is a book eminently proper to be read through, though we suppose we should not agree in all things with the President

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