view, renders the passage a not less satisfactory proof-passage of the doctrine.

2. It was necessary, however, in order to give its full force to the exhortation, to allude to the doctrine, and assume it clearly. The more exalted the prerogatives, the brighter the glory, the more dignified the real character, the more striking the humiliation. That the Pope should wash the feet of beggars in the imperial city is nothing; that a monarch who sways the sceptre over millions, should for a moment dispense. with his regal splendour, and converse with a fellow-worm, is nothing; that an angel should come, glowing from the very throne of God, and become an ambassador of God on earth, is nothing. But that the only begotten Son of God, the King of kings and Lord of lords, should wave the glorious display of his ineffable brightness, being made a little lower than the angels for the suffering of death, should dwell among men, be spit upon, crowned with thorns, and nailed to a cross; here is a bright, a powerful example, an eloquent, an irresistible appeal. Methinks we hear the loud strain of the choirs of heaven, when they sweep the strings with enthusiasm, and sing: Worthy is the Lamb that was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing, while from earth is faintly responded, For he was slain for us.

ARTICLE V.

A PURE AND SOUND LITERATURE.

By Rev. CHARLES WHITE, D. D., President of Wabash College.

MIND being the only part of man capable of excitement, impression, and improvement, every valuable change upon an individual or a community must be wrought by an action directly on the internal spiritual being. The persons exercising

powerful sway over their contemporaries, are those who have acquaintance and sympathy with the spiritual elements of man rather than the physical, who address themselves to intellect, who stir thought, who commune with the heart, who kindle and modify affection, who arouse volition. Wealth has power, bone and muscle have power, laws have power; but they who are furnished by education and talent to act on the intellectual and moral elements of society appropriate and wield the whole.

No class of intellectual labourers do more for good or evil than the contributors to our popular literature. No productions of mind pass more directly and largely, as elemental nutrition, into the character of our population, than do the works of these favourites of the public. What; therefore, shall be the intellectual and moral qualities of the books thrown abroad upon the country for general reading, is a practical and deeply momentous question.

We propose in this paper to offer our readers a few thoughts on the value of a sound, pure literature.

In this discussion polite learning will be left to stand on the basis of its own independent worth, without determining its comparative rank, and without at all disparaging other departments of study.

I. A preliminary consideration, showing the value of a sound, pure literature, is the displacement, which it would effect, of a superficial and corrupt one.

The removal of an evil may be as important a service, as the introduction of a positive good. The extermination of poisonous plants, by cultivation, may be as important a result as a harvest. The drying up a fatal miasma, in recovering low lands, may be even more important than all the subsequent crops which may be yielded. There is a light and vicious literature spread over our country, and even our world, fitly likened to poisonous plants, and to a deadly exhalation, which is to be supplanted and removed by the works of sound and pure writers. This injurious literature comes to us in the shape of pamphlets, monthlies, quarterlies, an

nuals, novels in shilling numbers, and sometimes in more imposing volumes.

The first epithet just given to these works, light, frivolous, superficial, is sufficient to condemn them. By their levity, their emptiness, their almost vacuity, they enfeeble the intellect of the country essentially and permanently.

Originally, as is well known, the human mind is indolent thoroughly. Without shame it will consent to be put in leading strings, and go whither another's caprice or interest may dictate. Sometimes, more easily still, it will submit to lie passively open, like a common pond between contiguous neighbours, to receive whatever may be thrown in, clean or filthy. A superficial literature encourages this inherent depravity-this inveterate intellectual laziness. It furuishes for the mind occupation, but not employment; gives a good supply, but no solid growth; produces pleasure, but not invigoration; creates a sickly craving, but no healthy appetite. It makes men mere consumers and not producers. As waters passing along an aqueduct, it courses through the intellect without effecting either enlargement or advantage. It is of course, that the reading which makes little or no demand on the intellectual powers, will exercise and task them into no vigour or invention. There does seem to be at first view some increased magnitude of mind, on the part of the assiduous readers of our light popular works, but it is the fulness of the dropsy. The farther the enlargement proceeds, the greater is the internal disease and debility. These readers are like men breathing a rarefied atmosphere, they take in fuller, quicker inspirations, but they pant, they are faint, their lungs collapse. Give them a dense, fresh, vigorous air! Send abroad a rich and solid and manly literature, to recover the intellect of the country from prostration and breathlessness!

The superficial levity of our popular works contributes to depreciate the intellectual character of the country also, by creating a dainty and fastidious taste which unfits for all serious and sober studies. Precisely to the extent that a com

munity is occupied and pleased with light literature, does a hearty disrelish of hard mental application grow up and become invincible. The voracious readers of such a literature forswear all books which demand patient research and intense thought, for the same reason that a child, fed on confectionary, declines plain, solid food, or a sinecure office-holder, the sweating toils of life. Indulgence in light reading will always be at war with all sound scholarship and all great intellectual exertion. As long as men can sit in their easy chairs and be furnished with glass and oyster-shell imitations, they will refuse to dig into quarries, even for the diamond; or to dive to the sea bottom, though it should be to bring up pearls. A vitiated taste, producing disgust with mental industry and profound learning, is at this moment preventing the intellectual attainments, and dwarfing the intellectual stature of the great body of the American people. Industrious minds, of only fair and respectable standing among their contemporaries in the times of Milton and Shakspeare and Johnson, in opulence of thought certainly surpass even the eminent literary writers of the present age.

But levity and emptiness do not constitute the chief objection to the popular productions referred to. Many of them are pernicious decidedly in their moral tendency. So far as they treat of men and the world their first injury is done by presenting life materially overdrawn, unduly successful, joyous, and exciting. Readers, fresh from those productions where they have been thrilled and absorbed with ideal beauty, pleasure, and splendour, turn and meet the cold realities of the world they live in, with a heart deeply saddened, disgusted, depressed. It is in this state of feverish thirst for stirring and brilliant things, and of consequent dissatisfaction with the unexciting incidents and monotonous matter-of-fact duties of real life, that the young abandon the ways of industry and virtue, and repair to vicious society, to the gaming table, to the theatre, to intemperance, to debauchery. But if the scenes, through which the sparkling authors of our light literature lead the young and vicious, be truly the bright

and the beautiful, it must be a mistake, we are told, to suppose there is so much danger in the simple fact, that they are imaginary. The result however is, that dazzling the visual organs, by means of the unreal and unattainable, makes the actual scene of our life and labour appear so covered with cheerless gloom, as to settle young buoyant spirits into inefficiency, or drive them off into dissipation and ruin. These authors, however the world may call them delightful enchanters, deserve the appellation of dangerous destroyers.

Many works belonging to our popular literature exert a demoralizing influence, by an extravagant excitement of the passive feelings, at the same time that they totally neglect any exercise of the active virtues. This seriously injures both. It is a well known law of our moral nature, that our passive and our active principles are deteriorated in precisely opposite methods, the former by exercise, the latter by the want of it. Being accustomed to distress, lessens the keenness of our pain on approaching it, and being accustomed to leave it unrelieved, diminishes our aptitude to acts of kindness. Although natural sensibility is blunted and enfeebled by being constantly witness to the miseries of life, yet, if our active nature is put into vigorous exercise in removing them, benevolent principle is so far strengthened by their action, that the aggregate of what is efficiently sympathetic in us, will be rather increased than diminished. But when, by the presentation of fictitious woes, we are thrown into excitement without being thrown into action; are pained at the evils men suffer, without being prompted to aid in their removal or mitigation, our sensibilities are worn out by familiarity with human affliction, and our active benevolence by neglecting them. Both operations together work a sad depreciation of our moral nature.

There is a large class of works, which inflict deep injury on the character precisely in the method here indicated. They lead us into scenes of unreal distress without asking or receiving from us any personal ministration, and call us to joy over imaginary bliss without moving us to make to it the least

THIRD SERIES, VOL. II. NO. III.

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