lect together the dissipated elements of the old world, after undergoing the process of purification by fire, reorganise and reconstruct them into a new and beautiful world, made and fitted up expressly for the saints? Can any one doubt the power of God to do this? And would not such a reaction more fully answer the figures and the declaration of Scripture, than the one before referred to? That new heaven and new earth may be such as literally to justify the magnificent and poetical descriptions given by the revelator. May there not be in that world a capital city, New Jerusalem, on which may be lavished all the magnificence and splendour described in the twenty-first chapter of Revelation? Could not the Almighty produce, out of the elements of this earth, the very metals, precious stones, and pearls, which are represented as adorning the walls, gates, and streets of the New Jerusalem ? We do not think that God is dependent for materials upon the old world. He has infinite resources at his command. He might dissolve Jupiter or Saturn, Uranus or Neptune, for materials out of which to form the new heavens and new earth; or he might create materials anew, or call them out of nonentity, if he saw fit to do so. But it may be pleasing to the Divine mind to have the future abode of the saints, or the New Jerusalem, bear a relation to the present world similar to that which the resurrection body will bear to our present body. Of course where the Scriptures are silent, we must not affirm; we can only conjecture. But if the saints are to have this earth at all for a residence, which the Scriptures do not affirm, we believe it will undergo as great a change as their bodies will, and be as well adapted to their new estate, as their resurrection bodies will be to their glorified spirits. ART. VI.-Two Years Ago. By the Rev. CHARLES KINGSLEY, Author of Amyas Leigh, &c. Boston: Ticknor & Field. 1857. THE formal criticism of a novel, in a religious quarterly, would, a few years ago, have been esteemed disgraceful to its character, both for orthodoxy and morality. Yet we have recently placed at the head of several Articles, the titles of fictitious works, without eliciting surprise or rebuke. The reason lies in a change which has occurred in the nature of these productions. No one who possesses a New Testament, will undertake to denounce fiction as necessarily unchristian. The human soul is constructed to be attracted by imaginary concep tions, and to delight in stories. This constitutional adaptation must be gratified, and every renewed heart will rejoice in the successful endeavour to combine pleasure with profit, and to teach in parables those who would not listen to sermons. When an author selects this department of literature, for his rostrum to enforce favourite dogmas, or to teach philosophy, we should not sneeringly deride the novel writer, but are bound to grant him a fair hearing, and to remember that his influence may be far more extensive, whether good or bad, than if he had published a treatise. For every reader of Brown, Reid, Stewart, or Hume, you will find a hundred of Walter Scott, and the novels of the latter convey to the common mind a better idea of Scotland, under Mary and James VIth, than the elegant history of Robertson. The Rev. Mr Kingsley is a clergyman in the Church of England, who has become distinguished by his association with a small circle of social reformers, in that communion. The divine life, imparted at the reformation to that church, has been working like leaven in the mass, through the last four centuries, now as non-conformity, again in Methodism, and recently in the evangelical movements. The problem of rendering the established church thoroughly Protestant and efficient, while retaining the antique forms and the State connection, has puzzled the divines and Christian statesmen of England, and seems, at present, little nearer solution, than when it was at first attempted. Mr Kingsley has undertaken, manfully and industriously, to do his part of the labour, and is diligently putting out his talents to usury, by the publication of village sermons, of dramas, and of numerous fictions, of which the subject of this Article is the last, and may therefore be supposed to contain the exposition of the writer's latest conceptions. This attempt cannot be blamed for any limitation in the matters under review. American Slavery, the last Presidential Election in these United States, the War in the Crimea, Sanitary Reform, the English Church, the Dissenters, and the current literature of the day, are a few of the topics which are introduced and discussed in this volume. The author has chosen this department of fiction, because it obtained a larger audience, and we do not object, any more than to street preaching. Multitudes, who would never open an essay on the present state of the world, or the incumbent duties of this generation, will eagerly peruse the pages of a romance, which, in the witching tale of horror and of love, uncovers the fearful sins of our time, and the terrible calamities which are impending. What Mrs Stowe has done in behalf of the antislavery cause, Mr Kingsley has attempted to do for the social life of his own country, by exposing its evils, and has also undertaken to prescribe the remedy. We suspect that our author selected his literary theatre, not merely for the audience, but, perhaps unconsciously to himself, for the liberty of the stage, which enabled him to say by another's mouth what the clergyman in bands could hardly utter, though he might think. It is much easier to put questions than to answer them; to state doubts than to remove them; and the scepticism of Tom Thurnall is in this volume more ably avowed than dispelled. We shall recur again to this serious fault when we speak to the merits of the doctrines. Examined as a work of art, this novel is essentially defective, both in plan and execution. The story is unnatural and preposterous, rivalling those tales of giants and fairies, of Gog and Magog, with which children are sometimes entertained, and sometimes frightened. The adventures of the hero equal in their absurdity the experiences of Herman Melville, since there is not a spot of the habitable earth that he has not trodden, and he luckily reached each place at the instant when the event which has made it historical was transpiring. He fought in Texas and in Mexico during the late war; he dug in California and in Australia; practised in the cholera at Paris, at St Petersburg, and in the West Indies; was a slave of the Tartars, and fattened for the sideboard of the cannibals in the South Sea Islands; and meanwhile conveyed a beautiful quadroon from Georgia to Canada; yachted in the Mediterranean; was finally shipwrecked on the west coast of England, when he started as a country practitioner: and hurried thence to the Crimea, to be converted by a mistaken imprisonment, which forbade his usual success. This imperfect summary, for we quote from memory, and must have omitted many adventures, will sufficiently justify the criticism on the artistic skill and plan of the volume. It is not a tale, but a series of tableaux, where scenes and characters are graphically and picturesquely delineated; as the curate, the banker, the worldling, the nobleman, the soldier. The description of the shipwreck shews genius as a limner, though the pictures are often too crowded to convey that grand impression, by a few bold lines, which marks the master hand. Mr Kingsley writes in free, out-spoken, generous English, and is a far better study than Ruskin and his school, for the young writer who would learn to express himself naturally and grammatically. We take at random an example: "For it befell in that pleasant summer-time, when small birds sing and shaughs are green,' that Thurnall started one bright Sunday eve, to see a sick child at an upland farm, some few miles from the town. And partly because he liked the walk, and partly because he could go no other way, having neither horse nor gig, he went on foot, and whistled as he went, like any throstle-cock, along the pleasant vale, by flowery banks and ferny walls, by oak and ash, and thorn, while Alva flashed and swirled, between green boughs below, clear coffee brown, from last night's rain. Some miles up the turnpike road he went, and then away to the right, through the ashwoods of Treebooze, up by the rill which drips from pool to pool over the ledges of grey slate, deep-bedded in dark sedge and broad, bright burdock leaves, and tall angelica, and ell-broad tufts of king and crown, and lady-fern, and all the semi-tropic luxuriance of the fat western soil, and steaming western woods; out into the boggy moor at the glen head, all fragrant with the gold-tipped gale, where the turf is enameled with the hectic marsh violet, and the pink pimpernel, and the pale yellow leaf stars of the butterwort, and the blue "bells and green threads of the ivy-leaved campanula; out upon the steep smooth down above, and away over the broad cattle pastures; and then to pause a moment, and look far and wide over land and sea. "It was a day of God.' The earth lay like one great emerald, ringed and roofed with sapphire; blue sea, blue mountain, blue sky overhead. There she lay, not sleeping, but basking in her quiet Sabbath joy, as though her two great sisters of the sea and air had washed her weary limbs with holy tears, and purged away the stain. of last week's sin and toil, and cooled her hot, worn forehead with their pure incense breath, and folded her within their azure robes, and brooded over her with smiles of pitying love till she smiled back in answer, and took heart and hope for next week's weary work. Heart and hope for next week's work. That was the sermon which it preached to Tom Thurnall, as he stood there alone, a stranger and a wanderer, like Ulysses of old; but like him, selfhelpful, cheerful, fate defiant. In one respect, indeed, he knew less than Ulysses, and was more of a heathen than he; for he knew not what Ulysses knew, that a heavenly guide was with him in his wanderings; still less what Ulysses knew not, that what he called the malicious sport of fortune was, in truth, the earnest education of a Father; but who will blame him for getting strength and comfort from such merely natural founts, or say that the impulse came from below, and not from above, which made him say— "Brave old world she is, after all, and right well made, and looks right well to-day, in her go to-meeting clothes, and plenty of room and chance in her for a brave man to earn his bread, if he will but go right on about his business, as the birds and flowers do, instead of peaking and pining over what people think of him, like that miserable Briggs. Hark to that jolly old missel-thrush below! He's had his nest to build, and his supper to earn, and his young ones to feed, and all the crows and kites in the wood to drive away, the sturdy John Bull that he is; and yet he can find time to sing as merrily as an abbot, morning and evening, since he sang the new year in last January. And why should not I?' "Let him be a while; there are sounds of deeper meaning in the air, if his heart has ears to hear them; far off church bells chiming to even song: hymn tunes floating up the glen from the little "So let him stride over the down, enjoying the mere fact of life, and health, and strength, and whistling shrilly to the bird below, who trumpets out a few grand ringing notes, and repeats them again and again in saucy self-satisfaction; and then stops to listen for the answer to this challenge, and then rattles in again with a fresh passage, more saucily than ever, in a tone which seems to ask-'You could sing that, eh? but can you sing this, my fine fellow, on the down above?' So he seems to Tom to say; and tickled with the fancy, Tom laughs, and whistles, and laughs, and has just time to compose his features as he steps up to the farm-yard gate. "Let him be, I say again. He might have better Sunday thoughts; perhaps he will have, some day. At least he is a man, and a brave one; and as the greater contains the less, surely before a man can be a good man, he must be a brave one first, much more a man at all. Cowards, old Odin held, inevitably went to the very bottom of Hela-pool, and by no possibility, unless, of course, they became brave. at last, could rise out of that everlasting bog, but sank whining lower and lower, like mired cattle, to all eternity in the unfathomable peat slime. And if the twenty-first chapter of the book of Revelation, and the eighth verse, is to be taken as it stands, their doom< has not altered since, unless to become still worse." Pp. 235-237. The plot, so far as there is any, consists in the spiritual experience and reform of Tom Thurnall, who is described above in one stage of his progress, and who is thus depicted at the commencement: "If I wished to define Tom Thurnall by one epithet, I should/ call him specially an ungodly man, were it not that scriptural epithets have now a-days such altogether conventional and official. meanings, that one fears to convey, in using them, some notion quite foreign to the truth. Tom was certainly not one of those ungodly, whom David had to deal with of old, who robbed the widow and put the fatherless to death. His morality was as high as that of the average, his sense of honour far higher. He was generous and kindhearted. No one ever heard him tell a lie; and he had a blunt honesty about him, half real because he liked to be honest, and yet half affected too, because he found it pay in the long run, and because it threw off their guard the people whom he intended to make his tools. But of godliness, in its true sense of belief that any Being above cared for him, and was helping him in the daily business of life-that it was worth while asking that Being's advice, |