dern exigency, preachers held converse direct with the
prime sources of British theology. We could imagine the reader of Boston
producing a sermon as good as Robert Walker's, and the reader of Henry
producing a commentary as good as Thomas Scott's, and the reader of
Bishop Hall producing sketches as good as the "Horae Homileticae:" but we
grow sleepy when we try to imagine Scott diluted or Walker desiccated,
and from a congregation top-dressed with bone-dust from the "Skeletons,"
the crop we should expect would be neither fervent Christians nor
enlightened Churchmen. And, even so, a reproduction of the men who have
repeated or translated Owen, is sure to be commonplace and feeble; but
from warm hearts and active intellects employed on Owen himself, we
could expect a multitude of new Cecils and Romaines and Fullers.

As North British Reviewers, we congratulate our country on having
produced this beautiful reprint of the illustrious Puritan; and from the
fact that they have offered it at a price which has introduced it to
four thousand libraries, we must regard the publishers as benefactors to
modern theology. The editor has consecrated all his learning and all his
industry to his labor of love; and, by all accounts, the previous copies
needed a reviser as careful and as competent as Mr. Goold. Dr.
Thompson's memoir of the author we have read with singular pleasure. It
exhibits much research, and a fine appreciation of Dr. Owen's
characteristic excellencies, and its tone is kind and catholic. Such
reprints, rightly used, will be a new era in our Christian literature.
They can scarcely fail to intensify the devotion and invigorate the
faculties of such as read them. And if these readers be chiefly
professed divines, the people will in the long-run reap the benefit. Let
taste and scholarship and eloquence by all means do their utmost; but it
is little which these can do without materials. The works of Owen are an
exhaustless magazine; and, without forgetting the source whence they
were themselves supplied, there is many an empty mill which their garner
could put into productive motion. Like the gardens of Malta, many a
region, now bald and barren, might be rendered fair and profitable with
loam imported from their Holy Land; and many is the fair structure which
might be reared from a single block of their cyclopean masonry.

FOOTNOTES:

[I] _The Works of John Owen, D.D._ Edited by the Rev. WILLIAM H. GOOLD,
Edinburgh. Vol