, Immortality, and Faith,--such
themes stock this volume, and they are all treated in a way to command
the attention of the reader, to bid him ponder, to contribute glad
assent, or to pay the equally flattering tribute of awakened criticism.
The style is simple, and comprehensible at a glance: the pen has
gathered no superfluities upon its journeys into these remote domains,
no scholastic terms cling to it, no ambitious rhetoric. It is never
heated, but it is never dull: the cool and equable flow brings down
thought enough from scholarly and well-spent years to exhilarate and
satisfy. The temper is perfect in which opinions, most discordant to the
writer's fine intelligence are set forth; all his hostility to them
appears in the justness of his comprehension. So that it would be
difficult to find a volume that contains a greater number of impartial
and exhaustive statements of creeds, dogmas, and tendencies of thinking.
And where they cannot win agreement, they extort respect.

The essay upon "The Regent God" is a fine specimen of intellectual
defining the combination with a gentle, tender self-forgetfulness, as if
Dr. Hedge would fain feel all the gifts of the mind and heart absorbed
in the Infinite Presence. Perhaps the essay upon "The Cause of Reason
the Cause of Faith" contains the most vigor; it is a favorite subject,
set forth with great freedom of movement, and with more illustration
than Dr. Hedge usually indulges. How refreshing is the boldness with
which he claims the word Rationalism for the service of Religion!
Elsewhere there are rich sentences in respect of illustration. What a
finished metaphor on page 371! where, in allusion to the belief of the
earliest Christians that some might fall asleep in Christ, but only to
be caught up with him at his coming, he says,--"Their sun of life might
decline, but only as the sun of the Arctic midsummer skirts an horizon
where evening and morning club their splendors to furnish an unbroken
day. In their horizon there was no dissolution of the continuity of
life."

But we have as little space to devote to admiration as to dissent. We
might show cause for our opinion that Religion appears, in this volume,
to be too closely confined to aspiration, to just thinking, and a sense
of human dependence; in vindicating Reason against Tradition, through
all the judicious and thorough discussion of various doctrines, the
author waives, or perhaps only postpones, his opportunity to