only those who
have rejected religion because they could not receive its dogmas, but
all who have struggled with their doubts and mastered them, or thought
they mastered them, nay, any sincere seeker for the truth, will find
Miss Cobbe's unpretending treatise exceedingly valuable and suggestive;
while to any one interested in modern theological discussions we would
recommend it as containing the latest, and perhaps the clearest and most
condensed, statement of the questions at issue which these discussions
have called out.

The spirit of the book is admirable. Both the skeptic who sneers and the
bigot who denounces might learn a beautiful lesson from its calm, yet
earnest pages. It is free from the brilliant shallowness of Renan, and
the bitterness which sometimes marred the teachings of Parker. It is a
generous, tender, noble book,--enjoying, indeed, over most works of its
class a peculiar advantage; for, while its logic has everywhere a
masculine strength and clearness, there glows through all an element too
long wanting to our hard systems of theology,--an element which only
woman's heart can supply.

Yet, notwithstanding the lofty reason, the fine intuition, the
philanthropy and hope, which inspire its pages, we close the book with a
sense of something wanting. The author points out the danger there
always is of a faith which is intellectually demonstrable becoming, with
many, a faith of the intellect merely,--and frankly avows that "there is
a cause why Theism, even in warmer and better natures, too often fails
to draw out that fervent piety" which is characteristic of narrower and
intenser beliefs. This cause she traces to the neglect of prayer, and
the consequent removal afar off, to vague confines of consciousness, of
the Personality and Fatherhood of God. Her observations on this
important subject are worthy of serious consideration, from those
rationalists especially whose cold theories do not admit anything so
"unphilosophical" as prayer. Yet we find in the book itself a want. The
author--like nearly all writers from her point of view--ignores the
power of miracle. Because physical impossibilities, or what seem such,
have been so readily accepted as facts owing their origin to divine
interposition, they fall to the opposite extreme of denying the
occurrence of any events out of the common course of Nature's
operations. Of the positive and powerful ministration of angels in human
affairs they make no accoun