Acts;" Knott on the Fallacies of the
Antinomians; A Tour in Syria; Dr. Grant and the Mountain Nestorians, and
six Hebrew Lexicons, singed by fire,--a paternal inheritance.
There are a good many works, too, of general literature, but rather
oddly selected, as will happen where one makes up his library chiefly by
writing book-notices: Peter Bayne's Essays; Coleridge; the first
volume of Masson's Life of Milton; Vanity Fair; the Dutch Republic; the
Plurality of Worlds; and Mommsen's Rome. That very attractive book in
red you need not take down; it is only the history of Norwalk, Conn.,
with the residence of J. T. Wales, Esq., for a frontispiece; the cover
is all there is to it. Finally, there are two shelves of Patent Office
Reports, and Perry's Expedition to Japan with a panoramic view of Yeddo.
This shows that the minister has numbered a congressman among his flock.
It is here that Dr. Parsons is diligently engaged, this cold March
afternoon, to the music of his crackling air-tight stove. He is deeply
absorbed in his task, and we may peep in and not disturb him. He has a
large number of books spread out before him; but looking them over, we
miss Lange's Commentaries, Bengel's Gnomon, Cobb on Galatians,--those
safe and sound authorities always provided with the correct view.
The books which lie before the Doctor seem all to, deal with a Romish
Saint, and, of all the saints in the world, Saint Patrick. In full sight
of his own steeple, from which the bell is even now counting out
the sixty-nine years of a good brother just passed away in hope of a
Protestant heaven,--tolling out the years for the village housewives,
who pause and count; under such hallowing influences,--beneath, as it
were, the very shadow of the Missionary Map and the Pauline Chart, and
with a gray Jordan rushing down through a scarlet Palestine directly
before him, suggestive of all good things; with Knott on the Fallacies
at his right hand, and with Dowling on Romanism on his left, the Doctor
is actually absorbed in Papistical literature. Here are the works of Dr.
Lanigan and Father Colgan and Monseigneur Moran. Here is the "Life and
Legends of Saint Patrick," illustrated, with a portrait in gilt of
Brian Boru on the cover. Here are the Tripartite Life, in Latin, and the
saint's Confession, and the Epistle to Co-roticus, the Ossianic Poems,
and Miss Cusack's magnificent quarto, which the Doctor has borrowed from
the friendly priest at the factory v
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