conscious or unconscious, it is not necessary to believe that they are materially geographically remote, but merely that they are conditionally distinct from and superior to the state in which we Christians struggling here now are. Between the people in the crypt of a cathedral, where all is cold, damp, and dark, and the people worshipping on the floor of the cathedral, there is but the thickness of a flagstone two or three inches thick; yet the conditions are totally different; and the one has no connection with the other, unless when a door opens, and one ascends, and a flash of the celestial splendour breaks in, and a few notes of the heavenly song are heard; but with that exception the two conditions are perfectly distinct and separate from each other. I have never been able to read otherwise that beautiful allusion in the twelfth chapter of Hebrews; and if I were alone in my interpretation I should hesitate; but I find the ablest Greek critics-and one of the ablest is the present Dean of Canterbury, Dean Alford-concur in what I think is its true solution, seeing we are surrounded with so great a cloud of witnesses.' What is a cloud? It is the effect of the sun's heat that has taken up water or steam from the earth, and fixed it in what seems to us a thick mass, but what is really a body of thin vapour, waiting for the cold wind to touch and to condense it. Seeing we are surrounded by a cloud, a company, of those who have been exhaled or raised from the earth by the fervour of the Sun of Righteousness, let us run with patience the race set before us, looking unto Jesus.'"-P. 47.

In this long and ornate passage the beauties crowd upon us so thickly that the difficulty is to decide where or what to choose first. The pudding is all plums; or, as Mr. Tupper might remark→

"When beauties too numerous crowd on thy senses bewilder'd, 'Tis hard to decide. O, beware then, and choose thou the fairest ! The strongest temptation will have thee."

On the whole, we incline to give the first place to the scholar-like inquiry into the meaning of the word "cloud," physical and metaphysical; after which we will glance briefly through the whole of the splendid paragraph which precedes it, and note the beauties which it contains.

In the eleventh chapter of his Epistle to the Hebrews the Apostle, as every one knows, expatiates very grandly on the word "faith" and its most illustrious examples; and having cited these, he begins his next paragraph with the well-known words:"Wherefore seeing we are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us run the race, &c." A passage so pre-eminently clear and simple that every school-boy of sixteen who reads his Greek Testament, and every pupil-teacher who reads it in English, would have no difficulty in showing the plain meaning, which every child of ten years old would understand at a glance. "The cloud of witnesses " simply being the vast number of the faithful in all past ages, whose spirits are still near the scene of their former conflict on earth, and watch in silent sympathy the struggles of their brethren still in the flesh. There is no obscurity, doubt, or difficulty in the whole passage; and this, therefore, is the very place for the Doctor to overwhelm us with the following revelation, of which we number the successive stages :

"(1.) Heaven is not a place but a condition. (2.) It is the spirits of believers in a state of happiness. (3.) Of which there may be a stratum above us; (4.) not geographically remote; (5.) between the people in the crypt and those on the floor of a cathedral there is but a flagstone; (6.) with no connection between them but when one ascends, and a flash of light or song breaks in; (7.) as St. Paul shows by his use of the word cloud; (8.) a cloud is the effect of the sun's heat, that has taken up water or steam; (9.) and fixed it in a mass waiting for wind to touch and condense it; (10.) the cloud (spiritual) is a company of those exhaled from earth by the fervour of the Sun of Righteousness, &c. &c."

Any English dictionary would have shown him that a "cloud" simply means a crowd, a multitude; any schoolboy would have told him that vépos simply means the very same thing, as where Homer says, (out of many examples) :

Αμα δὲ νέφος εἴπετο πεζῶν:

and Virgil imitates by the words nimbus peditum. But this would not at all have answered the Doctor's purpose, which is to impress his hearers with a vast notion of his acquaintance with natural philosophy, of his scholarship, and with his intention to approve of Dean Alford as one of the ablest Greek critics. Dr. Cumming has nothing new, and nothing worth hearing to say; but it is hard that he must expand his nothing into an acre of gossip alike unworthy

of himself and of the subject he professes to be explaining.

It is useless to tell such a writer that if heaven, according to his own showing, be a condition, it cannot be the spirits in that condition; that stratum is a word applied not to a living multitude in active motion, but to a body as a whole at rest; that there are no people in the crypt of a cathedral, but only the lifeless ashes; that the music and the light are not below but above, so that neither sound nor light must flash downwards, but up through the open door, of which he speaks with his usual obscurity.

This paragraph from Lecture IV. may be taken as a fair sample of the whole book, which contains upwards of twenty lectures, and more than 500 pages. The Doctor's style is uniformly excellent; marked by the same beauties, adorned with the same grace. At the opening of each discourse he rises to the same lofty height of eloquence, and from this he rarely descends till he reaches the last word of the final peroration. All difficulty, therefore, as to choice of extracts, if more be needed, is removed; but by the same law all necessity for making any more is also removed-ex pede Herculem! If, before taking leave of this great scholar and theologian, we indulge in a few more choice morsels from his well-crowned board, it is that our paper may sparkle to the last, and after such an opening bear our readers pleasantly to the end. After our previous quotations, it is not surprising to find the Doctor telling us such graceful and profound truths as these, (which are culled at random):

metaphysical thing, but a new and bright heaven; an enveloping, "The future is not, I repeat, an ethereal, impalpable, imponderable,

holy, happy, brilliant, joyous atmosphere."

Then we read, on the same page, of the Divine Being who is the King and Creator of that heaven, that—

"He did not make our headaches and our heartaches, our greyhairs, and the crow's feet about the eye, and decay, deformity, and infirmity."

This is quite in our author's style, but in the next line he outsoars himself, fairly out-cumminging Cumming :

"All these," he adds, "the headaches, the heartaches, the greyhairs, the crow's feet about the eyes, all these things will be made a present of to the devil !”

We make no comment on this choice and elegant passage, but simply remark that it occurs in the lecture entitled The First Resurrection, to which grand subject it is clearly well-fitted. Having announced that men who attain the glory of the eternal life shall be no more troubled with headache, heartache, or crow's feet round the eyes, it will be satisfactory to know that "the future is not a series of cold, insulated cells;" and that the inhabitants will not be shut up in stone and lonely cells, when the curse

"Like a stain of ink upon the blotting-paper, has radiated over all the surface of nature and struck down to its very heart!"

One more extract, and we have done. In this novel and original style he expatiates on the words, "There shall be no more death," when comparing the unseen glory of the world to come with "the Exposition of all Nations :”.

"The most beautiful creations in this exhibition," we are told," decay; there is rust on the purest gold; tarnish on steel; a worm in the cedar; a moth in the costly robes; the purple of Tyre, the cunning hands, are all gone; Phoenicians and artisans of Memphis; looms of Sidon; workshops of Nineveh; creations of Cambyses, &c.; whose factories (a new fact) "filled the whole Valley of the Euphrates." Then follow:-" Venice, blades of Toledo, Damascus, Verbruggen, Brussels, Valenciennes; Murillo, Raphael, Carlo Dolce, Titian, Praxiteles, Canova; death, decomposition, and decay are carrying on their processes everywhere, while we are expressing to our neighbours the admiration that we feel as we view those wonderful structures."

It is obvious that in the hands of a man who gravely prints froth of this kind, and counts it suitable to such solemn realities as the resurrection, eternal life, the judgment, and eternal death, no subject however high, mysterious, or holy, is safe. "The great multitude which no man could number, &c. &c.," with all its awful and glorious solemnity, is to him simply a passage which Burns

"Great for his exquisite thoughts, could never read without tears trickling down his cheeks;" there is "enough in the photograph taken by the sunbeams of the Sun of Righteousness, to move, to fascinate, and charm.”

In a word, the whole subject of The Millennial Rest is simply regarded as a field for idle speculation, for irreverent trifling with holy things, for tawdry sentimentalism, and for proclaiming its author as the prophet of the age. Of his good sense and taste every page furnishes numberless examples; his scholarship is apparent in such facts as shutting the Temple of Janus in time of war, or placing Persepolis in the Valley of the Euphrates; and his charity by his belief that there are no Roman Catholics in heaven," (p. 378,) and that while every variety of dissent shall find its way to that blessed place, no one modern divine of the Church of England is named in his list of "The citizens of New Jerusalem."

Books of this kind, however, attain a certain amount of popularity among readers and disciples of a certain class; that sort of popularity which rightly belongs to high-flown romances. And this conviction, we imagine, must have led the Doctor's publishers to advertise this precious tome as having all the charm of a novel without its illusions. It would be difficult to express a tithe of the mischief caused by pages of profane and silly babbling such as those of The Millennial Rest.

Recent Fiction.

HATEVER may be the cause, it is undeniable that the supply of indifferent fiction is wholly in excess of the demand for good. It is now only very rarely thought worth while to give a grievance the distinction of coming before the world in a volume by itself. Every social disfigurement is made conspicuous in the pages of a novel; and people who have a particularly serious "purpose" to proclaim almost invariably find their readiest medium in romance. It would be, however, remarkable that so many of these disguised treatises upon the morals of the times should so soon be put to tempt the subscribers of the circulating libraries from an uncut pile "reduced in price," were it not tolerably well known how the drug gets on the market. The truth is that there are publishers who notoriously encourage the publication of splendid sentiments, which are not on the whole appreciated if they are not in three volumes. A manuscript may even reveal a new religion, or shadow out a new Church, and show how the novelty can best be worked; but the publisher, it is most probable, has very little soul beyond the consideration of how much space the idea is likely to occupy; and it is, certainly, not every benevolent discovery that can with ease accommodate itself to the best-selling standard. There might be some There might be some reasonable hope that the evil would cure itself if the number of volumes did not so materially govern the development of the story. The fiction that eventuates in a mild catastrophe in three hundred pages is transformed, at least, into a tragedy when it is required to be trebled, as the first condition of the publisher; and the recognized sensualist, who may be merely vicious in one volume, becomes a revolting caricature when he is drawn into three. Half the novels that are written are required to fulfil no other condition than that of being "thirty-one and sixpence." Their production has become a trade, and the publisher does not very considerably concern himself about the credit of his attenuated publication when he looks in his ledger to the credit side of

by inviting their readers to the reflection that some of the weaknesses of human nature are to be found within parsonages; and the discovery has been so variously illustrated that a writer who confessedly knows nothing about the clergy has accidentally not always exaggerated. The novels of George Eliot have followed in the same direction, and Miss Sewell and Miss Yonge have never spoiled their admirable tales by pushing into undue prominence any particular purpose.

The Tractarian movement has had its history told in fiction, and even the novels that have praised Lord Palmerston's bishops have not invariably been particularly dull or particularly ❝ lofty." It has, indeed, been evidenced that in this sort of way Church principles may be served or attacked. High Church and No Church were actively circulated by the Nonconformists; and Miriam May and Crispin Ken were put on the index expurgatorius of Mr. Mudie. Nor does the supply of church fiction seem likely to cease. The Valley of the Maude,* by Mrs. Stewart, is not only very good, but quite that lady's best. Indeed, since the admirable author of the Heir of Redclyffe is not to be persuaded from over-writing herself, there is consolation in the consciousness that Mrs. Stewart, one of Miss Yonge's most valuable coadjutors in many of her serials, has not yet given us all her power. The Valley of the Maude shows a great advance on Atheline, and there is no reason why Mrs. Stewart should not write up to Heartsease yet. There is with this lady no striving after effect, no irksome obtrusion of purpose, and nothing in her style to weary; and there are few book clubs, or general circles, to which the Valley of the Maude may not be profitably commended. The republication of Mrs. S. C. Hall's last magazine contribution will probably only suggest the inquiry as to why it was ever written; nor will criticism be relieved when it is pointed out that it might have been worse, for it might have been in three volumes. Can Wrong be Right? can only be described as a "sensation" novel, full of inappropriate scriptural allusions. There is, moreover, brain-fever, and small-pox, and a very sudden marriage indeed; and the possibility of wrong being right never achieves any excitement in the hands of such a moralist as Mrs. S. C. Hall. It is always very clear that the end will be a great triumph for virtue; and that expectation should be realized only shows how much of this sort of patronage virtue can stand. In the matter of parenthesis, however, the book is a marvel; and the printer's establishment must have been put to it to find the ways and means to involve all the sentences up to Mrs. Hall's instructions. The Dream of a Life is not Lady Scott's best; but the difficulty of writing a tolerable "fashionable" novel is not easy to overcome. As a lovestory, and nothing more, it has been very effectively treated, and has not been troubled with a rival this season. But the Skeleton in the Cupboard was so good that Lady Scott has herself discovered a standard which her readers will insist upon her always reaching. As it is, she tells the story of a young girl's affection being directed in the matrimonial market, by her mother, in the usual way, always with originality, and often with power.

There is some cause to fear that Mrs. Wood has not calculated the consequences of becoming a speculation in the hands of publishers; and it would be satisfactory if a clever writer could resist the temptation of getting up a story merely to relieve the dulness of the book-trade this season. We believe that this lady is now engaged on three separate tales, and, it may be, has offers for as many more. The Channings is a third-rate novel that appeared at first in a serial form, and would never have been delivered from obscurity had not the success of East Lynne made the rescue a

profitable one. The Channings is the talk of the country only because it is by the author of East Lynne; there is nothing else that can account for its selling in thousands. At the same time Mrs. Wood tells a story, that is only an

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