yet this arrangement produced almost immediate discontent. Those stately ceremonies and imposing forms, carefully as they had been revised, yet had the odor of the old abomination about them; and had they been ever so pure, they were unsuited to the wants of earnest men. Time, which allays so many discontents, therefore only made this matter worse. Authority was then interposed to put down the rising feeling, and that of course aggravated it. At last, as might have been expected, the crisis came; and in one day two thousand brave men who had fought the battle of the cross went out from their livings in the establishment, not knowing whither they went. Thus was Puritanism brought into the world: a movement from its very inception making protest against the aesthetic religion, and to this day wonderfully illustrating the power there is in the Gospel of the Son of God.

But

This exodus did not leave much life in the house whence it came out, but the little it did leave proved tenacious and productive. In due season, therefore, another secession occurred in almost precisely the same manner. A large party, of whom the Wesleys were the representatives, were awakened to a desire for a more spiritual religion. They had no thought of casting off the old forms, much less of coming out from the old church; and even when their congregations began to form by themselves, they only called them "societies," still indulging the pleasant illusion that they were not a separate body, but should soon be able to kindle up a soul beneath those ribs of death. they found they had raised a spirit they could not control. God took the issue out of their hands. The result was inevitable. As the power of the Gospel began to be felt, all set forms and liturgical services became distasteful, the awakened multitude surged up against those restraints like the ocean waves against a crumbling cliff. The very idea at last became absurd. A warm Methodist praying from a book; shouting "glory " according to prescribed form; answering" Amen" only where it came in course; going off with the "power" at a convenient pause in the services! It would not do: the living force could not be so "cabined, cribbed, confined." It came out from the grand old temples where it was born, and took to the cross roads and open fields. Then, it cast off almost every vestige

of mere ornament, the reform in that respect extending even to personal apparel. A Methodist was as well known in those times by his plain coat as by his religious zeal; his place of worship was as innocent of the sound of bell and organ, as it was marked by often less melodious voices; and the movement of that day stood forth to view in rugged grandeur, like a naked mountain peak newly thrown up against the sky, and still hot and hissing with the fires that gave it birth.

Such have been those great reformations, one and all, that arrest the eye as victory-marks along the track of the church of Jesus Christ. Their uniform tendency has been to burst away from those artistic forms and splendid ceremonies in which a dying faith always arrays itself. Sometimes, by a reaction more natural than excusable, they have proclaimed war on all religious art. But this there has always been about them. They have rescued and defended the truth; they have borne the world onward in the direction of purity; and they have been marked by power. Such movements, from their earnestness, are somewhat impetuous also; and being impetuous, they become to a great extent extemporaneous as well. There is no time at any rate to dally with tinsel, nor patience to submit to perpetual routine. The voice of such an age is, "This one thing I do." There is a truth to establish, a sin to kill, an abuse to reform; and the word of God is shut up like fire in men's bones. Art must give way now before energy; embellishment before the impetus of the occasion; and all the mere æsthetic must wait upon the strength of the eternal God.

Those persons who at such times cling still to their elegant proprieties and liturgical arrangements generally stand upon the wrong side. The Church Esthetic and the Church Militant go apart like the poles. The former harbors the corruption which the latter is seeking to remove; it grasps the sword if it can, and wields it against the brave men who are fighting in the Holy War; and the hungry souls who ask to be fed with the bread of life are turned off with processions, and pacified with parade. That religion which puts these aesthetic proprieties in their secondary place is opposite. If it sometimes wears a "raiment of camel's hair," when a more beautiful garment would be as serviceable, there is this at least to be said, that it

will not flinch from hard work. It has been in the past the kind of religion that has chiefly leavened the masses: it is the kind that has pressed close upon the heels of emigration, and been found first on the frontier: it is the kind that has followed our armies in the march, and knelt by our dying men upon the field. In such rough duties the prayer-book and the surplice have very small place. They come in at a later stage. When the pioneer work has been finished; when the forests have been chopped down and the fields cleared, and the seed sown; when the meadows are all green, and the pastures growing, then comes in the æsthetic religion. Tripping across the velvet turf in her silver slippers, spreading her tints upon the already regenerate soil, she says; "I am the church: I have the apostolic succession: how can you abide among such unfashionable people?"

Thus stand the two kinds of religion which it has been the aim of this article to discuss. The aesthetic religion commits no fault by associating worship with some gratification of our natural sense of the beautiful: its sin lies in reversing the order in which the two words, strength and beauty ought to stand. The Scripture terms are, strength first and beauty afterward. And in that Millennial consummation, for which we are laboring, we shall behold the perfect blending of the two. The church of the future rises upon our sight, "Fair as the morn," but not only or chiefly so: to this are added two things more: "clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners." And so will it be in heaven. Those walls that flash their varied light of green and gold before our sight-great and high: those fair palaces of the saints-eternal in the heavens! Everything glorious, everything enduring; everything magnificent, everything substantial; everything beautiful, everything strong. And those words which we recite in God's earthly courts with pleasure, recalled amid the swelling chorus and the white-robed throng, will take on new meaning and impart new rapture to the soul as we shout; "Strength and beauty are in his sanctuary !"

ARTICLE VIII.

JOHN STUART MILL.

An Examination of Sir William Hamilton's Philosophy, and of the Principal Philosophical Questions discussed in his Writings. By JOHN STUART MILL. Boston: William V. Spencer. Two Vols. 1865.

The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. By JOHN STUART MILL. Boston: William V. Spencer. 1865. Dissertations and Discussions: Political, Philosophical and Historical. By JOHN STUART MILL. Three Vols. Boston: William V. Spencer. 1864.

A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. By JOHN STUART MILL. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1865. Westminster Review. April. Article: The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. July. Article: Later Speculations of Auguste Comte. By JOHN STUART MILL. New York: Leonard Scott & Co. 1865.

THE name of Mr. Mill, as a speculative and practical thinker upon government, society, metaphysics and morals, has gradually risen in prominence during the last twenty-five years, until he has become the foremost name in recent British philosophy. Born in 1806, he has now attained a ripe maturity, and his. opinions may be considered as settled upon every subject concerning which he has published his views; while his position in England has been so popularly conceded, that his recent election to Parliament was easily carried under peculiar circumstances, by the weight of his personal character. He is now a recognized leader of the English Liberals; and perhaps the foremost thinker in Europe who has been largely indebted to the Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte.

The position from which he writes may be better understood if we turn to his personal history. His father was James Mill, a Scotchman, the author of the History of British India and the Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, and the friend of Bentham and the Liberal school of thinkers whose

nucleus is the Westminster Review. John Stuart Mill was educated at home under these influences. In 1823, he took a clerkship in the India House of the East India Company, from which he rose through the intermediate grades of promotion until, in 1856, he was appointed the Examiner of Indian Correspondence, the post which his father had held before him. In these years he was a frequent contributor to the leading Reviews, editing the London and Westminster Review from 1835 to 1840, and even up to the present year its most regular and able contributor. The three volumes of his Dissertations and Discussions, are made up from these essays, first collected aud published in London in two volumes in 1859; and so general was the demand for them in our own country that the republication, in 1864, has met with a large sale and given a new impulse to the circulation of all his works. His earliest work was the editing of Bentham's Rationale of Judicial Evidence, in 1827, to which he added notes and supplementary chapters. Up to 1835, he was a frequent contributor to the daily press on the side of advanced liberalism. The work, which first made him extensively known in England and here, was his System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, published in 1843. Next came his Principles of Political Economy in 1848, and later his Essay on Liberty, his Considerations on Representative Government, his Utilitarianism; and now this present year the latest and most able of all his writings, his Examination of the Philosophy of Sir William Hamilton and the Essays on Comte. These volumes embrace a large range of discussion and include nearly every social problem. They are fearlessly yet temperately written, and carry weight because of the prevalent good sense which even in the highest reaches of speculation never deserts the author.

Mr. Mill is a psychological as distinguished from a retrospective thinker. He belongs to the school of Hobbes and Locke and Hume and Hartley and Thomas Brown and James Mill," to those who hold that the belief in an external world is not intuitive but an acquired product," to those who claim that even the elements of consciousness can be resolved into the results of sensations and inseparable association. In morals, he is an utilitarian, denying an original moral sense, and claim