every word and gesture regulated by precise enactment. First we are told of all the adverse events that occurred to the church during the century; then of all the prosperous events; then of the state of letters in the church; then of the learned men; and so on, through a regular round, with a da capo at the commencement of each new century. As Dr. Welsh very justly remarks, by this plan subjects are removed from each other which cannot be understood unless they are perceived in their natural connexions and bearings. It is,' he adds, as if, in the history of a war, one chapter were devoted to the victories and another to 'the defeats, instead of our being presented with a continuous ⚫ narration of the progress of events. For meteorological and other purposes it may be convenient to have a view of the state of the weather in different columns, but it would be insupportable to read an account of a voyage round the world, in which we had one chapter for the days in which the wind was favourable, and another for those in which it was adverse.'-(p. 408.) These strictures on the plan of Mosheim appear to us as just as they are happily expressed. We only wish that Dr. Welsh had gone a little farther in his opposition to this formal style of narration, and instead of giving us, in his first volume, an account of the external history of the church, and promising us an account of its internal history in his second volume, had dropped this artificial and really unmeaning distinction, and told us continuously and connectedly all that can be told of our religion and its professors during the epoch which his volume embraces. Why should we be informed of what emperors and high-priests did to Christians in one volume, and bid to wait for the appearance of a second before we are told what Christians were doing all this while to one another? Why should we learn at one time how far, and into what regions Christianity spread, and then be left to wait for an indefinite period before we are informed what was the peculiar machinery by which this diffusion of Christianity was effected, or even what it was after all which was thus diffused? Dr. Welsh tells us in this volume that the Apostles preached to men, and baptized those whom they succeeded in converting; but if any would know what was the nature and what the duties of the apostolic office, what it was and how it was that the Apostles preached, and what were the nature, mode and meaning of the ordinance of baptism, Dr. Welsh leaves them to wait till his second volume appears, where all the information they desiderate on these points will be found. Paul, we are told, in the various churches planted by him, established a system of government admirably calculated for preserving and extending 'the new faith;' but when we would fain learn what were the

articles of this new faith, and what was that system of government so admirably calculated to preserve and extend it, and what kind of institutions were the churches in which this system was established, all we get from Dr. Welsh is a polite intimation that this and other particulars will be referred to in considering the government of the church and the life of the early Christians.' Now it may be that for systematic purposes' such a mode of arranging his materials is necessary; but we are quite sure that, for historical purposes, this is nothing else than an utter disarrangement and dislocation of the whole subject. Strictly speaking, this is not history at all; it is merely an application of the materials of history to polemical or dogmatical uses. It presents no picture to the mind of the reader. It leaves no image of the actual, living Christianity of early times in the imagination. It may supply us with materials for reasoning about the affairs of the Christians of those times, but it will never enable us to realize what it would have been to have ourselves lived as Christians among the Christians of those times.

The notion, we believe, prevails to a very considerable extent among literary men who are not theologians, that ecclesiastical history is a department which presents little that can be interesting or instructive to them. They are apt to regard it as a wearisome record of priestly ambition and sectarian intolerance-of the crimes and follies of churchmen, the debates of controversialists, and the fanaticism of enthusiasts,—a record from which little can be learned that is calculated either to ennoble the

feelings or augment the happiness of the race. For such a reproach we shall not take it upon us to say how far our church historians have given just cause by the manner in which they have treated their subject; but we feel confident that the history of Christianity might be so written as for ever to silence all such insinuations, and convince the world that no story is more worthy of being told or more likely to benefit mankind in the telling. Discarding the figment of a universal visible church on earthholding sects and sectarian disputes to be, in many instances, what Carlyle calls shams,' or, at the best, the mere symbols and tokens of something far more important than themselves; and assigning to ambitious prelates and noisy fanatics no higher place than their actual influence upon the fate of the Christian religion entitles them to claim-we would have a history written of that great power which, for the last eighteen hundred years, has been operating upon the substance, modifying the forms, and influencing the destinies of human society throughout the civilized world. We would have it made manifest how the religion of Jesus Christ, besides answering its grand end of winning men to

God, and sanctifying, comforting, and elevating those by whom it has been embraced, has, at the same time, silently but surely, been leavening the whole social mass, and affecting for the better all the interests, relations, and pursuits of man. We would have a picture of Christianity in her birth and progress, her struggles and triumphs upon earth; not the Christianity merely of courts and councils- too often a meretricious trickster, a vile and greedy impostor; but the Christianity of Christ and his Apostles -the Christianity that dwells in pure hearts and loving souls, and whose power has been felt, acknowledged, and loved even where her principles have been repudiated or despised. We would have a display of the gradual process by which this mighty agent has, through the lapse of centuries, been working out those results in the political, intellectual, and ethical condition of Christendom, which all now see to exist-how it has affected our manners and customs, our tastes and pursuits, our poetry, our philosophy, our jurisprudence, our agriculture, our commerce, our liberties, our whole social, domestic, and individual wellbeing. Here is a theme surely worthy of the ablest pen; and were a work adequate to such a theme produced, it would for ever silence all complaints as to the barrenness and frigidity of ecclesiastical history: or if some one, affecting the honours of a philosopher, were still to be found to depreciate such a work, it would not be difficult to conclude, that the reason of this unfavourable estimate was to be sought, not in the circumstance that the work was beneath the critic, but in the circumstance that the critic was beneath the work.

To some of our readers we may perhaps appear, in this paper, to have set up an ideal standard of excellence in the department of ecclesiastical history, which there is no probability of our ever seeing reached. But the same may be said of all ideal standards; and were this objection of any force, it would go to set aside all attempts to conceive and delineate a perfect model in any of the arts or in any department of literary effort. What we have had chiefly at heart, in what we have written, is to call the mind of those who are interested in the Christian history off from the false and distorted conceptions which have too commonly prevailed regarding the design of such a history, to those which appear to us alone founded in truth, and alone calculated to lead to the production of a really worthy history of our religion. As it is to the prevalence of a false standard that we are inclined to attribute the fact that hitherto the noblest of all histories has been treated the worst, we indulge the hope that even the feeblest effort to point out a more excellent ideal may not be without its fruit.

ART. IV.-Revelations of Russia, and the Emperor Nicholas and his Empire, in 1844. London: Colburn, 1845. Second Edition.

A COMPLETE and faithful work on Russia has long been a desideratum in English literature. The older English works of Milton, Carlisle, Perry, and Motley, are now antiquated, while the contemporary French works, with the exception of Rulheire, who treats only of a particular epoch, are superficial and utterly unworthy of trust. Voltaire and D'Alembert were paid for their praises; and though Ségur may not be obnoxious to the reproach of receiving a bribe in solid money, still there are many ways of influencing an author without resorting to the expedient of greasing his hands with silver rubles. The Cabinet of Petersburg perfectly understands the effect of ribands and orders, diamond rings, and Malachite vases, and has made unscrupulous use of these persuasives to praise, not only in France and Germany, but also in England.

The modern works on Russia are all imperfect. Jones has long been out of date; Frankland is unpardonably silly, shallow, and superficial; Slade, though somewhat more grave and serious, only touches on portions of Russia; Bremner, though fuller, yet speaks with reserve and discretion, as though he had friends and relatives in the country who might be injured by his frankness; and the authoress of Letters from the Baltic,' though she writes fluently and in flowing strain, is entitled to no credit whatever. Her work, from beginning to end, is a pauky panegyric on Russia, written, perhaps, with the pardonable motive of praising a country which afforded a home and a settlement to some of her Scotch relatives;-but it is not entitled to the least credit as a description of the condition, habits, mode of life, manners, and government of the Russian nation. When we state, as we do, on the authority of the book at present under review, that the authoress of the Letters from the Baltic' lived in the house of the chief of the secret police during the whole period of her sojourn,' we think we state enough to exclude her testimony from consideration. Loath should we be, indeed, to accuse a lady of deliberate misrepresentation; but without going that length, or anything like it, we think it very plain that the fair authoress must have been insensibly influenced by the representations of the unscrupulous functionary under whose roof she had consented to remain a guest. In fact, she saw with the eyes, and heard with the ears, of the respectable functionary, her brother-in-law, who had become her host. There

remain but the works of Kohl and Custine, both of which have been given to the public in an English dress. The former is a minute and painstaking observer, but he wants vigour and profundity, and that political education in a free state without which no writer, however book-learned he may be, can ever write a perfect work on Russia. The work of Custine is, in every respect, valuable. He has, with the piercing eye of a man of genius, looked through the very core of the Russian system, and detected its canker and rottenness with intuitive quickness. His impressions are almost always correct. He gives them forth in a style forceful, varied, picturesque, and graphic; and it is an attestation at once to his truthfulness and genius, that the author of the 'Revelations of Russia,' who has evidently long lived in the country,who has studied its history thoroughly, and seen the working of its administrative system in every part,-comes, on the evidence of facts, and of facts alone, exactly to the same conclusions as the polished, elegant, and somewhat fanciful Marquis de Custine. The Russian Embassy and Consulate will, of course, raise a cry against this later work as they did against the work of Custine. Some of our own journalists will perform their allotted tasks with zeal and alacrity, but there is not a material representation in it for which we could not vouch from personal observation, and we rejoice to think that not all the Rigby rhetoric in the civilized world will suffice to rail down the evidence of facts which these volumes supply of the tyranny, the perfidy, and the moral turpitude of the Russian system and government; of the cureless cupidity, corruption, and malversation of her public servants, and of the prostrate and unhappy condition of her sixty millions of slaves.

To the humane and inquiring minds of the people of England, the condition of the inhabitants of the eighth part of the habitable globe, and the one-twelfth of the human race, can never be indifferent; and we do not hesitate to say, that more light is thrown, in these volumes, on the Emperor and his subjects and serfs, on the secret police, the civil police, laws, and tribunals, the religious persecutions, the military and naval strength of the empire, the commerce, manufactures, and mines, on the region of the Steppe and of the Nomades, on the capitals of Moscow, Novogorod, Kien, and Kasan, on Circassia and Georgia, than in any other work or works with which it has been our good fortune to meet. Whether the fact be, as our author states, that the general dislike entertained towards Russia in England is instinctively true to the national interests, feelings, and position, whether, still to use his words, 'Russia, or at least its cabinet, is the implacable, insidious enemy of British