Holy Spirit; the monitions of which will never fail, while there are two or three disciples to gather together truly in the name of Jesus Christ" (p. 248).

Throughout the work (which evinces great familiarity with the words of the Bible) the influences of the Holy Spirit are classed among natural phenomena, and yet are represented as miraculous. Mr. Mountford says: "The soul of man is susceptible of the Holy Ghost. It is not born with the Spirit, but only with a nature fitted for its coming. The apostle Paul asks: Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?' And it may be that it is through the same susceptibility of spirit that one man receives the Holy Ghost, and another man drinketh iniquity like water.' As a young man with his face in the right direction, Saul had the Spirit of God come upon him. Thirty years afterwards, with his face set wilfully wrong, the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and an evil spirit from the Lord troubled him.' And probably the same spiritual susceptibility by which he had been receptive of the Spirit of the Lord was the channel by which the evil spirit' sent on its errand got at him. That spiritual susceptibility for which, perhaps, Judas was chosen as one of the twelve, and through which, perhaps, he received 'power and authority over all devils, and to cure diseases,' was, in all probability, the same susceptibility through which diabolically it was put into the heart of Judas Iscariot, Simon's son, to betray him.' Demoniacal possession, as the Jews knew of it, and as it is known of to-day in many parts of the world, illustrates human nature, as to its susceptibilities spiritually, and as to its exposure to dangerous disembodied agencies and invisible forces. But from the scriptures it might seem as though in the age of Jesus Christ that that spiritual susceptivity by which the 'spirit of an unseen devil' could get entrance into the temple of a human soul was exactly what, with a better man, would have been receptiveness of the Holy Ghost. This spiritual susceptibility is by nature; though one man perhaps may have more of it than another, just as one man is more tender in heart, or poetic in thought, than another. But, perhaps, by prayer and other means, it is what a man can get quickened and purified for himself more surely than he can hope as to the enlargement of any other faculty of his nature" (pp. 322, 323).

The phenomena of mesmerism, many phenomena of dreaming, are classed among miracles. "Doubt about miracles as not perhaps being natural to man! But, really, even bread is not more so. Miracles those of the scriptures, and, as being nearer to our own time, those of the New Testament especially-miracles are true to human nature" (pp. 324, 325). Naaman from Syria had been directed, for a cure as to leprosy, by Elisha the prophet, to wash himself in the Jordan seven times. But he would seem to have felt himself aggrieved by the simplicity of the remedy. 'Naaman was wroth, and went away, and said, Behold, I thought he

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LITERARY INTELLIGENCE.

[Jan. would surely come out to me, and stand and call on the name of the Lord his God, and strike his hand over the place, and recover the leper.' That the prophet would move his hand up and down over the diseased part of his body was what was expected by Naaman, according to a correct translation of his words. Apparently it was a mode of healing which the Syrian knew of before his resort to Elisha. And it is certain that mes meric practice is to be seen sculptured on ancient monuments in Egypt" (p. 326). "Such facts as have been supposed to be supernatural, of the nature of dreams, apparitions, and strange impressions and impulses, and which have happened and been published within the last twenty years, and such narratives of a mesmeric character as are to be found in the Zoist, were these things to be gathered, examined, and collated with as much care as has been given to the lives and classification of butterflies, and with as much acuteness as what caught the lightning in its ways, there would result a pneumatology by which the scriptures would be illuminated for darkling readers, and by which men would believe in the immortality of the soul as they never can until they have some understanding about the soul itself, and discerningly 'have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the world to come"" (p. 325).

It is easy to see that if the phenomena of spiritualism be of the same nature with the miracles of the Bible, and if the dreams and visions of modern clairvoyants belong to the same genus to which the dreams and and visions of the prophets and apostles belong, then the whole subject of miracles, loses its importance, and the time spent on it by theologians has been wasted. Mr. Mountford quotes an opinion of Henry More, that often spirits" are very great fools; that there are as great fools in the other world as there are in this” (p. 201).

MARGARET. A Tale of the Real and the Ideal, Blight and Bloom. By Sylvester Judd. 12mo. pp. 409. Boston: Roberts Brothers. 1871.. Mr. Judd was the grandson of Rev. Jonathan Judd, the first minister of Southampton, Mass.; a clergyman who died at the age of eighty-three in the year 1803; a classmate at Yale College with Dr. Hopkins of Newport, R. I. He was a cousin of Dr. Hopkins, but a decided opponent of the Doctor's peculiar opinions (see Hopkins's Memoir, p. 253). Rev. Sylvester Judd was born in Westhampton, Mass., July 23, 1813, and died in Augusta, Maine, Jan. 20, 1853. He was ordained pastor of the Unitarian Church in Augusta, Oct. 1, 1840. He published several works, the first of which was "Margaret," now republished. This volume furnishes abundant proof of the rare genius of its author. The fact that after the lapse of thirty years, a new edition is called for, indicates its hold on the popular mind. An edition of it was published in 1856, with illustrations by Felix O. E. Darby. It has a far better claim than most works of fiction to be pictorially illustrated.

THE

BIBLIOTHECA SACRA.

ARTICLE I.

FREE PUBLIC LIBRARIES.1

BY REV. J. W. WELLMAN, D.D., NEWTON, MASS.

THE library, in the sense of a treasury of books, is not a modern institution. It can boast of great antiquity. The ancient Egyptians made vast collections of parchments. Osymandyas, one of the ancient kings of Egypt, it is claimed, was the first who founded a library. On the entrance of his library building were inscribed the words, "The Dispensary of the Soul"; and on the walls was sculptured "a judge, with the image of truth suspended from his neck, and many books or rolls lying before him." There was a library at Memphis so early in history that Homer was accused of having stolen from it the Iliad and the Odyssey, and of afterwards publishing them as his own. But the most famous collection in Egypt was that wonderful library at Alexandria, founded by Ptolemy Soter about B.c. 300, and afterwards greatly enlarged by Ptolemy Philadelphus. It contained at one time seven hundred thousand volumes; and when destroyed by the Saracens A.D. 642, so vast was the collection, that the parchments were distributed among the four thousand baths of the city to be burned, and it required "six months to consume them."

1 The substance of this Article was delivered as an Address at the opening of the Free Public Library at Newton, Mass., June 17, 1870.

VOL. XXVIII. No. 110.-APRIL, 1871.

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The Hebrews had their archives, their repositories of literature. The Persians possessed a "a house of the rolls." The Greeks gathered large numbers of books in public and private repositories. Plutarch tells of a library at Pergamus of two hundred thousand volumes. A public library was founded at Rome B.c. 167. Among the various magnificent projects of Julius Caesar for the embellishment of the Capitol," was that of a public library, which should contain the largest possible collection of Greek and Latin works." During the reign of Augustus learning was liberally patronized, and large collections of books were made; and afterwards libraries were gathered, to which the public had access, not only at Rome, but in the principal colonies and cities of the empire. But in various ways, by fire, volcanoes, earthquakes, and by the irruptions of Northern barbarians, these invaluable libraries of Italy, which had been growing for several centuries, were destroyed.

The advent of Christianity opened a new era in the history of this institution. When the gospel came, wherever it went, it awoke a wonderful intellectual life, especially among the common people. Throughout Christendom, in the first Christian centuries, schools were established for the instruction of children and youth, and higher institutions of learning were founded in various places. Great Christian scholars soon arose, who wrote books, as well as gathered them into libraries. Libraries were necessarily established at all the chief seats of Christian learning; but the books of Christians were rather for use than for show. It is instructive to notice that in that first and purer age of Christianity, under the influence of the primitive churches, with their simple democratic organization, there was developed, as there always has been under similar conditions elsewhere, and especially in New England and in all the more northern of the United States, a powerful tendency towards popular education. Books were made and used, as they never had been by the pagans, for the promotion of general intelligence. This did not favor the amassing of large libraries in a few places, as

much as the placing of books in the hands and homes of the people, the very end that has always by various methods been sought in New England, and that we are now endeavoring to accomplish by means of our free library system. But as church government became more centralized and corrupt, and the people were taught more by symbols, processions, crosiers, ecclesiastical millinery, and less by books, the interest in promoting popular intelligence ceased.

Coming down the Christian centuries, we find that the chief libraries were connected with monasteries. The monks not only made large collections of parchments, but also, with great painstaking, transcribed them, and thus greatly multiplied the copies of valuable works. The facile pen of the monk was the printing-press of those earlier ages. And the service which the monasteries thus rendered to literature is beyond estimate, and counterbalances, in some measure, their evil influence in other directions. But these monastic libraries were in the hands of the various religious orders that founded them, and were of no public utility in their day.

It was not until the great Protestant Reformation came that any general interest was taken in the founding of public libraries. Then occurred a great change in the popular estimation of the educational value of this institution. Christianity, once more disenthralled and purified, immediately inspired the people with unwonted zeal in promoting popular intelligence. And, among other means brought into requisition in aid of the education of the masses, was the public library. Previously, large collections of books had been made for the benefit of particular classes, of religious orders, of universities, and of the learned generally, -but not for the benefit of the people. Free libraries were not founded in any country for popular use before the time of the Reformation. Then appeared, for the first time, the germ of what we now call a free public library. This institution had its origin in that great religious movement. It is historically, therefore, and essentially, a Christian insti