our origin. (Our argument, if published in full, will contain drawings of these skeletons.)

3. Plato says in his Cratylus that "the soul is here in a state of punishment for faults committed in a preëxistent life." This is strong testimony for our theory by the most profound of the Greeks. And the farther we go back into Indico-Persian and Egyptian authors the more fully we find this theory of metempsychosis, or preëxistence, set forth. Living nearer to the time of our beginning, of course those old heathen knew more than we about it. So we prove a preexistence anterior to Adam, and we take pleasure in calling attention to the novel and conclusive nature of our evidence. Our fourth step may not seem so clear to some, but we are perfectly sure we are right, and so shall declare the point most positively; for when a theory is new or wanting in evidence, positiveness is the

common resort.

4. No two facts are better established in science and common belief than that there is a "milky way," so called, in the heavens, and that the moon is made up of a congeries of verdant, caseous substance, commonly called green cheese. Now though we may be the first to declare it, as Copernicus, Galileo and Newton propounded new truths, we declare, and challenge proof to the contrary, that these two facts stand related to each other as cause and effect; in other words, that the "milky way" furnished the material through a herd of preexistent milkers, of which the moon is made. The milky way is but an oriental and highly poetic expression for the great pasture ground of the celestial cows. Moreover, it is a clear fact in science that this pasture ground is at a great distance from the moon, and so the cows in going to and fro at milking-time were driven very far. The care of these heavenly flocks fell on the youngest of the created intelligences, the human, as the care of Jesse's flock fell on David, the youngest son. In threading these long cow-paths among the stars, these youngest children of the creation, Adam's ancestors and ours, fell in with Lucifer's boys, who were older and rather wild, and so were led away and corrupted. Then we had our preëxistence and our fall and depravity. Can any one disprove our theory? We call the attention of the learned to it, and shall be greatly mortified if it is not noticed and generally adopted by biblical and scientific men, and by all "progressive" men in theology. We call particular attention to the material of our data; living testimony, the Bible, common belief and the science of astronomy. Moreover, we ask, in great assurance and confidence that we are right, where could our race have had a better place to fall than somewhere between the "milky way" and the moon?

For the benefit of the sceptical we are about to confirm our theory by an exceedingly interesting experiment. According to recent discoveries in the most occult of the sciences, (see among our Book Notices, "The Soul of Things,") it is asserted that every object acts as a daguerreotype plate, and catches and fixes the picture of every object in view of it. Not only so, but all sounds are caught and fixed in the same way. When this object is placed on the bare head of a proper medium, every picture and sound thus fixed on it is revealed to the medium. For example, a brick from the Tower of Babel may be made to furnish a perfect picture of the tower, and also reveal all that was said there till the builders broke up and scattered in a polyglot rabble. We propose to get a small meteoric stone and lay it on the head of some suitable person, perhaps the author of "The Conflict of Ages" as a "medium," deeply in sympathy with this whole theory, and so likely to see and hear more than ordinary men, and so steal the secrets of the skies. In this we fully expect to get good pictures of the making of the moon, those cowpaths, the young Lucifers and Adamses, and precisely how and where the great apostacy, heretofore foolishly located in Eden, took place. We shall publish the result in the Boston Review, but grant copies of our original pictures to our subscribers alone.

CONCERNING STUMPS. The backwoodsmen have a saying that it takes a good driver to hit all the stumps. Some of our writers about rather than upon Christian topics, seem to achieve pretty nearly this difficult feat. They often contrive to run at least two wheels directly against the stumps in their newly cut track, beside locking another helplessly athwart their axletree. That their coaching, in these circumstances, is not peculiarly rapid, is not a thing to wonder at. They need a lift from Hercules, or some other of their favorite gods, as much as did their old prototype fast set in the mire.

The gentlemen who are at present so anxious to turn our human race into pre-Adamite fossils, are much in this situation. This is not surprising, considering in what out of the way swamps, morasses, unsurveyed and unexplored wildernesses, in what old caves and rubbish heaps, they have been pursuing their enterprising labors. If there be, in any of these weird localities, the bit of a skull or skeleton which has taken on some special rustiness, some extra antique yellowness, within the few hundred years of its caverned seclusion - here comes the driver to a dead stand-still; the trip is finished ; Adam's great-grandfather of a former earth has turned up at last; this is the identical "bone yard" of that earlier dispensation; Moses was mistaken in his "In the beginning"; Genesis is, therefore, ex

ploded; Exodus is no better; and so on to the finis—"quod-erat demon-strandum," as a friend of ours puts it, with a suggestive

accent.

A terribly stumpy region is this, as the development-theorists also have found it. Strange sights have been seen by travellers bewildered in dense forests; chattering apes and baboons hanging by their tails from swinging branches and playing mad antics with sailors' red night-caps. But our wise men have reached a region of more than African fabulousness, where monkeys sitting on wood-piles are visibly taken in the act of turning into humans, by a process which the proprieties of our Table forbid us minutely to describe. Suffice it, that the transformation precludes all further gymnastics which depend on the aforesaid caudal appendage, for which a different sort of suspending supplies an occasional substitute, not so frequently as might be salutary. Who, then, made the monkey? Like the poet, he is non fit. He was not made. He came along through myriads of ages, by a countless series of transmigrations from inferior types of animal life (we spare the reader the cacaphonous pedigree) the origin of all of which, including not only the entire variety of the irrational animal kingdom, but the whole family of man from the Adam to "the last man," from Shakespeare to the brainless imbecile, is not in the "Deus creavit," but in a very small cell or sack of slimy mucus suspended somewhere in space, where it had the total rotundity and vacuity of space to its own private use and occupation. Is not this a long road by which to drive around what God said by the Pentateuchist? And is it a very well made road? We would as soon drive through an acre of canebrake. But our Jehus have a fancy for this kind of exercise, no matter at what damage to iron and leather, as the "Zulu bishop" is so chivalrously witnessing. We doubt if they get through as well as a friend of ours once did, from amidst the perils of a Missouri forest-raid, who came to the stable with a broken eliptic tied up with his whip-lash, and his split and lost traces made good by a couple of twists of green hickory bark.

Our counsel to young divines is not to try to hit all the stumps. It costs too much in detentions and repairs.

CURRENTS AND TIDE-MARKS. Biblical and dogmatic criticism is becoming more and more destructive. We put on record one or two new developments. French imagination is taking its turn at reconstructing the Gospel narrative. Mons. Renan, a sensitive, learned, poetic individual, while wandering among the sacred haunts of Palestine, is seized by an afflatus which sets him to writing the Life of our Saviour from the purely human side. He has given the world, as the product of this inspiration, the story of the child, the youth, the man Jesus Joseph's and Mary's son, nothing more; filling up the thirty and odd years from his own conception of what they ought to have contained, using no more of the Scriptural narrative than squares with this inner light of his own. All pretensions to Deity are calmly rejected. Yet he concedes that Christ laid claims to miraculous powers, which is explained as a harmless use of a thaumaturgy to the belief in which the people around him were superstitiously addicted. This is, indeed, no novel or original theory of the sceptics. Humanitarianism is an old heresy. But M. Renan has done it over in a fresh way, and by a higher-keyed criticism, and the applause is great.

Germane to this, we note the evolutions in dogma at the recent chief concourse of our American Unitarians. Two points sharply thrust themselves into our orthodox nerves. The one, that the Christ of the Christian system is the Holy Spirit, or, in other words, the spirit of God, who or which is the indwelling disposition, temper, or spirit of man under a proper culture: so that we thus reach the German terminus · that man is God, nothing higher or more godlike being conceivable. The other is the sanctification of sin as an intrinsic good; that is, the optimism which states the thesis in literal verity, that whatever is, is positively, absolutely right in its own essence. We mark the progress of ideas thus unfolded: Christ is wholly human; God is simply man; sin, vice, iniquity are holiness, virtue, righteousness. We are leaving the things which are behind in a rather otherwise than the apostolic sense!

INDEX.

Book-Hunter, Burton's, The, noticed, 207.
Books, inside and outside, 209; book-
notices, what? 211.

Andrews' Life of our Lord upon the Broadcast, Adams', noticed, 206.

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