for noble effort she cannot employ. They corrode with the rust of inaction, or blindly follow out their nobler impulses in the stirring sphere of political plotting. Quinet says, in reference to Spain: "This people always had great occupations, great ends, sometimes the defence of Christianity, sometimes the occupation of the New World. Since its occupations have failed, it is dying of disgust." And not Spain alone finds itself thus ennuyée. Wherever the Church bears the most undisputed sway, there the malady is most prevalent; for at the present era unquestioning submission is imbecility, and not strength. The real life of Italy and France is in those whom the Church disowns, and with whose strivings for a career of noble devotion to liberty she has no sympathy. For them no road is open but a detested separation from humanity in the bosom of the ecclesiastical body, or a life of sensual enjoyment and artistic dilettanteism, or a devotion to their noblest ideal of patriotic, self-sacrificing love of country. The Church does not now stand at "the parting of the ways," and seek to win the youthful Hercules to a life of hardness, peril, and selfdenying virtue. She blesses rather the Epicurean and indifferent spirit, the still, numb soul which will ask no questions and offer no resistance.

Most fatal symptom of all is the distrust of change, the establishment of immobility, fixity, invariableness, as the test of divineness in doctrine and form. "You change," said Bossuet, "and that which changes is not the truth." Rather might it be said, You who do not change must necessarily be in error. The forms under which truth manifests itself must change from age to age. De Maistre admits this in everything but dogmas. But why should these be excepted from the common fate? The presence of a living spirit in humanity produces as a necessary result the changing surfaces of human development. Plato enunciates this law when he says: "Everything mortal is preserved, not by its being in every respect the same for ever, as the Deity is, but by the thing that is departing and growing old leaving another new thing." In every outward institution there is, as it were, an instinct of self-preservation, by which it resists all change, and shrinks with a foreboding sensitiveness from each out-bursting

throe of vital force. It distrusts the spirit, hardly believing that it can supply a better habitation, or furnish fairer forms. But there can be no absolute rest in the social or natural world. The repose of the landscape is only apparent and relative. The process is every instant going on by which continents are forming, mountains upheaving, oceans changing their boundaries, and rivers their beds. The new forms emerge, and the old pass away. Beliefs become obsolete, power changes hands, and new faiths stud the firmament, so that absolute rest is not there.

"To recreate the old creation,

All things move on in fast rotation."

Zeus must dwell

Plutarch gives us a fable which he quotes from Eudoxus, that Jupiter, being once unable to move because his legs grew together, spent all his time, for very shame, in the wilderness; but that, Isis dividing and separating these parts of his body, he acquired the right use of his feet. And he explains the fable as denoting that it is by means of motion that the unseen intelligence is brought into activity. The old seers beheld everywhere motion as essential to life. in the wilderness alone while his legs are tied. This is true also in the nineteenth century. Absolute repose in any respect is the negative of life. In proportion as the Church of Rome has succeeded in repressing the spontaneous movements of nations, and rendering her members torpid, she has approximated to death. It was by her attractive and assimilative power that she turned into nourishing juices the beliefs, aspirations, virtues, and even vices, of the different ages of movement and development. There was operative a never-ceasing law of affinity, which drew to her whatever was noble, heroic, and divine. But now corresponding elements in the life of the nations act as a chemical dissolvent, so that the existing parts no longer cohere.

There was a time when the Church might have adopted the theory of development, instead of absolute, unchangeable oneness of doctrine and fixity in discipline, and have recog nized Christianity as becoming ever more perfect in its doctrine and its form. Then the hope of progress would have Then it would have escaped this iron

been its heritage.

mould of Ultramontanism. Now, professing unchangeable. ness in doctrine, fixity in discipline, despotic monarchy inform, and allied everywhere to stationary principles in philosophy, politics, and social life, it must remain on one side, apart from the outgoing movements of the creative spirit, and be left a monument of the past, a pillar of salt, once a womanly form that fled from the destruction of the cities of the plain, and, looking back, was struck with death.

ART. VI.—1. Reformatory Schools for the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes, and for Juvenile Offenders. By MARY CARPENTER. London: Gilpin. 1851. 2. Juvenile Delinquents, their Condition and Treatment. By MARY CARPENTER. London: Cash. 1853.

We have already, in a brief notice,* called attention to one of the volumes now before us; but we are unwilling to dismiss them without recording more fully our sense of their great interest and value. The accomplished and excellent lady to whom we are indebted for this most satisfactory treatment of a subject so painful to the natural feeling, and so beset with difficulties to the practical understanding, has given one more example of the position that may be taken and the work that may be done by a Christian woman, while respecting the most scrupulous limits that society has assigned to the office of her sex. While so much in the true position of women is matter of declamation and debate, we rejoice to point to this instance, and to the kindred labors of another in our own country, to show how, without any cavil, or sacrifice of selfrespect, the noblest tasks of philanthropy may be undertaken, and carried through on the largest scale, by a woman's devoted energy and faith in God.

There is something very touching and beautiful in this protest of the religious conscience against the dark fatalism which, to so many minds, seems to swallow up all hope

*N. A. Review for July, 1854, p. 252.

for the future of the wronged and the criminal. Gigantic strides in social or industrial "progress" have fixed great gulfs between the favored and the poor. Vast piles of wealth cast deep shadows of want. Crime advances with a swifter pace than population. Ignorance in one class breeds and spreads faster than enlightenment in another class. Civilization is always beset by its "perishing and dangerous classes,"

those to whom life is a misery and a failure, and those to whom society is a foe. And it has been too much the way. with many, abandoning the social problem in despair, to give over those classes to hopeless ruin, contenting themselves with the dreary creed, that the Destiny which appoints to every nation its set time of growth and decay crushes men by' millions, and little children, too, by the same irresistible and irreversible decree. Now while this is the secret or professed' philosophy of some, and the minds of others yield unwillingly to a cowardly scepticism, it seems to us a noble and most cheering thing that Christian faith, embodied in a woman's labor, and uttered in a woman's words, not only speaks a brave protest, but shows the way of rescue, and proves by deeds that it is practicable.

The immediate aim of Miss Carpenter's volumes is to gather a mass of testimony that may have its practical effect, first, in convincing the public mind, and next in hastening and guiding legislation, testimony that may be irrefragable in its character, and irresistible by the sheer weight and bulk of it. To a remarkable degree, she keeps any personal agency or opinion out of view. Her own practical experience in the efforts begun many years ago, and most faithfully carried out, in Bristol, for the rescue of children from ignorance and vice, - which we know to have been not inconsiderable, is studiously veiled behind a mass of evidence gathered from both continents, and arranged with great skill and care, so as to serve for a solid and impersonal argument of fact. The mind of the author is chiefly apparent in the fervent religious tone, the confidence of conviction, the powerful sense of duty, and the direct appeal to conscience, which convert materials so various all to a single end.

It is in the grouping of materials, therefore, that the most

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obvious value of these volumes consists. In the earlier one, after an introductory chapter detailing the actual condition of the classes mentioned, we have the following topics: First Principles, Evening Ragged Schools, Free Day Schools, Industrial Feeding Schools, The Jail, and Penal Reformatory Schools. In the second volume, in which we seem to see more vigor and ease of handling, and the sense of a more immediate practical purpose, a fuller exposure is made of the evils of existing modes of treatment; the experience of America, of the Continent, and of private philanthropy in England, is given in greater detail; and the work concludes with a summary of principles and their modes of application. We give this rapid view of the broad field occupied by these treatises, because we wish to direct attention to Miss Carpenter's own statements, and not to substitute an imperfect sketch. Those who seek full information will not be satisfied without personal study of the subject; and they will feel especially grateful, that so much of the task of collection and condensation is superseded for them.

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The importance of the topic treated certainly cannot be exaggerated, neither can we over-estimate the need of some full and popular treatment of it, like the present. "The mass of society," says Miss Carpenter, "are better acquainted with the actual condition of remote savage nations, than with the real life and springs of action of these children, whose true nature is less visible to the public eye when collected in a Ragged School, or swarming in by-streets, than is the state of little heathen children as exhibited in the reports of missionaries." Many of the details presented in these volumes are of course more directly applicable to English society than to ours; but the same general facts are repeating themselves in our commercial cities with startling rapidity, and the condensed narrative before us has hardly less practical interest here than there. The several reform schools, the "FivePoints House of Industry," the reports of our city missions, deal respectively with the same order of things shown on so appalling a scale in the great cities of the Old World. Christian civilization is interested as a whole to defend itself against the invasions of ignorance, squalor, and crime. The