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States with the consent of their masters, they will probably learn, before long, that, if they wish to remain free, they had better not go back again.

In this view, the only important practical decision is that which certainly commands the vote of a majority of the judges, - whether it is acknowledged as law in all the circuits or not, that it is unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law prohibiting slavery in the Territories. But it is also clear that a "creature of municipal regulation" cannot exist until such municipal regulation as is necessary for its vitality is made. We do not suppose that the Supreme Court would have such squeamishness in declaring constitutional a law establishing slavery, as they show with regard to one to prohibit it. But we think it will not be very soon that a Congress will be found to pass the necessary laws which shall show what are the relations of masters and slaves in a territory, so as to make any man a person held to labor or service under the laws thereof."

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We are inclined therefore to take courage under the weight of this attack which the Supreme Court has made upon what have been considered some of the fundamental principles of our government. We trust we may look upon its manifestos so much more like the arguments of the stump than the edicts of a tribunal — as brutum fulmen et inane, and wait for future events with that tranquillity and patience that grow out of a steadfast belief that the future of nations is in the hands neither of courts nor of congresses.

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1. Miscellanies.

ART. VI.-JAMES MARTINEAU.

By the REV. JAMES MARTINEAU. Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols. New York: C. S. Francis & Co. 1852.

2. Pause and Retrospect: or, A Minister's Aims Reviewed; being the Last Discourse preached in Paradise Street Chapel, Liverpool, by JAMES MARTINEAU. London: J. Chapman. 1848.

3. The National Review. No. VI. October, 1856. Article VIII. Personal Influences on our Present Theology. Newman, — Coleridge, Carlyle. London: Chapman and Hall.

4. The London "Inquirer." Nos. for May, 1857.

THE recent appointment of Mr. Martineau to a permanent charge in the Manchester Theological College in London offers an invitation, which we cheerfully accept, to consider the position he holds among the foremost religious thinkers of the time, and the contributions he has made to our richest liberal Christian literature. Our attention is the more strongly solicited on account of the protest, grounded on theological distrust, which, as the English papers inform us, was made against the confirmation of his appointment, and the discussion that followed in a large meeting of the College Trustees.

We rejoice to see that the nomination was indorsed by the decisive vote of one hundred and thirteen to seventeen. It was not the Professor, but the body, that stood for judgment on that question. In our time the attitude and tendencies of a Christian party are indicated less by its "standards," than by its acknowledged standard-bearers. We know what energies are elastic in its heart, when we see the men in whom it concentrates its confidence or invests its noblest pride, and whose fame it welcomes as public deference to its own personality. The ease with which Bushnell, Park, Bishop Clarke, and Beecher, in our country, and Powell, Jowett, Rowland Williams, Davidson, and Maurice, in England, retain fellowship and enlarge their influence, is a noble augury for the future of a free Protestant Christianity. It shows us how readily the cords of the strictest creeds slacken

before the interior pressure of bold and threatening thought, and suggests the pleasant fact that the territory of the prominent sects is no longer measured by ramparts, but by pio

neers.

The generous confirmation of Mr. Martineau's appointment is a cheering confession that the Unitarians of England are not willing to sink into a contented and vulgar sect, with diagrams of infinite truth to be guarded, or imposed, by party spirit. By thus pledging their confidence in the most richly endowed and illustrious of their teachers, they acknowledge that it is their privilege to represent, in their organic life, the legitimacy of enfranchised thought in religion. They virtually reaffirm that it is the glory of the Unitarian movement to protect unhampered learning more than crystallized belief; to cherish sympathy with reverent inquiry more than exclusive zeal for the most satisfactory dogma; to display a devout trust that all destructive criticism, in the region of letter and records, which attends an unshackled yet sober scholarship, is only the preparation for a nobler edifice of historic faith; and to proclaim the principle that Christianity, being essentially an expression of infinite holiness and love through the soul of Jesus, for the redemption of men, is lifted above all peril of destruction, as an historic force, by any surgery of documents, so long as his personality and perfections are spared.

This question of liberty could not have a more honest trial than in the person of the distinguished man we have named. No more sensitive or thorough test could be applied, to determine if a man, by drift and affinity, stands for the principles in the Unitarian movement that lie behind its temporary dogma, than the question whether entirely apart from his personal acceptance of them—he considers Mr. Martineau's prominent theological views as within the legitimate lineage of the Unitarian spirit, and as having the right to direct the education of theological students. We shall rejoice still more in the noble vote of our English brethren, if it teaches us on this side of the water to see that any reserve of welcome to men who have widened the boundaries of intellectual liberty, and have striven to adjust the essence of Christianity to plain results of Biblical criticism, the new aspects of science, and

the threatening conditions of modern civilization, is an offence against the inspiring force of the Unitarian movement, and carries a man by moral gravitation outside the plane of its spirit and objects. The amount of faith which the American Unitarians have in their mission may be quickly and sadly gauged by their readiness to allow men of restricted thought and retreating sympathies to withdraw the public interest from problems that lie ahead, to the commonplaces of a mechanical theology which has more vital representatives in hostile sects, thus pushing our competent leaders and natural prelates into a background chilly with the shadows of distrust.

It is a misfortune, certainly, that Mr. Martineau's published productions have been desultory.* But the plane of a man's thought and the grade of his genius are not to be appreciated by the bulk and symmetry of his intellectual products. The principles which he grasps, the breadth of his orbit, the range of his light, the quality of the spiritual atmosphere that invests him, reveal themselves in an essay as easily as in a

* Of Mr. Martineau's productions there have been published about twenty occasional Discourses upon various topics; a volume called "Rationale of Religious Inquiry, or the Question stated of Reason, the Bible, and the Church"; two volumes of Sermons, entitled, "Endeavors after the Christian Life"; a volume of "Miscellanies"; and a volume of controversial theological dissertations upon the "Bible," the "Deity of Christ," the " Scheme of Vicarious Atonement," "Christianity without Priest and without Ritual"; and the "Christian View of Moral Evil." The following articles, the most of which have appeared in the Prospective, the Westminster, or the National Review, are also recognized as his : — Two papers on "Whewell's Scientific Morality"; "Strauss and Parker"; "Philosophical Christianity in France"; "Morell's History of Modern Philosophy"; "Dr. Channing's Memoirs"; "Newman's Phases of Faith"; "Mesmeric Atheism"; "Europe since the Reformation "; "The Soul in Nature"; "Kingsley's Phaeton"; "Kingsley's Alexandria and her Schools"; "Sir William Hamilton's Works"; "New Passage from Professor Newman's Creed"; "The Creed of Christendom"; "The Ethics of Christendom"; "Oersted's Soul in Nature"; "Lessing's Theology and Times"; "The Church of England"; "The Battle of the Churches"; "The Creed and Heresies of Early Christianity"; "The English Religion: its Origin and Present Types"; "Restoration of Belief"; "International Morality"; "Mediatorial Religion"; "St. Paul"; "Personal Influences on our Present Theology." We are happy to know that Messrs. Munroe & Co. are about issuing the two series of "Endeavors after the Christian Life," in one volume; and to state that a selection from Mr. Martineau's papers will probably be issued under the auspices of the American Unitarian Association, under the title "Sacerdotal and Spiritual Christianity; or Timely Thoughts for Religious Thinkers."

folio. No one, we think, who has faithfully read Mr. Martineau's Discourses and Reviews, with an eye capable of catching the system of thought of whose outline and spirit they are hints and gleams, will hesitate to say that, in all the essentials of a commanding liberal theologian and scholar, he is our foremost man. For ourselves, too, we have as little doubt that a thorough working out of the religious philosophy, thus richly suggested but irregularly sketched, in its relations to the sources of authority in the Gospel, the nature of inspiration, the rightful rank of the earliest records in the literature of Christendom, the principles that should rule in the discussions of science with faith, the natural nearness of the soul to the power and breath of the Holy Spirit, and the methods through which Providence conducts the spiritual education of the race by Christianity, would be the most valuable contribution of all which the Unitarian movement has made to the Church, and would leave an impress on theology more powerful and salutary than can be wrought by any living religious thinker.

It would be a grateful office to call attention, at greater length than our limits will allow, to the intellectual qualities which Mr. Martineau's papers display. They reveal the working of a mind equally acute and reverent by constitution, -fitted to attain eminence in the abstrusest regions of mental philosophy, but especially commissioned to deal with the mysteries of the spiritual nature, and to grasp the broadest laws of that solemn realm. They indicate a culture that has evidently been as careful and patient as if it were needed to hide scanty resources of original power, reminding us of the description of a Grecian island, where every jutting stone on its heights is covered with a basketful of soil, carried up with serious labor, to add another grape-vine or bunch of flowers to the general fruitage and bloom. They display without ostentation a learning that sheds wide light on every theme, and as opulent seemingly in history, science, and philosophy as in theology. We should find it still more delightful to point out the poetic riches strewn along a style which, though often stiff, ill-articulated, and scholastic,-reading like a too literal translation of eloquent Latin,-is always intelVOL. LXIII. 5TH S. VOL. I. NO. I. 9

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