gressive darkness and sin. The imprecations of the sermon express the present hostile relations of the former to the latter. It is the language of justice to guilt. False humanity, which weeps over the condemned criminal and unnerves the arm of law, is but weakness in complicity with wrong.

This justifies no human revenge, which is, in fact, a human corruption, a demoniacal imitation, or cruel exaggeration of the true sentiment of Divine justice. Whoever has an inspired commission, or a just governmental sanction for his utterances, may freely speak them in strict accordance with his

warrant.

The article on the Cotton Dearth has a special interest for the Southern States of our Union, as expressive of the estimation in which their slaveholding oligarchy is held by the Christian intellect and literature of Europe, and the persevering transatlantic determination not to be dependent on that odious source for a supply of cotton.

It appears that in England the mania for building cotton manufactories has entirely outrun the demand for the fabric. The manufacturer has therefore been a loser; while the mania has so stimulated the price of cotton, as to fill the pockets of our American planters, and raise the price of Virginia negroes. No result could be so trebly repugnant to the pocket, taste, and conscience of respectable Mr. Bull. He believes, therefore, that cotton can, and will, and shall spring up from other soil than American slaveland.

But the cause which Mr. Bull assigns to himself for his travels in search of a new cotton land, is an economical one. He believes the American supply to be precarious. He believes, on authority of an English inquirer, that it is to be "doubted if there could be found a single man, north of Washington, who would venture to guarantee the existence of slavery for another fifty years." The "critical condition" of the Southern States produced by the slavery agitation, and "the frightful proceedings in Kansas," have destroyed the confidence of the European market in the reliability of the American supply. Thus, we may add, is the turbulence of the slave power reacting on its own head. The slave power has originated and persistently continued the "agitation;" and just as the Kansas outrages have ruined slavery in Missouri, so will the atrocities of the slave power to force slavery upon the civilized world, force the civilized world to abate the slave power as a nuisance.

England is determined upon ignoring the Southern cotton-field. She first turns her attention toward India. Here there are three difficulties in the way; namely, "want of irrigation, want of cheap carriage by land or water, want of a just system of land tenure." The reinstatement of the English government in India, on a new basis, after that country is reconquered, will doubtless quicken the progress of reforms in all these respects. Meantime, the dearth of cotton to supply the over-increased manufactories of Lancashire, has produced the formation of a great association, which intends to repeat the agitation and victory of the Anti-Corn-Law League in the field of the cotton question. They hope "that the day may not be far distant, when even Lowell itself may be indebted to India for cheap cotton."

The only remedy suggested for our Southern cotton-growing interest against this loss of trade, is a curious one, and one well worthy the attention of our

Southern friends. It is the calling an immense amount of free labor into the vast unoccupied cotton lands of America, and thus by immense increases and cheaper modes of production, outrivaling every other cotton-growing section of the world. Other countries can beat America in producing cotton by slave labor; no other country can rival her, if she develop her vast cotton resources by free labor. These views are expanded and explained in the following

extracts.

The last report of the "Blackburn Power-loom Weavers' Association" says:

"We believe that all the trials which the cotton trade is now undergoing are entirely owing to the use of slave-grown cotton. Cheap cotton is the thread of our destiny. Slave-grown cotton cannot be so cheap as free-labor cotton. So long as we depend upon America for cotton, and neglect India, where any quantity of cheap free-labor-grown cotton can be had, we need not expect that remuneration for our labor, nor interest of capital invested, which is necessary to make both employers and employed happy.' "-P. 430.

On the subject of saving the Southern States by occupying their immense vacant cotton fields with free labor, the reviewer's quotation from Stirling's Travels in the Slave States will serve:

"Let them only give themselves fair play, by setting labor free, and they will produce cotton at such a cost, and in such abundance, as will baffle all conpetition. There are some 400,000,000 acres of available cotton lands in America; of these, about 28,000,000 are cultivated, the rest is a desert; there are no hands to till it. Now, by adopting free labor the South would not only double the effective force of her negro population, but would turn into her territories that stream of migration which is now enriching the prairies of the Northwest. The association with the noble free laborers of the North would be the best education for the freed negoes; and together they would build up a prosperity of which the South, as yet, has not the faintest conception. A generation would convert her vast cotton-lands from a howling wilderness into a gardenland. The slaveholders of the South, in their argument in favor of slavery derived from cotton as a power in the world, assume that slavery is indispensable to cotton culture. That this is not the case we might know from the latitude most favorable to the growth of cotton. Cotton is not a tropical production, even were it proved that negroes alone are capable of tropical labor. But we have more than a general inference to go upon; in these very Slave States, cotton is cultivated by free labor. In Texas it is raised by the free labor of Germans, and the quality is confessedly superior to that produced by slave labor. And even in Alabama, the small farmers who are too poor to own slaves, produce, with the help of their family, two, three, or five bales per annum. Therefore, even granting the importance of cotton, granting, too, the indispensableness of American cotton, it yet remains to be proved that slavery is either a necessity or a good. The onus lies clearly on the slave-owner. One thing is certain; no need of cotton or any other supposed necessary of life will ever induce the English nation to relax one tittle in its antipathy to slavery. This is with us a settled conviction, which neither gain nor argument can disturb. Cotton is great, but conscience is greater; and in any question where these two powers may come in conflict, the issue for the English mind will be nowise doubtful."-P. 436.

On the conditions above stated, Mr. Stirling (an English traveler) believes that America has from nature a monopoly of cotton production, as against any other country in the world.

In another article, however, the British Quarterly indicates another country as a still more dangerous rival to America than India, namely, Africa; as the following extracts show:

"In the discussion lately held at the Society of Arts, on the question, How can increased supplies of cotton be obtained?' the speakers chiefly insisted on the necessity of an immediate increase of the supply, and of a cheap water carriage. Now both these conditions Central Africa can fulfill. Of all species of native produce, cotton stands foremost there. In those parts of Western Africa visited by Dr. Livingstone, he remarks, there was cotton growing all over the country,' and that there he saw women with spindle and distaff in their hands, spinning cotton while going to the fields. In the district of the Zambesi, too, cotton, although of an inferior kind, was largely grown, while the reader has seen, in the preceding portion of this article, how widely the cultivation of cotton extends along the wild regions visited by Dr. Barth, and must have remarked how constantly the cotton field is pointed to, as the never-failing indication of a flourishing village, throughout the whole extent of his travels. What, then, should prevent our looking to these so lately discovered countries for that supply which, in each coming year, will be so imperatively demanded; to countries where the cultivation of cotton has subsisted from time immemorial, and where nature has provided means of cheap and speedy conveyance, without the cost and delay of the construction of canals or railways? countries, too, so wide and so vast as to be capable of absorbing countless millions of population, and still affording space enough for the cultivation of that raw produce which, as an able writer in the Examiner has lately shown, cannot be raised when the population exceeds two hundred to a square mile."-P. 414.

The surplus population of Europe is each year pouring itself upon America, and Give us room that we may dwell,' is the cry, even now, in wide districts which less than fifty years ago were trackless forests. Meanwhile, there is that large negro population, brought up from infancy to the culture of cotton, chafing under the yoke of slavery, and casting many a longing look toward the land from whence their fathers were torn. Who can say, that now, when slavery appears doomed, whether 'justice to the negro' may not at length be at hand, and that, disciplined by suffering, instructed in the arts of civilized life, the longoppressed Africans of America, like the chosen people of old, may come forth from their hard bondage in a peaceful exodus, to instruct their pagan brothers, and to found prosperous communities in the very land of their fathers ?"P. 415.

ART. X.-QUARTERLY BOOK-TABLE.

It is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men, and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.-MILTON.

I-Religion, Theology, and Biblical Literature.

(1.) "Debt and Grace, as related to the Doctrine of a Future State, by C. F. HUDSON." (12mo., pp. 472. Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1857.) The purpose of this learned and able work, though unexpressed by the title, unrevealed in the contents, and undisclosed until a large part of the volume has been read, is to sustain the doctrine of the annihilation of the wicked. It first tries the various theodices of eternal future suffering, and by a brief reply, endeavors to show that each is irreconcilable with the dictates of eternal justice, as tried by the moral sense. It next takes up the Scripture argument. Under this head it denies that the natural immortality of the soul is ever expressed or even implied in the Bible. On the contrary, life and immortality FOURTH SERIES, VOL. X.-10

are brought in fullness by the Redeemer, to the redeemed alone; while all others are not only naturally mortal, soul and body, at death, but, after that mortal suspension of positive existence, are raised at the final resurrection, and cast into the Lake of Fire as the second death. It denies that endless conscious suffering is ever affirmed to be the nature of future penalty; but affirms that the penalty consists in privation, and in its perpetuity consists the eternity of future punishment. The class of Scripture terms by which eternal misery is usually understood to be designated, such as condemnation, damnation, perdition, destruction, the writer understands to express the painful and penal consignment of the entire nature to the disorganization and complete nonexistence from which it

sprung.

Yet this author, if we understand him, does believe in an intermediate consciousness of being between death and the resurrection. The soul is the center of the being; the bodily death is the flinging off its external medium by which it has been drawn into sharp perception of outer existence; and then the resurrection is rather a new accretion of corporeity, which the undressed soul gathers and hardens around itself. This power is communicated by the Redeemer to the good directly, to the bad indirectly, so that the resurrection is a sort of natural process supernaturally conferred.

The writer then examines the history of doctrinal points involved. The tenet of the natural immortality of the soul, being not Hebraic, was introduced from the Grecian philosophies into theology. In the early ages of Christianity, the three doctrines of natural mortality and annihilation of the wicked, of restoration and of eternal torment, were held respectively by different classes of the Christian fathers. In the Western Church, under the prevalence of absolutism, the eternity of the punishment of the absolutely wicked, was still qualified by a purgatory for the imperfectly bad. Annihilationism, to a greater or less degree, has prevailed among the Jews since the Christian era. And so the unqualified doctrine of eternal suffering for all the unredeemed belongs to Protestantism only. Since the Reformation the supporters of annihilationism in the Western Church have been few and sporadic :

"The recent discussion of the subject in this country was occasioned by the publication of Six Sermons on the question: Are the Wicked Immortal?' by George Storrs, editor of the Bible Examiner.' These discourses passed through numerous éditions, and, with other publications that have been issued, have begun to command general attention and no small respect for the, to many, new doctrine. The most considerable argument which has appeared in reply, is the truly eloquent discussion of Dr. Post, in the New-Englander, whose articles were secured with a view to their republication with a reply; a design which we hope may be soon carried into effect. A return of the like courtesy, earnestness, and appreciation of the difficulties encountered, could not fail to improve the spirit of doctrinal controversy."

We may add, that a passionless re-examination of this subject by some master mind uniting a searching scholarship with a close metaphysical acumen, will supply a demand of the times.

(2.) “Sermons of the Rev. C. H. Spurgeon of London. Third Series." (12mo., pp. 448. New-York: Sheldon, Blakeman, & Co., 1857.)

(3.) "Spurgeon's Fast-day Sermon." (12mo., pp. 43. New-York: Sheldon, Blakeman, & Co., 1857.) Up to this time we had nothing to say of Spurgeon. And what use now for a critic to set himself up and pronounce on such a man? He must be accepted as a fixed fact. It is of no use to bring out our rule and measure, and decide that here he is too crooked or too straight, and there too short or too long. The man who, without rule or measure, or teacher or model, works out great results from what is in him, is lord of the critic, and not the critic of him. Criticism draws rules from the original; and thence proceeds to guide, correct, approve, condemn the inferior essayist. But when nature plants genius in a man, by which to work marvels, it is of no use for criticism to say that his methods are without precedent in the books, his procedures unruly, and his successes and achievements outrageous transgressions of all the fixed principles. We are to accept him, study him, explain him if we can, and use him to deduce new principles for pupils and followers to profit withal. Otherwise, he stands solitary and inexplicable, a plague to all critics, and a pleasure and a glory to all the world beside.

We think by his picture that Spurgeon is a burly-looking figure. His face on some shoulders would be thought a particle homely, if not vulgar. His style of shaping sentences is ungainly and inartistic. His paragraphs, though massy and substantial, roll no rounded music on the ear. We have not, in the productions themselves, any obvious notice that we are dwelling on syllables that have startled England with their utterance from the author's living lip. Be it so. We rejoice that the truths of the Gospel are such that their most downright expression, coming from certain souls whom God commissions and sends among us, possesses a power whose secret no literary criticism can detect. It is the simple power of the Gospel itself. And here is an assurance that the Gospel is indestructible, and instinct with a fresh and ever-springing life. Its nature is Divine and its spirit is immortal.

(4.) "Hymns for the Use of the Methodist Episcopal Church, with Tunes for Congregational Worship." (8vo., pp. 368. New-York: Carlton & Porter, 1857.) We trust that this book inaugurates a new era, or rather restores an old one in our public worship. Our congregations will recover their lost right, or rather will resume an abdicated privilege and duty, namely, the presenting to God the fruit of their own lips in the form of the actual song of praise. Our choirs will still be as ever needed, to cultivate with special zeal the science of sacred music, and to lead and sustain the congregational voice. We hope the result, then, will be that the flood of sacred song, like the voice of many waters, will completely fill the holy sanctuary of God. Let our ministers now forthwith set the reform in motion. Let all in the entire church who have music in their souls, pour it forth, not doubting that they will soon be followed by more timid spirits (like ourself) who, for good reasons, never sing in public, unless there be music enough around us to drown our voice.

The same dumb spirit which has possessed our congregations has also, we fear, silenced to a great degree the hymn of praise at the family altar. What life was once given to the scene of family devotion by the sweet spontaneous hymn, not scientific, not by book, by note, or by piano, but by a going out of