CONDUCTORS OF THE NEW ENGLANDER.

曩 Trench on the Study of Words.-(From New Englander for August 1852.) Sources of the American Population.-(From New Englander for August 1852.)

[The New Englander is an able and spirited Quarterly, published at Newhaven, and, as the name suggests, is intended to serve (in its ecclesiastical relations) as an exponent of the New England Theology, so called. It contains, however, many literary and miscellaneous papers, on which it will be a privilege occasionally to draw. Dr Leonard Bacon and the Rev. J. P. Thompson (both personally known and esteemed among us), are among the chief contributors.]

GEORGE B. CHEEVER, D.D.

Life and Writings of John Foster.—(Slightly abridged from Biblical Repository for January 1847.)

[Dr Cheever is pastor of a Congregationalist Church in New York, and is perhaps as well known on this side the Atlantic as any living American writer. The subjects of his volumes and their treatment have been alike popular, so that numerous editions of all his books have been issued. His article on Foster has excited considerable attention in America, and is deemed one of his ablest efforts.]

The Fragment entitled Plagiarisms from Pascal is taken from the Methodist Quarterly Review, and the article on Mormonism from the Christian Examiner. We are "far as the poles asunder" from the theology of this latter periodical; but the article in question is confined to a simple narrative of facts, which, we observe, several esteemed contemporaries in America have commended as a fair and accurate account of the origin and progress of this last and lowest of religious (?) impostures.

THE

FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW.

MAY 1852.

ART. I.-The Conservative Principle in our Literature. By W. R. WILLIAMS, D.D., New York.

[DR WILLIAMS, the author of the following thoughtful and eloquent production, although not so well known as yet in this country as many of his brethren, will infallibly be longer known than most of them. He has not been a voluminous writer, but all his pieces bear the impress of a mind of refinement and power. This paper was delivered some time ago as an address to the Hamilton Literary and Theological Institution. And although a few of the statements and references concern only or chiefly the United States, the burden of its lessons and warnings is of universal application and importance. We could not better commence our periodical than with such a paper on such a subject.-ED.]

GENTLEMEN,—In acceding to the request with which you have honoured me, and which brings me at this time before you, I have supposed that you expected it of the speaker to present some theme relating to the commonwealth of literature; that commonwealth in which every scholar and every Christian feels naturally so strong an interest. The studies in which you have here engaged, and which in the case of some of you are soon to terminate, have taught you the value of sound learning to yourselves and its power over others. That love of country, which in the bosoms of the young burns with a flame of more than ordinary purity and intensity, gives you an additional interest in the cause of letters; for, as you well know, the literature of the nation must exercise a powerful influence on the national destiny. Acting as it does not merely on the schools, but also on the homes of a land, it must from those fountains send out its waters of healing or of bitterness, of

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blessing or of strife, over the length and breadth of our goodly territories. You know that it is not mere physical advantages that have gained, or that can retain, for our country its political privileges. You have seen how the physical condition of a people may remain unchanged, whilst its moral condition is deteriorating rapidly and fatally. You remember that the same sun shone on the same Marathon, when it was the heritage and the battle-ground of freemen, and when, in later and more disastrous days, it re-echoed to the footsteps of the Greek bondsman and his Ottoman oppressor. You look to literature, and other moral causes, then, as determining to some extent the future history of our land. You are aware that literature is not always of a healthy character, nor does it in all ages exercise a conservative influence. It is, like the vegetation of our earth, of varied nature. Much of it is the waving harvest that fills our garners and piles our boards with plenty; and, alas, much of it has been, like the rank ivy, hastening the decay it serves to hide, and crumbling into speedier ruin the edifice it seems to adorn and beautify. As lovers of your country, you must therefore feel an eager anxiety for the moral character of the literature that country is to cherish. And of your number, most are looking forward to the work of the Christian ministry; and, from the past history of the world, you have learned in what mode the progress of literature has acted upon that of the gospel, and been, in its turn, acted upon; and to what an extent the pulpit and the press have sometimes been found in friendly alliance, and at others enlisted in fearful antagonism. How shall it be in your times?

By the literature of a land, we mean, it is here perhaps the place to say, more than the mere issues from the press of a nation. The term is generally applied to describe all the knowledge, feelings, and opinions of a people as far as they are reduced to writing, or published abroad by the art of printing. But it may well be questioned whether the term does not in justice require a wider application. Language, as soon as it is made the subject of culture, seems to give birth to literature. And such culture may exist where the use of the press and even of the pen are as yet unknown. Savage tribes are found having their poetry ere they have acquired the art of writing. Such were the Tonga Islanders, as Mariner found them. The melody and rhythm of their dialect may have been partially developed, and their bards, their musicians, and their orators have become distinguished, ere the language has had its grammarians or its historians. The nation has thus, in some sort, its literature, ere its Cadmus has appeared to give it an alphabet. The old Gaelic poetry, on which Macpherson

founded his Ossianic forgeries, was a part of the nation's literature, while yet unwritten. And if, as some scholars have supposed, the poems of Homer were, in the times of the author, preserved by memory and not by writing, it would be idle to deny, that even in that unwritten state, and whilst guarded only in the recollection of travelling minstrels, they were a glorious and influential literature to the Greek people, a xrna Es to them, and to the civilization of Europe for all ensuing times. And even in nations having the use of letters, there is much never written that yet, in strictness, must be regarded as forming part of the literature of the people. The unrecorded intercourse of a community, neither transcribed by the pen, nor multiplied by the press, may bear no inconsiderable part in the literary culture of that people, and form no trivial portion of their literary products. Of the eloquence of Curran and Sheridan, much was never reported, or reported most imperfectly; and yet in its effects upon the immediate hearers in courts of justice or houses of parliament, deserved the name and honours of literature, alike from the literary culture it displayed on the part of the speaker, and from the literary taste it formed and cherished on the part of the auditory. Some of the most distinguished among the living scholars of France were, whilst professors in her colleges, eminent for the eloquence of their unwritten lectures. Were not even such of those lectures of Guizot, Villemain, and Cousin as never reached the press, yet really and most effectively contributions to the literature of the land? The departed Schleiermacher of Germany had the reputation of being among the profoundest thinkers and the most eloquent preachers of his time. His sermons, it is said, were never written; nor were most of the pulpit discourses of a kindred spirit, Robert Hall of England. Although many have been published, more must have perished. Yet were not those which the living voice but published to a single congregation, truly a portion of German and British literature, as well as those which the press published to the entire nation, and preserved to succeeding times? Thus the arguments of the bar, or the appeals of the pulpit, the floating proverbs, or the current legends of the nation, and the ballads, and even the jests, which no antiquary may as yet have secured and written down, are expressions of the popular mind, which though cast only upon the ear, and stored only in the memory, instead of receiving the surer guardianship of the written page, may, with some show of reason, be claimed as forming no small and no uninfluential part of the popular literature. In this sense, the literature of a land embraces the whole literary intercourse of its people, whether that intercourse be oral or written. It is the exponent of the national

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intellect, and the utterance of the popular passions. The term thus viewed, comprises all the intellectual products of a nation, from the encyclopedia to the newspaper; from the body of divinity to the primer or the nursery rhyme-the epic poem and the Sunday-school hymn-the sermon and the epigramthe essay and the sonnet-the oration and the street balladthe jest or the by-word-all that represents, awakens, and colours the popular mind-all that interprets, by the use of words, the nation to themselves, or to other nations of the earth.

This literature not only displays the moral and intellectual advancement of the people at the time of its production, but it exercises, of necessity, a powerful influence in hastening or in checking that advancement. It is the Nilometer on whose graded scale we read, not merely the height to which the rushing stream of the nation's intellect has risen, or the degree to which it has sunk, but also the character and extent of the harvests yet to be reaped in coming months along the whole course of those waters. Thus it registers not merely the inundations of the present time, but presages as well the plenty or sterility of the yet distant future. The authors of a nation's literary products are its teachers-in truth or in error; and leave behind their imprint and their memorial, in the virtues or vices of all those whom their labours may have reached. The errand of all language is to create sympathy; to waft from one human bosom the feelings that stir it, that they may awaken a corresponding response in other hearts. We are therefore

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held responsible for our words, because they affect the happiness and virtue of others. The word that drops from our lips takes its irrevocable flight, and leaves behind its indelible imprint. It is, in the stern language of the apostle, in the case of some, a flame "set on fire of hell," and consuming wherever it alights, it "setteth on fire the course of nature;" as, in the happier case of others, that word is a message of salvation, ministering grace unto the hearers.” Reason and Scripture alike make it idle to deny the power of speech over social order and morality; and literature is but speech under the influence of art and talent. And a written literature is but speech put into a more orderly and enduring form than it usually wears. We know that God and man hold each of us responsible for the utterance of the heart by the lips. Human tribunals punish the slanderer, because his words affect the peace of society; and the Last Day exacts its reckoning for "every idle word," because that word, however lightly uttered, was the utterance of a soul, and went out to influence, for good or for evil, the souls of others.

And if the winged words, heedless and unpremeditated, of