man should make such representations of the custom of the Jews in regard to the Sabbath, and leave the reader to infer that he was at liberty to feast luxuriously on that day, without pointing out the difference between Jewish and modern festivals, or making one suggestion respecting the difference in the state of society amongst us and the Jews, is altogether unpardonable. And for a teacher of Christianity, in a community such as ours, to throw out so unguarded a sentence as the following: "In the time of Christ, we find him bidden to a feast on the Sabbath day and accepting the invitation," is, we think, highly criminal. We can already fancy that we see a fashionable infidel coming home from a dinner party on Sabbath afternoon, and his excuse is, Why, Dr. Channing says that Christ was invited to a dinner party on the Sabbath, and accepted the invitation!' Thus irreligion will soon be recommended on the authority of Dr. Channing, and from the example of Christ himself.

We should have said nothing respecting the literary character of this writer, were it not for the determination which Unitarians in this country and in England seem to have formed, to exalt him above the stars; in doing which they have set reason, justice, truth and soberness at defiance. Encomiums have been lavished on him, which would have become the populace who deified Herod, rather than men professing to be in their senses. In one of the speeches at a late dinner of the British and Foreign Unitarian Association, we find the following language:

"In connection with our progress in America, I cannot avoid referring to that splendid writer and high-souled man, whose services to literature have been of the highest order, and whose career was marked by a series of pure and beautiful triumphs; whether he unveiled the gentle, the generous, the judicious Fenelon to the stronger admiration and more correct estimate of mankind, or elevated vet higher our Milton, our own English poet,-him whose mind the mind of Channing most resembles”—!! *

We speak the feeling of our hearts when we say, that we have sincerely sympathized with Dr. C. for being made the subject of such extravagant praise and fulsome adulation. But then it has occurred to us, (and we ask the reader to consult his observation, and see if it be not so,) that the character of the praise which a man receives is generally in accordance with the character of his mind. There is something in real genius that awes the beholder it forbids the out-breaking of flashy, conceited adulation, or the heaping together of extravagant epithets, which seem more like burlesque than sober truth. Now the character of the encomiums which have been lavished upon this writer would lead to the suspicion that there is something wanting to inspire the respect usually paid to great men, We record it for the verification of future time, that that there is no man, whose literary celebrity is

* The individual who exhibited this affecting instance of folly, was Dr. John Bowring.

now so great, who will be so soon forgotten. He is not a deep, original thinker; he wants the moral courage which always accompanies an original mind. Much of his talent lies in the easy flow of his sentences; and his writings, which are very discursive, are popular, at the present time, because the present is a discursive age. We do not hesitate to say, that he has contributed but a very small share to the stock of human thoughts; and that he will not have extended the boundaries of knowledge, or be regarded hereafter in any other respect than as one who spread out his sentiments in pure language, and with pleasing illustrations. Still, there is the same indistinctness and want of point in his illustrations as in his reasoning. Most of his thoughts are very common, and are recommended by nothing but the chaste language in which they are clothed; and when he falls upon a sentiment of remarkable quality, he is sure to dilute it to a very low proof. As a specimen of his style, mode of thinking, &c., we give the following from the article before us.

"We can easily illustrate, by examples, the inferiority of human associations. In Boston there are two Asylums for children, which deserve, we think, a high place among useful institutions. Not a little time is spent upon them. Hundreds conspire to carry them on, and we have anniversaries to collect crowds for their support. And what is the amount of good accomplished? Between one and two hundred children are provided for, a number worthy of all the care bestowed on these charities. But compare this number with all the children of this city, with the thousands who throng our streets and our schools. And how are these fed, clothed, educated? We hear of no subscriptions, no anniversaries for their benefit; yet how they flourish, compared with the subjects of Asylums! These are provided for by that unostentatious and unpraised society, which God has instituted, a family. That shelter, home, which nature rears, protects them, and it is an establishment worth infinitely more than all the institutions, great or small, which man has devised "-"Let us take another example, the Hospital in the same metropolis; a noble institution, worthy of high praise. But where is it that the sick of our city are healed? Must you look for them in the Hospital? You may find there perhaps, and should rejoice to find there, fifty or sixty beds for the poor. The thousands who sicken and die among us, are to be found in their homes, watched over by the nursing care of mothers and sisters, surrounded by that tenderness which grows up only at home."

As Coleridge would say, these are "empty truisms, blown up into illustrious bubbles." The reasoning here, we think, is a little weaker than that respecting the Sabbath. It is a precious specimen of the non sequitur. Those who have parents and homes, are in no need of asylums; therefore, those who have not parents and homes Those who are blessed with mothers and sisters to watch over them in sickness, need no hospital; therefore, those who have no mothers and sisters We do him no injustice when we say that he has a great many thoughts of the same size and value. He picks up curious little shells on "the shore of the great ocean of truth," which the pearl divers had trodden under foot. He never throws out generous ingots of thought, but penuriously spreads a penny-weight over a large

surface. We know of no writer of moderate reputation, who has so poor a stock of words at his command. In all his writings, you never meet with a particular word that makes you pause at the comprehensiveness of its meaning, or that shows you, by its peculiar adaptation to the place where it is set, that the writer had been down in the mines, and had chosen it out from a thousand. There is throughout the same copious and tiresome flow of common-place words; so that the reader often casts his eye down the page, and anticipates the sentiment, instead of waiting for the feeble and tardy succession of words to pass through his mind. We began to read the first article in the last Number of the Examiner, on National Literature; but six pages of repetitious and dreamy trains of thought made us weary of the piece, and we laid it aside, not however, until the writer's repeated request "not to be misunderstood," and the frequent recurrence of "gifted men," and "gifted minds," left no doubt that the author was Dr. Channing. We should infer that there had been more of a feminine than of a manly influence exerted upon the mind of this writer. It seems as if he had associated more with females than with men, and that he wrote to suit their modes of thought. Yet we fear that we may be doing injustice to some of our female friends, who have been preserved from the enervating influence of the flimsy, ephemeral literature of the day.

We cannot contemplate the career of Dr. Channing but with extreme pain. He was once a very serious minded man, a professed believer in what we deem the religion of the Bible. But of this faith he has made shipwreck, and has been among the first to let in that flood of infidelity which, under a fashionable name, has swept over the altars of New England. We are taught by the article which we have now considered, that his designs are not yet fully accomplished, but that, having done all in his power to overthrow the faith of the Pilgrims, he is working at the foundation of an institution which they enjoined upon their children to defend. When licentiousness has reached its height in our land, and a jubilee is proclaimed to those in the upper classes of society who have hitherto been withheld by public opinion from an open renunciation of the Sabbath, Dr. Channing will be referred to as the "gifted mind," who, with commendable caution, first unloosed the yoke of a superstitious observance. But there is already a blot upon his name which will cleave to it till time shall be no more. The "central gallows"! We look far down into the period of coming glory to the church, and see a preacher, on some great occasion, recounting to the people the enmity and opposition of men to Christ. He tells them, 'There was once a man, who boasted that with one hand he would overthrow his religion;

another who manifested his hatred to that religion by libels on its sacred character; and another, who once was heard to preach Jesus and him crucified, was left, at last, to reproach his cross as "a central gallows," and an ignominious scaffold. Oh, if it be true,' he will say, that that cross bore an atoning sacrifice, and God manifest in the flesh was there reconciling the world unto himself, and it was then, and is now, and shall be to all eternity, the theme of wonder and praise to angels and principalities and powers, what a remembrance will wait through everlasting ages on his name who pointed at it as a scaffold, and poured upon it his scorn.'-May it appear in the judgement that he fled at last to that cross as his only hope, and that he did not go into eternity till the blood shed for the remission of sins was applied to his soul, and his peace was made with God through the atonement of his Son!

THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW FOR JAN. 1830. ARTICLE III.

OPPRESSION has drenched the annals of our race in tears and blood. Communities have in general respected the rights of each other, no further than they have been compelled by fear or interest. The might of the strongest has been the title of sovereignty, and the limit of power the boundary of dominion.

While we make these remarks, we would not forget that, during the last fifty years, the spirit of the Gospel has been exerting a redeeming influence upon the public sentiment of Christendom. Hence it is that so much has been accomplished for the abolition of the slave trade, aud even of slavery itself. Hence the "poetry of war" has lost much of its enchantment, and the civic wreath has begun to rival the laurels of the hero. Hence the desolating march of imperial ambition, like that of Napoleon; foreign interferences, like those of France and Austria, in suppressing the revolutions in Spain and Naples; and wanton partitions of defenceless territory, like those which have dismembered the land of the ill-fated Kosciusko have been regarded by so many thousands in Christendom with indignation and abhorrence. Hence, we add, the practical operation of the policy of Great Britain in regard to the people of Hindostan, has been so often and so severely condemned; and hence also it is, that we ourselves, the Christians of the United States, have been so often the theme of reproach and invective, in consequence of our treatment of the Aborigines of our country.

Of the causes of the rapid disappearance of these sons of the forest, we cannot now speak with particularity. Thousands have perished by the sword of the whites, and thousands more by their

own tomahawks, in their desperate wars with each other. But while the sword and the tomahawk have slain their thousands, the 'red dragon' of intemperance has slain bis ten thousands.

For the general course of measures relative to the Indians, previous to the revolution, the kings and cabinets of Great Britain are chiefly responsible. Since that period, our governments have professed to consult the best good of the tribes within our borders, and no inconsiderable effort has been made by some of our chief magistrates, to induce them to adopt the arts and usages of civilization. But our extensive purchases of their lands have had a most disastrous influence upon their character and condition. "When the white man puts down his foot, he never takes it up again. It grows fast and spreads wide." After relinquishing the best portions of their hunting-grounds, many tribes have been compelled to retire into some new wilderness, or to change at once all their modes of life, and attempt to derive subsistence from the cultivation of a pittance of their original territory. Those who have emigrated, have usually been despised by the tribes in their neighborhood, and have been obliged to submit to intolerable privation and insult. Of those who have endeavored to till the ground, the most have utterly failed of success, from want of a suitable preparatory discipline.

By the sale of their lands, they have also been brought into more immediate contact with the unprincipled portion of the whites. Their morals have thus been most dreadfully corrupted. The presents and annuities, which, have been distributed so freely among them, by the U. S. Agents, have allured into their midst a swarm of traders, more rapacious than the locusts of Egypt. We allude now more especially to the Northern and North Western tribes. In addition to the traders with their sponging extortion, there have been the white hunters who, by the payment of a small premium, have been enabled to bear away immense stores of peltry. When the Indian, therefore, has looked around him, and surveyed the cheerless wretchedness of his condition, is it strange that he should so often resort to the inebriating poison, to relieve the anguish of a wounded and mangled heart? The demoralizing and debasing effects of the use of ardent spirits among some of the Indian tribes, it is impossible to exaggerate. A single ancedote, for which we are indebted to the N. A. Review, speaks volumes on this point. "Father," said an aged Potawatomie Chief, after having been urged to remain sober, and make a good bargain for his people," Father, we care not for the money, nor the land, nor the goods. We want the whiskey. Give us the whiskey. Give us the whiskey."

We entertain no doubt, that a vast amount of the degeneracy and destruction of the sons of the forest has been occasioned by