Englishman, because his drawing cost him less than beer. Some thousand working men attend the adult schools every evening in Paris, and the drawing classes comprise great numbers whose skill would occasion much astonishment in this country. The most difficult engravings of the paintings of the Italian masters are copied in crayon with remarkable skill and accuracy. Complex and exquisitely minute architectural details, such, for example, as perspective views of the Duomo at Milan, or the cathedrals at Rouen or Cologne, are drawn in pen and ink, with singular fidelity. Some were drawing from plaster casts and other models. We found such adult schools in many of the chief towns of France. These schools are the sources of the taste and skill in the decorative arts, and in all manufactures of which taste is a prominent element, and which have made the designs for the calico printers, the silk and ribbon looms, the papers, &c. &c., of France, so superior in taste to those of this country, notwithstanding the superiority of our manufactories in mechanical combinations. "These considerations lead us to account drawing an important department of elementary education. "The improvement of our machinery for agriculture and manufactures would be in no small degree facilitated, if the art of drawing were a common acquirement among our artisans. Invention is checked by the want of skill in communicating the conception of the inventor, by drawings, of all the details of his combination. The manufacturers of Lancashire are well aware how difficult it is, from the neglect of the arts of design among the labourers of this country, to procure any skilled draftsmen to design for the cotton or silk manufacturer. The elevation of the national taste in art can only be procured by the constant cultivation of the mind in relation to the beautiful in form and colour, by familiarizing the eye with the best models, the works of great artists, and beautiful natural objects. Skill in drawing from nature results from a careful progress through a well-analyzed series of models. The interests of commerce are so intimately connected with the results to be obtained by this branch of elementary education, that there is little chance that it will much longer suffer the grievous neglect it has hitherto experienced." We cannot but believe, that a means of amusement which we have heard suggested, though we are not aware of its adoption any where, might prove a powerful rival to the alehouse, with the numbers whose scholarship is too imperfect, and whose intellect is too little developed to render its exercise a pleasure, except with every aid and stimulus. The cheap theatres, perhaps the only intellectual attraction to this class, are at present schools of vice. But would not a good reader, though not appealing by scenery to the eye, have a similar, though less powerful charm? From our best works of Fiction and Poetry, from History, Biography, and Travels, scenes of stirring interest, examples of heroic and of gentle virtue, facts in science and in natural history, might be selected, which, while they aroused the attention and interest of the most stupid, would inform the intellect, raise the moral standard, and refine the taste of the most enlightened among the hearers; and those whose days were necessarily passed among the vulgar and the worldly, might spend their evenings in contemplating and sympathizing with examples of all that is great and generous. SONNET. The evening breeze now rising from the west Now as it lightly skims the blue waves' breast A song of mournful melody it weaves, Then sighing sinks away-no more it grieves Its own wild music soothing it to rest! Let me, sweet spirit of the soft night-wind, With thee sweet counsel hold. Like thee doth thought Over the beautiful, fair earth depart, The bright and precious in its course to find, And with all-loving aspirations fraught, Returns to bless the pure and peaceful heart. ART. VI. THE FIVE POINTS OF CHRISTIAN FAITH. It is at all times difficult, even for the wisest, to describe aright the tendencies of the age in which they live, and lay down its bearings on the great chart of human affairs. Our own sensations can give us no notice, whither we are going: and the infinite life-stream on which we ride, restless as it is with the surface-waves of innumerable events, reports nothing of the mighty current that sweeps us on, except by faint and silent intimations legible only to the skilled interpreter of heaven. It is something however to have the feeling that we are moving, and to be awake and looking out: and perhaps there never was a period in which this consciousness was more diffused throughout society than in our own. No one can look up and around at the religious and social phenomena of Christendom, without the persuasion, that we are entering a new hemisphere of the world's history ;-a persuasion corroborated even by those who disclaim it, and who insist on steering still by lights of tradition now sinking into the mists of the receding horizon. Wherever we turn our eye, we discover some symptom of an impending revolution in the forms of Christian faith. The gross materialism and absolute unbelief diffused for the first time among vast masses of our population; the fast-spreading (and, as it appears to us, morbid) dislike to look steadily at anything miraculous, the extensive renunciation, even among the religious classes on the continent, of historical Christianity; the schisms and ever new peculiarities which are weakening all sects, and, like seedlings of the Reformation, are obscuring the species, by multiplying the varieties, of opinion; the revived controversies,-penetrating all the great political questions of the age,-between the ecclesiastical and civil powers, are not the only indications of approaching theological change. That very conservatism and recoil upon the high doctrine of an elder time, which is manifest in every section of the Christian world, is a confession by contrast of the same thing. For, opinion does not turn round and retreat into the past, till it has lost its natural shelter in the present, and dreads some merciless storm in the future. The outward strength which the older churches of our country seem to be acquiring, arises from the rallying of alarm and the herding together of trembling sympathies: and though fear may unite men against external assaults upon institutions, it cannot stop the decay of inward doubt. It would seem as if Christianity was threatened by the mental activity, which it has itself created: as if the intellectual weapons which have been forged and tempered by its skill were treacherously turned against its life. It is vain however to strike a power that is immortal: nothing will fall but the bodily form cast for a season around the imperishable spirit. Protestantism, with all its blessings, has after all greatly disfigured Christianity, by constructing it into a rigid metaphysical form, and setting it up on a narrow pedestal of antiquarian proof;-by destroying its infinite character through definitions, and developing it dogmatically rather than spiritually;-by treating it, not as an ideal glory around the life of man, but a logical incision into the psychology of God. The wreck of systems framed under this false conception, will but leave the pure spirit of our religion in the enjoyment of a more sacred homage:-you may dash the image, but you cannot touch the god. In the following remarks we shall seek to make this evident;-to show what principles of religion in general, and of Christianity in particular, may be pronounced safe from the shocks of doubt. In times of consternation and uncertainty, it behoves each one to look within him for the heart of courage, and around him for the place of shelter, and to single out, amid countless points of danger, some refuge immutable and eternal. With this view, we propose to trace an outline of Christian truths which we consider secure and durable as our very nature;-a chain of granite points rising, like the rock of ages, above the shifting seas of human opinion. In doing so, we shall be simply delineating Unitarian Christianity, according to our conception of it;-expounding it, not as a barren negation, but as a scheme of positive religion; exhibiting both its characteristic faiths, and something of modes of thought by which they are reached. I. In the first place, we have faith in the Moral Perceptions of Man. The conscience with which he is endowed enables him to appreciate the distinction between right and wrong; to understand the meaning of 'ought' and 'ought not ;' to love and revere whatever is great and excellent in character, to abhor the mean and base; and to feel that in the contrast between these we have the highest order of differences by which mind can be separated from mind. And on this consciousness,-the basis of our whole responsible existence,-no suspicion is to be cast: no lamentation over its fallibility, no hint of possible delusion, is to pass unrebuked: it is worthy of absolute reliance as the authoritative oracle of our nature, supreme over all its faculties,— entitled to use sense, memory, understanding, to register its decrees, without a moment's licence to dispute them. That justice, mercy, and truth are good and venerable, is no matter of doubtful opinion, in which peradventure an error may be hid ; is not even a thing of certain inference, recommended to us by the force of evidence;-is not an empirical judgment, depending on the pleasurableness of these qualities, and capable of reversal, if, under some tyrant sway, they were to be rendered miserable. The approval which we award to them is quite distinct from assent to a scientific probability: the excellence which we ascribe to them is not identical with their happiness, but altogether transcends this, precedes it, and survives it; the obligation they lay upon us is not the consequence of positive law, human or divine, or in any way the creature of superior will; for, all free-will must itself possess a moral quality,-can never stir without exercising it,-and cannot therefore give rise to that which is a prior condition of its own activity. And if (to pursue the thought suggested above) we could be snatched away to some distant world, some out-province of the universe, abandoned by God's blessed sway to the absolutism of demons,-where selfishness and sensuality, and hate and falsehood, were protected and enjoined by public law, it is clear that, by such emigration, our interests only, and not our duties, would be reversed; and that to rebel and perish were nobler than to comply and live. The discernment of moral distinctions then belongs to the very highest order of certainties: it has its seat in our deepest reason, among the primitive strata of thought, on which the depositions of knowledge, and the accumulations of judgment, and the surface growths of opinion, all repose. As experience in the past has not taught it, experience in the future cannot unteach it. The difference between good and evil we cannot conceive to be merely relative, and incidental to our point of view,-variable with the locality and the class in which a being happens to rest,-an optical caprice of the atmosphere in which we live ;-but rather a property of the very light itself, found every where out of the region of absolute night; or, at least, a natural impression, belonging to that perceptive eye of the soul, through which alone we can look out, as through a glass, upon all beings and all worlds; and if any one will say that the glass is coloured, it is, at all events, the tint of nature, shed on it by the ineffaceable art of the Creator. The modes in which we think of moral qualities are not terrestrial peculiarities of idea, like foreign prejudices: the terms in which we speak of them are not untranslatable provincial idioms, -vulgarities of our planetary dialect; but are familiar, like the symbols of a divine science, to every tribe of souls, belonging to the language of the universe, and standing defined in the vocabulary of God. The laws of right are more necessarily universal than the physical laws of force; and if the same agency of gravitation that governs the rain-drop determines the evolutions of |