The Press.
London, England, 1855-06-02 00:00:00

a preponderating influence might more safely
be intrusted to them than to " the people " set
up by Mr. Howitt as their natural opponents.
His obvious prejudice on this point renders
more than a word of caution unnecessary. The
concluding chapters on the wonderful advance
made by the colony even during the term of
the author's residence in it, and on its vast
and varied resources and brilliant prospects,
are among the best in the book. Commercial
failures are anticipated from excessive specu-
lation, but a country so richly endowed by
nature as Victoria, and affording at present
unlimited scope for the industry and enter-
prise of the Anglo• Saxon race, must surely
advance with prodigious though it may be un-
equal strides, and be destined to play a great
part in the future history of the world.

Rational Godlint's. By Rowland Williams,
B.D London : Bell and Daldy.
Tza history of Christianity, like that of the
world in general, is one of alternate peace and
warfare—now agitated by the stormy contest
of truth and falsehood, now relapsing into
calm, marked only by the daily noiseless
struggle of vice and virtue. To that cessation
of hostilities which has hitherto taken place
after every important movement in the Church
the great Anglican agitation, its work being
done, has in turn begun to yield. New reli-
gious literature contains, every day, less and
less about the Church, and more and more
about the principles of conduct; seeks more
and more to meet mankind, as it were, upon
their own ground, to point out to them as a
friend the weakness of their position ; and,
discarding the tone of authority, to say, like
Him who had the best right to use it, " Come,
let us reason together."
That the volume before us belongs to this
school of divinity our readers will probably
have surmised from its title. Our author, how-
ever, does not seek to disguise his opinions on
the subject of the Church. In the first sermon
of the volume, preached at Cambridge on the
29th of May, speaking of the Reformation and
the Rebellion, he says :
The Church of England, by whose deliberate judgment
I would endeavour to abide, has so fully adopted the first,
that to persons gifted with a certain confusion of thought
she appears to be its offspring.
And again, in the same sermon, he speaks
of Her as—
The one vine with many branches, but, according to her
true idea, though ever imperfectly realised on earth,
having bat one branch in each nation.
By persons " gifted with a certain confusion
" of thought " the latter truth is one, we think,
still more fatally misunderstood than even
the character of the Reformation.
But it is on the obligations to a virtuous
life, of which every Christian man who exerts
his reason must be sensible, that the Professor
has employed his calm and well-balanced intel-
lect to the greatest advantage. Here he is a
worthy disciple of the great author of the
" Analogy "—the perpetual remembrance that
the natural life is but a type of the spiritual ;
that we can no more rebel with impunity
against the laws of the one than of the other;
that as our age is stamped with the impress
of our boyhood, so may our future life be by
the impress of the present; that trials and
disappointments are but the discipline of the
soul, as labour and privation are of the body ;
that holiness is the result of habit, as opposed
to the doctrine of " experiences " ; and that
we cannot expect God, any more than man, to
help those who will not help themselves.
Such are the truths enforced throughout this
volume with the earnest eloquence of convic-
tion; truths which appeal, not to any highly-
wrought feelings, not to an excited imagina-
tion, not to the fervour of fanaticism, but to
the calm, sober, common sense of a practical
and thoughtful people. To give such examples
of the method in which this view of the
Christian life is expounded as would suit our
limited space would be to do Mr. Williams
the greatest injustice ; and we may shortly,
therefore, refer our readers to Sermons i.,
ix , and xxi., as those which dwell more espe-
cially ou the application of philosophy to
religious practice.