LAST WORDS OF A MURDERER. The following are the last words in the dying confession of Lucian Hall, who was recently executed in Connecticut, at the early age of twenty-eight, for a most awful murder.

"I have now given a full and true account of all the crimes I have committed, in my short life. I desire before I close, to say to all the readers of this book, that I impute all my wickedness and crime to a bad bringing up.

"Nobody ever gave me good advice; my father either made me work, or allowed me to play, on the Sabbath; and I never heard a prayer in my father's house. If I had been taken to church, and religiously taught, I should not now be in my present situation.

"I wish to say to all parents, Do not bring up your children as I was brought up. Give them the advantages of schooling, of religion, and good advice. For want of these I was led on to be what

I am.

"I wish to warn all young people against the course I have taken. Be ware how you reject good advice, or break the Sabbath. If you have religious friends and religious privileges, value them more than any thing else; receive the advice of such friends; improve those privileges while you have them. I wish with my last breath to warn all the young against that neglect of religion, and the Sabbath, which have brought me to ruin. I have suffered a great deal, and enjoyed myself very little, and have found that the way of trangression is hard."

AN ANGEL'S VISIT.

A young angel of distinction being sent down to this earth on some business for the first time, had an old courier spirit assigned him as a guide. They arrived over the sea of Martinico in the middle of the long day of an obstinate fight between the fleets of Rodney and De Grasse. When, through the clouds of smoke, he saw the fire of the guns, the decks covered with mangled limbs, and bodies dead or dying, the ships sinking, burning, or blown into the air, and the amount of pain, misery and

destruction, the crews yet alive were dealing around to each other, he turned angrily to his guide and said, "You blundering blockhead, you are ignorant of your business; you undertook to conduct me to the earth, and you have brought me into hell."

"No, sir," answered the guide, "I have made no mistake; this is really earth, and these are men. Devils never treat one another in this cruel manner;

they have more sense, and more of what men call humanity."-Franklin's Letters.

A LITTLE BOY.

A little boy, six years old, whose father had recently died, had gone to bed one evening, when his mother sat by the nursery fire, weeping at the remembrance of her loss. She supposed her son was asleep; but after a little time he raised his head and said, " Mamma, won't God be willing to be your husband?" "Why, my dear," said his mother, "how came "Because you you to think he would?" say, now that papa is gone to heaven, God will be my father, and I don't see why he wont be willing to be your husband."

THE YOUNG MAY DIE.

CHILDREN do not like to think much about dying when they are young. It is very common for them to think they shall be old men and women, and enjoy a long life. But this is not certain; the young may die as well as the old. Kind parents, and friends, and physicians, cannot prevent children from dying. We want our youthful readers to think of this, so that if they should be called to die young, they may be prepared to go where Jesus is, and be happy in heaven. We hope they will think of it every day, and pray that God will forgive their sins, and make them holy, that they may not be afraid to die. They will be aided in doing this by committing to memory the following pretty stanza;

"O blessed Saviour, take my heart,
And let me not from thee depart;
Lord grant that I in faith may die,
And live with thee above the sky."

THE ECLIPSE OF FAITH: or a Visit to a Religious Sceptic. London: Longman, & Co. pp. 450.

IT has been of late years very much the fashion with a certain class of writers to cry down most of the timehonoured standard treatises on the Evidences of Christianity with which our language happily abounds; and to speak of the doubts which perplex the men of this generation as so different from those by which the people of by gone ages were assailed, as to require meeting with altogether new arguments, and an altogether new mode of treatment. The answers which satisfied our unthinking forefathers will not do for us; the difficulties which we see never occurred to them; it may be questioned even, whether, with their very superficial amount of learning-the almost necessary result of the constant whirl of business and pleasure in which they were involved, and which forms so striking a contrast to the calm quiet of our age,-doubts could have suggested themselves to their minds of so profound a nature as those by which our modern literary youth are troubled. In relation to our present wants, Paley is very meagre and shallow; Leland, Butler, and Lardner are antiquated; even Chalmers is getting out of date; whilst no one of these writers, though the last three especially were pretty good fellows for their day, affords answers to the posing questions concerning myths, protevangels, spiritual insight, impossibility of a book-revelation, &c., which the wise men of our generation know so well how to propose.

Now in reference to all this sort of talk we would observe, that, although regarding it with contempt in the form in which we have usually found it expressed in Reviews and elsewherepandering as it does, at least in our opinion, to a juvenile conceit and a most sickly sentimentality,-we cannot but admit that it has, in a certain sense, a substratum of truth. We are aware that with respect to the subject matter of objections to christianity, it may be truly said there is nothing new under the sun. Modern Pantheism is but a revival of Spinoza-ism,

and that again was but a new edition of doctrines that had been broached many ages previous. A hundred years ago Woolston talked about "letter and "spirit" in a manner greatly resembling certain people in our day, and discoursed of the New Testament miracles in a mode almost exactly the same as that recently adopted by Strauss; and we have the authority of no less a personage than Tholuck, for the statement that the objections to christianity and the Bible, recently brought over to this country from Germany, are but a re-importation, with minor additions and improvements, (?) of articles previously manufactured in our own land, in the days. of Tindal, Morgan, Chubb and Bolinbroke. But though we grant all this, it must still be allowed that each succeeding age has its own peculiar mode of thought and expression, the use of which invests the infidel arguments, old as they are, with an air of novelty, and renders needful for the defence of christianity, not perhaps the manufacture of new weapons, but at least the furbishing up of the old ones. Every successive period has its peculiar wants in this respect. So that until infidelity shall cease from our world, and this we fear will not be for long ages hence, we shall be continually requiring new books on this old subject, adapted in form and style to the peculiar temper of the times for whose benefit they are produced.

Now the work whose title we give at the head of this article is an attempt-we think a very successful one,

to meet that form of religious scepticism which seems to be most fashion able amongst educated people of the present day. Both in purpose and style it is thoroughly adapted to the age. There was a time when men were extravagantly fond of reducing argumentation to the form of strict mathematical demonstration; now-adays we abominate all that, and ask for something brief, sparkling, and informal. In the work before us, then, we have sound, weighty argument, invested with a slight drapery of fiction, we have close, earnest, disquisition enlivened by witty repartee, and succeeded by pleasant interlude.

Subject, of course, is different, but so far as style and form merely are concerned, we have here Plato's Dialogues over again, done into English of the nineteenth century. But when we say that this is a book for the times, let us not be misunderstood. It is not a book for general readers. Only those who are tolerably well acquainted with the present state of the infidel controversy will be able fully to understand and appreciate it. Our more advanced students, however, and younger ministers, will, we think, be at once instructed and delighted by it; and if unfortunately there are in our congregations any persons fascinated by the so-called spiritualist" theories of Newman, Parker, & Co., such will find it to be just the book they need.

66

The plan of the work is as follows: A missionary in the South Pacific writes to a friend in England requesting information as to the present position of religious parties in this coun try, and more particularly as to the state of mind of a certain young man, named Harrington, a relative both of the missionary himself and of his Eng lish correspondent. The latter replies giving a brief account of the present distracted state of the religious world, and stating with respect to the young man in question that he has become, in reference to theological and ethical truth-a sceptic. Harrington, however, is no ordinary sceptic."He is an impartial doubter; he doubts whether christianity be true, but he also doubts whether it be false; and either from his impatience of the theories which infidelity proposes in its place, as inspiring yet stronger doubts, or in revenge for the peace of which he has been robbed, he never seems more at home than in ridiculing the confidence and conceit of that internal oracle, which professes to solve the problems which, it seems, christianity leaves in darkness; and in pushing the principles on which infidelity rejects the New Testament to their legitimate conclusion." Our missionary's correspondent adds, that he is expecting shortly to spend a few weeks with Harrington, during which they shall probably have frequent conversations on the subject of the latter's scepticism, and on religion generally, and promises to give his friend from time to time a minute account of every

thing of that nature which may pass between them. Then follows a series of conversations, in which not only Harrington and his uncle, but a young man named Fellowes, a devout admirer of Francis William Newman,another named Robinson, an equally ardent admirer of Strauss-and others take part. Among the subjects discussed are, the possibility or otherwise of a Book-revelation,-the identity of modern spiritualism with the older Deism,-belief and faith,-the difficulties of infidelity, the absurdity of the mythic hypothesis, the nature and possibility of miracles,-a future life,the supposed New Testament sanction of slavery, and the early spread of christianity. There is scarcely a single difficulty that has been urged in recent times in connection with the evidences of christianity, which is not here met and refuted. Four or five essays, some of them written in a serious and closely argumentative, others in a more light and humourous strain, are introduced in the course of the work. One of these, given in the form of a Dream, and entitled the "Blank Bible," has already appeared in the pages of this periodical. Another piece, of a somewhat similar character, appears under the heading, "The Paradise of Fools." In it the author sup poses himself transplanted to a world where are collected all those philosophers, and other knowing people, who in the present life have been accustomed to find such fault, not only with the Bible, but also with the entire constitution of this world, and the opportunity is afforded them of testing their own theories by experiment. Most ludicrous are the perplexities in which some of these persons become involved, and the impression left upon the mind, more especially with reference to the Bible, is, that notwithstanding all our fancied sagacity, it would be no easy thing for us to improve either on Divine revelation itself, the mode in which it has been accredited, or on the way in which it has been propagated amongst mankind.

In another and very amusing article, an attempt is made to apply to an event: of our own day the principles put forth by Strauss, and other German theorists. We need scarcely add that their fallaciousness thereby becomes abundantly manifest. The idea has evidently been