John Saltmarsh’s “_Sparkles of Glory_, or some beams of the Morning Star, wherein are many discoveries as to truth and peace, to the establishment and pure enlargement of a Christian in spirit and truth,” is a book of considerable power, written in a compact and lucid style, such as one rarely finds in works of this description. The author--without condemning water baptism, or the divers organized ministries of the Churches, or the institutes of Episcopacy, Presbyterianism, and Independency, as the Quakers were wont to do, but rather counting them as mere forms, full of weakness and defect, yet to be tolerated, as having subordinate and preparatory uses--dwells chiefly upon the passage from lower ministrations to higher, and expatiates with much delight upon the mystery of true Christian liberty from God, upon the glorious discoveries of the Spirit to the soul, and upon the revelation of Christ in us. The history of Christ’s life and death, with the new relationships in which those stupendous events place mankind to the Divine Being, and the grand doctrines embodied in the ancient Church creeds, are little, if at all, noticed in this mystical treatise. Religion is resolved entirely into the experience of a spiritual life. Personal responsibility, moral obligation, and individual duties, are not the subjects which attract the writer’s attention, his one chief idea throughout being, that the Christian soul is the passive, quiet, trustful recipient of grace and love. The highest prayer is a spiritual revelation. “All that we pray--and not the Spirit of God in us, not that spirit of prayer spoken of in Scripture--is but the spirit of man praying, which is but the cry of the creature, or a natural complaining for what we want, as the Ninevites, and the children and beasts of that city, all cried unto the Lord.” “That which is the pure, spiritual, comprehensive principle of a Christian is this:--That all outward administrations, whether as to religion, or to natural, civil, and moral things, are only the visible appearances of God, as to the world, or in this creation; or the clothing of God, being such forms and dispensations as God puts on amongst men to appear to them in: this is the garment the Son of God was clothed with down to the feet, or to His lowest appearance. And God doth not fix Himself upon any one form or outward dispensation, but at His own will and pleasure comes forth in such and such an administration, and goes out of it, and leaves it, and takes up another. And this is clear in all God’s proceedings with the world, both in the Jewish Church and State, and Christians now. And when God is gone out, and hath left such or such an administration, of what kind soever it is, be it religious, moral, or civil, such an administration is a desolate house, a temple whose veil is rent, a sun whose light is darkened; and to worship it then, is to worship an idol, an image, a form, without God, or any manifestation of God in