Mr. Martineau has long been known to a numerous class of readers in this country as an eloquent preacher and essayist. The present volume is composed of philosophical essays, selected from his contributions to the Westminster and Prospective Reviews, and is edited by the Rev. Thomas S. King, of Boston, himself one of the most eloquent and accomplished of New England clergymen. Mr. Martineau’s sermons have been repeatedly reprinted, but this volume of Miscellanies conveys an impression of the independence and fertility of his mind and the reach of his acquisitions, which his sermons, with all their peculiar merit, would never give. It evinces not only an interest in all the social and religious problems which puzzle the present age, but a grasp of scholarship extending far back over the philosophies and literatures of other times and nations. The bent of his nature, however, is toward mental hospitality to the radical opinions of the day, and new thoughts, new hopes, even new paradoxes, are ever welcomed by his heart and disposition when his cool head doubts, discusses, demurs, and withholds its assenting judgment. He seems to have more sympathy for reformers than their productions, as his rich and various culture enables him to detect one-sidedness or superficiality in many a plan of amelioration, the spirit of which he approves. Both, however, in politics and religion he would be classed with the extremely “liberal” party; and though the conservative elements of his mind are, to a discriminating reader, visible in almost every page of the present volume, the author appears all the while desirous to share the glorious unpopularity of a class of thinkers with whom he but imperfectly sympathizes rather than to indicate his points of disagreement with their schemes and systems. He has a deep mental disgust for the moral timidity and intellectual feebleness which characterize so many of the fashionable and conventional thinkers on politics and theology, and is perhaps from this cause too apt to overlook defects in heretical systems in his admiration of the courage of the heretics. In his own words, “it is a dishonorable characteristic of the present age, that on its most marked intellectual tendencies is impressed a character of FEAR. While its great practical agitations exhibit a progress toward some positive and attainable good, all its conspicuous movements of thought seem to be retreats from some apprehended evil. The open plain of meditation, over which, in simpler times, earnest men might range with devout and unmolested hope, bristles all over with directions showing which way we are _not_ to go. Turn where we may we see warnings to beware of some sophist’s pitfall, or devil’s ditch, or fool’s paradise, or atheist’s desert.”