The subjects of the essays in this volume are Dr. Priestley, Dr. Arnold, Church and State, Theodore Parker’s Discourses of Religion, Phases of Faith, The Church of England, and the Battle of the Churches. Of these we have been particularly impressed with the analysis of the mental character of Priestley, the review of Mr. Parker, and the articles relating to the English Church. The essay on Dr. Arnold has something of the some merit which distinguishes that on Dr. Priestley; it is acute in the examination of principles but dull in the perception of character. Mr. Martineau is always strong in the explication of ideas and the statement and analysis of systems, but he constantly overlooks men in his attention to the opinions they champion and represent. The dramatic element not only does not exist in his mind, but he hardly accepts it as a possibility of the human intellect; and therefore he always fails in viewing ideas in connection with the individuality or nationality in which they have their root, and is accordingly often unintentionally intolerant to persons from his want of insight into the individual conditions of their intellectual activity. But we gladly hasten from these criticisms on his limitations to some examples of his peculiar merits as a writer. In speaking of Dr. Priestley’s intellectual processes as a scientific explorer and discoverer, he shrewdly remarks: “He was the ample collector of materials for discovery rather than the final discoverer himself; a sign of approaching order rather than the producer of order himself. We remember an amusing German play, designed as a satire upon the philosophy of atheism, in which Adam walks across the stage, going to be created; and, though a paradox, it may be said that truth, as it passed through Dr. Priestley’s mind, was going to be created.” In referring to the purely independent action of Dr. Priestley’s mind in the formation of his opinions, our analyst gives a fine statement of the real sources of most men’s “positive” knowledge and doctrines. “It would be difficult,” he says, “to select from the benefactors of mankind one who was less acted upon by his age; whose convictions were more independent of sympathy; in the whole circle of whose opinions you can set down so little to the prejudgments of education, to the attractions of friendship, to the perverse love of opposition, to the contagion of prevailing taste, or to any of the irregular moral causes which, independently of evidence, determine the course of human belief.” Again, how fine is his statement of the indestructibility of Christian faith: “Amid the vicissitudes of intellect, worship retains its stability; and the truth, which, it would seem, cannot be proved, is unaffected by an infinite series of refutations. How evident that it has its ultimate seat, not in the mutable judgments of the understanding, but in the native sentiments of Conscience and the inexhaustible aspirations of Affection! The Supreme