to hold himself coldly aloof from the facts which he recalls to mind. Is not this faith of the sixteenth century, of which he traces the awakening, the struggles, defeats and victories, _his own faith and the life of his own soul_? Are not these men whom he describes, Calvin, Farel, Viret, bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh? Are not these churches, whose birth and first steps in life he relates, his own spiritual family? The reader himself, to whom his narrative is addressed, is for him an immortal soul, which he would fain make captive to the faith of the Reformation. He does not for an instant lay aside, as narrator, his dignity as a minister of Christ. The office of historian is in his case a priesthood. Not that he falls into the error of determining at all cost to glorify his heroes, to palliate their weaknesses, to excuse their errors, or to present facts in a light different from that objective truth to which he has been led by the conscientious study of the documents. The welfare of the church of to-day for which he desires to labor, may as surely result from the frank avowal and the severe judgment of faults committed, as from admiration of every thing which has been done according to the will of God.’ The same judgment was lately pronounced by the author of a great work on French literature, recently published,[8] Lieutenant-Colonel Staaf. It is in the following terms that the author introduces M. Merle d’Aubigné to the French public:—‘M. de Remusat has said of this work—“It may have had a success among Protestants (_un succès de secte_), but it deserves a much wider one, for it is one of the most remarkable books in our language.” We might add one of the most austere, for it is at once the work of a historian and of a minister of the Gospel. It would be a mistake to suppose that the author has sacrificed the narrative portion of his history to the exposition and defence of the doctrines of the Reformation. Without seeking after effects of coloring, without concerning himself with form apart from thought, he has succeeded in reproducing the true physiognomy of the age whose great and fruitful movements he has narrated. All the Christian communities over which the resistless breath of the Reformation passed live again in spirit and in act in this grand drama, the principal episodes of which are furnished by Germany, France, Switzerland, and England. In order to penetrate so deeply as he has done into the moral life of the reformers, M. Merle was not satisfied with merely searching the histories of the sixteenth century; he has drawn from sources the existence of which was scarcely suspected before they had been opened to him.’... ‘Now, at whatever point of view we may take our stand, it is no subject for regret that for writing the story of the conflicts and too often of the execution of so many men actuated by the most generous and unalterable convictions, the pen has been held by a believer rather than by a sceptic. It was