own littleness and blindness; and that his words concerning the Ancient of Days had need to be at once very wary, and very few!" * * * * * VI. By far the ablest of these seven Essays is from the pen of the "REV. MARK PATTISON, B.D., Rector of Lincoln College, Oxford." It purports to be an Essay on the "TENDENCIES OF RELIGIOUS THOUGHT IN ENGLAND, 1688-1750;" but it can hardly be said to correspond with that description. In the concluding paragraph, the learned writer gives to his work a different name. It is declared to be "_The past History of the Theory of Belief in the Church of England_[130]." But neither the title at the head, nor the title at the tail of the Essay, gives any adequate notion of the Author's purpose. Had we met with this production, isolated, in the pages of a Review, we should have probably passed it by as the work of a clever man, who, after amusing himself to some extent with the Theological literature of the last century, had desired to preserve some record of his reading; and had here thrown his random jottings into connected form. There is a racy freshness in a few of Mr. Pattison's sketches, (as in his account of Bentley's controversy with Collins[131],) which forcibly suggests the image of an artist whose pencil cannot rest amid scenery which stimulates his imagination. To be candid, we are inclined to suspect that, in the first instance, something of this sort was in reality all that the learned author had in view. But we are reluctantly precluded from putting so friendly a construction on these seventy-six pages. Not only does Mr. Pattison's Essay stand between Mr. Goodwin's open endeavour to destroy confidence in the writings of Moses, and Professor Jowett's laborious insinuations that the Bible is only an ordinary book; but it claims a common purpose and intention with both those writers. Mr. Pattison's avowed object is "to illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral truth, from a free handling, in a becoming spirit, of subjects peculiarly liable to suffer by the repetition of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment[132]." We proceed therefore to examine his labours by the aid of the clue which he has himself supplied. For when nine editions of a book appear in quick succession, prefaced by a description of the spirit in which "_it is hoped that the volume will he received_,"--it seems a pity that the author should not be judged by the standard of his own choosing.