These parties (if I may form a conjecture from the document itself) were essaying to extricate the mind of the age from the difficulties of its intellectual position; an age, asserting inconsistently, on the one hand, the freedom of spiritual life, and, on the other, claiming for the Bible an authorized supremacy over all the phenomena of that spiritual life. One of these parties sought to solve this difficulty by endeavoring to resuscitate the spirit of the past; the other, by attempting to set human intellect and consciousness free from the yoke of all external authority. In all probability the names were suggested to the somewhat profane allegorico-satitical writer by that text in the English version, "Put on the Newman," the new man of the spirit. We are almost driven to this interpretation, indeed, by the extreme and ludicrous improbability of two men--brothers, brought up at the same university--gradually receding, pari passu, from the same point in opposite directions, to the uttermost extreme; one till he had embraced the most puerile legends of the Middle Ages, the other, till he had proceeded to open infidelity. Probably such a curious coincidence of events was never heard of since the world began; and this must, at all events, be rejected. "'Similar observations apply to the name Masterman, which, in ancient English, was applied to him who was not a "servant" or "journeyman," and is not unfitly used to indicate collectively the assemblage of wealthy merchants who, like those of Tyre, were "princes"; as well as to imply that the powerful class to which they belonged were the "Mastermen" in the country, and, in fact, spoke in a potential voice in all such crises as that supposed. It might also, perhaps, be designed obliquely to intimate, that, 'whatever the clergy and the theologians of different parties might wish to realize, it was, after all, the powerful and independent class of the laity who were the "mastermen," and would not succumb to any spiritual guides whatever, even though called by the specious names of Wisemen and Newmen. The mere singularity of the names alone ought to decide the point. And what further confirms our view is, that it is impossible to point out any Englishmen of any distinction who ever had any of these names. Here we do not argue from conjecture, after merely looking into the most recent biographical repertories (as, for example, the "Bibliotheca Clarisimorum Virorum," in three hundred and fifty volumes folio); for it is no argument that this meagre collection makes no mention of any such names; since, in the successive compilations of such works, (as the world grows older,) it has been found necessary to extrude from time to time thousands of lesser names, which had twinkled in preceding ages. But, deeply anxious to establish truth, we have at infinite pains caused to be fished up, from the depths of the archives of our national museums, very rare