Saunders, Salad for the Solitary, etc. G. Mogridge, (Old Humphrey) various works. D. M. Mulock, A Woman's Thoughts about Woman. M. Fuller Ossoli, Papers on Literature and Art, etc. N. P. Willis, Various works. W. Legget, Writings. P. Bayne, Essays. H. Bushnell, Work and Play. H. W. Beecher, Life Thoughts; Star Papers. R. W. Emerson, Conduct of Life and other works. E. P. Whipple, Essays and Reviews. D. G. Mitchell, (Ik. Marvel) Reveries of a Bachelor and other writings. A. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects. A. R. Hope, Book about Dominies. Book about Boys. D'Arcy Thompson, Day Dreams of a Schoolmaster and other works. A. H. Boyd, (The Country Parson) Miscellaneous Volumes. William Smith, Thorndale, or the Conflict of Opinions, Gravenhurst. J. G. Holland, Letters of Timothy Titcomb, etc. 21 CHAPTER XX. RELIGIOUS BOOKS AND SUNDAY READING. WE approach both these topics with some hesitation. We do not expect that what we write will be understood by all our readers, or will be accepted by all who understand it. Very many persons who are intelligent upon a variety of other subjects never think or read with earnestness upon religion, although in the words of Daniel Webster, "the noblest theme that can occupy the intellect of man is man's relations to God." Lord Bacon also says in sober earnestness that "Theology is the haven and Sabbath of all man's contemplations." Religion and its truths, its theologies and its ethics, its histories and its biographies, its poetry and its criticism, are despised by many otherwise well and even highly cultured persons as the offspring of a fond imagination, a credulous superstition or a timid traditionalism. Or all these are disliked as imposing unwelcome restraints upon the pursuits and passions by which too many are controlled; perhaps they are scorned with passionate contempt from some inherited or conventional associations. There are not a few skeptics or rejectors of Christianity who if honest would be forced to confess with Hume, that they had never read the New Testament through with intelligent attention. On the other hand, there are not a few earnestly and actively religious people who rarely read earnestly upon the very subject which occupies their best emotions and inspires their best activities, either because they never read upon any subject with intelligence and effect, or because they have been trained to conceive that the ex ercise of a very active intelligence upon religious topics is inconsistent with warm emotion or a confiding faith. Hence the religious reading which they allow themselves is below their intelligence, and done rather for the purpose of exciting devotional feelings or spending a half hour over a quantum of religious phraseology than for the ends of intelligent conviction and reasonable emotion. They read history, biography, novels, poetry and criticism on the most liberal scale and with excited wakefulness, but their religious reading is limited to one or two books of devotion or a few second-rate biographies of second-rate and goodish people. Others perhaps never care or never dare to read any religious book unless it has the imprimatur of their own religious communion. The Romanist is by necessity almost precluded from any other than Catholic literature. If the reader is a Methodist he is likely to read only such books as are issued by the "Book Concern," if a Presbyterian, to believe only in the blue-backed volumes of "the Publication Society," if an Episcopalian he ignores all works except those written or sanctioned by Churchmen, or if he is a Liberal Christian he may have a traditional and very illiberal contempt for every literary production that proceeds from the so-called Orthodox. A very large class of Christians are so intensely practical or evangelical as to be conscientiously jealous of the exercise of earnest thinking upon religious truth or duty, and are offended by every book which would either awaken or stimulate the intelligence, or requires its vigorous exercise in order to be understood. It must be confessed that religious emotion as such, like every other description of emotion, is not of itself friendly to, or promotive of the exercise of intellectual. energy. The fact has been noticed by Coleridge that the fond indulgence of religious feeling has often brought a species of dry rot into a noble intellect by the force of simple stagnation. We hold that this is unnatural and abnor mal-nay more, that this happens not only by error but by sin, and that as a consequence the religious character itself becomes one-sided and degenerate. We contend that if a man dwarfs or blinds or stupefies his intellect in order to attain to earnest and sustained religious feeling-especially if he uses vigorous thinking and earnest reading upon other topics and dares not to do it or is disinclined to do it upon religious themes-he will sooner or later suffer lamentably in his religious faith and fervor. We assert that it is the duty of every one who reads with zest and curiosity upon other subjects, to read with earnestness and with freedom upon religious themes. We would even go farther and assert that the cause of the decline and fervor in very many persons of active and imaginative minds is that they do not give to religious subjects the same activity which they bestow upon subjects of inferior interest. The injunction "give attention to reading" has a wider reach and is supported by a greater variety of reasons than is usually thought. If what we have said should have disturbed the feelings of any, we hasten to relieve them by adding that we do not propose to discuss any questions which relate directly to special theological creeds or to ecclesiastical or denominational divisions. We assume indeed, as we have already explained, that the Christian History is true and that Christ is the proper object of confidence, reverence, and gratitude. This being premised, we proceed to speak respecting the selection and reading of religious, i. e. Christian books. Religious books may be divided into four classes: good books, i. e. books which are very good-goodish books— books which are good for nothing-books which are worse than nothing. Good books are such as are positive and conspicuous for one or all of three merits-merits of thought, feeling, and diction. Every good book can show a raison d'être. There is some occasion for its being produced and read. Good books invariably bear marks of having originated in a gifted mind—in a mind set apart by nature or called of God to speak to one's fellow-men by reason of the gift of genius or of earnestness. They show the signs of this calling and these gifts, and awaken a response in the ear and the hearts of the truly earnest or the truly cultured of those who hear them, and thus prove there was an occasion for their being written. Goodish books are books of second-hand goodness-books that are consciously or unconsciously imitated from good books -books that repeat old thoughts, by stupid and servile copying, or with such original variations as despoil them of their freshness and life-books which seek to express simple and familiar emotions without just or real feeling— books which strain out affected conceits, or extravagant imagery with some empty ambition of originality-books whose authors are willing to gain the admiration of the uncultured and the half cultured by any extravagance of thought or diction. Above all, they are books which utter the words of religious feeling, when the writer does not really possess it, or possessing it describes the objects of his excited emotion in borrowed or stereotyped phraseology. Such books are deformed by more or less of cant in the strict and proper acceptation of that term, as characterizing an unsuccessful attempt to sing what another sings heartily and sings well. Goodish books may have more or less positive merit, with all their strained and factitious untruth-they may be eminently useful to readers who do not observe their defects or are not offended by them, who do not require anything better, or who may have a taste so perverted as to prefer them to good books, even though good books would be far better for them. There is unhappily, in the religious world, a very large class of books of whom the remark of a shrewd observer will hold, "men who are simply and earnestly good, I like |