last thirty years a continuous decrease of one per cent. per annum, a rate of mortality which, if it goes on unchecked, must soon blot out the race from the land." (Vol. ii. p. 290.) This is indeed a solemn and melancholy thought; and the more so, as most of the causes assigned appear to lie almost, if not quite, beyond the reach of a remedy. But they are not all of so hopeless a character. Meanwhile, he describes the people as generally prosperous and happy. Industry is procuring for them the comforts of life; they are becoming good customers for English manufactures, to their own benefit; want appears to be unknown amongst them; reason and judgment are in course of development; inquiry is abroad; and education has already done much, and is making further progress. It is probable that half of the native population can read, and that a third of them can write, as well as work the simple rules of arithmetic. The author, who sometimes speaks so disrespectfully of missionaries, as our readers have seen, speaks always reverentially of Christianity; and while discussing the means of conferring additional benefits on the native population, urges that the influence of Christianity ought to be most diligently kept alive and extended amongst them. "It is a mistake," he says (vol. ii. p. 302), "to imagine that the efforts of the missionary cease where worldly instruction begins." This is a lesson which all who love the gospel and men's souls have learned long since; and we most fervently desire for New Zealand that wherever the labours of the missionary are withdrawn in New Zealand, that part of the work having been accomplished, the pastor of the Christian flock may be appointed to succeed him at once; and that fitting men may be found to enter upon that important ministry, and to guide their flocks, by their teaching and their example, to heaven.

Against any expressions of dissatisfaction with missionaries which we encounter in these volumes, we are content to set the distinctly favourable testimony of Mr. Swainson, and of the late governor, Sir George Grey, as so eloquently given in his preface to the "Poetry of the New Zealanders." And that a great and blessed work is going on under their faithful ministrations, none will doubt who read with candid mind the publications of the Church Missionary Society. God grant them the continuance of His favour, fill them with zeal for His glory and love for souls, and crown their labours for the good of their fellow men with great and increasing success!

THEODORE PARKER AND THE OXFORD ESSAYISTS.

1. Theodore Parker's Experience as a Minister. London: Whitfield. 1860.

2. Essays and Reviews. London: Parker and Son. 1860. (Second Notice.)

A MAN of some note has recently been taken from the world. Theodore Parker," the celebrated," according to some," the notorious," according to others,-died at Florence in the month of May, 1860. His last injunctions were characteristic. He was to be carried to the grave and interred in silence, without service, prayer, exhortation, or eulogy,-a Unitarian minister merely reading over his grave the first eleven verses of the fifth chapter of St. Matthew's gospel. These instructions were obeyed; and we thus part with a remarkable man; not silently, however, for he himself has imposed a duty upon us. Shortly before his departure, he remitted to his late congregation in Boston, N.E., a long letter, of the nature of an autobiography-an "experience," which has just been re-published in England, and on which it will be our duty to make some remarks.

Theodore Parker was, in a peculiar sense and in an unusual degree, what his friend Emerson calls "a Representative man." Coming forth, about twenty years ago, an unknown youth, from a New England village, he became, before his death, the foremost man, the prophet and leader of the "New Theology," of that system which is more accurately described as the philosophical infidelity of our day. This is true of him to a greater degree than even his followers would like to confess. He was a bold, outspoken man, and fearlessly uttered, with unhesitating speech, doctrines which numbers of his less courageous followers in their hearts believe, but which they fear to avow. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands, in England, some of them ordained ministers of our church,-others, pastors of dissenting congregations-who hold in substance what Theodore Parker held, but who could not easily be brought to acknowledge such a participation. Their posi tions in life, the obligations into which they have entered, and the painful consequences which would be likely to follow an honest profession, are circumstances which abundantly account for, if they do not justify, this concealment of the extent of their unbelief. One notable instance of this kind will presently come under our notice. But, first of all, we must give a brief sketch of the history of Theodore Parker.

He appears to have been the son of a New England farmer, and to have been born about the year 1810; his "relatives and neighbours, all hard-working people, living in one of the most laborious

communities in the world." (p. 6.) He was, he tells us, "born and bred among Unitarians." (p. 9.) His father's "strong, discriminating, and comprehensive mind encouraged his original fondness for scientific and metaphysical thought." (p. 6.) Meanwhile, the coldness and deadness of the religious atmosphere around him acted injuriously on an active, energetic, and enthusiastic mind. He says, that "the notorious dulness of the Sunday services, their mechanical character, the poverty and insignificance of the sermons, the unnaturalness and uncertainty of the doctrines preached, the lifelessness of the public prayers, and the consequent heedlessness of the congregation, all tended to turn a young man off from becoming a minister." (p. 7.)

The slavery, too, in which the Voluntary system holds the ministry, disgusted him. An anecdote related by him, has a pungent meaning." 'Do you think our minister would dare tell his audience of their actual faults?'- -so a rough blacksmith once asked me in my youth. Certainly I do!' was the boyish answer. 'Humph!' rejoined the smith, I should like to have him begin, then !" (p. 7.)

To a penetrating, masculine intellect, too, and a mind not yet inured to controversial immoralities, the "unnaturalness" and unreality of the Unitarian theology was likely to prove exceedingly repulsive. Theodore Parker afterwards said, in his Discourse on Religion, that "If the Athanasian Creed, the Thirty-nine Articles, and the Bull Unigenitus, could be found in a Greek manuscript, and be proved to be the work of an inspired apostle, no doubt Unitarianism would explain all three, and deny that they taught the doctrine of the Trinity or the fall of man!" (p. 357.)

At the outset of life, then, the characters and circumstances of Thomas Scott and of Theodore Parker were nearly alike. Both had parents of masculine and penetrating intellects; both were bemired in the Socinian slough. But, as Bunyan shows us at the beginning of his story,-one man gets out of the mire on the heavenward side, another on the earthward. Thomas Scott was led by the Divine Spirit onward and upward; while poor Theodore Parker was repelled by Unitarianism, and fell backward into positive infidelity. He describes, in the narrative now before us, how he first got rid of "the ghastly doctrine of eternal damnation and a wrathful God,"-then, of the doctrine of the Trinity,-then, of "a belief in the supernatural birth of Jesus of Nazareth,"-then, of the miracles of the Old and New Testament ;-" some were clearly impossible, others ridiculous, and a few were wicked." Next, "he had no belief in the plenary, infallible, verbal inspiration of the whole Bible, and strong doubts as to the miraculous inspiration of any part of it." (p. 11.) Such was the opening of his life, before he went into a theological school. Here he began more and more to study the subject, and disliking law as a profession, began to set himself to find out, that he might afterwards teach, a religion of his own fashioning.

And the result, he tells us, of long and assiduous study carried

him just as far as the second chapter of the epistle to the Romans. He says:

"I found certain great primal intuitions of Human Nature.

"1. The instinctive intuition of the Divine,-the consciousness that there is a God.

"2. The instinctive intuition of the Just and Right; a consciousness that there is a moral law, independent of our will, which we ought to keep.

"3. The instinctive intuition of the Immortal; a consciousness that the essential element of man, the principle of individuality, never dies." (p. 15.)

Now these great immutable principles, to which, he tells us, the intuitions of human nature bear witness, are all placed by St. Paul at the opening of his argument. They are plainly and broadly stated,-1. Romans i. 19, 20; 2. Romans ii. 14, 15; 3. Romans ii. 5-9.

But what right had poor Theodore Parker to stop here? What right had he to shut his eyes to another "intuition of human nature," which met his gaze at every turn? Whether he studied the histories of ages and nations long since gone by, or the thoughts and feelings of man in a state of heathenism now, how could he avoid seeing, except by resolving not to see, the prevalence of an "intuition" in all ages, and in all parts of the earth, that man was a sinner; that God was an offended God; and that a propitiation was needed, to make peace between the two?

Or, supposing that he had, by the most violent strain upon his conscience, resolved to ascribe all this to "priestcraft," what right had he to drop out of his system altogether, the great, all-important fact, of Sin itself, now defiling all parts of God's earth with blood and tears, and to leave the future consequences, and the possibility of a cure or extirpation of this grand evil, wholly out of view? What should we say of a physician, called to the absolute government of a vast lunatic asylum, who proceeded to deal with the inmates without the least reference to their mental disorders; or of a governor who set to work to clear his prisons, from mere good nature, without remembering that the inmates were thieves and murderers? Yet neither of these irrational persons would commit a greater absurdity than the man who could speak or think of mankind, without taking the least notice of the existence of Sin! But on this point we shall presently have to remark more at length.

Having thus discovered for himself, as a creed of his own, that first step to truth which St. Paul places at the beginning of his argument, but which stops short of a solution of the grand problem, poor Theodore Parker resolved to go no further. His "intuition of the just and right" was to serve him for a religion. And it was not long before he gave most potent proof of the lamentable insufficiency of this new rule.

With "conscience," or "the intuition of the just and right,” for his guide, he began to assail the faith and doctrine of ninetenths of the professedly Christian world, in the following fashion: -He told his hearers, that

"The Protestant minister, on the authority of an anonymous Greek book" (meaning the New Testament) "will believe, or at least command others to believe, that man is born totally depraved, and that God will perpetually slaughter men in hell by the million, though they had committed no fault, except that of not believing an absurd doctrine they had never heard of." (p. 31.)

Thus, this professedly honest and sincere inquirer, who had resolved at last to enthrone conscience, or "the instinctive intuition of the just and right," as the alone arbiter of his faith, lost no time in showing us the real value of this his chosen guide. He had never heard this doctrine, as stated above, preached by any living man. He had never read it, in any existing or forgotten book. No such doctrine ever had been preached or promulgated, by any human being. Yet this professed follower of "conscience" finds no difficulty in writing down, revising, and committing to the press, this wicked falsehood; even in a book which was composed with the open grave immediately in view! He thus does us one important service. He shows us what sort of a religion, what sort of a code of morals, the admirers of "the instinctive intuition of the just and right" would substitute, in lieu of God's revealed and written law.

Theodore Parker knew full well, at the very moment when he was penning this calumny, that the doctrine actually held by those" Protestant ministers" whom he was describing, was simply that doctrine which was set forth by St. Paul, in the same opening of the epistle to the Romans to which we have already referred: namely, that

"God will render to every man according to his deeds :-to them, who, by patient continuance in well-doing, seek for glory, and honour, and immortality, eternal life; but, to them who do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath, tribulation and anguish, upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile but glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good, to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile."

And, as to those who have "never heard of" the gospel, the same record is equally explicit. "Those who have sinned without law, shall also perish without law,"-" their conscience bearing witness" to the justice of their punishment, they having had "the work of the law written in their hearts," and so standing "guilty before God."

A man who had thus outgrown his teachers, and who derided as drivellers the very Unitarian doctors who had brought him up, was not likely to want opponents and angry accusers. In fact, it seems to have been as much his policy "to say strong things,"