Tue papers just to hand are, as might be expected, full of articles upon the late Dean Stanley. The deceased Churchman was in many respects one of the most remarkable men of the time, and decidedly the most many-sided of any man in the Establishment. No man," says his revieweriu the Saturday, "commanded deeper attachment among those with whom he was connected by ties of family or friendship; and he had the most various, and perhaps the widest, acquaintance of all his contemporaries. He possessed the esteem and confidence of the Queen of her family he was one of the most brilliant and popular members of the best society in England; his personal relations with the clergy were uniformly friendly, though he was engaged in incessant controversy with almost every section of the body; a resolute supporter of the principle of Church establishment, he cultivated the friendship and possessed the respect of many leach Nonconformists: and finally he took gen. me pleasure in communicating his own tastes and intellectual interests to meiabers of the working classes." The life-work of the Dean of Westminster, to quote the Times, was to bring Christianity back to the lives of many who had passed from under its influence. "The spirit of the modern world, its cager enquiry, and its scientific temper are and have been in many important respects antagonistic to the spirit of traditional Christianity, Ben are no longer indignant and scornful; rather pi they are impatient of mero mechanical dogma, the crystallized product of bygone metaphysic, and they are prone to regard it andah that it implies as lifeless and obsolete.
This tendency is encouraged by the too often illiterate and unhistorical temper of a good deal of modern science; and it was by means of history that Dean Stanley strove to effect a reconciliation of the religious and scientific tempers." We cannot of course reproduce a specimen of everything that every paper says about the Dean, and must very reluctantly pass over the delicate and admirable remarks of the Spectator. But it is impossible to refuse place to the following beautiful lines from the Dean's own hand, that appear in the last-named periodical, and in which, swanlike, he seems to be singing his own requiem "Till Death us part."
So speaks the heart, When each to each repeats the words of doom 'Thro' blessing and thro? curse, For better and for worse, We will be one, till that dread hour shall come.
Life, with its myriad grasp, Our yearning souls shall clasp, By ceaseless love, nud still expectant wonder; In bonds that shall endure, Indissolubly sure, Till God iw death shall part our paths asunder, Till Death na join.
0 voice yet more divine That to the broken heart breathes hope sublime 5 'Thro' iously hours And shattered powers We still are one, despite of change and time, Death, with his healing hand, Shall once more knit the band Which needs but that one link which none may sever ill, thro' the Only Good, Heard, felt, and understood, Our life in God shall make us ove for ever, The books reviewed in this week's Specta-for appear of exceptional interest. One, entitled Conversations on the Creation and Chapters on Genesis and Eeolution, embodies an attempt—which is quite novel to the reviewer—to reconcile the account of Creation in Genesis with the nebular hypothesis by suggesting the probable existence of the earth and of vegetable life upon it at a period anterior to that of the existence of the Sun in its present concentrated spherical shape; the author connecting the isolated verses in the second chapter of Genesis as to the time when there was no rain upon the earth, but only a vapour going up from it, which served the purpose of sustaining the vegetable life it contained, with this ante-solar period of the earth's existence. The following extract from the book itself is worth deep consideration. The ideas are well and forcibly expressed Lam sorry,' ho said, 'I cannot with you, It iv true enough, in the strict sense of the words, that the Bible was not tended to teach science most serious Bible star was, But when yeu imply that if taken, it is all no matter—to orthodoxy—wondering whether you would '80 sure about the matter il had not vested interest in it.'... Let us w come anything that savours of honesty truth; for this question is no mero child's Supposo " lly prove that man rose unaided from an ape, instead of falling from something little lower than an angel; how can your orthodoxy possibly remain as it is, based as it is from first to Fall of some sort, and a Red-refrain? Let us, at least, be "16 the Lord be God, follow him; but if Baal, then follow him!" Do you know what Dr. Martineau this? Iwas reading him the other all never forget muches it di and. remove historical away from their very foundations." You never read truer words. If the extreme statements of the Evolutionists are received as true, people will assuredly begin to feel that a Bible we totally mistaken about the beginning may not be more accurate concerning the end. Such arguments only make people reproach you with dishonesty, hey may leave you with " bare shell of religion, but that will be all. Doubtless, even if all our old-established beliefs are to Lo overturned by fuller knowledge, it is still better tu know tive truth than to yo on believing a jie, Let ug have the truth at any risk, and at all luazards. Bus the new belief, however much are being led by such wholesale concessions, No; if fam compelled by the storm majesty of truth to give up what I used to bold so dear, I will admit what I have lost, and that I have lost it. Ishall, you will tell me, get hold of higher and better truth, and it may be so; but till have hold of higher and better than is taken from me, I will not cheat myself with mere phrases, or pretend it is no matter, when it la just all the matter in the world,'
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.