tical intelligence from the Old World and the New, communications from German missionary districts, in the western part of our country, and critical notices of the more remarkable productions of German and Anglo-German theology. It is Protestant, mainly after the Mercersburg Review stamp; but, as far as we have examined it, appears to be conducted with industry, ability, and good temper. The articles on the History of the German Church in America we have read with a good deal of interest. We wish the work all the success we can wish any heretical work, and consider it superior to most Protestant works that fall under our notice.

9.

·New-Yorker Sion. Herausgegeben von einem Vereine von Katholiken. Redigirt von L. VOGELE, Prof. February 16, 1850. 4to. Jahrgang I., Nr. I.

THIS is a new Catholic paper, published weekly, in the city of New York, in the German language. Judging from the numbers already issued, it is an excellent paper, conducted with ability, energy, zeal, and in a true Catholic spirit, well adapted to the wants of our German brethren, who form so large and so important a part of our American Catholic population. The editor speaks the language of a freeman, in tones which gladden the freeman's heart. He dares tell the truth, which the men of the age, struggling for the liberty of passion, do not like to hear. And he does not fear to assert the right of religion to rule over our politics; that man is as much bound to obey God when acting in the political field, as when assisting at the Divine offices. It would be well if such men as Mr. Charles C. Kelly, noticed above, would read his bold and energetic assertion of the rights of religion, of the man, and of the citizen. We rejoice that our German Catholics have so able and so truly a Catholic journal as this promises to be. It is necessary to protect them against the false notions of liberty so rife in our age and country, and which those not on their guard may imbibe before suspecting their dangerous character. We wish it all success, and warmly recommend it to the support of all who read the language. in which it is published.

10.

Poems. By SARAH A. NOWELL. 1850. 12mo. pp. 208.

Boston:

Tompkins.

THIS is a very unpretending volume of poems, by one of our near neighbours, but is far superior to many which make much greater pretensions, and are commended by the newspaper critics. Mrs. Nowell possesses a good deal of facility in versification, has much

poetic feeling, and a mind of a high order. The poems seem to have been written mainly for her own amusement; but were she to devote more time and thought to the cultivation of poetry, she could easily place herself far above the Sigourneys, the Osgoods, and the Welbys.

11. Poems. By JAMES RUSSELL Lowell. Reed, & Fields. 1849. 2 vols. 16mo.

Boston Ticknor,

We have recently expressed our general estimate of Mr. Lowell as a poet. He has written no poem that we much admire, but he has written occasional passages of as exquisite poetry as are to be found in any American poet. He is now and then a little cockneyish, and babbles of nature as one to whom nature is unfamiliar; but he does not lack either the poetical temper or the poetical heart. He is, we are sorry to say, a philanthropist; and of all poetry, the philanthropic species is the least endurable, as of all men philanthropists are the most intolerable. Poor Dr. Channing has much to answer for. His everlasting preachments about the "dignity of human nature" has corrupted our literature, as it has our morals; and if philanthropy, which received such an impetus from him, continues to rage much longer in this Commonwealth, it will be necessary for every honest man and peaceable man to emigrate from it. What with our moral-reform societies, our anti-hangman societies, prisoners' friend societies, abolition societies, temperance societies, there will soon be no living here for a man who wishes to mind his own business, and to let his neighbours mind theirs. Really the evil is becoming insufferable, and we are fast retrograding to the days of the old colonial sumptuary laws, which even our fathers could not bear. Mr. Lowell would be a great poet if he were not a great philanthropist.

12. The Second Advent: or what do the Scriptures teach respecting the Second Coming of Christ, the End of the World, the Resurrection of the Dead, and the General Judgment? By ALPHEUS CROSBY. Boston: Phillips, Sampson, & Co. 1850. pp. 173.

12mo.

WE have not read this book: we broke down before we had got beyond half a dozen pages.

13. The War with Mexico reviewed. By A. A. LIVERMORE. Boston Crosby & Nichols. 1850. 12mo. pp. 310.

THIS volume is written with ability, and contains a good deal of information, together with a much greater amount of childish prattle

and nonsense. No work coming out under the patronage of the American Peace Society could by any possibility be really worth reading. We dislike war, and disliked the Mexican war in particular; but not for the nonsensical reasons set forth by your nambypamby peace men, your Worcesters, Ladds, Burritts, and Cobdens. Mr. Livermore is a Unitarian minister, a man of respectable attainments and commendable industry; but he is a philanthropist, that is, the lover of man in general, and the hater of all men in particular, unless they chance to be rogues and criminals. Leave your philanthropy, man, and learn charity, the good, oldfashioned Christian virtue of charity, and then you may write things that it will not sicken a sober man to read.

14.

Circassia, or a Tour to the Caucasus. By G. L. DITSON, Esq. New York: Stringer & Townsend. 1850. 8vo. pp. 453.

THIS is a work of lofty pretensions, but of feeble performance. Who the author is we know not, and have no wish to know. His style is inflated, stilted, and altogether uncivilized, and his book tells us very little which we could not have learned without going out of the room in which we are now writing. The author, it appears, entered two or three huts in Circassia, saw a woman or two with breasts uncovered and with bare and dirty feet. This is about all the addition he makes to our previous knowledge of the Caucasians. Yet, though the reader is every moment on the point of throwing the book in the fire, he continues to read on to the end. Why, he can hardly explain to himself. If the author had more simplicity, if he made fewer pretensions, and retained some respect for religion and morals, we are not sure but he might write a very pleasing book of travels. Even while he disgusts us, he throws a sort of interest over his work which we cannot shake off, but which we are at the same time ashamed of feeling.

15. Poems. By ROBERT BROWNING. A new Edition. Boston: Ticknor, Reed, & Fields. 1850. 2 vols.

16mo.

We have read only one or two of Browning's poems, and must reserve our judgment of these volumes till we have succeeded in reading the rest. Mr. Browning is too weighty to be despatched in a light literary notice. We will only add, that the Messrs. Ticknor & Co. have issued these volumes, as they do all their poetical publications, in a style becoming a poet of the first order.

BROWNSON'S

QUARTERLY REVIEW.

JULY, 1850.

ART. I.- St. Peter and Mahomet; or the Popes protecting Christendom from Mahometanism.

WHEN the Apostles were sitting at the feet of Christ for the last time before his passion, they began to dispute among themselves; and the question was, which of them would be the greatest. Our Lord settled this dispute, and then he turned to the Apostle who was soon to become prince of the sacred college, and said to him, "Simon, Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as wheat. But I have prayed for thee, that thy faith may not fail. And thou, being converted, confirm thy brethren."

St. Peter knew not at that moment in how many ways Satan would sift the Church, - from how many quarters he would lead forth the united strength of earth and hell. He saw the Devil, not as a serpent, nor as an angel of light, but as a roaring lion. His conception of the whole matter appears in his answer: "Lord, I am ready to follow thee to prison, and to death." And the first sifting which the Church received at the hands of Satan was precisely that which St. Peter expected. The world for three hundred years groaned beneath the tyranny of Rome, and during that long period the worship of Christ was proscribed, and his children hunted to the death; the prisons were choked with them, the wild beasts were glutted with their flesh, the ground was red with their blood; they were pitilessly murdered, sometimes singly, sometimes by hundreds, sometimes by thousands. This was the first great sifting; it was a trial of the Church by fire and the sword, a determination to crush her by treating her children as convicted enemies of the Empire

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and of the immortal gods. The yet uninspired fisherman was ready for all this, but he had no notion of the far more terrible storms which would issue from the womb of time, and burst upon the Church. He could not foresee the day when heresy would sit upon the throne and trample the altar, when the astonished world would find itself Arian, when the true faith would be denied by the East, and scarcely find a resting-place in the West except in the bosom of Leo the Great. He did not suspect that Scribes and Pharisees would sit again in the chair of Moses, that some of his successors would be ambitious, cruel, and licentious men, incapable of denying the faith simply because Jesus Christ had promised the world that his Vicar should never lead the people to believe a lie. He did not see the tide of barbarism issuing from Northern Asia with resistless force, and failing to destroy civilization only because it could not destroy the parent of all true civilization, the Church of God. In the days of St. Peter the Emperors were the high-priests of paganism, and after a thousand years had rolled away, the German Cæsars bethought themselves of this fact, and straightway they claimed some of the inalienable rights of the High-Priest of Christianity. A long struggle served to evolve an undeniable right of the Holy See; the refractory Emperors were stripped of the purple, until they would consent to render to God the things which are of God. The Western schism threatened to leave the Church a dismembered corpse upon the plains of Europe; the captivity of Babylon, as the stay of the Popes in France was justly called, nearly ruined Italy, and produced the most deplorable effects in the Western Churches; and the Protestant rebellion tore whole nations from their mother's arms. St. Peter was ready for imprisonment and death, but he was not prepared to meet storms like these. What if he could have heard modern doctors proving that he had never been in Rome! What if he could have heard the wise disciples of Strauss gravely say that he never lived, that his Master was an Idea!

If the Church ever could really fear an enemy, she would have been hopelessly affrighted at Mahometanism. All her other trials were accompanied with some solace for her wounded heart. The persecutions were bitter, but she often had a little time to breathe; she felt that such a violent state of things could not endure long, and she knew that the surest way to enlarge her fold on earth was to send crowds of martyrs to heaven. No man ever sowed tares in her fields as Arius did, but in three