phenomena of man. They are well adapted to perform one of the best offices, which a book can perform,-that of making the reader think; not only furnishing him with suggestions of great practical importance, but awakening and stimulating his mind to reflections of its own. For works like these, the times of peculiar agitation in which Fuller lived, and in which every form of character, whether generous and pure, or fantastic and vile, was strongly developed, may have furnished unusually ample materials and excitement.

Of the cast of thought and mode of writing in this work, the following passages on Anger, and on Self-praising, will afford fair specimens.

'Let not thy anger be so hot, but that the most torrid zone thereof may be habitable. Fright not people from thy presence with the terror of thy intolerable impatience. Some men, like a tiled house, are long before they take fire, but once on flame there is no coming near to quench them.'

- p. 173. Anger kept till the next morning, with manna, doth putrefy and corrupt; save that manna corrupted not at all, and anger most of all, kept the next sabbath. Saint Paul saith, "Let not the sun go down on your wrath;" to carry news to the antipodes in another world of thy revengeful nature. Yet let us take the Apostle's meaning, rather than his words, with all possible speed to depose our passion, not understanding him so literally that we may take leave to be angry till sunset: then might our wrath lengthen with the days; and men in Greenland, where day lasts above a quarter of a year, have plentiful scope of revenge. And as the English (by command of William the Conqueror) always raked up their fire, and put out their candles, when the curfew-bell was rung; let us then also quench all sparks of anger, and heat of passion.' — pp. 173, 174.

'He whose own worth doth speak, need not speak his own worth. Such boasting sounds proceed from emptiness of desert; whereas the conquerors in the Olympian games did not put on the laurels on their own heads, but waited till some other did it. Only anchorets that want company may crown themselves with their own commendations.

'It showeth more wit but no less vanity to commend one's self not in a straight line but by reflection. Some sail to the port of their own praise by a side-wind; as when they dispraise themselves, stripping themselves naked of what is their due, that the modesty of the beholders may clothe them with it again; or when they flatter another to his face, tossing the ball to him

that he may throw it back again to them; or when they commend that quality, wherein themselves excel, in another man (though absent) whom all know far their inferior in that faculty; or lastly, (to omit other ambushes men set to surprise praise) when they send the children of their own brain to be nursed by another man, and commend their own works in a third person, but if challenged by the company that they were authors of them themselves, with their tongues they faintly deny it, and with their faces strongly affirm it.'

pp. 155, 156.

In the following extract from 'The Good Sea-Captain,' there is a strain of vivid and imaginative writing, though occasionally disfigured by an uncouth expression.

'Tell me, ye naturalists, who sounded the first march and retreat to the tide, "Hither shalt thou come, and no further?" Why doth not the water recover his right over the earth, being higher in nature? Whence came the salt, and who first boiled it, which made so much brine? When the winds are not only wild in a storm, but even stark mad in a hurricane, who is it that restores them again to their wits, and brings them asleep in a calm? Who made the mighty whales, who swim in a sea of water, and have a sea of oil swimming in them? Who first taught the waters to imitate the creatures on land? so that the sea is the stable of horse-fishes, the stall of kine-fishes, the stye of hog-fishes, the kennel of dog-fishes, and in all things the sea the ape of the land. Whence grows the ambergris in the sea? which is not so hard to find where it is, as to know what it is. Was not God the first shipwright? and all vessels on the water descended from the loins (or ribs rather) of Noah's ark? Or else who durst be so bold, with a few crooked boards nailed together, a stick standing upright, and a rag tied to it, to adventure into the ocean? What loadstone first touched the loadstone? or how first fell it in love with the north, rather affecting that cold climate than the pleasant east, or fruitful south or west? How comes that stone to know more than men, and find the way to the land in a mist?'* - pp. 113, 114.

* In 'Vivian Grey,' part second, there is a direct plagiarism of a portion of the above extract from Fuller. Essper George addresses the sea as follows; 'O thou indifferent ape of earth, what art thou, O bully Ocean, but the stable of horse-fishes, the stall of cow-fishes, the sty of hog-fishes, and the kennel of dog-fishes?'. A modern novelwriter might probably deem himself very secure in plundering the folio of an old divine; but one would hardly have expected him to think of resorting to such a source.

We trust that a literary undertaking so judiciously and well begun, will not fail for want of the patronage of our reading community. Should it proceed, as it has commenced, a set of volumes will appear, which will surely deserve and claim a place in the libraries of all, who love the wisdom of 'olden time.' Enough, and more than enough, of our attention is called and given to the productions adapted to meet and satisfy the transient taste of the day, springing up in crowds with a rapidity that would be fearful, did they not pass away with equal rapidity, and leading us to suppose that the advice, which was long since given, is not thought to be out of season

now:

'Stir, stir, for shame; thou art a pretty scholar.
Ask how to live? Write, write, write any thing;
The world's a fine believing world, — write news.'

It is necessary, doubtless, that in the literary, as well as in the natural world, an annual supply should be provided for annual consumption. But meanwhile there is danger, lest the great minds of past generations should be forgotten by us, or treated with a neglect at once ungrateful to them and injurious to ourselves. We are far enough from wishing to see the antiquarian bibliomania displace important and useful studies. But we do wish to witness the prevalence of such a sound and just taste for the strong good sense, the exciting energy, and the intellectual riches of the older authors, as shall take away all occasion for the complaint, so beautifully expressed by Mr. Young, that 'the moss has been suffered to creep over the wells of English undefiled," and hide their clear and sparkling waters from the general view.'

ART. II. — ORIGENIS Opera Omnia, quæ Græcè vel Latinè tantum extant, et ejus Nomine circumferuntur. Operâ et studio Caroli Delarue. Parisiis. 1733-1759. 4 vol fol.

AT the conclusion of our remarks on the life and writings of Origen, in our last Number, we intimated our purpose to treat, in a future Number, of his opinions. The greater part

of his errors and extravagances, as it will appear, were derived from the corrupt philosophy which was then prevalent in Egypt, and with which his mind had become deeply imbued in the schools of Clement and Ammonius, the latter of whom was, at that time, chief of the sect of Alexandrian Platonists, and one of its most distinguished ornaments.

He

Origen's views of the Deity will not long detain us. was accused by subsequent Fathers of circumscribing the power of the Divine Being, asserting that he created only as much matter as he could dispose and adorn, and that by his omnipotence we are to understand simply a dominion over things actually existing, the heavens, the earth, sun, moon, and stars, and all that is in them.' We shall not pause to examine the foundation of this charge, which may be regarded as in itself frivolous, and the discussion of which would plunge us into the dark abysses of the Alexandrian philosophy.

It has been made a question, whether he regarded the Deity as corporeal, or incorporeal. On this, as on several other points, his opinions, or at least his language fluctuates, and he appears not always consistent with himself. In the present instance, however, we believe that it is not difficult to reduce his apparently conflicting expressions into harmony with each other. With the ancients generally, he believed spirit to consist of an exceedingly subtile and attenuated substance, wholly unlike the gross and palpable bodies we bear about with us, but still not destitute of materiality, and in some sort strictly corporeal.* In this sense, he seems to have supposed the Deity corporeal. True, in parts of his writings, particularly in his books' Of Principles,' if we may trust to the version of Rufinus, he says distinctly and repeatedly that God is incorporeal. But the term is evidently to be understood as subject to the qualification just pointed out. The Deity is not corporeal in the gross sense of the term, but he is so in the more refined sense, in which all spiritual beings, according to Origen, are to be regarded as such, all, from the Deity down to the human soul, being supposed by him, as we shall hereafter show, to partake of the same essence. tullian expressly ascribes a body to the Deity. But Origen has not expressed himself so grossly, though, as we have Adv. Prax. c. 7.

* De Princip. Præf.

Ter

seen, he supposed a very intimate union between matter and God.*

In other respects, he appears to have entertained just and elevated conceptions of the nature and attributes of the Divine Being. He ascribes to him the greatest goodness and equity, and an absolute supremacy over all other beings, including the Son. With regard to the latter, he participated in the sentiments which were common to the age, and which were originally derived, as we contend, from Platonic sources. A rapid glance at the history of these sentiments may be necessary to put our readers in complete possession of the views of Origen, and fulfil our design of tracing the rise and progress of the doctrine of the trinity.

The first century was characterized by great simplicity of doctrine. The primitive Christians, it is true, appear to have sometimes applied the title God to Christ, but in a sense totally different from that in which it came afterwards to be attributed to him. His miraculous birth, his Messiahship, and the state of glory to which he was advanced after a painful and ignominious death, God having raised him up,' and highly exalted him,' making him 'both Lord and Christ,' for the suffering of death' crowning him with 'glory and

*He taught, according to Jerome, (Epist. 94, al. 59, ad Avitum,) that all bodies, that is, all of the grosser sort, will be finally converted into spiritual substances, that all corporeal nature will be reduced back to the divine, which is the 'most excellent,' and then 'God will be all in all.' This was the Alexandrian principle, which taught that matter originally flowed from the bosom of God, and which Origen has been considered as adopting in full extent. The principle well accords with several parts of his system, though we are not aware that he has any where expressly asserted it as regards the origin of matter. Beausobre thinks, that his real opinion was not that matter originally emanated from the substance of God; that all he meant to affirm was, that God never existed for a moment without exercising his perfections, and consequently without an act of creation; and that in this sense he supposed matter to be eternal. Upon the emanative principle it might be regarded as eternal, as proceeding from the bosom of the Eternal One. The Egyptian Platonists, who were Origen's masters, admitted it to be eternal in this sense alone, thus departing from the dualistic system of the Athenian Sage. See Beausobre, Histoire de Manichée et du Manichéisme, T. 11. pp. 284, 285. Also Brucker, Hist. Crit. Phil. T. 111. p. 443, and Huet. Origeniana, Lib. II. c. 11. Quæs. 2, § 24. Quæs. 12, $2. To the learned labors of the latter especially, we acknowledge ourselves indebted for no little assistance in our attempt to collect and classify the opinions of Origen.