bridegroom in the flower of life? Alas it is! Six months passed, and he also is borne forth in death. Desolation sits upon his house.

"The brother has become the lord of the estate. The Calero is departed; he is troubled in mind lest the Calero may restore her again and blast his prospects and his place. But years pass and the Calero comes not. He feels contented. Suddenly he receives a letter. A new Calero comes and threatens him with disgrace. He bargains with him for gold to deliver up the girl. The compact is made. They meet; the meeting fails; the Calero is in death; the usurping lord flies away in terror. I see the semblance of two whom I know." Here he stopped. But I had grown impatient.

"O venerable sage," I asked, "canst thou not give us any clue to the parentage of Francesca? She is my betrothed; she is the rightful owner of large possessions. What avails all, if we know not this ?"

He paused, and answered, "I cannot tell names. The personages whom I see speak not audibly. I can see their lips move; I can behold their dresses and appearance; the localities in which they act and dwell; but I cannot go beyond this. The castle that should be hers is a great and noble baronial pile; the park is vast, and crowned with beauty. It is in England, but where I know not. This must be for thee to discover."

The sentiments that run through the volume are of the most noble and lofty kind; everywhere a strong and vigorous denunciation of shams and vices, and a laudation of virtue in her purest and most elevating form. We have not space for half the quotations we have marked, but cannot forego the following extract upon woman:

O woman! how true, how noble, how heavenly a being thou art! I have read and heard of men at whose name the world bows the knee, and have been taught to think in honour of their heroism; but the true, the sole, the great and perfect heroic, exists in woman only-or if there be an exception among men, it is only that it may prove the rule to be true which I have first enunciated. There have been moments when I would have curled the lip at any man who spake this truth, and sneered him down as most unworthy of his race; when I would have smitten him to the dust with a mocking glance and a satirical smile, as one but fitted to comb a lapdog, or be "brained by my lady's fan;" but in the confessions of my heart I will not lie, nor deceive myself or others. I will put forth the broadly honest opinions of my soul, founded upon experience and reflections. Man is intellectually superior, but morally inferior to woman; and all the great things of the earth will be found on examination to have been inspired, fostered, and fed under the sunshine of female auspices. It would be casy to prove this by reference to history and biography; but this is not a disquisition. Let him who questions it enquire with an honest spirit, and he will find that I am right. He will trace back every noble discovery, either in art or science; every holy principle of philanthropy that has been reduced into practical action; every institution that redeems earth from ignominy, and gives a glimpse of the Paradise Gardens from which we are hapless exiles, to the guiding influence of sacred woman. From her the philosopher has learned the truest love; the soldier the most lofty courage; the navigator the rarest patience; the poet the purest sentiment. Open the historic page, and every line is full of feminine devotion and grandeur of soul, faithfulness in affliction, courage in misfortune, wisdom in the midst of danger, hope when whirled in the eddies of despair. Accursed ever be the wretch who injures but in thought one of this sacred race of beings.

With these remarks we must dismiss the volume, leaving those who require to dip deeper into its pages to peruse the book itself. It is issued in a cheap form, the three volumes being bound in one and sold for 5s.

SWEDENBORG.*

THIS little volume, which appears to have been reprinted from the Holborn and St. Pancras Guardian, is most admirably adapted for the purpose which it professes to have in view-that of making "Swedenborg more generally known." It contains simply a descriptive sketch of the principles taught by the great Swedish seer, and is written in a popular and readable style. Of course it makes no claim to the profoundity of thought of the work of Dr. Parsons, reviewed on another page; but at the same time it is a most useful little volume to put into the hands of persons who know little of Swedenborg, and who have neither the time nor the inclination to dive deep into the profound truths in which his teaching abounds.

THE LORD'S BLOOD.†

MOST of our readers will be familiar at least with the name of the Rev. Chauncey Giles. His little volume entitled, The Nature of Spirit and of Man as a Spiritual Being, has had a very large circulation in this country, and the author himself, although an American, was personally amongst us a few years ago. The sermon on the Lord's Blood is written in the graphic style of which Mr. Giles is so great a master, and deals, as its name implies, with a topic of very great importance. We have seldom seen so much sound sense compressed into the space of a short sermon. It is, of course, thoroughly Swedenborgian, Mr. Giles occupying a prominent position as a Minister in the New Church.

WATTS ON THE BIBLE AND CHRISTIANITY.‡

MR. CHARLES WATTS, whose pen is seldom idle, has favoured the world with his views on The Bible and Christianity. It need hardly be said that we disagree with his conclusions most thoroughly, and consider his arguments as a rule extremely fallacious, and such as could not for one moment be sustained in debate with an antagonist who understood the question. Still we have no hesitation in saying that this brochure (unlike most

* Emanuel Swedenborg, the Spiritual Columbus. A Sketch, by U. S. E. London: BEVERIDGE & Co., Fulwood's Rents, Holborn.

+ The Lord's Blood. By the REV. CHAUNCEY GILES. London: JAMES SPIERS, 36, Bloomsbury Street.

The Bible and Christianity. By CHARLES WATTS. London: C. WATTS, 17, Johnson's Court.

of those issued by rejectors of Divine revelation) is written in a calm and deliberate spirit, and displays considerable ability. Mr. Watts is master of a highly polished style, which of course renders what he writes all the more mischievous as he devotes himself to the endeavour to overturn the authority of the Scriptures. It is needless to say that men of this class thoroughly misunderstand the Bible, and hence their opposition. They never get beyond the letter which the Apostle tells us, killeth, having no knowledge whatever of the spirit that giveth life. The doctrines attacked by Mr. Watts are those of the most extreme character, such as few men of intelligence and thought even in the orthodox Churches now accept.

RELIGION AND PHILOSOPHY OF SWEDENBORG.

THE author of this work is a great legal functionary in America, where, we have been informed, his Treatises on Law are so frequently referred to, and considered of so high an authority that he is himself looked upon as a sort of American Blackstone. He was for many years Professor of Law in one of the American Universities, and is now nearly eighty years of age. It is not, however, as a lawyer that we have to do with him here, but as the author of a series of works on a far different topic. Some time since we came across a volume written by him, entitled Deus Homo, the subject of which may be gathered from the title. It appeared soon after the publication of Ecce Deus, and the still better known work, which gave rise to it, entitled Ecce Homo. We found Deus Homo to be by far the greatest work of the three, and perused it with an amount of pleasure which we have seldom experienced. It is a marvellous production, and calculated to do an incalculable amount of good. Having read this most charming volume, we were on the look out for something else from the same pen, when Mr. Spiers, the well-known Swedenborgian publisher, recommended us three small volumes of Essays by the same author, which we procured and greedily perused-the reading of which tended, if possible, to increase the estimation in which we held the author. Now we have before us another volume from the pen of Dr. Parsons, just issued by the same enterprising publisher.

The Outlines of the Religion and Philosophy of Swedenborg is just what its name implies, and as such must be highly acceptable at the present time. For that there is just now a disposition on the part of thoughtful minds to become better

* Outlines of the Religion and Philosophy of Swedenborg. By THEOPHILUS PARSONS, LL.D. London: JAMES SPIERS, 36, Bloomsbury Street.

T.S.-II.

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acquainted with the teachings of the great Swedish Seer no one can deny. Swedenborgian ideas are permeating society from the top to the bottom. We hear them enunciated from the pulpits of almost every denomination; we meet with them in books written by evangelical authors and issued by most orthodox publishers; and we come across them almost daily in ordinary conversation; usually, of course, without any acknowledgment of the source from whence they were obtained. If the New Church be not increasing in the number of its members, most certainly the ideas of which it is the exponent are spreading rapidly throughout the entire society. The result of this must be that any work explaining the religion and philosophy of Swedenborg must prove acceptable to a great number of inquiring minds; and it is difficult to conceive any book better adapted for this purpose than the little volume under consideration. The author-as may be judged from what has been already said-is a thorough master of the subject, and there is in his method of explaining it a clearness which is rarely employed in dealing with these profound subjects. Almost every phase of Swedenborg's teaching is dealt with; and any person desirous of learning what New Church doctrines really are, cannot do better than to peruse this admirable little volume. We are glad to see that the author translates Swedenborg's Proprium by "ownhood," which is certainly by far the best translation of the term possible. We expect to hear that the volume under consideration has had a very large sale, as it most certainly deserves. It contains as much solid mental food as is sometimes to be found in a whole library; is neatly got up, and issued at a price which places it within the reach of almost

every person.

GRIMES' MYSTERIES OF THE HEAD AND THE HEART.*

THIS volume is written by a well-known lecturer on phrenology in the United States, who, judging from the notices of the press appended to the book, has been very successful in his labours. There is a great deal of sound sense in the volume, and much information may be gained by perusing it. The author appears to have a system of phrenology of his own, but then that is somewhat common with phrenologists, especially in America. A portion of the book, however, is devoted to An Explanation of the Mysterles of Mesmerism, Trance, Mind

The Mysteries of the Head and the Heart Explained. By J. STANLEY GRIMES. Chicago: W. B. KEEN, COOK & Co. 113 & 115, State Street.

reading, and the Spirit Delusion," and the theory set up here is preposterous in the extreme. The common-place way in which the author dismisses the grand idea of the supernatural, as embodied by Shakespeare in Macbeth and Hamlet, would be laughable, were it not painful to find the mighty thoughts of England's greatest genius reduced to the coarsest forms of matter-of-fact life. In dealing with these, Mr. Grimes shows himself utterly incompetent to treat the subject of Spiritualism. A man who discovers in the ethereal and supernatural beings portrayed as the witches in Macbeth nothing but a band of gipsies betrays an utter incapacity for dealing with the subject of trance. The explanation that Mr. Grimes gives of what are called spiritual manifestations is ridiculous in the extreme, and only shows his intense ignorance of the entire subject. The whole thing is according to him a kind of hallucination, and, therefore, the phenomena are subjective, and the movement a delusion. We should advise Mr. Grimes, before he again writes on this subject, to make himself a little better acquainted with the facts of Spiritualism, for if he has no capacity for understanding Shakespeare's mighty creations, he may yet be able to observe and chronicle physical facts.

IPHIGENIA.*

THE name of Mr. Henry Pride will be familiar to many Spiritualists, as having occasionally appeared in the Medium appended to prose contributions. Here, however, he comes forward as the author of a little volume of poems, got up in a very showy binding, and dedicated to Gerald Massey. In the book there are some thirty separate poems, some of which are short and simple hymns, and others of a more pretentious character. The former of these are some of them very pretty, and display real poetic power. The longer pieces are exceedingly faulty, and we are sorry that the author did not hand his volume over to some competent person for revision before giving it to the world. The poem entitled "Iphigenia," from which the book takes its name, is just passable; but then it is followed by others which contain passages very much below mediocrity. What is to be said, for instance, of the following lines on Christ?

Then came the voice of God; hear it they must,

Even though they shrank appalled back to their lust;
Even though they sought to slay the messenger,
And clamoured curses for the bliss he bare.

Iphigenia and other Poems. By HENRY PRIDE. London: J. BURNS, 15, Southampton Row, High Holborn, W.C.