'thing in the case of an establishment, that necessarily implies 'feebleness in the Church? The expression of having kings 'for her nursing fathers, it has been well observed, appears to 'denote feebleness such as to require it.'* If Dissenters point to the numerous evils which appear in the working of the Establishment, they are referred to the authorized documents of the Church. Try her, it is said, by her formularies, not by her ministers. We have done so, alluding to other publications only as supplying extraneous and unimpeachable evidence of the errors contained in the Book of Common Prayer and the Book of Homilies; and have found those formularies opposed to freedom of conscience, to our civil rights as Britons, and to the word of God. Feeling the injustice with which the National Church (as it is falsely called) oppresses all who refuse to bow down before the idol it sets up, we sigh for deliverance. Well aware how prone the young are to be decoyed by the gentility and the pecuniary advantages which garnish the establishment, we would fain, ere we die, know that our descendants will be exempted from such temptation. But God is our witness, that it is not for our own sakes chiefly, that we long for the day when what is called the Church of England shall disappear. Its bad consequences to us, as Nonconformists, are but as the dust of the balance, when compared with its terrible results to those who are embraced within its pale. Ten thousand immortal beings, who know not the way to heaven, are encouraged by this ungodly system to act as clergymen; and thus incur the guilt of poisoning the streams of religious instruction at their source. As the inevitable consequence, formality, under the name of piety, overspreads the land; and the evangelical clergy, who should come forth in the power and spirit of Elijah, are toiling to reconcile their schismatical position, with their allegiance to an ecclesiastical system which contracts their views and withers their energy. Millions of our countrymen, including especially the higher ranks,† are p. 81. + What can pious Churchmen think of the late royal christening? Can it indeed be that they find satisfaction in the thought that the archbishop solemnly declared the princess regenerate, grafted into the body of Christ's church, and adopted by God? Can they be satisfied, either as loyal subjects or as sincere Christians, when they remember that the words of the catechism and the voice of the prelate are in a few years to be employed in fostering the delusion? Churchmen are not blind to the class of facts referred to. What said that favorite organ of the evangelical clergy, the Record, a few weeks since ? 'Having thus obtained a world of regenerated and new-born creatures, the class of preachers to which we allude seem satisfied with their work and with their proselytes. They make them believe that, except the inordinately beguiled and betrayed by the delusions which are thus, by authority, palmed upon them as scriptural verities; and the literature of a language in daily use throughout Great Britain, Ireland, and North America, and familiar to the learned of all lands, has not escaped the infection.* Nor is the evil, in its direct form, confined to England; but the most determined measures are adopted by the government to establish and foster the same faith and polity in all our colonial territories. By our national acts we are thus sowing the seeds of civil discord and religious delusion in all parts of the world; and every member of the community is taxed to perpetuate errors, by which it is to be feared distant tribes will be vexed and cursed long after those errors have disappeared from the land that gave them birth. Happily that Erastianism, in which many of these abominations had their origin, and by which mainly their life is protracted, is awakening from different quarters a cry of remon wicked, they are in a safe and satisfactory state, and have a happy prospect for eternity. Talk, indeed, in social life, to the men or women of this regenerated community about their souls, and they set you down as a madman; of the hidden life of God in the soul, and the mass of them have no more conception than the brutes that perish. Even to allude to such a subject in such society, is worse than fanaticism. It is a positive insult. And yet these men are all regenerated and born from above, and the greater part of the preaching at the west end of the town addressed to the sons and daughters of dissipation, is constructed on this admitted truth.' Sir G. Robinson talks of one holy, undivided, and catholic church! 'Mark the babe Not long accustomed to this breathing world; In due time A day of solemn ceremonial comes; At the baptismal font. And when the pure The original stain, the child is there received Are all renounced; high as the thought of man A dedication made, a promise given For due provision to control and guide, And unremitting progress to ensure In holiness and truth.-Wordsworth's Excursion, book 6. strance, which is daily waxing louder and louder. Statesmen are endeavoring to hush the rising cry; the majority of the clergy, dreading all change, concur in the attempt; and not a few Dissenters, mistaking lukewarmness or timidity for candor, instead of speaking the truth in love, in the exuberance of their charity, bury it in their own bosoms. In the meanwhile, the deep and plaintive tones of dissatisfaction, issuing from the cloisters of Oxford, are vibrating in every ecclesiastical edifice throughout the land; and in the north, Chalmers, not knowing the majesty of his vocation, is leading on his friends to destroy what he aims to build up: in England, Dissenters are assuming that position of determined and religious resistance to a corrupt Establishment, to which duty has long and loudly called them: and in Ireland, the voice of the times is not to be mistaken. Let all who rejoice in this movement be meek, resolute, active, and persevering; and the hour may be much nearer than they have ventured to hope, when the glorious company of the apostles, and the goodly fellowship of the prophets, and the noble army of martyrs, and the holy church throughout all the world, shall raise in concert the song of triumph, Alleluia; for 'the Lord God omnipotent reigneth. Let us be glad and rejoice, ' and give honor to him: for the marriage of the Lamb is come, ' and his wife hath made herself ready." Art. II. German Literature, by Wolfgang Menzel. Translated from the German, with Notes. By THOMAS GORDON. In four volumes. Oxford: D. A. Talboys. 1840. OUR UR readers will recollect that in the year 1837, we inserted a series of articles on the stalwart and vigorous Teuton whose name is appended to the above work on 'German Liter'ature.' We commenced that series by some account of Wolfgang Menzel himself, and then proceeded to give an analysis of his work, accompanied by copious citations. Those extracts were from the incomplete and now never to be completed MSS. of two friends who had long indulged the hope that their 'translation' might one day be published with their joint names, and stand as a memorial of a long and endeared friendship. But their work was so long delayed by unexpected engagements that, though they announced it, they cannot complain if others have taken the field before them, and rendered it unnecessary that they should take it at all. They have the less reason to complain, inasmuch as the new translator has made honorable mention of his obligations to the series of articles in question, as well as to the articles in the Edinburgh and Foreign Quarterly.* It is a curious and striking tribute to the merit of Wolfgang Menzel, that while at least two distinct translations were preparing in England, one was also preparing in America; it appeared some little time before that which is the subject of the present article. Of the American version, we have only one volume, and that for too short a period to allow us to form any opinion of its merits. We can therefore give no opinion as to whether that or the British translation bears away the palm. But without attempting to decide which is the better of the two, we have no hesitation in saying that the present translation is upon the whole a very good one. There are some few (as we conceive) misconceptions of the author's meaning, nor is the expression always quite so elegant as it might have been. There are also some cases in which the meaning is not very intelligible; but on referring to Menzel himself, we generally find that such obscurity is but the shadow cast by the original, and that what is dark and mystical in the English, is also dark and mystical in the German. It is true there is much less of this matter in Menzel than in most German authors, yet is he not always entirely free from it. He would not be German, were it otherwise. Upon the whole, the translation is marked by the union, to a considerable extent, of fidelity and elegance-by a close adherence to the meaning of the original with a due regard to the idioms of the language into which the meaning is to be transfused. Of the justice or otherwise of these commendations the extracts which we shall presently make will be the best test. Our author seems to have overlooked no source of information which could by possibility throw light either on Menzel's history or the character of his work; and as already said, he has made diligent yet perfectly fair use of those translations of portions of Menzel's volumes which had already appeared in the English periodicals. We must also mention, The following is the translator's courteous mention of his obligations to the labors of his predecessors. Menzel's Deutsche Literatur," says the translator, has been several times reviewed in England, and always very favorably. The following I have met with, which are, so far as I know, the only notices-Foreign Quarterly, vol. xvi., Edinburgh Review, vol. lxiii., Eclectic Review (new series) 1837, vols. i. and ii. The Eclectic contains six or eight articles, almost entirely occupied with translations, principally of portions of the first volume of Menzel. These I have compared with my own; and to them, as well as to the translated passages contained in the Edinburgh and Foreign Quarterly, I have to express my acknowledgments for several expressions adopted.' to the great credit of the translator, that he has given som account, in the shape of brief foot notes, of all the principal writers mentioned in the course of Menzel's extensive survey; and though these contain little more than the dates of birth and death, place of residence, rank, and titles of principal works, yet they form altogether a considerable mass of matter, and add much to the interest with which the volumes may be perused. We are also glad to see that the German works which have been translated into English have been for the most part carefully distinguished, though here we have noted some important omissions, especially in the cases of Herder, Lessing, Schiller, and Goethe. At the beginning of the first volume we find a sketch of Menzel's history and character; it contains little which was not already stated in the sketch which was introduced into the first of our own series. One or two paragraphs, however, contain further information, with which we will gratify the reader. The following characteristic passage is extracted from the Recollections of Ernst Muench:- It was upon another fine summer's day that, going to invite my friend Steingass to a walk, I saw an unknown figure sitting at his study table. This was a powerful young man, of slender form and swarthy complexion, with a pair of keenly penetrating eyes; his long black hair parted on his forehead, and cut after the fashion of the Black Forest. His beard was long, according to the fashion of the Turners; and he was clad in the shortest black old-German coat I had ever seen. Long did the young man sit before me, uttering nothing but the most indispensable answers, and absorbed in the map of Switzerland. My friend soon appeared, and introduced him to me as Herr Wolfgang Menzel, of Waldenburg, near Breslau, formerly Vorturner at Jena and Bursch at Bonn, who had thought it prudent to withdraw himself from the immediate presence of the Prussian government, and seek his personal safety in that classic land of liberty, Switzerland. 'I now learned much of the sacred legend of Menzel's early achieve. ments; of his feuds with the Breslau Menzel, Carl Adolph (the historian), with whom he is not unfrequently confounded, but with whom he disowns all kindred; of his dissensions with his parents, who opposed his literary career; of the hard fate of his youth, whence arises the harshness of his manly mind; of his audacious attack upon Goethe's lofty aristocratic supremacy at Weimar, &c. I soon discovered that he was, indeed, an overbearing companion, with whom it was not every one that could live, but richly endowed with intellect, and of a very decided character; in short, that he really was of the wood out of which, if they themselves mar it not, illustrious men are carved.' It is by no means our intention to enter further into Menzel's history, or to discuss again the character of his mind or the |