NEW Enrrioss.—Self-Renunciation, with an Introduction by the Rev. T. T.
Carter (Rivington).—This little volume is from the French of Guil- lore, who, says Mr. Carter, " shared, with other spiritual writers of that period, the reproach of Quietism." The reproach was not undeserved, if we may judge from this volume. We read on p. 267, " By this sacrifice [that of the intellectual powers] wo offer the truest homage in our power to God, and that because the mind, made in His Image and like- ness, is the noblest part of man ; and when offering up our intellectual faculties to Him, we give him the worthiest tribute we possess,—His own image." Now this is not meant to inculcate devotion of the mental powers to God's service. It enjoins "mortification of the mental powers," i.e., we are to make them as nearly dead as may be, just as ordinary asceticism does with the bodily emotions. And we honour God by abnegating that part of us which is most like Him, serve Him best, and by making ourselves less divine. Happily this is teaching that is not likely to affect English temperaments very strongly. May wo add that the editor, with his very vigorous intellectual personality, teaches his admirers a quite different lesson P—Ritson's Ancient Songs and Ballads appears in a third edition (the second was published in 1829), under the care of Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt (Reeves and Turner). The work has " undergone such changes only as were clearly imperative in the correction of obvious and material errors, of which the number has proved very considerable, and after additional notes have been inserted here and there." An index and a glossary have been added.—Dr. Samuel Osgood sends out a "new and enlarged edition of Milestones in Our Life-Journey (E. P. Dutton, New York). It is dedicated "to the Class of 1832" (Harvard University).—We have also to acknowledge a new and revised edition of Sunshine and Shadows; or, Sketches of Thought, Philosophic and Religious, by W. B. Clulow (Williams and Norgate), and a cheap edition of Charlie Carew and other Tales, by Annie Thomas (A. H. Moxon).
Previous page
