The Metropolitan Tabernacle. By G. H. Pike. (Passmore and Alabaster.)—This
is an account, reaching from the days of the Long Parliament to the present time, of the Baptist congregation which, after various changes, now meets in the enormous building which Mr- Spurgeon's eloquence has filled. Much of it has, of course, a merely local interest, in which the general reader, though he sympathizes with the desire of such a body to connect itself with the past, can hardly share.. One name, however, in the history—we leave Mr. Spurgeon himself to. the judgment of posterity—has a certain celebrity, that of the com- mentator Dr. Gill, who was pastor from 1720 to 1771, and who, though Robort Hall did call his ponderous work "a continent of mud," and, heartily agreed with the wish of some enthusiastic Cymrian, that it had. been written in Welsh, was certainly a man of genuine learning,. especially in the direction of Rabbinical literature. His life is worth reading. The congregation, it may be noted, did not altogether flourish during his pastorate, because, Mr. Spurgeon thinks, he had a "difficulty in exhorting all men to repentance and faith ;" but then Dr. Gia was a. Calvinist who had not learnt to slip out of the conclusions of his theory-
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