The second volume of Thirty Thousand Thoughts, edited by the
Rev. Canon H. D. M. Spence, Rev. Joseph S. Exell, and Rev. Charles Neil (Kegan Paul, Trench, and Co.), is before us. Five more sections, making ten in all, have been added, and "Thought 6,527" has been reached. The editors briefly notice in their preface a criticism which seems to have been passed on their work in more than one quarter, viz , that these royal roads to knowledge are not desirable, and that a young preacher, started in life with these "thirty thousand thoughts," would be very apt to think, and that very much to his ultimate loss, that all his reading had been done for him. Doubtless, there is an advantage which it would be unwise to neglect in the scientific mapping-out of those provinces of human thought with which the divine has especially to deal ; but the editors have done something more than this mapping-out. If they had given us, along with scientific arrangement, a table of the original works which they wished the student to make himself acquainted with, their course would have been less open to objection. As it is, we cannot but think that the danger of a reader contenting himself with these encyclopaadio volumes is a real one. We should like the editors to ask this question,—Do they think that when they have completed these volumes they will have furnished a young divine with all that he wants ? or, to put it in another way, do they think that it would be a desirable result if some student could make himself thoroughly acquainted with the contents of the " Encyclopaadia Britanuica," and then be content ?
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