to be, a preacher? Nay, verily. In fact, a considerable share of Mr. Dawson's popularity, with a certain class at least, springs from the preacher-air, and the preacherphrases, which still cling to his delivery and style. He is little else than a clever lecturer, made out of the elements or ruins of a second-rate preacher.

In Mr. Dawson's lectures we find no variety of thought. Two or three ideas, imported into his mind, are rattled like peas over and over, into a thousand different sounds or discords. The same terms, too, such as subjective and objec tive, dynamical and mechanical, are perpetually repeated, with a parrot-like iteration. There is in some minds, and in some styles, a gigantic monotony, as in the ocean surges, or in the beams of the sun. But there is also a small mannerism arising from the mimicry of a model-itself, in part, a copy, which can with difficulty be endured for a few nights, and for no more.

Of course he proclaims warfare against conventionalisms of speech, and of thought: to call, in prayer, a woman a handmaiden, the sea the great deep, &c., is with him a grave offence. Words are things. Things ought to be called by their right names. A spade should be a spade: and not, with Dr. Johnson, a "broad, semi-wooden, semi-iron, instrument for tearing the bosom of terra firma, the pioneer of the advenient seed." Shade of Dr. Johnson! then, art thou not provoked to ask, What in the name of wonder, George Dawson, art thou? what callest thou thyself? Art thou infidel, pagan, or Christian, or any thing more than a man preaching? I know not how to entitle thee, positively; but, negatively, depend upon it, I shall never call thee, by any accident, “a great deep."

Too often in Mr. Dawson's prelections what is new is not true, and what is true is not new. In proclaiming the stern truth that there is something higher than happinessnamely, blessedness-he only repeated the finest sentence in that abysmal volume, "Sartor Resartus." But who instructed him for once to go beyond his master, and to ridicule the phrase, "luxury of doing good?" Because duty can play its high part at times without public fee or reward, has it not always, in its own exercise, a joy beyond the name of pleasure?" Does not Scripture often appeal to

the desire and to the prospect of happiness as stimulants to duty ? Has not the Divine Being annexed even to sacrifice and to martyrdom, a feeling which we may appropriately term "luxury," if luxury mean something at once delicious and rare? "To be good for good's sake," is the noblest reach of man; but what does good imply in its very conception? Surely some severe but real delight, partly in present feeling, and partly in future prospect. We know right well the tendency of Mr. Dawson's sneer-it is an attempt to scoff out the golden candlestick of celestial blessedness, as the reward of the good; although as well might he seek to puff away to-morrow's sun.

We notice, in connection with all his allusions to religion, a want of moral reverence for the subject. Suppose it were true, what he so often intimates, that God has abandoned our present forms of worship, in what spirit should he tread the deserted shrine? In what spirit did (we beg pardon for the reference) the Son of Man walk in the desecrated and doomed Temple of Jerusalem? It was not, certainly, with contemptuous disregard any more than with the cry on on his lips, Raze, raze it to its foundation! It was, doubtless, with tears in his eyes, as he remembered, "Here God once dwelt." With what coolness, with what propensity to sneer, with what ill-suppressed joy, at these long desolations, do some now walk through what they call a ruin, as forsaken as the temple of Jupiter Palatinus. Shame to thee, George Dawson, if this be thy feeling, as we fear it is! This is not, rely on it, the feeling of thy Master, though he never took the vows of the ministry upon his soul. If we have not totally misconstrued the nature of Thomas Carlyle, he passes through the sanctuary, which he deems now forsaken, nay, a den of thieves, with emotions of profoundest sorrow, because, to use the language of Howe, the broken arches, the mouldering inscriptions, and the extinct fire, seem to him but too plainly to testify that the Great Inhabitant is gone.

Mr. Dawson's forte lies, unquestionably, in his lively and amusing illustrations. His is a species of proverbial philosophy. He abounds both in "old saws and modern instances." He accommodates the results of philosophy to every-day life, and translates its technicalities into the loose conversation, almost into the slang, of every-day language.

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It may be questioned whether in this he does men much service; for, in the first place, in such a process a great deal that is most valuable necessarily escapes. There thoughts in every high philosophy which will not bear translation into ordinary speech. Our English vernacular will only look ludicrous as it attempts to girth their greatness; and these thoughts are, of course, the deepest and noblest. Secondly, apart from this aboriginal difficulty, the translator, when also a popular lecturer, is under strong temptation to dilute what truth he does tell too much, and to give his babes, instead of milk, milk and water. And, thirdly, those babes will be exceedingly apt to fancy, after a few such diluted preparations, that they have suddenly shot up into men of full age. In the short space of four or five amusing hours, they are quite qualified to chatter Carlylese-to dogmatize on the characteristics and tendencies of the age, and to look with sovereign contempt on ministers, and on all who are weak enough to put their trust in them. We met, some time ago, in a London omnibus, a good-natured, amusing old lady, at whom we inquired if she had ever been in Edinburgh. She answered," No; but I saw a panoramar of it, which gave me a very good hidear of it." Such a satisfactory panoramaric hidear does Mr. Dawson give his auditors of the German philosophy, and of Plato.

When I hear such a preacher, said one, I go home well pleased with him; when I hear such another, I go home ill pleased with myself. Mr. Dawson sends home most of his audience well pleased with him and with themselves, and thinking more of him and of themselves than of his theme. They carry away no stings with them-none of that fine humility, of that divine despair, which contemplation of nature's vastness and of man's littleness inevitably produces, and yet which never fails afterwards to excite genuine aspiration. From hearing Professor Nichol, you come home with but one thought, the grandeur of his subject; in which almost the thought of the lecturer has been lost, to which he has but served meekly to point, like the rod which he holds in his hand. In hearing Samuel Brown you have a similar feeling, blended, however, owing to his youth, with still more admiration for the man, who, at such an age, seems conversant with mysteries so profound, as if he had commenced his stu

dics in an ante-natal state of being. The masterly ease, selfpossession, clearness, interest, and fluency of Mr. Dawson's talk, give you an hour's, or perchance a night's pleasure, and that is all; for, indeed, he is rather a talker than a teacher. To those who have read Carlyle's Miscellanies and other works, he tells nothing new; and those who have not, are in general more amused by the novel and vivid illustrations, than impressed and subdued by what to them ought to be the startling truths. The enthusiast alone can teach, because he alone can feel up to that point where feeling overflows, burning, and sometimes scalding into other minds. Mr. Dawson may be, we trust is, at heart, a sincere man, but he is not an enthusiast; he has no self-forgetfulness, no rapt emotion of any kind; he manages his instrument but too dexterously, and too consciously well. We have no conception what he can have made of Switzerland-what shape its rocks, torrents, and glaciers have assumed in his mind-what gingerbread cast of the Alps he has contrived to form, or how his essentially cold and clever style has managed to rise to cope with the magnificent field. Were there any barn-fowl flutterings, any ghastly contortions of imaginative penury and weakness? or did he, as we rather suspect, with his wonted tact, avoid the grander features of his subject, and turn aside into paths equally pleasing, less hackneyed, and for him less dangerous? Let our Glasgow friends, who heard him on this subject, answer the question. Altogether, Mr. Dawson's mission seems to us exceedingly uncertain, both as to its purpose and its probable results. We do not see any distinct reason or call why he should have separated himself to that gospel of negations which he preaches. We have asked him already, what is he? we ask him now what he wishes us to be? A man who has started from the ranks, who has done so as if in obedience to a voice, "Come out, and be thou separate," ought to be able to tell with some explicitness what he would give us in exchange for what we are in effect required to resign. But "story," like the knifegrinder, "he has none to tell, sir." He offers, it is true, relief to doubters-nay, builds a chapel for them, and calls it by the unpretending name, the "Church of the Saviour;" but in truth his teaching only adds fire to fever, and seems to us a masterly machinery for creating or confirm

ing doubt. We grant him readily that doubters-the most interesting and one of the most numerous of classes of men in the present day, including, not now as formerly, merely the vain and the vicious, but many of the sincere, the intelligent, the virtuous and the humble-including, especially, so many of the young and rising spirits of the time

are not sufficiently attended to in the daily ministrations. Their feelings are not respected, their questions are not fairly answered, their motives and characters are misrepresented, their doubts are flung back unresolved, contemptuously, in their face; and hence, many of them are carrying their questions to other oracles, and getting their Gordian knots cut by other swords than that of the Spirit.*

But let those who have done, repair the injury. Let the various churches of the country set to work with greater zeal, with greater unanimity, and, above all, with greater intelligence, and greater charity, to attend to this most important and neglected class. Let them not dream that merely to abuse Germanism is to answer it. Let them no longer waste their strength and breath in calling Carlyle or Emerson by hard names. Let them demonstrate that their charges against Christianity as dead, are untrue, by showing that its ancient spirit is still alive. Let them remember that the front of skeptical battle is changed since the days of Voltaire and Volney-that the character of the leaders is changed too-and that there must be a corresponding change in the tactics of Christian defenders. Such books as Paley, Watson, Hall on Modern Infidelity, or Olinthus Gregory, the leviathan of German skepticism takes up but as straw or rotten wood. They split upon his adamantine scales. The onset of Paine and Volney was from below-from the hell of mean passions, politics, and low conceptions of man; the onset of the German philosophers is from above-from the height of transcendental thought. From a higher eminence ought their onset to be repelled. Dr. Chalmers, from that lofty watch-tower which he occupied, and round which, alas! the shades of evening were gathering fast, saw the big

*We refer our readers for a more particular elucidation of our views on this subject, to our subsequent paper on Sterling.