Short Notices [pp. 567-576]

Short Notices.[
Lessons Aboutt Salvation; from the Life and Words of the Lord Jesus.
Being a Second Series of Plantation Sermons. By the Rev. A. F. Dickson,
Orangeburg, S. C. Philadplphia: Presbyterian Board of Publication,
821 Chestnut street. Pp. 264.
These simple discourses are well adapted for the instruction
of the class of persons for whom they were intended.
Seed-Time and Harvest of Ragged Schools. By Thomas Guthrie, D. D.
New York: Robert Carter & Brothers, No. 530 Broadway. 1860.
The religious education of the poor, particularly in our large
cities, is the grand necessity of our age and country. The
mass of the population in such great centres is growing up in
heathenism or worse. In Europe, among Protestants on the
Continent, the law provides for this great object. Scarcely a
bare-footed boy in Berlin can be found who cannot read and
write, repeat Luther's Catechism, and give a good account of
the facts and doctrines of the Bible. Here men are without
law in this matter. Whatever Christians and philanthropists
can do to supply this great need by voluntary and systematic
effort, it becomes them to do with their might, for the evil,
actual and prospective, is portentous.
The Divine Purpose Explained, or All Things Decreed; yet Evil not
caused, nor Moral Freedom impaired, and the Glory of God the end of
all. By the Rev. George Morton. Philadelphia: Joseph M. Wilson.
The high themes here discussed have never ceased to enlist
the interest, and task the powers of all grades of thinkers.
They involve an insoluble element which men never tire of
attempting to solve. Even among those who agree as to the
essential truths concerned, and accept the Calvinistic system,
considerable diversity obtains as to their methods of explaining
and vindicating them, and still more as to how far the problems presented by the existence of evil admit of any rational
solution, i. e., whether the facts and truths on this subject,
which are undeniably proved, can, with any light at command
in this world, be explicated, on all sides, to the perfect satisfaction of mere human reason. Among the great mass of
Calvinistic divines, however, the following points may be considered as established and catholic, and all contrary opinions
exceptional and casual. 1. That God is absolutely sovereign,
and hath foreordained all events, including the acts of free
agents. 2. That man is absolutely free in all his acts, which
are thus pre-appointed. 3. That man is the immediate cause
or efficient of his own acts. 4. That these acts are determined
as to matter and quality by the motives, i. e. the desires and
dispositions which prompt them. 5. That God is the efficient
cause of all holy desires and dispositions, and controls the
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