Biblical Inspiration, as tested by a careful examination of the Septuagint Version, with special reference to the sanction given to it by the Apostles, and to its variations, by way of addition and omission, from the received text of the Canonical Scriptures.' The conclusions of such an investigation would be worth a hundred eager declamations on one side or the other, and would be absolutely decisive of the chief questions at issue."

The Life of Mrs. Cameron: partly an Autobiography, and from her Private Journals, &c.; author of the "Two Lambs," "Margaret Whyle," &c. Edited by her eldest Son. London: Darton & Co.Mrs. Cameron was a pious gentlewoman, a clergyman's wife of the old school, which, in many important points, was by no means inferior to the new one. Clerical ladies were then much less useful in the parish, but perhaps more useful in the parsonage-house. There is an excess on both sides; and we doubt whether many a clergyman does not suffer more in his family from the over-taxed devotion of his wife to schools, and district-visiting societies, and missionary-working parties, and clothing-clubs, and twenty other benevolent objects which are gliding from our pen, than the church will gain by the record of her usc ful life, and premature, though, no doubt, very happy death; published in a volume after the most approved style, and set off with a preface by some excellent clergyman, who tells us he knew nothing of the dear deceased, but hopes the book will sell, since he is informed she was an excellent person, and the profits are to be given to an excellent charity.

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To speak seriously the work which an exacting religious public demands, not only from a clergyman, but from his wife too, is a serious evil. It is unscriptural. A clergyman's wife ought to find her most important pursuits at home, and there she ought chiefly to be found; or else St. Paul gave Timothy and Titus instructions on such matters no longer applicable. We do not mean to argue that all her labours are to be confined within these limits, but we do maintain that this is her world; and that when she steps beyond it to labour in a wider sphere, it should never be at the expense either of home duties neglected or health sacrificed. In short, we want a division of labour. Laymen and lay women ought to do the work which is now thrown exclusively upon the overburdened pastor, and his often still more overburdened wife.

Mrs. Cameron lived in the remote days of King George III. She was the sister of Mrs. Sherwood, and we are told that "all Mrs. Sherwood's early books were sent in manuscript to her sister for correction and publication. Henry and his Bearer' came, beautifully written, in one letter, and owed much of its divinity to its English correction." It would have been well if Mrs. Sherwood had submitted her later writings also to her wiser sister's revision. They would probably have been free from some of those errors, both of taste and doctrine, which deface them, and make them worse than useless.

We meet with occasional passages in this little volume which show us that for some time after she became an earnest Christian Mrs. Cameron was not free from the bondage of the law. But her light shone more and more unto the perfect day. "I would lay hold," she

says, in one of the last pages of the volume, "of those texts which assure me that Christ will never let His sheep perish without regarding the inferences which some persons draw from them. I have certainly been deterred from doing this by the sad misrepresentations of some who take away all the responsibility of man in his rejection of Christ, and cast it upon God. An awful denial of my Father's name of love!" On the same page we meet with this remark, with which we conclude our notice of a very pleasant book: "On visiting a Tractarian church in Oxford, I confess that the monotonous reading of the Scriptures was not to be endured, because it really rendered the reading of the lessons almost a dead letter. The church was hung about with endless childish vanities, and the impression left on my mind was, that an effort was being made to change the simple character of the New Testament minister into the high priest of the old dispensation-and a very bad imitation, too."

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Suggestions on Popular Education. By Nassau W. Senior, one of the Commissioners appointed to inquire into the state of Popular Education in England. London: John Murray. 1861.- Our readers, like ourselves, are no doubt by this time heartily weary "suggestions on popular education." A royal commission has sat; another blue book has been printed; a heavy expense has been incurred; a great number of facts and a great number of opinions, wise and unwise, have been collected; and having said this, we have said all that can be said. The royal commission is allowed to be a failure; its suggestions are, some of them, mischievous, some of them unimportant, some of them contradictory to the positions which the commissioners themselves lay down. If our readers think that we are dealing with the Report in too sweeping a manner, let them lay out a single sixpence on a pamphlet of eleven pages of which the title is this:"Remarks on some portions of the Report of the Royal Commission on Education. London 1861." It emanates from a Committee appointed April 19th, 1860, "to watch proceedings in parliament in reference to the grants for national education." Of this committee the duke of Marlborough is chairman, and J. C. Colquhoun, Esq., deputy chairman.

Mr. Senior was one of the commissioners; and in this volume he gives us those of his own views in which he differed from his colleagues, as well as several papers which he submitted to them, some of which were adopted and others rejected. Mr. Senior's book appears to us the most valuable result which the public are likely to obtain from the appointment of this commission. Of education, however, we are not about to speak, except that we may quote a single sentence which we do in order to express our perfect concurrence. It is that which recommends that no child should be hired out for service of any kind until it is provided with a certificate from a schoolmaster duly licensed by government that it can both read and write, or that it has been at school for at least one hundred and seventy-four days during the previous year. How much this implies none can tell except those who have given attention to the subject of infant labour. Mr. Senior gives an array of cases of cruelty to children, mere infants, engaged in labour in our various manufactures, which is truly horrible. The recital is

sickening; and yet these are pages which ought to be read. That they may be read is one great reason why we draw attention to the volume :

"We look with shame and indignation upon the pictures of American slavery; but I firmly believe that the children on the worst managed plantations are less overworked, less tortured, better fed, and quite as well instructed as the unhappy infants, whose early and long-continued labour occasions the fabulous cheapness of our hardware and our lace, and whose wages feed the intemperance of their parents.......

"But the class of whom I am now speaking, the population which in infancy and from infancy works every day, and all day long, is necessarily uneducated. Those who were the children of 1843 are the parents of 1860. I will extract from the report of Mr. Horne, one of the assistant commissioners on the Children's Employment Commission, a portion of his description of the children in Wolverhampton

and Willenhall :

"Putting together all that I elicited from various witnesses, and all that fell under my own observation, I am obliged to come to the conclusion that the moral virtues of the great majority of the children are as few in number and as feeble in practice as can well be conceived of those who are born in a civilized country, surrounded by religious and educational institutions, and by individuals anxious for the improvement of the condition of the working classes.'" (pp. 212, 213.)

"I do not believe that the cruelties, which I have rather alluded

to than described, can be repressed by any half measure. It is of no use to forbid undue or unmerited torture. Who is to be the judge, and to whom can the complaint be made? All bodily infliction on a child or a young person must be made a misdemeanor, and the remedy must be summary. Real offences on the part of the child or young person must be punishable by the magistrate.

"The Poor Law Board require the master to teach the apprentice his trade, and to allow him to attend some place of divine worship, and, if his parents require it, a Sunday-school. But they prescribe no other education, nor do they limit the hours of labour.

"These are, I think, omissions. In every apprenticeship, and in every hiring, except for the purposes of agricultural labour or mere domestic service, the hours of labour should be limited on the principle of the Factory Acts; so many for children under thirteen, so many for young persons under eighteen.

"I should like to add a provision that children under thirteen shall attend an inspected school, either every day, or at least for three days in every week. At present few apprentices or children engaged in trades or manufactures not under the Factory or Printworks Acts get any schooling whatever, except, in a few cases, that of the inefficient Sunday school.

"The 42 Geo. III. c. 73, introduced by one of our most eminent manufacturers, the first sir Robert Peel, contained, as will be recollected, a clause ordering every apprentice in a cotton or woollen factory to be instructed at the expense of his master in reading, writing, and arithmetic.

"It is also ordered that every such apprentice should for one hour at least in every week be instructed and examined in the principles of the Christian religion by some proper person to be provided and paid by his master; that he should be taken once at least in every year to be examined by the rector, vicar, or curate, and at the age of fourteen be duly prepared for confirmation. Sir Robert Peel, therefore, was willing to assume himself, and to throw on all the cotton and woollen factory occupiers, the whole responsibility of providing and enforcing the secular and religious education of their apprentices.

"There may be a difficulty in requiring attendance at school by agricultural children in some parts of the year, but I do not believe that there would be any in requiring such attendance by children employed in trades or manufactures.

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"My proposals may appear to be large, but we must recollect the magnitude of the evil to be combated and of the object to be attained. If that evil were merely the misery of some hundreds of thousands of infants, children, and young persons for ten or fifteen years, a misery followed by no further ill consequences, the abating it would still be a glorious object. But the evil to be destroyed and the good to be obtained are immeasurably greater. The misery endured by one generation is not temporary; it reproduces itself in the next. The brutally treated children of 1823 became the brutal parents of 1843. The brutally treated children of 1843 are, I repeat, the brutal parents

of 1860.

"The mischief goes on, extending, and diffusing, and perpetuating itself with the increase of our town population and of our hand-work manufacturers. To masters and parents, such as they have been described, we propose to extend the franchise. They already legislate through the trades' unions. If the next generation should encounter difficult times, what will be the political conduct of those whose only experience of power has been as an instrument of evil, who have never been protected or restrained by it, who have passed from a youth of abject slavery to a manhood of unresisted tyranny?

"The Children's Employment Commissioners close their report almost in despair. From the whole body of evidence,' they say, 'it appears that there are at present in existence no means adequate to effect any material and general improvement in the physical and moral condition of the children and young persons employed in labour.'

"Are we also to look at the constantly increasing evil and danger in hopeless inactivity? If a remedy is to be applied, what measures short of those which I have suggested will be adequate?" (pp. 240— 242.)

But we have no space and no heart to pursue the subject. May God send in His mercy a better mind both to the parents of these poor children, and to those who live upon their toil; for, till then, the case is hopeless.

PUBLIC AFFAIRS.

THE proceedings of Parliament have not been without interest during the month past. A Bill has been brought into the house of commons for disposing of the four seats vacant by the disfranchised boroughs. One of them is given to Birkenhead, the great suburb, or rather Southwark, of Liverpool, though Chelsea and Kensington contended for the prize. The decision seems to have given general satisfaction, on the broad ground that the metropolis is sufficiently represented, and that the interests of the greatest commercial seaport in the world require a third member, which Manchester including Salford has long possessed. The three remaining seats will probably be given before these sheets are dry-one to Lancashire, and two to Yorkshire. There is evidently a growing dislike to civic constituencies. Great towns have always boasted of higher civilization; they have been considered as the homes of liberty, the great centres of free thought. How is it that, with a few exceptions, they scarcely ever return a statesman to the house of commons? The fact is notorious, and is not denied either within the walls of the house or beyond them. Is it that town constituencies have too selfish a regard to local interests, and seek their representatives amongst the class of senators who will condescend to be little more than delegates? The subject deserves attention, not only in the house of commons, but in town councils, and from those whose position gives them weight in the borough politics of England.

On a third reading of sir John Trelawney's Bill for the Abolition of Church-rates, a parliamentary phenomenon occurred which does not return more than once or twice in a century. The numbers on each side, in a very full house, were equal-274 voting for, and 274 against, the measure. The speaker gave his casting-vote with the Noes, so that the bill does not go up to the house of lords; where, however, it would certainly have been rejected. An attempt, probably a last attempt, at a compromise had been made by Mr. S. Estcourt. It conceded more than we think it would have been safe to yield-more than we should have been disposed to yield if the principle of a church-rate must be maintained. And we feel no disposition to part with it; now that the leaders of the nonconformists avow their determination to be satisfied with nothing else than their total abolition; while the political dissenters of the Liberation Society, with Mr. Miall for their spokesman, tell us that it is "their sacred mission to shatter the established church, and give the dust of it to the four winds of heaven." Deprived of the motive for concession grounded on an earnest desire to conciliate dissenters and to put an end to a vexatious strife, churchmen have really no reason left for consenting to the abolition of church-rates. They are honestly informed that the ditch is to be drained, only in order that the fortress may be more easily assaulted. They may think the ditch not worth contending for; but if fight they must, they may choose their own ground: they may as well fight for the ditch as for the rampart. This argument, it is