Beside the topics of thought treated of in this volume, it suggests incidentally many others of peculiar interest.  As an indication of the present condition of English scholarship, it is full of encouragement for the future.  For more than a century there has been very little deep, original, and productive study of the Scriptures in England.  A new impulse has now been given to it.  What will be its effect, and the effect of the liberalized and more tolerant spirit of which it is a proof, upon the constitution of the English Church can be foreseen but in part.  It is certain that it must lead to great changes, and to a virtual breaking-down of many of the most confining sectarian barriers.  No Articles and no Creeds can stand for many generations as the authoritative expressions of belief, after the character of the compulsion which they exercise is understood, after the history of sectarian differences is fairly stated, after the interpretation of Scripture is placed upon a sound basis, and the nature of Christianity and the object of the teachings of Christ are thus brought home to the intellects and the hearts of men.

A Journey in the Back-Country.  By FREDERICK LAW OLMSTED. Author of “A Journey in the Seaboard Slave-States,” “A Journey in Texas,” “Walks and Talks of an American Farmer in England,” etc.  New York:  Mason Brothers. 1860. pp. xvi., 492.

Mr. Olmsted is no ordinary traveller for amusement or adventure.  He leaves home to instruct himself through his own eyes and ears concerning matters of general interest about which no trustworthy information was to be found in books.  Looking at Slavery merely as an economist, with no political or moral prepossessions to mislead his judgment, he went to study for himself its workings and results as a form of labor, we might almost say, so cool-headed is he, as an application of forces, rather than as a social or political phenomenon.  Self-possessed and wary, almost provokingly unsympathetic in his report of what he saw, pronouncing no judgment on isolated facts, and drawing no undue inferences from them, he has now generalized his results in a most interesting and valuable book.  No more important contributions to contemporary American history have been made than in this volume and the two that preceded it.  We know of no book that offers a parallel to them, except Arthur Young’s “Travels in France.”  To discuss the question of Slavery without passion or even sentiment seemed an impossibility; yet Mr. Olmsted has shown that it can be done, and, having no theory to bolster, has contrived to tell us what he saw, and not what he went to see,—­the rarest achievement among travellers.  Without the charm of style, he has the truthfulness of Herodotus.