like the infancy of human beings, may require protection, even though their adult vigor could be safely left to take care of itself.  Suppose it conceded that this protection is at first costly.  So are the cradle and the nursery.  Yet it may be that they “pay” in the end.  Nay, as the cradle may enrich the household through the new incentives to labor and frugality which it supplies, so protections of industry may evoke new industrial powers, and thus at once begin to enrich the nation, though the capital which supports these fresh industries could not at first hold its own, as against other capital, without the motherly cares it receives.

But enough.  Here is a book on a matter of large and immediate importance, put forth by one of the amplest and soundest minds of our time,—­a man so long-headed and clear-hearted, so able and intrepid to think, to speak, and to hear correction, so intent upon high ends and so calmly patient upon the way, that the public can neglect his thought only by a criminal neglect of its own interests.

A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life.  With a Complete Bibliography of the Subject. By WILLIAM ROUNSEVILLE ALGER.  Philadelphia:  Geo. W. Childs.

Few “signs of the times” are more significant than the disposition shown on all sides to scrutinize and interpret the spiritual history of mankind.  Lessing, Schlegel, Herder, Hegel, Guizot, Buckle, and others, endeavor, with various degrees of ambition and success, to estimate history considered as a progress; Carlyle in his “Heroes” and Emerson in the “Representative Men” regard it rather as a permanence, and seek to present its value in typical forms; meanwhile the Bibles and mythologies of the old world are collected, translated, subjected to interpretative study; and the critical scholarship of our time is almost wholly engaged in an endeavor either to arrive at the exact text or at the precise value of all the ancient literatures.

All men have at length discovered that the history of mankind means something, and are naturally intent on learning what it means.  No one now regards it as a mere Devil’s phantasmagoria, significant of nothing but Adam’s sin in the Garden.  However differing on other points, we all now perceive that the history of the mind of man is a more interior history of the universe,—­that it must be studied, in the most earnest and reverential spirit of science,—­that what Astronomy seeks to do in the heavens and Geology on the earth must be done in the realms of the mind itself,—­and that, till we have found our Copernicus and our Newton of the human soul, modern science lingers in the porch, and does not find access to the temple.  We all see that this history, not indeed as to the succession of its outward events, but as to its interior reality, must be grounded in the eternal truth and necessity of the universe.  What wonder, that, having been so fully penetrated by the scientific spirit, modern minds should look with great longing toward these earths and skies of human history, coveting some knowledge of the law by which the thoughts and faiths of man perform their courses?