THE VARIETIES OF HUMAN CHARACTER.* WHATEVER may be the number of evils in the mundane system, we suppose no man will account it one of them, that in each class of beings that have many general principles of constitution in common, there should be found individuals strikingly contrasted with one another; that there should be laburnums and woodbines as well as oaks-peacocks as well as eagles antelopes as well as camels and elephants-and Chateaubriand as well as Paley. There is yet room in the system for them all; and there are offices and occupations for them all to fill, and which can be filled by each respectively in a far better manner than by the opposite entities. Let them only avoid mixing and exchanging their vocations, and the economy will go on commodiously.

CHARACTER OF M. CHATEAUBRIAND.

We think M. Chateaubriand has fully made good his claims to a place in our fine portion of the creation; that he has fallen into the right district of it; that his activity in it has been most laudably, indeed almost heroically, zealous ; and that he has transgressed his proper limits only about as much as is commonly incident to the self-deception and ambition of mortals, even when their intentions are the best.

He is a singular and interesting man; so sincere, so tender, so impassioned, so enthusiastic, so imaginative, that we admit him among our friends, with less of the cold inquiry and calculation what good he is likely to do us, and among men of genius, with less disposition to put his judgment to any severe proof, than we should entertain in almost any other instance. It is gratifying, too, and excites a strong partiality, that a French infidel of genius should become a Christian almost of any kind, and on any terms. And, provided the simplicity and sincerity of his principles be not injuriously affected by his success, we are pleased that one reward of his honesty and courage has been such a popularity, in France, of his services to a good cause, as to outrival and mortify the base fraternity that he has deserted. The Beauties of Christianity. By F. A. De Chateaubriand. 8vo. Three vols.

1813.

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His own account, however, of this happy separation, will serve to apprise his pupils that they are not to attend him for the acquisition of logic, and his admirers that they must beware of proclaiming him for a philosopher.

"My religious opinions have not always been the same they are at present. Öffended by the abuses of some institutions, and the vices of some men, I was formerly betrayed into declamation and sophistical arguments against Christianity. I might throw the blame upon my youth, upon the madness of the revolutionary times, and upon the company I kept: but I wish rather to condemn myself, for I do not know how to defend what is indefensible. I will only relate simply the manner in which Divine Providence was pleased to call me back to my duty.

"My mother, after having been thrown at seventy-two years of age into a dungeon, where she was an eye-witness of the destruction of some of her children, expired at last upon a pallet, to which her misfortunes had reduced her. The remembrance of my errors diffused great bitterness over her last days. In her dying moments, she charged one of my sisters to call me back to that religion in which I had been brought up. My sister, faithful to her solemn trust, communicated to me the last request of my mother. When her letter reached me beyond the seas, far distant from my native country, my sister was no more; she had died in consequence of the rigours of her imprisonment. These two voices issuing from the tomb, this death which served as the interpreter of death, struck me with irresistible force. I became a Christian. I did not yield, I allow, to great supernatural illumiuations, but my conviction of the truth of Christianity sprung from the heart. I wept, and I believed."

DESIGN OF "THE BEAUTIES OF CHRISTIANITY." This work was an earlier performance than either his Itinerary," or "The Martyrs," though it comes later into the English language. The author had contemplated with grief the great practical victory gained over Christianity, in his native country, by the philosophic, the lettered, and the unlettered wits, with Voltaire at their head. He had observed the inefficacy of the vindications of the Christian religion on the ground of historical evidence; vindications so numerous and so conclusive that the argument appeared to him incapable, on that side, of any material addition. But the infidels had rendered these defences in a great measure unavailing, by withdrawing their attacks from that impregnable side, and occupying and seducing the popular

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mind with a misrepresented, degraded character of the religion. They laboriously defamed it as something mean and barbarous, destructively opposed to all the graces, repressive of genius, estranged from magnificence and sublimity, and congenial with all the harsher principles of the human nature. Here, then, was the ground for its advocate. He considered all this as the direct reverse of truth, and planned a work to prove that Christianity must be of Divine origin, because it is allied and auspicious to everything that even the wits and geniuses themselves must acknowledge to be graceful, and liberal, and dignified, and grand.

"Four parts, each divided into six books, compose the whole work. The first treats of the tenets and doctrines: the second and third comprehend the poetic of Christianity, or the connexion of Christianity with literature and the arts: the fourth contains the worship, that is to say, whatever relates to the ceremonies of the church, and to the clergy both secular and regular.”

DEFECTS IN CHATEAUBRIAND'S SCHEME OF THEOLOGY.

From a prospectus indicating such width in the compass of the subject, the reader must indeed begin to apprehend that the Christian religion has many associations not commonly taken into account by its disciples. If the work were coming among us with some authoritative prescription, appointing it (as might be done in the author's country, if the master so pleased) to be the text-book of divinity in the colleges and academies, enjoining it to be read in schools, and placed on the table of every vestry, and exacting some pledge of coinciding with it from the teachers of religion, there would be an inconceivable alarm throughout the religious portion of our community. That our sober theological course through catechisms, compendiums, a few standard volumes of sermons, with a few treatises on the church, on ordinances, and severally on the few leading topics of religion-crowned possibly with a quarto, or even a folio body of divinity-that this plain quiet progress should be suddenly turned into a vast adventure of what may be denominated intellectual foreign travel; into a rhapsodical, poetical, romantic excursion through all science, history, polite literature, and arts; and that among the temporary residences for study in so many regions, a rather protracted one should be in the

schools of the distinguished painters and statuaries; this would awaken us with a vengeance; this would be as capital a rousing almost as that given to the Christian world by Luther. The more aged, austere, and jealously orthodox of our instructed believers, who have long settled their system of opinions, would be moved with an indignation which we hope no sanction of civil or ecclesiastical power would be able to intimidate into silence. And we should suppose that the youngest, the most inquisitive, the most lax, or the most liberal among us, would feel no small degree of hesitation and apprehension at the view of such an innovation.

We cannot pretend to give anything like a methodical account of a work so multifarious, and itself so destitute of any real method, though it is cast into books and sections. All we shall attempt will be some very slight notices.

PHILOSOPHIC INQUIRIES INTO THE TRINITY.

The chapters on the Trinity are singularly crude, fanciful, and ineffective. It is wonderful that a man so learned, and so zealous to reclaim unbelievers, could persuade himself to demand the submission of their understandings to such reasonings.

The Trinity," he says, "opens an immense field for philosophic studies, whether we consider it in the attributes of God, or collect the vestiges of this dogma diffused throughout the ancient East for so far from being the invention of a modern age, it bears that antique stamp which imparts exquisite beauty to everything upon which it is impressed."

He follows the traces of the doctrine, or an analogous doctrine, among various ancient and modern heathens, and quotes from Bossuet and Tertullian some obscure and unavailing attempts at explaining the mystery; or at least to show why it may rationally be believed independently of evidence from divine revelation. This, though most honestly intended on the part of our author, is an injudicious, and, in effect, treacherous way of defending the doctrine. When

the appeal to the reason and to the taste of unbelievers, in favour of a Christian doctrine, is rested on dogmas and dreams of the Grecian, Persian, or Indian schools of philosophy, it will soon be seen how light they will make of the wisdom of those schools, though they might have been

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talking of it with affected reverence or rapture a moment before. He had better have entirely let the subject alone, if, while he was bringing so many unexceptional corroboratives and illustrations of other Christian doctrines from the scenes of nature and the structure and sentiments of the human mind, he could not venture to demand for one doctrine a submissive, unspeculating faith, on the pure exclusive authority of that revelation which he was doing so much to establish as a communication from the Deity. We repeat, however, that there is evidently nothing insidious in his vindication of the doctrine. He adverts to it in other parts of the work with the unquestionable signs of sincere belief. But his belief is accompanied by the fantastic adjunct which has injured its sobriety and simplicity in the writings of some of our own divines, the notion of a certain Trinity to be descried also in the system of nature, and in the constitution of man.

The chapter on Redemption asserts, in plain language, the fall and depravity of man; but this is almost all that is plain in it, excepting a just and very pointed reproach of the unreasonable and disingenuous conduct of the infidels, who, if you offer them animated images and sentiments, hear them with scorn, and are all for arguments: and then, if you accordingly begin to argue, are just as loud for something animated, interesting, eloquent.

CARELESS EXPRESSIONS IN THEOLOGICAL WRITING.

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There are the strange expressions, affirmatively used, of "God dying," "God expiring for sinners ;" and there is such an unaccountably careless sentence as this, "Without pretending to decide in this place whether God is right or wrong in making us sureties for each other, all that we know is," &c. That it is the language of Massillon is taken as a sufficient warrant for saying, that there were accumulated upon head of Christ all the physical torments that might be supposed to attend the punishment of all the sins committed since the beginning of time, and all the moral anguish, all the remorse, which sinners must have experienced for crimes committed." It is said that "Christ was born of a virgin that he might not partake of original sin." In the most monstrous style of French rhetoric, man, as originally created, is actually called the "sovereign of the universe." Death is pronounced