seen.

And a bigot, he simply tells us, "is a man devoted to a certain party." More zealous and absolute devotedness to party and to party measures, and those of the rankest kind, we have never In religion, it is, (where it has indeed been found before,) for the lowest Unitarianism;-in politics, for what in France was called jacobinism;-on abolition it is, for "the most straitest sect," and the most unflinching party measures. Wo betide the man or the woman, who swerves or wavers in any one of these matters. He can possess neither talents nor goodness. If this is not bigotry, neither we nor the lexicographers can tell what the thing is—unless, perchance, it be a term of reproach to be applied exclusively to evangelical and sober people!

Dr. Beecher, as we have before intimated, she seems to regard as about the worst of bigots. He opposes the catholics, and does not promote the right measures for emancipation, and he is also orthodox. Nor is she content with repeatedly putting the brand on his forehead. With a vengeance, (though without expressly naming them in the passage), she visits his transgressions on his daughters-whose talents and energy we should at least have supposed would shield them from the contempt, if not the hatred, of such a lover of female energy and enterprise.

"Revivals of religion," she of course abhors. But we shall not stop to quote her here.

Nor is she any more fond of the christian Sabbath as a day of worship. We must bear her a moment on this vital matter, though she has a pretty doleful story to tell, before she gets through, concerning both the desire and "the cowardice" of Our Miss Sedgwick, in regard to destroying that prime bulwark of vital religion and morality.

"The asceticism of America is much like that of every other place. It brings religion down to be ceremonial, constrained, anxious, and altogether divested of its free, generous, and joyous character. It fosters timid selfishness in some; and in others a precise proportion of reckless licentiousness. Its manifestations in Boston are as remarkable as in the strictest of Scotch towns. Youths in Boston, who work hard all the week, desire fresh air and exercise, and a sight of the country, on Sundays. The country must be reached over the long bridges before-mentioned, and the youths must ride to obtain their object. They have been brought up to think it a sin to take a ride on Sundays. Once having yielded, and being under a sense of transgression for a wholly fictitious offence, they rarely stop

there. They next join parties to smoke, and perhaps to drink, and so on. If they had but been brought up to know that the Sabbath, like all times and seasons, was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath; that their religion is in their state of mind, and not in the arrangement of their day, their Sabbaths would most probably have been spent as innocently as any other day.”—Vol. ii. p. 341.

This is in perfect accordance with all her teaching elsewhere, and with her practice, so far as she has seen fit, (rather ostentatiously sometimes), to publish it. For instance, she somewhere tells us how, on a Sabbath when in a steamboat on the Mississippi, she scorned to listen to a sermon which a minister on board was preaching, and preferred to be about something else. But we must return to the same page again, and hear her lecture to her admired and bosom friend, Miss Sedgwick, of the good puritanic town of Stockbridge, Mass.

"The author of 'Home' arranged the Sunday in her book, somewhat differently from the usual custom; describing the family whose home she pictured as spending the Sunday afternoon on the water, after a laborious week, and an attendance on public worship in the morning. Religious conversation was described as going on throughout the day. So much offence was taken at the idea of a Sunday sail, that the editor of the book requested the author to alter the chapter; the first print being proposed to be cancelled. I am sorry to say that she did alter it. If she was converted to the popular superstition, (which could scarcely be conceived), no more is to be said. If not, it was a matter of principle which she ought not to have yielded. If books are to be altered, an author's convictions to be unrepresented, to avoid shocking religious prejudices, there is a surrender, not only of the author's noblest prerogative, but of his highest duty."-p. 341. Note.

How Miss Sedgwick will relish this severe castigation and this more tremendous breach of confidence in revealing a bad secret which it had cost so much trouble and money to suppress, and all this, by a bosom friend whom she had so long welcomed in her village and at her home, we are not able to decide. We hope the loss of character, in the eye of her own New England, will not make her quite as reckless in her own future conduct or writings, as the Boston Sabbath-breakers become by their exposure on the bridges. If so, we must tremble at the appearance of her next book. But how could Miss M. be so inconsistent with the principle she had just noticed so strongly-and how could she be so ungrateful and cruel toward her admired

and confidential friend, as thus to expose and thus to tempt her! Or are we to understand all this, and all her revelations respecting her Boston friends, as only a sound and integral part of that improved code of human intercourse between Sabbathbreakers, which is to take the place of God's law?

However plausible may be the arguments, in some cases, for the violation of the Sabbath, and however insidious the attacks of those who hate its restraints, we confess we can regard the unblushing authors of such attacks, in no other light than that of the most dangerous enemies to human society on earth, and human felicity hereafter. Send young people off on a Sabbath excursion of pleasure, by land or water, and it matters little that you set them to conversing on religion. It will at best be but a blind-fold to their consciences-if it be not in fact such conversation as we find in the book before us, and fitted only to poison the very life of all conscience. And then for women openly to preach the desecration of the Sabbath; women, who owe to the benign and humanizing influence of the Puritan Sabbath, all the elevation they enjoy in England and this country above their degraded sisters of continental Europe and the rest of the world; for women, thus fostered and blessed by such a Sabbath, to lead the very van for its destruction, is but another instance where fact surpasses fiction and belies the common principles of our rational nature.

But there are other most serious changes in morals and religion, with which this reforming law-giver proposes to usher in the new reign of perfect freedom. The few we can stand to notice, respect chiefly the clergy, and their modes of influence. She laughs at their scruples about playing cards, and at that "Boston prudery" which prevents their attending the theatre.' "The clergy should dance, like others, as they have the same kind of bodies to be animated, and of minds to be exhilarated." She would have them change their whole demeanor, and mingle in all the gaities of fashionable life. Their present influence, she thinks most baneful. She would also have them mingle in all the political strifes of the day. Nay, they must engage eagerly in worldly pursuits. And that for the very purpose of making them like other worldly men, and no longer bigoted fools.' "The ascetic practice of taking care of one another's morals," and of minister's taking care of them as they do, alarms her exceedingly, and she is glad to find at least one minister to join her in devising a remedy.

"A most liberal-minded clergyman, a man as democratic in his religion, and as genial in his charity, as any layman in the land, remarked to me one day on the existence of this strong religious sensibility in the children of the Pilgrims, and asked me what I thought should be done to cherish and enlarge it, we having been alarming each other with the fear that it would be exasperated by the prevalent superstition, and become transmuted, in the next generation, to something very unlike religious sensibility. We proposed great changes in domestic and social habits: less formal religious observance in families, and more genial interest in the intellectual provinces of religion: more rational promotion of health, by living according to the laws of nature, which ordain bodily exercise and mental refreshment. We proposed that new temptations to walking, driving, boating, etc. should be prepared, and the delights of natural scenery laid open much more freely than they are; that social amusements of every kind should be encouraged, and all religious restraints upon speech and action removed in short, that spontaneousness should be reverenced and approved above all things, whatever form it may take."-p. 345.

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Symptoms of the breaking out of the true genial spirit of liberty were continually delighting me. A Unitarian clergyman, complaining of the superstition of the body to which he belonged, while they were perpetually referring to their comparative freedom, observed, "We are so bent on standing fast in our liberty, that we don't get on." Another remarked upon an eulogy bestowed on some one as a man and a Christian: "as if," said the speaker, "the Christian were the climax! as if it were not much more to be a man than a Christian!"-p. 346.

What a revealer of the secrets of some of the clergy! Let us now see what she says of the clergy as a mass.

"The American clergy are the most backward and timid class in the society in which they live; self-exiled from the great moral questions of the time; the least informed with true knowledge; the least efficient in virtuous action; the least conscious of that christian and republican freedom which, as the native atmosphere of piety and holiness, it is their prime duty to cherish and diffuse."-p. 353.

"Seeing what I have seen, I can come to no other conclusion than that the most guilty class of the community in regard to the slavery question at present is, not the slave-holding, nor even the mercantile, but the clerical: the most guilty, because not only are they not blinded by life-long custom and prejudice, nor by pecuniary interest, but they profess to spend their lives in the study of moral relations, and have pledged themselves to declare the whole counsel of God." -p. 356.

About all the good Miss Martineau thinks the clergy can do, is to preach such things as abolitionism and women's rights; and these, alas, they will not do. In the notice we have occasionally taken of this woman's abolition principles, it will not be understood that we design at all to meddle with this question as a party matter among ourselves. She as a foreigner seems to suppose, (absurdly enough,) that all who oppose a certain set of measures for abolition, are either hostile or cold towards the cause of emancipation.

Though she considers "the American clergy the least informed with true knowledge," still, so far as religious science is concerned, the acting pastors are spoiled by knowing too much. They should know nothing of it. The scientific study and popular administration of religion," she mournfully says, "have not only been confided to the same persons, but actually mixed up and confounded in the heads and hands of those persons." She would have a few recluses study the doctrines of religion, though it would unfit them for the pastoral work. But the pastors, the preachers of religion, (or rather of politics,) should study the politics and the exciting topics of the day,should know how to play at cards, and to dance, and to grace the drawing rooms;-but should not dream of entering the chamber of sickness, or the house of mourning, except it be the hovel of extreme poverty! She ridicules a minister for attempting to console a bereaved mother; but we must omit the passage and give only the following short one.

"Over those who consider the clergy' faithful guardians,' their influence, as far as it is professional, is bad: as far as it is that of friendship or acquaintanceship, it is according to the characters of the men. I am disposed to think ill of the effects of the practice of parochial visiting, except in cases of poor and afflicted persons, who have little other resource of human sympathy. I cannot enlarge upon the disagreeable subject of the devotion of the ladies to the clergy. I believe there is no liberal-minded minister who does not see, and too sensibly feel, the evil of women being driven back upon religion as a resource against vacuity; and of there being a professional class to administer it. Some of the most sensible and religious elderly women I know in America speak, with a strength which evinces strong conviction, of the mischief to their sex of ministers entering the profession young and poor, and with a great enthusiasm for parochial visiting. There is no very wide difference between the auricular confession of the catholic church, and the spiritual confidence reposed in ministers the most devoted to visiting