The Atlantic Monthly, page 229 by Various Authors
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taught To avenge a fancied guilt by deeper guilt,-- Death at the stake to those that held them not. Lo, the foul phantoms, silent in the gloom Of the flown ages, part to yield thee room.
I see the better years that hasten by Carry thee back into that shadowy past, Where, in the dusty spaces, void and vast, The graves of those whom thou hast murdered lie. The slave-pen, through whose door Thy victims pass no more, Is there, and there shall the grim block remain At which the slave was sold; while at thy feet Scourges and engines of restraint and pain Moulder and rust by thine eternal seat. There, 'mid the symbols that proclaim thy crimes, Dwell thou, a warning to the coming times.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
Ecce Homo: a Survey of the Life and Work of Jesus Christ. Boston: Roberts Brothers.
The merits of this book are popular and obvious, consisting in a strain of liberal, enlightened sentiment, an ingenious and original cast of thought, and a painstaking lucidity of style which leaves the writer's meaning even prosaically plain. There is a good deal of absurd and even puerile exegesis in its pages, which makes you wonder how so much sentimentality can co-exist with so much ability; but the book is vitiated for all purposes beyond mere literary entertainment by one grand defect, which is the guarded theologic obscurity the writer keeps up, or the attempt he makes to estimate Christianity apart from all question of the truth or falsity of Christ's personal pretensions towards God. The author may have reached in his own mind the most definite theologic convictions, but he sedulously withholds them from his reader; and the consequence is, that the book awakens and satisfies no intellectual interest in the latter, but remains at best a curious literary speculation. For what men have always been moved by in Christianity is not so much the superiority of its moral inculcations to those of other faiths, as its uncompromising pretension to be a final or absolute religion. If