BEECHER ON INTEMPERANCE.

Showing the nature, occasions, signs, evils, and remedy of Intemperance. Though written at the commencement of the Temperance reformation, these discourses, in portraying the various bearings of the sin, and in powerful appeal, equal any thing that has since appeared.

DR. EDWARDS' TEMPERANCE MANUAL. The author of this standard treatise was one of the first movers in the Temperance reformation, and has been familiar with its history to the present time. At its commencement he labored seven years, visiting different parts of the country, and spreading out the reasons why all men should abstain from the use, as a beverage, of intoxicating liquors, and from the traffic in them. He also collected numerous facts, which were embodied in a volume of "Permanent Temperance Documents," which has been widely circulated, and translated into seven of the languages of Europe. The Manual is a dense concentration of the principles and facts on the subject of Temperance, as adapted to the present time; showing, with great clearness and force, the immorality of the use of intoxicating liquors as a beverage, and of the traffic in them for that purpose. No family or young man in the United States should be without it.

DR. EDWARDS' SABBATH MANUAL.

The first Part of this work shows that the sabbatical arrangement has its foundation in the nature and relations of things, and that the fourth commandment is an expression of the moral obligation which thence arises, and is

binding upon the whole human family. The second Part shows that the day which has ordinarily been kept by the Christian church as the Sabbath, is the day which God, in his word and his providence, has clearly shown that it is his will should be so kept by all people to the end of the world. The third Part exhibits the Sabbath as a Family Institution, and shows its influence upon children while under the care of their parents, and on young men, in that most dangerous of all periods, from the time they leave their father's house to the time they become heads of families. The fourth Part shows the proper mode of keeping the Sabbath, in respect to business, travelling, and the various ways in which men are tempted to profane the day.

BURDER'S SERMONS TO THE AGED.

Twelve sermons, in large type, on topics specially appropriate to the spiritual benefit and consolation of those in advanced years.

THE BOATSWAIN'S MATE.

A work adapted to gain the attention of seamen, in the form of dialogue and narrative, and which has been in demand among that large class of readers.

THE SET OF BOUND TRACTS.

Every one of the more than five hundred treatises embraced in these neat and attractive volumes has been selected and prepared with great care. They contain the most able discussions of important topics throughout the whole range of practical truth and duty; the most

touching and instructive authentic narratives, and portions adapted to all ages and classes of readers, embodying an amount of mature and condensed thought probably not to be found, on kindred subjects and within the same compass, in the works of any one author of any age. This set forms an invaluable library for a family, the children of which will be found repairing to it from week to week, and year to year, as if it contained mines of entertainment that could never be exhausted.

VOLUMES FOR THE YOUNG.

Among the most responsible and useful departments of the Society's labors is the providing of books for the young, which shall interest and instruct, without cherishing those delusive views of human life which unfit them to meet its trials and discharge its duties. This is the more necessary, as the adversary, through writers, publishers, and venders, heedless of the welfare of men and pandering to a corrupt taste in many cases first created by themselves, is filling the land with high-wrought infidel and licentious fiction, inflaming the young mind with dreams of unreal bliss, rendering the endearments of home insipid, and even the word of God and the Gospel of Christ too tame and spiritless to have their regard. The numbers, especially in our cities and villages, who are thus ensnared and unfitted to live or to die, are lamentably large, and the evil demands the united efforts of the friends of truth and soberness, as far as possible to preoccupy minds not yet diverted from the love of truth and fact, and to supplant injurious works by providing

books in all respects adapted to gain the attention and win the understanding and the heart.

"If the young," says Mr. Gallaudet, "read nothing but story-books, intended almost entirely to entertain them; or, if they read so many of these books as to dislike to read those of a more serious and instructive kind, then there is very great danger of their acquiring a strong dislike to the reading of the Bible. For the Bible is very far from being a book of mere entertainment. It is full, indeed, of interesting things; but to understand them, and to get good from them, requires patient thinking and serious feeling. Let parents and teachers beware lest, by indulging children too much in the perusal of books of mere amusement, they acquire such a fondness for fiction, that it will be difficult for them to read any thing that demands attention, and tends to produce serious thoughts. Should this lead to their considering it an irksome and disagreeable task to sit down, at suitable times, to the faithful perusal of the sacred Scriptures, what an error in their education has been committed-what a tremendous evil has been incurred! The influence of fiction is, just now, immense. It sways the minds of the rising generation, who have access to books, to a vast extent. It is moulding their intellectual habits. It is forming their taste. It is influencing their moral feelings. It is training them up, in too many instances, to a loose, desultory, luxurious, and disconnected kind of reading, which will render to them, in maturer life, all our standard works of religious truth, by which the souls of English and American Christians of earlier days were nurtured to deep thought and a vigorous faith, insipid, irksome, revolting."

"It is painful," says Mrs. Hutchings, " to see the child

that has acquired a taste for fictitious reading, even though of a religious cast, turn away dissatisfied from truthful narrations of real life. Well may it excite parental anxiety to see the young reader rush eagerly through one fiction after another, impatient of the delay interposed by the moral of the tale, dashing aside every sober sentiment, imbibing the stimulus, rejecting the nourishment, till the mind, exhausted and craving, is unfitted for the persevering effort so essential to the acquisition of useful knowledge, or for the performance of the common, unexciting, but peremptory duties of life. There is, it may be, a class of fictions not highly wrought, but tinged in the staid coloring of nature. While in interest these cannot compete with true narrative, do we not usually find them stamped with the peculiar and biassed conceits of the mind that invented them, rather than with those lessons of wisdom and instruction which Providence interweaves in the thread of all actual human experience ?”

The following criticism by the distinguished Rev. ROBERT HALL, even if it censures too severely the writings of Miss Edgeworth, presents, nevertheless, the most valuable and discriminating thoughts applicable to a large class of semi-religious fiction.

"She is the most irreligious writer I ever read; not so much from any direct attacks she makes on religion, as from a universal and studied omission of the subject. In her writings you meet a high strain of morality. She delineates the most virtuous characters, and represents them in the most affecting circumstances in life-in distress, in sickness, and even in the immediate prospect of eternity, and finally sends them off the stage with their virtue unimpaired-and all this without the remotest allusion to religion. She does not directly oppose 10*

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