us a system of mere rationalized ethics as the new religion of humanity. With some special features of its own, the work is ultra Unitarian in its bearing on the person and government of God, and essential Universalism in its disposal of the life hereafter a mixture of error with which we are becoming painfully familiar.

Professor Fisher brings to his task a careful study of the questions at issue between the oppugners and defenders of a supernaturally governed world and a superhumanly authenticated revelation of religious truth. He rightly perceives that this debate covers the first as well as the second of these topics, and that, in the hands of the rationalists, it rejects the supernatural element from every department of the jurisdiction of the universe, material and spiritual. Hence, while he does not regard miracles as the most important testimony to Christianity, he directs his attention very much to their defence as involving the whole question of supernaturalism. Pursuing this intention, he examines, with a nice critical eye and a fine mastery of the subject, the more recent attacks upon the genuineness of the historical books of the New Testament; the speculations of the Tübingen school of extreme rationalists, in which the assumption revived by Hedge' is refuted, that the earliest doctrine of Christ's person was humanitarian; the writings of Strauss 2 and Renan respecting the life and work of Jesus; the similar labors of Mr. Parker. Professor Fisher regards the sceptical movement thus described, as in a transition state from deistical to pantheistical foundations, if anything worthy of this word can be predicated of so airy a thing as this; and accordingly makes an argument for the personality of God against these dreamers. In these varied bearings of his subject, he shows himself familiar with its present phases, and has well maintained the catholic ground against its ingenious, learned, and often unscrupulous assailants. His work will become a text-book upon this

1 Reason in Religion (reviewed in our last number). Book II., ch. I.

2 The exposition here given of Strauss' revision of his Life of Jesus for the German people, is most damaging both to his literary and moral honesty. So far from its being a retraction of his former work, it now ascribes the Gospels to a studied falsification for purposes of theological partizanship, instead of the earlier theory of a mythical genesis consistent with pious motives. The spirit of this recension is thoroughly bad. Prof. Fisher says, its proper title would be: "Conjectures concerning the Life of one Jesus, by a Disbeliever in the Authenticity of the Gospels and Existence of God."

controversy. Compared with Mr. Lecky's volumes, while equally able intellectually, more thorough and accurate in its scholarship, and much more deferential to historical truth, it is Christian and not Pagan in its fundamental principles. We mean just this. But our purpose is not to follow these writers in the unfolding of their views. We shall give, instead, our own reflections upon the main issue involved, as variously suggested. And the line of thought which our discussion will follow is this: Nature-its laws and order: Man- his relation to nature: God-his relation to both of these, in providence, in miraculous intervention, and in remedial grace.

§ I. What do we mean by Nature? In common understanding it includes the created system of things; that which has in it a being or becoming, under a constitution of law and in a sequence of orderly progression. From this we separate rational and responsible life: and when we would speak of this we say human nature, making thus a familiar distinction between two quite unlike departments of creation. So the beauties and sublimities of nature lie in the sphere of the material or physical world-sky, ocean, mountains, forests, and the like. The adaptations and forces of nature, in the same way, refer to the forms, combinations, and compositions of the earth's solid and fluent adjuncts, and the rest of the outlying portions of the universe. The word has other uses, which are inexact or figurative; as when nature is personified into a sentient, living being, and then called the cause or author of other things. If it is thus said that nature produces plants, flowers, animals, or any existence, it can only be truthfully meant that these come to pass in accordance with the order or laws of the natural world. To state this literally, or in any sense except by an allowance of language, is to erect a mere effect into a sovereign, creating power, which is but another name for God.

The world about us as thus described, is a vast machine or mechanism which has a variety of movements and ways of acting, the observance, classification, interpretation of which make up our natural sciences. Students of this kind of knowledge have collected a multitude of facts from every part of this great kingdom; have compared, analyzed, experimented, combined, and established what are styled the laws of nature. These

forces are inherent in, or inseparable from, all material substances. They always have been so. A uniformity is observed in their working. It is necessary to the comfort, security, continuance of the universe that it should be steadily governed by laws of this sort. The order of nature prevents the disorder, the rupture, the destruction of nature. It is an in estimable blessing as it is a demonstrated fact.

One of these laws is, that whatever is now in a state either of rest or motion will continue so, until something occurs or operates to change its condition. So of the whole material structure it is true, that it will naturally run on as it is going, under its proper and constituted forces of attraction and repulsion, growth and decline, life and death, unless some outside interference comes forward to alter, reset, redirect its on-goings. That is, these forces have a specific and understood action. They are not fitful and irregular, or self-opposing and defeating. Water will not descend to-day and ascend to-morrow of its own accord, as we say. So universally. The stars in their courses, the atoms of a sandhill, the gases of the atmosphere obey the laws of their being, as their uniform and reliable state. As it was in the beginning, so is it now, and so it will be. We have no hesitancy in putting this obvious and unquestionable truth as strongly as those who draw from it an inference which we regard as wholly unauthorized and inadmissible. That inference we shall state in due time. But here we must devote some attention

§ II. To Man in relation to this nature which lies around him. He is partly material. Our bodies do not differ from other merely physical organizations in their components, and laws of being. They are made up of much the same elements that enter into the formation of the things which we daily see and handle. They submit to the same forces which control inanimate substances. They grow and decay and die under mechanical causes. These processes are mainly like the similar changes which we observe in vegetation. We are thus of the earth earthy.

But we are more than this. When God had created man out of the dust of the ground, he breathed into him the breath of life, and man became a living soul. This means very much

more than that God gave him simply an animal life, such as the birds and beasts possess. It indicates a rational nature. It is equivalent to another text which says, that the inspiration of the Almighty has given us understanding. A soul is an intelligent, forecasting, choosing spirit. It involves the powers of reflection, reasoning, memory, will. It is an active life, not merely a passive existence. It acts upon every thing within its reach. The mind determines and modifies many of our bodily motions. It can not change the laws of motion, but it is continually varying its direction. Thus; it is a law of motion that we tread downward upon the surface of the earth, in obedience to the gravitating force, rather than upward into the air; that we walk rather than fly. We must submit to this; we can not alter it by any amount of resolution. But where and whither we will walk, how fast or how slow, or whether forwards or backwards, we can decide for ourselves. We have a modifying control of physical laws.

The chief part of our life-work consists of these changes to which we subject the objects and substances of the material world. We take the crude products of the mineral or vegetable kingdoms, and manufacture them into countless articles of usefulness and ornament. There is no end to these inventions, discoveries, improvements in practical art. Whatever we choose to do of this nature, within the compass of our capability, we execute. But every thing we thus do, by the act of our will, is done under law. Liberty of choice belongs to us by our original constitution. Fixedness of relations belongs to matter by its organization. In one sense physical nature is our master, because we must yield to its established order of cause and effect. In another sense we are masters of the inert world around us, because we can use these laws which regulate it to our own pleasure indefinitely. We can not stop the action of the gravitating force, for instance, in one particle of solid, in one globule of fluid extension; but we can take that principle, or any other, of the physical universe, and task it as a daily servant. We can make the force which holds the solar system together, turn our mill-wheels and weigh our merchandize. We can create nothing; we can not absolutely control any thing. But we can interfere with almost every thing, bending it to new

purposes, shaping it to our individual wishes. God has given us this dominion in the earth over inanimate and animate forms and forces. Their passive natures he has subjected to our active powers, placing us thus in some faint resemblance to his own attitude toward all finite being. We come then to

§ III. The relation which God sustains both to nature and man as now defined. "The earth is the Lord's and the fulness thereof; the world and they that dwell therein." Proprietorship is here asserted without limitation or qualification. The entire creation is his, because he made it. He has the producer's right to the universe, in its completest form. "Thou hast established the earth and it abideth." It abides daily by an ever renewed establishing. "Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own?" This is the biblical philosophy.

God has a personal will. The denying this function to him, as the supreme cause, is necessarily to fall back upon the deified forces of matter, and in giving them the power of Godship in place of a personal, living, creating, ruling Jehovah, we set up another and the absurdest form of idolatry which men have ever invented. It amounts to this: if Jehovah is not God, gravitation, physical attraction, chemical affinity, crystallization, are gods—that is, Nature, which is made up of these impersonal, soulless, involuntary laws-is God. This is worse than the classic paganism. For it were better to fall down and worship Jove the thunderer or Saturn the progenitor, who were supposed to be thinking and knowing individuals, than to adore the law of gravity or any other such mindless force. If our nature-worshippers would but reflect, in the midst of their sentimental ardors, that nature means only dead physical being and passivity—a something which never acts except as it is acted upon or within, they might possibly realize the fatuity of their thus bowing down to stocks and stones, and painted leaves, and wind-driven clouds. If Pope's couplet is true

"And, binding nature fast in fate,

Left free the human will";

one would think that a being endowed both with a conscience and free-will should seek some loftier, worthier object of adoration than that fate-fixed captive and bond-slave, called Nature.