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spirit. This combination, of which he is the first example, was renewed afterwards in numberless individuals; and those, not only men of Teutonic origin, but natives of Spain, of France, and of Italy, countries which Teutonic example and the infusion of Teutonic blood had filled with that spirit of enterprise, which, when led captive by Roman religion, formed the motive of medieval pilgrimages and crusades, inspired no small part of the daring of Columbus and Cortez, and found its last, but not its feeblest embodiment in Ignatius Loyola and Francis Xavier. We had hoped to have had room to trace the influence of these Latin and Teutonic elements-the Roman organization and the fresh Teutonic blood-on the doctrine and practice of the Western Church, and especially on its mightiest instrument of power-the monastic orders. But our limits are already exceeded and we must defer the more detailed treatment of these subjects until the appearance of the next instalment of Dr. Milman's work. We will only point out at present the leading characteristics of each. In Latin Christendom doctrine has generally been kept subordinate to practice: the interesting questions of debate have been not what was to be believed, but what was to be done. The East debated for five centuries, and exhausted, to the most subtle shade of difference, the nature of the Godhead, and the manner of its union with the manhood in the person of Christ. Latin Christendom never originated a question of this kind, seldom listened to them with interest, often failed of appreciating their subtilties, yet in the end, judging without passion, and therefore with judge-like impartiality, most frequently decided right. It turned its more practical mind to practical questions: some trifling ones, such as would in ancient days have been referred to the College of the Pontifices;-the time of Easter; the shape of the tonsure; the manner of divine service; the fasts to be imposed on the people and some more important ones, such as the merit of virginity, the restrictions to be placed on the marriage of the clergy, the mode of reconciling the penitent, the degree of reverence to be paid to the Saints. Even the one great Latin speculative question was, at the same time, deeply practical. From Pelagius and Augustine to our own age, and perhaps for many an age to come, religious men will ask with profound anxiety, If God be all-powerful, how can I be free? If I am free, as free I seem to be, how is it true that without him I can do nothing? Must I move myself? or wait until he moves me? This is speculation to satisfy a practical want, not to feed the curiosity of the mind.

It has cultivated

Monasticism has had a strange destiny. forests, preserved literature, even made discoveries in science. It has produced teachers, preachers, scholars, statesmen, soldiers.

The most ardent missionaries and the most ruthless inquisitors have come out of its convents. It has been the most powerful engine ever set to work upon the world. Yet its first votaries, who sowed the little seed from which this great tree has grown, had no other idea than to leave the world entirely and for ever. Such was Antony: and such have been all its oriental disciples, as much the monks of Athos at this day, as those of Nitria in that of Athanasius. This original idea was retained for many centuries by Latin Christianity also. It was simply the desire to leave the world that led Benedict of Nursia, and Stephen Harding, and Bernard of Clairvaux into a convent. Even the organization of monks into an order, with subject monasteries, and a gradation of officers, all under a single general-the form in which they became, in after years, the regiments of the Pope's army-is no Latin invention. It was anticipated in the East by the Egyptian monk Pachomius. Latin monks, being sprung from more active races, did more work than oriental ones, but we do not see that, in the ages that preceded Francis of Assisi and Dominic, the Latin convent displayed, either in discipline or in employment, any essential difference from the oriental one. The great distinction between early Greek and Latin monasticism appears to be, that while Eastern Christendom was never able (if it attempted) to regulate the relations of the monastic bodies to the central ecclesiastical government, and so let them grow up into an independent power and a dangerous rival, the organizing spirit of Rome assigned to them their place in the great system, and kept them in it by the strong hand of discipline. Sometimes their corporate spirit was too strong for its iron grasp and even Jesuits have rebelled; but in general they have proved its most devoted subjects. We believe that the great diversion of monastic zeal from self-culture to work in the world, which is indeed characteristic of the West, but of the Germano-Latin, not the purely Latin, West, and took place involuntarily in Francis of Assisi, and with wellconsidered purpose in Dominic, was caused by the same universal longing for religious enterprise, which had sent pilgrims and crusaders to the Holy Land. But this point lies beyond the limit of Dr. Milman's present work and we cannot enter into it now, although we hope to return to it hereafter.

We take leave with regret of this first instalment of a very able and valuable work. We have already mentioned two defects that we think we have discovered in it: these only affect the plan; and are such as could be easily supplied. In other respects, it leaves us little to desire and we feel it to be a credit both to the author, and to the country, as well as to the too

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barren soil of English Cathedral establishments. Dr. Milman has many of the qualities of a great historian, and stands in the foremost rank among modern writers of Church history. In the fundamental point of all, truth of statement, founded on careful research and honest judgment, he has entirely satisfied us. In the process of investigation he is always anxious and patient, and in forming his judgments candid and impartial: often have we noticed him suppressing his verdict, where his convictions were carrying it in favour of the side towards which his sympathies inclined. His study of the times which he describes has been complete: no original source seems to have escaped the very wide range of his reading: and the opinions of modern writers, especially those of Germany, have been duly weighed, and where necessary noticed. And to this careful research and honest judgment he adds that poetic liveliness of imagination which makes each man and each period live as they pass before us. Some of his characters are beautifully drawn, and have been evidently considered, not only with the inquisitive interest of the student of human nature, but with the sympathy of an intimate acquaintance, and the charity of a Christian brother. Only in his more general views of history, while we still find much to praise, we find something to except against. Belonging, in general tone of mind, to that school which friends call liberal, and enemies latitudinarian, he attaches little importance to the minuter variations of theological opinion; and though he can appreciate in an Athanasius the heroism that can suffer and die even for a self-invented theological phrase, when deemed to embody truth, yet it is evident that the heroes of controversy have not his sympathy, and that he hates with all his heart the "odium theologicum." The same liberal or latitudinarian spirit is extended to differences of practice; and thus we sometimes feel inclined to ask, with reference both to doctrine and to practice, What does the author himself think right? and what true? He seems too apt to judge both with reference rather to the effect that they have produced on the world, than to the relation which they bear to abstract truth and right: so that the reader is tempted to doubt whether he thinks that there is a right and a truth at all. For example, while the papal power appears to him to be founded on error, and he is even one of those who think that its mythic founder, the Apostle of the circumcision, never visited its local seat in the chief city of the uncircumcised; yet he thinks, that "on the rise of such a power, both controlling and conservative, hung, humanly speaking, the life and death of Christianity,-of Christianity as a permanent, aggressive, expansive, and, to a certain extent, uniform system;" that "it is impossible to conceive what had been the

lawlessness, the chaotic state of the middle ages, without the mediæval Papacy;" in a word, that the very existence of what we believe to be eternal truth depended for many ages on the establishment and continuance of a fiction. Again, he believes the mythology of the middle ages to have been "a vast system moulded together out of the natural instincts of man, the undying reminiscences of all the old religions, the Jewish, the Pagan, and the Teutonic, with the few and indistinct glimpses of the invisible world and the future state of being in the New Testament;" which he admires and defends, yet not for its truth, but for "its uses, its importance, and its significance in the history of man." Once more, the opposition of Berengar of Tours to Paschasius Radbert's doctrine of transubstantiation seems to him no revolt against the truth; yet he thinks that, had it been successful, "it would have prematurely undermined in the hearts of men the greatest of those influences by which the hierarchy had swayed the world, and might have led, long before Christendom was ripe for a more spiritual and intellectual religion, to a fatal disturbance of the traditional and dominant faith." Does this mean that simple truth is fitted for the civilized only, and that error is the truth of the barbarian ?-that the overthrow of error and the introduction of spiritual religion can ever be premature? If so, we must enter our protest against such philosophy.

We do so all the more earnestly, because men are not content with employing it in their reflections on the past, but apply the same principles to their conduct in the present, and their anticipations of the future. We have philosophic historians, and learned theologians, and even right reverend bishops, who no longer tell us that their doctrines are true, and must be held whatever comes, but that they are necessary for the wellbeing of times like ours. Nothing can maintain order, (they say :) nothing support the state: nothing can perpetuate this or that religious society: nothing can stave off revolution or unbelief; but a general acceptance of this or that or the other doctrine: they are necessary, whether they be true or not. This way of judging the present and the future, together with the course of conduct to which it leads, is encouraged by a philosophy, like that of Dr. Milman, which supposes that there are periods in history to which error has been necessary and valuable. But the principle is false when applied to the past, and still more so when directed towards the future. Man has sufficient faculties for discerning what is right and true; but not sufficient for appreciating all the wants of his time, still less for forecasting the requirements of the future. That doctrine only is necessary for the individual and necessary for the age which the individual or the age, with its whole heart, believes.

The Insoluble Problem.

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ART. IV.-The Philosophy of the Infinite: with Special Reference to the Theories of Sir William Hamilton and M. Cousin. By HENRY CALDERWOOD. Edinburgh, Constable & Co. 1854.

CAN GOD be known by man?-If a negative answer must be returned to this question, our deepest feelings are, it seems, founded on illusion, and human regard should be contracted within the limits of this earthly life. Religious belief cannot be originated when its nominal object is wholly unknown; and all the words which express what is called theological knowledge should be excluded from language as unmeaning sound. We cannot obtain such knowledge either naturally or supernaturally. Can a Being in any sense be "revealed" who is absolutely incognisable? Is not the revelation impossible, or at least incapable of being attested by evidence?-But if this result is at variance with our moral aspirations, and even with the necessities of reason, an affirmative reply seems on the other hand involved in inextricable intellectual difficulties. How can the infinite God be in any way an object of our thoughts? To conceive an object is in some sense to define it. Definition implies limitation, and an infinite object cannot be limited. Moreover, the unlimited Being is not only an inconceivable Being. His very existence does not logically consist with the existence of any other being besides. In every act of knowledge I must distinguish myself from the object known by me. Every object that exists must therefore be either limited, by the subtraction from it of my finite being, or, as infinite, must absorb me and all the universe into itself. An infinite Being, existing in plurality-as One among many, seems an express contradiction, while the only logical solution of the difficulty lands us in the doctrine of Spinoza. Atheism or Pantheism are thus the only alternatives, when the response to our question is

logically weighed.

The mental habits of the majority of mankind permit them to evade the horns of this dilemma. The unreflecting multitude are not disturbed by the intellectual horn; the decay of religious belief unhappily relieves some acute reasoners from the pressure of the other. But is the harmonious development of religious faith and speculative reason impossible? Neither scepticism on the one hand, nor fanaticism on the other, can silence this question. Faith in God has, in all ages, been the stay of men. But the history of mankind also proves, that subtile speculation has more than once withdrawn the object of that faith from the reason, and therefore from the hearts of thoughtful men. In

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