love, is to be condemned, as worthy of the wrath of God. We have no quarrel with Nature; that is, with true, normal Nature. Nature tends to the domestic relations, and unites husband and wife, and parents and children. Can intellect do better? Nature being a matter of law, all her monitions must be subject to rule and held under healthy restraint. What Christianity proposes is, not to make war upon Nature, not to crush out our humanity, nor to exterminate any one of its essential elements, but rather to cherish them, to elevate and purify them, and to hold them in subordination to the laws of God. When she utters the language of condemnation, it is not of Nature, in its true and normal condition, but of Nature as fallen, depraved, diseased. Christ came to be the Physician, the healer, not the exterminator. Thus have we briefly touched upon a few of the most salient points of Mr. Buckle's voluminous work. We acknowledge the delicacy of criticising a man who has already gone to answer to his God; and we remember the maxim, "Tread lightly on the ashes of the dead." But books sent out into the world to mould opinion, are not to be confounded with men; and we have not hesitated to exhibit some of the objectionable features in Mr. Buckle's great work, so fraught, as we believe, with mischief to mankind. We have said enough to show that the work is full of groundless assumptions, that his theories are at war with human experience, with the purests instincts of humanity, and with the well-being, nay, with the very existence of Society. As a fitting conclusion, let us gather for a moment around the death bed of Thomas Henry Buckle. A writer in Frazer's Magazine, for August, 1863, who was with Mr. Buckle at Damascus, May 31st, 1862, when he died, has given a sketch of his last hours. It was a death in full harmony with his life and teachings. We give a short extract: "The day after their arrival at Damascus, in the evening at dinner, he was unable to sit at table, where a party of Austrian nobles had taken the place of our friends, who had left that morning. On the divan behind he was having brought to him what food he could eat. Suddenly I heard a cry from him, and springing up, saw him wild and delirious-looking; and when I went up to him, he said-'Oh, I am going mad!' I half carried him up stairs to the little open gallery before his room door, and there sat him on a chair. In bringing him up stairs, I had ordered one of our servants to go immediately for the French doctor Mr. Buckle had seen in the morning. His incoherent utterances were most painful to listen to; at one moment saying, 'how nice, very nice!' was the iced orangeade I had brought him, and thanking me; then telling me to go away; in the midst of all exclaiming, O my book, my book! I shall never finish my book!' and after running on quite incoherently, crying, 'I know I am talking nonsense, but I cannot help it!' and bursting into tears. Four days afterwards he was attacked by typhus fever, and after a three days' stupor died." This was not so fearfully tragic as the last end of Voltaire and Tom Paine; yet what a death for a philosoper! who had consecrated his life to writing down the Religion of Him Who had conquered Death! and brought Life and Immortality to light in His Gospel. NOTICES OF BOOKS. HISTORY OF THE PLANTING AND TRAINING OF THE CHRISTIAN CHURCH BY THE APOSTLES. By Dr. Augustus Neander. Translated by I. E. Ryland. Revised by E. G. Robinson, D. D. New York: Sheldon & Co. 1865. 8vo. pp. 547. What the (Philadelphia) Episcopal Recorder can mean by the following notice of this work of Neander, passes our comprehension. We might have looked for such language from Pelagian Andover, or New Haven; but for a Church Newspaper at Philadelphia, near the seat of a Theological Seminary, to publish such an endorsement, is at least alarming. The Recorder says: "This is an improved edition of a work of the most signal value. In the language of its editor, Dr. Robinson, it is superfluous to add at this late day, that no work of Neander exhibits more conspicuously his best characteristics, as a fervid Christian theologian and a sagacious and critical historian, than his planting and training of the Christian Church."" We, on the contrary, pronounce this book a most dangerous one. Full of a supercilious spiritual self conceit, and of "private judgment" run mad, it is an insidious attack upon the very citadel of the Faith of Christ. Hold only what Neander allows us to hold, give up all that he demands of us to give up, and we have nothing left in Christianity but the name; a sublimated Humanitarianism, a good deal better than the best heathen morality, yet differing only in degree, not in kind. Yet Neander is full of pious talk; he uses the traditional orthodox technicalities of the Continental Reformers; just as an Andover Professor takes his oath every year that he believes in the old Puritan Platform, while it is notorious that he hates it with a perfect hatred. In quoting from Neander to sustain this strongly expressed opinion, we hardly know where to begin. Whether it be on the question of Inspiration, or of Miracles, or of Doctrine, or of the Church, or the Ministry, or the Sacraments, he is everywhere radically unsound. His work is not a "History," as it purports to be; it is a running commentary on the planting and training of the Church, as recorded in the Acts of the Apostles, and in the Epistles of St. Paul, St. James, and St Peter; and is a work supplementary to, and a continuation of, his "Life of Christ." His "History of the Christian Religion and Church during the first three Centuries," and his subsequent volumes, are only parts or developments of his plan. This revised and corrected translation of the Fourth German edition of the History of the planting and training of the Church, contains the author's latest annotations, and is much fuller than the third edition, which was republished in this country in 1844. It is significant, that in a large number of his Notes, he finds it necessary to defend himself against the assaults of the openly pronounced scoffer, Baur; who evidently regarded Neander as fair game: and so he is; for, between Baur and Neander, there is no middle ground tenable. Take, for an example of Neander's views, what he teaches respecting the Atonement, the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Blood of Christ, the Blood of the Covenant, the Expiatory Sacrifice-a Doctrine incorporated into the Creeds and all the Liturgies of the Early Church as a foundation-stone of Christian Faith. If Neander does not scoff and rave at it, like Tom Paine, if he is more decent in his unbelief, he yet does reject it decidedly and utterly. We mean distinctly this, that Neander denies that the Atonement is something God-ward, or that it is an Expiation, an Oblation, a Satisfaction. He holds that it is only something Man-ward. He says, "When Paul speaks of what Christ effected by his blood, his Cross, or other means, one single point which forms the consummation and close of the whole, stands for that whole." From what has been said, we may attach merely a subjective meaning to the Reconciliation," &c., &c. We ask our readers to remember that this is precisely that point, where the Faith of the country is being most rapidly undermined; and on which radical error, drawn from German Rationalism, is already taught in some of the pulpits of the Church, as it is taught almost every where around us. Thank God! for a Scriptural Primitive Liturgy still left to us! 66 In respect to other points, it is impossible, in a mere notice like this, to illustrate his teaching by quotations. The following must suffice. Thus, respecting the Conversion of St. Paul, the inspired narrative tells us, that Jesus that appeared unto thee (Saul) in the way." Neander positively denies that Paul saw Christ. He says, "if it be not allowed that the narrative in the Acts is trustworthy, yet the testimony of Paul himself in reference to this event, from which he always dates the commencement of a new era in his life, must be met." Neander tells us how it was. He thinks that Paul's conscience troubled him; and that "not far from Damascus he and his followers were overtaken by a violent storm; the lightning struck near to Paul, and he fell senseless to the ground," &c., &c., (p. 85). So also, where we read, Acts XIV, of St. Paul's healing the lame man at Lystra, instead of confessing that Paul wrought that miracle by the immediate power of God, he drivels in the following style: "Whoever is not entangled in a mechanical view of nature, whoever acknowledges the power of Spirit over nature, and a hidden dynamic connection between soul and body," &c., &c. So also, the damsel "possessed with a spirit of divination," (Acts XVI. 16), according to Neander, was only a somnambulist, and "in her convulsive fits," uttered what the inspired penman has recorded. And when the Apostle pretended to cast out a personal evil spirit," he probably followed the "received notion, without reflecting at the moment any further upon it." Now these are not solitary exceptional cases in Neander. His works are full of such teaching. We have marked extracts from his works, scores in number, some of them worse than the above; and yet such abominable stuff as this an Episcopal Newspaper endorses, without a word of qualification! Neander was a Jew; and on his conversion to Christianity, under the strongly rationalistic influences of the Continent, he took the following position, which he states in one of his works: "In the Old Testament, everything relating to the Kingdom of God was estimated by outward forms, and promoted by specific external rites. In the New, everything is made to depend upon what is internal and spiritual." This mere assumption is the key to much of Neander's rationalism. When we consider that Neander's works are used as text books in a large number of the Theological Seminaries of the country, and that the "religious press" of the country, without exception, so far as we have observed, is strong and unqualified in its commendation of Neander's works; when the authors of Essays and Reviews," and Colenso, and Renan, are declaring open war upon all that is Supernatural in Christianity; we ask our readers if it is not high time to sound the note of alarm. Delivered at the Royal LECTURES ON THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. New York: When Professor Müller declares Language to be a Science, even as Astronomy, and Botany, and Geology are Sciences, he utters a great truth; and one which is yet to throw floods of light upon important questions in the history of our race. The disinterred slabs of Nineveh give credibility to a single page of the inspired record; the discoveries and researches of philologists are already shutting the mouths of infidels, and confirming the Mosaic record as to the antiquity, unity, and dispersion of the human family. When Professor Müller says, that "the languages spoken by the Brahmans of India; by the followers of Zoroaster, and the subjects of Darius, in Persia; by the Greeks, by the Romans, by Celtic, Teutonic and Slavonic races, were all varieties of one common type;" when he says that the religion of the Greeks and Romans did not consist merely and simply of the fables of Jupiter and Juno, of Apollo and Minerva, of Venus and Bacchus, but that through the veil of mythic phraseology, we catch a glimpse of the great realities which lie behind and beyond,-we see at once what some of the uses are to which the Science of Language is to be applied. Yet the Science is still in its infancy; and must remain so until more ascertained facts authorize a broader and clearer induction. Professor Müller's Lectures are twelve in number, and are divided into two parts. In the first, he treats of what he calls "the body, or the outside of language; the sounds in which language is clothed, whether we call them letters, syllables or words; describing their origin, their formation, and the laws which determine their growth and decay;" and in this he discusses the principles of Etymology. In the second part, he investigates "what may be called the soul or the inside of language; examining the first conceptions that claimed utterance, their combinations and ramifications, their growth, their decay, and their resuscitation." He also examines some of the fundamental principles of Mythology, both ancient and modern, and the sway |