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the material, a severer artist could have aimed at. The truth is, those who knew Wilson unanimously feel that, as relics of such a magnificent human being as he was, all the writings that he has left behind him are less than adequate. What we have as Wilson's works in 1856, including even these glorious Noctes, is less than Scott and others who knew the Wilson of 1816 might have expected, and did expect, from such a soul lodged in such a physique. And so, after all, the moral is, that in literature as in war, one may often back the dark-skinned little Roman, drilled and disciplined, against the large succulent Goth, with eyes azure as the heavens and locks like golden sunbeams, whose first appearance terrifies him. With sinews of knotted steel, a step trained and firm, and one weapon at least of which he is master, the man naturally smaller may in the long-run accomplish the greater amount of consistent and effective work. Or, to drop the metaphor, there is many a man who shute," who "canna fish," who "canna loup," who " warsle," who " canna soom," who canna put the stane," who canna fling the hammer," who "canna drive a gig," who canna to ony effeck drink whisky," who yet may be a master of his craft, a perfect Kant in cogitation, a Pitt in politics, a Pope, or something better still, in poetry, and altogether a very tough customer if you happen to come across him. Only, the Shepherd is certainly right in recommending open-air exercise; and every one must admit, that if the Goth were disciplined, the Roman, unless he too were of the same huge stature, would have a poor chance.

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ART. VIII.—THE PAST AND FUTURE OF CHRISTIANITY.

The History of Christianity, from the Birth of Christ to the Abolition of Paganism in the Roman Empire. By the Rev. H. H. Milman. 3 vols. London: Murray. 1840.

History of Latin Christianity; including that of the Popes to the Pontificate of Nicolas V. By Henry Hart Milman, D.D., Dean of St. Paul's. London: Murray. 3 vols. 1854; 3 vols. 1855. Signs of the Times: Letters to Ernst Moritz Arndt on the Dangers to Religious Liberty in the Present State of the World. By Christian Charles Josias Bunsen, D.D., D.C.L., D.Ph. Translated from the German by Susanna Winkworth. London: Smith, Elder, and Co. 1856.

Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologie. Von Karl Schwarz. (Contributions to the History of the most recent Theology. By Charles Schwarz, Professor Extraordinary of Theology at Halle.) Leipsic Brockhaus. 1856.

Ir seems a strange question to ask in the middle of the nineteenth century of the Christian era-" What is Christianity? what is its proper work? in what does its essential principle consist?" Yet the different and even contradictory answers which it has received, and is still receiving, are a sufficient proof that it has not hitherto been satisfactorily solved. No thoughtful, unprejudiced mind can deny, that such a question does continually present itself, and sometimes under a very perplexing aspect. When answers have been attempted, we find some too narrow, and others too broad; some shut up within the closest limits, others with scarce any limits at all; some obviously determined by the mental peculiarities of an individual or a sect, others so loose and vague as to leave us in the conclusion, that Christianity is every thing, and every thing is Christianity. humorist once inscribed on the opening leaf of an album, "Whatever good thing shall be written in the ensuing pages of this book, I hereby claim as my own:" and so it has been remarkednot altogether without reason-of some Christian advocates, that they go through this world's history, with a title assumed à priori to appropriate whatever is pure and noble as Christian, and to reject whatever is evil as its opposite, without distinctly indicating the specific Christian element which can properly claim the one, and is not justly chargeable with the other.

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Christianity is a vast subject, and we may look at it from three different points of view. We may contemplate it, first, in its seed and germ-in the documentary witnesses of its origin and earliest propagation preserved for us in the New Testa

We may, secondly, survey it as a great world-fact, traversing the history of ages, modifying, and at length transforming, the whole civilisation of the West. Or, lastly, we may separate, both from their scriptural source and from their historical development, its great spiritual principles-the love, the trust, the hope, the self-consecration to God, which constitute its living soul, and determine the most solemn and momentous relations of man's higher nature to the Infinite and the Everlastingand treat them as a branch of human psychology, and endeavour to find their true place in the wide field of religious philosophy. Each of these views has had its own class of adherents, and been developed too much apart from the rest, with results as unsatisfactory and narrow as might naturally be expected from so onesided an access to a subject which has many sides, and which, to be

comprehended, must be surveyed on all. Scriptural critics and interpreters are prone to look for the whole of Christianity-the Christianity of all times and all countries-in the doctrines and applications, so largely determined by local and temporary influences, of the infant church and the first age, and thus to make a passing phase of Hebrew civilisation a type and model for the great European world of the present day. Christian historians, on the other hand, are apt to lose themselves in mere history, and to acquire such a fondness for whatever is antique, for old dogmas and old usages, long-silenced controversies, and the dim and shadowy forms of the great saints and heroes of the past, with whom they have grown familiar in their long wanderings through ancient paths, that Christianity becomes with them a kind of antiquarian dilettantism, and they forget the vital interests which it still represents in millions of human souls. The philosophic Christian, again, disjoins himself in another way from the world that now is and the world that has been; he is enamoured of ideas which bind him too exclusively, not simply to the present, but to his own feeling and conception of the present-insulating rather than sympathetic-sublime, but abstract-wanting the support of a true life in the concrete realities of history. Fully to understand Christianity, we must fathom it at its primal source; we must trace its course through the long windings of centuries; we must realise it in the present; we must incorporate it with the living organism of qur own moral and spiritual being; and work it out into all the results, connections and applications of a healthy and reverential speculation.

In the mean while, a fearless and impartial exhibition of Christianity as a great historical fact, is indispensable to the clear recognition of that continuous thread of thought and sympathy which vitally connects the religion as a present conviction with the fresh outburst of the spirit at its origin, and to the development of those mental conditions which must enter into any adequate comprehension of Christianity as a whole for the very diversity and contrast of the outward forms in which a common principle clothes itself, enable the mind more readily to distinguish it from them, and to apprehend it in its essence. In the breaking down of old theological systems, and the consequent weakening of many of the traditional conceptions of Christianity, there seems something almost providential, slowly preparing the way for some greater harmony of belief hereafter-in the remarkable impulse which has been given to the historical study of Christianity, and in the new lights which have been thus cast upon it from various quarters-in Germany, Holland, France, and more recently in England, within the last

half-century. In this view we hail with much satisfaction the completion of Dean Milman's excellent work. It will occupy, we have little doubt, for a long time to come, a prominent place in our theological and historical literature. It does honour to the University in which such high scholarship was disciplined, and to the Church where views so large and liberal, and a spirit so genial and catholic, have been honourably acknowledged and met with their reward. Of the nine volumes (including those on the general history of Christianity to the fall of Paganism), the three just published, for interest, for clearness and vividness of narration, and for general historical ability, appear to us decidedly the best, though there is perhaps more of original research and a deeper vein of learning in the three first. The author's reading, indeed, is immense. He seems to have let no accessible source of information escape him. He has not only made himself acquainted with the primary authorities, but has diligently read up the most recent contributions of modern learning (and these in France and Germany have been exceedingly abundant) which have any bearing on the various points of his great theme. We might add, perhaps, that in one sense his reading has been too vast and multifarious. He is often oppressed by the weight of his materials. At times he merely indicates them in a note, without any adequate criticism of their value; at others, the endeavour to bring them within the prescribed limits of his narrative, encumbers and embarrasses his pen, and is evidently among the causes of the looseness and slovenliness of style, sometimes approaching, if it does not actually transgress, the verge of the strictly grammatical-which, though less painfully obvious than in the three former volumes of his Latin Christianity, still continues to disfigure many passages of a book the general tone of which is so scholar-like and refined. His work in this respect contrasts unfavourably with that of Gibbon, which is the model ever in his eye, and to which his own is plainly designed as a Christian counterpart and counteraction. That great writer is always completely master of his materials; he has them under his control, and moulds them at will; and, however diversified their source and character, fuses them down with matchless art, and yet with a rare fidelity which loses nothing essential, into a common substance with his own powerful and commanding thought, and the strongly-marked style which is its expressive index. Yet Milman has merits of his own, which must not be overlooked. He is more simple and natural than his stately and sonorous archetype. His heart is full of kindly human feeling; and he has an eye that catches with singular felicity, and under a softer and tenderer light than the cold philosophy of Gibbon was ever able to cast upon them,

the picturesque aspects of the many strange and stirring scenes with which this great transition period of human history is so richly fraught. When his sensibilities are touched, and his fancy is awakened, and he can fling off for a moment the learned oppression of his task, the poetry latent in his nature breaks forth in such beautiful gleams, that it is impossible not to regret, that either more time or a narrower subject did not permit him to diffuse its brightness more uniformly over his pages, and to present the results of so much research and meditation in a more perfect and classical form. Milman is pre-eminently the poet, the scholar, and the man of taste; but the refined and delicate qualities of his mind are too often crushed and buried in the work before us underneath a load of dull and heavy erudition, which a mind more vigorous and muscular, perhaps coarser and less sensitive, might have borne without stumbling. The highest, undoubtedly the rarest, attribute of an historian we are unable to predicate of him. He does not seem to us largely endowed with the philosophic faculty. We miss in him that power of subtle and penetrating analysis, and that commanding grasp of innumerable particulars from a common point of view, which in the delineation of character or the discussion of a system, goes at once to the root of the associated phenomena, and detects the seminal principle that runs through them and binds them together in organic unity. This deficiency has struck us in his account of the Gnostic theories, and the Scholastic speculations of the middle ages, which offer so many points of interesting comparison, and though unquestionably, in their wild extravagance, a very morbid display of human intelligence, still run down into some of the deepest problems of our being, and yield collateral glimpses of great truths, not without benefit for more enlightened and scientific times. We must not forget, that it was Leibnitz who said, in speaking of the medieval Scholasticism, “Il y a de l'or dans ce fumier." Both these subjects Dr. Milman has treated rather slightly and superficially, as compared with the importance which attaches to them, from the immense effect both of the Gnostic and of the Scholastic movement on the subsequent development of Christian doctrine, and even on the general course of human thought.

The subject of the six volumes of Latin Christianity is not rightly conceived or duly presented from our point of view. Too much prominence is given to the epithet "Latin." Latinism and Teutonism (if we may be allowed such terms, to express the two constituent elements of medieval civilisation) are too broadly distinguished by the author. What he calls Latin Christianity was powerfully modified in its whole character and working by the reaction upon it at every point of the Teutonic influences

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