Princeton Review calls, "the dreamy, unauthoritative pseudo-inspiration of modern mystico-transcendentalism."

THEOLOGICAL JUGGLING. A sentence in the last Christian Examiner catches our eye, which is worth a notice as illustrating the facility of drawing a very much too general inference from an admitted fact. Writing of "Orthodox Congregationalism," the author says that

"However tightly tied up it is in the theory of the old theology-as appeared in its late National Council at Boston-many of its ministers possess an adroitness which those famous jugglers, the Brothers Davenport, might envy, in loosening themselves the moment attention is withdrawn, and walking at large before their audience in a freedom wholly unaccountable to those who saw them lately tied hand and foot, with their own full consent." p. 9.

We do not deny that there is something of this among us, and wherever it exists, it deserves severe reproof. But we flatly deny that it can be charged truthfully upon "many" of our ministers compared with their whole number. Of course, there should be none of it found among honorable and Christian men. It would be well for any who may be loose in their morality at this point, to reflect how little credit they thereby are gaining with outsiders whose good opinions possibly they think to win by this jugglery. Our liberal friends should really draw a quite different conclusion from these premises that such a Council as this of June last is one of the surest pledges how resolved the body there represented is to confine this "adroitness" within the narrowest possible limits. But has the Examiner forgotten the proverb about throwing stones out of a glass house? Are its people, who so stoutly claim to be the Christians of the day, par excellence, the ones to be very severe upon others in a matter like this, with the "confusion worse confounded" of its late "Ecumenical" so freshly in memory, and its utter failure to tie up to any sort of a creed in theology which would not suit the baldest Deism? We fancy the Liberal Christianity of the day would feel itself to be much more respectable than at present, if it had come as near to uniting, ex animo, on a Confession of Faith, as those did whom it seems disposed to regard as not much better than a troupe of acrobats.

66

"WHAT," asks Hawthorne in the Diary which the Atlantic Monthly is printing, were the contents of the burden of Christian in the Pilgrim's Progress? He must have been taken for a

peddler travelling with his pack."

Doubtless; if he had been seen

walking into the sanctum of that oracle of Natural Religion.

BOSTON REVIEW.

VOL. VI.-APRIL, 1866.-No. 32.

ARTICLE I.

NATURAL AND SUPERNATURAL.

History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in Europe. By W. E. H. LECKY, M. A. Two Vols. New York: D. Appleton & Co. 1866.

Essays on the Supernatural Origin of Christianity, with special reference to the Theories of Renan, Strauss and the Tübingen School. By Rev. GEORGE P. FISHER, M. A., Professor of Church History in Yale College. New York: Charles Scribner & Co. 1866.

WHOSE is this world? By whom, and how, is it managed? These questions underlie the scepticism and the faith of all ages. They take up the essential points of belief and unbelief. They are vital to the settlement of a sound religious foundation. They have accordingly been agitated, debated, and variously determined in successive schools and systems of philoso phy, time out of mind. Every generation has given them a fresh hearing; has canvassed them under its peculiar lights and stimulants, now to one conclusion, and anon to another. They are up for the same purpose in our day. Our scholars are handling them, in the spirit of reverent devoutness, of timid or politic compromise, of bold, defiant dogmatism. Some of the most recent and eagerly read issues of the press are controverting these matters. They are prominent in our secular

as well as our religious periodicals. The special culture of this century is giving this ancient controversy some aspects of its own. One of these is, that almost as many of the prominent supporters of the sceptical side of the argument, and some of the ablest of them, are working their batteries inside of the nominally Christian line. That is, the cause of substantially deistical anti-christianism is finding just now staunch and ingenious defenders in professedly orthodox communions, as well as in others which assume the name of liberal churches. Those of them like Powell and Williams and Colenso appear to stand upon about the same platform with Theodore Parker and his disciples. Their avowed object is, of course, to reconstruct the Christian system into closer harmony with the progress of this period of the world. But as yet they have shown no ability of this kind. They have a genius for disorganization and destruction; but for rebuilding and rehabilitating they have as yet found neither time nor faculty, whatever may be the wishes of some of the more conservative. We are sometimes exhorted to address ourselves to this controversy as something new under the sun, in its elementary positions and forces. We can not so regard it. It is essentially the disputation of the early Christian centuries: "Not whether the first principles of ethics and natural religion are true and valid, but whether natural religion is able to secure the eternal interests of mankind- a question which is constantly recurring, and which constitutes the gist of the controversy between scepticism and Christianity at this very moment, as much as it did in the first ages of the church." For, continues Professor Shedd, from whom we quote: "it was their desire," the anti-christian philosophers, "to establish human philosophy upon the ruins of Christianity, as a universal religion sufficient to meet the wants of humanity, and therefore rendering the revealed system superfluous.' What but this are our sceptics attempting?

The recent volumes of Mr. Lecky and Professor Fisher substantially represent the present state of the argument, on the opposite sides of this great debate. Mr. Hurst's work on Rationalism, noticed in our last number, gives the historical aspect of the conflict from the evangelical stand-point. Mr.

1 History of Christian Doctrine. I. pp. 64, 65.

Lecky writes in the interest of the sceptical school, with much literary ability. His reading is extensive, and he is a master in the art of effective contrast and grouping. He aspires to the philosophical treatment of his subject both in the temper and the method of his discussion, more successfully, however, in the first than the second. Religion and theology, in his view, are under the same law of development with material science; must submit to the same conditions of acceptance or rejection. Here he is alike illogical and unhistoric. His favorite theory, in regard to religious and supramundane matters, is that belief and scepticism flow and reflow by some kind of tidal influence which no one can account for, but which sweeps along resistlessly, carrying away old faiths of immemorial reverence. Thus, he says, that the universal belief in witchcraft drifted off, awhile ago, into the Dead Sea, whither, in the same way, he is sure the belief in all miracles is just going, if not already gone. But, the superstition about witches gave way before the clearer processes of the human understanding carefully re-examining the subject; while no such result is following the most scholarly inquiry into the physical world and textual exegesis, as related to the miracles of the Bible. Mr. Lecky strangely overstates the facts, at this point. The supernaturalism of Christianity is in no such dilapidated condition as he assumes. Then, again, in subjecting the science of theology to the same laws which govern other scientific growths, does he mean to teach that these are the sport likewise of his currents of belief and unbelief which silently work under old foundations, overturning all that the heart used to love, and the reason to venerate? We had thought that thorough study was the especial boast of the natural as well as rational philosophy of the day; that the age was not quite so much afloat as this at the mercy of what seems hardly more than accident.

Under this tendency, the author sees the intellect or sentiment of the modern world advancing to the enthronement of the individual conscience as the verifying faculty of all truth and error; to a theology, the cardinal doctrines of which shall be equality, fraternity, the suppression of war, the elevation of the poor, the love of truth, the diffusion of liberty." Rejecting the dogmatic and the miraculous from the Scriptures, he gives

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 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

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."