put, be denied or blinked. It has indeed been attempted to weaken their force, by appealing to the sublime views of God and of man's relations to God, arrived at by a few pagan philosophers, and latterly, to the grand speculations and lofty morality to be found in some of the so-called sacred books of the East. But frankly look at them. What, in good truth, have they ever effected? What have they done for the regeneration of human nature? What safe foundation have they pointed out for our most earnest aspirations? What have they done to clear up the problem of human existence and to justify our hopes with regard to a hereafter? What one sufficient and truly peace-bringing solution have they ever offered to the perplexing doubts of the sin-burdened conscience? But to supply just these wants is the very end of religion according to its true idea; and whatever may be said of other books, there is but one in which this end is made supreme, and in which the solution of these questions is aimed at from the beginning, and finally so completely realized to every need of human nature as to leave nothing to be desired.1

Such being the difference between the religious knowledge embodied in the myths and speculations of ancient wisdom, and that which Scripture, without any parade of speculation, plainly reveals from the beginning; and such being the results of the teachings on both sides, namely, decided failure to check sin and renew humanity in the one case, and comparative success in the other, the question returns with new force: how to account for this difference on the supposition that the Scriptures are not really what they claim to be, but merely another form of the natural development of the religious consciousness of mankind? The instinct which impels us to seek a sufficient reason for every phenomenon, and which will not permit us to ascribe appearances differing in their whole manifestation to one and

1 Toute religion est vraie en quelque point. Vraie, sinon comme pensée divine, du moins comme pensée humaine. Et sous ca rapport, toute re igion est une révélation. Mais celle-là scula est la vraie qui, d'un côté, a posé toutes les questions, et de l'autre, a repondu à toutes. Vinet.

the same cause, cannot be satisfied by such a supposition. In truth, the more we try to make a serious application of this theory to explain the religious history of mankind, the more we must be convinced of its utter incompetency. The further we go back with it, to where its application ought to be the easiest, the more palpably it fails us. Instead of, explaining anything, it embarrasses everything. In attempting to explain everything without a miracle, it involves everything in a more perplexing maze, in which we may grope in vain to find a possible beginning for that religion which alone, of all the systems that are called such, truly deserves the name. To put this religion, so evidently divine in all its teachings, so purifying in all its influences, so grand and glorious in its effects even as they appear here in time, into the same category with the dark, enigmatical and as they eventually proved, whatever of truth they may have embodied at first—the superstitious and polluting mythologies of the nations, is so contrary to the first impressions that force themselves upon every reflecting mind, calmly looking at the facts, that it seems unaccountable how such a thing should ever have suggested itself to any serious inquirer after truth, or what motive could exist for it, except some invincible prejudice against the very idea of a positive religion. For ourselves, we have no doubt that it is indeed a prejudice of this sort, springing chiefly, though perhaps not always, from hatred to a positive religion, which lies at the bottom of all the attempts, in these modern times, to divest the religion of the Bible of its supernatural character, and to place it, so far as its origin is concerned, on the same level with the multitudinous human systems of belief. Where this prejudice cannot be supposed to arise from any special hostility to religion generally, we can only conceive of it as growing out of a strong à priori persuasion of the improbability or impossibility of a supernatural communication of divine truth to the human mind. And if we ask what can be the ground for such a persuasion, the fair answer must be, that it is that singular notion of freedom on the part of man and necessity in God, the offspring of modern specula

tion carried to the extreme, which, while it denies the possibility of God's interfering with His own laws, asserts for human reason an absolute independence of outward authority, and a self-sufficiency for the discovery of all truth, by its own unaided powers, to which the history of human errors shows it to be little entitled. The immanency of God in His rational creatures is the articulate form in which this persuasion expresses itself. God, it is said, impenetrates His own creation; and, while maintaining a sort of independent personality, lives through all life, and especially through the life of thought. He cannot be conceived to work outwardly and by fitful communications; He can only be conceived to work inwardly, by one uniform law of indwelling energy through all minds.

The religion of the Bible, it is held therefore, is the historical result of this constant, indwelling energy, in the purest form in which it, as yet, has manifested itself. But it is a form vitiated by a false intermixture of the supernatural and miraculous. All this latter adds nothing to the essential truth, but rather stands in the way of its free reception. It makes that outward and objective to us, which, as religion, should be most inward and subjective. It makes that positive and authoritative, which, as being the highest freedom of the rational soul, should exist only within it as its inmost law. This, so far as we can make it out, is the position maintained by the most subtle and powerful antagonists of a positive revelation at the present day. It is a formidable one not indeed in itself, but because it addresses itself to the strongest passion of cultivated human nature, the pride of its own self-sufficiency; and because again, being a protest against all outward authority whatsoever, in the province of religion, it seems to take the strongest stand of Protestantism against Romanism. But as an extreme departure from one error generally leads to another which is its opposite, so it has proved in this case. For how can we suppose that to be anything else than an error, and one even more dan

1 See the recent work of Schwarz: Zur Geschichte der neuesten Theologiethroughout.

gerous than Romanism itself, which, to maintain itself, must contradict all that we know of the history of the human mind when undoubtedly left to itself, and do violence to that Word, which is admitted to contain the fullest and purest expression of religious truth, by separating that truth from every supernatural element, that is to say, from all the vital connections with historical facts, wherewith it is bound up? To what strange lengths men may be led by their overweening reliance upon some preconceived theory avowedly based upon nothing but their own ideal notions; to what lengths they may be led in arbitrarily modifying and altering, or, in their own language, correcting the best established facts of the past; what extravagant fictions, irreconcilable with the plainest dictates of common sense, more incredible than any miracle in the legends of the saints, they are ready to palm upon others and upon themselves, rather than to take things as they are given and as they only could have occurred, is nowhere more strikingly illustrated than in those bold criticisms upon the sacred narratives peculiar to the present age- which for no other purpose than to transform the miraculous into the mythical, and thus escape the necessity of admitting a positive divine revelation, would bring down the time of the composition of the gospels to somewhere about the middle of the second century. 1

1 These later writers of the critical school, as it is called, coming after such men as F. Wolf and B. Niebuhr, might remind one of a set of giddy, thoughtless boys, who having witnessed the grand blaze made by the burning up of a heap of rubbish, take some opportunity afterwards to try the same experiment on the next convenient hay-mow or grain-stack. With what indignation Niebuhr regarded this misapplication of his own true method of historical criticism, is well known. In my opinion,” says he in one of his letters from Rome, “he is not a Protestant Christian, who does not receive the historical facts of Christ's earthly life in their literal acceptation, with all their miracles, as equally authentic with any event recorded in history, and whose belief in them is not as firm and tranquil as his belief in the latter; who has not the most absolute faith in the articles of the Apostles' creed, taken in their grammatical sense; who does not consider every doctrine and every precept of the New Testament as undoubted divine revelation, in the sense of the Christians of the first century, who knew nothing of a Theopneustia. Moreover, a Christianity after the fashion of the modern philosophers and pantheists, without a personal God, without immor

in

When we find men put to such shifts to make out their point, we may reasonably conclude that they are wrong their original position. They do but prove the very thing they are aiming to confute, by showing the absurd consequences that must follow by supposing its contrary. We We may therefore, as it seems to us, look upon all this terrible array of "searching criticism" as but constituting another link in the chain of evidence which, to those who pay due regard to the moral bearing and tendencies of an argument, places beyond the possibility of rational doubt the fact that God has miraculously and supernaturally interposed, and in His written Word declared to man, directly and authoritatively, those truths which, though relating to His own eternal well-being, he could never have found out by himself.

It being sufficiently evident from these general considerations that a supernatural revelation is, some how or other, contained in the sacred books of Scripture, the next point to be inquired into is: How was this revelation given, and what is the nature of the process by which the divine communication has been safely and without material error brought under the form of human conceptions and of written language for the common benefit of mankind? And here it may be proper to draw clearly the line of distinction between the conceptions revelation and inspiration.

By revelation, then, we understand all God's direct manifestations of Himself, with their necessary connections and dependencies.' Revelation, according to our view of it, is an organic

tality, without human individuality, without historical faith, is no Christianity at all to me; though it may be a very intellectual, very ingenious philosophy. I have often said, that I do not know what to do with a metaphysical God. and that I will have none but the God of the Bible, who is heart to heart with us."Niebuhr's Life. Am. ed p 362.

An able and remarkable article on Revelation by Dr. Rothe, in the last number of the Theol. Studien u. Kritiken, came into our hands too late to be made use of; which we regret. He regards the supernatural as belonging necessarily to a revelation in the strict sense, which he defines as consisting of the two elements, divine manifestation and inspiration — manifestation (miraculous) forming its external and objective; inspiration, its internal and subjective, side. What he has to say of the supernatural historical unfolding of revelation within the "organism of natural history," is well worthy of attention.