VIII. A MONTH OF VICTORY, AND ITS RESULTS IX. REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE Theology. Renan's Vie de Jésus, 279. Miss Cobbe's Religious Demands of the Age, 282. Orr's Unitarianism, 282. Dr. Osgood's Address, 283. Science and Philosophy. Tyndall on Heat, 283. Dentons' Psycho- metric Researches, 285.- History and Politics. Fisher on the Consti- tution, 286. Estvàn's War Pictures, 290. Pisani's Letters on the United States, 293. Speeches, etc. of Wendell Phillips, 293. Mrs. Kemble's Journal, 294.- Biography. Life and Works of Albert Dürer, 295. Beamish's Brunel, 298. Prime's Memoirs of Nicholas Murray (Kirwan), 299. Geography and Travels. A Winter at Mentone, 300. Roba di Roma, 301. C. Wordsworth's Italy, 302. The Hannibal at Palermo, 302. Druses and Maronites, 303. Tartary, &c., 304. Peru and India, 305. The Taeping Rebellion, 306. Niphon and Pecheli, 306. Yeddo and Peking, 307. Horses of the Sahara, 308. In the Tropics, 308. — Miscellaneous. Austin Elliot, 309. Hospital Transports, 310. Theology. Gillett's Life and Times of Huss, 446. Discourses on Freedom and War, by H. W. Beecher, 447. Voltaire, Lettres Inédites, 448. — His- tory of Literature. Satyricon of Petronius, 449. Ticknor's Spanish Lit- erature, 453. Hallam's Literature of Europe, 454. Essays, etc. Grün's Pensées, 455. Hawthorne's "Our Old Home," 455. A. H. Hallam's "Remains," 456. Richter's Levana, 457. Gail Hamilton's Days," 458.-Fiction. Faith Gartney's Girlhood, 460. The Amber Gods, THE CHRISTIAN EXAMINER. JULY, 1863. ART. I. CONDITIONS OF BELIEF. A Critical History of Free Thought in reference to the Christian Religion. Eight Lectures preached before the University of Oxford, in the Year MDCCCLXII., on the Foundation of the late Rev. John Bampton. By ADAM STOREY FARRAR. London: John Murray. 1862. SINCE Paul before Felix uttered his famous saying that "after the way which men call free thought "* he worshipped the God of his fathers, the relations between intellectual liberty and spiritual faith have offered the most constant and the most vexing problem in the history of the Christian Church. A careful, able, conscientious, and scholarly discussion of this problem, in the different forms it has presented in these eighteen centuries, makes the latest contribution to theological learning on the celebrated Bampton Foundation, at Oxford. The thick, handsome, and prepossessing volume by Mr. Farrar covers too large a space, includes too many matters of detail, is too ambitious of a certain statistical completeness, and, moreover, too frank in its avowal of a purely didactic and practical aim, to be of the highest sort of value to the careful student of these matters. And yet it offers an aid in the study of them which he will gratefully recognize. There is nothing offensive in the dogmatism with which the Oxford lecturer conceives it his duty to treat his vast subject. Unfriendly criticism is disarmed by the candor of his avowal that VOL. LXXV. · **Ην λέγουσιν αἵρεσιν. - 5TH S. VOL. XIII. NO. I. 1 the very conditions on which he speaks preclude the unprejudiced and free discussion of any of the points, even of mere erudition, with which the lectureship may have to deal. The very terms of it prescribe that it shall be didactic, apologetic, dogmatic. The only point to be ascertained is that the lecturer undertakes his task in good faith, and intelligently accepts, as critic, the principles which he must defend as advocate. In language which wins confidence and respect, Mr. Farrar assures us that he has done this. Before entering upon holy orders, he had made himself acquainted, at first or second hand, with all the objections raised against the current conception of the Christian revelation by the school of English Deists, and conceived that they had been satisfactorily answered. In special preparation for this present task, a laborious course of study had made him informed of the more recent schools, Continental and English, of philosophical, historical, or literary scepticism; and his classification of them shows, to say the least, as complete a mastery of their main outline and direction, and as fair an appreciation of their spirit, as any study of them ab extra could be supposed to give. The mere breadth of range and quiet impartiality of treatment puts aside the possibility of that deeper apprehension of them, which can be had in its fulness, perhaps, only by a partisan, and in less degree by one of keen philosophic insight, who in good faith matures his own view by comparing it with many others. An assumption is apparent at the threshold of this volume which will more or less affect its value to the reader, namely, that "free thought" is to be dealt with as a thing outside the limits of sound Christian belief. This assumption is not put forward in an offensive way. On the contrary, what is suggested by the phrase is clearly distinguished from that "free-thinking" of the eighteenth century which was consciously antagonistic to the Christian faith. And we have not observed any expression which would imply moral hostility or contempt towards a sincere absence of belief, — still less, anything of that theological judgment which pronounces it doomed and accursed of God. But the fixed conditions of Christian belief are recognized with great distinctness, as op posed to the unanchored liberty of speculation. They consist, in Mr. Farrar's statement, in these three things: first, the acceptance of a sacrificial atonement, as essential to man's salvation; secondly, the miraculous and divine authority of Scripture; thirdly, the personal indwelling and controlling power of the Holy Ghost in the believer's soul. These are the three essentials of faith on which, as a foundation, the Christian Church is built. They are the Divine trust, which it is the commission of the Church to cherish and defend. As nearly as possible, the vindication of them defines the mission of the Church, in its encounter with the adverse forces of the world. There are four great historic forms in which that controversy (regarded on its intellectual side) has been carried on. These are,-1. The struggle against the Heathen Philosophy, waged by the first apologists, and terminated by the victory of the Church within the Empire. 2. The labor of the Christian doctors of the Middle Age to correct the sceptical tendencies of Scholasticism. 3. The religious struggle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries with the infidel literary spirit of the Renaissance. 4. The controversy invited by the manifold forms of Modern Philosophy. These topics, firmly and clearly sketched at the outset, define the purpose and prescribe the arrangement of the lecturer's argument. Such criticism as we might be disposed to bring against the logical method of these lectures were easy to anticipate, and had perhaps better be implied than stated in detail. It is not our habit, in dealing with questions of learning, to defer much to dogmatic assumptions of what the decision of them must be. We are willing to take our lecturer at his word, when he says that his purpose is "to guide the student, not refute the unbeliever," and we judge of his statements accordingly. The gulf between his position and any that we are accustomed to think of as sure, or even possible, in these days, is shown in a single sentence, (page 462,) where he meets certain views on the Old Testament with the suggestion that the historical narrative of Scripture is "not amenable to criticism." And in brief, gathering what we may of pure information from the book, we dismiss altogether the task of dealing with the writer's opinions as such, or vindicating ourselves from any possible charges which he may have implied against us. It is only with the leading assumption already alluded to that we have now to do, the assumption that the intellectual structure of belief within the Church is fixed on an unswerving foundation and in invariable outline, while the sphere of free thought is, if not essentially antagonistic, at least quite outside its limits. This supposed antagonistic or independent power has been, as Mr. Farrar reminds us, ascribed by some theologians to the direct agency and prompting of evil spirits; but, dismissing this conjecture, (which would put the topic outside all limits of criticism,) he deals with it partly as originating in the freedom of the human soul, which delights in unlimited ranges of speculation, partly as controlled by historical conditions such as modify all the phenomena of a given place and time. In all this he is modest, sensible, and right. He does not see so clearly, or state so strongly, that the historical development of the Christian doctrine itself is also subject to the same conditions. And yet, if nothing more, those words of Paul which we began by quoting might serve to show this to be both true and necessary. What "men called free-thinking" in him was, as the apostolic narrative very plainly tells, distinguished hardly more from the dogmatism of the Jews with whom he broke, than from the narrower view of the Christians with whom he joined. And no result of the more recent criticism is at once more positive in the main fact, and more curious in its details, than the sharp antagonism between the Pauline doctrine and the "orthodoxy" of the early Church.* Strictly speaking, however, the element of "free thought is only one, and by no means the principal one, that has to be taken into account by the historian of religious belief. The type of belief found at any given period is determined, not by the wilfulness of those who set themselves to be its expounders, but by the grade of mental culture, by certain fixed intellectual conditions and social or historical phenomena of the time. While the faith itself is a vital phenomenon, one which we do not profess to "account for" in any merely scientific or speculative way, theology takes its rank among * Illustrated especially in the writings known as "Clementines." |