vitalizing power in its conclusions, that it now begins to be suspected that much of its most carefully prepared chemical food is little better than poison. Calcine the beef-bone into which the mystery of animal life has organized phosphorus, and extract that element, and you get an active and virulent poison. Boil that bone, and you get the phosphorus in its organic form; and it makes a wholesome ingredient in your soup. No one can tell exactly what the difference is between the phosphorus organized or unorganized; but it is all the difference between food and poison. Take away the vital principle from an organized human frame, and you have straightway death and corruption.

Jesus Christ organized the eternal and universal principles of all religion in his wonderful personality. They gained their first full power to meet the wants of human souls, by that mysterious change and sublimation. They became thus not mere ideas or abstract principles, but ideal forces, organic forces; and some of us are now trying to calcine Christianity and get its essence out of its organism, in the vain impression that when we succeed we shall throw away merely a bone and get a concentrated nutriment. Let us see to it that we do not get a poison out of our philosophic crucible.

If the Unitarian body means to give up Jesus Christ as the head of its faith and its Church, it has only to discuss the preamble in a few more conferences, and propose amendments like Mr. Clarke's, and have them supported by Mr. Hale and Mr. Collyer, and passed in the real mind and heart of the Convention, even though just formally escaped as matters of record by tender deference to personal influence, or by friendly concession. It is not what is voted, but what is meant, that ruins a religious body. It is our sad conviction that rationalistic and semi-Christian or anti-Christian proclivities and opinions prevail in our body much more extensively than is confessed, or even known; and that they require kind, tender, serious, but also positive, frank, and vigorous, opposition. If they cannot be checked by this process, the body cannot long hold together. We fully believe that if well understood,

clearly faced, and thoughtfully considered, these semi-Christian or unchristian ideas would not be welcomed, approved, or accepted. To make them better understood ought to be the painstaking effort of all believers in the Gospel and Church of Jesus Christ.

ART. VI. -REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.

DR. MAHAN's design was excellent.* So also is the basis which he has taken for his groundwork, the validity of the human intelligence as a faculty of world knowledge, as established by the direct and immediate testimony of consciousness. From this basis, by a strictly demonstrative argument, as he claims, he establishes the truth of Theism. Materialism and Idealism, he maintains, are grounded upon pure and unsupported assumptions, especially the one com-. mon assumption, for which there is no valid ground at all, that underneath all phenomena, both of spirit and matter, there exists only one and the same substance, of whose necessary activity all phenomena are the self-necessitated evolutions. In opposition to this assumption, Dr. Mahan maintains that our knowledge of matter and spirit as distinct and separate entities, the former as having real extension and form, the latter as possessed of the powers of thought, feeling, and voluntary determination, is given in consciousness as exclusively presentative or immediate knowledge; and that therefore mind and matter must be taken, for the basis of all our deductions, as separate, distinct, and known entities, having the real qualities referred to. This conclusion, he maintains, cannot be denied without denying the validity of the testimony of consciousness, making our intelligence a lie. Next it is shown that facts of order having an existence in time, suppose a cause out of and above nature; and that the facts of order in nature have had a beginning in time. Moreover, it is shown that the order of events in nature has been from time to time changed, and that parts of given series are arranged in

*The Science of Natural Theology; or, God the Unconditioned Cause, and God the Infinite and Perfect, as Revealed in Creation. By Rev. ASA MAHAN, D.D. Boston: Published by Henry Hoyt, 1867.

forms which can by no possibility be accounted for by a reference to natural law. These facts, it is undeniable, also necessarily imply the existence of a cause out of and above nature, and no inhering law of nature, as their ultimate cause. Thus it is shown that a first cause, eternal, immutable, and of adequate efficiency for the work of creation, does exist. By the same argument, but more especially by the argument that the laws, adaptations, demands, and necessary ideas of our mental and moral nature are " correlative to what is real in the Creator, and not what is unreal," he proves that this first cause is a free, self-conscious personality, and finally is infinite and perfect. This argument Dr. Mahan claims to be entirely à posteriori, and the one sole valid line of proof. He denies the existence of any à priori proof of the existence of God, and denies also the validity of Paley's argument from design. Dr. Mahan's method of proof is, indeed, very strong, is perhaps stronger than any other one line. But it is not as exclusively à posteriori as he claims, and we do not think he makes out his case against the argument from design. One of his chief arguments for the infinity and perfection of God - viz., the argument that the idea of Him as such is a first truth, a necessary conception of universal mind; and that the idea could not be thus necessary and universal unless it accorded with the reality—is almost identical with one of the proofs commonly called à priori. Compare it, for example, with the à priori proof as given by Hickock. It is true, it is not wholly à priori; it is partly à posteriori; viz., in its appeal to the fact of such a necessary and universal conception of God existing among men. But neither is the argument from creation in time wholly à posteriori; that is, wholly grounded on evidence. That also is à priori in its major premise, that every change in phe

nomena must have a cause.

To the argument from design, the objection is made that "it is assumed that facts of order do not and cannot exist unless they are produced by some cause, and that an intelligent one. Now, in the divine mind," says Dr. Mahan, "order or facts of order do exist without a cause. If order may exist in mind without a cause, for aught that we do or can know to the contrary, it may exist in matter or any real substance without a cause." This objection, first brought forward, we believe, by O. A. Brownson, in his novel of "Charles Elwood," is a fallacy founded upon an ambiguity in the word "order" which should not have escaped one who prides himself so much upon the severity of his logic as Professor Mahan does. Although there

may be said to be order in God, as a principle or mode of action of his mind, yet it is not properly supposable, much less is it to be set down as an established fact, that there is order in the mind of God in the sense in which order is used in the argument from design; viz., in the sense of an adaptation of means to ends, an arrangement of parts to accomplish an intelligent purpose, or such an arrangement of parts as is in accordance with the action of an intelligent mind. For by the very conception of mind, of spirit, it is not composed of parts. Dr. Mahan, moreover, objects to the argument from design, that the major premise, the à priori element, ought always to be indisputable, and the doubt, if any, to be in relation to the minor premise, the question of fact, which can be settled by an appeal to facts. Now, in the argument from design, the major premise-viz., that adaptation of means to ends, or (as he chooses to state it, weakening thereby materially, we think, the strength of the argument by the change in the form of statement) facts of order, imply intelligence—is denied by many antitheists, and is not indisputable. His own argument, he claims, is not open to this objection, but its major premise - viz., that facts of order beginning in time suppose a cause out of and above nature—is universally admitted and indisputable. But an acquaintance with the English and French philosophy of the last ten years would have shown him that this had been denied as well as the major premise to the design argument. Dr. Mahan is, indeed, most strangely ignorant, or else most unwarrantably ignores pretty nearly all the philosophy or science of the last ten years. The names and the peculiar views of such men as Mill, Bain, Comte, Büchner, Molleschott, McCosh, &c., in philosophy, and of Darwin, Huxley, Lyell, &c., in science, nowhere are found alluded to in the body of the work.

He says, for example (p. 56), “We know of no philosopher of any standing who maintains the validity of the fundamental principles of the philosophy of Locke; to wit, that the elements of all ideas and of all forms of knowledge existing in the human mind were originally derived from one source exclusively, experience, or external and internal perception." Are not Mr. Mill and Mr. Bain philosophers of any standing; or did Dr. Mahan not know of their existence?

Again (p. 129), it is asserted that "the history of the world, since the origin of the human race, presents us with not a solitary fact indicating the remotest tendency on the part of any one species of animals or plants towards a transmutation into a different or opposite species;" and again (p. 152), "The dogma of transmutation now stands

among the exploded errors of the past." The most charitable judgment that can be made in regard to the exhibition of such ignorance or ignoring of the facts which Darwin has collected, and the fact that the theory of development which goes now by his name (which Dr. Mahan, by the way, always calls the Lamarckian theory), has been adopted as a probable theory by half the scientific world, including such men as Lyell, Huxley, Professors Peirce, Gray, &c., the most charitable judgment, we say, which we can make in regard to such ignorance or ignoring as this, is that the book was published without revision, just as it was written ten or twelve years ago, for College Lectures. This philosophical and scientific "behind-the-times" is the chief fault of the book, and it is a capital one. A manual of natural theology needs to be abreast of the latest thought and discoveries as much as a manual of geology.

It is, as we have said, a fundamental position of our author that we have an immediate presentative knowledge of matter as well as of mind; that we know matter as it is in itself. If this is not so, we are told, on almost every other page, we must impeach the integrity of consciousness itself, we must make the testimony of consciousness a

But when one set of faculties, such as the reasoning faculties, tests the apparent testimony of another set of faculties, such as the perceptive faculties, is the result a contradiction of the testimony of consciousness, or not rather the corrected and true testimony of consciousness? The true testimony of consciousness is, at least, as likely to be found in the deliberate judgment of the thoughtful and reflective, as in the hastily formed and unsifted beliefs and convictions of the unreflecting many. That the testimony of consciousness in its pure and original state is to be accepted as decisive, needs no argument and little repetition. The question is as to what is the pure and unalloyed testimony of consciousness in regard to our cognition of matter. In the face of the fact that almost all the great names in philosophy, as Sir William Hamilton himself admitted, are ranged against the doctrine of the immediate, presentative cognition of matter, to assume, nevertheless, that this is the undeniable testimony of consciousness, is to make an assumption hardly warrantable, at least when made as it is, without discussion, assignment of reasons or qualification by explanations.

If we do not know matter immediately, as it is in itself, Dr. Mahan repeatedly asserts, we cannot prove the truth of Natural Theism. The truth of the latter, he says, depends on the truth of the former.