the Reformation, viz., the materialistic and the rationalistic or transcendental, in the bad sense of these words. But neither Bacon nor Descartes contemplated such results from their systems. Especially is it only by taking the lesser half of the Baconian system, that infidelity gains any countenance from him. He himself says, "that it is most certain, and approved by experience, that while light gusts may move men to Atheism, yet fuller draughts bring men back to religion," and in a striking passage in the New Organon, he says: "Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God; and that power obtained, its exercise will be governed by right, reason, and true religion." It was only when his system was transferred to another soil, and brought under the formulas of infidelity, that it came to nourish skepticism.

The course of modern infidelity has been curiously determined by the comparative freedom of the different nations, and it has come to its height, it is well worthy of being carefully noted-not in those countries where political thought and speech are freest, but where they have been most restricted. Deism, Atheism, Pantheism are the three main forms represented respectively by England, France, and Germany. The movement began in England with Herbart, Hobbes, Collins, Tindal, Chubb, and Morgan, in the 16th and 17th centurie, (including Toland, who, however, held to a kind of material pantheism). And as far as the main and fundamental position of these free-thinkers are concerned, meeting them on their own grounds, fairly and fully, English Christianity showed itself fully equal to the task, as is seen in the works of Baxter, Cudworth, S. Clark, Waterland, Leland, and especially the immortal Analogy of Bishop Butler.*

This same movement, transferred to Germany, at first attained the form known by the name of rationalism, criticising the historic records of the faith, and setting up natural reason and ethics as the ultimate test and source of truth. Philosophic rationalism received its most consistent form through the criti

*The great religious movement in England, under Whitfield and Wesley, in the last part of the century, completely broke the popularity of this deistic movement. Dr. Gillett's God in Human Thought, 2 vols., N. Y., Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1874, gives a comprehensive and able account of the whole English controversy, and of the services of Bishop Butler.

cism of Kant; though he himself, with all his speculative insight, confessed the radical evil of human nature and a firm faith in the being of God.

In France the infidel movement was neither critical nor rationalistic-it become materialistic and revolutionary. The French monarchy had become a despotism; the banishment and slaughter of the Huguenots had decimated the moral power of the nation; a corrupt and persecuting Romanism was all the faith recognized. Rousseau pleaded for the rights and sympathies of nature; Voltaire, though retaining faith in a God, ridiculed the Scriptures on the basis of a philosophic portative. D'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, preached atheism in the Encyclopédie (Diderot declaring that the height of religion was to have none at all): and the result was reached in the chaos, conflicts, and woes of the French Revolution, from which that fated land only recovered by accepting an imperial despotism, and restoring the Catholic clergy with new pomp; so that now, ultramontane principles have the ascendancy in the successors of Bossuet and the old Catholic bishops, who contended so manfully for the Gallican liberties.

But it was reserved for Germany, in some of its more recent forms of philosophy and theology, to combine together all the phases and all the resources of infidelity, in the most learned, acute, and comprehensive assaults ever made upon the Christian faith-so that any other current infidelity in any other part of the world is but a feeble echo, so far as learning and speculation go, of what is found in these Teutonic schemeswhile, at the same time, it is true, that the same land has furnished the most elaborate and thorough replies to the criticisms and hypotheses of those assailants of our faith. There is a striking resemblance in many points between the character of the attack on Christianity in this last form of it, and that which it assumed under the influence of the New-Platonic philosophy in ancient times-the same comprehensiveness of method and combination of weapons, and the same attempt to form a complete system for man by an eclectic process; but yet the Germans show more thoroughness and destructiveness in both the historical and philosophical methods of conducting the argument, for infidelity must grow in skill to compete with a Christianity which has been growing in power for 1800 years.

Ever since the time of Leibnitz, the German philosophic movement has tended toward the construction of an universal system. The influence of Spinoza, with his pantheistic theory of one substance, and his demonstrative method applied to metaphysics, also had a very great influence, especially in the later German schools. Kant initiated a powerful tendency by his Criticism of the Pure Reason (directed in part against Hume's skepticism), and by his Criticism of the Practical Reason (conscience), on which he grounded his severely ethical and strongly theistic creed. He is the real philosophical father of strict ethical rationalism—that is, of the system which puts the prescripts of reason above the written word. At the same time, there was a host of scholars who were applying historical and philological criticism to the interpretation of Scripture in a way to undermine its infallible authority. Fichte followed Kant, retaining, however, chiefly his idealism in a subjective sense; he endeavored, in his earlier writings, to deduce the universe from the Ego, and substituted the moral order of the universe for God. Schelling, in his youthful enthusiasm, when magnetism was discloing its wonders, announced, as a prophet, the theory of the identity of opposites, of the ideal and the real with pure intellectual vision descrying one common essence with the two poles, viz.: the spiritual and the material; in his later system, the Philosophy of Mythology, he plants himself upon more distinctive theistic and Christian ground. Hegel, with his more thorough and logical method, identified thought and being, and made the vast attempt of a logical development of the universe from pure being by an inherent law, the law of negation, confounding the movement of real being with the processes of logic. He makes spirit to be ultimate. By the law of negation, spirit is transformed into nature, and then comes back to itself in humanity; God becomes conscious in man. This is Hegel's theory, as expounded by the so-called left wing, of which Strauss is the most signal representative. Hegel himself, and many of his followers of the right wing, claim that his system is to be understood only as a philosophy of the Christian faith; that Hegelianism gives us, in the form of philosophy, the same fundamental truths which Christianity gives in the form of creeds. The later German tendencies are a reaction against such an abstract ideal

ism, and, as developed by Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, they avow pessimism as their creed, and make annihilation to be the chief boon for the race. Not to speak more particularly of the contemporaneous movements in France and England, we can now only refer to the alliance, in these three countries, of pantheism and materialism, in their most developed forms, and in a common attack upon the Christian creed and church.

This rapid historic sketch may suffice to show, that in all the periods of this great conflict, there has been a difference in the character, both of the assault and the defense. At first it was Christianity against Polytheism, Judaism, and the wisdom of the ancient schools. And here Christianity was vindicated as a positive revelation; and, as a result of the conflict, the old Catholic Church ruled in the East and the West. In the mediæval period, there was not only the subjugation of Northern Europe, but also the consolidation of the Christian system in the scholastic theology and the realistic philosophy. The Christian theory governed the world of thought and kept it in bonds. In the next stadium we have the separation of these elements, and the conflict of Christianity with all the forms of human research and speculation. It has come into conflict with deism, with rationalism in its various modes, with atheism. and with pantheism; and now it is contending with atheism, and pantheism allied. And as the form of the conflict has changed, so has the mode of the defense. The Analogy of Bishop Butler, admirable as it is for its specific ends, does not meet the questions raised by Hegel and Baur, by Darwin and Spencer.

And not only are these comprehensive systems making their assaults upon the Christian faith, but each special science joins in the attack. Historical research is trying to undermine the basis of the biblical records. Strauss and Baur, and many critics of no special philosophical school, are endeavoring to disprove the authenticity of the Scriptures, especially of the Gospels and the Acts, and to explain the history of the Christian church as a process of natural development. Astronomy, palæontology, ethnography, and even the special physical sciences, are striving to construct a theory of the earth and the

heavens, of the origin and growth of all life, at war not only with the Scriptures, but with the very dictates of human reason as hitherto interpreted; denying all efficient and final causes, and making a blind, unconscious force to be that in which we live and move and have our being; so that Apologetics must embrace the whole of natural theology and much of moral science, as well as the so-called evidences of Christianity. Its sphere is necessarily wide, and ever widening. It must, in fact, taken in all its scope, lead to the conclusion, that Christianity is the one absolute system of truth for man; and that this is provable and proved by the facts of history, as well as by the nature of Christianity itself.

IV.

Ever since the time of Schleiermacher, Apologetics, as a system, has been taking on new forms in Germany, as shown in the works referred to at the head of this article, of which that of Sack was one of the earliest, and is not superseded even by that of Ebrard, the latest and, in many respects, the best, of these treatises.

Of these and other kindred works we may at some time give a fuller account, in order to illustrate the nature of Christian Apologetics, and to show its special need for the church of the present day. Meanwhile, we will only add, that it must be apparent, even from this review, that Christian Apologetics as a science derives its materials from a great variety of sources, and embraces within itself some departments of Christian theology hitherto kept distinct-such, for example, as natural theology and the evidences of Christianity (both of which are combined in the interesting volume entitled Christian Apologetics, by the late Dr. Hetherington of Scotland). Without proposing any final arrangement, we only add, in conclusion, that Christian Apologetics, as a science, has for its object to vindicate the divine authority of Christianity and its records, and to show that it is the highest and best system of truth for man. And in doing this, the materials of which it must make use may, perhaps, be best distributed in the following general scheme :

FIRST.-Fundamental Apologetics-Comprising the question; embraced in natural theology; the being and nature of God,