consent and established acceptance; and contend that this is what is peculiarly consistent with that repose and unchange'ableness which is the attribute and characteristic of truth; and even when pressed with the somewhat obvious objection, that on such a principle the first admission of the gospel ought to have been opposed, they are still at no loss for an answer; and, with the enviable facility with which such unsubstantial notions can be made to assume any desirable form, they disguise their meaning, or hide their want of it in ambiguous phraseology, and studied mystification.

Meanwhile, under the veil of all this mystery, it surely requires no great penetration to discern the reality of a religion (such as it is) deprived of all the characteristic peculiarities of the Christian revelation, and existing as well without the New Testament as with it.

Such a view, in fact, directly divests the Christian religion of the attributes of reality; it confounds truth and fable; and makes it idle and dangerous to attempt to separate them, or to unravel the perplexing distinctions between history and tradition,-between fact and fiction. It removes all the landmarks of historical testimony, and reduces the Gospel to a mystical legend. The obvious tendency is to make religion no more than an empty veneration for the occult and the unknown; and the adherents of such opinions delight in the contemplation of the hidden origin of a supposed universal doctrine-the mystery of antiquity, and the divinity of tradition-the more pure the nearer its heavenly source, upon which poets and philosophers have loved to dwell; but which can only be considered applicable to Christianity by those who look upon its truth as no better established than the dreams of the ancient Heathens. a word, the very notion implies the absence of all distinct idea of a Revelation. It is the very claim of revealed religion, that it does assign a definite origin to the truth, and conveys it pure and fresh to the most distant generations.

In

That such notions are often taken up in pure simplicity, we cannot doubt; but it is no less certain that they are extensively advocated by men of far too high intellectual powers, to allow of our regarding the profession of them in any other light than that of a studied equivocation; the superinduction of an ominous twilight over the whole state of intellect and feeling; -the elaborate and systematized adoption of a condition of

* Soph. Antig., 456. Vide Cicero de Leg., ii. 11. Tusc, Disp., i. 12.

opinion, or rather of imagination, hovering between a persuasion of something like truth, so expressed as to be hardly distinguishable from fiction, and the indulgence in a waking reverie, which, if it presents images resembling realities, offers no substantial objects of rational contemplation. Nor can we omit to notice in passing, as one effective element in the keeping up of such ideas, the adoption of a peculiar style of language, chiefly engrafted into English composition from the existing taste for German literature;a style tending directly to vitiate and destroy the genuine, clear, and forcible expression of words and thoughts.

It is highly worthy of remark, how closely the most opposite parties have sometimes agreed in the professed disparagement of Reason in matters of religion. The disciples of a blind fanaticism, and the votaries of Catholic authority, are equally hostile to its exercise, as essentially at variance with the nature of faith. We may take as a type of the case, the instance of Chillingworth between the Jesuit Knott and the puritan Cheynell; the former contending that he destroyed the nature of faith by resolving it into reason,' the latter praying that God would 'give him new light to deny his carnal reason, and submit to faith;' whilst a third party, equally despising each of the former, exactly chimes in with both, in making its boast, that reason and philosophy infallibly lead to the rejection of all religion-and that all real science is in radical and necessary opposition to all ❝ theology.'*

The assertion, that the understanding is an insufficient source ⚫ of knowledge in Divine things,' (which in one sense is doubtless true,) has been sometimes strangely misapplied. It was the adoption of this idea which led Lord Herbert of Cherbury to resort to a supposed instinct, or peculiar consciousness, as the ground of religious belief-and thus to reject a positive revelation altogether. While, with a singular inconsistency, by a writer who allows and dwells upon this, we hear it alleged that the very opposite view was the source of error in the cases of other Deists. Thus we are told, † the erroneous conceptions of inspiration • and prophecy . together with the exclusive appeal to the intelleet in the proposition of the evidences, had confused to Collins the argument from prophecy;' and that Tindal, constantly referring to rationality,' came to reduce Christianity to a mere re publication of the religion of nature.

* Comte, Piilosophie Positive, ii. 36.

† See Pusey on Rationalism, vol. i. p. 125; and Note, p. 126.

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If some other faculty of our nature, distinct from reason, is to be made the standard and guide to religious belief, it can only follow, that the subject on which it is exercised must be beyond the region of facts. Whenever matters of fact are in question, reason can be the only judge. If we refer to mythic legends or theological mysticism, then, indeed, another faculty or feeling is called into play. But a religion built on such a basis, professedly grounded solely on the claims of an infallible authority or the creature only of feeling, emotion, and impulse or upheld on the mere plea of utility, and enforced by compulsory enactmentsor appealing only to the veneration for antiquity or dependent on the general voice of the many-any such systems manifestly involve no question of TRUTH; they have no connexion with evidence, and consistently discard all appeal to reason.

But a system which claims to be built on facts, necessarily implies the question of truth or falsehood; and must refer to evidence of some kind, and to reason, to judge of that evidence. To reject reason and evidence is to render faith no better than fiction; Christianity a fable; its history a legend, of no better authority than the chimeras of Paganism.

When we hear some parties distinctly professing—' faith without evidence,' we cannot but ask in what do they believe? An internal impression on the soul may doubtless be most vivid and even enduring, and practically efficacious; but is it meant that there is no objective reality in what is presented to the mind? Facts may become the foundation of feelings, but not feelings of facts.

The distinction is often dwelt upon between the fides historica and the fides viva, and instances are appealed to of a convinced understanding co-existing with an unconvinced heart.' What, we ask, is this, but an exemplification of the lamentable, but very common inconsistency of human nature. There must be, we apprehend, some definite object of belief supposed; a fides historica in the first instance, to guide the fides viva in the right path.

When some contend for a simple impression of truth, conveyed by the Word of God, on the internal conviction, looking for evidences afterwards in the practical fruits of such conviction, which are alleged to be amply sufficient to distinguish true from false systems of doctrine; when they affirm that conversions, not miracles, are the abiding proofs of the true faith;' that an inward sense conspiring with the written word, gives each a mutual corroboration of the other,-upon the most entire admission of the truth of these respective pleas, we must yet observe, that they do not set aside, but in fact imply, distinctly, the existence of some

sort of clear outward indication, to show what is the Divine word to which the appeal is to be made.

We have here alluded chiefly to one species of mysticism, as being that which is most prevalent among ourselves at the present day; but other kinds may be distinguished, and in some instances connected with views exhibiting pretensions of the most opposite character to those here alluded to. Extremes often meet in a very singular manner: the very same mystical chimæras are engendered equally in the cold recesses of academical cloisters, and in the heated atmospheres of certain lecture-rooms. A system in which the abstractions of reason are the avowed objects of contemplation, is sometimes strangely made to run into the wildest hallucinations of mystical reverie ;-the very counterpart of that we have already exposed as the prevalent tendency of the "Catholic' school.

We will only offer one specimen of this style of theologizing, from an address to the senior class in Divinity at Harvard University,' by the Rev. R. W. Emerson. The author thus describes the kind of religion he is recommending :—

It is a mountain air: it is the enbalmer of the world. It is myrrh and storax, and chlorine and rosemary. It makes the sky and the hills sublime, and the silent song of the stars is it. Always the seer is a sayer. Somehow his dream is told. Somehow he publishes it with solemn joy, sometimes with pencil on canvass, sometimes with chisel on stone; sometimes in towers and aisles of granite his soul's worship is builded. Man is the wonder-maker. He is seen amid miracles. The stationariness of religion; the assumption that the age of inspiration is past, that the Bible is closed; the fear of degrading the character of Jesus by representing him as a man, indicate with sufficient clearness the falsehood of our theology. It is the office of a true teacher to show us that God is, not was-that He speaketh, not spake. The true Christianity-a faith like Christ's in the infinitude of man-is lost. None believeth in the soul of man, but only in some man or person old and departed! In how many churches, and by how many prophets, tell me, is man made sensible that he is an infinite soul; that the earth and the heavens are passing into his mind; that he is drinking for ever the soul of God!'

Or again :

The very word miracle, as pronounced by Christian churches, gives a false impression: it is a monster; it is not one with the blowing clover and the falling rain. Man's life is a miracle, and all that A true conversion, a true Christ, is now as

man doth.

always to be made by the reception of beautiful sentiments.

The gift of God to the soul is not a vaunting, overpowering, excluding sanctity, but a sweet natural goodness, like thine and mine, and that thus invites thine and mine to be and to grow.'

In such a rhapsody it is little to the purpose where we begin or leave off; but the above will, we suppose, suffice. The reader, however, will not fail to be struck with the parallel so manifestly presented between many of these ideas, and the doctrines of Catholicism; respecting the perpetual supernaturality of the church, the continuance of Divine teaching, and the same reference to religion embodied in the architecture and other artistical adjuncts of ecclesiastical pageantries. Thus systems, professedly of so opposite a character, are identified in the practical results, of an unintelligible chaos of visionary notions; in which the spirit of sentimental devotion loves to lose itself, and into which all substantial ideas of definite belief are sublimed and lost.

Emerging, however, from these cloudy regions, and descending to something like rational argument, we find more precise allegations sometimes put forth among the advocates of the Anglican school; to some of which we will briefly advert, as substantiating more exactly the same inference as before. It is contended that it was the peculiar office of the early church to preserve, to uphold, to hand down, to be witnesses to, the true view of Christian doctrine. This essential doctrine, then, was clearly dependent on the judgment and fidelity of the early Divines for its transmission, for which no infallibility is claimed. They were the living depositaries of something more than was actually contained in the volume of the New Testament; yet of equal value and importance to a right faith.

Many speak of these recorded traditions of the early church, especially as collected in the writings of the primitive Fathers' Creeds and Councils, as in some way subsidiary to the written word; or, as Dr Waterland expresses it, antiquity as the handmaid to scripture.' But in what sense were they so? They manifestly cannot be regarded as more peculiarly subsidiary than any other aids of human learning, or any modern comments; unless they be viewed as supplying something essentially defective in the Apostolical Records. And we then necessarily imply, that the declarations of the New Testament were not plenary or final; and make these records not less essential to the true faith. To suppose that we gain any further insight into Christian truth, from the writings even of the immediate successors of the Apostles, is to impugn the sufficiency of their writings, and to lower their authority to a level with that of their followers. Principles which, if true, would at least require us wholly to modify our notions of the nature and extent of Divine revelation.

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The reference to antiquity, in general, takes its most specious

VOL. LXXXIV. NO. CLXIX.