power, or the originality, or the clearness of these writers which has given importance to their volume, for that it signally lacks every one of these qualities, but that it has owed, its notoriety to the one fact that the authors of its sceptical lucubrations were not avowed unbelievers, but (all save one) clergymen of the Church of England. When,' he says, 6 six persons dressed in academic hoods, cassocks, and surplices come forth and preach scepticism, they do more mischief than six hundred sceptics clad in their own clothes. They wear the uniform of the church, and are mingled in her ranks, and fight against her, and therefore they may well say,

""CREED OF CHRISTENDOM," p. 55.

¢ "It is now clearly ascertained and generally admitted amongst critics that several of the most remarkable prophecies were never fulfilled at all, or only very partially and loosely fulfilled. Among these may be specified the denunciation of Jeremiah (xxii. 18, 19; xxxvi. 30) against Jehoiakim, as may be seen by comparing 2 Kings xxiv. 6; and the denunciation of Amos against Jeroboam (vii. 11), as may be seen by comparing 2 Kings xiv. 23-29."

I will not affirm that the Essayist copied from the Sceptic, but the coincidence is certainly remarkable.'

'How,' asks Dr. Wordsworth, are we to

account for such blunders?'

Our answer is, We have seen that the sceptical writer to whom we have referred quotes precisely the same prophecy of Amos, and asserts that it failed. It seems most probable that our Essayist borrowed his examples of supposed failure from that or some other similar work, but did not stop to examine them.'

This is severe, but, we are forced to add, it is most just criticism. It is for the sake of the highest truth, and not for what, if it were not thus made necessary, would be mere cruelty, that the great literary professions of our new sceptics are thus rndely plucked from them; and, inspired by this love of truth, Dr. Wordsworth is, indeed, without pity, both in the exposures we have already quoted, and when he resolves the dolorous dirge of the

6

first six pages of the Professor's Essay into the effeminate effusions of a maudlin sentimentalism' (Replies,' p. 411), and drily hints at the depth of his German erudition in the words Lachman, as the Essayist calls him, p. 352, and again Meier, as our author writes his name, p. 339' (p. 414).

But Dr. Wordsworth is not content with the annihilation of his opponent. Though he refers to another of his publications for *Lectures on the Inspiration and on the Interpretation of the Bible, delivered at Westminster Abbey.' Rivingtons, 1861.

"Vadimus immixti Danais, haud numine nostro, Multaque per cæcam congressi prælia noctem Conserimus, multos Danaûm demittimus Orco"

(Replies,' p. 430); and then he offers one general remark' on these allegations :—

'They are not original. The allegation just quoted may serve as a specimen. It is only a repetition of an objection which appeared ten years ago in a sceptical book (which, because it was not written by a clergyman, fell still-born from the press) called "The Creed of Christenthe two volumes side by side:dom." Let us place the passages from

"" ESSAYS AND REVIEWS," pp. 342, 343.

"The failure of a prophecy is never admitted, in spite of Scripture and history (Jer. xxxvi. 30; Isaiah xxiii.; Amos vii. 10, 17)."

'establishing the truth,' his present Essay is full of valuable suggestions on this most important point; and for these and for his proofs that the calm sagacity of Lord Bacon and the impartial majesty of Bishop Butler's philosophy had preceded him in some of them, we gladly refer our readers to his pages. There is another Essay in this volume, on which we heartily wish that our limits would allow us to dwell as its carefulness, its breadth, and its power deserve. It is that in which, not as a counter essay to Mr. Wilson's, but rather as a thorough discussion of the great subject, Dr. Irons examines the whole question of a National Church. But for this we must refer our readers to the volume itself, assuring them that they will find that Essay well worthy of the most careful study.

for dwelling further on it, to quit what we Here we are compelled, by lack of room may term the literature of this controversy, or there are other works which we would gladly examine, particularly Lord Lindsay's new volume, in which he traces the retrogressive character of Scepticism, and contrasts it with the stable and progressive character of the Church of England, with all his usual Letter to the Bishop of Oxford,' a vigorous depth of thought; the Rev. A. T. Russell's and original volume; Mr. Burgon's Essay On Inspiration; and Seven Answers to the Seven Essayists,' by the Rev. T. N. Griffin, to which an Introduction has been contributed by an ex-Lord Chancellor of Ireland,

the Right Honourable Joseph Napier. A very few words of his, indeed, we must quote, because they add to Dr. Wordsworth's heavy charges against the Essayists, the solemn confirmation of one not himself a divine, but whose naturally great faculties have been trained throughout the professional carcer which seated him on one of the highest eminences of the law to the calm and dispassionate weighing of evidence. Thus he speaks:It is well worthy of observation that throughout the volume of " Essays and Reviews," there is not a new objection to be found; its scepticism is second-hand, if not stale.... To reproduce in an English dress the exhausted sophistry of Continental sceptics, and bring out in a modern style the old exploded fallacies of our own native Deists, to ignore the detection of the sophistry, and to disparage the authority of those who have answered and exposed the fallacies-these are perverted efforts, of which we may say "an enemy hath done this."

This charge of repeating as original, and without a hint of their staleness, the already refuted objections of others, which we at first. brought against these writers, is strikingly confirmed by every subsequent examination we have made as to the sources of their inspirations. Dr. Goulburn has already suggested that Dr. Temple's slight and somewhat wearisome introductory Essay cannot claim the merit of originality. He has pointed out more than one passage in the writings of Lessing with a most suspicious and fatherly resemblance to the colossal man of the Head Master of Rugby. We need not tell those of our readers who are acquainted with German literature that Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who was born in 1729, was one of those early Deists who, by the doubts they sowed, prepared Germany for all the long sufferings which she has since endured.

Michelet (Hist. de France,' ii. 380, ed. Paris, 1852) says, as to the doctrine of certain people in the thirteenth century, that the reign of God the Son was at an end, and the

THE EDUCATION OF THE WORLD.

'In a world of mere phenomena... it is possible to imagine the course of a long period bringing all things at the end of it into exactly the same relations as they occupied at the beginning. We should then obviously have a succession of cycles rigidly similar to one another, both in events and in the sequence of them. The universe would eternally repeat the same changes in a fixed order of recurrence. . . . Such a

* Replies,' pp. 45, 46, 47.

Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts,' occupying pp. 308-329 in vol. x. of Lessing's Works, Lachmann's ed., Berlin, 1839. This work was published by Lessing as edited' by him, and it has been questioned whether he was the author: it is

reign of the Holy Ghost was at hand-‘C'est sous quelque rapport l'idée de Lessing sur l'education du genre humain,' Lessing himself alludes to those thirteenth-century people. In his pages we find the following:

'That which education is to the individual, revelation is to the race. Education is revelation coming to the individual man; and revelation is education which has come and is yet coming to the human race.... Education gives of himself; it gives him that which he might to a man nothing which he might not educe out easily. In the same way, too, revelation gives educe out of himself, only quicker and more nothing to the human species which the human reason, if left to itself, might not attain; it only has given, and still gives to it the most important of these things earlier * [than man could of himself reach them].'t

We leave our readers to conclude for themselves how far this disposes of Dr. Temple's claim to originality, and what is the true sequence of the theory which pervades his Essay.

But whilst we admit that Dr. Goulburn seems to have traced some of Dr. Temple's Essay to the pages of Lessing, we are inclined ourselves to believe that as a whole it was copied more immediately from the writings of Hegel. The whole idea of the Essay seems to us to be borrowed from his 'Philosophy of History; whilst in many particular passages the identity of expression is so great that Dr. Temple may almost be thought to have translated into English, with due regard for our lack of metaphysical genius, the enlarged speculations of the German philosopher. We will ask our readers to cast their eyes from one to the other of the passages which we print side by side, and decide for themselves if the similarity between them can by any laws of probability be held to be purely accidental. We quote from Mr. Sibree's translation of Hegel's work (1861) first published by Mr. Bohn in 1857 :

เ

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY.

The changes that take place in Nature-how infinitely manifold soever they may be-exhibit only a perpetually self-repeating cycle. . . . Only in those changes which take place in the region of Spirit does anything new arise.'-p. 56.

'We are thus concerned exclusively with the idea of Spirit. . . . Nothing in the past is lost for it; for the Idea is ever present; Spirit is immortal; with it there is no past, no future, but an

supposition is possible to the logical understanding: it is not possible to the Spirit.'-pp. 1, 2.

To the Spirit all things that exist must have a purpose; and nothing can pass away till that purpose be fulfilled. The lapse of time is no exception to this demand. Each moment of time, as it passes, is taken up in the shape of permanent results into the time that follows, and only perishes by being converted into something more substantial than itself.'-p. 2.

...

We must exhibit to our readers one other of these parallels, which seem to us to prove 'We may, then, rightly speak of a childhood, a youth, and a manhood of the world (p. 4). In childhood we are subject to positive rules which we are bound implicitly to obey. In youth we are subject to the influence of example, and soon break loose from all rules unless ..... In manhood we are comparatively free from external restraints, &c. (p. 5). Precisely analogous to all this is the history of the education of the early world (p. 6). When the seed of the Gospel was first sown, the field which had been prepared to receive it may be divided into four chief divisions: Rome, Greece, Asia, and Judea. Each of these contributed something, &c. (p. 15). Rome contributed her admirable spirit of order and organization (ibid.). To Greece was entrusted the cultivation of the reason and the taste.... Her highest idea was not holiness, as with the Hebrews, nor law, as with the Romans; but beauty, &c (p. 47). The discipline of Asia was the never ending succession of conquering dynasties.... Cycles of changes were successively passing over her, and yet at the end of every cycle she stood where she had stood before.'-p. 18.

There is one other passage in another work of Hegel's, between which and Dr. Temple's Essay the similarity is equally striking. According to Dr. Temple there were four great instructors of mankind in the early stage of education, viz.-Judæa, which taught monotheism and chastity; Greece, science and art; Rome, order and organization; Asia, which contributed the mysterious element in religion, disciplining the spiritual imagination. And so, according to Hegel, The Jewish religion is that of sublimity; the religion of Greece is that of beauty; the religion of Rome that of organization or purpose (as we may perhaps translate the German Zweckmässig keit); whilst Asia is the seat of Pantheism in its various forms (in China, in India, in Thibet); the general principle of which he regards as being an elevation of the spirit from the finite and contingent conceived as a mere negation, to the consciousness of absolute power as the one universal existence.*

* Hegel's Works, vol. xi. p. 308. Edit. 1840.

essential now. This necessarily implies that the present form of Spirit comprehends within it all earlier steps. . . . The life of the ever-present Spirit is a circle of progressive embodiments. . . The grades which Spirit seems to have left behind it, it still possesses in the depths of its present.'-p. 82.

Change, while it imports dissolution, involves at the same time the rise of a new life.... Spirit, consuming the envelope of its existence, comes forth exalted, glorified, a purer spirit. . . . Each successive phase becomes in its turn a material, working on which it exalts itself to a new grade.'-p. 76.

a remarkable though unacknowledged borrowing from the German speculator:

This is the childhood of history. . . . . &c. Continuing the comparison with the ages of the individual man, this would be the boyhood of history; no longer manifesting the repose and trustingness of the child, but boisterous and turbulent. The Greek world may, then, be compared with the period of adolescence. . . . Here is the kingdom of beautiful freedom... ... The third phase. . . . is the Roman state, the severe labours of the manhood of history.

The first phase. . . is the East... It is the childhood of history.. We find the wild hordes breaking out... falling upon the countries... but in all cases resultlessly... &c. On the one side we see duration, stability... the states... without undergoing any change. are constantly changing their position towards each other.'-Hegel, 111-113.

We can hardly conceive it possible that these strict resemblances are the result of mere chance. We cannot but believe that The Philosophy of History,' in conjunction perhaps with the same author's lectures on the Philosophy of Religion,' was, in truth, the parent of The Education of the World." Nor, if we are right in this, is it worth notice only because it is another instance of the 'staleness' of these Essays, and a new proof of the degree to which they are obnoxious, as literary productions, to the grave charge of abounding in plagiarisms. There is yet another deduction to be drawn from this, over and above the literary reproach which attaches to it. It is highly indicative of the real spirit of the Essay. For it is the characteristic of the whole Hegelian theory, that whilst its propounder continually wrote as being himself a believer in the truth of the Christian Revelation, yet the inevitable conclusion of his system, as it developed itself in its completeness, was to oscillate between two results, equally inconsistent with all Revelation;

whole nation was one of reaction in favour of authority. Churchmen who had been faithful to the Crown when it was trampled in the dirt under the feet of the Independents, would naturally suffer in the highest degree from the general epidemic; and the very loy alty of the Church led to its unduly exalting the Throne, for which it had so severely suffered. The Revolution of 1688, which in so many directions strengthened and enlarged our liberties, tended only, from all its complicated operations, to weaken the free action of the Church as the spirituality of the realm. Nor, as we may find occasion to show hereafter, has recent legislation had any other tendency.

No reasonable man can shut his eyes to the benefits which have resulted from the struggles which make up this long history. The character of the Church of England resembles greatly that of men who, with wills and understandings naturally strong, have been brought up under no very fixed or definite rules of education, and have developed in that comparative freedom a firmness, an independence, and an individuality, with which more correct rules of early training must have interfered. For there is in her a marvellously tenacious grasp of fundamental truth; an intelligent consent, amidst difference on details of a multitude of minds, as to the leading articles of the faith; an earnest, common-sense religiousness, which could probably have been bred no otherwise than under the full and free action of her existing constitution. But it is an inevitable correlative of these advantages that the action of authority within her body, when at last it is called for, should be slow, sporadic, and somewhat feeble. We must not, therefore, expect, perhaps we need not very passionately desire, that the rise of any error within her communion should be followed at once by the meeting of the authoritative synod, the thunder of an anathema, and the lightning shaft of summary excommunication. All this is illustrated in the history of the Essays and Reviews' controversy.

When, shortly after the publication of our former article, public attention had been called to the subject, and the minds of thinking men thoroughly roused to its importance, the first action of authority was the appearance of a document, bearing first or last, we believe, the signature of every bishop of the United Church, and condemning many of the propositions of the book as inconsistent with an honest subscription to her formularies. This was, in our judgment, a mode of action highly characteristic of the temper and spirit which we have attributed to the Established Church. Somewhat informal in its concep

tion and in its putting forth-struggling, we might almost say, into being, against the ordinary laws of ecclesiastieal parturition, it yet manifested at once the formal slavery and the real freedom of the ecclesiastical element in our mingled constitution; our essential agreement, in spite of minor differences, on all matters concerning the fundamentals of the faith; and our common-sense view of the foolish attempt to substitute the dreamy nebulosities of used-up German speculation for a simple adherence to the language of the formularies, the letter of the Creeds, and the plain teaching of the Bible.

The effect of the publication of this document was great and timely. The mind of the Church was only, perhaps, too much quieted by it, and disposed to be prematurely contented with what had been done as sufficient for the occasion. Amongst the partizans of the Essayists it produced a vast amount of indignation. By one of the warmest and most eloquent amongst them it was described as a 'document which, whilst Cambridge lay in her usual attitude of magnificent repose, about a month after the appearance of the " Quarterly," startled the world; one without precedent, as we trust it may be without imitation, in the English Church.'* It was the counterpart of the Papal excommunication levelled against Italian freedom, filled with menaces borrowed from the ancient days of persecution,' &c. All this irritation was but a testimony to the real weight of the condemnation, and not less so was the curious attempt of the same water to lessen its authority by representing the venerable Bishop of Exeter as not having joined with his brethren in their censure. There is an audacity which reaches almost to pleasantry in the attempt of the Reviewer to claim the present Bishop of Exeter as one who, when the defence of the foundations of our belief was the question at issue, could conceive it to be the course of faithfulness to the duty of his great station to protect,' in the Reviewer's sense of the words, the cause of free and fair discussion from the indiscriminate violence of popular agitators.'t This is really very much like expecting the great Athanasius to have deemed it his special vocation to protect the heretic Arius from the agitation and violence of the Catholic Church. But bold as this attempt would have been in any one who knew only the principles and character of the Right Rev. Prelate, whose name he wished thus to coax off the bond, perhaps it might warrant even some stronger epithet when it is seen upon what the suggestion was really founded.

*'Edinburgh Review,' No. 230. + Ibid.