am

"How may I understand Jesus and all inspired minds? They utter, you say, the supernatural; I grant it. But liow I to get at it, if I cannot by my own powers understand the supernatural?" What our Lord says in person or by inspired organs is the Christian revelation. The minister's question is, how is he to get at this, if he cannot understand the supernatural by his own powers. If, by getting at this, he means apprehending it when properly proposed, he can get at it with his own powers; but in so doing, he does not by his own powers understand the supernatural; for Christian doctrines, humanly apprehended, are, quoad nos, only human doctrines. To get at them, in the sense required for divine faith, requires the supernatural elevation of our fac-, ulties by the grace of faith. God can, if he chooses, so elevate them. Consequently, it is not impossible to get at the revelation without being able by our own powers to understand the supernatural.

"Can the church remove the difficulty?" The difficulty the minister imagines, we have shown, does not exist. That difficulty is, that the capacity to receive the supernatural implies the ability to know and do the supernatural. Therefore, if you deny the natural ability to know and do the supernatural, you deny the capacity to receive supernatural assistance. This must apply also to the church. If, then, you deny to the individual the power to understand the supernatural, you deny the ability of the church to help him. She either gives us the natural or supernatural. If the natural only, she gives us only what we already have. If the supernatural, she encounters the same difficulty, for she can give it only on condition that we are able to understand the supernatural; which you deny. But we have seen that it does not require the previous ability, without supernatural assistance, to understand the supernatural. Consequently this difficulty vanishes. It is idle to pretend that God cannot elevate us by grace above our natural capacity and ability. The minister professes to believe in supernatural inspiration. The inspired must have had the natural capacity to be inspired, or else they could not have been inspired; but had they, therefore, the natural ability to know without the grace of inspiration all that God by inspiration revealed through them? And could not God possibly inspire them to reveal truths which transcended the reach of their natural ability? If he could not, will the minister tell us wherein the matter of revelation, or the mysteries of

faith, differ from the matter of human philosophy? If he admits that God ever inspired any man to reveal what could not have been reached by the human intellect unassisted, he yields the whole question.

The only difficulty there is in the case the church can remove, if she be what she professes to be. If she has. received the deposit of faith, if she is commissioned and supernaturally assisted to keep and faithfully propose it, she can remove the only real difficulty there is to be removed; for we know then that what she proposes for the word of God is his word, and therefore infallibly true. And here is the only open question, the only question proposed to our natural powers. Has Almighty God instituted the church, and authorized her to teach in his name? If you postponethe question as to what is taught, till you dispose of the question, Who or what is the teacher? your difficulties will soon vanish. This, too, is the only reasonable course. The church com s to us as an ambassador from God, and if she comes from him, she comes with credentials, and we should examine her credentials before examining her message. If her credentials are satisfactory, if they prove that God has sent her, then we know that her message is from God, and that we are bound to receive it, be it what it may. If her credentials are such as to prove beyond the possibility of a reasonable doubt that she is from God, reason requires us to believe her message, however unpalatable we may find it, unintelligible, or apparently unreasonable; for we can have no higher reason for declaring her message unreasonablethan we have for believing her from God, and nothing is more reasonable than to believe God. If you seek, you will find her credentials all that your reason can ask. You will find them accrediting her beyond the possibility of a reasonable doubt, as the ambassador of God, sent to treat with you in his name. Then, whatever she proposes in his name is. infallibly true. Then, after this, you have only to listen, asa child to his mother, to her instructions, and she will tell you what else you want, and how you may get it, and render you all needed assistance.

We agree with the minister, that "any man with an honest heart may come to God," but only in God's way, and as God draws him. "No man can come unto me except the Father draw him." But if we refuse to come in God's way, if we will not suffer him to draw us, we shall not find' him, though he is not far from every one of us. The min

ister greatly misconceives the Catholic doctrine, if he supposes it renders the approach to God more difficult. The contrary is the fact; and, according to it, it is every one's own fault if he remain at a distance from God. The church is provided expressly to bring him to God, to afford him that precise help he needs to enable him to come to God. Hence her glory, and the tender love we have for her.

We have touched upon all the points in the letter which have struck us as important. The minister must be on his guard against impatience and hasty conclusions, rely on God rather than on himself, and be willing to pause and let God speak. We are all more ready to instruct the Almighty than we are to let him instruct us; and no people in general use reason more unreasonably than they who declaim the most vehemently for the use of reason. Nothing is more reasonable than to believe God on his word, or unreasonable than to distrust the teaching of one he has commissioned to teach in his name. We should beg of God to give us true docility, a childlike willingness to follow him, to believe what he says, and then sit down calmly, patiently, and with all our powers to inquire if he has commissioned any one to speak to us in his name. He may have done so; and if he has, that is the one to whom we must listen. And he has done so. The Blessed God has not left himself without a witness on the earth. We own that it seems almost too good to believe; but nothing is too good for our God to do. Men disbelieve the church, in reality, because they have but low notions of his goodness, because they do not believe him good enough to provide so liberally for our darkness and our weakness. How should they, when they have no conceptions of the kingdom of grace, none of the supernatural? O, if they could once rise above nature, and catch but the feeblest glimpse of the glory of God as it shines in the face of Jesus Christ, they would never again distrust his goodness, or believe any thing too good for him to do! He is better than we can think, has provided more liberally for us than we have ever dared wisli, or been able to conceive. O God, who would not love thee, that but beheld thy love and mercy, of which the church, after all, in this earthly state, is but a feeble manifestation? Thy love is too great for us; it overpowers here on the way; what will it be when we get home, and behold thee face to face, as thou art in thyself?

VOL. III.-2

MORELL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for April, 1850.]

*

MR. MORELL is, we believe, a Scotchman, and a minister of the Scottish kirk. He first made himself known to our community by a History of Modern Philosophy, written from the eclectic point of view, and which we have heard spoken of as a very clever performance. Some views advanced in that work touching the mutual relations of religion and philosophy were supposed to favor modern rationalism, and the volume before us has been written to develop them, and to show that they are defensible on psychological principles. The volume has attracted no little attention among British and American Protestants, and though it contains nothing new or striking to one familiar with the later developments of Protestantism on the continent of Europe, or even in our own country, and though it is written in a dry, hard style, without much regard to idiomatic grace or propriety, we have read it with a good deal of interest, and, considering the source whence it emanates, we cannot help regarding it as a remarkable production.

Mr. Morell belongs to the progressive party among Protestants, the party that labors to continue the work of the reformers of the sixteenth century, and carry it on to its legitimate termination. He retains, indeed, many traces of his Presbyterian and Evangelical breeding, but he departs widely from the formal teachings of his sect, and appears to be fully aware that the formal or scholastic theology of the elder Protestant teachers is without vitality, is, indeed an anomaly in Protestantism, and at best superfluous in the Protestant economy of life. He seems, also, to be convinced that religion itself cannot be maintained on the ground ordinarily assumed by Protestant theologians, and that, if they continue to retain the rule of private judgment, they must either reject all religion, or else exclude from religion, as unessential, whatever transcends private reason. Determined, or apparently determined, to retain that rule at all hazards, he adopts the latter alternative, and labors with all

The Philosophy of Religion. By J. D. MORELL, A. M. New York: 1849.

18

his learning, energy, and power of analysis, to prove that religion originates in and is determined by an element of our nature; that, in all that is essential to it, it comes within the scope of individual reason, and that it is as philosophically explicable and verifiable as any other psychological fact that passes under our observation. In this he is, unquestionably, faithful to the Protestant spirit, and deserves great credit for his courage and consistency. But although he in this strikes a mortal blow at all dogmatic Protestantism, and, in reality, resolves modern Evangelicalism into mere sentimentalism, which is all very well, he goes, perhaps, further than he intends, and certainly further than we can go with him. We cannot bring all religion within the scope of private reason, without excluding as unessential all that is supernatural, and therefore not without excluding all that is peculiarly and distinctively Christian. Mr. Morell, then, whatever his intentions, really rejects the Christian religion itself, and is even a more dangerous enemy to it than he would be if he confessedly arranged himself on the side of its open and avowed enemies. However conclusive his work may be against his own sect, we cannot, therefore, commend it, for even Presbyterianism is better than total apostasy, than absolute incredulity.

The very title Mr. Morell gives his work, The Philosophy of Religion, proves that he is either consciously hostile to religion, or totally ignorant of its real nature. There is and can be no philosophy of religion. Religion must be regarded either as natural religion or as revealed religion. As natural, since philosophy is simply natural theology, it and philosophy are identically one and the same thing, and it is as absurd to talk of the philosophy of religion as of the philosophy of philosophy. As revealed, religion is above philosophy, not accountable to it, nor explicable on its principles. A philosophy of religion is conceivable only on the supposition that religion is below philosophy; a special discipline, like physics or æsthetics, under philosophy, deriving its principles from it, and bound to apply them according to its commands. The author sees this, and therefore attempts to relegate religion to a single department of human nature, and to confine it to a single class of human emotions. But this is manifestly false and absurd; for religion, if any thing at all, is no special discipline, but the queen of all disciplines, giving the law to all special disciplines, and receiving it from none.