mutually complete each other; and it is quite a mistake to suppose that the unknown and uncomprehended has more impressiveness or better religious influence than the known and understood." The inevitable consequence of these views is to reduce all miracle to the category of the relative, and Schleiermacher, like Spinoza, occasionally defines it as "the religious aspect of an event;" repeating in various forms Spinoza's opinions as to the identity of knowledge of nature and knowledge of God; the incompatibility of interruptions of the one with the notion of the other; the far better proof which we have of divine wisdom and power in the conservation of the order of the universe3 than in its interruption. But Schleiermacher in the circumlocution office of the pulpit is a very different being from Spinoza the philosopher at the Hague. The "Christliche Glaube," the latest and ablest attempt to blend the incompatible elements of philosophy and tradition, is but ingenious prevarication, a dexterous display of the art of rigmarole. At first it seems as if the current which before set so strongly in the direction of rationalism had been reversed, and that regardless of worldly philosophy we are summoned to look exclusively to the consequences of sin and the redemption of the cross. Eventually it appears that Schleiermacher is more rational than rationalism itself, and that while ostensibly recoiling from the name of Pantheist, he is quietly appropriating its resources, and setting aside miracles as irrelevant. But why, when so plainly intimating that miracles are no more useful to theology than compatible with science, does he relapse into wordy ambiguity, retaining in regard to a few circumstances the

1 Comp., s. 38, p. 190.

2 Reden ueber die Religion.

3 Comp. Christ. Glaub., I. 1, s. 47, p. 234, with Spinoza's "Cogitata Metaphysica," 2, 9, 4.-"Majus videtur esse miraculum si Deus mundum semper uno eodemque certo atque immutabili ordine gubernaret, quam si leges, quas ipse in naturâ optimè et ex merâ libertate sancivit,-propter stultitiam hominis abrogaret."

idea of the supernatural which in others he abandons? Why, when dwelling on the religious significancy of the miracle, blink the question as to the fact, when after all the scriptural narrative of the fact is the only remaining motive for entertaining the subject at all? A plain answer would be uncomplimentary to theology as well as discreditable to human nature; and it may suffice to add that, setting aside certain recently manifested symptoms of theological desperation, exhibited in a reaction to blind belief, the tendency of the better class of modern theologians in the wake of Schleiermacher has been to dispense with the miraculous as far as possible; to disparage, with Kant, its evidential force and value; to give prominence and preference to manifestations of a specially moral and beneficent character; and in general, to restrict miracles to the relativity, which, while affording a show of orthodox decorum, is in reality a disclaimer of them."

The Scripture Principle.

But among supernatural and also irrational beliefs there were some which proved much more intractable than others, as being either more obscure in themselves, or more intimately bound up with the very texture and safety of ordinary Protestantism. Special articles of creed might be modified or abandoned with comparative ease under cover of a vague reference to Scripture; but Scripture itself could never be dropped without ruin; since, to ordinary minds it was the sole remaining stay of faith, the sole channel of legitimate communication between a lifeless3 universe and God. Rejecting tradition, which in

1 According to Augustin's dictum," Plus est quod vitia sanavit animarum quàm quod sanavit languores corporum.

2 Thus Tholuck defines a miracle,-"an event differing from the usual course of nature, as known to us, and having a religious origin and object." 3 Lifeless, that is, in the philosophies of Bacon, Taurellus, Hobbes, Gassendi, etc.

Catholicism had supplied the deficiencies of Scripture, Protestantism was obliged to make the most of what remained, and to strain the Scripture principle to the utmost. Hence the theory of the absolute inspiration of the Bible, as pure, all-sufficient, and infallible; as containing the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but truth; and that not only in essentials, but in its history and geography, its very words and letters. For it was justly urged that were even a single verse ascribed to mere human agency, Satan would take advantage of the concession to extend the postulate to chapters and books, and ultimately to the whole volume. In the view of absolute inspiration, the questions since so elaborately canvassed as to style, authenticity, genuineness, etc., could not arise; since the writers, whether apostles and eye-witnesses or not, were considered as the amanuenses of the Holy Spirit, and it signified little who held the pen, when the true author, the "Auctor primarius," was God. Moreover, Scripture was its own infallible interpreter. It was the revelation of one and the same Being, who in the Old Testament announcing himself as God of Abraham, in the New as Father of Christ, fulfilled in the latter what he promised in the former. The hypothesis of a common "primary" authorship engendered the possibility of making all or any of the "secondary" authors the mutual expounders of each other; of deciphering obscurer by clearer notices, and thus by the so-called "analogy of faith," getting almost any desired meaning out of a general average of passages compiled from different books.1 A wide field was thus opened for the arbitrary proceedings of the "Harmonists;" and Osiander, splitting up the Gospels into fragments, re-assorted them in a fanciful continuity

"We must not," says Locke, (Reasonableness, etc., p. 152,) "cull out here or there a period or a verse, as if they were distinct independent aphorisms; we must see how the passage agrees with itself, and with other parts of Scripture."

regardless of historical fitness. Arguments, internal or external, derived from genuineness, miracles, prophecies, etc., might be tolerated perhaps as collateral confirmations, but could not be relied on as evidence in chief; and Calvin warns us against building our faith on the shifting sands of human conclusions, like those "scoundrels" ("nebulones," "blaterones," "canes," etc.), who would make God's eternal truth dependent on human suffrages. But then where, after discarding both authority and argument, was the ultimate infallible criterium for Protestants to rely on : that something in the background of Scripture, which, as Bellarmine justly argued, was wanted to authenticate Scripture itself? Whence was the new faith to get that near and ample confidence, which, unlike the external assurance of the Catholic derived from precedent and association, should bring conviction home to the mind and heart of individuals? "As if," answers Calvin (Instit. I. 7, 2), "a laboured proof were needed to enable us to distinguish black from white, or light from darkness; as if the divinity of Scripture were not as immediately self-evident to the soul as sweetness to the palate!" In this claim of the "inner witness," the true rights of reason, conscience, sentiment, lay as yet dormant and undistinguished from the usurpations of mystical assumption. But its evidence, as understood at the time, was by no means allowed to be the mere precarious suggestion of man's reason; it was the "testimony of the spirit," a supplementary internal revelation from within confirming the outward or written

one.

Altered View of Inspiration.

All these pretensions have been successively abandoned, either absolutely, or with merely nominal reservations. First the claim of the "inner witness,"-that reduplication of inspiration consisting in an assumed miraculous power to recognise and interpret a miraculous book,-was found

to be untenable. Carlstadt, when he went about the streets of Wyttenberg challenging the poorest and least educated to expound the Bible,-on the ground that "things hidden from the wise and prudent were revealed unto babes,”might have read the refutation of the "inner witness" in the blank countenances of his auditory. The Arminians demanded proof of its reality,-some rational assurance for thinking it to be something more than presumptuous fancy. Catholicism begged the question of its own infallibility, or appealed to Scripture in proof of its right to constitute and interpret Scripture; Protestantism was equally illogical in quoting the book to establish the reliability of the feeling, and then depending on the feeling to establish the authority of the book.

"The Word is thus deposed; and in this view

You rule the Scriptures, not the Scriptures you."

If feeling be the ultimate criterium of faith, how, it was asked, are we to reply to the Quakers and the Anabaptists, when claiming spiritual insight on behalf of ploughmen and shoemakers; and what can we say as to the conflicting interpretations of Protestant Confessions, by which the Holy Ghost is made to concede to the Lutheran what he denies to the Calvinist, and proving only that

"The rule is far from plain where all dissent."

Protestantism here refuted itself by the discrepancy of its inferences; and Spinoza sarcastically remarked that those who claimed supernatural illumination, as being but scantily furnished with natural,-appeared after all, from the uncertainty and wide discrepancy of their interpretations of the same passages, to be as much in the dark as others. Michaelis subsequently disclaimed any consciousness of the internal movements of the Holy Spirit in his own case; and Semler followed Spinoza in avowing the experience of the moral power of Scripture to make men better, to be the sole real assurance of its value.

The notion of the "inner witness" failing, the Bible was