views of the human powers, and aimed at a full development of our nature. He despised no attribute of humanity, whether physical or spiritual. He magnified human nature, not for itself, but as the manifestation of God through it. Like the earliest Christian fathers, Irenæus, Origen, and Tertullian, he never would dissociate man from God; and while he held strongly to the facts of sin and depravity, he saw deeper and more encouraging truths than these, still left in nature. Hamann's views of Christ are marked by great feeling and depth; and on this account he is a favorite author with German evangelical commentators, especially Olshausen; and we notice that some American theological writers are beginning to quote Hamann. He has a future, we believe, more happy and powerful than the past. "The Word made flesh," he says, "is the only wonderful plan that reaches the inner relations, the limitless desires, and the infinite wants and sorrows, of our nature. It alone reveals the mystery of the divine nature, its Lord. It is the Tree of

Life, in the midst of the garden. When all speculations fail, then the foundation-truth of the union of Divinity with humanity, and of humanity with Divinity, stands." His view of the depth of the work of Christ for us, would satisfy Augustine himself. He more than once quotes Luther's language: "a Christian does not behold his own virtue and holiness; but sees, in himself, guilt and unholiness. In a word, his holiness is in heaven, where Christ is." "There is a voice," he says, "which sin drowns, but which God hears. That voice, in the depth of our heart, is the blood of the Redeemer, crying: The depth of our heart is sprinkled with the blood shed for the whole world."

Something of Hamann's religious philosophy might, perhaps, be thus expressed: All the works of God are the manifestations of his qualities; and thus natural things are the images of spiritual things. God reveals himself, in Nature, in a more general manner. God reveals himself, in his word, in a more particular and secret manner, as it were, to the inmost soul of man. The unity of the authorship of both, is shown in the dialect of both; in which there is the same

tone of immeasurable height and depth, the same infinite majesty.

natural creation of

God, therefore, reWhere, then, nature

Now man himself belongs to this God, in which God manifests himself. veals himself in the nature of man. truly speaks in man (or where nature is restored to its origi nal divine truth), there is God speaking. Religion is simply the restoration of divine truth in the nature of man. As the life itself is essential to a perfect working or speaking of nature, so the pure reason in man cannot be separated from the real experience, in any true philosophy. The revealed Word, therefore, as the instructor of human experience, is absolutely essential. The reason, alone, is an imperfect guide. The study and obedience of the word of God are the indispensable wings of the reason, without which it hobbles upon the ground. When the Godhead manifests himself both through nature and through his word, philosophy must confess this, and is bound to show their harmony.

Though this is a crude statement, yet we may perceive in this, glimpses of the modern German philosophy, in which this double idea of nature and experience, of the subject and the object, is more fully carried out. Whatever there is true in it, is here foreshadowed; but in Hamann's case, it was joined with, and modified by, the great and saving truth of a belief in the essentialness and supreme authority of the word of God; in fact, of the true manifestation of God in Christ. In one of Hamann's letters, he recommends to a young theologian, to throw away his proud scientific preparations, and to study but three books: the Bible, Schulzen's Hymn-book, and Luther's Abridgment of Doctrine.

Hamann's published works, issued from the three periods of 1759-63, 1772-76 and 1779-84, are numerous, but are fragmentary and impulsive. He seemed to write to relieve an active mind, and to unburden a soul thoroughly dissatisfied with his age. He did not write, like Goethe, to build a temple to his own genius. His largest works are "the Memorabilia of Socrates," "Golgotha and Schlebimini," and "Sybilline leaves." He wrote upon philology, especially on

the Hebrew and Greek languages; upon religion and philosophy; freedom and education; law and legislation; contracts and trade; history and poetry. Most of these writings have a polemic tone, and are directed with great power of satire against the materialism, imitativeness, and shallow negation of his times; and this circumstance now assists in destroying these works, because the best polemical writings, like shells that have battered error, have done their work. Jean Paul Richter says of Hamann's style: "Hamann is a deep sky full of telescopic stars, and many nebulae that no eye can resolve." And again he says: "His style is a stream which a storm drives back toward its source, so that Dutch market-tubs cannot navigate it." Another writer thus characterizes his writings: "The kernel contains great thoughts, but the shell is a hard compound of all sorts of things." Owing to his irregular education, his powerful and almost oriental but undisciplined imagination, and his mistaken cautiousness in the expression of religious truth, his style is dark, metaphoric, involved. It is wheel within wheel, though they be all living creatures, instinct with intelligence, and glowing with the love of God. In its most grotesque, ironical and weirdlike form, it is pregnant with great and good thoughts. Or, to put Richter's idea into another shape, his style is like an old Flemish painting, very dusky at first, but the more one looks at it, the more interior it has. The following short extract, though quite simple for Hamann, may give some slight idea of his singular and allegorical method of writing. It is from the introduction to a little book

entitled "Fragments."

"A host is bountifully fed from five loaves; this small portion is so abundant for the multitude in the desert place, that more baskets full are left over, than there was bread originally. We see a similar miracle of divine grace in the multitude of wisdoms. What a vast collect is the history of sciences! And upon what is it all based? Upon the five loaves, upon the five senses, which we share with irrational creatures. Not only the whole store-house of the reason, but the treasure-house of faith, rests upon the same

seer, to

foundation. Our reason is like that blind Theban whom his daughter delineated the flight of birds, and he prophesied from her report. Faith,' says the apostle, ' comes through hearing,' through hearing the word of God. Go and show John those things which ye do hear and see,' said our Lord. — Man enjoys infinitely more than he has need of, and wastes infinitely more than he enjoys. What a prodigal mother Nature is to her children, and how great her condescension, when she diminishes the scale and proportion of our wants, but sets herself to supply sumptuously the hunger and extravagance of our desires. Must she not be the daughter of a loving and benevolent Father? The visible world may be ever so like a desert in the eye of a soul created for heaven; the bread which God gives us here may seem ever so inconsiderable and insufficient; the fishes may be ever so small, but they are blest, multiplied and glorified, by a wonder-working, mysterious God, whom we Christians call ours, because he has manifested himself to us in such great lowliness and love. But our souls may be guilty of wasting that nutriment of their strength which God supplies in the desert of this life. Besides the moderation which our poverty should prescribe to us, a frugal care of the fragments which fall in the heat of our appetite, and which we do not take the pains to collect, because we see more before us, cannot be blamed. We live here upon fragments. Our thoughts are nothing but fragments. Yes, our wisdom is piecemeal."

Hamann's metaphors, which form the invariable clothing of his thoughts, are sometimes full of simple majesty and beauty. He says in one place: "Faith is like the pillar of cloud by day, but when the night of affliction comes, it turns into a pillar of fire." "What," he says again, "is that voice of our own heart, which we sometimes call conscience, sometimes the voice of reason, sometimes the whisper of our ministering angel? Ah, it is more than our own heart, or than any angel. It is the Spirit of God speaking in us."

ARTICLE V.

ROMANISM AND A FREE BIBLE.

BY REV. WILLIAM BARROWS, READING, MASS.

WHAT place does Romanism assign to the Bible, as a book for the people? This is becoming a question of grave interest in our country. Several minor issues concerning its use have sprung up in communities where the papal and protestant communions are mixed, showing that two widely different policies form the usage of the two denominations. The uniformity of action, and the persistency in it, shown by Romanism, make it evident that they are not experimenting to discover the true theory. They act as from principles settled and well-understood. Their action is as definite, as prompt, and as cordial, as is the protestant, in the use they wish to make of the scriptures, as a book for the people.

It is evident, and latterly there has been painful growth of the evidence, that the two theories of these two great divisions of Christendom are antagonistic.

It is a matter of the first consequence that the two parties understand each other. Probably an issue of greater moment to us could not be raised respecting our prosperity and perpetuity as a people, than the question, which of these two theories shall prevail. As we understand our history, our beginning, so fruitful in what makes a people truly great, lies far back in the wrenching of the Bible from the iron grasp of the hierarchy. The principal freight of the Mayflower was a free Bible. Plymouth Rock is but a common landing for any band of adventurers, till we discover that the English Bible of the Puritans is coupled with it. This book it is that, among us, has aroused the mind, freed and cleared the conscience, and defined and enlarged the limits of civil, social, and religious liberty. It is the Bible that has stimulated industry, and developed national resources and growth, till we span the continent and lay a hand on either ocean. In contrast with