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truth. It seems, as Paul says, that God had chosen the foolish and the weak, to confound the mighty and the wise. Now we have accomplished scholars, skilled in all the lore of the world, accomplished orators; but who does the work of Paul and Timothy? Out of the mouth of babes and sucklings praise was perfected; out of the mouth of clerks and orators what do we get?-Well said Jeremiah, "The prophets shall become wind, and the word not be in them."

If we come from the days of the apostles to their successors, and still later, we find the errors of the first teachers have become magnified; the truth of Christianity is dim ; men had wandered further from that great light God sent into the world. The errors of the Pagans, the Jews, the errors of obstinate men, who loved to rule God's heritage better than to be ensamples unto the flock, had worked their way. The same freedom did not prevail as before. The word of God had become a letter; men looked back, not forward. Superstition came into the Church. The rites of Christianity-its accidents, not its substance-held an undue place; asceticism was esteemed more than hitherto. The body began to be reckoned unholy; Christ regarded as a God, not a man living as God commands. Then the priest was separated from the people, and a flood of evils came upon the Church, and accomplished what Persecution, with her headsmen, and her armies, never could effect. Christianity was grossly corrupted long before it ascended the throne of the world. But for this corruption it would have found no place in the court of Rome or Byzantium. Still in the writings of early Christians, of Tertullian and Cyprian, for example, we find a real living spirit, spite of the superstition, bigotry, and falseness too obvious in the men. They spake because they had somewhat to say, and were earnest in their speech. You come down from the writings of Seneca to Cyprian, you miss the elegant speech, the wonderful mastery over language, and the stores of beautiful imagery, with which that hard bombastic Roman sets off his thought. But in the Christian you find an earnestness and a love of man, which the Roman had not, and a fervent piety, to which he made no pretension. But alas, for the superstition of the bishop, his austerity and unchristian doctrines! It

remains doubtful, whether an enlightened man, who had attained a considerable growth in religious excellence, would not justly have preferred the religion of Seneca to that of Cyprian; but there is no doubt such an one would have accepted with joyful faith the religion of Jesus-the primitive Christianity undefiled by men. To come down from the Christianity of Christ, to the religion popularly taught in the churches of New-England, and we ask, can it be this for which men suffered martyrdom-this which changed the face of the world? Is this matter, for which sect contends with sect, to save the heathen world? Christianity was a simple thing in Paul's time; in Christ's it was simpler still. But what is it now? A modern writer somewhat quaintly says, the early writers of the Christian Church knew what Christianity was; they were the fathers: the scholastics and philosophers of the dark ages knew what reason was; they were the doctors: the religionists of modern times know neither what is Christianity, nor what is reason; they are the scrutators.

THOUGHTS ON THEOLOGY.*

Ar the present day, Germany seems to be the only country where the various disciplines of Theology are pursued in the liberal and scientific spirit which some men fancy is peculiar to the nineteenth century. It is the only country where they seem to be studied for their own sake, as poetry, eloquence, and the mathematics have long been. In other quarters of the world, they are left too much to men of subordinate intellect, of little elevation or range of thought, who pursue their course, which is "roundly

• Entwicklungsgeschichte der Lehre von der Person Chrisii von den altesten Zeiten bis auf die neuesten, dargestellt. Von J. A. DORNER, a. o. Professor der Theologie an der Universitat Tübingen. Stuttgart: 1839. 1 vol. 8vo, pp. xxiv. and 556. (Historical development of the doctrine of the person of Christ from the earliest to the latest times, &c.)-[From the Dial for April, 1842.]

smooth, and languishingly slow," and after a life of strenuous assiduity, find they have not got beyond the "standards" set up ages before them. Many theologians seem to set out with their faces turned to some popular prejudice of their times, their church, or their school, and walk backwards, as it were, or at best in a circle, where the movement is retrograde as often as direct. Somebody relates a story, that once upon a time, a scholar, after visiting the place of his academic education, and finding the old professors then just where they were ten years before, discussing the same questions and blowing similar bubbles, and splitting hairs anew, was asked by a friend, "what they were doing at the old place." He answered, "One was milking the barren heifer, and the others holding the sieve."

To this rule, for such we hold it to be, in France, England, and America, at this day, there are some brilliant exceptions; men who look with a single eye towards Truth, and are willing to follow wherever she shall lead; men, too, whose mind and heart elevate them to the high places of human attainment, whence they can speak to bless mankind. These men are the creatures of no sect or school, and are found where God has placed them, in all the various denominations of our common faith. It is given to no party or coterie, to old school or new school, to monopolize truth, freedom, and love. We are sick of that narrowness which sees no excellence, except what wears the livery of its own guild. But the favoured sons of the free spirit are so rare in the world at large, their attention so seldom turned to theological pursuits, that the above rule will be found to hold good in chief, and theology to be left, as by general consent, to men of humble talents, and confined methods of thought, who walk mainly under the cloud of prejudice, and but rarely escape from the trammels of bigotry and superstition. Brilliant and profound minds turn away to politics, trade, law, the fascinating study of nature, so beautiful and composing; men who love freedom, and are gifted with power to soar through the empyrean of thought, seek a freer air, and space more ample, wherein to spread their wings. Meanwhile the dim cloisters of theology, once filled with the great and wise of the earth, are rarely trod by the children of genius and liberty.

We have wise, and pious, and learned, and eloquent preachers, the hope of the Church, the ornaments and defence of society; men who contend for public virtue, and fight the battle for all souls with earnest endeavour, but who yet care little for the science of divine things. We have sometimes feared our young men forsook in this their fathers' wiser ways, for surely there was a time when theology was studied in our land.

From the neglect of serious, disinterested, and manly thought, applied in this direction, there comes the obvious result; while each other science goes forward, passing through all the three stages requisite for its growth and perfection; while it makes new observations, or combines facts more judiciously, or from these infers and induces general laws, hitherto unnoticed, and so developes itself, becoming yearly wider, deeper, and more certain, its numerous phenomena being referred back to elementary principles, and universal laws,-theology remains in its old position. Its form has changed; but the change is not scientific, the result of an elementary principle. In the country of Bossuet and Hooker, we doubt that any new observation, any new combination of facts, has been made, or a general law discovered in these matters, by any theologian of the present century, or a single step taken by theological science. In the former country, an eminent philosopher, of a brilliant mind, with rare faculties of combination and lucid expression, though often wordy, has done much for psychology, chiefly, however, by uniting into one focus the several truths which emanate from various anterior systems; by popularizing the discoveries of deeper spirits than his own, and by turning the ingenuous youth to this noble science. In spite of the defects arising from his presumption, and love of making all facts square with his formula, rather than the formula express the spirit of the facts, he has yet furnished a magazine whence theological supplies may be drawn, and so has indirectly done much for a department of inquiry which he has himself never entered. We would not accept his errors, his hasty generalizations, and presumptuous flights,-so they seem to us,-and still less would we pass over the vast service he has done to this age, by his vigorous attacks on the sensual philosophy, and his bold defence of VOL. IX.-Critical Writings, 1.

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spiritual thought. Mr Coleridge, also, in England, a spirit analogous, but not similar, to M. Cousin, has done great service to this science, but mainly by directing men to the old literature of his countrymen and the Greeks, or the new productions of his philosophical contemporaries on the continent of Europe. He seems to have caught a Pisgah view of that land of stream and meadow, which he was forbid to enter. These writers have done great service to men whose date begins with this century. Others are now applying their methods, and writing their books, sometimes with only the enthusiasm of imitators, it may be.

We would speak tenderly of existing reputations in our own country, and honour the achievements of those men who, with hearts animated only by love of God and man, devote themselves to the pursuit of truth in this path, and outwatch the Bear in their severe studies. To them all honour! But we ask for the theologians of America, who shall take rank as such with our historians, our men of science and politics. Where are they? We have only the echo for answer, Are they?

We state only a common and notorious fact, in saying, that there is no science of theology with us. There is enough cultivation and laborious thought in the clerical profession, perhaps, as some one says, more serious and hard thinking, than in both the sister professions. The nature of the case demands it. So there was thinking enough about natural philosophy among the Greeks, after Aristotle; but little good came of it in the way of science. We hazard little in saying, that no treatise has been printed in England in the present century, of so great theological merit, as that of pagan Cicero on the nature of the Gods, or the preface to his treatise of Laws. The work of Aristotle, we are told, is still the text-book of morals at the first university in Christian England.

In all science this seems everywhere the rule: The more light, the freer, the more profound and searching the investigation, why the better; the sooner a false theory is exploded, and a new one induced from the observed facts, the better also. In theology the opposite rule seems often to prevail. Hence, while other sciences go smoothly on in regular advance, theology moves only by leaps and violence. The theology of Protestantism and Unitarianism are not

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