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literature we do deeply fear; but we are not blind to other and better things in him, which are justly calculated to win the homage of men's spirits; and we have no wish to judge uncharitably. One word on the argument employed, or at least implied, by many who lean to scepticism, because they imagine that they thereby avoid committing themselves. Such a supposition is utterly hollow, and will not bear the slightest examination. It has well been said, 'We must act, or abstain from action; and on many subjects abstaining from action is well ' nigh equivalent to acting in the opposite direction. If, when some person calls on us to obey him as a duty, our doubts lead us to refuse him obedience, we practically deny his authority. If, when hungry, we abstain from food which is put before us, 'such abstinence implies a practical belief that the food is distasteful, or unwholesome, or that it is for some reason wrong 'to eat it. Hence arises the danger in all practical subjects, ' of methods of investigation and habits of thought which imply a long suspense of judgment with regard to matters immediately before us. Doubts may hang over the distance; but 'still we can make progress if they leave the foreground clear. • With a few firm points on which to place our feet, we can 'make our way over a quagmire. But if we must advance at once we cannot account him a benefactor who floods the ground which lies immediately before us while he gives us a promise that it shall be dry land next year. All information tell us in what Alas! for those

6

as to our course is a mockery which does not direction we must turn our footsteps now.'1 who have no better guidance for immediate action than such as they can obtain from the pages of Arthur Hugh Clough.

It is some consolation to perceive in Clough's latest verses so many signs of his 'olden heart'; so far higher a tone than that of the Amours de Voyage.' The 'Clergyman's Tale' is truly beautiful: the following lines involve a teaching most admirable for all of us :—

'There are, I know of course, who lightly treat
Such slips; we stumble, we regain our feet;
What can we do, they say, but hasten on,

And disregard it as a thing that's gone.

Many there are who in a case like this

Would calm re-seek their sweet domestic bliss,

Accept unshamed the wifely tender kiss,

And lift their little children on their knees,

And take their kisses too: with hearts at ease

Will read the household prayers-to church will go,

And sacraments,-nor care if people know.
Such men-so minded-do exist, God knows,

And, God be thanked, this was not one of those.'

The Letter and the Spirit, by Rev. C. P. Chretien, Fellow of Oriel College, &c. (Macmillan.) 1861.

From what sources, besides internal self-communion, Clough derived the deep sense here manifested of the weight of sin, of the way to regain lost graces lying through the road of selfdenial in things lawful, we will not even pause to ask. Most happily, in thorough hatred of evil, the two schools of thought in which his spirit graduated are perfectly agreed. Nor does he make his penitent rest in anything that he himself can do. The wife is made to speak of—

'One who takes away

Our sin and gives us righteousness instead.'

It is, we believe, the sole allusion to that Name throughout this volume. But its author was deeply reserved. May it have been more often in his heart, if not upon his lips? His temptations in the direction of doubt were assuredly not light ones. In all sincerity and reverence do we utter over him the Apostolic aspiration- Δώῃ αὐτῷ ὁ Κύριος εὑρεῖν ἔλεος παρὰ Κυρίου ἐν ἐκείνῃ τῇ ἡμέρᾳ. Αμήν.

90

ART. IV.-1. Essay on Religious Philosophy. By M. ÉMILE SAISSET. Translated, with Critical Essay, Marginal Analysis, and Notes. Two Volumes. T. & T. Clarke, Edinburgh. 1862.

2. Observations on the Attempted Application of Pantheistic Principles to the Theory and Historic Criticism of the Gospel. By W. H. MILL, D.D. Second Edition. Cambridge: Deighton, Bell, & Co. London: Bell & Daldy. 1861.

3. Hegel et Schopenhauer. Études sur la Philosophie Allemande Moderne. Par A. FOUCHE DE CAZEIL. Paris. 1862.

'Most educated men,' says the translator of M. Saisset's Essays, 'have for some time been aware of the presence in our contemporary literature of a certain Pantheistic element, which perhaps they have felt rather than been able to analyse.' This element is very perceptible in such French works as are likely to be popular. It floats upon the air of poetry like those impalpable colouring matters in the atmosphere which the naked eye can only detect in the sickly hue cast over the landscape, but which in a short time stain deeply every substance which is exposed to them. A something from which the Christian shrinks drops at his feet, as the conclusion of scientific as well as of metaphysical reasonings, half hidden in those mots d'enflure which Pascal hated.' In English it is not difficult to find similar instances. The Spinozist natura naturata and natura naturans, tricked out in the finery of the school of Schelling, reappear in Mr. Emerson's writings, not in geometrical formulæ, but in a rich and coloured prose. Two little words, and the mode of their typography, in

1 We quote the first instances at hand :- A poem, full of the one problem Being, under its triple aspect-Humanity, Evil, the Infinite, the Progressive, the Relative, the Absolute.'- Victor Hugo. Preface to La Légende des Siècles, p. xvi.

'Must we believe that different simple bodies, if there are such, are only found of one and the same matter in diverse states of condensation? We are thus led on to the idea of the unity of substance. Gas, liquid, solid, vacuum and plenum, heavenly bodies and spaces, satellites, planets, suns, &c. will, in that case, be only transitory forms of something eternal, ephemeral images of something which cannot change; and in the whirl of phenomena, in the eternal movement of all substances, the history of the world shows us everywhere Becoming in Being, Being in Becoming.'-Analyse du Soleil par la Chimie. Par M. Auguste Laugel.

2 Let us not longer omit our homage to the efficient nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snow, itself secret, its

Mr. Carlyle's 'Life of Sterling' personal god-reveal to us his appreciation of that truth which is the beginning of all religion, and, as Maine de Biran has told us, the end of all philosophy. In the laxity of the closing sentences of a notorious essay upon the National Church,' a Missionary Bishop, just returned from China, was reminded of the esoteric Pantheism which he had so lately left. Twenty years ago, a divine who, when the controversies of the day have died out, will be mentioned in the same breath with Pearson and Barrow, wrote these warning words :We hear much of laudable efforts to bring the saving truths of 'Christianity within the reach of the votaries of Brahmanism; 'but few amongst us are aware that the very esoteric doctrine ' of Brahmanism, and of all pagan theology, is now in the course ' of propagation to cultivated minds from the centre of Christian 'Europe.'1 The prophecy has been sadly fulfilled.

The selection of the subject of Mr. Mansel's Bampton Lectures may be taken as a proof that the ambitious constructions of German Pantheism are viewed with admiration by many thinkers. The profound interest excited, first by the delivery and subsequently by the publication of that remarkable volume, testifies that the subject which it discusses is one of the day. Men care but little for the refutation of theories which have been merely exhumed and resuscitated for the purpose of enabling some dialectical gladiator to exhibit the sharpness of the implement which he wields. Hegelianism is as difficult as, and perhaps not much more profound, than Gnosticism; and even Mr. Mansel would not be disparaged by a comparison with Dr. Burton; but we never heard that the Lectures on the Heresies of the Apostolic Age by that eminent divine, delivered in 1829, excited much interest beyond a narrow circle of learned and orthodox clergymen. The conditioned and unconditioned, the finite and infinite, the relative and absolute, are not in themselves much more attractive than the emanating ons, the life and light, of Gnosticism; the triplicity of Hegel is perhaps not

works driven before it in flocks and multitudes. It publishes itself in creatures. ... The knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being, from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death which philosophy and religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. . . . The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence is for ever creeping again into the state of free thought. Hence the virtue of the influence on the mind of natural objects. Man imprisoned, crystallized, vegetative, speaks to man impersonated.... Wisdom is infused into every form..... We did not guess its essence, after a long time— We should think not!—Eight Essays. By Ralph Waldo Emerson. Essay VI. -Nature.

1 Dr. Mill on the Mythical Interpretation of the Gospel.-Page 6.

more profound than the primary octave of Basilides.1 But it is felt that, under the smoke of this terminology, a momentous battle is waged by human reason, and that the points at issue are nothing less than the personality of God, the moral nature and the immortality of man. For a God without thought and love is no God. A moral nature without freedom and responsibility is moral only by courtesy. An immortality without memory and personal identity is so like death that we shudder as we look at its shadowy outlines.

2

In our day, as in every day, it is necessary that the teachers of religious truth should be acquainted with the forms of error which surround them. They, at least, have lost their right to be ignorant. They, of all men, cannot choose to spend their life with a child's thought. If there is always morality in the right exercise of reason, some acquaintance with those problems which environ the divine Book out of which they teach, is something like an imperative duty. Some, indeed, may be so devoted, and others so unapt for speculation, as to be able to wrap themselves round in their work, and exclude every echo from the world of thought. But such men are not common. Nor is it only the teachers of religion who have an interest in these questions. The study of philosophy has revived. The young men of the present day exhibit some of that dialectical love for snarlings and snappings, to the right and to the left, which Plato mentions as a characteristic of the Athenian youth." They want a philosophical teaching which shall restrain their petulance from the book upon the altar, and from the veil which hangs before the Holiest. One who, up to a recent period, was an eminent teacher of philosophy in the chief philosophical school of England, states that, to borrow philosophy from Hegel's 'Lectures on the History of Philosophy, seems to him (like borrowing poetry from Shakspeare) to be a debt that is almost 'unavoidable.' Surely they who must read Hegel should be carefully prepared by those principles which can alone secure them from the philosophical prejudices against a Personal God, which are so much more hopeless than those of the vulgar, because they add the drunkenness' of false reasonings to the thirst' of the original prejudices. The number of educated laymen is large, and daily increasing, who desire to understand the groundwork of their faith—and, probably, since the age of

1 πρώτη ὄγδοας.

2 οὐδείς τ ̓ ἂν ἕλοιτο ζῆν παιδίου διάνοιαν ἔχων διὰ βίου.—Arist. Ethic. Nic. Σ. iii. 12.

àel.

3

· χαίροντες ὥσπερ τὰ σκυλάκια τῷ ἕλκειν τε καὶ σπαράττειν τοὺς πλησίους

4 Aristotle's Ethics. By Sir Alexander Grant, Preface, page vi.