under the old economy slaughtered the priests of Baal. Moreover, Christ himself threatened damnation to all who should not believe in Him; and Paul pronounced accursed any who should preach any other gospel.

This anathema of the Apostle's pleases our modern Judaizer so much, that he takes to hurling it himself, only in the opposite direction, whence it can but recoil upon himself :

'German Protestantism cannot acknowledge that there is in the doctrine recognized by the church as given by Divine inspiration, any distribution of articles of belief into two sorts-fundamental and non-fundamental. Can the human soul pretend to draw a line on the revealed page, on one side of which shall be placed all doctrines essential to salvation, while on the other are to be found such only as God has made known as luxuries and superfluities? As to the individual soul, nothing is fundamental save the last glimmer of the faith which links it with the Divine source of all spiritual life. But, as respects the church, everything is fundamental which belongs to the one indivisible faith once delivered to the saints. And anathema sit, who conscientiously surrenders a single tittle of the Divine heritage!'

Of course, the denial of this distinction implies the Extra ecclesiam nulla salus, which is thus unblushingly asserted by Dr. Stahl. Our doctrine is, that God's promises to impart grace are made to the soul only in connexion with the church.' Again: The fruit of the kingdom of God is the salvation of the soul, but the soil on which alone this fruit grows and flourishes is the church.' Well may the Chevalier call sentiments like these, with which the discourse on Christian Tolerance overflows, not semi-Catholic, as their modest author seems to apprehend they may be considered, but out-and-out Romanist or, as he adds, that there may be no mistake about his meaning, popish to the core. We regret that our limited space precludes our giving more specimens, and still more, that we cannot make room for a few paragraphs from his doughty antagonist's crushing refutation. We must not, however, omit one passage in particular, in which Stahl has a fling at Independencywhich we are happy to find is being more and more talked about on the Continent, as the discussions on the constitution of the church swallow up all others; nor shall we forbear to add a sentence or two of Bunsen's rejoinder to this ignorant attack upon a system to which the Old World owes so much, and the New everything.

'We deny,' says Stahl, ' that the individual soul, that is, the soul in its individuality, is the seat of the Divine communications and of the impartations of grace. This is the notion to which we stand opposed, and it is nothing else save the culmination of the principle of Inde

Stahl's Attack on Independency.

439

pendency. According to Independency, the single congregation is independent, sovereign in the kingdom of God, and the seat of the Holy Ghost. According to this notion (?), the individual soul, if we follow out the principle, is independent, sovereign in the kingdom of God, the seat of the Holy Ghost, and consequently may begin to expound the Bible entirely afresh, out of its own imaginations, and to discover things therein quite new, certainly, and hitherto unheard of. Our doctrine is that God's promises to impart grace are made to the soul only in connexion with the church. The church, however, is not a mere outward institution; it is a kingdom in which inward spiritual powers breathe and blow. It is the action and reaction of the man's internal personal faith, and, again, of the forms and monuments which faith has aforetime created, and which now breathe back the breath of faith upon men,-an interpenetration of the grace which God has caused to reside in his ordinances, and of the grace which he works in the soul. It is the treasury of all Divine blessings, and of all human charisms and achievements, a handing down of sacred things from generation to generation. It embraces, therefore, the understanding of the Word of God, according to the interpretation given to it by the faith of Christendom, and a profound, believing, theological science through a chain of centuries; and the beautiful worship which thoughtful piety has established from the apostolic age till now; and fellowship with the spiritual office, and the Christian estimate of all the relations of life, the family, the state, art, science, and Christian morality and good order amongst the people, with the sacraments crowning all, in their right administration, and their right meaning. These are institutions and bonds of union which God has cast around Christendom, and which Christendom itself has striven, in harmony with God, to maintain unimpaired throughout all periods. The communion of believers within the scope of these institutions and bonds-not outside them-is the Church, is the mystical body of Christ, the seat of the operations of Divine grace, and of the Spirit, who leads men into all truth.'

(

'German Protestantism can never acknowledge the Evangelical sects, it can only acknowledge certain members of such sects, in their personal capacity, as brethren in Christ, not so much because as in spite of their belonging to the sects. Its toleration is here also only carried to the extent that it does not judge the persons; it does not go the length-as in America, perhaps, where they know no better -of deeming the existence and foundation of sects as something innocent in itself.'

To us it seems that German Protestantism' is at present, like a frog suddenly shifted out of the exhausted receiver and plunged into an atmosphere of oxygen, playing very odd pranks, and giving itself strange airs. Who would believe that this is the Magdalen from whom so lately seven devils have been cast out ?—Ïf, indeed, rationalism and its kindred imps have wholly

left her as yet. But this the largest charity can hardly grant, when it reflects that in this same Berlin, where this inflated stuff was vented, not one in twenty of the population ever enters a place of worship, whilst in many parts of Protestant Germanyin Rhenish Bavaria, for instance there were within half a dozen years, if there be not now, large towns of 6000 or 8000 inhabitants, in which not a score attendants on the Sunday services could be mustered, and not a soul at the sacrament; that comparatively very few young men now enter upon the theological curriculum of study, and that science is at so low an ebb, that Hundeshagen lately publicly complained that for hundreds who, twenty or thirty years since, heard the university lectures, scarcely as many dozens can now be got together; that notwithstanding the repeated lustrations of her academical senates, such Pantheists and Deists as Baur and Zeller, and Ewald and Hilgenfeld, and Credner and Knobel and Hitzig, with dozens more who durst not give a plain yea or nay if asked whether our Redeemer really rose from the dead, are still the Gamaliels of her future Pauls; and, lastly, to enumerate no more of these painful scandals, that not to speak of the fearful immorality which disgraces the cities and towns, there are on record such facts as the following, touching the condition of the rural population of Protestant Germany. Of the forty-three families inhabiting a small Bavarian commune, thirty-six had children, but only thirteen had none but legitimate offspring. Seven families included none but illegitimate children. Besides these families were seven single women, who had children from one to seven in number, and two of them had daughters with several illegitimate children. Of Mecklenburg, which is one of the principal seats of the New Lutheranism, we are told, that whereas at the beginning of the century only one birth in sixteen was illegitimate, there is now one in four. In 1851, in two hundred and sixty localities more than a third of the births, and in two hundred and nine more than half were illegitimate. Nay, in seventy-nine localities there were none but illegitimate births! But we may safely leave these Pharisaical Lutherans, who thank God that they are not as other men-for which these other men, too, ought not to be ungrateful-these Sadducees of yesterday, who make broad their phylacteries to-day-these quondam deniers of all that is supernatural in Scripture, who now talk so unctuously of the perpetual miracle of the altar,' and have so suddenly swung round the whole arc from the highest pitch of negation to the loftiest assumptions of superstitious nonsense-we may safely leave them, we say, in the hands

*Baumgarten's Zechariah, ii. 334, 335.

Bunsen and the Independents.

441

of one who shows himself so able to chastise their sophistry, conceit, and insolence, as the author of the Signs of the Times.

We have only still, in performance of our promise, to cite from his genial pages his animadversions on Stahl's reference to the Independents, and may then leave the reader to his own quiet reflections on the newest phase assumed by that portentous thing called GERMANISM. If there was one thing which Luther never attempted, and which, considering his grievous lack of right materials, he most wisely left to future generations, it was the restoration of the New Testament CHURCH, for which he could only pave the way by restoring the RELIGION of the longforgotten book. Yet it is the bare scaffolding of the temple as it was left by the great Reformer, and which has long had the dry-rot in every one of its timbers-it is the miserable police succedaneum for a church, with which his followers have been fain to put up for three centuries, that fills Stahl, and his associates, with such boundless contempt of the sects. The work left undone by Luther was taken up in the generation after his death by another Reformer, ROBERT BROWN-a much-maligned and misunderstood man-whom, we rejoice to find, the Chevalier estimating at something of his true worth. It is thus that he speaks of him and his followers :

'The claims of religious toleration were first preached, and that with the greatest success, by the men, and the martyrs as some became, of the Evangelical Protestant faith.

The series begins towards the end of the sixteenth century with ROBERT BROWN. That courageous preacher, filled with the spirit, proclaimed the independence of particular churches (i. e., according to the usus loquendi of Apostolic Christianity, congregations) and the Christian right of Christians to the free exercise of their own mode of worship. Why did the orator (Stahl) choose to suppress all mention of this noble patriarch of the Independents and of the great cause of toleration? It is clear Herr Stahl has no love for the Independents. In the sequel of his discourse, he seeks to prove against them that their principle, if consistently followed out,' excludes Christian communion altogether, and leaves everything to the individual soul.' That is just as if any one were to contend that the earth, according to the principle of centrifugal force, consistently followed out,' must necessarily fly off into space. The true centripetal force, which is conscientious free faith in the God of the Gospel, it verily appears to me, no Christian communion has been less wanting in than these same congregationalists. This community of Christians has maintained its ground for now well-nigh three hundred years, under grievous oppressions and cruel persecutions on the part of the State and the priesthood, and numbers, at this day, more congregations than all the Lutherans on the face of the earth. Sufficient reason surely why we

NO. XLVI.

6

G G

should not underrate them! But their greatest glory, doubtless, is still the fact that they first preached freedom of conscience (I beg pardon, toleration I mean), and that they have violated the principle much less than the Lutherans and than their own persecutors the starched Presbyterians.'

ART. VII.—Modern Painters. Vol. III., containing Part IV. ( Of Many Things'). By JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. Smith, Elder, & Co. 1856.

MORE than ten years have passed away since two volumes bearing the unpretending title of Modern Painters, by a Graduate of Oxford, came out, and startled amateurs, connoisseurs, and artists themselves, alike, by their frank enunciation of new principles in art, and bold assertions of the right of Turner— much-abused Turner-to the foremost place among landscape painters, both past and present. The work was eagerly read, it was much admired, but far more bitterly denounced; still it did not fail in its aim; some check was given to the virulent attacks upon Turner, and the aged painter, already sinking into death, must have felt cheered in his desolate home by the eloquent advocacy of that young champion who flung himself so chivalrously between him and his cowardly assailants, and so willingly received the thrusts that were aimed at the gifted old

man.

Turner did not long survive-scarcely long enough to note even the first turn of the current of opinion which now sets so strongly in his favour; and the work originally intended to vindicate the living artist is now continued as a tribute to his memory. "The critic's proper and appointed work,' as Mr. Ruskin bitterly says, had already been done, so far as regarded the recognition of Turner's genius in his lifetime; they had 'blinded the world in general to the presence of a great spirit 'among them, until the hour of its departure. With them and 'their successful work I had nothing more to do; the account of 'gain and loss, of gifts and gratitude between Turner and his 'countrymen was for ever closed. He could only be left to his 'quiet death at Chelsea, the sun upon his face; they to dispose of a length of funeral through Ludgate, and bury with three'fold honour his body in St. Paul's, his pictures at Charing Cross, and his purposes in Chancery.' Still, with respect to