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their proverbs are not printed. We should be indisposed to quote a few of this class of proverbs, if we did not believe that these remarks explain their seeming severity. One can see a good-natured and affectionate smile behind them all. The fact that when a man begins particularly to admire one woman, he strives to hide it by a general satire of the sex, is not unfrequently the occasion of the discovery of his passion.

The first proverb which we quote on this subject is suggested by the last remark: "Love and a cough can not be hid." In vain does a man endeavor to retreat behind raillery and pretended invective. Here are some good-natured and pleasant sayings about matrimony: "A good wife makes a good husband." "There is a good wife in the country and every man thinks he has her." Here is a cheerful picture of rural happiness: "A little house well filled, a little land well tilled, a little wife well willed." But besides such genial proverbs, it must be confessed that there are many that are of a different character. Woman's suppos ed inability to keep a secret is thus cruelly satirized: "A woman conceals what she knows not." Her supposed possession of the earliest news is most unkindly put: "He that telleth his wife news is but newly married." Her ready command of tears for lesser occasions is thus ungallantly and unfeelingly described: "As great a pity to see a woman weep as to see a goose go bare-foot." The Jews are particularly severe on women. In one of their Liturgies they render thanks to God that they were not women. In the spirit of that thanksgiving is the proverb: "When an ass climbs a ladder we may find wisdom in a woman." The Italians have a saying to this effect: "It is a sad house where the hen crows louder than the cock." In the same vein is the English saying: "One tongue is enough for a woman."

From this rapid survey it will be apparent that proverbs are an inexaustible repository of poetry, wit, and wisdom. We conclude in the spirit of our subject, by reminding our readers that "An oak is not felled at one chop," and that if the few chips which we have cut off from the old proverb-tree, the growth of centuries, have the fragrance and value of the sandal wood, they would do well often to rest beneath its shadow and carry away its spicy twigs!

VOL. VI.-4

ART. III.-RECENT GERMAN APOLOGETICS.

Das Apostolische und das Nachapostolische Zeitalter. Mit Rücksicht auf Unterschied und Einheit in Lehre und Leben. Dargestellt von GOTTHARD VICTOR LECHLER, Doctor der Philosophie, Dekan zu Knittlingen, K. Würtemberg. Zweite, durchaus umgearbeitete Auflage der von der Teyler'schen theologischen Gesellschaft gekrönten Preisschrift. Stuttgart. Verlag von Rudolf Besser. 1857.

Apologie des Christenthums in Briefen für gebildete Leser. Eine gekrönte Preisschrift von C. H. STIRM, Kön. Würtembergischem Ober-Consistorialrath, Doctor der Philosophie und Theologie. Zweite vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage. Stuttgart. E. Schweizerbart'sche Verlag. 1856.

THE character of the defenses of Christianity form an accurate key to the character of the attack which those defenses are constructed to meet. In England, the solid historical outworks of Lardner and Paley bore witness to the fact that English skepticism, availing itself of the practical character of the people with whom it had to deal, brought its attacks to bear upon the proof of revelation, not upon its meaning. In France the enthusiastic eloquence of Bossuet, and the keen irony of Pascal, showed that there wit was to be encountered. In Ger many, however, the attack has been far different. It exhibits neither the dashing effrontery of English infidelity nor the brilliant wit of French. The infidel treatises of Paine meet with no circulation in Germany; those of Voltaire but little. The German skeptic does not plumply contradict; he does not smartly ridicule. He simply doubts. But this doubt, to a speculative nation, is an agency peculiarly powerful. An assault may be readily resisted; a citadel may be made bombproof; but when in the garrison itself there exists a hostile power, which, if it does not corrupt, at least bewilders and mystifies, the battle may be lost as effectually as if the works

were undefended. It is to a brief consideration of one or two of the recent attempts to meet this last-mentioned antagonism that the present article is devoted.

Of the leaders of the present mythical school of German skepticism, we need not say that Strauss has been the most potent. He was educated in the school of Hegel, and derived his fundamental conceptions from that profound philosopher. According to Hegel, the absolute religion is Christianity, though other creeds, as preparatory or ancillary to it, have each their subjective reality. The unity of God with man, the sum of all religion, was carried out in the one God-man. This union, through the Spirit, is to be made the common property of all men. But these truths are not to be learned through revelation. We only know God and IIis attributes through His evolution of Himself in our hearts.

At Hegel's death, his kingdom, like that of Alexander, (to adopt the illustration of one of his eulogists,) was not only divided among his lieutenants, but was destroyed by their dissensions. Among them Strauss was prominent; and in the struggles for the management of the disciples of their common master, he had great advantages. His understanding was eminently sharp, clear, and analytic. His style-a very peculiar phenomenon in German philosophy-was elastic and fresh. He approximated nearer than any other German skeptic to that gay impudence which the English unbeliever of the Bolingbroke school employed to confuse an honest though awkward faith. These advantages, added to the prestige of the Hegelian camp, attached to him at once the advance-guard of German speculative theology.

Had Hegel lived, he would have been as much amazed at the operations performed on his theory by Strauss, as Kant was by the similar work attempted towards him by Schelling. Strauss discovered that the Hegelian assumption of an historical God-man must go. It was an hypothesis inconsistent with the prime principle of Hegel, since this notion or idea could not exhaust itself on the individual or ego, but must be the common property of the race. Hence all mankind is the Son of God. The Christ of the Gospels is a mere myth. This follows from the unreality of the New Testament Scriptures,

which is proved, (1) by their irreconcilable contradictions; (2) by their repugnancy to historical reality; and (3) on the assumption that they are authentic by their consistency with the hypothesis of merely human attributes in Jesus. This was the office of the Leben Jesu. A step further was taken in the Glaubenslehre, in which Strauss maintained that modern science had evaporated revelation altogether. His death opened the way for another advance under the guide of Bauer of Tubingen, once the teacher of Strauss, and now his successor. Bauer applies the solvent of criticism to the apostolical history in the same way that Strauss did to the biography of our Lord. To what extent he has succeeded will be evidenced by the fact that he has abolished the scriptural canons, and has resolved into a myth the entire primitive Church.*

In what way this school of skepticism has been met we will now briefly consider. Foremost and most efficient in the work of vindicating both common-sense and faith, is Dr. J. H. Ebhard. Himself a descendant of Huguenots, he has adhered through choice as well as education to the Reformed faith, (holding a moderate Calvinism, somewhat in the nature of that of Leighton,) as distinguished from the Lutheran. Of Olshausen's instructions he was able to avail himself when at Erlangen; and it is not a little to his credit that he has been able not merely to conclude, but to do so with success, the masterly commentaries which his great instructor left in an unfinished state. In 1849, he was elected Professor at Erlangen, where, until 1853, when he took the post of Consistorialrath at Speyer, he labored with great energy and fidelity, maintaining incidentally the integrity of his reformed principles in the midst of a faculty otherwise entirely Lutheran. Familiar with French, and not unconversant with English, he attracted no little attention at the meeting of the Evangelical Alliance in London

in 1851.

How far he has gone, may be seen from the fact that in his "das Christenthum und die Christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte," p. 448, (a work, we are glad to say, as yet untranslated,) he tells us that "forgiveness of sins, reconciliation, assurance, and peace of conscience are the products of every religion; and were to be obtained even in heathendom, by those who believed in the gods, in whose gift these highest graces of spiritual life lay." All faiths become thus alike in the light of an absolute subjectivity. None exist objectively; each exists savingly and comfortably, however, to him that believes it to be true.

Dr. Eblard, though scarcely more than at his prime-he is now about forty-five-and though with a large proportion of his time for many years mortgaged to his professor's duties, has published a series of works, the aggregate bulk as well as the elaborateness of which few American divines would conceive. to be practicable. Among these we may mention a treatise on Systematic Divinity, (2 vols. 1851;) a treatise on the Lord's Supper, (2 vols. 1845 ;) lectures on Practical Divinity, (1854 ;) and a commentary on Hebrews and Revelation, being an appendix to Olshausen, (published in Germany in 1850-2, and republished in England in Clark's Theological Library, and in this country by Professor Kendrick.) To these is to be added what is particularly before us-a philosophical criticism of the evangelical history, (Wissenschaftliche Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte, 1841, 1851,) being substantially a defense of the Gospels against the attack of Strauss.

The literary charms of Strauss exist in almost equal degree with Ebhard; and hence the apologist has the advantages of access, so far as recommendatory power of manner and style is concerned, to the same class of minds as the assailant. Frank, animated, pugnacious, as well as laborious and able, he treats Strauss very much with the same mixture of persiflage and confutation-of dogmatic denunciation with close and logical retort-with which Bishop Watson treated Paine. If he jokes, it is without coarseness; if he becomes diffuse, he never ceases to be vivacious as well as elaborate. There is always at the bottom a profound reverence to God and devotedness to the cause of Christianity which attracts for him respect, while his talents and ardor secure for him attention. It is greatly to be wished that a translation of his defense of the Gospels could be so scattered in this country as to go wherever Strauss has led the way.

Hengstenberg's vast energy and fine gifts were turned to the same object, obliquely, it is true, but not the less effectually. The character and history of this eminent man we may pause for a moment to consider. For the office of a Christian apologist he possesses great gifts. Introduced by marriage into a high social position at Berlin; invested by the administration. of the king whose retirement this year has witnessed with an

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