the threatened truths, and so strengthening | that he shall be himself a match for the setthe whole system against attack. Each course has its separate advantages. The first is more direct in its action upon the teachers of the special error to be refuted it exposes their fallacies, and by so doing it damages their claims to authority, and destroys their arms of offence; and it is therefore surest to attract attention and to create immediate interest. There is far more of dramatic power about it. The refutation of error-often a somewhat dull matter in the abstract - is rendered exciting by the satisfied indignation with which the sense of justice sees the individual offenders pursued, brought to trial, and condemned. But against this is to be set the negative tendency of this treatment. To condemn error is not necessarily to maintain truth; and after the satisfaction of a righteous indignation against an offender there is not seldom a reactionary slumber, as if all had been accomplished by his chastisement, although the treasure for the sake of which he was pursued has not been itself recovered. The second mode, though far less exciting, is free from this evil. It proceeds by building up against the perversion or negation of error the positive truth, and so smites the robber of our faith only incidentally. But whilst it lacks much of the strong interest of the former method, it is, in the long run, the most valuable. The work is purely positive, and its interest is enduring. The mere barricade against an enemy may at the moment of attack be the defence of all we value, but when the assault is over it is worthless. But the opening of some great military road, though rendered needful at the time of its construction by some passing exigency of warfare, is of perpetual value, by opening what remains as a permanent approach to districts closed heretofore to all necessary intercommunication. The "Replies to Essays and Reviews," to which the Bishop of Oxford has contributed a preface, and the " Aids to Faith," of which the Bishop (Thomson) of Gloucester and Bristol is the editor, are good examples of these two methods. The "Aids to Faith," as its title signifies, proposes, upon the matters which have come recently into question, to supply detailed statements of, and arguments for, positive truth, which may so inform the reader upon the whole question ter-forth of old objections under new garbs, and see at once through the subtleties which would suggest difficulties, and insinuate the charge of impossibility against that which has been received from the beginning as the voice of God in the Revelation of his Truth. The volume is, in our judgment, worthy of its occasion and its argument. It deals with the foundations of the faith upon all the great matters which have come into dispute; and though with various power and success, in almost every instance it deals with them in a mode well calculated to confirm the faith it is intended to secure. The work consists of nine essays, dealing respectively with Miracles as Evidences of Christianity; with the Study of the Evidences of Christianity; with Prophecy; with Ideology and Subscription; with the Mosaic Record of Creation; the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Pentateuch; Inspiration; the Death of Christ; and Scripture and its Interpretation. There is less to object to or allow for than we should have thought possible in so many essays on such high subjects, contributed by such different writers. In the second essay, indeed, we think that the writer sometimes pushes too far the inferences which he draws from his leading principle, that Christianity is an historical religion. He sometimes, doubtless quite unintentionally, slides into language which would appear, in exalting the historical, to undervalue the internal evidence of our faith. This has led him, in our judgment, to condemn too sweepingly what has been called the "Evangelical" movement in our own Church. We have never been amongst those who have closed their eyes to the many evils which waited upon that really great awakening. But we do not think that the first loss of theological knowledge amongst us is fairly to be traced to that source. It began earlier. It was the fruit, in great measure, of that wretched policy which, under the influence of Bishop Hoadley and his fellows, discouraged the promotion to the high places of the Church of sound and learned theologians, and thought it wiser to fill our great chairs with safe men, who would be obedient to the party which promoted them, whilst it discouraged divines of powerful minds, high attainments, and holy lives, who might have proved, in the evil days which followed, leaders alike to the clergy and to the laity. This policy led, as it always must lead, to an age of cold hearts, of worldly lives, and of doubting spirits; and in this dark time these evils had spread to a fearful extent amongst our clergy as well as our laity. The Evangelical movement was the awakening reaction of the great soul of the nation against this deathlike slumber. It had not long established itself amongst us, and had scarcely reached up to the high places of the land, when the preliminary throes of the great revolutionary earthquake began to make themselves felt; and it was not long before the full consequences of such a decay of faith were written broad before our eyes as in characters of fire in the convulsions of the neighboring continent; and especially of France, in which from many causes the sleep had been the deepest. Closely connected with this vein of thought is another tendency which may perhaps, as we have hinted, be traced here and there in this essay-we mean a depreciation of the full weight of authority, and of internal evidence, in the exaltation of the importance of that which is external. We quite agree with the writer, that to abandon the historical and external evidence for the truth of our faith would be alike foolish and fatal. But, in establishing this, we cannot venture to assert "that the gospel certainly never made its way by first recommending itself to the conscious wants and wishes of mankind" (p. 63). It is true, indeed, as the essayist says, that "it was to the Jews a stumbling-block, and to the Greeks foolishness" (p. 63); but that was because in them its accents were drowned by the storm of their prejudices: The immediate work of the leaders of the but wherever it broke upon an ear prepared new movement was, it is true, far more to to receive it, its voice awoke at once in the awaken souls, and to guide those which were listener's heart a burst of unutterable joy. just awakening, than to be great in theolog- We think, too, that he has stated with a ical attainments. But they were not a set breadth which might lead to a misapprehenof ignorant men amongst men of learning, sion of what we doubt not is his true meanwho fought for unlettered subjective relig- ing, the proposition that "the minds of many iousness against a school of well-furnished among the humbler classes in Christian lands theologians; they were men whose hearts base their faith upon rational evidence" (p. were warmed by the great truths of the gos-70). We cannot doubt that he would readpel in the midst of an apathetic generation. ily admit that the gospel has spread through The evil of exclusiveness, it is true, fell upon its divine power of meeting "the conscious their party at a later period, when the follow- wants and wishes of mankind," and that to ers of the first ranks narrowed all the faith the mass of the people in Christian lands it to the comparatively small range of truths must always be propounded by authority and (mighty as those truths were) which their received by the action of a faithful obedience. fathers had won, and refused to share in the When St. Paul preached the Gospel at increasing breadth of view which was dawn- Athens, declaring to her philosophers the ing on the awakened Church. We are Unknown God, after whom, in their ignobound, therefore, to admit that the indigna- rance, they were so passionately reaching tion which some statements of this essay forth, he appealed to their "conscious have aroused in those who represent the wants and inarticulate " wishes ; " and party to whose doors he seeks to lay this when the Moravian brethren preached to the great reproach, is not unnatural. We can- poor Greenlanders the doctrine of the Atonenot wonder at the aggrieved feelings with ment through the Cross, and found those which those who know the depth and truth- dull hearts melt beneath the heavenly warmth, fulness of that hold upon the doctrine of the the process in such different materials was Atonement and the influences of the Holy exactly the same. Surely it is to such an Spirit, which was the sheet-anchor of the inward answering to those conscious wants early Evangelical movement, have seen their in the listeners' heart of hearts, which had fathers in the Christian strife here at home long been craving in their dumb misery for described as co-operating in any sense what-some deliverer, and not to teaching them the ever with the authors of that German move- evidences, that St. Paul refers when he speaks ment, which brought it to pass among our of" commending himself to every man's conforeign brethren that "religion was regarded science in the fear of God." (2 Cor. iv. 2.) as an affair of sentiment."—(P. 60.) Nor amidst the hundred thousand cottages of England in which the souls of the rustic est peaks of some mountain range where all inhabitants have received the truth and been are giants. These two essays-Professor so enlightened by it as to do patiently their duty here and to know the calm peacefulness of a believer's death-bed at last-can we conceive that their hopes rested upon their having "felt the force of evidence," though they never consciously framed a syllogism" (p. 69); but upon the fact that the Gospel of our Lord, propounded to them on the authority of the Church into which they had been baptized, did meet all "the wants and wishes of their own souls." Of course, the Gospel ever had a whole system of external evidences on which to fall back. There were, its history, its miracles, its fulfilled prophecies-all ready to satisfy the most intelligent inquirers. But these were not its instruments of conversion-these were not the arms with which it subdued the world. They were the great Reserve of Truth on which the Evangelist could fall back, and which distinguished the present victory which the announcement of the glad tidings had won in the souls whose conscious wants it met, from the mere passing triumph of a groundless enthusiasm. Mansel's and Dean Ellicott's-seem to us to satisfy every reasonable requirement, and successfully to fulfil their own high design. Mr. Mansel deals with "Miracles as Evidences of Christianity," and his treatise dispels, like the sun upon the mountain-side, the mists and confusions with which the subtleties of doubt and error have sought to invest this most important question. It is hardly possible to give a fair sample of his mode of treating the question, because the terse conciseness of his style and the close texture of his argument will not bear compression. But we must make the attempt. We will take the point where, having shown that it is impossible to believe at all in Christ if we disbelieve the truth of his miraclesfor that from the mode in which he refers to them any natural explanation of them deals the death-blow to the moral character of the teacher no less than to the sensible evidence of his mission-having demolished the plausible objection that "no testimony can reach to the supernatural, because testimony can apply only to apparent sensible facts " ("Essays and Reviews," p. 107), by showing that this applies only to the testimony of the observer and not the performer of the act; having shown how entirely the improbability of miracles may be removed by the moral circumstances which may call for them and transform them from "uncouth prodigies of the kingdom of Nature into the fitting splendors of the kingdom of Grace;" having exposed the old fallacy of treating miracles as an infraction of the laws of Nature, by showing what such a violation would really be-namely, the obtaining in two cases different resulting facts from the same antecedent causes; whereas the believer in mir The truth is—and it is this we think which Bishop Fitzgerald has somewhat failed to notice that whilst the great value of external evidence is in the battle with the world and the unbeliever, internal evidences are the strength of the Gospel for the listener and the faithful. Even miracles themselves were not, properly speaking, instruments of conversion to those before whose eyes they were wrought; they did but call attention to the message which was the instrument of conversion, and the strength of that message lay in its marvellous answer to all "the conscious wants and wishes of the hearts" of fallen men. With this qualification, then, we can heart-acles avers not this, but that there is the speily commend this volume as one valuable product, at the least, of this sad and wearisome strife. Bishop Thomson's own essay, especially in its closing pages, rises often to the height of his great argument; and there are some quite excellent passages both in Mr. Cook's handling of ideology and subscription, and in Mr. Rawlinson's "Proof of the Genuineness and Authenticity of the Pentateuch." But, besides these, there are two essays which rise amongst their fellows as the lofti cial intervention of a personal agent to prevent, in this particular instance, the action of these causes; "he thus replies to the seemingly learned objection: : "In an age of physical research like the present all highly cultivated minds and duly advanced intellects have imbibed, more or less, the lessons of the inductive philosophy, and have at least in some measure learned to appreciate the grand foundation conception of universal law-to recognize the impossibility even of any two material atoms subsisting together without a determinate relation of any action of the one or the tion of religion or morality, is worth conother, whether of equilibrium or of motion, tending about. Admit the existence of a without reference to a physical cause of any free will in man, and we have the experimodification whatsoever in the existing con-ence of a power analogous, however inferior, ditions of material agents, unless through to that which is supposed to operate in the the invariable operation of a series of eter-production of a miracle, and forming the nally impressed consequences, following in basis of a legitimate argument from the less some necessary chain of orderly connection, to the greater. In the will of man we have however imperfectly known to us. 6 the solitary instance of an efficient cause in the highest sense of the term, acting among and along with the physical causes of the material world, and producing results which would not have been brought about by any invariable sequence of physical causes left to their own action. We have evidence also of an elasticity, so to speak, in the constitution of nature which permits the influence of human power on the phenomena of the world to be exercised or suspended at will without affecting the stability of the whole. We have thus a precedent for allowing the possibility of a similar interference of a higher will on a grander scale, provided for by a similar elasticity of the matter subjected to its influence. Such interferences, whether produced by human or by superhuman will, are not contrary to the laws of matter; but neither are they the results of those laws. They are the work of an agent who is independent of the laws, and who, therefore, neither obeys nor disobeys them. "This operation of a series of eternally impressed consequences' could hardly be described more graphically or forcibly than in the following words of a great German philosopher: Let us imagine, for instance, this grain of sand lying some few feet further inland than it actually does. Then must the storm-wind that drove it in from the seashore have been stronger than it actually was. Then must the preceding state of the atmosphere, by which this wind was occasioned and its degree of strength determined, have been different from what it actually was; and the previous changes which gave rise to this particular weather; and so on. We must suppose a different temperature from that which really existed, and a different constitution of the bodies which influenced this temperature. The fertility or barrenness of countries, the duration of the life of man, depend, unquestionably, in a great degree on temperature. How can you know since it is not given us to penetrate the arcana of nature, and it is therefore allow- "Substitute the will of Ged for the will able to speak of possibilities-how can you of man, and the argument, which in the know that in such a state of weather as we above instance is limited to the narrow have been supposing, in order to carry this sphere within which man's power can be exgrain of sand a few yards further, some an-ercised, becomes applicable to the whole excestor of yours might not have perished from hunger, or cold, or heat long before the birth of that son from whom you are descended; that thus you might never have been at all; and all that you have ever done, and all that you ever hope to do in this world, must have been hindered in order that a grain of sand might lie in a different place?' tent of creation, and to all the phenomena which it embraces. of "The fundamental conception which is indispensable to a true apprehension of the nature of a miracle, is that of the distinction of mind from matter, and of the power the former, as a personal, conscious, and free agent, to influence the phenomena of Without attempting to criticise the ar- the latter. We are conscious of this power gument as thus eloquently stated, let us in ourselves; we experience it in our everymake one alteration in the circumstances day life; but we experience also its restricsupposed an alteration necessary to make tion within certain narrow limits, the prinit relevant to the present question. Let us cipal one being, that man's influence upon suppose that the grain of sand, instead of foreign bodies is only possible through the being carried to its present position by wind, instrumentality of his own body. Beyond has been placed there by a man. . . The these limits is the region of the miraculous. most rigid prevalence of law, and necessary In at least the great majority of the miracles sequence among purely material phenomena, recorded in Scripture the supernatural elemay be admitted without apprehension by ment appears, not in the relation of matter the firmest believer in miracles so long as to matter, but in that of matter to mind-in that sequence is so interpreted as to leave the exercise of a personal power transcendroom for a power indispensable to all moral ing the limits of man's will. They are not obligation and to all religious belief-the so much supernatural as superhuman. Mirpower of Free Will in man. Deny the ex-acles, as evidences of religion, are connected istence of a free will in man, and neither the with a teacher of that religion; and their possibility of miracles, nor any other ques-evidential character consists in the witness which they bear to him as a man approved | interpretation may well be supposed to inof God by miracles and wonders and signs, volve many difficulties and diversities; secwhich God did by him.' He may make use ondly, that the words of Scripture in many of natural agents, acting by their own laws, parts have more than one meaning and apor he may not: on this question various conjectures may be hazarded, more or less plication; thirdly, that Scripture is inspired, plausible. The miracle consists in his mak- and that, though written by man, it is a ing use of them, so far as he does so, under revelation from God, and adumbrates his circumstances which no human skill could eternal plenitudes and perfections." bring about."✶ Each of which pregnant propositions of refutation he expands into a crushing demolition of the whole system of the objectors. to be said against his argument ever degenNor does this fulness in admitting all that is We know not where to find a finer specimen of close reasoning and happy illustration than all this; but wellnigh every page of this essay would furnish others like it, nor could we exhaust them without trans-erate with Dean Ellicott into a mawkish ferring the whole bodily to our pages. tenderness for the enemies of truth. So far purpose than to meet Dean Ellicott's contribution, whilst differing in almost every characteristic of style, treatment, and illustration from Mr. Mansel's, is marked by equal excellence. There is a completeness in his treatment of the objections of the gainsayer which could be obtained only by a fulness of admission of all that is to be urged against the truth, which at first sight is sometimes positively alarming. This element of his strength is well exhibited in the manner in which he deals with the favorite objection that Holy Scripture is not treated as other books are, that different interpretations of the same passage are equally admitted until all reality of meaning is destroyed. Here, having first proved that there "has been from the first a substantive agreement, not only in the mode of interpreting Scripture, but in many of its most important details" (p. 389), he proceeds to admit "frankly the existence of diversity of interpretation," and then asks, "How can we in the same breath assert prevailing unity and yet admit diversity? How do we account for a state of things which in Sophocles or Plato would be pronounced in-us observe that nothing can really be less tenable than the assertion that there is no credible or absurd ?" At first sight we foundation in the Gospels or Epistles for might almost suppose that we had got hold of one of Professor Jowett's insinuations of any of the higher or supernatural views of the fallaciousness of the Scriptures; but inspiration".. mark the fulness of the answer, and the wisdom as well as the safety of the most complete admission of everything the adversary can claim will be at once apparent. "Our answer," continues the Dean, "is of a threefold nature. We account for this by observing: first, that the Bible is different from every other book in the world, and that its "Aids to Faith," pp. 17, 19, 20. ... Let which assertion-one of those well denominated in the words of Dr. Moberly "random scatterings of uneasiness," is then contradicted by a whole pageful of direct quotations summed up with the telling conclusion, "We pause, not from lack of further statements, but from the feeling that quite enough has been said to lead any fair reader to pronounce the assertion of there being 'no foundation' in the *Preface to "Sermons on the Beatitudes," p. 11. |