his rich genius, his original intelligence, or his vast erudition, stand him in better stead, than in showing and vindicating the synthetic relation of the natural and the supernatural. Probably the most important of his various publications was one of the earliest, entitled Teorica del Sovrannaturale. His theory of the supernatural is very profound, and is not easily mastered. We do not regard ourselves as having by any means fully mastered it; but from what we do understand of it, we are satisfied that it furnishes the principles of a real harmony between reason and revelation, and the basis of a solid union between rationalism and supernaturalism. The work before us was intended to be the development and application of this theory, showing that it is only in Catholicity that the various fragments of truth scattered through all other religions are collected, united, and integrated in one original, symmetrical, complete, and living body of truth. Whether he has really succeeded in showing this or not, this is what needs to be done, and what must be done to save our age from pantheism and materialism, from petty rationalism and stolid atheism, and to recall it to the life and vigor of a reasonable, a sublime, and an energetic faith. Whoever does this work will have given what in its fullest, deepest, and highest sense is to be understood by the PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION.

This brief statement will show the importance, nay, the necessity of those researches, discussions, and speculations to which many excellent and saintly men are and always have been opposed. There have always been in the Church a class of men whom we may call "Literalists," who attach themselves to the literal statements of the Holy Scriptures, to what they call the simplicity of faith, and oppose all philosophical efforts to bring the natural and the supernatural into harmony. Thus, at that early day, we find St. Irenæus opposing the Christian Philosophical School of Alexandria, of which Clemens and Origen were, if not its founders, its most successful continuators. But he did not succeed, and his followers have not succeeded in preventing the great Doctors and Theologians, like St. Augustine, St. Anselm, and St. Thomas, from laboring with untiring industry, and with all their genius, intellectual power, and erudition, to show the harmony of the natural and the supernatural, and the real synthetic relation there is between them. The human mind is so constituted that, if it acts at all, it must reduce, or labor to reduce, all branches

of its knowledge and belief to a principle in which they are seen to be consistent, and but parts of one uniform and indissoluble whole. It is in vain we war against this tendency of human intelligence. It is in vain we dwell on the dangers to which it exposes the simple believer, the errors and absurdities to which its indulgence may lead. We cannot suppress this tendency without suppressing the human mind itself, and even St. Irenæus himself is obliged to follow it to a greater or less extent in his writings against heretics, especially against those philosophical heretics, the Gnostics, so often reproduced in our own day by rationalists and transcendentalists. Every man, if he thinks at all, if he be really a man, and conscious of the dignity he possesses as a rational soul, wishes and must wish to render to himself an account of his own faith, whether in the natural or the supernatural.

Although there has always been a party in the Church opposed to this tendency, and therefore to all philosophizing on the subject of religion, the Church has never sanctioned their opposition, but has accepted and availed herself of the labors of the theologians and philosophers. She has accepted human intelligence; she has respected human reason, and aided and blessed its cultivation. She has canonized St. Augustine; she has canonized St. Anselm; she has canonized St. Thomas; she has canonized St. Bonaventura, and marked her high appreciation of Bossuet and Fénelon. All who engage in constructing a philosophy of religion are liable, no doubt, to fall into many errors; but it is even better to err than never to think; it is better sometimes to be wrong than never to be right; and a living dog is better than a dead lion. All that can be asked of those who err is humility, docility, and a willingness to correct their errors when clearly and distinctly pointed out to them by the competent authority. Even the errors of great men are often more instructive and more salutary than the commonplace truths of little men; for they become provocative of thought and inquiry, and the occasion of the attainment to higher truths and their fuller appreciation.

ART. III.-Introduction Historique et Critique aux Livres du Nouveau Testament. Par REITHMAYR, HUG, THOLUCK, &c. Traduite et Annotée par H. DE VALROGER, Prêtre de l'Oratoire de l'Immaculée Conception. Paris: Lecoffre & Cie. 1861. 2 Tomes. 8vo.

WE are not able to review these two goodly volumes, and to speak of their contents according to their merits, because, owing to the continued inability to use our eyes, we are unable to read them, and because, though we know French very well by sight, we know it but imperfectly by hearing. The well-known character of the works translated, as well as of the translator, is a sufficient pledge of their great merit, and of their being up with the literature of their subject. Germany has been, for the last sixty years, the classic land of Biblical literature; and nowhere has that literature called forth more serious or profound study, attracted a higher order of intelligence, or been more successfully prosecuted; and nowhere is it so advanced as in the more distinguished German writers. We were tolerably familiar with the results obtained in Biblical literature some twenty-five years ago, but of the results obtained since then, which, we are assured, are of vast importance, we are comparatively ignorant. These results a competent French critic has assured the public may be found well summed up and clearly set forth in these two volumes, much enriched by the valuable notes of the translator. The German authors translated may not be the most brilliant or daring, but they are among the most solid and really erudite of German authors who have devoted themselves to Biblical literature; and Père Valroger himself is one of the most learned Biblical scholars in France. We have no hesitation, then, in recommending the work as the best Historical and Critical Introduction to the New Testament that has as yet been published.

We welcome the appearance of these volumes, because they indicate a return of Catholic scholars to a field which is properly their own, and which was so successfully cultivated by their predecessors, especially the learned Benedictines, but which they have, except in Germany, apparently, to some extent neglected since Don Calmet, as they have so many other fields of literature and science. Since the close of the seventeenth century till quite recently, Catho

lics have suffered themselves, in almost every branch of learning, of science, and literature, to be surpassed by the non-Catholic or anti-Catholic world. We are indebted, in the main, to non-Catholic, and, in some instances, to antiCatholic authors, for the illustration and vindication of our own Catholic_antiquity. The best history of the life and times of St. Gregory VII., before that not yet completed by Gfrörer, a convert from Protestantism, we owe to Voigt, a Protestant minister, as we do the best history of the life and times of Innocent III. to Hurter, another Protestant minister, though since become a Catholic. We know no Catholic historian who has treated the history of the Middle Ages with so much learning, so much impartiality, and in so true a historical spirit, as Professor Leo; and, with all its faults, Ranke's History of the Popes is superior to any thing we have of the sort from Catholic sources. If we have returned to the study of history, and have ceased to apologize for our own medieval antiquity, we are indebted to the labors, the researches, and the truthfulness of those not of our communion. We have caught the stimulus. from them, have been spurred on by their example, when we ought to have taken the lead and been first in the field. Protestants have also preceded us in the application to Biblical history and criticism of the new facts discovered by profounder historical researches, and disclosed by modern travellers and the more familiar acquaintance with the language, the manners, the customs, the geography, and the natural history of the East. It is with no pride, but with a sort of humiliation, that a Catholic reviewer is obliged to make these confessions; and, therefore, it is with no little. gratification we perceive our own scholars disposed to regain the pre-eminence they once held, and the possession of which they should never have suffered themselves to lose.

It is not precisely that our scholars, during the last century and half, have ceased to study, or have not kept themselves up with all new facts and discoveries, but that they have seemed to want the tact, the capacity, or the ability to use effectively the materials they amassed, and to adapt themselves to the new modes of thought and expression which had come into vogue. The world, which they had cast in their own image, they found crumbling away around them, and seemed to imagine that the most that remained for them was to prevent themselves from being buried in

its ruins. The new world springing up around them, emerging from the general chaos, and only half-formed, has filled them with fear, as a strange and unnatural monster, which could neither be driven back, nor moulded into any shape of beauty or loveliness; they have been paralyzed by the strangeness of their position, and lost their creative faculties. The crisis of the eighteenth century was to them inexplicable, and they knew not how to meet it; they saw not how the old that was passing away, and the new that was emerging, could have any principle in common, nor how their life could flow on in unbroken stream from the foot of the Cross to the final consummation of the world, unless they could drive back the new and recall the old. Thus they suffered the leadership in science and literature, in history and criticism, to pass from their hands into the hands of those who were animated by the new spirit, and moved by the genius of the new world springing into exist ence. Though professing a faith which is always young, ardent, and vigorous, which never grows old, but has always the future before it; though belonging to a Church which recognizes in man the principle of progress, and is the medium of his progress to the infinite, which takes the infant at his birth, and carries him onward and upward, until he becomes one with the infinite and eternal God, they lost their hope, became retrograde in their movements, and wasted their energies in bewailing a past that can never return, while they suffered the spirit of progress to pass into the non-Catholic world, which had no right to it, except through their fault, which could not guide it, and could at best only break it or materialize it.

The fault has been, not in the defect of study, not in the defect of learning, not in the defect of special science or special knowledge, but in the defect of appreciation of the new state of things in which our scholars found themselves placed; in not understanding that nothing good ever passes away, that no order ever falls into the past till its work is done, and it has no longer any power to serve the cause of God or man;-in not understanding that the new order springing from the destruction of the old, is not the destruction of what was good in the old, but its rejuvenation under new forms better adapted to the future progress of religion and civilization. The new is always the continuation of the old, a new birth from the past, in which the past lives a new and more vigorous life. The man of true ge