of so needed within. It seems to us, in the moral economy ciety, much such an error as it would be in medical science to prescribe to the symptoms and not to the disease; and to aim at relieving the petty details and discomforts of sickness, while unable to discover, and incompetent to treat, the primal, radical evil, the deep-seated malady out of which these external symptoms spring. It is not man's condition alone that needs bettering, but his heart much more. We would honour even the misguided zeal of our brethren of the race who seek in any form to lessen the amount of human misery and wrong; but the claims of our common Father, and the wrongs He has met at our hands, are to be acknowledged by all who would pity, with an effectual compassion, human sorrow, and would remedy, with an enduring relief, social disorder and wretchedness. To forget or to contradict these truths, is to reject the lessons alike of history and Scripture. All reform so based is itself but a new, though it may be unconscious, lawlessness. We have said that proposals of social reform are not causes of wonder. Already human life is less secure in many portions of our republic than under some of the European monarchies, and frauds and embezzlements are less surely and less severely punished. In some of our legislatures, in the very halls, and under the awful eye, as it were, of the embodied justice of the state, brawls and murders have occurred, in which our legislators were the combatants and the victims. And yet in such a state of things, when human life is growing daily cheaper, and the fact of assassination seems to awaken scarce a tithe of the sympathy, horror, and inquiry, which it provoked in our fathers' times-it is in such a state of things that, by a strange paradox, a singular clemency for the life of the assassin seems to be springing up. In a nation lax to a fault in the vindication. of human life when illegally taken away, the protest is made most passionately against its being taken away legally, and the abolition of capital punishment is demanded by earnest and able agitators. Would that the picture thus dark were but the sketch of fancy! Unhappily its gloomy hues are but the stern colouring of truth. Can the patriot, as he watches such omens, fail to see the coming judgment? Can he shut his eyes against the fact so broadly printed on all the pages of history, that anarchy makes despotism necessary; that men who are left lawless soon fly for refuge even to a sceptre of iron and a law of blood; that a Robespierre has ever prepared the way for a Bonaparte, and the arts of the reckless demagogue, like Catiline, have smoothed the path for the violence of the able usurper, like Cæsar? Of all this, should it unhappily continue or increase, the effects must with growing rapidity be seen in the injury done to our literature. There is a close and strange connection between moral and literary integrity. Not only does social confusion discourage the artist and the scholar, but disjointed and anarchical times are often marked by a want of laborious truth, and of seriousness and earnestness on the part of the popular writers. A passion for frivolity, a temper that snatches at temporary triumphs by flattering the whim of the hour, and a science of agreeable, heartless trifling, spring up in such days to be the bane alike of all eloquence and of all truth. 4. Another of the perils which seem to us lying in the way of our rising literature, is a false liberalism. To a manly and Christian toleration we can never be opposed. Something of this toleration is required by our free intercourse with many lands. The wonders of steam are melting the nations most highly civilised into comparative uniformity and unity. Our colonists are the emigrants of many shores. In this audience are found blended the blood of the Celt and the Saxon, the Norman and the Roman. We are scions alike from the stock of those who fought beneath, and those who warred successively against, the eagles of the old Latin empire. Our varied origin seems giving to America, as its varied learning has given to Germany, a "many-sided mind;" a sympathy at many points with mankind, and with widely diversified forms of society. More easily than the English, the ancestors whom many of us claim, we adopt the peculiarities of other nations. And all this is well. But when we suffer these influences to foster in us the notion that all the moral peculiarities, and all the forms of faith, marking the various tribes from which our country is supplied, and with which our commerce connects us, are alike valuable; when, instead of an enlightened love of truth wherever found, we learn indifference to all truth, and call this new feeling by the name of superiority to prejudice; when we learn to think of morals as if they were little more than a conventional matter, the effect of habit or tradition, or the results of climate or of the physical constitution of a people, we are learning lessons alike irrational, and perilous, and untrue.* The spirit of Pope's "Universal Prayer" seems to many, in consequence of these and other influences, the essence of an enlightened Christian charity. They cannot endure the anathemas of Paul against those who deny his Lord. They would * It is well that we should cherish an humble sense of our own fallibility; but whatever may be true of us, God and Scripture are infallible. The Creator, too, so constituted his universe, that there is truth in it, and throughout it; and he has so constituted man as to thirst with an inextinguishable longing after truth. An utter despair of obtaining it, and a general acknowledgment that we are altogether and inevitably in the wrong, is alike a state of misery to man, and a dishonour done to God. It may give birth to a sort of toleration, but it is the spurious toleration of Pyrrhonism, a liberality that patronises error, but that can be fierce against the truth; for, as the wise and meek Carey complained, sceptics may be the most intolerant of mankind against the truth. They resent naturally that strong conviction and that ardent zeal, classify the Koran and the Shaster with the Scriptures. Some have recently discovered a truth of which those writers were themselves strangely ignorant,-that the deistical and atheistical scholars of France, the Theomachists who prepared the way for its revolution, the men who loaded the crucified Nazarene and his religion with all outrage, were in truth Christians, although they knew it not themselves. Just as much, it seems to us, as Nero was an unconscious Howard; just as much as Catiline was, in modest ignorance of his own merits, "a Washington, who had anticipated his time." It is worse than idle thus to confound all moral distinctions. To suit these new and more liberal views of Christianity, it has become of course necessary to revise the gospel, and to supersede at least the ancient forms of the Christian religion. Thus in a land, the literature and religion of which are becoming more and more known to some of our scholars, Strauss has eviscerated the New Testament of all its facts, and leaves in all its touching and miraculous narrations but the fragments of a popular myth, intended to shadow forth certain truths common in the history of human nature in all ages. The nation to which he belongs, and which claims to be the most profound in metaphysical speculation, and in varied learning, of all the nations of our time, is reviving in some of its schools an undisguised Pantheism, which makes the universe God; and thus, in effect, gives to Job and the dunghill on which he sate, the ulcers which covered him, and the potsherds with which he scraped himself, the honour of being all parts and parcels alike of the same all-pervading Deity. And this is the wisdom, vaunted and profound, of our times; a return, in fact, to those which they have not for themselves, but which the consciousness of truth possessed and the benevolent desire of its general diffusion, naturally inspire in the believer. They envy the votaries of the truth their calm, immovable assurance. A Christian toleration appreciates the innate power of truth to diffuse and protect itself, and pities error, while resisting it. The liberality of scepticism denies existence to truth, and canonizes error as a sufficient substitute, and sets men afloat on a shoreless, starless ocean of doubt. Or as a young poet of England has not infelicitously described it, it prescribes to mankind the task of conjugating falsehood through all its moods, tenses, and cases, and teaches them mutual forbearance as the result of their common infatuation: "Let them alone,' men cry, "I lie, thou liest, they lie: What then? Thy neighbour's folly hurts not thee!' discoveries described of old in a venerable volume, which we all wot of, in the brief and pithy sentence-"The world by wisdom knew not God." The result of its arrogant self-confidence was blindness to the great fact blazing on the whole face of creation, and deafness to the dread voice that speaks out of all history, the truth that there is a God. And hence, not so much from any singular cogency in his reasoning, as from the palatableness of the results which that reasoning reaches, Baruch Spinoza, the Pantheist Jew, is, after a long lapse of years of confutation and obscurity, rising again in the view of some scholars in Germany, Britain, and America, to the rank of a guide in morals, and a master of religious truth.* When *Of the system of Spinoza, it has been said by the acute Bayle, certainly no bigoted adherent to Christianity, and no prejudiced enemy of scepticism, that "it was the most monstrous scheme imaginable;" and again, that "it has been fully overthrown, even by the weakest of its adversaries." In a similar spirit, Maclaurin, the celebrated British mathematician, had remarked, "It does not, indeed, appear possible to invent another system equally absurd."—(Dugald Stewart's Progress of Metaphysical Philosophy, p. 116, Am. edit.) Stewart quotes from Colerus, the author of the earliest Life of Spinoza, the singular anecdote, that "one of the amusements with which he was accustomed to unbend his mind, was that of entangling flies in a spider's web, or of setting spiders to fighting with each other; on which occasions, it is added, he would observe their combats with so much interest, that it was not unusual for him to be seized with immoderate fits of laughter."-(Ibidem, p. 351.) Stewart, we think, lays too much stress on this incident, when he finds in it a proof of Spinoza's insanity. It was certainly not the most amiable trait in the character of a philosopher, for whom his disciples have claimed a remarkable blamelessness and even piety. We cannot imagine such an amusement as delighting the vacant hours, and such merriment as gladdening the heart of a Christian philosopher like Bayle or Newton. Trivial as it was, it betrayed the spirit, and furnished no unapt emblem, of the system he elaborated in his philosophy, where an acute mind found its amusement in entangling, to their ruin, its hapless victims in a web of sophistry, that puzzled, caught, and destroyed them; and grim Blasphemy lay waiting to devour those who fluttered in the snares of Falsehood. Yet this system, the product of such a mind, has been recently, with loud panegyrics of its author, commended anew to the regard of mankind on either side of the Atlantic. Paulus, the celebrated Neologian divine of Germany, had issued, years ago, an edition of his works. Amongst ourselves and the scholars of England, such views have obtained currency mostly, it is probable, from the admiration professed for Spinoza by such men as Goethe and others, the scholars and philosophers of Germany, for whom we have contracted too indiscriminating a reverence. Goethe's course was paradoxical. Rejecting revelation as impossible, for the singular reason, that if it came from God it must be unintelligible to men, and declaring God, as presented in the teachings of Christ Jesus, to be an imperfect and inadequate conception, Goethe held that the Divinity revealed in the Bible involved difficulties which must drive an inquirer to despair, unless he were "great enough to rise to the stand-point of a higher view; " in other words, a higher point of observation than that occupied by Christ. "Such a stand-point Goethe early found in Spinoza; and he acknowledges with joy how truly the views of that great thinker answered to the wants of his youth. In him he found himself, and could therefore fortify himself with Spinoza to the best advantage." These are the words of Eckerman (Eckerman's Convers. with Goethe: Boston, p. 37), who played with Goethe the part that James Boswell acted to the great lexicographer and moralist of England, recording, as an humble admirer, the conversations of his oracle. Of the moral character of some of the productions of Goethe we need not pause to remark. There are principles developed in his writings that needed "fortifying." We would but notice a difficulty which the language of his admirer suggests. Goethe is made to speak of Spinoza as the thinker "in whom he found himself." To us, the uninitiated, it seems hard to reconcile this test by which he recognised and adopted his master's system, with his passionate words elsewhere, recorded by the same admiring Eckerman (p. 309), "Man is a darkened being; he knows not whence he comes, nor whither he goes; he knows little of the world, and less of himself. I know not myself, and may God protect me from it." How the rule of the old Greek wisdom, "know thyself," might seem folly to the modern German, we can conceive; such a form of philosophy becomes prevalent, all forms of religion are alike true, or, in other words, are alike false; and room is to be made for a new religion, by which man shall worship Nature or himself. So difficult is it for the gospel to suit men's waywardness. It was the objection of the old Pagans to Christianity, as we learn from Origen, that it was too universal a religion; that every country should of right be allowed a religion of its own; and Christianity was arrogant in asking to be received as the one faith of all countries. But now the opposers of this gospel discover that it has the defect of not being universal enough; and they wish a wider faith, that will embrace the race, let them think as they please, and worship as they may. Thus would this school reconcile all religions by evaporating them. In Germany, the country that has most cultivated this hide and how the view of his own heart might shock and appal one who would fain idolize his own wisdom and virtue, we can, with as little difficulty, imagine. But how one who shrunk from knowing himself, could, by knowing himself, recognise the truth of a system of Pantheism, is to us inconceivable. A religion that begins in dogmatic ignorance as to our own nature, and ends in dogmatic omniscience as to God's nature, does not commend itself to our reason, more than it does to our sympathies or our hopes. An affecting proof may be gathered from the same volume (pp. 405, 407), how easily the Pantheism of the schools slides into the Polytheism of the multitude. Goethe had received a cast of a piece of statuary. A model from Myron's cow with the sucking calf, was sent him by the young artist. "Here," said he, "we have a subject of the highest sort the nourishing principle which upholds the world, and pervades all nature, is brought before our eyes by this beautiful symbol. This, and others of a like nature, I esteem the true symbols of the omnipresence of God." What the omnipresence of the Deity in the system of Pantheism is, we need not linger to remark. Sceptics have affected to wonder at the unaccountable perverseness of the children of Israel forging and adoring their golden calf at the foot of Sinai; but here we have the practice palliated by a master spirit of scepticism, amid the boasted illumination of the nineteenth century. A cow with her calf is, according to Goethe, "the true symbol" of the all-pervading, all-sustaining Divinity, who comprises, and himself is, the universe. Did Pantheism but rule the schools, we can see how easily idolatry in its most brutish forms might be revived among the populace; and the ox-gods and onion-gods of Egypt, at which even a heathen Juvenal jeered, might, amid all our vaunted advance in knowledge, receive again the worship of our scholars. Pantheism is the philosophy of Brahminism with all its hundred thousand graven images, from Ganeshu with his elephant's head, to Doorga with her necklace of human skulls. The men who had outgrown the Bible, and found themselves wiser than the Redeemer, might, under the auspices of Pantheism, return to the worship of Apis, and adore the gods of the dairy and the stall, as they stood chewing their cud, or suckling their calves. Then the science and taste of the nineteenth century would be required to take, as the emblem of their aspirations, the craven Hebrews of Ezekiel's vision; "men with their backs towards the temple of the Lord, and their faces towards the East.”—(Ezek. viii. 16.) The Christian missions of our time, assailing eastern heathenism, would be repaid by an irruption of Oriental Pantheism into our schools of philosophy; the Sufis of Persia and the Brahmins of India would retaliate on the native lands of their Christian antagonists, and our Careys and our Martyns would be chargeable with having assailed, in the Pantheistic faith they found in the East, a higher truth than they had themselves brought from the West. A living German historian, whose works have found translation and currency in England (Schlosser), in his " History of the Eighteenth Century," has intimated broadly, that the most ancient tradition makes Pantheism the original faith of the world. Thus does the philosophy that would fain soar over the head of our Saviour, to a higher and more adequate view of the Divine nature, find itself grovelling at last in the very mire of beast-worship. It is with no impaired reverence for his Bible, that the Christian student turns from such spectacles of human presumption and impiety, to muse on the sovereignty, and adore the wisdom, of Him who thus "taketh the wise in their own craftiness." |