(Rev. xii.) Even the "revelation" of Catholicism is a proof of the presence of Christ with his church, because it is a fulfilment of his Inspired Word, and a manifestation of his omnipotent and ever wakeful care. The history of the church is, in a certain sense, a perpetual revelation of the truth and grace of her Redeemer. Not an authoritative revelation, however. It is the figment of "authority" which has made Catholicism, and substituted it for Christianity; which has put the church herself on an infraction of her charter, an invasion of the rights and royalties of her Lord. This was the germ of her "apostasy," as it is the germ of all apostasy, whether in the church or the individual soul-putting man for God, and obeying man instead of God. This has made her a papal church, a worldly hierarchy, a vast empire made up of aggressions, on the one hand, on the kingdom of God, and on the other, on the powers of this world; a mass of error, corruption, and tyranny, of which the world itself has been, and not without reason, ashamed. Still, this abuse and perversion does not in the least impair the glorious truth itself, that "now unto principalities and powers in the heavenly places," and of course to contemplative minds on earth who look at her history in its true light, "is made known by the church the manifold wisdom of God." This renders church history, (not consulted in barren and precarious compends, but in the living products of Christian genius and piety which every age has produced), a vast and fruitful knowledge." There is, we firmly believe, no field in the vast domain of theological learning which will more richly repay the researches of the Christian scholar, or enable him to do more important and timely service to truth. Catholicism, in one or other of her branches, has almost had this field to herself; and the extent to which she has falsified the remains of Christian antiquity by her omissions, interpolations, mistranslations, and garbled indexes even, exceeds all belief of any one who has not carefully looked into the matter. There is no ground on which the ministry, the doctrine, and the worship of our church stand stronger, or on which Catholicism is more weak and incapable of defence, than that of Christian antiquity.

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Even in this movement of the subjective philosophy, we joyfully recognise, not the control merely, but the overruling and guiding sway of the Head of the Church. There is a "balance of truth" in the world of mind and opinion, as well as a "balance of power" in the physical forces and political relations of nations. The very aberrations from the faith of the church are made, in the end, to contribute to the maintenance of this equilibrium. The tendency of the human mind is to extremes, even in the right direction. The speculations which have of late

tended to exaggerate the subjective side of Christian truth may be intended, and we trust and believe they are intended, to correct and compensate for a general and popular tendency in an opposite direction. The immense increase of the materiel (so to speak) of Christianity by the translation, printing, and distribution of the Holy Scriptures, which is the great and wonderful fact of our age, seems to have begotten in many minds an expectation that the mere multiplication and distribution of copies of the inspired volume is to bring about the conversion of the world. Now, this is an expectation wholly unwarranted, nay, it is utterly contradictory to prophecy, and subversive of the very nature of Christianity. The written Word can never give a saving revelation of God to one human soul, unless the same Spirit who inspired it impart a capacity for the intuition, belief, and reception of its truths. Deest aliquid intus. The letter is powerless without the Spirit. The whole artillery of truth can do nothing without the propulsive power of the Spirit. It is only when we "receive the Spirit which is from God, that we can know the things which are freely given unto us of God." If a copy of the Bible were placed in every human abode, in every human hand; if its truths were lodged in every mind, unfolded by the most orthodox and skilful exposition, and pressed to the heart and conscience by the most eloquent appeals, would the conversion of the world be the necessary and sure result? If it were, it would be "by might and by power," and not "by the Spirit of the Lord of Hosts." But the conversion of the world is not to be so accomplished. After all this "planting" and "watering," God must "give the increase, or there will be none. The intellectual, religiouslyeducated Saul of Tarsus, with his mind full of religious ideas, familiar doubtless with the facts of Christianity, and having beheld an overpowering manifestation of their truth in the martyrdom of Stephen, was untouched by one holy impression, unvisited by one ray of saving light. "When it pleased God to reveal his Son in me," discloses the true era of his conversion, an era through which every soul must pass which "passes from death unto life." Has not the church been in danger of forgetting this? Amidst her own vastly increased activity, and the multiplied instrumentalities and facilities afforded by the physical and civil progress of society, has she not been tempted to form material ideas of the kingdom of God, and to overlook her absolute dependence on the Holy Spirit? Do we not sometimes hear appeals for money towards Bible distribution, and for men towards the missionary work, urged too much in the calculating and self-relying spirit of the world? Now, while this popular tendency is in full force, a strong counter-current of philosophical speculation sets in, which be

yond measure exalts and exaggerates the subjective. In this system, the Spirit is every thing, the Word is nothing. Revelation is wholly intuitional, individual, subjective. There can be no such thing as "a revelation by verbal exposition," a revelation transmitted by written word or living voice. The prophets were wholly mistaken when they said, "Thus saith the Lord"; the apostles not less so, when they declared that "holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost,' and that "all Scripture is given by inspiration of God." The thing is psychologically impossible; for there can be no revelation but that which is made to "the intuitional consciousness," and therefore revelation, and the inspiration which conveys it, are, and of necessity must be, generically the same in every believing soul that they were in the writers of the sacred volume.

These are startling propositions! If they only startle the church into a more distinct recollection, and a deeper faith in the universal need of the Spirit's influence in order to the saving perception and experience of the truth, their effect will be salutary. These extreme statements will soon be perceived to be in direct conflict with the plain declarations of the Bible, the universal opinion of thinking men in all ages, and the perpetual sentiment and consciousness of the Christian Church, to say nothing of the psychological refutation of which they are capable, and which inevitably awaits them. Meanwhile, amidst all this clamour about "the objective and subjective," "the logical and intuitional," "the mechanical and dynamical,' though it may bewilder many, and "seduce some," the very wants and longings of the renewed soul will keep it at the right point. The truth which shines forth in the Word is its only steady light, the "sincere milk of the Word" its indispensable aliment. The sober and spiritual Christian will find no repose but in the combined and mutually supporting truths of an inspired Bible, and a converting, enlightening, and sanctifying Spirit. No philosophic fog can long conceal from him that precious certainty inscribed in his Redeemer's last prayer, "Thy Word is truth' -nor that equally precious assurance "left" to his church for all time," The Spirit shall come and lead you into all truth." When, in the faith and fresh remembrance of both these truths, the disciples shall, as at the beginning, "search the Scriptures daily," and "continue with one accord in prayer and supplication," then will they again be "clothed with power, the Holy Ghost coming upon them;" then, too, will "the word of God grow mighty and prevail." Then shall we behold a reproduction of primitive preachers, men at once" mighty in the Scriptures" and "fervent in the Spirit," and therefore "eloquent men," "teaching effectually."

Then will the Church go forth to sure and glorious victories, being armed with "the sword of the SPIRIT, which is the WORD OF GOD."

ART. III.-Die Kirchengeschichte des 18 und 19 Jahrhunderts, aus dem Standpunkte des evangelischen Protestantismus betrachtet, in einer Reihe von Vorlesungen, von Dr K. R. Hagenbach. Leipzig. 8vo. Vol. I., 1848, p. 511. Vol. II., 1849, p. 467.

OTHER works of Dr Hagenbach have made him sufficiently known as a writer of comprehensive views and unusual sprightliness. This, rather than what the Germans love to call depth, is at the bottom of his popularity. Yet he is decidedly a German; looking on the world's history and the world's geography as finding their central region in central Europe; but with a kindly, liberal, and even all-embracing welcome to the rest of the earth. Without being a Hegelian, or even in all details a follower of Schleiermacher, he shows both in nomenclature and opinion the influence of the modern philosophy. Without being one of the churchly orthodox, or any thing like a Puritan, he has a warm side towards Pietism, and even goes to insular Great Britain, to seek and applaud what is good in Methodists. So far as sentiment, feeling, and philanthropy are extant in evangelical religion, he gives it his hand, and is clearly on ascending ground towards what we hold to be good and right. In his record of the decline of orthodoxy, he is unsparing in his censure, even where he characteristically throws in lenient judgments on the other side.

We have chosen to take up these volumes, because they so nearly resemble in manner the French and English treatment of such topics. Here are none of the needless and endless partitions into books, chapters, sections, subsections, paragraphs, and notes, by which German cooks and their American pupils make mince-meat of the viands. The lectures have all the air proper to oral delivery before a promiscuous assembly. They are diversified by anecdote and citation, and enlivened by a constantly recurring ebullition of pleasant humour. In the notices which follow, it is not our purpose to follow the lecturer into his sources of authority, nor to indicate every instance in which we employ his words. Still less do we mean to be accountable for the opinions which we recite. But the period of time which is here brought under view is too deeply momentous, in regard to the decadence of Protestant Chris

tianity and its partial revival, and too instructive and admonitory as to the beginnings of similar ills at home, for us to pass it by. This we say, with full knowledge that there are those among us who regard the mention of a German name as symptomatic of neology; and who think safety consists in not knowing the dangers of those who have fallen, and in shutting the eyes hard at the first steps of downward tottering in our own land. Dangerous as it is to walk the wards of an hospital, it is nevertheless the only means of arriving at a sound pathology and a preventive regimen. And when, quod avertat Deus, the new hypothesis respecting Inspiration, Scripture myths, the Athanasian Creed, and the probative force of miracles, shall have crept a little more into light through our colleges and magazines into our young ministry, these doctrines will find their stoutest impugners and staunchest confuters, in those who shall have learnt their rise, growth, and decay in the older churches of Europe. Every age has its own race of objections; and though truth is one, sufficient, and triumphant, the aspects of truth, towards this or that error, are special, and therefore best defended by turning our regards humbly and believingly towards specific forms of contemporary falsehood. The monstrous doctrines of Cousin, Emerson, Parker, and the like, have made least havoc among those who have examined their natural history, not in mutilated, disjointed articles, but in the living though fearful organisms from which these parts have been filched for importation, and which can be duly known only, as the naturalists say, in situ. Hagenbach looks on the eighteenth century as pre-eminently the Age of Toleration. Some remarkable exceptions, it is true, meet him at the very theshold, in the cases of the Camisards and the Salzburgers; but these are only trailing clouds of the preceding night. The influence of Voltaire in promoting toleration, in the famous affair of the Calas family, is brought boldly forward. We willingly pass from the speculations on this head to consider the progress of religious sentiment in the German States. For the understanding of this, the author thinks it necessary to delineate the portrait of the times, including those of the Kings of Prussia; and there is uncommon life and entertainment in his picture.

Dr

Frederick William I., the father of Frederick the Great, reigned from 1713 to 1739. He was like his great ancestor in this, that he opened a door for the persecuted Salzburgers. But he caused their leading men to be deeply probed upon their tenets, by two court divines, and found them happily. orthodox. A number of these exiles came to America, in 1733-4, and are mentioned in all histories of South Carolina and Georgia. The case was remarkably like that of the Por