we remember that queries of this nature were continually arising in our minds about the essential virtues of Christianity; it was the first painful questioning we had about the Christian religion. But we did come to the conclusion, after two years of such reading, that it was our doubt, born of the Pagan (school) classics, that was wrong, and not Christianity and we have still the same conviction. The ideal of Christian meekness seems to us, not a low, but a lofty one. It does not exclude indignation at wrong. But, while conscious of the wrong, to stand calm and patient and self-restrained under its infliction; to resist it doubtless at times, but never to retaliate; to wish no ill to the aggressor; to pity him amidst his utmost violence; to bless those who curse us, to do good to them who hate us, and to pray for them who despitefully use us and persecute is this to be represented as a slavish meanness ? And the patience, the prayer of Jesus on the cross-we shudder to ask the question-is that to fall before the same criticism? And the virtue of martyrdom, to die rather than speak the false word—to die for principle, — the canonized virtue of all ages-is that the virtue of slaves?

us;

We understand Mr. White, too, as objecting to prayer; that is, to prayer considered as direct petition. He says that a "desire of conformity with the will of God" is constant with him, and that is his prayer. But we ask, not merely whether the Scriptures do not encourage and enjoin express petitions, but whether it is not the very language of nature, whether a man who believes in God can help sometimes saying, in pain and in peril of his soul, “God help me!"—and that is direct prayer. Observe what the unhappy sufferer whose experience we are considering, says in his own case. "Oh God!" he says, "thou knowest that I do not feel justified in directing particular petitions to thee. My heart is open before thee. Thou knowest the great affliction in which I am lingering." But now observe what follows. "My only request is for strength, patience, and love of thee. As an expression of my love, I also pray for my son, my relations, and all my good friends." + Are not these "particular petitions?"

* Vol. iii. p. 276.

t Vol. iii. p. 293.

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Need of Faith.

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Thus we believe that human nature will always contradict itself when it enters into speculative controversy with its own inevitable wants and irresistible tendencies.

At length this remarkable person, when approaching the end of his mortal pains and strifes, quits the last hold upon positive Christianity. The belief in a God alone remains to him. He dies and gives no sign" of Christian hope. These are his words. "I have often confessed to thee, my God, my own more than indifference to that supposed continuation of life, in which people so loudly profess a belief. That thou art able to maintain my individual consciousness forever, I will not deny, though my imagination faints whenever I try to embody that conception."* "More than indifference" to a future life! - is not this the merest hallucination? Is it not an absolute intellectual insanity? When a man says to us, that he does not care to live hereafter, we would ask him this simple question:If a peril approached your life, would you not strive to ward it off? If it were now proposed to you instantly to cease to be, would not the simple love of existence say, "No, let me live?" If then, at the present moment you would live the next moment, for the same reason in this life you would live another life.

But it is time to finish this, we fear, too extended review. We will only say, in conclusion, that we have no fear of the prevalence and spread, for a long time, of the opinions which we have been examining. This school of opinions must die. Its tendencies are suicidal. So long as humanity demands a faith, the system of no-faith cannot prevail. This philosophy, in fine, is the apotheosis of humanity, and we believe that humanity is too humble to accept it. The central thought of religion indeed is in the soul of man; but the circumference spreads to infinity, to eternity. Upon the radiating lines that run outward to those awful regions of the unknown and the illimitable, thoughts, affections, desires, live and tremble with undefined hope and fear. They ask some other guidance than their own. And in that system which tells us there is none, there can be no repose. There are needs of our nature which that system cannot supply, sorrows which it never can console,

and quenchless aspirations which it never can satisfy. If we must come to this, God pity us! "If in this life only we have hope," we are despite of philosophy, despite of all the joys of life, despite of any fortitude that we can understand we are of all beings, the most miserable.

We have only to add with regard to the autobiography of Blanco White, that we have examined it in this article with a particular view. We have thought it of the first importance to subject its Rationalistic tendencies to a careful review. But there is an entirely different direction of thought with regard to this work, which we could wish to see thoroughly followed out. The value of its protests against the popular forms of Christianity ought to be carefully appreciated; and we hope that some competent hand will undertake the task.

0. D.

ART. VI. SCHAF ON PROTESTANTISM.*

It seems that a young German scholar from Berlin, by the name of Schaf, has just been appointed to one of the professorships in the Theological Seminary of the German Reformed Church in Pennsylvania. We have before us his Inaugural Address, considerably enlarged, and an apologetic Introduction by his colleague, Dr. Nevin. Together they make a bulky pamphlet, but the whole is worth reading; as is also the Appendix, containing a sermon by Dr. Nevin on Catholic Unity. As regards the literary execution of the Address, the most remarkable thing is, that a discourse, delivered on a public occasion in this country, should need to be translated into English; but as it was necessary, we wish it had been translated into better English.

The object of Dr. Nevin in the Introduction is twofold; first, to reconcile the Orthodox in this country to the policy

* The Principle of Protestantism as related to the Present State of the Church. By PHILIP SCHAF, Ph. D. Professor of Church History and Bib. Lit. in the Theol. Sem. of the Ger. Ref. Church. Translated from the German with an Introduction. By JOHN W. NEVIN, D. D. Cham

bersburg, Pa. 1845. 12mo. pp. 215.

1845.]

The Reformation.

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of introducing here a German teacher of theology; and secondly, to apologise for this teacher's German style of thought and expression. Dr. Nevin maintains that there are prevailing and characteristic defects in the Anglo-American as well as in the German mind, and that what is true and good in one might and should find its complement in what is true and good in the other. Though Orthodox himself, he contends earnestly for what he calls an "historical progress" in the religious life of the Church, and in Christian theology, and is sure that if Protestantism does not recognise this fact and govern itself accordingly, it cannot stand. On this point his words are:

"Taking the present state of Protestantism as ultimate and complete, we must despair of its being able to stand against its enemies. Our faith in its divine mission can be intelligent, only as we confidently trust that it will yet in due time surmount its own present position, and stand forth redeemed, and disenthralled from the evils that now oppress it, to complete the Reformation so auspiciously begun in the sixteenth century. The necessity of some such new order of things is coming to be more and more sensibly felt; and may we not trust, that the way for it is fast being prepared, though, to our narrow view, chaotically still and without light, in the ever deepening and extending agitation, with which men's minds are beginning to be moved, as it might seem all the world over, in this direction. The feeling that we are on the eve of some vast religious revolution, by which a new epoch shall be constituted in the development of the history of the Church as a whole, has taken strong possession of many of the first minds in Europe. And it is quite evident that in this country too, a sentiment of the same general sort is steadily gaining ground. Men feel that they have no right to be satisfied with the actual state of the Church, and they are not satisfied with it in fact."-p. 16.

Professor Schaf chose for the subject of his Inaugural Discourse, "The Principle of Protestantism, and its relation to the present posture of the Church, particularly in the United States." He endeavors to prove that the Reformation was one stage in the growth or historical progress of the Catholic Church, and that Romanism, or the so-called Catholic Church, by falling back from itself, has lost its title to Catholicity, which then passed over to the main body of the Protestant Churches. In common with many Continental writers, he holds that the essential principle of the Reformation was Luther's doctrine of justification by

faith alone, and that the sufficiency of the Scriptures, and the right of private judgment in the interpretation of Scripture, were but incidental to it as Protestantism. He thinks that the two last mentioned principles have been pushed much farther than the authors of the Reformation intended; and hence Rationalism and Sectarism, which he stigmatizes as diseases or caricatures of Protestantism. Puseyism he regards as a reaction occasioned by these abuses, but not the remedy.

"Preposterous imagination! Can the Church be renovated by putting on a new coat? I have all respect for the Episcopal system. It possesses in fact many undeniable advantages, and by its antiquity besides must command the veneration of all who have any right historical feeling. But the thought must be utterly rejected, that it carries in its constitution as such the proper and only remedy for the existing wounds of Protestantism. Does it offer any sure guaranty for union? The contests with which the English Episcopal Church has been torn, especially for the last ten years, (to say nothing of the posture of our American Episcopacy at this moment,) sufficiently show the contrary. Or does it furnish more efficient means for the promotion of true inward piety? Let the state of the Greek Church, always true to the Episcopal succession, be taken in reply; or the Roman Church as it stood towards the close of the Middle age, and as it stands still in entire countries; or the Church of England itself, as it appeared under the last Stuarts and during the eighteenth century. No, we need something higher and better than anointed lords and consecrated gentlemen. Such aristocratic hierarchs and proud bearers of the apostolical succession precisely, like the pharisees and high priests of Judaism, have themselves again and again secularized the Church, rocking it into the sleep of lifeless formalism or religious indifference." -p. 126.

Professor Schaf turns with hope and confidence to the great reaction against. Rationalism in his own country, which he dates from the first publication of Schleiermacher's "masterly Discourses upon Religion," in 1779. So shorn was this epoch of all religious life and consciousness, that Schleiermacher, he tells us, "found it necessary to start from the beginning; taking his stand as it were in the court of the Gentiles, to teach his Wolfian, Kantian and Philanthropistic contemporaries, the nature of religion first in general, that he might gain footing again for an intelligible representation of the Christian system." To a