the understanding, it runs in the limits of the understanding. Spiritual things cannot be logically discerned; they must be spiritually discerned. The forms in which they can be expressed most adequately are those of the imaginative reason, or the reason speaking by symbols. Jesus taught almost wholly in this way, using the forms of nature as symbols of spiritual facts and laws. The garment by which we see God is woven "at the roaring loom of Time," with every daybreak and sunset. Dr. Bushnell, fully aware of this, returns to the original language of the soul, and so passes far away from the reach of the New-England theology into the theology of the universal heart and spirit of man.

The real gospel, he says, is the whole life of Jesus. "There has been kept up, for centuries, a strain of logical and theological endeavor-shall I call it high, or shall I call it weak and low?—to make out some formal, legal, literal account of substitution and vicarious sacrifice, in which all God's quickening motivity and power are taken away from the feeling, and nothing left but a sapless wood, or dry stubble of reason, for a mortal sinner's faith to cling to " (p. 48). He therefore proposes no article about Christ, but Christ himself, the power of God unto salvation. The cross is with him a moral power. The vicarious sacrifice is essentially the SYMPATHY of God and Christ with the sinner. He bore our sins by sympathy. Thus, a mother may suffer by sympathy for her child more than the child suffers for itself. All love is thus vicarious, and such vicarious suffering is also the highest joy. Christ's work was therefore not exceptional or peculiar, but the same in kind with that done by all good beings. Goodness is the same in all worlds. God himself is no better than he ought to be. The atoning work of Christ was not an official work, done because he was sent to do it, but a work springing naturally out of his goodness. We are all to take a part in Christ's vicarious sacrifice. We all are to atone for the sins of the world by our loving sympathy with sinners. Christ's character, not his office, made him a Redeemer of men. "The true and simple account of his suffering is, that he had such a heart as would not suffer him to be turned

away from us

(p. 108). If we are Christians, we must partake of this atoning work too.

"What shall we think of any theologic doctrine or dictum which makes a blank space at the very heart of the gospel, or which raises fences to keep men off from just that common standard of heavenly virtue in which all perfect minds are to meet; which says, this kind is for Christ, another for mankind? . . . The supreme act of the Devil never invented a greater theft than the stealing-away from the followers of Christ the conviction that they are thoroughly to partake of the sacrifice of their Master" (p. 122).

Accordingly, Christ, says Dr. Bushnell, did not come here to die, but died because he was here. He came, not to suffer a certain amount of penalty, but to heal souls; not to do something for them with God, but to do something in them, by making them alive. Those who call preaching a satisfaction to God's anger or justice "preaching Christ," do the poorest and most repelling thing of all. The true view of Christ's mission, says our author, excludes the possibility of any dogmatic formula, in which it can be stated. It included all his life.

Dr. Bushnell, therefore, contradicts all Orthodoxy, Old School and New, that of Princeton and that of Andover equally.

"I am obliged," he says, "to disallow the necessity of any penal satisfaction, or, indeed, of any compensation to God's justice, for the release of transgression" (page 267).

"There is no such thing in God, or in any other being, as a kind of justice which goes by the law of desert, and ceases to be justice when ill-desert is not exactly matched with suffering." "There is no principle which a human being can state or even think, which obliges him to do by the disobedient exactly as they deserve.

"God does not dispense justice by direct infliction, but by a law of natural consequence.

"On the whole, this matter of a contrived compensation to justice, which so many take for a gospel, appears to me to contain about the worst reflection on God's justice that could be stated, without some great offence against reverence. For the justice satisfied, is satisfied with injustice! The forgiveness is forgiveness on the score of pay!

The Judgment-day disclaims the fact of forgiveness after payment, and takes payment again! The penalties threatened against wrongdoers, are executed on a right-doer. And only in a fictitious sense are they executed even on him!" (page 293.)

We do not follow Dr. Bushnell through his criticisms on the different schools of Orthodoxy. The above extracts indicate sufficiently the method he will take with them. Nor do we linger on the fine chapters at the end of the volume in regard to sacrifices and sacrificial language, concerning which he takes the same view we have given above, in the first part of this article.

We thank Dr. Bushnell for the book as a whole, omitting criticisms on its details. It proceeds from a living mind and heart, and from a free spirit. It shows no anxiety to stand right with Orthodoxy, or to make heresy sound as much like. the Assembly's Catechism as possible. It is the first manly, frank, declaration from the Orthodox side that the whole Orthodox creed on this subject is empty. It takes its stand, not on tradition, not on Scripture, not on the expediencies of technical religion, but on the "broad stone of honor, "the eternal instincts of right, of truth, of noble purpose, of manly generosity. We welcome the book in this sense, not as a Unitarian book, which it is not, and does not pretend to be, but as a book written in that spirit of a reasonable and liberal Christianity, which includes all sincere faith and purpose "as the sea its waves."

ART. VI. AN AMERICAN IN THE CATHEDRALS OF EUROPE.

Art and Scenery in Europe. By HORACE BINNEY WALLACE. Philadelphia. 1857.

To one who appreciates the most solemn and enduring interests of human nature, who is susceptible to the grandeur and pathos of the world and of our fate in it, there are no other

buildings on earth so affecting as those religious structures in which humanity has embodied its aspiration and worship, its spiritual glory and grief. And far at the head among these stand the old cathedrals of Europe, overpowering shrines of the awe and love of other days, the faith, sacrifice, pain, and peace of departed generations; soaring into the sky, rich and wondrous as the inspiration that built them; lovely, revered, and lasting as the realities they typify. When the American, escaping from the storm of cares and rivalries that make the atmosphere of life in this land so corrosive, leaving behind him the prosaic newness and irreverent eagerness that prevail here, strays to the shores where solemn antiquity broods, and enters these old fabrics, tender and mysterious as the emotions out of which they sprang; as he contemplates the stains and tracks so many ages of his race have left there; as his awe-struck eyes follow the long aisles, the springing arches, the tremendous vaults, the cloud-bearing and sun-gilt spires; as he gazes around on the gray monuments of the dead, whose occupants lie figured on them in marble or bronze, while over their slumber a shower of pictures and sculptures image the achievements, and shadow forth the secrets, of the Christian faith, he becomes the subject of indescribable sensations, sensations holy, strange, and sweet even to awfulness.

The first religious impression made on the visitor to these churches is the profound sense of his own nothingness which they awaken. The prodigious magnitude, capable of holding the population of a city; the suggestions of endlessness in the aspiring lines and vaulting arches; the symbols of infinity in the silence, the dimness, the music, and the dome which "the solemn feelings of the mind distend into an ideal immensity, corresponding with the emotion of reverence that grows in the gazer," - humble man to the dust, make him feel himself and his fellows to be as insignificant as so many insects creeping across the eternal floors, and vanishing, while the hoary edifice still reverberates, as before, the thunders of chant and dirge.

The same influences that thus convince man of his personal

littleness and helplessness, also create in him an irresistible persuasion of the nothingness of his life, the nothingness of the poor pomps, prides, and cares with which he vexes himself. In contrast with these weather-beaten walls, by which the successive waves of humanity for a thousand years have rippled, and then sunk into the grave, he cannot help feeling that his existence is but a bubble that breaks in a moment, on a river that flows for ever.

But, forcible as is this negative side of the religious influence of the cathedral, it is equalled by the enhancement and emphasis it gives to the positive religious feeling, the sense of the omniscience, omnipotence, and perpetuity of God; the sense of participation with the loftiest and most abiding experiences of illimitable hosts of other souls. We experience the sublime ecstasy of self-annihilation in God; we lose the sense of our nothingness in the sense of His infinitude. Despite our evanescence as pilgrims, flitting across this slender isthmus of a middle state, we reach out each way over the long generations of the past and the future, and appropriate the divinest elements of their experience; we make their grandest inspirations and triumphs our own; we dilate and burn with the raptures of their faith, are healed with the consolations they knew, and soothed with premonitions of the heavenly peace into which they have passed and will pass.

The religious sentiments of the human soul are pre-eminently addressed by the cathedrals of the Middle Age, because those buildings are the monuments of a pre-eminently intense and profound inspiration of the religious sentiments existing in the period and the minds of those who reared them. The ecclesiastical idea claimed the whole epoch from the eleventh to the fifteenth century, rolling wave after wave of its contagious fervor through the Christian nations, and leaving these peerless edifices scattered over half Europe as its trophies. The doctrines and hopes of Christianity were taken into the social imagination of Christendom with such realizing vividness that it took fire with a creative impulse. Men were moved by a common desire to perpetuate their faith in visible forms. Entire populations toiled at the sacred