together could teach him. We do not admire the spirit that could indite the following sneer: "The attitude of too many English scholars before the last monster out of the deep, is that of the degenerate senators before Tiberius. They stood balancing terror against mutual shame. Even with those in our universities, who no longer repeat fully the required Shibboleths, the explicitness of truth is rare. He who asserts most, committing himself least to baseness, is reckoned wisest." Dr. Thirlwall, Bishop of St. David's, is one of the ripest scholars in England. He is the diocesan and visitor of Lampeter College, and in his latter capacity. has been brought into controversy with its vice-principal and professor of Hebrew. Dr. Williams appears to consider that there is nothing between tacking and trimming with Thirlwall, and running up the death'shead and cross-bones with Bunsen. To be learned and orthodox is to him inconceivable, and as he gives his bishop the credit of knowing more than his mountain clergy, among whom orthodoxy is excusable, he can only suppose that Drs. Thirlwall, Oliphant, Whately, Tate, Lee, and Graham are degenerate senators, balancing terror against mutual shame. Lord Shaftesbury's bishops he passes by in silent contempt; their orthodoxy is unblemished for the same reason as that of the mountain clergy. Guileless of Greek, and not sinning in Hebrew, they have not crucified the English version-as the Salamanca doctor said of Ximenes' edition of the Vulgate-between two thieves, the Greek and the Hebrew text. If Dr. Williams ever becomes a bishop, as he was once near attaining to, he will be the Warburton of the nineteenth century-in love with his own paradoxes, and threatening to horsewhip every one who dares to doubt or differ with him. The dogmatism of conformity is bad enough, but that of heterodoxy is worse far. From the tyranny of such a bishop may the Welsh clergy be long preserved! Let the Vicar of Broad Chalk settle down in Wiltshire to outdo Ꭰ Warburton or re-write the Divine Legation of Moses with the new lights of Bunsen and Ewald. The modern Warburton may prove that Moses was inspired because he knew nothing of cosmogony, and made a mistake in his whole account of creation, as the first Warburton proved his inspiration from his limited views of the immortality of the soul. But till he gets more of the meekness of wisdom, we should wish Dr. Williams to remain where he is. The lesson we should wish him to learn is contained in four lines, which, as they are not original, as the sonnet to Bunsen professes to be with which Dr. Williams concludes his Essay, we will quote them : "Let knowledge grow from more to more, But more of reverence in us dwell, 35 CHAPTER III. BADEN POWELL'S ESSAY. Ir is too late in the day to call attention for the first time to the "Essays and Reviews." The volume is too notorious already, and not even the "Tracts for the Times," thirty years ago, or the Whistonian or Bangorian controversy, a century ago, caused a greater stir in their day, or so awoke the slumbering fires of controversy. Perhaps the fittest parallel in the history of theology is the publication of the Wolfenbuttel fragments, eighty-five years ago. Germany was then slumbering on in Wolfian orthodoxy, which was a sort of compromise between Leibnitz and Luther-much as the orthodoxy of Locke and Lardner was a kind of compromise between the Puritans and the Latitudinarians; or like the blank page between the natural and revealed religion in Bishop's Butler's "Analogy." Into the middle of this mediating and moderating theology the Wolfenbuttel fragments fell like a thunderbolt out of a clear sky. From 1774 to 1778 Lessing published eleven fragments from a larger work, which defended the rights of Theism, attacked the Church doctrine of inspiration, and subjected the Biblical history to a bold criticism. It is now certain that the real author of this work was the Hamburg Professor, Samuel Hermann Reimarus. And the manuscript of it, under the title, "Vindication of the Rational Worshippers of God," is kept in the Hamburg Town Library. The tendency of this work is to resolve Scripture and the doctrine of the Church into theistic Rationalism. If Reimarus, in the introduction to the work, states the manner in which he arrived at such conclusions. He had been early instructed in Christianity, and was destined to be a theologian. But then the thought had impressed itself on his mind that Scripture, after all, spoke so very indistinctly and loosely of that which in the symbolical books of the Church and in the systems of divinity was so minutely defined and fixed. these symbolical books and systems were of such consequence, why had God not expressed Himself more distinctly in Scripture? And many things in these symbols and systems-especially the Trinity-had become more and more unintelligible to him. But he could not stop with the omission of the Trinity. He soon became unable to persuade himself that God would abandon to destruction ninety-nine parts of mankind, who, without any fault of theirs, did not know anything of Jesus Christ. After having thus estranged himself from the doctrine of the Church, he had become disgusted with a large portion of the Old and New Testament. With great ingenuity he lays open the contradictions in the accounts of Christ's resurrection. Christ declared Himself to be the the Messiah. In so doing He intended nothing else than the restitution of the Jewish state. Whatever in the Gospels does not harmonise with this plan has been inserted into His life by the disciples from their later convictions. Christ was far from wishing to abolish the Jewish law; He denounced the external view of it only. With this plan of Christ John the Baptist agreed; and both worked into each other's hands. The execution of His plans was by Christ fixed for the high festival. Triumphantly He entered Jerusalem, excited the masses by bold speeches against the rulers, and exercised authority in the Temple. But instead of a throne, He found a cross, and repented in dying by declaring Himself to be forsaken of God. His disciples now understood in a spiritual sense the doctrine of the kingdom, and represented the life and doctrine of their Master accordingly. The Wolfenbuttel fragments have much more in the same strain; but we will spare our readers further extracts, referring them to Kahnis' "History of German Protestantism" for a full analysis of this first great manifesto of German Rationalism. But the real point of attack, the key of the position, around which the controversy raged then, and on which we take our stand against the "Essays and Reviews" this day, is set forth in the following sentence: "Let us, then, in the first instance, give up the hard doctrine of the Theopneustia of the Apostles, in all their discourses, writings, and actions; and let us take out of their system that which is good, which applies to all men, and will serve for the improvement of their intellect and mind; for it is quite impossible that all the nations of the human race should be brought to a conviction and belief in the Apostolic semi-Judaic system." This cool proposal, that the Christians should become Rationalists, in order that the Rationalists may become Christian, reminds us of the wolves who proposed that the wolfdogs should take off those ugly spiked collars fastened round their necks, which disfigured them so, and besides, were so unbrotherly between beasts of the same genus canis. To come to terms with Rationalism, by first discarding the supreme authority of the document by which we defend the sheepfold against it, would be a strange compromise on our part. But the wolfdogs will not be so unwary as to do this. It was all in vain for Lessing to protest that the letter was not the spirit, and that the Bible was not religion; that, moreover, religion existed before the Bible, and Christianity before the Evangelists and Apostles had written; that Christianity is not true, because Evangelists and Apostles taught it; but they taught it because it was true. The only answer to these fair speeches is in the words of the Sunday School Hymn, "We won't give up the Bible at the bidding either of Rome or Rationalist. We suspect a snare in any proposal to treat religion as an open question, with no authority higher than the light within, We believe, on the contrary, |