ART. VI.-THE NEW LATITUDINARIANS OF

ENGLAND.

By Prof. H. B. SMITH.

RECENT INQUIRIES IN THEOLOGY, by Eminent English Churchmen; being "ESSAYS AND REVIEWS." Second American, from the Second London Edition. With an Appendix. Edited, with an Introduction, by Rev. FREDERIC H. HEDGE, D.D. Boston: Walker, Wise & Co. 1861. Pp. xiv. 498. The Westminster Review, No. CXLVI. Oct. 1860. Art. 1, Neo-Christianity.

CHRISTIANITY and philosophy, faith and reason, have been in a constant process of conflict and of attempted adjustments. In this contest, the aim of philosophy as opposed to Christianity has always been to show, that the alleged Christian facts and verities are not final or real; that they are only partial and imperfect statements of more universal truths which reason is to substitute for them. The victory of reason would then, of course, banish Christianity into the realm of the mythical or the imaginary. The aim of Christianity, on the other hand, has been to defend the revealed faith, as containing the best, the final, and the necessary system for the human race. And the victory of Christianity would not annul, but only rectify human reason; it would, in fact, consist in showing that reason itself demands such a specific revelation to solve the ultimate problems of human nature and destiny. Thus far in this warfare, the Christian faith has been the stable as well as progressive party, while infidelity has been always changing its front, and prophesying some future victory. But the weight of historic reality and historic progress has remained with the Christian Church, which has never even remained in its old.

entrenchments, but has been always planting its standards in the camps of its foes.

Each of these two contesting parties claims of course, when consistent, to have a final and universal system of truth. But this system has been, in each successive age, a different one with the opponents of Christianity, while the Christian system has always stood firm upon certain simple and well-defined positions. Every new system of philosophy, metaphysical, moral, or physical, represents a new stadium in the progress of human thought, in the knowledge which man has of himself or of the natural world; and each successive system, when thoroughgoing, has claimed to be ultimate, and has baptized itself with the name of human reason. In order to make good its assumptions, it must of course enter into conflict with that one religious system, which has the historic prestige and position, and which also claims universality; and the character of this philosophic assault has varied with the postulates of each philosophic system. But the nature of the Christian defence has been unvarying on all the main points on which it rests and must rest, as the one divine system of redemption. Though the doctrines and polity of the Church, internally, have been subject to change of form and re-statement, to meet heresies, schisms, and objections, yet, as against infidelity, the attitude of Christianity has been uniform, simple, and unchanging. It has always claimed to be a specific, divine revelation, supernatural in its origin, announced in prophecy, attested by miracles, recorded in inspired Scriptures, centering in the person and work of the Godman, and having for its object the redemption of the world from sin. It presupposes a personal God, and anticipates a future state of reward and punishment. On these positions it has always stood: here it has been exclusive-exclusive, just because it is a final and universal system. As soon as it abandons these cardinal positions, it abandons its claim to supremacy and ultimate authority, and is resolved into some more general movement, into some philosophic generalization. Its revelation is specific, and not to be resolved into general reason; its Book is inspired, and no other book is thus divinely inspired; its pro

phecies are out of the category of historic conjectures or morbid clairvoyance; its miracles are above and beyond the course of nature; its Redeemer has, as the Godman, a specific and unmatched dignity, and there is no other such union of divinity and humanity; and his is the only name given under heaven amongst men, whereby we must be saved. The Christian faith claims, and has always claimed, that there are limits here which cannot be passed, without passing outside of the sunlight into a penumbra or the shades; that the mere abstract and generalizing notions which philosophy would substitute for these realities, are ghostly shapes, without essential vitality or reality. They lack the signature of life: there is no divine breath within them. They are the masquerades of imagination, and not the living forms of real truth.

The constant aim of infidelity, on the other hand, its tenacious purpose in the midst of all the changes of philosophic systems and methods, has been, and must be, to bring down the Christian faith from this position of supremacy and universality; to show that on these points the Christian system has no specific and unrivalled eminence. We speak of infidelity here of course in its higher forms and aspirations; of an infidelity which is not content with incidental and fragmentary criticisms and objections, but which really grapples with the subject in its larger relations; of an infidelity which tries to an wer the question, What is the highest, truest, and final system for man? The aim of such infidelity has ever been to eliminate from all the specific Christian truths their fixed import; to resolve the facts of revelation, inspiration, prophecy, miracle, redemption, incarnation, and regeneration, into some more general and abstract notions. A philosophic unbeliever resolves revelation into intuition, miracles into the course of nature plus myths, inspiration into genius, prophecy into sagacious historic conjectures, redemption into the victory of mind over matter, the incarnation into an ideal union of humanity with divinity realized in no one person, the Trinity into a world-process, and immortal life into the perpetuity of spirit bereft of personal subsistence. He takes the wondrous volume in which all these truths and facts are embodied and em

balmed, and which on that very account is the unique wonder and the very marvel of all literature, and demands that it shall be interpreted just like any other book, not merely in its words but in its inmost sense; that its histories, its prophecies, its miracles, its sacred truths, shall be subjected to the standard by which we try the words and explain the sense of Herodotus and Plato, of Virgil and Tacitus, of Dante and Bacon. All in it that is supernatural, all that discriminates it as a specific revelation, is to be adjudicated by natural laws and reason. And the philosophical unbeliever knows full well that, if this radical point is gained, he has gained his cause ; that he has resolved specific Christian truth into something else, into his own system; and that it is that system which is left, while Christianity has been sublimated in the process; for no one can resolve these specific truths and facts of Christianity into mere general ideas or idealizing formulas, without annulling their nature, and robbing them of their formative. principle, just as a plant or animal loses its specific vital force when decomposed into its inorganic elements. Especially has the whole form and pressure of modern unbelief run in this direction. It has come to its most distinct expression in the conflict between Christianity and Pantheism. It has come to consciousness in this contest; for, to absorb the concrete in the abstract, to deny real being to any thing individual and personal, to resolve specific truth into spiritual ideas as its last expression, is the whole method and art of pantheism; and hence all this anti-Christian movement runs into it by a kind of logical necessity.

The significance of the volume of Essays and Reviews which we have put at the head of this article, is in the fact that this general tendency is supposed to be here represented by men of high position in the Church of England, where we have not been wont to look for such things. If these Essays had been published by avowed unbelievers, they would not have made any stir. There is nothing new, nothing that has not been said a hundred times before, either in the way of criticism or of theory. Many of the same objections have been made and answered in every century of the Christian church. Far abler

attacks upon Christianity have also been made even in England, to say nothing of Germany, without discomposing the steadfastness of Christians, without enlivening the hopes of infidelity. But this volume, a series of disconnected essays, is in its fourth edition in England, and in its second, under a more definite title, in this country, and has called forth comments from all the leading reviews of both countries. Whence this eager interest in a volume with so unpretending a name?

A part of it is owing to the position of the authors in the world of letters and in the Church of England. Dr. Temple is Chaplain in Ordinary to the Queen, and Dr. Arnold's successor as Head Master of Rugby, one of the most important schools in England; Dr. Rowland Williams, a graduate of Cambridge, is Vice-Principal and Professor of Hebrew in St. David's Col lege, Lampeter, a training school for English clergymen; Baden Powell, lately deceased, was Professor of Geometry in Oxford University; Mr. Wilson, vicar of Great Staughton, was one of the four tutors who remonstrated so strongly against No. XC. of the Oxford Tracts for the Times, as containing principles inconsistent with subscription to the Articles, and he now advocates the lowest terms of subscription; Mr. Goodwin, a graduate of Cambridge, refused, it is said, to take orders, from an honest conviction that his views were inconsistent with the clerical profession; Mr. Pattison and Mr. Jowett are both teachers in Oxford; the latter is Regius Professor of Greek, and is exerting an influence second to that of no other man in educating the young men of that University; Mr. Pattison has just been elected rector of Lincoln College, Oxford. Several of these writers had contributed to previous volumes of Oxford Essays. Dr. Temple wrote there on National Education, and now writes on a wider theme, the Education of the World; Professor Powell wrote on Natural Theology, and here assails the Evidences; Mr. Wilson's previous essay on Schemes of Comprehension is followed by his present theory of a "Multitudinist" church; Mr. Goodwin advances from the Papyri of Egypt to the Mosaic Cosmogony. Dr. Rowland Williams attained repute by his "Dialogue on the Knowledge of the Supreme Lord, or, Christianity and Hinduism," pub