common, as a living tongue; and men of education would, before this time, have been familiar with ancient Greek classics and modern Greek books and newspapers. What is much more important, the Scriptures of the New Testament in its original language, and the Old in its earliest version, would have been books of daily reading to thousands in families and Sunday schools, instead of the few clergymen who now monopolize the little Greek reading done in this country. Much of the long time taken from the life of every youth by his dull, laborious, and ill-requited Greek studies, would have been saved for other objects, and that portion of it devoted to the language would have been cheerfully spent in pleasing exercises, intelligible, rational and profitable, encouraging and strengthening to the mind, and preparing it to pursue with vigor its future courses. Instead of renouncing the language with joy on leaving the place of a pupil, he would choose the best books of antiquity for the companions of his leisure hours through life; and the libraries of our educated men would not be disgraced by the productions of the frivolous and immoral fiction-writers, who are daily weakening our national taste and polluting American society.

Can our professors of Greek be much longer content to continue their old, laborious and thankless task, Can parents be willing to subject their sons to a course of study so expensive in time and money, with such results as it has hitherto produced? The following extract of a letter from our reverend missionary in Athens, in reply to one addressed to him by the writer, will be read with the respect which it deserves; and offers a most appropriate confirmation of the views above given, which were written before the date of this letter:

"SCHOHARIE, August 23, 1864. "DEAR SIR-In answer to your inquiry, I would say that I am fully of the opinion, and have long been, that the ancient Greek should be taught in all our schools and colleges with the pronunciation and accentuation of the moderns, as now taught in Athens; and that the acquisition and use of the modern and living language is of the greatest assistance in learning the ancient, and in making it valuable to every student.

"This opinion I expressed many years ago to Professor Blackie of Edinburgh, to the late Professor Felton of Harvard University, and to many other distinguished scholars in various parts of Europe and America. Yours, truly,

JONAS KING.”

ART. VIII.-WARREN'S INTRODUCTION TO SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY.

Systematische Theologie einheitlich behandelt. Von WILLIAM F. WARREN, Doctor und Professor der Theologie. Erste Lieferung: Allgemeine Einleitung. 8vo., pp. 186. Bremen. 1865. IT is an acute remark of D'Aubigné,* that "the cultivation of theological science has never produced a revival of Christian life in the Church." But this would only be a half-truth without the corresponding statement with which he completes it, that all revivals of Christian life in the Church have been followed by "creative epochs" of theological science.

The early Church had no scientific theology. Its first age was one of faith and of action—the age of nascent Christian life. But in the very progress of the action of the Church, the need of science soon appeared, as heresy after heresy arose and demanded clearness of apprehension and of definition on the part of the upholders of the faith. In the apostolic phrase, the Church was compelled to "add to its faith knowledge;" that is to say, to bring out the contents of the faith into the forms of human thought; first, as special statements of doctrine in controversial writings and in the creeds; and afterward, as scientific co-ordination of the doctrines, in systematic theology. What is true of the Church as a whole, is true also of every branch of the Church which has ever manifested, by its vitality and endurance, its right to live. The original period of its history, its age of revival and struggle, has been followed by its age of doctrine and science. An inevitable law compels every such organism to study and to develop not only its own mode of being, but also its own modes of apprehending and appropriating the contents of the faith. And this study and development is nothing else but scientific theology. So, in the Reformation period, we find the order of development to be, first, life, that is revival of true religion; then doctrine, in the controversies of the Reformers and in the creeds which soon grew up as the necessary expression of the results of those controversies; and, finally, systems of theology, in Melancthon * Discourses and Essays, p. 318.

and his successors of the Lutheran branch on the one hand; and in Calvin and his followers of the Reformed branch on the other.

Methodism has followed this general law. As a genuine revival of Christian life, and in fact one of the two great revivals which have marked the history of the Church, (the Lutheran Reformation being the other,) it had its first period of youthful action and vital development in the early labors of the Wesleys and their coadjutors, as evangelists, in the special work to which they felt that God had "raised them up," namely, to "spread holiness." Then followed its period of doctrinal controversy, corresponding to the strife of the early Church with the first heresies, and to the battles of the Reformers of the sixteenth century with Romanist errors on the one hand, and with heretical tendencies on the other. To Methodism appears to have been assigned by Providence the task of developing the great central aim of Christianity, personal holiness; and of purifying theology, for the English-speaking races, from the corruption of Augustinism which Calvin introduced into the Reformed Churches; as Melancthon had purged it for the Lutheran Church, and some of the adherents of the Heidelberg Catechism had purified it for the German Re formed. It was in this field of controversy that Wesley, and after him Fletcher, chiefly labored; and to this day their writings constitute a collection of materials for the study of Christian Anthropology and Soteriology, and especially of the points involved in the so-called Calvinistic controversy, which no student, and certainly no professed theologian, can afford to neglect.

Wesley's theology was the growth of his religious life. Of systematic theology, as such, he seems to have had no conception at the beginning of his career, and in this respect he resembles Luther. Each of these great reformers, although both were great thinkers, nevertheless felt out his theological system rather than thought it out. They illustrated the truth (or rather half-truth) of Schleiermacher's theory that doctrine is developed from the religious consciousness; but they illustrated also the other side of that truth, which Schleiermacher never fully got hold of, namely, that the supernatural facts of Christianity, as recorded in Scripture, are the proper and necessary FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XVIII.--7

complement of the religious consciousness, and that scientific theology is the synthesis by the intellect of these two great elements.

Wesley's early reading lay among the English Arminian divines; but he did not find in them clear answers to the questions of eternal moment which his own experience suggested. How can I be saved from sin? how can I be holy? how can I be assured of salvation? these were the imperative problems for him; and to these questions the cold Churchly and semi-Pelagian Arminians had no answer to give. The Moravians were the means of leading him to Christ; and with his personal experience came his clear intellectual apprehension of the doctrines of sin, of grace, and of the work of the Spirit. No one held more thoroughly than Wesley to the maxim, Pectus est quod theologum facit; nay, he even carried it so far as to maintain that a good heart will almost necessarily lead to right opinions.

In view of these facts, superficial writers have disparaged Wesley as a theologian. As well say that Luther was no theologian. Both were men of action; but both were also men of profound insight and of speculative intellect. The central truths of Christianity-those, namely, which relate to the reality and nature of sin, the person and work of Christ, and the office of the Holy Spirit-were powerfully grasped by Wesley's intellect almost simultaneously with his obtaining a sense of personal acceptance through Christ; and he never relaxed his hold of them. In all his multitudinous controversies these central truths were his guide and law; he wrote always in view of them, and therefore always methodically. A master of logic, he brought every subject promptly under the imperative categories in which these great truths were formulated for his own mind; categories, too, that he could express in the very words of Scripture, which he always held to be not only the source but the criterion of doctrine. It would not be difficult to gather from his writings sufficient elements of Anthropology, Soteriology, and Eschatology, to form a symmetrical body of divinity in which there would be few gaps to be supplied.

The controversial labors of Wesley and Fletcher were a necessary preliminary to the origin of any work of systematic theology within the sphere of Methodism. It is no matter of marvel, therefore, but quite in the natural course of historical

*

development, that while Methodism took its rise in 1739, its first scientific theology appeared from the pen of Richard Watson only in 1824. A singularly superficial view of this fact is given by a writer who seems to be an authority in the Presbyterian Church, as his work bears the imprimatur of the Presbyterian Board of Publication. In attempting to vindicate a quasi prediction of his own, that Arminianism cannot be a "permanent redeeming power upon earth," and that Methodism, if it holds fast its Arminian theology, must lose its efficiency as an evangelical Church, he proceeds as follows:

It is now only a few years over a century since Wesley began his career. A religious system matures slowly. The truths asserted may, for a long period, hold in check the serious errors with which they are combined. The errors, if not eliminated, will at last work out the dissolution of the system. It may indeed outlast many generations, but what are even ages to the life of a true, permanent theology? It is to be remembered, also, that the Arminian scheme has yet to be reduced to a systematic and logical form. Where is its whole body of divinity, from under the hand of a master, sharply defining its terms, accurately stating its belief, laying down the conclusions logically involved therein, trying these conclusions no less than their premises by the Word of God, refuting objections, and adjusting all its parts into a consistent and systematic whole?

This paragraph was written, it will be remembered, nearly thirty years after the appearance of Watson's Institutes, of which great work another Calvinistic divine, of larger and finer culture, (Dr. J. W. Alexander,) speaks as follows:+"Making due allowance for the difference of age, Watson, the Methodist, is the only systematizer within my knowledge who approaches the same eminence" [as Turretine.] In another place Dr. Alexander remarks, "I read as much in Wesley and Watson as in Turretine." One would think, from the above paragraph of Dr. Humphrey's, that he had never heard of Watson at all; but he adds in a foot-note:

Without disparaging the ability displayed in the "Theological Institutes" of the eminent Wesleyan divine, Richard Watson, we may suggest that the points at issue between the Arminian theology and our own are not discussed in that work with the thor

*

Humphrey, Our Theology and its Developments. (Philadelphia: Presbyterian Board. 1857.)

Hall, Forty Years' Letters of Dr. Alexander, pp. 181, 187.