intimate sympathy of the pure and perfect God with the heart of each faithful worshipper. This is that which is wanting in Greek philosophers, English Deists, German Pantheists, and all formalists.' Now, if this be so, whence comes this all-pervading sentiment? Mr. Newman says it does not rest upon the Bible or upon Christianity; for it is a postulate from which every Christian advocate is forced to start' (p. 201). That men are responsible to God is indeed such a 'postulate;' but intimate sympathy'- this is a much higher truth; and Mr. Newman admits that the Greek philosophers' knew it not. He has admitted what would of itself prove the superhuman origin' of Christianity, and the 'preternatural and miraculous agency' exercised in Judaism. Whence, if not from God, could such a great truth come?

Amongst the beneficial effects of Christianity combated, is that which it has exercised upon the female sex; and in disputing its influence, Mr. Newman has never alluded to that illustration of conjugal love and duty, employed by Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians, from the mutual love of Christ and his Church an illustration which gives as exalted a view of the conjugal relation as man can receive. This is not fair. He says, too, p. 168, that the New Testament teaches that God will visit men with fiery vengeance for holding an erroneous creed. Mr. Newman cannot refer to a single passage which justifies

this assertion.

The way in which the authority of the Gospel of John is set aside, displays almost the height of recklessness. First of all, at p. 173, a suspicion (no more) is thrown out against the historical reality of the discourses;' then, in the next page, the testimony of the Baptist to Jesus, and the conference with Nicodemus, are characterised as imaginary, on not even a pretence of proof; and in p. 175, the miracles he records are rejected on the ground of a series of statements respecting the date, &c., of this gospel (one of which, at least, is not correct): and on the ground of the suspicions before mentioned, which are now referred to, as if they had been substantiated facts! Irving's imitation of the gift of tongues' is not only made the ground of disbelieving Paul's account, but also of charging him with speculative hallucination in the matter of miracles! (p. 180.) What is to be said to such proceedings? finally, for we must yet notice 'The Soul,' in replying to some Unitarian dogmas, Mr. Newman says of the character of our Lord, if I am to criticise him, by the common standard of right and wrong, I find myself driven to conclude that his alleged "perfection" is wholly imaginary. It is with perfection as with the infallibility of the Church of Rome; to fail

And.

Of

in one point, however small, is to fail altogether' (p. 210). course, then, Mr. Newman is prepared with some one small point that shall set this question at rest, for he knows that on him, as the assailant of the received belief, rests the onus probandi. By no means; on the next page, to our amazement, there stands these words-'It is not fair to ask that those who do not admit Jesus to be faultless, and the very image of God, will specify and establish his faults!' And it is so that the Bible and the Saviour are set aside! There is a work by Isaac Taylor, entitled The Process of Historical Proof exemplified and explained.' It deserves careful study in connexion with the questions agitated by Mr. Newman; and it suggests to us that if the conclusions respecting the incredibility of the Gospels are correctly deduced from the contradictions in the different narratives, and from the 'credulous' character of the writers; then must ancient history, so far as it is based on Herodotus, be assuredly abandoned;' for the contradictions between his account of the Persian Monarchy and that given by Ctesias (not to mention Xenophon's story of the great Cyrus, and the three other accounts of his life and exploits which Herodotus heard in Persia, and rejected; nor yet the legends of fabulists of later date), are so great as to defy reconciliation; and the credulity of both historians, their marvels, and invented stories, which no chronology can arrange, are known to most of our readers. And if Herodotus were given up, what must be done with the rest of ancient history? It is a good sign for the controversy that is beginning here, that the reaping sickle' of 'Niebuhr criticism' is going out of fashion amongst scholars.

Our notice of 'The Soul' must be very brief, and confined to the great points of the book. The first thing that strikes a reader is, that notwithstanding all he has seen in the Phases,' he meets here with nothing new; it is just Christianity and the gospel again—but without Christ; whilst in two places Christ is spoken of in a way that is inconsistent both with this book and with the Phases (pp. 73, 101); and throughout, the very words of Scriptures are employed for the same purpose, and in the same manner, as they are by our most orthodox divines! And yet all the conclusions of the Phases' in both points are asserted with new energy, and under new forms!

To give to the theological scheme exhibited in The Soul,' any claim to be regarded as something different from, and independent of Christianity, as popularly understood, Mr. Newman ought to have been furnished with one instance, at least, of such a spiritual progress as he has sketched, where no knowledge had been derived from Hebrew or Christian teacher, or from the Bible. Or failing that, he should have produced passages from

profane writings in illustration of his subject, as much to the point as those he has quoted from the Bible. But he has not left us to infer from his silence that such quotations could not be found; he has given us a testimony to the Bible, which, considering its source, is invaluable. After speaking of the stage at whichsins,' as offences against God, are perceived, he proceeds: In this state were the Hebrews from even an early period; and God, as abhorring sin, was entitled by them a Holy God. Where Polytheism and its degenerate deities were honoured, such phrases could not enter the common language even of philosophers; yet in Greece, for instance, philosophers of a religious turn undoubtedly held the fundamental notion involved in them' (p. 65).

Sin, forgiveness, spiritual life; these are the three chief topics of this book, and under each we have wondered as we read that the writer, instead of resorting to argumentative processes, as at pp. 122, 123, did not take God manifest in the flesh' as the one thing he needed to bring his speculations into vital relation to the soul. Mr. Newman says, in the beginning of the chapter on 'Hopes concerning Future Life': To me the discussion loses all interest, from the fact that it is not addressed to the soul, but to the pure intellect, and is consequently unintelligible to the vulgar (p. 219). This is the very defect of his own theological system. It wants what would make it for those whom he designates the vulgar,' a living reality; and the gospel has that in Jesus Christ. Both conscience and intellect may make sin be seen as a fact; and yet it may not be felt,-felt as it would be felt if we had the assurance that God is so interested in it, as we know he is in human sin. This is effected by Jesus Christ. It may in the same way be seen that forgiveness can be obtained only from God, directly from God; and yet the doubt, unassailable by any reasoning, for reasoning cannot persuade the heart, remain-can we, may we go to God for pardon? This doubt is prevented by Jesus Christ. We appeal to experience respecting the truth of these statements; and Mr. Newman knows the value of experience in such matters (pp. 118, 119); and it is so throughout the whole progress delineated here.

We appeal to experience, also, against Mr. Newman's misrepresentation of the question of Mediation, respecting which he has done well in this second edition to omit some phrases which savoured more of youthful vehemence than of spiritual zeal. As taught in the gospel, its sole effect is to enable men to come to God, and to persuade them to do so. With Romish perversions of it we have no more to do than with Pagan secondary deities.' And we have our author on

our side

against himself, if any meaning is to be ascribed to those two occasions on which he mentions Christ, referred to above; and in pp. 78, 79, where the explanation which he gives of Paul's doctrine is one which we have already remarked upon. Mr. Newman ought to have noticed the allusion to this truth in 1 John ii. 1, since it affords a view of mediation, which truly pondered might have kept him from much that he has said in opposition to it.

But let the theological system of The Soul' be subjected to the double test to which the gospel of Jesus Christ has been subjected, and if it can abide that, we may feel ourselves called upon to wonder as much as if one of the old prophets had risen from the dead.' Its reception amongst cultivated minds we do not doubt; that is, if it could be made known to such as those Greek philosophers, of whom Mr. Newman so often speaks, they would be able to enter into and appreciate its beauty and spirituality, and to approve the ideal it presented for the endeavours of men; yet it must appear destitute of certainty,'-a devout imagination, and no more. But let it be preached as a gospel to the poor, the ignorant, the brutalized, the ferocious; and when it has gathered souls to repose beneath the fatherly love of God from amongst them, as the gospel has, or even subdued one Africaner, we will allow that it has claims on our regard beyond what we can see at present.

These are the peculiar difficulties under which Mr. Newman's scheme lies; for the proof that it is not removed out of the reach of the objections that lie against the gospel, we only refer to the "reply to philosophy' (pp. 118-123); and therewith leave it.

Beside the view which we have taken of these works, they may also be regarded as carrying on the controversy of reason against faith, or authority, originating in the insoluble difficulties which the universal conditions of humanity, and the essential nature of religion, render inevitable both for the deism of Mr. Froude, and for the Romanism of the elder Newman. Each age attempts the solution in its own way; and each individual, also, consciously or unconsciously; but too frequently either by endeavouring to extinguish the natural light, or else, plunging into intellectual darkness, by refusing to give to faith the things that are faith's.' For ourselves, we cannot imagine Faith, as if sightless, led through the mysteries of the universe by the hand of Reason; neither can we imagine that no brightness illumines her face, but such as is reflected from its beams. To assent to such representations, however beautiful they may be, appears to us to be giving up the fundamental principle of the whole controversy allowing the reasonableness of such speculations as those which have passed in review before us. We would rather

assign to Reason the task of discerning the source whence the obscurities which surround us arise, and of rebuking the pretences of falsely assumed authority; while Faith, gazing upward with eagle eyes, receives from the fountain of heavenly wisdom those Truths that wake to perish never;'

which Reason must apply to the grand and noble purposes in the daily life of men, for which alone they are given.

We have already alluded to the phase of avowed hostility to Christianity presented by these and similar books. It is not a little remarkable that it should, on one side, assume the same form which characterised the heresies of the first centuries. The orthodox fathers then combated and silenced their opponents by appealing to catholic consent,' which they also held. It will not, perhaps, be so easy to find a common ground of truth, on which we may meet these new opponents; unless it be that which is taken in The Soul.' But we do most earnestly deprecate the attempt to stifle the inquiries, which these books are rather the sign than the cause of, by speaking contemptuously of such as find no satisfaction in what satisfied Leibnitz, and Newton, and Locke. Such ridicule is unphilosophical; for it overlooks the fact that, beside the idola specûs et tribûs, which mislead the soul in its inquiry after its relations to the spiritual world, there are yet more serious hindrances put in its way by the idola fori et theatri of its age. It would be as well to bid men still defend church towers from the thunder-stroke by the tolling of baptized bells, as was done before lightning conductors were known, as to command them to drive away the deluding spirits of the present day by the words which exorcised those that haunted men in former times. The whole world of mind is changed from what it was ; and most of what was written in the ;; age of Leibnitz and Locke is as irrelevant to the questions now agitated as the Apologies of Tertullian and Justin Martyr. Nor is it less unwise than unphilosophical; for they that submit to ridicule can never do much honour to the cause they adopt; whilst, with most, such treatment of difficulties which they know to be real must lead them to exaggerate their importance, and if ever they are overcome, it must be by an agony of conflict, that no one would wish to involve another's soul in. Respecting this new, or rather renewed hostility, however, the question it has brought forward, as far as we understand it, is, the general relation of the Bible to religion; or the fact, ground, and extent of its authority in matters of faith. Some of the thoughts we have expressed may, perchance, assist in calling forth an answer; but, doubtless, many an effort will be made before the true and satisfactory reply is gained.