Many sensible persons are at a loss, we believe, to understand why this refutation of thirty-two extinct heresies should be regarded with so much interest. Is it so well done, then? they ask. Far from it: better books are brought out every year; and such a controversial argument offered in manuscript to Mr. Longman or Mr. Parker to-morrow, would hardly be deemed worth the cost of printing. Does it add materially to our knowledge of the early heresies? Something of this kind it certainly contributes; but the gain is not large, and will make no essential change in the conclusions of any competent historical inquirer. Is any light thrown by it on the authenticity of our canonical books? This can hardly be expected from a production of the third century; and M. Bunsen's application of it to this purpose appears to us, for reasons which we shall assign, extremely precarious. Perhaps it supplies the want which every student of that period must have felt, and organically joins ecclesiastical to civil history, so that they no longer remain apart,—the one as the stage for saints and martyrs, bishops and books, the other for soldiers and senators, emperors and paramours,—but mingle in the common life of humanity. When we think how the author was placed, it is impossible not to go to him with an eager hope of this nature. He lived at the centre of the vast Roman world, and felt all the pulsations and paroxysms of that mighty heart. He witnessed the ominous decline of every traditional maxim and national reverence in favor of imported superstitions and degenerate barbarities. Under Commodus he saw the ancient Mars superseded by the Grecian Hercules, and Hercules represented by an emperor who sunk into a prize-fighter, and the administration of the empire in the wanton hands of a Phrygian slave, who was only less brutal than his master. In the midst of pestilence, which had become chronic in Italy from the time of M. Antoninus, and of which a Christian bishop could not but know more than others, the city was still adding to its semblance of splendor and salubrity; and the magnificent baths and grounds that were opened to the public service at the Porta Capena, with the multiplied festivities and donatives, attested how little mere physical attention to the people can arrest the miseries of a moral degradation. Nor could the Christians of that age be wholly without insight into the habits of the highest class in Rome, for, in that great colluvies of heterogeneous faiths, the caprice of taste, if not some better impulse, determined now and then an inmate of the palace to favor the religion of Christ; and the favorite mistress of Commodus, who ruled him while she could, and then had him drugged and strangled in his sleep, is the very Marcia whom our presbyter describes as φιλοθεος and at whose intervention the Christian exiles were released from their banishment in Sardinia. If he was at home when the excellent Pertinax was murdered, and cared to know what tyrant was to have the world instead, he was perhaps in the throng that ran to the Quirinal, and heard the Prætorians shout from their ramparts that the empire was for sale, and saw the bargain with the foolish senator below, who bought it with his money, and paid for it with his head. Caius and his people had reason to tremble when they saw in Septimius Severus not only the implacable conqueror who suffered no political opponent to live, but the worshipper of demons, the gloomy and fitful devotee of astrology and magic, pliant only to sacerdotal hate; and when the young Origen came to be their guest awhile, and told of the terror in Alexandria which had joined his father to the band of martyrs, the post that just then brought the news of the Emperor's death in Britain would seem to take off a weight of fear; especially as one son at least of the two inheritors of the empire had in childhood been committed to a Christian nurse, and been said to shrink and turn away from the savage spectacles of the amphitheatre. They were doomed to be disappointed, if they had placed any hope in Caracalla, and to find that what they had taken in the boy for the nobleness of grace, was but the timidity of nature; the murder, before his mother's face, of his only brother, and then of his best counsellor, for refusing to justify the fratricide, would soon make them ashamed of remembering that he had ever heard the name of Christ. It would be curious to know how the Christians comported themselves when the Priest of the Sun became monarch of the world, and seemed intent on dethroning every divinity to enrich the homage to his own. The grand temple on the Palatine, which he built for the god of Emesa, every passer-by must have seen as it rose from its foundations. And when the black stone was paraded on its chariot through the streets, and the elder deities were compelled to leave their shrines and attend in escort to the Eastern idol, or when the nuptials were celebrated between the Syrian divinity and the goddess of Carthage, and Baal-peor and Astarte succeeded to the honors of Jove, no Christian presbyter could fail to witness the gorgeous and humiliating procession,—renewed as it was year by year,—or to ask himself into what deeper abomination the city of the Scipios must sink, ere the catastrophe of judgment made a sudden end. The orgies of Helagabalus were more insulting to the elder Paganism of Rome than injurious to the new faith, which equally detested both; and the offended moral feeling of the city reacted perhaps in favor of the Christian cause, and prepared the way for that more public teaching of the religion, in buildings avowedly dedicated to the purpose, which was first permitted in the succeeding reign. The natural recoil in the imperial family itself from the degradation of the court tended, perhaps, in the same direction, and drove the astute Mamæa to seek, amid the universal corruption, for some school of discipline which might save the young Alexander Severus from the ignominy of her sister's son. Whether from this motive, or from suspicion of the growing force of Christianity as a social power, she had sent for Origen, and had an interview with him at Antioch; and the Roman disciples had reason to rejoice that her intellectual impressions of their system should have been derived from such a man, and her political estimate of it formed in the East, where the crisis of conflict between the dying and the living faiths was more advanced than in the West, and afforded a less disguised augury of the result. From their fellow-believers trading with the Levant, or arriving thence, the pastors of the metropolis would learn the propitious temper of the young Cæsar and his mother; and would feel no surprise, when he succeeded to the palace of his cousin, that he not only swept out the ministers of lust and luxury, but in his private oratory enshrined, among the busts of Pagan benefactors, the images also of Abraham and of Christ. They could not, however, but observe how little the morals of the court and the wisdom of the government could now avail to arrest the progress of decay, and reach in detail the vices and miseries of a degenerate state. When they passed the door of the palace, they heard the public crier's voice proclaim, "Let only purity and innocence enter here"; they visited a Christian tradesman in a neighboring street, and found him just seized by a nobleman whom he had dunned for an outstanding debt, charged with magic or poisoning, doomed to pine in prison till he gave release, and no redress or justice to be had. The Emperor who, gazing in his chapel on the features of Christ, recognized a religion human and universal, was the first under whom a visible badge was put upon the slave, and a distinctive servile dress adopted; the slave markets were still in consecrated spots, the temple of Castor and the Via Sacra; and if ever some captive Onesimus, recommended by letters from the East to the brethren in Rome, was brought to the metropolis for sale, thither must the deacon or the pastor go to find how the auction disposes of their charge, and learn which among the chalked feet it is that are "shod with the preparation of the Gospel of peace." The commonwealth had never boasted of so many great jurists as in the age of Papinian and Paulus; but as the science of Law was perfected, the power of Law declined; and Alexander Severus, the justest of emperors, was unable to protect Ulpian, the greatest of civilians, from military assassination in the palace itself, or to punish the perpetrators of this outrage on popular feeling as well as public right. The three days' tumult, in which this master of jurisprudence fell the victim of Prætorian licentiousness, our presbyter Caius must have witnessed; and countless other momentous scenes, during a generation painfully affluent in vicissitude, must have passed before his eyes; and had he but known of what value his reports would be to this age of ours, he would have said more of the life he saw, and less of the speculations he denounced. To us it would have been worth anything to know just what was too close to him to catch his eye;—how the Christians lived in such a world; what thoughts stirred in them as they walked the streets and heard the news; what happened and was said when they met together, and how this could adjust itself with the real facts of an inconsistent and tyrannical present; and how, as the corrupted State became ever more incapable of vindicating moral ends, the rising Church undertook the secret governance of life, and penetrated with its authority into recesses beyond the reach, not of the arm of administration only, but of the definitions of the widest code. But in this respect also our author fails to realize our hopes. He gives us a book of fancies rather than of facts, and instead of painting existence, which is transient, and must be caught as it flies, occupies himself in describing nonsense, which is always to be had. The enormities of Helagabalus, though staring him in the face, are nothing to him in comparison with heresy in Lesser Asia, which keeps Easter on a wrong day. He is shut up within the interior circle of the community of believers, and gives but a single glimpse beyond; and builds for us no bridge to abolish the mysterious separation of ecclesiastical and ideal from civil and real existence in the early ages of our faith. He is not peculiar in this defect. We all of us live in the midst of history without knowing it, and ourselves make history without feeling it; and that which will most clearly paint us in the thought of other times, which will seem our power to them, our romance and nobleness, with which, therefore, they will most crave to satiate their eye, is precisely what is least consciously present to us,—the natural spirit and daily spring of our common being, through which not the will of man, but the providence of God, works its appointed ends. At all events, the insight which we should be best pleased to gain into the life of the third century is not given even incidentally, except in the scantiest measure, by the "Philosophumena," which we must rank, in this respect, below the Apologies, and with the writings of Irenæus and Epiphanius. The book is dogmatic and controversial, and the interest attached to it arises entirely from its being a register of opinion, a new witness to the thoughts about divine things, which the Christianity of its period owned and disowned. For those who care at all to know the state of belief a century before the Council of Nice, the work possesses a high value. But the worth of this sort of information is itself a thing disputed, at least its religious worth; and will be very differently estimated, according to the preconception which occupies us as to the nature of Divine Revelation, and the sources open to us for the attainment of sacred truth. Here it is that we find M. Bunsen's great and peculiar strength. His religious philosophy, taken by itself, brings us occasionally to a pause of doubt. His historical criticism is not always convincing. But his doctrine of the relation between religion and history, of the mingling of divine and human elements in the theatre of time, and of the special agency of Christianity in the spiritual education of mankind, appears to us profoundly true and beautiful. This it is that makes him attach so much importance to the creed of the second and third centuries, and to the new light now thrown upon it; an importance which, from every ordinary point of view, can scarcely fail to appear fanciful and exaggerated.
The Roman Catholic, for instance, entertains a conception about what sacred truth is, and how it is to be had, which, leaving nothing to depend on new discoveries, discharges all the richest interest from any fresh knowledge we may gain of religion in the past. With him divine truth, so far as it is special to Christendom, is something wholly foreign to the human mind, intrinsically unrelated to any faculty we have. In being supernatural, it belongs to another sphere than that to which our thought is restricted, and is totally withdrawn from all the movements of our nature. It consists, indeed, in a set of objective facts from which we are absent, and which no ratiocination of ours can seize, any more than our ear can tell whether there be music on Saturn's ring. There is no human consciousness answering to it; and to resort thither for it is like asking the dreamer or the blindfold to describe the scene in which he stands, or consulting your own feelings to learn what is going on in Pekin or Japan. On this theory, the objects of faith are conceived of as objects of perception, only by senses otherwise constituted than ours; we can have no surmise about them, till they are announced to us by qualified percipients, and no comprehension of them even then, but only reception of them as facts imported for us from abroad. The bearing of this doctrine of invisible realism on the treatment of ecclesiastical history is manifest. The inaccessible facts are deposited with the sacerdotal corporation; with whom alone is vested the duty and the power of stating and defining them. They are not indeed all stated and defined in their last amplitude at once; for definition is always an enclosure of the true by exclusion of the false; and it is only in proportion as the dreaming perversity of men throws forth one delusive fancy after another, that the Church draws line after line to shut the intrusion out. If the creeds seem to enlarge as the centuries pass, it is not that they have more truth to give, but only more error to remove. The divine facts were conceived aright and conceived complete in the minds of Apostles and Evangelists, but they were not contemplated then as against the follies and contradictions opposed to them in later times; but as soon as the hour came for this antagonism to be felt, the infallible perception secured in perpetuity to the living hierarchy supplied the due verdict of rejection. To the Catholic, therefore, Christianity was made up and finished, its treasury was full, in the first generation; its power of development is only the refusal of deviation; and its intellectual life is tame as the story of some perfect hero, who does nothing but stand still and repel temptations. The history of doctrines thus becomes a history of heresies; the primitive stock of tradition and Scripture must, on the one hand, be maintained entire in the face of all possible exposures by critical research; and, on the other, remain in eternal barrenness and produce no more. Natural knowledge, whether of the world or of humanity, may grow continually, but the new thoughts it may lead us to entertain of God are either not new, or not true; and every pretended enrichment of truth is nothing but evolution of falsehood. This removal of all variety from religion, this expulsion of life and change into the negative region of aberration and denial, eviscerates the past of its devout interest, rests the study of it on contempt instead of reverence for man; with all its pious air, it simply betrays history with a kiss, and delivers it over for scribes to buffet and chief priests to crucify. Short work is made in this way of any fresh witness, like the author of our book, who turns up unexpectedly from an early age. Does he speak in agreement with the hierarchical standards? He only flings another voice into the consensus of obedient believers. Does he say anything at variance with the regula fidei? Then have we only to see in what class of heretics he stands. His testimony is either superfluous or misleading.
The Protestant, of the approved English type, arrives, under guidance of a different thought, at the same flat and indifferent result. Though he gives a more subjective character to divine truth than the Roman Catholic, and brings both the want and the supply of it more within the attestation of consciousness, he puts its discovery equally beyond the reach of our ruined faculties, and equally cuts it off from all relation to philosophy and the natural living exercise of reason and conscience. He further agrees that his foreign gift of revelation was imported all at once, and all complete, into our world, within the Apostolic age; that the conceptions of that time are an authoritative rule for all succeeding centuries; and that every newer doctrine is to be regarded as a false accretion, to be flung off into the incompetent and barren spaces of human speculation. He denies, however, the twofold vehicle of this precious gift; and, cancelling altogether the oral tradition and indeterminate Christian consciousness of the early Church, shuts up the whole contents of religion within the canonical Scriptures. The guardianship of unwritten tradition being abolished, and the canon requiring no guardianship at all, the trust deposited with the hierarchy disappears; and no permanent inspiration, no authoritative judicial function, in matters of faith, remains. Whatever Holy Spirit continues in the Church is not a progressively teaching spirit, which can ever impart thoughts or experiences unknown to the first believers; but a personally comforting and animating spirit, whose highest climax of enlightenment is the exact reproduction of the primitive state of mind. The apprehension of Divine truth is thus reduced to an affair of verbal interpretation of documents; and though in this process there is room for the largest play of subjective feeling, so that different minds, different nations, different ages, will unconsciously evolve very various results; these are not to be regarded as possible Divine enrichments of the faith, but to be brought rigidly to the standard of the earliest Church, and disowned wherever they include what was absent there. This view is less mischievous than the Roman Catholic, only because it is more inconsequent and confused. The canon which you take as sacred was selected and set in authority by the unwritten consciousness and tradition which you reject as profane. The Church existed before its records; expressed its life in ways spreading indefinitely beyond them; and neither was exempt from human elements till they were finished, nor lost the Divine spirit when they were done. So arbitrary a doctrine corrupts the beauty of Scripture, and deadens the noblest interest of history. If the New Testament is to serve as an infallible standard, it is thus committed to perfect unity and self-consistency; and you are obliged to contend that the various types of doctrine found within its compass—the Messianic conceptions of Matthew and John, the "Faith" of Paul and James, the eucharistic conceptions of the first Evangelists and the last, the eschatology of the Apocalypse and the Epistles—are only different sides of one and the same belief, colored with the tints and shadings of several minds. How utterly inadequate such an hypothesis is to the explanation of the Scriptural phenomena, what a distorted and absurd representation it gives of the sacred writers, and their mode of thought, is best known to those who have honestly tried to deal with the fourth Gospel, for instance, as historically the supplement of the others, and dogmatically of the Book of Revelation; to suppose the Logos-doctrine tacitly present in the speeches of Peter; to detect the pre-existence in Mark, or remove it from John; or to identify the Paraclete with the gifts of Pentecost. All feeling of living reality is lost from our picture of the Apostolic time, when its outlines are thus blurred, its contrasts destroyed, its grouped figures effaced, and the whole melted away by the persevering drizzle of a watery criticism into a muddy glory round the place where Christ should be. If, moreover, we are to find everything in the first age, then the second, and the third, and all others, must be worse, just in so far as they differ from it; and the whole course of succeeding thought, the widening and deepening of the Christian faith and feeling, the swelling of its stream by the lapse into it of Oriental Gnosis and Hellenic Platonism and the Western Conscience, must be a ceaseless degeneracy. Thus to the Bibliolater as to the Romanist, Divine truth has no history among men, unless it be the history of decline, or of recovery purchased by decline. He also will accordingly care nothing about what the people of Caius or Hippolytus thought. Is it in the Bible? If so, he knew it before. Is it not in the Bible? Then he has nothing to do with it but throw it away. By a fitting retribution, this moping worship of the letter of a book and the creed of a generation brings it to pass that both are lost to the mind in a dismal haze of ignorance and misconception; and if the "Evangelical" believer could be transported suddenly from Exeter Hall into the company of the twelve in Jerusalem, or the Proseucha which Paul enters on the banks of the Strymon, or the room where the Agape is prepared at Rome, we are persuaded that he would find a scene newer to his expectations than by any other migration into a known time and place.
But now let us abolish this isolation from the rest of human existence of the incunabula of our faith, and throw open that time to free relation with the whole providence of humanity. Suppose Christianity to be the influence upon the world of a Divine Person,—in quality divine, in quantity human,—whose Epiphany was determined at a crisis of ripe conditions for the rescue, the evolution, the spread of holy and sanctifying truth. What are those conditions? They consist mainly in the co-presence, within the embrace of one vast state, of two opposite races or types of men, both having a partial gift of divine apprehension, and holding in charge an indispensable element of truth; both with their spiritual life verging to exhaustion and capable of no separate effort more; and each unconsciously pining away for want of the complement of thought which the other only could supply. The Hebrew brought his intense feeling of the Personality of God; conceiving this in so concentrated a form as to exclude the proper notion of infinitude, and render Him only the most powerful Being in the Universe, its Monarch,—wielding the creatures as his puppets,—acting historically upon its scenes as objective to Him, and by the annals of his past agency supplying to the Abrahamic family a religion of archives and documents. The sovereignty of Jehovah raised him to an immeasurable height above his creation; dwarfed all other existence; placed him by nature at a distance from men, and only by condescension allowing of approximation. And hence his worshippers, in proportion as they adored his greatness, felt the littleness of all else; acquired a temper towards their fellow-men, if not severe and scornful, at least not reverent and tender; and regarded them as separate in kind from Him, mere dust on the balance or locusts in the field. The religion of the Hellenic race began at the other end,—from the midst of human life, its mysteries, its struggles, its nobleness, its mixture of heroic Free-will and awful Destiny; and their deepest reverence, their quickest recognition of the Divine, was directed towards the soul of a man vindicating its grandeur, though it should be against superhuman powers. In proportion as men were great, beautiful, and good, did they appear to be as lesser gods, and earth and heaven to be filled with the same race. Thought, conscience, admiration in the human mind were not personal accidents separately originating in each individual; but the sympathetic response of our common intellect, standing in front of Nature, to the kindred life of the Divine intellect behind Nature, and ever passing into expression through it. When this feeling of the Hellenic race became reflective, and organized itself into philosophy, it represented the universe as the eternal assumption of form by the Divine thought, which we were enabled to read off by our essential identity of nature. Hence a whole series of conceptions quite different from the Hebrew representations; instead of Creation, Evolution of being; instead of Interposition from without, Incarnation operating from within; instead of Omnipotent Will, Universal Thought; assigning as the ideal of man's perfection, not so much obedience to Law, as similitude of Mind to God; and tending predominantly not to strength in Morals, but to beauty in Art. These two opposite tendencies had run their separate course, and expended their proper history; and were talking wildly, as in the approaching delirium of death. But they are the two factors of all religious truth: and to fuse them together, to make it impossible that either should perish or should remain alone, the Christ was given to the world, so singularly balanced between them, that neither could resist his power, but both were drawn into it for the regeneration of mankind. In the accidents of his lot given to the one race, and only baffling the visions of prophets to transcend them; in the essence of his nature, so august and attractive to the other that the faith in Incarnation was irresistible; presented to the Hebrews by his mortal birth, and snatched from them by his immortal; stopping by his holiness the mouth of Law, and carrying it up into the higher region of Faith and Love; in the Temple wishing the Temple gone, that there might be open communion, Spirit with Spirit; translating sacrifice into self-sacrifice;—he had every requisite for conciliating and blending the separated elements of truth which, for so many ages, had been converging towards him. But if this was the function providentially assigned to him, and for which the divine and human were so blended in him, it is a function which could not be accomplished in a moment, in a generation, in a century. It is an historical function, freely demanding time for its theatre; and as the separate factors had occupied ages in attaining their ripeness for combination, so must their fusion consume many a lifetime of effervescing thought, ere the homogeneous truth appeared. The words of Christ are not in this view the end in which Revelation terminates; but the means given to us of knowing himself, contributions to the picture we form of his personality. Nor are the sentiments of his immediate followers about his office and position in the scheme of Providence anything more authoritative to us than the incipient attempts made, when his influence was fresh, to grasp the whole of his relations while only a part was to be seen. The records of the great crisis are no doubt of superlative value, as the vehicles by which alone we understand and feel its power; but their value is lost if they are to dictate truth to our passive acceptance, instead of quickening our reason and conscience to find it: they stop in this way the very development which they were to lead, and disappoint Christ of the very work he came to achieve. Human elements were inevitably and fully present in the first age and its Scriptures, as in every other; and the transitory ingredients they have left, it is a duty to detach from the eternal truth. And as conditions of finite imperfection cannot be banished from the central era, neither can the guidance of the Infinite Spirit be denied, whether among the Hebrew, the Hellenic, or the Christian people, in the ages before and after. In that new development of human consciousness and knowledge in regard to God, which we call Christianity, all the requisite conditions—viz. the factors taken up, the Person who blends them, and the continuous product they evolve—include Divine Inspiration as well as Human Reflection,—the living presence and communion of the Eternal with the Transitory Mind, of the perfectly Good with the good in the Imperfect. To disengage the one from the other, to treasure up the true and holy that is born of God, and let fall the false and wrong that is infused by man, is possible only to Reason and Conscience, is indeed the perpetual work in which they live; the denial of which is not merely Atheism, but Devil-worship,—not the bare negation, but the positive reversal, of religion,—the virtual affirmation that God indeed exists, but exists as Un-reason and Un-good. No mechanical, no chronological separation can be effected of the Divine from the Human, the Revealed from the Unrevealed, in faith; there is no person, no book, no age, no Church, in which both do not meet, and require to be disentangled the one from the other; but the perseverance of God's living and self-harmonious Spirit throughout the discordant errors of dying generations enables the men most apt and faithful to his voice to know more and more what his reality is, and drop the semblances by which it is disguised. The effect of this view on our estimate of ecclesiastical literature is evident. As, according to it, the Apostolic period is not exempted from critical judgment, so neither are succeeding times to be without their claim on religious reverence. The canonical books of the New Testament fall back into the general mass of literature recording the earliest knowledge and consciousness of the disciples, neither detached, as a mysterious whole, from other productions of their time, nor excluding the greatest diversities of value among themselves. They exhibit the first struggling efforts—not always concurrent in their direction—of an awakening spiritual life, to interpret a recent Divine manifestation, and to solve by it the problem of the world's Providence. Their very freshness and proximity to the great figure of Christ was by no means an unmixed advantage to these efforts; and they were not so complete and successful as to supersede their continuance in the next and following generations, which lay under no incompetency for their prosecution, and are as likely, so far as antecedent probability goes, to have enriched and improved, as to have impoverished and spoiled, the earlier doctrine of Christ's relation to God and to mankind. The chasm thus disappears between the Apostolic age and its successor; the products of the first are not to be accepted simply because they are there, nor those of the second rejected because they are absent from the first; nor is everything to be admitted on showing that it stands in both, and even had a tenure long enough to become the prescriptive occupant of the Church. The Catholic is right in clinging to the continuous thread of Divine Inspiration binding the centuries of Christendom together; and in maintaining that the expression of true doctrine grows fuller with time. He is wrong in making the Spirit over to an hierarchical corporation; and in treating the ostensible growth of doctrine as the mere negation of heresies. The Protestant is right in rescuing from the haze of uncertain tradition the real historical ground of his religion, and setting it in the focus of an intense reverence; and in rejecting whatever cannot be adjusted with the clear facts and essential Spirit of that primitive Gospel. He is wrong in his insulation of that time as a sole authoritative age of golden days, in which the faith had neither error nor defect, and from which it must be copied, with daguerreotype exactitude, into every disciple's mind. Keep the positive elements, destroy the negative limitations of both these systems, and the true conception of Christianity emerges. As a system of self-conscious doctrine, it is a religious Philosophy, starting from the historical appearance of Christ as an expression of God in human life, and always detained around this one object as its centre; and in its development consulting not the idiosyncrasies and conceits of private and personal reflection, but the devout consciousness and spiritual consensus of all Christian ages and all holy men. All religion is the product of an action of the Infinite mind upon the finite: in the Christian religion that action takes place upon souls engaged in the contemplation of Christ as the manifestation of God's moral nature. This given object remaining the same, there is room for indefinite expansion and variety; and every developed form is to be tried, not by its date, but by the tests of truth relevant to religious philosophy.
How far M. Bunsen would recognize his own doctrine in this exposition we cannot say; but without intending in the least to make him responsible for it, we think it does not essentially deviate from his scheme of thought. The philosophical aphorisms in which he has embodied his speculative faith follow an order which we should have spoiled, had we, for our present purpose, so brought them together as to make them speak for themselves. And though they display the same astonishing command of our language, in which the author never fails, the cast of the thoughts is so Teutonic, that few English readers, it is to be feared, will appreciate their depth and richness. The complaint, which we have heard and seen, that they are wholly unintelligible, is indeed purely ridiculous, except that it sadly illustrates the extent to which reflection, and even feeling, on such subjects has ceased in England. M. Bunsen, we can assure our readers, knows what he means, and lucidly states what he means; and those who miss his meaning have for the most part no slight loss. The following sentences, which the greatest sufferer from philosophobia may drink in without convulsions, will explain his idea of Revelation, in its bearing upon the use of written records. The mere "Natural Religion" of the Deist, he observes, was—
"The negative reaction against the equally untenable, unphilosophical, and irrational notion, that revelation was nothing but an external historical act. Such a notion entirely loses sight of the infinite or eternal factor of revelation, founded both in the nature of the infinite and that of the finite mind, of God and man.
"This heterodox notion became still more obnoxious, by its imagining something higher in the manifestation of God's will and being than the human mind, which is the divinely-appointed organ of divine manifestation, and in a double manner; ideally in mankind, as object, historically in the individual man, as instrument.
"The notion of a merely historical revelation by written records is as unhistorical as it is unintellectual and materialistic. It necessarily leads to untruth in philosophy, to unreality in religious thought, and to Fetichism in worship. It misunderstands the process necessarily implied in every historical representation. The form of expressing the manifestation of God in the mind, as if God was himself using human speech to man, and was thus himself finite and a man, is a form inherent in the nature of human thought as embodied in language, its own rational expression. It was originally never meant to be understood materialistically, because the religious consciousness which produced it was essentially spiritual; and, indeed, it can only be thus misunderstood by those who make it a rule and criterion of faith, never to connect any thought whatever with what they are expected to believe as divinely true.
"Every religion is positive. It is, therefore, justly called a religion 'made manifest' (offenbart), or, as the English term has it, revealed; that is to say, it supposes an action of the infinite mind, or God, upon the finite mind, or man, by which God, in his relation to man, becomes manifest or visible. This can be mediate, through the manifestation of God in the Universe of Nature; or a direct, immediate action, through the religious consciousness.