source of weakness. Had Dr Bushnell chosen to set forth a consistent exhibition of all that the mere understanding has to say against the doctrines of the Trinity, Incarnation, and Atonement; or had he chosen to give us the musings of a poetical mystic; or had he even endeavoured to reproduce the system of Hegel or Schleiermacher, we doubt not he would have made a book of considerable power. But the attempt to play so many incongruous parts at one time, in our poor judgment, has made the failure as complete as it was inevitable.

The extravagance of the book is another of its characteristics which must prevent its having much effect. Every thing permanently influential is moderate; but Dr Bushnell is extravagant even to paradox. This disposition is specially manifested in the Preliminary Dissertation on Language, and in the Discourse on Dogma. There is nothing either new or objectionable in his general theory of language. The whole absurdity and evil lie in the extravagant length to which he carries his principles. It is true, for example, that there are two great departments of language, the physical and intellectual, or proper and figurative, the language of sensation and the language of thought. It is also true that the latter is to a great extent borrowed from the former. It is true, moreover, that the language of thought is in a measure symbolical and suggestive, and therefore of necessity more or less inadequate. No words can possibly answer accurately to the multiplied, diversified, and variously implicated states of mind to which they are applied. In all cases it is only an approximation. Something is always left unexpressed, and something erroneous always is, or may be, included in the terms employed. Dr Bushnell, after parading these principles with great circumstance, presses them out to the most absurd conclusions. Because language is an imperfect vehicle of thought, no dependence can be placed upon it; there can be no such thing as a scientific theology; no definite doctrinal propositions; creeds and catechisms are not to be trusted; no author can be properly judged by his words, &c., &c.-(See pp. 72, 79, 82, 91, et seq., and the Discourse on "Dogma" passim.) As creeds mean nothing or any thing, he is willing to sign any number of them. He has never been able, he says, "to sympathise at all with the abundant protesting of the New England Unitarians against creeds. So far from suffering even the least consciousness of restraint or oppression under any creed, I have been the readier to accept as great a number as fell in my way; for when they are subjected to the deepest chemistry of thought, that which descends to the point of relationship between the form of the truth and its interior formless nature, they become thereupon so elastic, and run so freely into each

other, that one seldom need have any difficulty in accepting as many as are offered him."-(P. 82.) This is shocking. It undermines all confidence even in the ordinary transactions of life. There can, on this plan, be no treaties between nations, no binding contracts between individuals, for the "chemistry" which can make all creeds alike will soon get what results it pleases out of any form of words that can be framed. This doctrine supposes there can be no revelation from God to men, except to the imagination and the feelings,-none to the reason. It supposes that man, by the constitution of his nature, is such a failure that he cannot certainly communicate or receive thought. The fallacy of all Dr Bushnell's reasoning on this subject is so transparent, that we can hardly give him. credit for sincerity. Because by words a man cannot express every thing that is in his mind, the inference is that he can express nothing surely; because each particular word may be figurative and inadequate, it is argued that no number or combination of words, no variety of illustration, nor diversity in the mode of setting forth the same truth, can convey it certainly to other minds. He confounds, moreover, knowing every thing that may be known of a given subject, with understanding any definite proposition respecting it. Because there is infinitely more in God than we can ever find out, therefore the proposition, God is a spirit, gives us no definite knowledge, and may as well be denied as affirmed! His own illustration on this point is the proposition "Man thinks," which, he says, has a "hundred different meanings." Admitting that the subject "man," in this proposition, may be viewed very variously, and that the nature and laws of the process of thought predicated of him are very doubtful matters, this does not throw the smallest obscurity or ambiguity over the proposition itself. It conveys a definite notion to every human being. It expresses clearly a certain amount of truth, a fact of consciousness, which within certain limits is understood by every human being exactly alike. Beyond those limits there may be indefinite diversity. But this does not render the proposition ambiguous. The man who should reverse the assertion, and say "Man does not think," would be regarded as an idiot, though the greatest mental chemist of the age. This doctrine, that language can convey no specific, definite truth to the understanding, which Dr Bushnell uses to loosen the obligation of creeds, is all the sceptic needs to destroy the authority of the Bible, and all the Jesuit requires to free himself from the trammels of common veracity. The practical difference between believing all creeds and believing none, is very small.

What our author says of logic, is marked with the same extravagance. It is true that the understanding out of its legi

timate sphere is a perfectly untrustworthy guide. When it applies its categories to the infinite, or endeavours to subject the incomprehensible to its modes, it must necessarily involve itself in contradictions. It is easy, therefore, to make any statement relating to the eternity, the immensity, or will of God involve the appearance of inward conflict. From this Dr Bushnell infers (i. e., when speaking as a mystic), that logie and the understanding are to be utterly discarded from the whole sphere of religion; that the revelations of God are not addressed to the reason, but to the esthetic principles of our nature; and that a thing's being absurd is no proof that it is not true. Nay, the more absurd the better. He glories in the prospect of the harvest of contradictions and solecisms the critics are to gather from his book. He regards them as so many laurels plucked for the wreath that is to adorn his brows. That we may not be suspected of having caught a little of the Doctor's extravagance, we beg the reader to turn to such passages as the following:-"Probably the most contradictory book in the world is the Gospel of John, and that for the very reason that it contains more and loftier truths than any other.”—(P. 57.) "There is no book in the world that contains so many repugnances, or antagonistic forms of assertion, as the Bible. Therefore, if any man please to play off his constructive logic upon it, he can easily show it up as the absurdest book in the world."-(P. 69.) "I am perfectly well aware that my readers can run me into just what absurdity they please. Nothing is more easy. I suppose it might be almost as easy for me to do it as for them. Indeed, I seem to have the whole argument which a certain class of speculators must raise upon my Discourses, in order to be characteristic, fully before me. I see the words footing it along to their conclusions. I see the terrible syllogisms wheeling out their infantry on my fallacies and absurdities." (P. 106.) He laughs at syllogisms as a ghost would at a musket. Syllogisms are well enough in their place; but the truth he teaches perfectly consistent with absurdity, and therefore cannot be hurt by being proved to be absurd. He says:-" There may be solid, living, really consistent truth in the views I have offered, considering the Trinity and Atonement as addressed to feeling and imagination; when considered as addressed to logic, there is only absurdity and confusion in them."—(P. 108.) The Incarnation and Trinity "offer God, not so much to the reason or logical understanding, as to the imagination, and the perceptive or esthetic apprehension of faith."-(P. 102.) They are to be accepted, he elsewhere says, as addressed to "feeling and imaginative reason," not "as metaphysical entities. for the natural understanding."-(P. 111.)

one.

It is among the first principles of the oracles of God, that regeneration and sanctification are not esthetic effects produced through the imagination. They are moral and spiritual changes, wrought by the Holy Ghost, with and by the truth as revealed to the reason. The whole healthful power of the things of God over the feelings depends upon their being true to the intellect. If we are affected by the revelation of God as a father, it is because he is a father, and not the picture of If we have peace through faith in the blood of Christ, it is because he is a propitiation for our sins in reality, and not in artistic form merely. The Bible is not a cunningly-devised fable-a work of fiction addressed to the imagination. It would do little for the poor and the homeless to entertain them with a picture of Elysium. It would not heal a leper or a cripple to allow him to gaze on the Apollo; nor will it comfort or sanctify a convinced sinner, to set before him any sublime imaginings concerning God and atonement. The revelations of God are addressed to the whole soul, to the reason, to the imagination, to the heart, and to the conscience. But unless they are true to the reason, they are as powerless as a phantasm.

that

Dr Bushnell makes no distinction between knowing and understanding. Because it is not necessary that the objects of faith should be understood (i. e., comprehended in their nature and relations), he infers that they need not be known. Because God is incomprehensible, our conceptions of him may be absurd and contradictory! This is as much as to say, because there are depths and vastnesses in the stellar universe which science cannot penetrate, nebulæ which no telescope can resolve, therefore we may as rationally believe the cosmogony of the Hindus as the Méchanique Céleste. It is plain, the poetic element in Dr Bushnell's constitution has so completely swallowed up the rational and moral, that he can see only through the medium of the imagination. Through that medium all things are essentially the same. Different creeds

present to his eye, " in a fine frenzy rolling," only the various patterns of a kaleidoscope. It may be well enough for him to amuse himself with that pretty toy; but it is a great mistake to publish what he sees as discoveries, as though a kaleidoscope were a telescope.

As one other illustration of our author's spirit of exaggeration, we would refer to what he says of his responsibility for his opinions. No man will deny that we are all in a measure passive in the reception of any system of doctrine; that the circumstances of our birth and education, and the manifold influences of our peculiar studies and associations, and especially (as to all good) of the Spirit of God, determine in a great

measure our whole intellectual and moral state. But under these ab extra influences, and mingling with them, are the mysterious operations of our spontaneous and voluntary nature, yielding or opposing, choosing or rejecting, so that our faith becomes the most accurate image and criterion of our inner man. We are what we believe; our faith is the expression of our true moral character, and is the highest manifestation of our inward self. We are more responsible, therefore, for our faith than even for our acts; for the latter are apt to be impulsive, while the former is the steady index of the soul, pointing God-ward or earth-ward. Dr Bushnell, however, pushes the admitted fact that outward and inward influences have so much power over men, to the extent of denying all responsibility for his opinions. "I seem," he says, "with regard to the views presented, to have had only about the same agency in forming them, that I have in preparing the blood I circulate, and the anatomic frame I occupy. They are not my choice or invention so much as a necessary growth, whose process I can hardly trace myself. And now, in giving them to the public, I seem only to have about the same kind of option left me that I have in the matter of appearing in corporal manifestation myself-about the same anxiety, I will add, concerning the unfavourable judgments to be encountered; for though a man's opinions are of vastly greater moment than his looks, yet, if he is equally simple in them as in his growth, and equally subject to his law, he is responsible only in the same degree, and ought not, in fact, to suffer any greater concern about their reception than about the judgment passed upon his person."-(P. 98.)

Hence the sublime confidence expressed on p. 116:-"The truths here uttered are not mine. They live in their own majesty. ... If they are rejected universally, then I leave them to time, as the body of Christ was left, believing that after three days they will rise again." We venture to predict that these days will turn out to be demiurgic.

All we have yet said respecting the characteristics of these Discourses might be true, and yet their general tendency be good. It is conceivable that a book may pull down rather than construct; that its materials may be incongruous, and its tone exaggerated, and yet its principles and results be in the main correct. This, we are sorry to say, is very far from being the case with regard to the volume now before us. Its principles and results are alike opposed to the settled faith of the Christian world. This we shall endeavour, as briefly as possible, to demonstrate.

We have already said that the spirit of this book is rationalistic. The rationalism which we charge on Dr Bushnell is