2. Nor shall we find less suggestive of doubt and alarm the second bearing of this system, viz., that on the Christian scheme, regarded as the ultimate and clearest expression of the highest wisdom,—as that which anticipates, includes, and sums up, not only the profoundest truths grasped by the finite intellect, but also that infinite and immutable truth, which, under God, energises into life all the moral relations of humanity. Just this, so far as it can be gathered up in a single definition, is Christianity. And how, we ask, does this philosophy, and M. Cousin in particular, treat this pretension? He professes much on this point; he often uses words savouring of a genuine reverence. He tells, with apparent unction, how he was born in Christianity, and how he respects its teachings. He speaks of it as a revelation, an advance in spiritual knowledge, a divine life. But the value of his declarations depends upon the manner in which he treats it. Such generalities are too vague: they are too often met with on the pages of the merest infidels to be of much consequence in themselves. Left to our own inferences from what he omits to say, as well as from what he actually says, we are forced to believe that he means little or nothing by such language; and that, in common with the more respectful rationalists of the day, who pity the vulgar apprehension of the masses, and mourn the necessity it forces on them to use the old terminology on sacred themes, he employs the ancient and honoured words, Christianity, Revelation, &c., in the esoteric and eclectically expansive sense of the new school of thought.

It were ungracious, perhaps, to call our author a rationalist, in the face of his strong and frequent declarations of attachment to the "Christian symbol and mysteries." But there are statements and avowals, there is a certain manner and tone in these lectures, not to go farther, which leave us no alternative. From beginning to end, there is not a single word about any distinctive principle of our holy faith. The Son of God himself is mentioned only in a historical way, and his doctrine is alluded to only as an advance in the spiritual knowledge of mankind. Is the church spoken of?-it is merely as a formative element of civilization, or as a barrier, in past ages, to the march of free thought. Of progress and development much is said; nay, every thing is said, but that they have their alpha and omega in terms set by revelation, and that they will be consummated in some future era of glory only as they go on in contact with a supernatural and divine order. It is in points like these that we discover in M. Cousin an affinity, hardly unconscious to himself, with a class of thinkers who name the written Scriptures of God, but reverence more the utterances of their own reason; who speak of Christ, and

mean only the living symbol of a divine idea; of his mystical body, and mean only a moral fellowship based on a common sympathy; of a priesthood, and mean only those gifted souls scattered along the ages, who, by rare capacities of thought and insight, reflect and body forth the higher inspirations of collective humanity.

Nor is it only in what our author has omitted to say, as the exponent of a new philosophy, but yet more in what he has said, that we discover this affinity. It might be expected that an ardent devotee of philosophy would use strong language about the value and elevation of his pursuits. We are disposed, for this reason, to make abatements from M. Cousin's statements. But there are some, and those on the most vital points, so often and earnestly reiterated under every variety of phrase, that we are forbidden even this. Speaking of Christianity as compared with philosophy, he says:-"Philosophy is the worship of ideas; it is the last victory of thought over every foreign form and element; it is the highest degree of liberty. Industry was already an enfranchisement from nature; the state a still greater one; art, a new progress; religion, a progress still more sublime; philosophy is the last enfranchisement, the last progress of thought." tional form is necessarily the last of all." "After having thus proclaimed the supremacy of philosophy," &c. "Philosophy raises faith gently from the twilight of the symbol to the full light of pure thought." He admits, indeed, that "all truths are deposited in the sacred symbols of religion;" but he asks, "Can thought stop with symbols?" Philosophy is among the people in the sincere, profound, admirable form of religion and worship. Christianity is the philosophy of the people." "Happy in seeing the masses nearly all in the arms of Christianity, it is contented to offer its hand to Christianity and to aid it in ascending to a higher elevation."

66

"The ra

Such, so far as they bear on the faith, are the tone and temper of these volumes. From only one or two such phrases we should hesitate to draw the inference forced upon us, but they are only specimen ones taken from various pages of the work. And now, what else are these inferences than that philosophy is commensurate with, nay, superior to religion— that it not only accounts for and justifies it, but measures it, contains it; that reflection, which is the form of rational activity, is higher, calmer, surer than faith, whose ground is in a certain spiritual enthusiasm," or desire; that the form of truth, cognisable by the intellect, is nobler, more comprehensive, than the form of truth cognisable by that holy function of the soul, which, through the gift of God's Spirit, * See Lectures I and II. passim. Vol. i.

NO. VI.

2 T

is "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen;"-that man, the philosopher, stands on higher ground than man the Christian;-that man, developing himself under the full swing of the powers of reason, and dwelling in the region of "pure thought," is greater than man unfolding himself under the shapings of a divine order, moving in the orbit of spiritual insight, and becoming "as a little child" in docility, that he may learn that "wisdom" which God has "ordained" to flow from "the mouths of babes and sucklings;" -and, finally, that "philosophy, living among the people in the form of worship and religion," and "Christianity being the philosophy of the masses," the two may be regarded as interchangeable and coincident by those who, purged of grosser apprehensions, have been lifted by the workings of "the inspired reason" into the last enfranchisement and progress of thought?

Such inferences (and that they are legitimately deduced from M. Cousin's Eclecticism we think will be granted) may be trusted to make their own impressions, and to supply their own antidote to those among us who have surrendered themselves to his guidance, and floated the precious freight of which God has made them vessels of honour unto sanctification into this harbour, as a place of refuge from the storm, and of repose amid the shattering antagonisms between the claims of God's revelation and the assumed prerogatives of

human reason.

From this we turn to note the air of superiority and condescension affected by this system. This it has, in common with all the rationalism and intellectual infidelity of the day. Christianity has a life within it, and an oaken fibre around it, which gather vigour and tenacity from violent assault and open abuse. As a system so shaped as by the weak things to confound the things that are mighty, and to win peace through conflict, it can well endure the calumnies of the reviler, and the tortures of an armed and overwhelming foe. It feels them as water about its roots. The hallowed vine it enwraps sends forth its choicest blossoming, and spreads over the fallen its softest shade, when rocked by the tempest and riven by the lightning. It may weep over its martyrs, but into its own mighty heart flows back, only to reproduce a grander inspiration and a calmer march, the blood which they have shed. But patient as it may be under outrage and insult; silent as it may be when a carnal lust or a secular hate is driving the knife through its members; nobly as it may suffer, and little as it may be disposed to vaunt its pretensions, there is one kind of affront which it cannot, will not, bear; and that is just what this new creed offers, viz., the conde

scending, patronising flatteries of a human philosophy. The Word made flesh, and the teachings He uttered under the thorn, and the spear, and the other side the grave, to be raised by any process of man from "the twilight of the symbol to the full light of pure thought!" that "mystery of godliness," on whose fulness the ages waited, -that doctrine of love, before whose height, and depth, and amazing grandeur, the rapt vision of holy Paul sunk in blindness, to be "taken by the hand," and aided in its "ascent to a higher elevation," by a philosophy which, from out infinite confusions and tedious travails, has hardly staggered into a temporary popularity! Such is the modest offer of Eclecticism. What else is this than the lighted torch going forth to chide the obscurities of a noonday sun; or the miserable æronaut, whose audacity is the condition of successful ballooning, stepping forth from his paper car to help the stars along their eternal pathway!

"Taken by the hand and gently aided," welcomed as the menial is welcomed by the patron! Religion, or rather the religious symbol, has aforetime had this service done for it by philosophy. It is an old offer of civility; and there is old experience of its result when accepted, or even for a moment courted. Paganism itself has a story to tell. Philosophy in the guise of Plato's golden livery, but in the mincing gait and soft graces of the scepticism of Aristippus, undertook to justify to the popular apprehension, and to lead to a higher elevation, the Greek religious symbol; and soon it was hearsed and carried out for burial, a despised and lifeless thing. And so was it with the Roman symbol. It may be said, little harm was done. A plank seen on the shore, it is considered of small matter to throw away; but what shall measure its value to the wrecked and drowning man? They had some light not of earth, though it was only the wandering and splintered beam of a lost revelation; and it was just this that "pure thought" made as darkness visible. And the early ages of our own divine faith, what are they but so many records of what it cost God's servants to free it from this gentle patronage and proffered aid of human reason! The corruptions of mediæval religion were not more the result of human pride acting through the usurpations of a secular ambition, than of human pride seeking to extend unduly the reach of dialectical science, which was the philosophy of that period. The twofold Protestant struggle of the Reformation witnessed to this double process of disturbance in the church. So likewise is it now. The ages change, they bear away their freight of decayed empires; but the truth of God and the tendencies of man's nature remain. And if philosophy, especially in its later guise, do not again prove the fruitful source of ruin to the Christian faith,

it will be, not because the foe has altered in nature or spirit, but because God's own sentry ceases not, day nor night, to watch and to walk round about Zion. Its hidden and dissolving fires are near us; this day they roll beneath the orthodoxy of communions, who boast much of having planted together the school-house and the church. They have already ploughed deep their furrows over the American mind, and left their track to be traced by the ashes of spiritual death.

On the third and last bearing of this system, viz., that on the true type of human greatness, we have only space for a word, and with this we must for the present leave it. We call that the true type which God has revealed to us as true, and of which it is enough to say, that it begins and ends in humility, in dependence on a power outside the individual soul. But the type held up by this creed, as the goal after which mortals are to strive, begins and ends in pride and selfexaltation. It is a greatness, not of the soul that finds its rest, its home, and its joy in fellowship with Him who is the Way, the Truth, the Life; but of

"The soul that on itself retires for strength "—

of the soul that stares gropingly into the unfathomable depths, and calls the limit of its own vision the bounds of the universe, that essays to comprehend and explain all, and makes the bounds of its own thought the measure of all life and being.

Verily, the old fables of Ixion on the wheel, and of Sisyphus toiling on the mountain side, are not without a meaning for Modern Philosophy.

ART. IV.—1. A History of the Church of Russia. By A. N. MOURAVIEFF, Chamberlain to his Imperial Majesty, and Under-Procurator of the Most Holy Governing Synod, St Petersburgh. 1838. Translated by the Rev. R. W. BLACKMORE, formerly Chaplain in Cronstadt, now Rector of Donhead, St Mary, Diocese of Sarum. Oxford: 1842. 2. Biblical Researches and Travels in Russia; including a Tour in the Crimea and the Passage of the Caucasus. By Rev. Dr HENDERSON. London: 1826.

3. The Present State of the Greek Church in Russia; or, a Summary of Christian Divinity. By PLATON, late Metropolitan of Moscow, with a Preliminary Memoir on the Ecclesiastical Establishment in Russia, and an Appendix on the Sects. By ROBERT PINKERTON. Edinburgh:

1814.