Appendix I

APPENDIX I.

SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF APOLOGETICS.*

From an Article by Prof. Smith in the "Presbyteiian Quarterly and Princeton Review," July, 1876.

The Italian philosopher, Giovanni Battista Vico, the founder of the modern philosophy of history, and one of the ablest and most comprehensive of the

* Works. Apologetik. Wissenschaftliche Rechtfertigung des Christenthums. Von J. H. A. Ebrard, Dr. Phil, et Theol. 2 Theile. Gittersloh, 1874-5.

System der christlichen Apologetik. Von Franz Delitzsch. Leipzig, 1869.

Christliche Apologetik auf anthropologischer Grundlage. Von Christ. Ed. Baumstark. Erster Band [all published], Frankft. a. M., 1872.

K. H. Sack, Christliche Apologetik. Hamburg, 1829. [Second edition, 1841.]

Von Drey, Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung des Christenthums in seiner Erscheinung. Mainz, 3 Bde. 1844-1847. (Roman Catholic.)

Werner, Geschichte der apologetischen und polemischen Litcratur. 5 Bde. 1861-67. (Roman Catholic.)

Dr. Fr. DUsterdieck, Der Begiiff und die encyclopadische Stellung der Apologetik, two instructive articles in the Jahrbiicher fur deutsche Theologie, 1866. Dr. DUsterdieck is a Consistorial Counsellor in Hannover.

Theod. Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief Transl. by Rev. H. U. Weitbrecht, etc. New York, 1874.

Luthardt, Apologetic Lectures. Three series: On the Fundamental, the Saving, and the Moral Truths. Transl. Edinb.

philosophers of the eighteenth century, develops, in his Principles of the New Science, a theory of civilization embracing what he calls the Law of Returns. Each age runs its appointed course and dies; and after a long period there will be a return of the same process. Though this cannot be called a final law of history (since it neglects too much the law of progress), yet it shows us one of its marked conditions. At different periods, widely sundered, we find similar historic laws, though working under different conditions. The early literature of Christianity was apologetic. The same is true of the present literature of Christianity in almost all its departments. We, like the early church, live in an apologetic era. There is hardly an effective theological work, we might almost say, hardly any great Christian discourse, which does not take on an apologetic stamp.

I.

As has been said, Christian Apologetics is essentially Vindication. It seeks to vindicate, and in vindicating to establish, the value and authority of the Christian faith. It begins, in fact, with the Scriptures, the epistles, and especially the discourses of Paul. In Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and other Christian writers, it received more distinct form, proposing to defend Christianity against all gainsayers. All that belongs to the proof of the Christian religion, and all that belongs to its defense, and all that belongs to its counter-attack against its foes, is a part of Apologetics.

We sometimes think it strange—it almost alarms us—that Christianity should be so desperately assailed; but when we come to think about it, it is the most natural thing in the world. Evil will always attack good; error instinctively assails the truth; sin, by its very nature, is opposite and opposed to holiness. Incarnate Love was crucified between two thieves; and the church cannot expect to be better treated than its Head and Lord—it is surely enough for the servant that he be as his Master. Men who cannot find God in nature cannot find God in the Bible. Men who deny the supernatural must consider all religious faith a delusion. Even a heathen might go on and find God, but a materialist must go back, deny himself, in order to find him. As long as there are sin and unbelief, so long there will be attacks on Christianity; and there must needs be a defense also.

And this, too, is to be considered: that as knowledge grows, as science extends, as the boundaries of investigation and thought are enlarged, man's restless and inquisitive intellect will always be framing new theories about something or other, or about everything. And each infant Hercules must first fight it out with his nurse. Christianity has bred all the new aspirants for omniscience; and the young men and women wish to show that they are wiser and stronger than the authors of their being. This, too, is quite natural. Nor is it all wholly sinful. These sciences and philosophies and criticisms have a right to be; and if Christianity cannot make good its ground against them—where they oppose it—cannot approve itself as wiser, stronger, and better—it must so far forth give place to them. If it cannot appropriate all that is good and true in them (however new it may be), and still preserve its lordly sway, then it is not the wisest and best system for mankind, and will give place to what is better. But it has the prescriptive right of possession and favor; its roots are imbedded in the depths of the broad earth, and wind round among its ribbed rocks, and its branches wave high, overshadowing and fruitful, so that the nations of the earth lodge beneath them. And infidelity has got to dislodge them before it can even begin to build its own temple on and with the ruins. Neither the end of the world nor the end of Christianity seems to be very near yet; and there is still a fair chance that the world may end first.

The necessity and importance, now, of the diligent and specific study of Apologetics is seen in part just here, viz.: in this constant progress of the human race in knowledge and in aspiration; in the advance of the sciences and arts, of culture and civilization; in the successive and comprehensive schemes of philosophic speculation, wherein thoughtful men struggle with the grand problems of nature and of humanity, and try to solve them. What is the world? Whence is the world? For what is the world? Whence is man? What is man? and for what? These questions have stirred men's minds from the dawn of thought—elevating, perplexing, often confounding, yet always impelling them. In the darkness of the labyrinth which we call life, the groping hand has been ever in search of the clue no eye could see—feeling after God, if haply it might find him. What wonder if here many go astray, especially those whose eyes are blinded by reason of sin. What a marvel, that, in spite of every defeat, and of innumerable false lights, the same search is going on from age to age! A new question for every new generation! Yea, a new question for every new soul, struggling in the throes of its higher spiritual birth.

And every new science and every new philosophy —still dealing with the same old, old questions— views them in some new light. And hence the necessity of a renewed, an honest, a patient investigation.

It is true that the questions are ever essentially the same: for God and man and the universe remain essentially the same from age to age; and the questions are ultimately about them and their relations. It is true that the substance of faith and the formal nature of unbelief remain the same, and that sin is sin, and holiness is holiness only, and forever.

But it is not true that the form of the conflict or its weapons remain, or can remain, the same; these change with the changes of age and nations and philosophies, just as much and as surely as do the armaments of war.

Hence, Apologetics as a system must, to a certain extent, be reshaped, in each century, with each new class of opponents, so as to adapt Christianity to each new age, and to exhibit its inherent superiority over all that can be brought against it.

And this subject is forced upon us anew every day, not only in works of learning and philosophy, but also in the current popular literature. Many a popu

lar lecturer owes a part of his success to his covert,
when not open, attacks upon the Christian system.
This shape of evil, this substance of infidelity, often
realizes the great poet's apt description of its pro-
genitor:

"If shape it might be called, which shape had none
Distinguishable in member, joint, or limb;
Or substance might be called, that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either."

And the very fact that infidelity is so subtle and so persuasive, is only another reason for studying it well and understanding its weapons and its arts.

II.

In discussing so wide a subject, there must, of course, be a selection of certain special points. At present we propose to consider briefly the elements of the conflict—some of the different phases through which attack and defense have hitherto run, and a statement of the main topics embraced in a course of Christian Apologetics. And it will be found that there is in its career a kind of logical process—at any rate, such logic as there is in the development of a system of truth through and by antagonisms—which seems to be one of the laws of all terrestrial progress.

The term infidelity, in its most general usage, ✓ covers both skepticism and unbelief; it expresses both the state of doubt and the state of denial, which, though differing in some respects, are often passing over into each other. Doubt tends to denial; it is not always such. The state of doubt in respect to religious realities is different from, though often confounded with, that philosophical disposition which leads to inquiry and investigation; since the latter is chiefly intellectual, while the former is essentially moral, in its nature. When men come to doubt about or deny sin and judgment, the moral law and the moral law-giver, their moral perceptions are already obscured or benumbed. Infidelity consists in the doubt or denial of those moral and spiritual truths upon which moral judgment and personal accountability are dependent. Man is accountable for his belief just so far as any moral truth influences his judgment—just so far as his decisions have respect to sin or holiness.

The Christian faith, having its ground and essence in the spiritual realm, appeals directly to man as a spiritual and religious being, as made for God, and in the image of God. And it especially addresses itself to man's sense of sin and need of redemption. It is, in its very nature, a redemptive system; all that is in Christ, in his relation to us, centres around and in the question of redemption from sin. If sin and punishment are denied, Christ and salvation must consistently be denied. And accordingly, we find in the whole history of Christianity, that here, in the last analysis, the battle has been fought in every believing and unbelieving soul, in all the ages of faith and all the epochs of infidelity. Any system of philosophy, any speculation, any tendency which weakens the sense of sin, also weakens the power of Christianity, and gives to infidelity an easier victory.

Still further, the Christian system is, in its very nature, a supernatural system—above nature in its origin, its processes, and its results; for it is from God, and it works for eternity. It works with and through the seen and temporal, but it works also above and beyond all that greets the eye of sense. It makes the spiritual and the eternal to be the grand, realities, and the tangible and temporal transient and shadowy in comparison. The supernatural element is not to be found—as some would have it—merely, or even chiefly, in the sphere of the will (for such a supernaturalism a mere naturalist need not deny)— but it is essentially found in those divine truths and realities (the most real of all that is) which come from God through a specific revelation, for the elevation and restoration of the lost race of man. And it is this supernatural element of the Christian faith which has always provoked the assaults of unbelief; for man, through the power of sin, is involved in spiritual darkness, as well as made subject to a distempered will.

Here, then, are the essential elements of the conflict of all ages. On the one hand, a supernatural and redeeming system centering in one Incarnate God; on the other hand, man, loving the sin inborn and inbred, and blind to the light which streams out from the heavenly places. The one rests ultimately in God, making the divine wisdom and glory, as they are the source, to be also the end, of all things; the other has its roots in human nature—as it now is— and makes man's needs the great impulse, and man's well-being the great end, of all our striving. The whole alphabet of the one—its Alpha and Omega— is God in Christ; the other uses the whole alphabet to syllable the desires of man, or express the facts of nature. The former echoes with the sharpest emphasis the wail of humanity, groaning under its body of sin and death, haunted by a sense of sin profounder than all our other experience, so that its cry is and must be: Who shall deliver me from the body of this death? The latter feigns that sin is a negation, or a process of education, and repentance and regeneration purposes of man's will alone, and redemption a gradual progress in moral culture. Unbelief has on its side not only all our natural desires, but also their main bias, their partial and limited ends; while faith is obliged to contend against and overcome the natural man, its victory is the overcoming of the world, the flesh, and the devil, and these do not yield without violent throes and conflicts. The one finds in natural reason, in its laws and processes, the limits of all knowledge; the other is satisfied only when, in the darkness of nature, it can feel that it is touching the right hand of God, and that, though itself is blind as to the future, it is led by one who sees the end from the beginning. As Wordsworth—that truly Christian poet—has well sung:

"No ! let this age, high as it may, install
In her esteem the thirst that wrought man's fall.
The universe is infinitely wide,
And conquering Reason, if self-glorified,
Can nowhere move, uncrossed by some new wall
Or gulf of mystery, which thou alone,
Imaginative Faith, canst overleap
In progress toward the fount of Love."

III.

The elements of the contest being thus given, on the one hand in the supernaturalism and redemptive grace of the Christian system; and in the love of sin and the pride of reason on the other; and these being the strongest of contestant agencies, it is not wonderful that we find the history of the church, yea, the very history of mankind, to be a record of this immortal battle in different and progressive stadia.* All the philosophical and religious systems of the ancient world, and every new system—physical and metaphysical—have enlisted in this, as yet ineffectual, warfare against the victorious progress of the Incarnate God. The battles of empires and of races are but mimic mock-fights, in comparison with this intenser conflict between the underlying and mightiest powers that sway the destiny of the race.

First of all, to rehearse these spiritual wars in a rapid outline: there was the subtlety of the Greek speculation, and the pride of the Hebrew legalism; the cross was to the Jew a stumbling-block, and to

* Dr. Werner's History of Apologetics is the fullest general account, though based on Roman Catholic views. The last volume contains a more minute history of the English deistic works than is to be found elsewhere—on some points more complete than Leland. He is a voluminous writer, the author of the History of Roman Catholic Theology in the Munich Geschichte und Wissenschaften, of a History of Arianism, etc. The well-known smaller works of Bolton on the Early Apologists, and Farrar's History of Free Thought, as well as the sketches of the later German Theology, by Hagenbach, Schwarz (4th ed.), and Kahnis (new ed., 1875, in two volumes), must of course be consulted as well as Buckle and kindred authors.

the Greek foolishness; while to them that believed, it was the wisdom and power of God unto everlasting life. Against these foes the Christian literature of the second century became to a large extent apologetic, and as such, both offensive and defensive. Against the Jew the object was to show that Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah, and that the law was not only abolished, but also fulfilled, in the Christian dispensation. Against the heathen there was a wider range of argument to refute their objections, that Christianity was a new religion, and that it was irreligious and immoral (superstitio exitabilis —a detestable superstition), and that it claimed to be, what no heathen believed possible, a religion for all mankind. This last, for example, was one of the strong objections of Celsus; a pagan of the classic world could believe in a universal empire, but not in a universal religion. To meet these and similar objections, we have in the second century the admirable apologies of Justin Martyr, Tatian's Oration against the Greeks, the anonymous epistle to Diognetus (going often under the name of Justin, yet certainly not by him), one of the most admirable remains of early Christian literature, far surpassing the works of the so-called Apostolic Fathers. To these in the same century were added the writings of Athenagoras, of Theophilus of Antioch, and, in the latter part, the great names of Clement of Alexandria, and the fiery and struggling genius of Tertullian, who, in the name of Christ, conquered the Latin tongue,* and made it speak the words of faith.

Hooker speaks of Tertullian as " a sponge steeped in vinegar

But heathenism was not willing to part with its gods without a more desperate struggle. It gathered up all its resources for attack and for defense. In the city of Alexandria, Greek, Roman, and Jew all met; and there was framed out of this confluence an eclectic system, a New Platonic school, the object of which was to show that Christianity lacked the elements needed to secure supremacy and universality. It was a movement wonderfully akin to some tendencies of our own times. Celsus, Porphyry, Proclus, Plotinus, and Julian are the prototypes of some Frenchmen and Germans, not to say Englishmen and Americans of to-day. Celsus, for example, who has been much overrated, because the adamantine Origen replied to him, says, that in the Greek wisdom we have the true logos, the Messiah; that this fair world (kosrnos) is the true Son of God; that Christianity leads to social disorders; and that the only way of keeping up law and nationality is by propping up the pillars of the old temples.* Porphyry, too,

and gall." The remains of Celsus (a.d. 178) have been admirably restored by Dr. Keim of Zurich, in his Celsus' Wahres Wort, 1873, and compared with Lucian and Minucius Felix. The Plea of Athenagoras, admirably edited by Prof. March, of Lafayette College, is included in the Douglass Series of Greek and Latin Writers, vol. v. Of course, the hints here given of the history of Apologetics are meant to be only references.

* On the difference between the early Greek and Latin Apologists, there is a striking statement by the late Dr. Hundeshagen, in an admirable address, as Pro-Rector, at the birthday celebration of the Duke of Baden, in Bonn, Nov. 22, '60: "As the Greeks contended for the assailed cause of Christianity on rational grounds, with appeals to Socrates, Plato, and other coryphaei of philosophy, so did the Latins on grounds of right and justice, and with citations from the objects, that the Christian faith interrupted the historical continuity, and introduced barbarism. Finding how the personal power of Christ was silently and surely working {e.g., Origen says, that He, unlike others, represents the sum and perfection of all the virtues), these pagan assailants looked about for an ideal man to set up in his stead, and brought forth Pythagoras, to whom distance lent enchantment; and Apollonius of Tyana, the juggling impostor, the best that heathenism could find, and quite as good as some of the objects of the fashionable worship of genius in these later days. Then, at last in Julian, the apostate, Julian, the emperor, the philosopher, and the priest, we have the union of all the resources of the ancient world against the growing forces of Christianity: the state against the church, philosophy against faith, the old culture against the new; the host of stars of the polytheistic canopy of night, in contrast and contest with the rising sun of the new and better day. Julian, with the zeal of a fanatic, attempted to revive the old pagan enthusiasm, representing heathenism as world-historical, and Chris

Roman laws. With the former, the salient thought held up against opponents is always the evidence for the truth of Christian doctrine; the latter make prominent the bearings of Christianity upon the injured rights of the individual and of society. 'All the early Latin apologists were advocati, versed in law. Tertullian, Cyprian, Augustine, and Ambrose, the former Proconsul of Aemilia and Liguria, had all of them been Roman Causidici, and teachers of legal eloquence; they were all men who received their special mental, as well as their general, character, not from the divisive and uncertain philosophy of the Greeks, but from a solid and 6rm training in the service of the Roman State.'"

tianity as a conventicle and a sect; and, if truth is to be settled by mere tradition and numbers, he undoubtedly had the right of it. Christianity, too, he said, was but a mixture of Judaism and heathenism, retaining their worst elements; for example, taking from Judaism what Julian calls its atheism (adeorr??), that is, its belief in one God; and also that adventurous faith which leaps the gulf between the finite and the infinite. But in vain did Julian prostitute all the power of the State to help the debased deities; in vain did he borrow from Christianity some of its benevolent institutions, and engraft them upon heathenism; in vain did he himself offer sacrifices as the Pontifex Maximus, and preach, and lead even an austere life; flames and an earthquake kept him from building the temple of Jerusalem, whereby he attempted to disprove the prophetic word; and he himself, with his expiring breath upon the plains of Persia, could only say, according to the tradition: "Thou has conquered, O Galilean!" The great victory over the whole external civilization, as well as over the speculations, of the ancient Greek and Roman world was now gained; and the cross inscribed upon the labarum of Constantine was the symbol of its victory; the cross, which meant only ignominy and torture, penetrated all literature and all history, and entered into every loving and believing heart, as the symbol of divine suffering and victorious love. And the greatness and completeness of the victory is seen in the simple fact, that for more than a thousand years the whole literature of the church was chiefly occupied with the shaping and systematizing of doctrines, and had but little to do with the avowed foes of Christian thought and the Christian faith. Augustine wrote his De Civitate Dei on the highest ground which human thought (outside the inspired prophecies) had yet reached as to the problem of human history; and Aquinas summed up the controversy in his work De Vera Catholica Fide adversus Gentiles, which alone would have made his name immortal, had he not himself eclipsed it by his Summa—undoubtedly one of the master works of theological authorship. On the eve of the Reformation, Boccaccio, indeed, had satirized the faith, and Macchiavelli wrote upon the antinational tendencies of the Christian system. Here and there was one who uttered some dissent on minor points; but the whole tone of thought and belief was on the side of the church. And herein was a part of the secret of the power of Rome—the mystical Babylon. The papacy became despotic, corrupt, and anti-Christian; the reform, prepared for during more than a century, broke out simultaneously in all parts of Europe; and with the reform came a spirit of free action in all departments of life, and free inquiry in respect to the truths of the faith. The highest aim and success (so far as it went) of the mediaeval church and theology, was to combine (in the realistic theory) the traditional dogmas of the church with the Greek, especially the Aristotelian philosophy: for Scholasticism is the marriage of the Aristotelian philosophy with the Christian dogma (as determined by consent and councils). The Reformation consisted, intellectually and spiritually, in the denial of the premises, viz., in the position, that the dogmas of councils are not divine and immutable, and that the metaphysics (not so much the logic) of Aristotle does not contain all ultimate truth in its best form.

The essence of the skeptical spirit, which, after the Reformation had been adjusted in its political and religious relations, manifested itself in the different countries of Europe, may perhaps be said, in the most general and abstract formula of statement, to consist in exalting the subjective, the individual reason and will, against the objective, as found in the faith and the Scriptures of the church. The earth was made the centre, and the sun supposed to revolve around it—reversing the law of astronomy. The mediaeval church feigned that itself was theocentric; the extreme reaction of the Reformation was anthropocentric—man's need and destiny being the one thing needful. The shape that this tendency has taken in the latest times is virtually geocentric— making this world and its supposed laws to determine destiny. The philosophic method of the latter tendency is called inductive—a powerful and sufficient method in its own sphere, but now assuming to govern the premises, as well as the mode, of inference. Every method presupposes certain facts, and can only dictate the inferences. It cannot limit either the facts of nature, or the phenomena of consciousness.

Bacon and Descartes, though both of them believed in the Christian faith, are put at the head of the two great and opposite tendencies in which infidelity has shown itself since the Reformation, viz., the materialistic and the rationalistic or transcendental, in the bad sense of these words. But neither Bacon nor Descartes contemplated such results from their systems. Especially is it only by taking the lesser half of the Baconian system, that infidelity gains any countenance from him. He himself says, " that it is most certain, and approved by experience, that while light gusts may move men to Atheism, yet fuller draughts bring men back to religion," and in a striking passage in the New Organon, he says: "Only let mankind regain their rights over nature, assigned to them by the gift of God; and that power obtained, its exercise will be governed by right, reason, and true religion." It was only when his system was transferred to another soil, and brought under the formulas of infidelity, that it came to nourish skepticism.

The course of modern infidelity has been curiously determined by the comparative freedom of the different nations, and it has come to its height—it is well worthy of being carefully noted—not in those countries where political thought and speech are freest, but where they have been most restricted. \ Deism, Atheism, Pantheism are the three main forms 'represented respectively by England, France, and ■ Germany. The movement began in England with * Herbart, Hobbes, Collins, Tindal, Chubb, and Mor'gan, in the 16th and 17th centuries (including Toland, who, however, held to a kind of material pantheism). And as far as the main and fundamental position of these free-thinkers is concerned, meeting them on their own grounds, fairly and fully, English Christianity showed itself fully equal to the task, as is seen in the works of Baxter, Cud worth, S. Clarke, Waterland, Leland, and especially the immortal Analogy of Bishop Butler.*

This same movement, transferred to Germany, at first attained the form known by the name of rationalism, criticising the historic records of the faith, and setting up natural reason and ethics as the ultimate test and source of truth. Philosophic rationalism received its most consistent form through the criticism of Kant; though he himself, with all his speculative insight, confessed the radical evil of human nature and a firm faith in the Being of God.

In France the infidel movement was neither critical nor rationalistic—it became materialistic and revolutionary. The French monarchy had become a despotism; the banishment and slaughter of the Huguenots had decimated the moral power of the nation ; a corrupt and persecuting Romanism v/as all the faith recognized. Rousseau pleaded for the rights and sympathies of nature; Voltaire, though retaining faith in a God, ridiculed the Scriptures on the basis of a philosophic portative. D'Holbach, Diderot, D'Alembert, preached atheism in the Encyclopddie—(Diderot declaring that the height of

* The great religious movement in England, under Whitfield and Wesley, in the last part of the century, completely broke the popularity of this deistic movement. Dr. Gillett's Godin Human Thought, 2 vols., N. Y., Scribner Armstrong & Co., 1874, gives a comprehensive and able account of the whole English controversy, and of the services of Bishop Butler.

religion was to have none at all): and the result was reached in the chaos, conflicts, and woes of the French Revolution, from which that fated land only recovered by accepting an imperial despotism and restoring the Catholic clergy with new pomp; so that now ultramontane principles have the ascendancy in the successors of Bossuet and the old Catholic bishops, who contended so manfully for the Gallican liberties.

But it was reserved for Germany, in some of its more recent forms of philosophy and theology, to combine together all the phases and all the resources of infidelity, in the most learned, acute, and comprehensive assaults ever made upon the Christian faith —so that any other current infidelity in any other part of the world is but a feeble echo, so far as learning and speculation go, of what is found in these Teutonic schemes—while, at the same time, it is true, that the same land has furnished the most elaborate and thorough replies to the criticisms and hypotheses of those assailants of our faith. There is a striking resemblance in many points between the character of the attack on Christianity in this last form of it, and that which it assumed under the influence of the New-Platonic philosophy in ancient times—the same comprehensiveness of method and combination of weapons, and the same attempt to form a complete system for man by an eclectic process; but yet the Germans show more thoroughness and destructiveness in both the historical and philosophical methods of conducting the argument, for infidelity must grow in skill to compete with a Christianity which has been growing in power for 1800 years.

Ever since the time of Leibnitz, the German philosophic movement has tended toward the construction of a universal system. The influence of Spinoza, with his pantheistic theory of one substance, and his demonstrative method applied to metaphysics, also had a very great influence, especially in the later German schools. Kant initiated a powerful tendency by his Criticism of the Pure Reason (directed in part against Hume's skepticism), and by his Criticism of the Practical Reason (conscience), on which he grounded his severely ethical and strongly theistic creed. He is the real philosophical father of strict ethical rationalism—that is, of the system which puts the prescripts of reason above the written word. At the same time, there was a host of scholars who were applying historical and philological criticism to the interpretation of Scripture in a way to undermine its infallible authority. Fichte followed Kant, retaining, however, chiefly his idealism in a subjective sense; he endeavored, in his earlier writings, to deduce the universe from the Ego, and substituted the moral order of the universe for God. Schelling, in his youthful enthusiasm, when magnetism was disclosing its wonders, announced, as a prophet, the theory of the identity of opposites, of the ideal and the real, with pure intellectual vision descrying one common essence with the two poles, viz.: the spiritual and the material; in his later system, the Philosophy of Mythology, he plants himself upon more distinctive theistic and Christian ground. Hegel, with his more thorough and logical method, identified thought and being, and made the vast attempt of a logical development of the universe from pure being by an inherent law, the law of negation, confounding the movement of real being with the processes of logic. He makes spirit to be ultimate. By the law of negation, spirit is transformed into nature, and then comes back to itself in humanity; God becomes conscious in man. This is Hegel's theory, as expounded by the so-called left wing, of which Strauss is the most signal representative. Hegel himself, and many of his followers of the right wing, claim that his system is to be understood only as a philosophy of the Christian faith ; that Hegelianism gives us, in the form of philosophy, the same fundamental truths which Christianity gives in the form of creeds. The later German tendencies are a reaction against such an abstract idealism, and, as developed by Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann, they avow pessimism as their creed, and make annihilation to be the chief boon for the race. Not to speak more particularly of the contemporaneous movements in France and England, we can now only refer to the alliance, in these three countries, of Pantheism and Materialism, in their most developed forms, and in a common attack upon the Christian creed and church.

This rapid historic sketch may suffice to show, that in all the periods of this great conflict, there has been a difference in the character, both of the assault and the defense. At first it was Christianity against Polytheism, Judaism, and the wisdom of the ancient schools. And here Christianity was vindicated as a positive revelation; and, as a result of the conflict, the old Catholic church ruled in the East and the West. In the mediaeval period, there was not only the subjugation of Northern Europe, but also the consolidation of the Christian system in the scholastic theology and the realistic philosophy. The Christian theory governed the world of thought and kept it in bonds. In the next stadium we have the separation of these elements, and the conflict of Christianity with all the forms of human research and speculation. It has come into conflict with deism, with rationalism in its various modes, with atheism and with pantheism; and now it is contending with atheism and pantheism allied. And as the form of the conflict has changed, so has' the mode of the defense. The Analogy of Bishop Butler, admirable as it is for its specific ends, does not meet the questions raised by Hegel and Baur, by Darwin and Spencer.