The Mercersburg Theology
Art. IV.- The Mercersburg Review. Mercersburg, Pa. May, 1850.
In his number for May, the Mercersburg Reviewer attempts to defend his doctrine from the charges we preferred against it in our Review for April last. He asserts that the pantheistic consequences we drew from his premises are not warranted, and repeats his main objection to what he improperly, and in very bad taste, terms Romanism, that is, Catholicity.
We expected as much ; for we did not flatter ourselves^that he would at once submit to the Church, and we did not doubt his sincere intention to be a Christian, which, of course, he could not be, if his doctrine involved the consequences we alleged. But the simple denial of those consequences is not enough ; he must show that he can so interpret his doctrine as to escape them, and that, when he so interprets it, he is able to distinguish it from, and oppose it to, Catholic faith and theology. He himself, in his January number, reduced the whole controversy between the Church and all classes of her opponents to the question between her and his specific form of Protestantism, and virtually conceded, that, if his specific form of Protestantism is untenable, her claims as the infallible Church of God, out of which there is no salvation, must be admitted. Since the presumption is always in favor of the Church, as prior occupant, his business was to prove his doctrine, and to prove it, not only in so far as coincident with hers, but in so far as distinguished from and opposed to hers. If he has not done this, he has done nothing to his purpose, and we are free, by his own concession, to conclude the Church against him.
In our reply to the Reviewer, as our readers will remember, we analyzed his doctrine, and found that it teaches, among other things, - 1. The supernatural object of faith is in the subject, not out of it ; 2. The supernatural does not wholly transcend the natural ; and, 3. Faith is the immediate apprehension of the truth of the matter believed. If he holds these principles, we contended, - 1. He necessarily denies the object of faith, for whatever is in the subject, not out of it, is subject, not object, and therefore he denies faith itself ; for where there is no object to be believed, there can be no act of believing. 2. He denies the proper supernatural, and therefore Christianiiy as a supernatural revelation, and then Christianity itself; for it is a contradiction in terms to call that supernatural which does not wholly transcend the sphere of the natural. And 3. He denies faith itself, again, by confounding faith with science ; for the immediate apprehension of the truth of the object or intrinsic truth of a proposition is knowledge, not faith. The three principles, or rather the first two, for he is silent as to the last, the Reviewer reaffirms in his answer ; but he denies the consequences we drew from them. He might, as it seems to us, just as well deny that two and two are four.
The reasoning by which the Reviewer attempts to escape these fatal consequences is to us not very clear, or easy to comprehend. The author has apparently a great aversion to clear, distinct, and definite statements, and follows a species of logic which is more convenient than conclusive, and which allows him to conclude any proposition he chooses, if he only contrives to assert somewhere, on some subject, something which is not false. But we shall do our best to understand him, and to reply fairly and pertinently to his real thought.
The first charge against the Reviewer is, that, by placing the object in the subject, and denying it to be real, save as concreted " in the thinking and willing of single minds," as he expresses himself, he denies the object itself, because if in the subject, it is not object at all. To this he replies, " We still say, however, that there is no truth or law in the icorld of mind under a purely objective form." (p. 317.) In the world of mind, that is, in private thought and will, as existing in them, agreed ; but that is a mere truism, and not the question. The question is, Do you, or do you not, admit any purely objective reality, any object really existing, a parte rei, independent of our thinking and willing ? " Intelligence and will are needed to make room for such existence, and to bring it actually to pass." (Ibid.) Room for its existence " in the world of mind," that is, in intelligence and will, certainly ; for that is a truism again, but not ad rem. Are human intelligence and will needed to make room for the existence of truth, as reality, as something existing in re ? " Truth exists, as truth, only by being known. Blot out all knowledge, all consciousness, all thought, and you blot out all truth at the same time. Intelligence is the light in which it reveals itself, the very form in which it becomes real." (Ibid.) Real as a fact of intelligence ? Agreed, again ; but that is not to the purpose, and is also a mere truism, for it is only saying that what is not known is not known. But does truth as an objective reality exist only by being known, or has it no existence a parte m, till it is a fact of human intelligence? Your meaning, if meaning you have, or if you are saying any thing to the purpose, is, that it does not so exist. Then you concede that you hold the principle, that the object is in the subject, not out of it ; therefore is subject, not object, as we have alleged. Pray, tell us, then, if truth is unreal, a pure abstraction, while unknown, how it can be an object of knowledge at all, or how there can be an act of knowledge where there is no cognizable or intelligible object; that is, how there can be any truth at all.
" God is at once object and subject, in the most universal sense. He is the absolute union of both." (p. 318.) You must mean by this either that God is at once the human subject- the only subject in question-and its object; or that he is, in regard to himself, at once subject and object, that is, the adequate object of his own intellect. If you mean the former, you are a pantheist ; if the latter, it is true, but not to the purpose. By subject in this controversy, the Reviewer very well knows, unless he is wholly ignorant of modern philosophy, is meant the human soul, the thinking and willing subject we ourselves are, and by object, that which is distinguished from it. Subject and object in God are identical, for he is actus purissimus, most pure act. But because they are identical in him, do you say therefore they are identical in us? Whence does this follow ? Are we God, and like him the adequate object of our own intellect? " And so, then, in the constitution of the universe under God, object and subject can never fall absolutely asunder, but are required always to go together as ]oint factors in the determination of all proper reality in the world." (Ibid.) If this is at all to the purpose, it asserts that, in like manner as subject and object are one in God, so are they in us. This confirms our assertion that the Reviewer places the object in the subject, or identifies them. But if so, then we are God, and the Reviewer unwittingly reasserts the very autotheism he disclaims,-evident also from the further fact that he makes all the "proper reality in the world" the result of the joint operations of subject and object. But here is another difficulty. Reality is the result of their action as joint factors. Then they, regarded in themselves, are not real; then they are mere abstractions, mere possibilities ; then they are incapable of action, and nothing can result from them ; then there can be no reality, and nullism, which we before charged upon the Reviewer's doctrine, follows as a necessary consequence. Will the Reviewer explain to us how his reasoning obviates the consequences we have before drawn from his premises ?
But the Reviewer adds, that he does not mean to understand his doctrine in such sense as to subordinate truth and law to the power of individual thought and will, as though truth and law might be considered the product of men themselves. Pray, then, what is the meaning of all you have been saying, and of your objection to us, that we place the object out of the subject, and hold it to be independent of us ? " Men make neither truth nor law." Indeed! And yet you accuse us of heresy, because we hold truth exists a parte rei, and is proposed objectively to our apprehension, and because we do not recognize man's autonomy in constituting the law which he is morally bound to obey! Have you not said that " truth exists, as truth," that is, as a reality, " only by being known" ? Have you not said that "the law is brought to pass, comes to its actualization in the world, only in the form of being apprehended and willed by its subjects,"- that u mind thus by its very constitution is required to be autonomic, self-legislative, a true fountain and source of the laio itself" -and that " only as the law is willed, freely embraced, affirmed, constituted, by the created intelligence it is ordained to rule, so as to be at the same time the product of this, its own act virtually and deed, can there be any morality or religion "? (p. 316.) Here is what you say, and nothing you say inconsistent with this can be entertained. If you choose to contradict yourself, that is not our business.
" Men," says the Reviewer, " make neither truth nor law. These have an absolute necessity beyond their will, and underlie the very order from which they spring. But still truth and law actualize themselves in the world, become concrete, and thus real for men,-only as they are incorporated with their life and pass over in this way from a purely objective character to a character which is at the same time subjective and individual." (Ibid.) Concede all this, which is no more than every autothe-ist or pantheist says, it amounts to nothing. The Reviewer supposes it is possible to assert an objective world independent of our thinking and willing, and yet to maintain that this objective world, considered apart from our thinking and willing, is only a pure abstraction, and is real only as we think and will it, or, what is the same thing, as it is concreted " in the thinking and willing of single minds." But such an objective world is no real world at all,- has no existence a parle rei, and is at best only a mode or affection of the subject; for we never cease to repeat to him,- and we wish we could induce him to take notice of what we say, - that a pure abstraction is a sheer nullity. The Reviewer is misled by his German metaphysics, which teach him that the form of the object in both the intellectual world and the moral is supplied by the subject. He understands well enough, what we were not aware any body denied, that, in order to a fact of human life, subject and object must in some way come together, - that there must be a real mediation between them ; but he supposes - and here is his primal error - that the mediation must come from the side of the subject, and not from the side of the object, and hence he concludes, that, if the object be conceived as out of the subject and independent of it, existing really, or a parte rei, there can be no real mediation between them, - that they can never come really together; for the subject obviously can never go out of itself. But to assume either that the form of the object is supplied by the subject, or that it is the subject that mediates between the subject and object, is the denial of all reality out of the subject, or distinguishable from it, and the assertion of pure autotheism, pantheism, or nullism, whichever term you choose. The true solution of the difficulty is not to be found in Cartesianism or Kantianism, either as modified, on the one hand, by Fichte, or, on the other, by Schelling and Hegel. The form of the object is itself objective, and the principle that mediates between subject and object is not the intelligence of the subject, but the intelligibility of the object. We see intellectually the object, because it is a parte rei, and because it is intelligible, not by us, but to us. Let the Reviewer understand this, and he will be surprised at the doctrine he has been contending for.
But we have not done with this part of the subject yet.
From the Reviewer's doctrine with regard to subject and object we drew the inference that his general doctrine is pantheistic. We never supposed for a moment that he regarded himself as a pantheist, but we felt certain that his whole scheme was pantheistic at bottom, as is all modern German thought, no matter of what philosophical or Protestant school. The Reviewer says he is no pantheist, and formally disavows the pantheistic consequences we charged upon him. This is all very well, but pantheism seems to us to lurk in the very phraseology in which he disavows it. Thus, in a passage we have just quoted:-¦" Men make neither truth nor law. These have an absolute necessity beyond their will, and underlie the whole order of existence from which they spring." Here the assertion is not that these have a real existence beyond the human will, but simply a necessity. This necessity of truth and law is perhaps extra-human, but the truth and law themselves are not; for we are told immediately that " they actualize themselves in the world, become concrete, and thus real for men," only as they become "subjective and individual." They actualize themselves, and become real. This can only mean that the necessity develops or pushes itself out in individual thinking and willing as truth and law, which is a purely pantheistic conception, or, if you please, atheistic, resolving God into necessity, and making him operate, not as free will, but as necessary law or force.
We are aware that the Reviewer denies this, and asserts that God is distinct from the world, and its free cause ; but every pantheist says as much, and the Reviewer's conception of freedom is the Calvinistic conception, - what he calls " free necessity,"- that is to say, no proper freedom at all. The freedom with which God causes creation is only the freedom with which he causes his own being. " God," he says (p. 314), " is the free cause of his own being ; and much more then of all his works." The a fortiori is inadmissible, unless there is a parity between the sense in which God is the free cause of his own being, and that in which he is the free cause of his works. He is the free cause, or the cause at all, of his own being, only in the sense that he depends for his being on nothing beyond himself, exterior to, or distinguishable from himself, and therefore is the free cause of the universe only in the sense that nothing distinguishable from himself impels, compels, or moves him to produce it. But as in reality he is not the cause of his own being, since he is necessary being, and therefore uncaused, so the universe is uncaused, and springs forth necessarily from the inherent necessity of the Divine nature, which we need not tell the Reviewer is pure Spinozism.
The Reviewer tells us he is no pantheist, but to prove that his doctrine is pantheistic, or worse, we need only examine " the dualism or abstract deism" which he condemns as the error immediately opposed to the error of pantheism. The essence of pantheism is in the denial of the contingency of the universe, or its proper creation, and in the assertion of the substantial identity of God and the world. The error opposed to the error of pantheism, says the Reviewer, is abstract deism. Well, what, according to him, is this abstract deism ?
" Abstract deism," he says," as distinguished from the true theism of Christianity, it is hardly necessary to say, is not in and of itself an exclusion absolutely of God from the world. It prides itself rather in being an acknowledgment of God, under the character of the great first cause and end of all things. In this view, however, he is taken to be always out of the world, beyond it, over and above it, and in no sense truly immanent in its constitution and life. His relation to the world is that of a mechanician to a machine. It is the product of his mind and hand ; it works according to his will; it goes forward under the superintendence of his eye ; while he remains himself, whether near at hand or afar off, wholly on the outside of it, abstract and independent altogether as another order of being." -p. 311.
Now let us examine this, and see what he must maintain who denies it. It takes God " to be always out of the world, beyond it, over and above it, and in no sense truly immanent in its constitution and life." But do you deny that God is out of the world, beyond, over, and above it ? Then you deny the extra-mundane Divinity, which is itself pantheism, if not atheism ; and how, if not out, beyond, over, and above the world, do you distinguish him, as to his substance, from the world ? "In no sense truly immanent in its constitution and life." You cannot say this, because you have begun by conceding that abstract deism does not assert the absolute exclusion of God from the world ; then it can hold, and does hold, him to be in some sense immanent in it. " It is the product of his mind and hand." Do you deny this ? Then you deny creation. " It works according to his will." Deny this, and you deny that God is the Supreme Governor of the universe. " It goes forward under the superintendence of his eye." Do you maintain that it is not so ? Then you reject Divine Providence. " While he remains himself wholly on the outside of it." This is ambiguous, and may mean outside under the relation of space, or outside in the sense of distinction from. In the former sense, the assertion is gratuitous; no theologian holds God to be outside of the world in that sense, for every one holds that he dwells, not in space, but in immensity. Do you deny that he is outside of the world in the second sense, outside inasmuch as he is distinguished from it ? Then you identify him with it. "Abstract and independent altogether." Abstract we will pass over, for none but men of the author's school hold God, as distinguished from the world, as a pure abstraction. Do you deny, then, that God is " independent altogether " of the world ? If you do, you make him dependent on it, and deny his independent existence, and therefore deny him to be God. " As another order of being." God is increate, and the world is created ; he is necessary, and it is contingent. Do not necessary and contingent, increate and created, constitute two orders ? Do they not belong to two distinct categories ? Deny it, assert that God and the world belong to the same category, to the same order, and you identify them, and make a formal confession of pantheism. Now, supposing the Reviewer to write with any definite notions of what he writes, he does make all of the denials we here enumerate, and then, unless we assume that of contraries both may be true, he undeniably maintains atheistic, pantheistic, and nullis-tic doctrines, whether he knows it or not.
We accused the Reviewer of giving a pantheistic interpretation to the mystery of the Holy Incarnation. In reference to this he says, - " Christ, we are told, is the author of the new creation, but no part of it in his own person ; just as he is the old creation, only mediante actu creativo, by the act of creating it, [we said, in that he creates it,] and in no more intimate way. To make him the real fountain of Christianity itself, is gravely represented as a full identification of his life with that of his people, and runs, we are told, into palpable pantheism." (p. 309.) The Reviewer disdains minute accuracy, and takes the liberty to reproduce our statements, not as we made them, but as best suits his own convenience. We admit that, in one sense, Christ is identically Christianity; but not when Christianity is taken as the new creation, or created supernatural order. Christ is then it only mediante his creative act. What we objected to was the assertion, that Christ not merely begets or creates the Christian life in his" people, but is identically the substance of that life itself. It was the assumption of this identity of substance that we pronounced pantheistic, and that assumption the Reviewer continues to make. He considers it ridiculous to assert that Christ is in his own person no part of the new creation, and its fountain in no more intimate sense than that of being its creator. His intimate and immanent presence in - not by - his creative act is not enough to satisfy our Mercersburg doctor. But, from the very nature of things, Christ cannot be the fountain of the new life of his people in a more intimate sense, without being identically it, and in his substance identified with their substance. In the first place, how can Christ in his own person, which is wholly Divine, be any part of the new creation ? Is the person of Christ created ? Is the Reviewer not only a Eutychian, as we before proved him, but also a Nestorian ? In the second place, how can the Christian life be called a new creation, if it is the very substance of the life of Christ's person, which is God ? And if it is the very substance of that life, how can the author deny that in the supernatural order he maintains pantheism ? or, if he maintains pantheism in the supernatural, how can he deny that he also maintains it in the natural ?
The Reviewer replies, " We carefully distinguish Christ from his Church." Very true, as the fountain from the stream, not as the cause from the effect. " Yet we hold them to be in a deep sense one, even as the head and members are indissolubly joined together in the living constitution of one body." (p. 310.) But you hold this oneness to be, not mystical, as we ourselves hold it, but substantial, physical, - a oneness in substance, as the substance of the stream is one with the substance of the fountain from which it emanates, or " flows forth." " The position of Christ is absolute and central, while that of his people is relative and peripheral." (Ibid.) This does not relieve the Reviewer. Absolute and relative mean, in modern philosophy, being and phenomenon, substance and accident, and are the very terms used by pantheists to express their conception of the relation between the external world and its internal origin. The very fact, that he uses these terms in the connection he does, is presumptive proof that his thought is pantheistic. " The position of Christ is central; that of his people peripheral." This does not help the matter. The periphery is simply the external termini of the rays which emanate from the centre, which implies that the Christian life is not a creation by our Lord, but an emanation from him, in the Oriental sense of emanation. Then, again, in the circle, centre and circumference are mutually dependent, and the one is inconceivable without the other ; and to suppose God in any order to be dependent on creation, or in any sense to come within the category of relation, is, if not atheism, at least pantheism. It is, of course, not easy to determine the Reviewer's exact meaning, for he gives us figures of speech instead of scientific statements, and descriptions instead of definitions ; but, as far as we can determine his doctrine, it is virtually the old Oriental doctrine of emanation from, and of final absorption into, God. If so, our first charge against his doctrine, that it converts the object into subject, and denies all faith by denying all object of failh, is, of course, well founded.
The second principle we found the Reviewer to hold, namely, the supernatural does not wholly transcend the natural, he concedes and defends. The simplest way of doing him justice is to cite what he says, and we are happy to acknowledge that what he says on this point is for the most part intelligible and ad rem.
" We have never meant to deny the supernatural; nor yet to make it the same thing simply with the supersensible, the world of pure thought as distinguished from the world of sense. Our objection to Mr. Brownson is, not that he sets the supernatural out of nature, over it, and above it, but that this transcendence, in his hands, is carried to the point of such an absolute disruption of the one world from the other as amounts at last to downright dualism, and leaves no room for the accomplishment of any real conjunction between them in the life of man ; which, however, at the same time is the necessary conception of all religion, and the very form especially in which the idea of Christianity becomes complete. We see not how such a real conjunction should imply any thing like a full sufficiency on the side of nature, left to itself for the actualization of the supernatural as its own product; but it does seem to us certainly to require a constitutional fitness and capability on the part of the first, for apprehending with some inward connatural grasp, the presence of this last when brought within its reach. We question not the full objectivity of the supernatural, as an order of life above nature; only we ask that a corresponding subjectivity be allowed also on the part of man, whereby he may be able to receive the object which is thus higher than himself into true union with his life, so as to be lifted by the power of it, not magically but rationally, into its own superior sphere. Such directly receptive capacity we take to be inherently at hand in the gift or faculty of faith. Faith carries in it a real, inward, living, and rational correspondence with the truth it is called to embrace; and in this view it belongs to the proper, original nature of man, though a Divine influence is needed certainly to bring it into exercise. Such drawing out of the subjective capacity of our nature, however, by no means implies that the truth itself is drawn out in this way; just as little as the awakening of sight in a previously blind eye would imply, that the surrounding world was brought to pass by its becoming thus an object of vision. What else does our Saviour mean when he says, No man can come to me, except the Father draw him ; He that is of God, heareth God's words ; If any man will do my will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God ? For the reception of Christ, all depends on a certain inward sympathy and correspondence with the truth revealed in his person, a real receptivity for the supernatural on the side of the human soul itself, such as all men ought to have, but only some men have in fact.' -pp. 322,323.
We say this is for the most part ad rem; we speak relatively, and only mean that it is so in comparison with the Reviewer's statements in general. He evidently does not comprehend the precise point of the objection we urged. It is, however, clear that he holds that the supernatural does not wholly transcend the natural, and therefore, that, though it is doubtless contrary to his intention, he really denies the supernatural ; for whatever lies within the sphere or reach of the natural, no matter on what side or under what relation, is natural, not supernatural. The conjunction of subject and object, or correspondence between them, contended for, must, of course, take place, or the creditive subject and credible object must remain always apart, and no act of faith be ever elicited. The Reviewer is right in asserting the necessity of the conjunction, or correspondence ; his error lies in supposing that the conjunction is that of the natural subject and the supernatural object. No such conjunction or correspondence of the natural and supernatural is conceivable. The Reviewer is right, too, in assuming that this conjunction or correspondence is by virtue of the gift or faculty of faith ; his error is in maintaining that this gift or faculty is natural, belonging "to the proper, original nature of man," and needing only a Divine influence to call it into exercise, simply drawing out " an original capacity of our nature." For the conjunction or correspondence to take place, subject and object must be in the same order, and therefore the subject on its side must be supernaturalized, elevated to the plane of the supernatural. What thus elevates the subject is the danum fidei, or gift of faith, which is not an original capacity, or faculty, of our nature, but a supernatural gift, a supernaturally infused habit, as all Catholic theology teaches, and as we thought we had sufficiently explained in our previous answer to the Reviewer. The Reviewer has fallen into his fatal error, an error which involves the denial of the supernatural altogether, in consequence of the Protestant denial of supernaturally infused habits. All heresy is illogical, and inconsistent with itself. In consequence of rejecting, or not recognizing, the infused habit of faith, which is the supernatural elevation of the creditive subject to the level of the supernatural credible object, he is obliged to restrict the supernatural to the credible object and the Divine influence which simply excites the natural subject to activity, without elevating that activity above the order of nature ; and so restricting the supernatural, he is obliged either to bring it within the sphere of the natural, which is to deny it to be supernatural, or else to keep it always beyond the reach of the subject, and thus incur the very objection he strangely enough imagines must lie against us. The Reviewer should learn from this how dangerous it is to reject or misconceive any Catholic doctrine. Catholic doctrine is a unity, and you must either accept the whole or reject the whole.
The Reviewer passes over in profound silence the third principle we represented him as holding, and the objection we drew from it, namely, faith is the immediate apprehension of the truth of the matter believed ; therefore, faith is science, and mysteries are incredible. Consequently he leaves us free to conclude that he concedes both, since he says nothing in his answer which in any respect indicates or implies the contrary. We, then, rightly apprehended the Reviewer's doctrine on these three points, and he has failed to set aside the consequences we drew from them. Then his doctrine is Antichristian and false, and by his own concession our Church is true, -¦ the Church of God.
Here we might stop, but there are two or three other points on which we wish to offer a few remarks, more for the Reviewer's sake than our own. The Reviewer is an able and learned man, an earnest, vigorous, and eloquent writer. He has caught some glimpses of certain important Catholic truths, not much regarded by Protestants generally, and which he wields with murderous effect against vulgar Protestantism. But he only partially apprehends these great truths, and he combines them in his own mind with principles utterly repugnant to them, and which, taken by themselves, involve all the fatal consequences we have pointed out. But, unless we have entirely mistaken the character of his mind and heart, his real intellectual and moral wants would be much better satisfied by the Calholic doctrine on the points covered by the uncatholic principles, than by these uncatholic principles themselves. It seems to us that he values those principles for the sake of the Catholic truths in his view connected with them, and pot by any means for their own sake. He clasps the errors to his bosom, because he does not see how, without them, he can hold the Catholic truths which he sees in connection with them, and which really enrapture his heart. What he wants is to see the Catholic truths discriminated from the erroneous principles, and its gaps, as existing in his mind, really filled up, as they are in Catholic minds, with Catholic doctrines.
The Reviewer's first and principal objection to Catholicity is, that it sunders subject and object in both the natural order and the supernatural. After what we have said, he must see that this objection is unfounded, and indeed it can appear only ridiculous to those who are acquainted with Catholic theology. The object is independent of the subject, but the subject is never independent of the object. God is independent of his creatures, but they are absolutely dependent on him, and exist, as we have constantly maintained, only by virtue of his intimate presence, and the immanence of his act creating them from nothing. More than this no man can say, without falling into pantheism. In the supernatural order there is no sundering of object and the subject. The supernatural object exists a parte m, independent of the subject, and is as real in se when not apprehended or believed as when it is. But no body supposes, at least no Catholic supposes, it can be believed by a subject that has no inward correspondence with it, - only that correspondence is not natural, but must be supernatural. Grace is twofold, exterior and interior, or objective and subjective. As exterior, or objective, it constitutes and presents the supernatural object; as interior, or subjective, it raises or elevates the subject to the plane of the object, and establishes a proportion, a correspondence, between them.
The second objection of the Reviewer is, that Catholicity denies individual freedom, or, in other words, individual freedom and authority are irreconcilable on Catholic principles. The boast of the Reviewer is, that his doctrine reconciles the two, and his objection is, that ours sacrifices liberty to authority, and, as a consequence of sacrificing liberty to authority, loses authority itself. Both the boast and the objection proceed, as it strikes us, from a total misconception of liberty and authority, as well as of Catholic theology. We are not very positive as to what is the Reviewer's precise doctrine on the subject; for what he says, in the article before us, to elucidate it, only renders it to our apprehension more obscure and indefinite ; but he appears to us to resolve both authority and liberty into necessity. His conception of law seems to be that of simple force, acting, in regard to the subject, either from abroad or from within. If from abroad, the subject is not free, and belongs to the physical world as distinguished from the moral; if from within the subject, if through the subject's own intelligence and will, it is the law of freedom, and the subject is free. Slavery would seem, then, to consist, not in being held to obey an unjust law, but in being held to obey a law that comes from abroad, from a source foreign to or distinguishable from the subject; and liberty would seem to stand, not in being held to obey only just law, but in not being held to obey any law not self-imposed, or which does not proceed from the subject himself. This is what we gather from the following passage.
" It may now appear in what sense, and in what sense only, we have ever dreamed of allowing man a will or voice in the constitution of the law by which he is required to be governed. ' To assert man's authority, or right to be governed only by his own will,' according to Mr. Brownson, • is to deny that he is under law, or bound at all to seek God as the Sovereign Good. Does the Reviewer maintain that we are not morally bound to seek God as our ultimate end ? Does he deny all morality, and assert that man is free to live as he lists ?' Nothing of this sort, we reply ; nothing of this sort whatever. All we mean to say is, that mind is not matter ; that morality is not nature; that the law of freedom, to be different from the law of blind necessity, must come to its actualization in the world, not in the way of merely outward force under any view, but through the self-moving spontaneity of its own subjects, the thinking and willing of the created minds in which it works and reigns. The planets obey a law which they have no power to accept or not accept; it is in them, but not from them or of them in any way ; and for this very reason their action is blind and unfree. So throughout Nature, as such. Its very character is to be without autonomy in its own order of existence. The Moral, on the contrary, as distinguished from the Natural, is self-conscious, self-active, in a certain sense we may say even self-productive, and in such form truly free. It is not made, except as it at the same time makes itself. It is not moved, save as it originates its own motion. It stands, like all created existence, in the power of law ; but the law here is not from abroad simply, as in the case of mere nature, not objective and outward only, but inward also and subjective ; it is brought to pass, comes to its actualization in the world, only in the form of being apprehended and willed by its subjects. On the outside of such self-conscious life, it can have no being in the world whatever. Turn it in any way into mere blind force, simple outward compulsion, and all proper morality is at an end. The necessary medium of its revelation, the very element in which it exists and makes itself felt, is the self-moving activity of the life it is formed to bind ; which at the same time has full power to be untrue to itself by refusing the authority of its proper law, and which can be rightly bound by this in the end only as it receives the law freely into its own constitution, and so enacts it into force for its own use. Mind thus, by its very constitution, is required to be autonomic, self-legislative, a true fountain and source of law for itself; while the law, notwithstanding, has its ultimate ground only in God, and can be of no force whatever as the product merely of any lower intelligence. Objective and subjective here must fall absolutely together. The will without the law is false; denies its own proper nature; falls over to the sphere of bondage and sin. But the law, on the other hand, without the will, has no power either to accomplish its proper work. Only as the law, previously necessary by Divine constitution, is willed, freely embraced, affirmed and constituted, by the created intelligence it is ordained to rule, so as to be at the same time the product of this, its own act virtually and deed, can there be any true escape from the idea of slavery, any true entrance into the sphere of freedom, any morality or religion in the full and right sense of these terms. It is this union of law and will, necessity and liberty, not outwardly, but inwardly, which brings the life of man emphatically to its proper form. This is what we mean by the autonomy of the human subject, the right of man to be governed by his own will, and not simply by a heteronomic force acting upon him from beyond his will, the voice that belongs to him properly in the constitution of the law which he is called to obey." - pp. 315, 316.
This, we think, sustains the view we take, especially as we are bound to interpret it in an anti-Catholic sense. What the Reviewer says about the moral subject being " self-conscious," "self-active," &c, makes nothing against our interpretation ; for it is all reconcilable with the assumption that the law is an inherent principle, operating from within the subject, and the further assumption that the subject, as his intelligence is developed, apprehends and wills it. We are inclined to believe this is the Reviewer's doctrine, for it is genuine Calvinism, and corresponds to the general pantheistic character of his speculations. Moreover, we nowhere find him recognizing, unequivocally, any freedom but that which he calls " free necessity," and his very boast is, that his doctrine reconciles necessity and liberty ! The freedom with which man acts he likens to the freedom with which God creates or causes his own being, which, as we have seen, is no freedom at all, for God is ens necessariuni) and uncaused. We therefore conclude that the Reviewer really means to teach that the law is necessity, and operates necessarily ; but as it operates from within, and is apprehended and willed by the subject, it, at the same time that it is the law of necessity, is also the law of freedom. We need not tell our readers that this does not reconcile liberty and authority, for it resolves both into necessity. There is no freedom in my simply apprehending and willing the necessity to which I am subjected.
Perhaps, however, the meaning of the Reviewer is simply that the law, in order to bind, to have the obligatory force of law, must be accepted or assented to by those it is intended to govern. Much he says may be interpreted in accordance with this view. Hence he would maintain, that to require man to obey a law which he has not voluntarily assented to is tyranny, and he who is required to obey such a law is a slave, and no freeman. This view makes the legality, or binding force, of the law depend on the assent of the subject. This doctrine has been held ; we find traces of it in some of our so-called Gallican authors ; it lies at the bottom of all the Jacobinical and anarchical theories of the day ; it is the fundamental principle of all Protestantism, that is, private reason judging public authority ; and it is appealed to in justification of all rebellion in Church or state, and as sanctioning the wild and destructive revolutionary movements which have recently come so near overthrowing all European governments, abolishing all law, and dissolving society itself. Law is law only in that it binds, and therefore, according to this principle, law derives its legality, its character, its very existence as law, not from the authority which wills and promulgates it, but from the voluntary assent of the subjects it is intended to govern. It is law only by virtue of that assent or acceptance. But this makes the subject the real legislator, and the sole source and ground of the law as law. Men are then in every sense their own lawmakers. But this the Reviewer denies. He says expressly, " Men make neither truth nor law"; that the law " has its ultimate ground only in God, and can be of no force as the product merely of any lower intelligence." It would seem, then, that the Reviewer does not, after all, mean this, and we must return to the view already given.
But pass over this; suppose the Reviewer really does mean that the law, to be actually law, must be apprehended and voluntarily assented to by the subject. This, undeniably, makes the subject the real sovereign, which is a contradiction in terms. The law regarded in se exists prior to the assent of the subject, as the author must concede ; for if not, there would be nothing to assent to. Now has the subject a right to withhold his assent? The self-moving activity of man, the Reviewer says, " has full power to be untrue to itself by refusing the authority of its proper law." To refuse his assent to the law which is made " previously necessary by Divine constitution," would then be for man to be " untrue," that is, disobedient to his proper law. Has man, we say not the poioer, but the right, to be thus untrue or disobedient? If you say, yes, you utter a palpable contradiction, and deny all morality; if you say, no, you assert that the law binds prior to the voluntary assent of the subject, and then deny your thesis, for you say man " can be rightly bound by this [the law], only as " he " receives the law freely into " his " own constitution, and so enacts it into force for " his " own use."
The law, in the sense we are to consider it in this controversy, is not a power or force, but a simple rule or measure of action, prescribing what is to be done and what is to be avoided, or commanding good and prohibiting evil. Voluntary obedience to it is virtue, right conduct, righteousness, or justice ; voluntary disobedience to it is evil conduct, vice, unrighteousness, or injustice. Now we ask the Reviewer, whether he does or does not admit the reality of a law prescribing the good and prohibiting the evil, and thus constituting a distinction between right and wrong, independent of man's assent. Is it man who prescribes the good and prohibits the evil ? Is it his will that makes the distinction between right and wrong? and could man, if he chose, alter the relations between good and evil, right and wrong, by giving or withholding his assent to the law? If you say, yes, you deny the eternal law, and make the whole moral order dependent, not on the eternal and immutable will and nature of God, but on the will of man ; if you say, no, you admit a law above man, independent of his will, demanding no assent of his to be obligatory, and which convicts him of sin, of rebellion, if he does not both assent to and obey it. In the former case, you deny the whole moral order, all immutable morality, and make virtue and vice whatever man wills them to be,-nay, destroy the very conception of both, and leave man, as we before said, free to live as he lists. If the latter, you cannot make the binding force of the law depend on the assent of the subject. Law is not law unless it prescribes what the subject ought to will, and what he ought not to will, and therefore must be a law to the will, not a law deriving from it, and consequently must, by its very nature, derive all its force from an authority above it, from an authority which has the eternal and indefeasible right to command the will. We here repeat only the A B C of ethical science, which the Reviewer must concede, or deny ethical science altogether. To make the law derive its binding force, that is, its character as law, from the assent of those whom it is to govern, is to deny its essential character as law, - is to deny that men are under law, and therefore to deny all morality, for there is morality only where there is law, and if no law binds the assent, there is no law for man.
What the Reviewer really wants to maintain, if he did but see it distinctly, is, however, a very obvious and a very certain truth; namely, none but a rational being, capable of apprehending and voluntarily obeying the law, can be the subject of a moral law ; for the simple reason that none other is by the constitution of his nature a moral being. Man must have a moral constitution, or he cannot be the subject of the moral law. No doubt of this. But we must never confound that which constitutes man a moral being with the moral law itself, or the law to which he is morally bound to conform all his thoughts, words, and deeds. Here is where the Reviewer seems to us to err. He does not keep the two distinct, but runs them one into the other, as is evident from his saying that "objective and subjective must here fall absolutely together." The law is not constituted, or actualized, or made binding, by our moral constitution ; but God, in giving us a moral constitution, has made us capable of being governed, not by a physical law, as is external nature, but by the moral law, which addresses itself to reason. We are moral not because we are not bound to obey the law till we voluntarily assent to it, but because we are morally free in obeying it, that is, are not forced against our will to obey it, but can refuse to obey it, if we choose,- because to obey or not to obey rests always in our own free will ; we are, however, always bound to obey it, and the law is just as obligatory when we reject it as when we actually assent to it, and we disobey it only at our peril; we never have the right to refuse our obedience.
The reconciliation of authority and liberty is never a difficult question. The authority of God is absolute over all his creatures, and as his authority is will inseparable from infinite justice, and therefore always inherently just will, it is legitimate, for law is power conjoined with justice, or will regulated by reason. Subjection to God, or to any authority immediately or mediately deriving from him, is never any encroachment upon liberty, for liberty is destroyed, not in being held lo obey legitimate authority, but in being subjected to an authority which is illegitimate. Liberty is intact so long as man is left in the full possession of all his rights, and no one of his rights is taken away or abridged by holding him to obedience to God ; for he never had and never can have any right to disobey God. If, then, as the Catholic maintains, the Church be really commissioned by God, authorized by him to speak in his name and by his authority, there is and can be no violation of liberty in requiring all men to believe what she teaches, and to do what she commands. If she is what she professes to be, her authority and our liberty are perfectly compatible, one with the other ; for in submitting to her authority we submit simply to the law, which we never had and never can have the right to disobey.
" Our objection," says the Reviewer, " to the Roman doctrine, as we understand it to be exhibited by Mr. Brownson, is that the law objectively taken is so far sundered from the activity of the obeying subject, as to be in fact set over against this in the character of another nature altogether, and under a wholly outward form. Objective and subjective are made to fall apart dualistically into two distinct worlds. We do not wish to confound them, [then you must acknowledge them to be distinct,] to mix them together, or to make one absorb or destroy the other ; we recognize their difference; but still we object just as strenuously also to this abstract separation." (p. 317.) This may all be very clear and distinct in the Reviewer's mind, but is a little obscure and confused in ours. His objection is, that we sunder too far the law objectively considered from the activity of the obeying subject. But before bringing this objection he should point out how far the two may be legitimately sundered, and where is the line beyond which it is not lawful to go. Then he should show that we do transgress, and in what respect we transgress, that line. We have to regret that he has done neither. We set the object over against the subject, it seems. But the very definition of object, taken simply as object, is that which is over against the subject, or that which stands facing the subject. The very word itself says as much. " In the character of another nature altogether." Subject and object are of the same nature, or they are of different natures. By nature here we must understand that which constitutes the thing what it is, and distinguishes it from every other. In this sense, it is incommunicable, and its presence always asserts identity, and excludes diversity. You cannot then assume that subject and object are, as subject and object, partly of the same nature, and partly of diverse natures. You must either assert them as one and identical, as does the pantheist, or you must assert them as differing by nature altogether. The same is the same, and things different are different, then not the same. Are then object and subject the same, one and identical? The Reviewer says, " We recognize their difference." Very good, what more do we ourselves do? We assert their difference, and maintain that they are really as well as apparently distinct. " Under a wholly outward form." We do not know what this means. The Reviewer is perpetually talking about " inward " and " outward." We wish he would explain himself, and tell us in what sense he uses these words ; for, as the case now stands, he seems to us to be frightened by apparitions raised by his own fancy. In the sense of distinct from one another, we oppose subject and object to each other tinder an outward form, if you please, and so does the Reviewer ; for he recognizes their difference ; but we are not aware that we distinguish them in any other respect in an outward form. We recognize an intelligible world distinct from the sensible, and hold that the intelligible exists a parte m, and is as truly objective as the sensible. The law pertains to the intelligible world, as the object of the intellect, not of the senses. But it is not for that reason any more one with the intellect that apprehends it, than a tree is one with the sense of sight by which we behold it. As the tree does not become subject by our beholding it, so the law does not become subjective, or cease to be purely objective, by our apprehending or understanding it. Here is all the "outward form " we assert, and we are very much mistaken if our outward is more outward than the Reviewer's inward.*(footnote: * The Reviewer seems to us to reason throughout as if he held that tho activity of the subject transforms the object into subject, that the fact of knowledge identifies the intellectual subject and the intelligible object, and that the act of willing identifies the voluntary subject with the object willed; hence he never objects that we distinguish the subject and object, but that we assert them to be wholly distinct, and he never denies the objectivity of the object altogether, but simply that it is merely objective. So, again, he does not deny that the distinction between subject and object is outward, or that they exist as distinct under an outword form, but denies that the form is wholly outward. The two maybe sundered, but must not be sundered too far. It is remarkable that throughout he never dares affirm or deny any thing absolutely. At the tail of his aflir-mations or denials there always comes in a qualification, which takes off at least one half of the assertion or the negation. He never makes a strictly categorical statement, and hence there is not a single definition, properly so called, in either of his articles against us, Whence comes this1? It certainly comes not from his ignorance of the categories, or from his want of logical capacity or discipline; but it comes, in our judgment, from a vicious ontology, which he has been led to adopt, partly by modern philosophers, but still more from his having plunged deeply into the study of mystical theology before having devoted sufficient time to the study of speculative or dogmatic theology. He seems to mistake everywhere mystical union for substantial unity, or identity of substance; or if he does not do this, he assumes that the denial of this unity or identity, or the assertion of the distinction of substances, is a denial of the mystical union itself. The soul in the Christian life is certainly mystically united to God, and its life consists in an ineffable union with him; but there is no identification of substance. The creature remains in the category of created things, and the Christian's higheBt life, here or in the beatified state, is never the identical life of God, for the promise is, not that when he shall appear we shall be God, but that " we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is "; and likeness always implies difference, as the Reviewer must have learned from the old controversy between the homoou-sians and the homoiousians. Love makes us one with God, we concede, but mystically, not physically, for we remain always creature, and he always Creator. So in the fact of knowledge the subject and object are united, but not unified, or made identical. They remain - Plotinus and the Neoplatonists, and Schelling and Hegel, to the contrary notwithstanding - as distinctly two things in the fact of knowledge, as they are out of that fact. This the Reviewer seems to us to overlook, and hence the pantheistic character of his own statements, and his apprehension that we, in asserting the two to be distinct a parte rei, and also in conceplu, are denying, not only their union in the fact of our life, but the very possibility of such union. This apprehension is idle, for union is inconceivable without distinction and difference.)
" But still we object just as strenuously to this abstract separation." What abstract separation? The abstract separation which he understands us to make? What is that? We are sure we make no abstract separation ; if we make any separation at all, it is real, not abstract. We do not deal in abstractions. But what separation do we make between object and subject? We d'stinguish them one from the other as different a parte rei, and so does the Reviewer ; but to distinguish is not to separate. The doctrine we have insisted on in our Review is, that the object, regarded as existing a parle rei, is distinct from and independent of the subject, but that the subject, though really distinct from the object, is dependent on it, and does and can live only by union with it. We deny in no sense the intimate relation of the subject to the object, but we do deny that the relation is reciprocal, that the dependence is mutual. The object is God, the only intelligible object per se, and all else that is object to us is so only mediately, as made intelligible to us by his intelligibility. To make the dependence mutual would be to make God as dependent on man as man is on God, and would, as we showed in our former reply, involve Buddhism, and finally nullism. God is separable from man, for he can annihilate man and be all that he now is, but man cannot be separated from God, and live ; for it is in him we live, and move, and are, and our separation from him would be our annihilation.
One more point we must consider, and then we will await the Reviewer's response. The Reviewer, after disavowing the pantheistic consequences we charged upon him, adds : -
" But now, as we take it, the truth, in opposition to these several pantheistic consequences charged upon us by Mr. Brownson, does not stand on the other side, in their simple negation and contradiction. There is another class of conceptions in this form, and which the common understanding is always prone to lay hold of as the necessary and only alternative in the case, that go just as directly and surely in the end to exclude God from the world, and to unsettle all the foundations of religion. These are comprehended collectively in the idea of dualism, or abstract deism, which may be taken as the immediate reverse of what is properly pantheism in the bad and false sense. It may be said that dualism involves a great truth, the actual distinction of God and the world; and this we are freely willing to admit; but it is just as certain, on the other side, and just as necessary too to be affirmed always, that pantheism also involves a great truth; such a truth indeed as may be said to meet us on almost every page of the Bible, as well as from the inmost and profoundest depths of our own religious nature. That is a poor and cheap orthodoxy, in any case, which stands barely in the rejection of error in some one direction, while it makes no account of the danger, always at hand, of falling under the power of its natural counterpart in a direction just the opposite. We are bound to do justice, in the case before us, to the truth which underlies pantheism, as well as to that which underlies dualism ; and we are not more bound to fear and avoid heresy in the first shape, than we are bound to avoid and fear it also in the second shape. It has been our wish at least, and our honest endeavour, to keep clear of both extremes, as well as to acknowledge and honor the great truths out of which both grow. Mr. Brownson, we are sorry to say, in common with a large amount of what we conceive to be bad Protestantism, (the almost universal thinking, we might say, perhaps, of New England,) turns the two phases of thought into the form of a simple syllogistic dilemma, where one horn is the only resting-place from the other, and avoids and rejects thus the pantheistic extreme only in such a way as to lay himself open, in our estimation, to the charge of dualism. We distinguish, of course, as he also has done in our case, between his theory and himself, and speak of what the first is by necessary consequence, as it strikes our own mind, rather than by open and direct avowal; although at some points, the general consequence itself might seem to be not indistinctly allowed, in the particular propositions by which we find it indirectly affirmed. The facility with which he throws us continually into the wrong, serves only to illustrate, as we take it, the fault and wrong of his own position. It shows this to be itself a dialectical extreme, whose very character it is always to condemn in a wholesale way, as its own opposite, all that is different from itself, or that carries towards it in any way the aspect of negation. No such extreme can ever live by simply killing its opposite; but only by coming to a true inward reconciliation with it in the power of a higher idea, whose province it is, in such case, not to destroy absolutely on either side, but rather as regards both to complete and fulfil."- pp. 310, 311.
The Reviewer, while conceding that we were right in condemning the pantheistic conceptions, maintains, that, since we asserted their immediate contradictories as the truth in opposition to them, we fell into an opposite error, which he calls dualism, and this because the truth in opposition to them u does not stand on the other side, in their simple negation and contradiction." That there is an error as well as a truth opposed to pantheism, we do not deny ; that we asserted dualism, if he chooses so to call it, in opposition to pantheism, we concede, but not in the sense in which dualism is false. Dualism is false only when taken in the modern deistical sense, which, after acknowledging God as Creator of the world, denies him as Providence, as Conservator, and as Governor, and asserts that the world, now it is created, is sufficient for itself, and goes " ahead on its own hook," - the sense common to most of our modern geologists, naturalists, or cultivators of the physical sciences, and advocates of the Baconian philosophy; or in the sense in which, as in Plato's Timscus, it asserts God on one side, and the eternity of matter on the other ; or, in fine, in the Oriental sense, in which it asserts the dual origin of the universe, and of two original, eternal, self-existent, and mutually independent principles, or beings, one good, the other bad,-the old Manichsean doctrine, held by the Albigenses in the Middle Ages, and perhaps, in modern times, by the great body of Protestants, who boast of being their descendants and continuators. But the Reviewer will not pretend that we assert dualism in any one of these three senses; and the only sense in which he can pretend that we assert it is in the sense in which it asserts that creation is contingent, not necessary, and that God and the world are distinguished as creator and creature, cause and effect. That the truth in opposition to pantheism does not stand in an opposite error, we of course concede ; but that it does not stand on the other side, or side opposed to pantheism, we cannot concede, for if it does not, it is not the truth in opposition to it. There may be opposite errors, but the truth always stands between them, opposed to both, opposing one face to the one, and another face to the other.
The Reviewer is not satisfied with this. He holds that a great truth underlies pantheism, and another underlies dualism, and that our duty is to accept and harmonize the two. Neither is to be denied absolutely, but we must deny a little and affirm a little of both. This is all very well for a Protestant, who can have truth only as mixed with falsehood, and who can never make an affirmation or a denial without falling into error, but the Reviewer must excuse us for not consenting to place ourselves in his unpleasant position. Pantheism is either true or it is false, and if false it is to be denied absolutely, and no truth does or can underlie it; for if a great truth did underlie it, it would be founded in .truth, and a doctrine founded in truth is true doctrine, not false. So of dualism ; it is either true or it is false, or true in one sense and false in another. If true in one sense and false in another, your business is to distinguish, and define in what sense it is true and in what it is false, and then to affirm it in the former sense, and deny it in the latter. In the sense it is false, or as a false doctrine, no great truth underlies it, for it is a perversion or denial of the truth. Let us have no eclectic or syncretic twaddle on the subject.
The Reviewer says of us," The facility with which he throws us continually into the wrong serves only to illustrate, as we take it, the fault and wrong of his own position." That is, we must have fallen into the error opposed to the pantheistic error, or we could not have so easily thrown the Reviewer into the wrong ! This is not so clear to us. We should draw an opposite conclusion from the same premises, and say that the facility with which we threw him into the wrong serves to illustrate the truth of our position and the falsity of his ; for we are quite sure that, without the truth on our side, we should never have been able to throw such a man as the Reviewer into the wrong. " It shows itself to be a dialectical extreme." And " no such extreme can ever live by simply killing its opposite; but only by coming to a true inward reconciliation with it in the power of a higher idea, whose province it is, in such case, not to destroy absolutely on either side, but rather as regards both to complete and fulfil." Here is the mere vulgar cant of our modern eclectics, by which they seek to rehabilitate falsehood, and consecrate every error and heresy, past, present, and to come. It rests on the assumption that error is merely a partial or incomplete truth, as Cousin and his school expressly teach. The assumption is itself a monstrous error. Error is not an incomplete truth, a partial or one-sided view of truth, but a false view, that is, a denial of truth. Every false doctrine is, in that it is false, a contradiction of the truth, and must be killed, or the truth cannot live. Pantheism, the Reviewer concedes, is an error. Its essence consists in the denial of the contingency of the universe, and the assertion that in their substance God and the world are identical. This is not an incomplete truth, a partial or one-sided view of truth, to be completed by an error from the opposite quarter ; but it is a sheer, unmitigated falsehood, and is got rid of only by asserting its direct contradictory, namely, the universe is contingent, not necessary, and God and the world are of different substances, or distinct and different as to substance. It and this truth which we oppose to it are in the very nature of things irreconcilable, and one can be asserted only by the absolute, unqualified denial of the other. And what we say of pantheism, we say of every false doctrine. The Reviewer is all wrong in his eclectic twaddle, for we can in conscience call it by no name more respectable. There is no logic by which opposites, that is, contraries, can be reconciled. Truth is never opposed to truth, and of opposites one must always be false. In the power of what higher idea than either truth or falsehood can truth and falsehood come to a true inward reconciliation with each other ?
The Reviewer wishes to be able to assert the immanence of God in his works, and he thinks this immanence is the truth that underlies pantheism. With his leave, this is a great mistake, for pantheism, by his own concession, is false. Then the immanence of God cannot be asserted in a pantheistic sense ; then, in the only sense in which it is permitted us to assert it, it is not pantheistic, is no part of pantheism, is not related to pantheism, neither underlies it nor overlies it, and is not denied in denying pantheism, but in fact is denied in asserting pantheism. In denying pantheism, the Reviewer may be in danger of denying this immanence; but no one who has an infallible guide is in danger of doing it, or has any occasion to fear that, in the plain, plump denial of error on one side, he may fall into an error on the other. Let the Reviewer define the true immanence of God, as distinguished from the pantheistic immanence, and perhaps he will find that we have not denied it, and that he, in order to maintain it, must take his stand with us.
We have now replied to the Reviewer's article, as far as we have judged it necessary. We are not conscious of having overlooked a single important point, and we have done our best to seize and reply to the real thought of the author. If we have failed, it has been unintentionally, and perhaps the Reviewer's fault more than our own ; for we must tell him that, if he writes with vigor, he by no means writes with clearness and definiteness. Pie seems rarely to express his meaning with distinctness and precision. If he replies to us, we hope he will be more explicit, and try and accommodate himself somewhat to our dulness of apprehension. We wish to be just to him, and have no disposition to charge upon his principles consequences which they do not logically involve. We think, also, that he would find his own advantage in attempting to give his doctrines a more rigidly scientific and logical method and statement. He will find it no useless discipline, and one of the speediest ways of arriving at truth. In conclusion, we must beg him to excuse us if we have seemed now and then a little severe in our remarks. Our severity is intended for his doctrine, not for him personally, for personally we have a high esteem for him.