Morell's Philosophy of Religion

Brownson's Quarterly Review, April, 1850

Art. II.- The Philosophy of Religion. By T.D. Moueix, A. M. New York: Appleton&Co. 1849. lGmo. pp. 359.

Mr. Morell is, we believe, a Scotchman, and a minister of the Scottish kirk. He first made himself known to our community by a History of Modern Philosophy, written from the eclectic point of view, and which we have heard spoken of as a very clever performance. Some views advanced in that work touching the mutual relations of religion and philosophy were supposed to favor modern Rationalism, and the volume before us has been written to develop them, and to show that they are defensible on psychological principles. The volume has attracted no little attention among British and American Protestants, and though it contains nothing new or striking to one familiar with the later developments of Protestantism on the Continent of Europe, or even in our own country, and though it is written in a dry, hard style, without much regard to idio­matic grace or propriety, we have read it with a good deal of interest, and, considering the source whence it emanates, we cannot help regarding it as a remarkable production.

Mr. Morell belongs to the progressive party among Protestants, the party that labors to continue the work of the Reformers of the sixteenth century, and carry it on to its legitimate termination. He retains, indeed, many traces of his Presbyterian and Evan­gelical breeding, but he departs widely from the formal teachings of his sect, and appears to be fully aware that the formal or scholastic theology of the elder Protestant teachers is without vitality, is, indeed, an anomaly in Protestantism, and at best su­perfluous in the Protestant economy of life. He seems, also, to be convinced that religion itself cannot be maintained on the ground ordinarily assumed by Protestant theologians, and that, if they continue to retain the rule of private judgment, they must either reject all religion, or else exclude from religion, as unes­sential, whatever transcends private reason. Determined, or apparently determined, to retain that rule at all hazards, he adopts the latter alternative, and labors with all his learning, energy, and power of analysis, to prove that religion originates in and is determined by an element of our nature; that, in all that is essential to it, it comes within the scope of individual reason, and that it is as philosophically explicable and veri­fiable as any other psychological fact that passes under our observation. In this he is, unquestionably, faithful to the Prot­estant spirit, and deserves great credit for his courage and consistency. But although he in this strikes a mortal blow at all dogmatic Protestantism, and, in reality, resolves modern Evangelicalism into mere sentimentalism, which is all very well, he goes, perhaps, farther than he intends, and certainly farther than we can go with him. We cannot bring all religion within the scope of private reason, without excluding as unessential all that is supernatural, and therefore not without excluding all that is peculiarly and distinctively Christian. Mr. Morell, then, whatever his intentions, really rejects the Christian religion itself, and is even a more dangerous enemy to it than he would be if he confessedly arranged himself on the side of its open and avowed enemies. However conclusive his work may be against his own sect, we cannot, therefore, commend it, for even Presbyterianism is better than total apostasy, - than ab­solute incredulity.

The very title Mr. Morell gives his work, The Philosophy of Religion, proves that he is either consciously hostile to re­ligion, or totally ignorant of its real nature. There is and can be no philosophy of religion. Religion must be regarded either as natural religion or as revealed religion. As natural, since philosophy is simply natural theology, it and philosophy are identically one and the same thing, and it is as absurd to talk of the philosophy of religion as of the philosophy of phi­losophy. As revealed, religion is above philosophy, not ac­countable to it, nor explicable on its principles.    A philosophy of religion is conceivable only on the supposition that re­ligion is below philosophy, a special discipline, like physics or resthetics, under philosophy, deriving its principles from it, and bound to apply them according to its commands. The author sees this, and therefore attempts to relegate religion to a single department of human nature, and to confine it to a single class of human emotions. But this is manifestly false and ab­surd ; for religion, if any thing at all, is no special discipline, but the queen of all disciplines, giving the law to all special disciplines, and receiving it from none.

The author does not lack ability and industry, and we cheer­fully concede him considerable philosophical aptitude ; but, with all his pretensions, he is no real philosopher. He is mis­led by the psychological method of modern philosophy, and mistakes philosophy no less than Christianity. He is a mere psychologist, or rather psychologue, and gives us as the result of his painful philosophizing only miserable psychologism, which, we need not tell our readers, is as far removed from philosophy as any thing well can be. Taking the human soul, or, in modern language, the facts of consciousness, for its point of departure, and the Cartesian doubt for its method, psychol­ogism necessarily, as we have heretofore shown, results on the one hand in sensism,*(footnote:  •We venture to introduce sensism from the scholastic Latin sensisvnis, or the Italian il. sr.nsismo,m more np^roprisito tliiui the Fencli scnmalismc, which, though the more ordinary term, lias,in English, n practical rather than a spec­ulative sense Psyrlwliiifisvi and jjsycholniruR we use in a had, and psychology and psychologist in a good sense, agreeably to the practice of some recent writers in our language.) and on the other in pantheism, both of which, in their turn, necessarily result in Pyrrhonism and null-ism or nihilism. That Mr. Morell is a mere psychologue, even in religion as well as in philosophy, is evident enough from the very design of his book, and is proved by the follow­ing extract from his opening chapter.

" Whatever may be the religion proper to man, its real nature, and its possible intensity, must depend upon the constitution of the human mind. If the human faculties were of a lower order than they really are, it is obvious that our religious consciousness could never reach the standard to which it now rightly aspires. The reason of this becomes manifest, when we consider, that under such circumstances the real objects of religious worship could not be in the same sense accessible to us; and that, as a natural consequence of this, the emotions arising from their contemplation must be pro-portionably modified and diminished.    If, on the other hand, we possessed a combination of faculties of an order superior to those
¦vhich the human mind now enjoys, then our enlarged powers of
thought and feeling, and the widened range of our actual expe­
rience, would naturally elevate our whole religious being, when
once awakened, to a proportionally higher degree of development.
Accordingly, since the whole aspect of our religious experiences
must depend upon the natural capacities with which we have been
endowed, our first object in discussing the philosophy of religion
must be to make some inquiry into the powers and faculties of the
human mind
 
" By this process of analysis we find at length that the central
point of our consciousness - that which makes each man what he
is in distinction from every other man, - that which expresses the
real concrete essence of the mind, apart from its regulative laws
and formal processes- is the will. Will expresses power, sponta­
neity, the capacity of acting independently, and for ourselves. If
this spontaneity be withdrawn, our life sinks down at once into a
mere link in that mighty chain of cause and effect by which all the
operations of nature are carried on from the commencement to the
end of time. Without will man would flow back from the eleva­
tion he now assumes, to the level of impersonal nature, - in a
word, we should then be things, and not men at all. Spontaneity,
personality, will, self,- these, then, and all similar words, express
as nearly as possible the essential nature or principle of the human
mind. We do not say, indeed, that we can comprehend the very
essence of the soul itself, apart from all its determinations; but
that, by deep reflection upon our inmost consciousness, we can
comprehend the essence of the soul in connection with its opera­
tions ; that we can trace it through all its changes as a potoer or
pure activity; and that in this spontaneous activity alone our real
personality consists. If, therefore, in our subsequent classification
of the faculties of the mind, little appears to be said about the will,
it must be remembered that we assume the activity it denotes as
the essential basis of our whole mental being, and suppose it con­
sequently to underlie all our mental operations.
 
" Between the intellectual and the emotional activity, however, there always subsists a direct correspondency. Just on the same principle as we saw that a higher development of our whole intel­lectual capacity would imply a possibly higher development of the religious nature; so also in every succeeding stage to which the consciousness, intellectually speaking, attains, there is always asso­ciated with such an advancement a proportionally higher order of emotion. Our intellectual and our emotional life, in fact, run parallel with one another, and develop themselves correlatively; so that we may draw out a table of the successive stages of human consciousness in the following manner :

M I N D
commencing in Mehe Feeling (undeveloped unity)
evinces a Twofold Activity.
i. ii.
Intellectual. Emotional.
1st Stnge. The Sensational
consciousness (to which  correspond) The Instincts. 5Jd Stage. The Perceptive
consciousness " Animal Passions.
3d Stage. The Logical
consciousness " Relational Emotions.
4th Stnge. The Intuitional
consciousness " /Esthetic, moral, and
religious Emotions,
meeting in D
-v'-
Faith - (highest or developed unity)."
- pp. 35-38.

This extract, to the intelligent reader, proves not only the psychological character of the work, but that its psychology, even as psychology, is defective and false. That such would be its character was to be expected from the author's method. M. Cousin holds that it is possible to rise by psychological anal­ysis to ontology, or the science of being, but this the author, in what he says of the "intuitional consciousness," very properly rejects ; yet he does not seem aware that psychology no more than ontology can be psychologically constructed. To be of the least value, our psychology, as well as our ontology, must be ontologically derived ; for, as we shall have occasion before we close to repeat, it is the object that determines the sub­ject, never the subject that determines the object. All evi­dence is objective, must be in the object instead of the subject, or knowledge is impossible, and all real certainty out of the question. To suppose, as Mr. Morell does, that the subject determines the object, and that the object must vary as varies the subject, or as varies the intellect that apprehends it, is to deny all objective certainty, to make the object the creature of the subject, and to reduce all existence for us to the soul and its subjective affections ; which is to deny the soul itself, for none of its faculties actually exist without their appropriate ob­jects. If man could exist and operate, save in relation with his appropriate object independent of himself, or if he were his own adequate object, that is, adequate to a single act, he would be pure act, and therefore not man, but God, who is termed pure act, because he is in himself his own adequate object. But as man is not pure act, is not God, he can actually exist only in relation with his object, and then not at all if that object is removed, or does not itself exist.
It is the folly of modern philosophers to supppse that we are capable of independent action, and can know dependent beings without knowing that on which they depend, or the creative being from whom they derive their being. Only that which is can be an object of knowledge, and what is only from and by another, since it is not in and of itself, cannot in and of itself be intelligible. Hence that which is only from, by, and in another, is intelligible only mediately through the intelligibility of that from, by, and in which it is, or has its being. As the human soul is only by virtue of the Divine creative act, and as that act is only from God as real being, and therefore cogniza­ble only in the cognition of God, it follows that the human soul itself is cognizable only in the cognition of God, from whom, by whom, and in whom it is, or has its being, and therefore its intelligibility. Psychology, which is the science of the soul, is then possible only in ontology, which is the science of being, that is, the science of God. The science of God, or ontology, is learned from the Catechism, and whoever disdains to study that will never be able to attain to either an ontology or a psychol­ogy deserving the least reliance. He who does study it, and constructs his psychology in the light of the ontology it teaches, will fall into no gross psychological errors. Indeed, as a mat­ter of fact, nearly all the errors which vitiate modern psychol­ogy originate in doubt of the ontology of the Catechism, and in the effort of philosophers to defend or justify that doubt; that is, philosophical errors are in general the result of a departure, and of the insane attempt to justify departure, from the faith. Philosophy, whenever regarded as an independent discipline, distinct from theology, and as capable of being constructed with­out revealed theology, or as any thing more than a collection of rules for the right use of reason in the service of theology, in­dicates a heterodox tendency, if not absolute incredulity.

But be this as it may ; a single glance at Mr. Morell's psy­chological table is sufficient to show, that, whether psychology is or is not attainable psychologically, his psychology is not worthy of our acceptance. He mutilates human nature, and misrepresents the faculties which he recognizes. The will he resolves into the general activity of the soui, and makes it equally underlie all our mental operations. He acknowledges only two faculties, the intellectual and the emotional; and thus necessarily reduces all our mental operations to cognitions and emotions. Man is, then, simply a being that knows and feels, and therefore differs only in degree from any of the animal tribes ; for they all know and feel to some extent at least. But by what authority does the author exclude volitions ? When one wills to do or not to do a thing, to resist or to follow incli­nation, to obey or to disobey God, is the mental fact simply an emotion or a cognition ? A child knows better. The differ­ence between cognition and emotion is not greater or more ev­ident than the difference between either of them and volition, and the fact of volition is as certain as that we know or feel.

The author, doubtless, fancies that he recognizes volitions, because he professes to recognize the will ; but he does not recognize the will as a distinct faculty, or as the principle of a distinct class of mental facts.    He resolves it, as we have seen, into the general activity of the soul, and gives it only the intel­lectual and the emotional modes of action.     He  must, then, either deny all voluntary activity, or else assert that all activ­ity is voluntary.    We have just shown that he cannot do  the former ; is he prepared to assert the latter, - that all our sen­sations, perceptions, intuitions, instincts, and animal passions are volitions, and therefore acts for which we are morally re­sponsible, even though we have not deliberately excited or as­sented to them ?    This were, indeed, to go the full length of Calvinism.    Calvinism, we are aware, confounds will with the simple power to. act, and freedom with liberty a coactione. Hence it declares the simple motions of concupiscence to be sins, not only the effects of original sin, and inclining to sin, but sins themselves, for which we may be brought into judgment, even when actually resisted.    It makes all instinctive and in-deliberate actions, not proceeding from grace, mortal sins, and allows no distinction between what we do deliberately, and what we do indeliberately and unintentionally.    This is the real doctrine of Jonathan Edwards's famous Treatise on the Affec­tions, and it makes sanctity consist in having no internal strug­gles, and diminishes our merit just in proportion to the internal obstacles we have to overcome, or spiritual conflicts to main­tain.    But this is manifestly false as well as horrible.    We are responsible only for what we do voluntarily ; and only that act is voluntary which it  depends on the will to do or not to  do. Nothing is more absurd than to term an act which we cannot but do a voluntary act',  and nothing is more certain than that our cognitions and emotions do not always depend on our will, - are not always subject to our control. They not unfrequently come and go unbidden, in spite of our most strenuous efforts to the contrary. How often do we grieve at the intrusion of unwelcome thoughts, and at emotions which we would, but cannot, suppress ? Who that knows any thing of the spiritual life, who that has attempted to live in thought, word, and deed a pure and holy life, needs to be told that not a few of his thoughts and emotions are indeliberate and involuntary, and oc­cur in spite of his firmest resolutions, and most unremitting vig­ilance in guarding the avenues of his mind and heart ? Who needs to be told that the Christian's life is an unceasing warfare? But our objections to Mr. Morell's psychology do not end here. Leaving by the way, for the moment, what he says of the emotional side of his table, we assure him that we cannot accept the intellectual side without important modifications. The mind, according to the author, begins in mere feeling, and passes successively through four degrees or stages of develop­ment ; namely, the sensational, the perceptional, the logical, and the intuitional. In sensation, the sensitive subject and sensible object are confounded ; the soul seizes, indeed, the sensible object, but does not distinguish itself from the object, or external cause of its sensitive affection. In perception, the soul apprehends the sensible object, and apprehends it as ex­ternal and distinct from both the apprehension and the subject apprehending. In logic, or reflection, the soul generalizes, or applies its own abstract forms to the objects which it has per­ceived. That is, by perception we learn sensible objects, and by logic apply to them the abstract forms, or, as Kant would say, the categories, of the understanding. But our knowledge is not limited to our sensible intuitions and the subjective forms of the logical understanding. Above the logical understanding, which adds nothing to the matter or " content" of knowledge, is the intuitional consciousness, in which the soul apprehends another and a higher order of truth, -supersensible, necessary, and absolute truth, - pure Being, or God himself. This the author explains in the following passage.

" The mathematical sciences, for example, have as their essen­tial foundation the pure conceptions of space and number ; or, if they be of the mechanical order, the conceptions of power and mo­tion. Moral science, ngain, is based upon the fundamental notions of a;ood and evil; resthctical science upon that of beauty; theologi­cal science upon the conception of the absolute, - of God. Now, these primary elements of all the sciences can never be communicated and never learned exegetically. Unless we have a direct con­sciousness of them, they must ever remain a deep mystery to us,- just as no description could ever give to a blind wan the notion of color, or to a man who has no organ of tasto the idea of bitter or salt. We do not deny but that means may be employed to awaken the consciousness to these ideas, but still they can never be known by definition, - never communicated by words to any man who has not already felt them in his own inward experience. Here, then, we have the actual material of all scientific truth, and that material, it is evident, must be present.af.ive, coming to us by the immediate operation of our intuitional consciousness." - pp. 69,70.

There is little here, in the sense of the author, to which we do not object; but we restrict our comments to his doctrine of in­tuition. By the " intuitional consciousness" it is clear that he means the reason of Jacobi, Coleridge, and Gioberti, who very unreasonably distinguish reason as a faculty from understanding. It is the Vernunft distinguished from the Verstand and Em-pfindungs-vermb'gen of the Germans, and is held to be a power or faculty of the soul to apprehend immediately supersensible truth, - in our terminology, the intelligible as distinguished from the sensible, the Idea, in the language of Plato, which, as we showed in our last Review,*(footnote: * Quarterly Review, January, 1850, Art, I., pp. 24-26.) is identically God as Ens reale et necessarium. But to this we object, - 1. That it supposes the order of truth intuitively revealed comes to the mind only in the fourth stage of its development, instead of the first ; and 2. That it makes intuition a faculty of the soul, and asserts for man the natural subjective power to see God.

1. The solidity of the first objection we established in our Review for last January, in the article just referred to, by showing that the order of knowledge must follow the order of being, since what is not can be no object of knowledge, and where there is no object there can be no fact of knowledge. That is to say, we cannot know without knowing somewhat, and cannot know somewhat unless somewhat is, - no very startling proposition, we should suppose, and very much like a truism. The intuition of God, then, if the order of knowl­edge follows the order of being, must precede all knowledge of existences, because existences are from God, and subse­quent to him, and because without him our existence is not, is nothing, and one term of a relation always connotes the other. To affirm ourselves as simple being, as ens reale, is to affirm a falsehood, for ens reale is God, and we are not God,    To affirm ourselves as existence, taking the word, as we must if we distinguish it from real being, in its strict etymological sense, (from cxslarc,) is to affirm that we are from God, and are only as we are in him, by virtue of his creative act, and therefore is to distinguish ourselves from him, and to assert our dependence on him and relation to him as his creatures ; which is impos­sible, unless we know that he is, and has created us. Percep­tion, in Mr. Morell's sense, cannot precede intuition of the in-intelligible, for it is only by virtue of intuition of the intelligible, that the sensible is perceptible, or any thing to us but a mere sensitive affection or mode of the soul itself. Nor can the logical operation described, but, by the way, inaccurately de­scribed, precede intuition ; for logic cannot operate without data, and without the intuition of the intelligible it can have no data, that is, can have no principles, no premises ; for no man a little versed in philosophy can seriously maintain that the cate­gories are mere subjective forms of the understanding. The error of the author grows out of his confounding the order of intuition with the order of reflection. Intuition follows the or­der of being, and presents us the ontological order as it really is, independent of us, as it is revealed by God himself, and taught us in the Catechism, and therefore presents being before existence, the Creator before creatures, because such is the real order. Reflection, which is rethinking, reverses this order, begins where intuition leaves off, and leaves off where intuition begins. It takes the creature from intuition, and by analysis rises to the reflex cognition of God. It is the neglect to dis­tinguish between these two orders of knowledge, and fixing at­tention mainly on the fact of reflection, undistinguished from intuition, that so wofully misleads our modern philosophers, and renders obscure and doubtful what in itself is clear and certain.

2. We ourselves, indeed, hold that God reveals himself in­tuitively to us, but we do not admit that intuition is a faculty, nor that we have the natural, inherent power to see God. The distinction between reason and understanding, contended for by Kant, Jacobi, Coleridge, Gioberti, and others, is imagina­ry ; for to know is always one and the same fact, and demands, on the side of the subject, only one and the same faculty. To suppose that we must have one power by which to know sen­sible objects, and another by which to know God, is as super­fluous as to suppose that we need one voice with which to sing the praises of our Redeemer, and another with which to sing the praises of a conquering hero. All the facts of knowledge have not, indeed, the same conditions, nor the same objects, but, as facts of knowledge, they all depend, by the very force of the word, on the same cognitive principle. Can there be a cognition which is not cognition, which is more or less than cognition ? - or knowledge that is intellectual, but not ra­tional,- rational, but not intellectual? Can there be a man that understands but does not know, or knows but does not understand ? There is, and can be, only one cognitive faculty. Intuition is simply a mental fact, not a mental faculty, or power of the soul.

Hut we do not admit that we have the inherent power to he-hold God intuitively. In the first place, what is intuitively re­vealed to us of God is not his quidditas, is not to/iflf God is, but simply that he is ; that is, he is made known to us simply as Qui kst, He who is, and who creates existences. In the second place, this cognition of God, although intuitive, is not by virtue of our own inherent intellectual force or created light ; for till God is present to the mind as its intelligible object, it has no intellectual activity. Prior to the intuition of God, the intellect is not constituted, is not actual intellect, is at best only inlelleclus in potentia. It is only the moment when God pre­sents himself as the creative intelligible object, that the in­tellect is objectively formed, - is intellectus in actu. The power or activity that reveals and affirms God is his, not ours, and the revelation or affirmation of himself as intelligible ob­ject is only the completion of that creative act, which, from nothing, creates us, not only existences, but intellectual exist­ences. As it is only by virtue of the intimate presence and immanence of God as ens rcale, mediante his creative act, that we are existences, or continue to exist, so it is only by the intimate presence and immanence of God as the intel­ligible, mediante the same act, that we are and continue to be intellectual existences ; for it is only in him that we live, move, and are, or are able to perform any function whatever. It is not, then, we who by our power behold God, but he who, by his own agency, makes himself known to us ; and our intuitive apprehension of the fact that he is, is by virtue of an act as truly an act of divine revelation as is the revelation of the Christian mysteries themselves, differing from that only in the respect that it reveals what, when revealed, is evident per sc, whereas that reveals what, when revealed, is evident only per alia. This distinction between the two  revelations, we remark by the way, is important ; for if we neglect it, we shall attempt, either, with De la Mennais, to base science on faith, or, with the Rationalists, to reduce faith to science.

Intuition, we have said, is a fact, not a faculty, and we use it simply in contradistinction to discursion or ratiocination. First principles are never discursively obtained, for the mind must have them before it can operate discursively. They must be known, or else discursion is valueless ; for conclusions drawn from unknown premises are as conclusions drawn from no premises at all. De non apparenlibus el non existenlihus ca­ll em est ratio. They must, then, be given intuitively. Now God is the first principle of all science as of all existence, and therefore must be known as the indispensable condition of all science, and therefore intuitively known. This is all we mean by saying that our knowledge that God is, and is the creator of existences, is intuitive. But we do not suppose him the pas­sive object of our intuition ; we are ourselves rather the passive recipients of his own revelation and affirmation of himself. We are the spectators, and he is the actor. We assert that he must be known in this way, because, unless he is, the fact of knowl­edge in any order is, not merely inexplicable, but absolutely inconceivable.

Now Mr. Morell's doctrine of intuition of God is widely dif­ferent from this. He supposes that prior to the intuition the intellectual faculty is formed and already in active operation, and therefore that there may be knowledge, science, without recognition of God. He supposes, also, that we have a vis intuitiva adequate to the immediate apprehension of God, with­out his active revelation of himself. lie makes no account of the very important fact, that in actual cognition the object must concur actively no less than the subject. He places the intelligibility, not in the object, but in the intellect itself, which is the radical principle of all skepticism. If the intelligibility is in the intellect, in the subject, nothing is intelligible per se ; then nothing is evident per se, and then all evidence is purely subjective. Then we can have only subjective certainty, which is sufficient neither for science nor faith. Here is the fatal error of Cartesianism, which has plunged the whole mod­ern philosophical world into real, if not formal, skepticism. Descartes placed the evidence in the subject, that is, in our own conceptions, and consequently denied to himself all possi­ble means of objective verification ; for he retained only his conceptions with which to verify his conceptions, and conception can never be more evident than conception. If his con­ceptions were called in question, he had no remedy ; for the conceptions he might be disposed to allege in support of the conceptions questioned, could themselves be questioned in turn, and thus on ad injinitum.

It is this grave error of placing the evidence in the subject, the intelligibility in the intellect, instead of the object, that has embarrassed all modern philosophers, and led to those intermi­nable and fruitless discussions  as to  the objective validity of our conceptions, whether there be or be not an external reality corresponding to the internal conception, or idea,    It is also this that creates the grand difficulty we have in proving to lib­eral Protestants that they ought to assent to the Divinely institut­ed authority of the Church.   " Private judgment has, no doubt," say they, "its inconveniences, and is, unquestionably, no ade­quate rule of faith.    It gives rise to as many different doctrines as there are doctors, and leaves all things floating and uncertain. But what is the remedy ?   You propose authority.    Very good. But what is the authority for your authority ?    That must be taken either on the authority of private judgment or on none. The real sense, too, of its teachings and definitions, inasmuch as they are addressed to the individual, can be determined for the individual only by his private judgment, and will be in his mind only what he judges it to be.    Words themselves mean to the mind only what it interprets them to mean.    So, after all, if you by authority diminish in some degree the external mani­festation of the evils of private judgment, you do not in the least remove them.    At bottom, under authority, there is all the diversity that there is elsewhere."    No scientific reply to this is possible, if you place the evidence in the conception, the intelligibility in the subject, instead of the object.    The real an­swer is in showing that this reasoning proceeds on a false as­sumption, because the object concurs as actively as the subject in the production of a fact of knowledge, and the intellect never does and never can act, save in concurrence with an object in­telligible and evident per se, and therefore never does and never can know any thing which is not immediately or mediately ob­jectively intelligible.    The object is not intelligible because we know it, but we know it because it is intelligible.

According to Mr. Morell's doctrine, as we understand it, man has the inherent power to see God, and in the fact of in­tuition God is intelligible to us, not by bis own act, not by vir­tue of his own intelligibility, but by virtue of our created light.  It is, then, we who, by our intellect, make him intelligible lo us, not hu who makes himself intelligible to our intellect by his own intelligibility. What we assert is, that Cod by his own creative act places the intellectual power with which he endows us in relation with his own being as its intelligible object, as the ob­ject intelligible per se, and as the light by and in which our in­tellect sees and knows all that it does see and know. Accord­ing to this view, man can no more be intellectual without the intimate presence and immanence of God as intelligible object, than he can simply exist without the intimate presence and im­manence of God as creator. Mr. Morell overlooks this impor­tant i'act. He supposes that, in the natural order at least, our intellect is complete in itself, and sufficient for itself. In other words, that God has created us, given us certain powers, and constituted us capable of acting, within a given sphere, inde­pendently, lie does not seem to be aware that in this he vir­tually adopts the old Epicurean philosophy, which supposes that, God having made us, we can now, as the excellent Dr. Evarisle de Gypendole would say, u go ahead on our own hook."    If this were so, we might, sing,-

" Let the gods go to sleep up above us,- We know there is no god for this earth, boys."

But we cannot so far separate man, either in his existence or his intellect, from his Maker; we cannot conceive him in any respect capable of performing a single independent action. It is by the immanent presence of God that he denies God, and by the immanent light of God that he blasphemes God. In him we live, and move, and are, and in the natural order, no more than in the supernatural, are we any thing, or can we do or know any thing, without him. Our intellect is not the intel­lect of pure Being, but the intellect of a dependent being, of a created existence, which is nothing save by virtue of the im­manence of the creative act, any more than my volition is something independent of my willing. Suppose my intellect capable of an independent act, of one fact of knowledge, the sole product of its own inherent power, and you suppose it the intellect, not of man, but of God. The human intellect as the intellect of a creature can, in the very nature of the case, know only what is made intelligible to it by a light not its own ; that is to say, a created intellect is simply the faculty to be taught, or to receive, actively, what the Creator chooses, immediately or mediately, to communicate- to it, and the primal sin of man is in aspiring to know independently, to know as God knows, in and of himself, without a teacher.

We have dwelt thus long on this point, because we have wished to distinguish the ontological intuition, which we hold in common with the Fathers and great Doctors of the Church, from the psychological and transcendental doctrine sometimes confounded wilh it, that the intelligibility of the object is in the intellect, and that our intellectual power is adequate to the in­tuition or direct and immediate vision of God, which implies that man may, if he chooses, enjoy the beatific vision even in this life. In the beatific vision the blessed see God as he is in himself, but in this life we cannot so see him. Here we see him, as to what he is in himself, only through a glass darkly, as in an enigma. All we can see here is that he is, and is crea­tive. This is all that is evident to us per se, and this we see only because he so far reveals and affirms himself to vis. All beyond, not logically deducible from this, that we believe of him, we know only by his supernatural revelation, coeval and parallel with the intuitive. The one revelation is, in reality, as old as the other, and, indeed, they are two revelations only in regard to us ; - in regard to God they are one and the same, and made by virtue of one and the same Divine act. In re­gard to us, they are distinguishable, and should always be dis­tinguished, but never separated. The object of faith is God as superintelligible, - the object of philosophy is God as in­telligible ; the matter of faith is what is contained in the super­natural revelation,-the matter of philosophy is what is con­tained in the intuitive revelation, or what is evident per se ; but the two form, in reality, only one whole, and neither is complete in fact without the other; for the root of the intelligible is in the superintelligible, and the supernatural presupposes the natural.

The error of philosophers in all ages has been in not rightly understanding the fact we here state, and in attempting to sepa­rate philosophy, or natural theology, from supernatural theolo­gy, and to erect it into a distinct and independent discipline. In our times their effort is, not only to erect it into a distinct and independent discipline, but to make it the mistress and judge of faith, forgetting that the supernatural is above the nat­ural, the superintelligible above the intelligible, and therefore that faith, not science, is sovereign. Philosophy is only the handmaid of faith, and has no right to aspire even to freedom, or to act save as bid. A right use of reason is essential, and the right use of reason in theological and religious matters is all that the philosopher can aspire to. This he should aspire to ; but even this he can attain to only under the infallible direction of the society to which God has committed his supernatural revelation. In other words, we need and can have no inde­pendent system of philosophy ; and natural theology can escape error, and be worthy of our reliance, only as subjected to the supervision of supernatural or Catholic theology ; for it is only by virtue of orthodoxy in faith that we can preserve or­thodoxy in science, and it would not be difficult to prove that all modern scientific heterodoxy has grown out of the religious heterodoxy professed by the Reformers of the sixteenth centu­ry. Descartes only gave to Luther's heresy its philosophy, as Rousseau afterwards gave it its politics.

Thus much we have judged it proper to say of philosophy in general, and of Mr. Morell's philosophy, or rather psychol-ogism, in particular. We proceed now to consider the author's application of philosophy to the explanation of religion, or ra­ther, to the explanation of the facts of religious experience. We do Mr. Morel!, in the outset, the justice to say, that he disclaims being a Rationalist. A Rationalist he defines to be one who places religion in the logical faculty as its subject. The logical faculty deals not with the matter but with the forms of knowledge, which are merely forms of the subjective under­standing. These forms are abstract, without "content," and have no objective validity. To place religion in them is to make it a mere formal thing, a dry, dead abstraction, destitute of all objective truth. Such, according to him, is Rationalism, and, indeed, all scholastic theology, or logical statement of doctrine; in which he agrees precisely with our countryman, Dr. Bushnell. We of course do not accept this definition either of Rationalism or of the logical faculty. Logic deals, indeed, on­ly with the forms of knowledge, but these forms are real, exist in re, not merely in mente. But let this pass. We agree that Mr. Morell is not a Rationalist, and must tell our Puseyite friends of The Christian Remembrancer, that they are wrong in maintaining that he is. But he is generically a Humanist, and specifically a Sentimentalist.

We have seen that Mr. Morell's psychological table has two sides, the intellectual and the emotional, which run parallel with each other in their respective stages of development. The in­tellectual side we have already considered. On the emotional side we find, placed in the order of their development, instinct, animal passion, relational emotion, and aesthetic, moral, and religious emotions.    Now on this emotional side of human na­ture, that is, the inferior or sensitive soul, the author places re­ligion as in its subject, which, after Jacobi and Schleiermacher, he defines to be " the absolute feeling of dependence, and of a conscious relationship to God, originating immediately from it." This is not Rationalism, but it is something far below it.    Ra­tionalism errs in denying all truth not intrinsically evident, or evident per se, that is, in rejecting the Christian mysteries out­right, or attempting to explain away their supernatural sense by treating them as symbols of truths or facts of the natural or­der.    This last we see in Pierre Leroux, really one of the pro-foundest thinkers, as well as the most perverse, that we are ac­quainted with among the enemies of our holy religion.    He does not, like ordinary unbelievers, regard Christianity as a fic­tion and her mysteries as falsehoods.    He maintains that Chris­tianity is true, and that all her mysteries cover great ontologi-cal facts or truths, but facts or truths of the primitive creation, not of the new or supernatural creation.    Here is his error, and a no vulgar error it is.    But Mr. Morell falls far below him, degrades religion from the rational nature altogether, to grovel in concupiscence, or mere sensitive affection, differing only in degree from instinct and animal passion.    We let him speak for himself.

" Inferring, then, from the foregoing considerations, that religion cannot be a form, of pure intellection, we proceed to inquire next, Whether it can consist essentially in action 1 The superficial and degrading idea, that religion consists in the mere external perform­ance of certain duties, can hardly merit the serious attention of any reflective mind. No outward actions can possibly answer to the most feeble notion we possess of real piety; for we invariably look beneath the outward phenomena to the spiritual life within, before we pronounce upon the religious attributes of any agent whatevei*. And if we take the term action in an inward and spirit­ual sense, yet it only presents to us the aspect of a blind and inde­terminate energy, until it is regulated and directed by some specific purpose or feeling. Action, then, as action, cannot be religious; it only becomes so when we show that it springs from a religious im­pulse or emotion. The measure of our mere activity, whether ex­ternal or internal, can never be the measure of our religious inten­sity ; it is activity in some particular form which alone can deter­mine it. The essence of religion, accordingly, cannot consist in the activity itself, for that is indifferent to the question ; but in the peculiar element, whatever that may be, which influences our ac­tivity so as to direct it towards the Infinite and the Divine.    Now it is an almost universally acknowledged axiom in psychology, that the principles of action (those which give aim and direction to all our energies) are the feelings or emotions, which on that account have been frequently called the active, in opposition to the intel­lectual powers. We may conclude, therefore, even by the rules of the disjunctive syllogism, that the essence of religion belongs to that class of phenomena which we term emotional.

" This conclusion, we find upon due consideration, is borne out by the very same kind of reasoning by which the other cases were rejected, Neither intelligence nor activity, viewed alone, can become the measure of our religion ; but there are certain forms of emo­tion which can readily become so. If, for example, we could find some determined form of emotion, which causes all our thoughts, desires, actions, - in a word, our whole interior and exterior life,- to tend upwards towards God as their great centre and source, we should have little hesitation in saying that such an emotion would precisely measure the true religious intensity of our being, and little hesitation in fixing there the central point, the veritable essence, of religion itself.

" The most able and earnest thinkers of modern times, who have attempted to solve the problem now before us, have in fact almost universally considered the essential element of religion to consist in some of the infinite developments of feeling. We shall adduce two of them as examples. Jacobi, who was one of the first to see the full worth and signification of feeling in the domain of philosophy, defines religion to be ' a faith, resting upon feeling, in the reality of the supersensual and ideal.' The oilier author to whom we refer is Schleiermachcr, than whom no man has ever pursued with greater penetration of mind and earnestness of spirit the paihway of a Di­vine philosophy ; and he places the essence of religion in the abso­lute feeling of dependence, and of a conscious relationship to God, originating immediately from it. All our former considerations, accordingly, as well as the groat weight of authority amongst the best analysts, lead us to place the primitive and essential element of religion in the region of human emotion." - pp. 88, 89.

"These considerations give us a safe clew to the solution of the problem we have now before us, - to determine, namely, the pre­cise mode of feeling in which religion essentially consists. Let us recapitulate the steps and draw the conclusions. Every state of consciousness involves in it the opposition of subject and object: in the emotions, the predominance of the subject gives a sense of freedom, the predominance of the object a sense of dependence. On the side of freedom, our feelings cannot reach the infinite, for the subject, self, is always circumscribed. On the side of depend­ence, however, wo can reach the sphere of infinity ; for the mo­ment our consciousness attains that elevation in which our finite self becomes nothing in the presence of infinity, eternity, and omnipo­tence, the accompanying state of emotion is one which involves an absolute object; and such an emotion must be equivalent to a sense of Deity. Hence we infer that the essential germ of the relig­ious life is concentrated in. the absolute feeling of dependence, - a feeling which implies nothing abject, but, on the contrary, a high and hallowed sense of our being inseparably related to Deity; of our being parts of bis great plan; of our being held up in his vast embrace; of our being formed for some specific destiny, which, even amidst the subordinate and finite pursuits of life, must ever be kept in view as the goal of our whole being.

" In describing this absolute sense of dependence, as containing the essential element of religion, wo do not mean that this alone, without the cooperation of the other faculties, would give rise to the religious life. To do this there must be intelligence; there must be activity; there must be, in short, all the other elements of human nature. But what we mean is this, - that the sense of de­pendence accompanying all our mental operations gives them the peculiar hue of piety. Thinking alone cannot be religious; but thinking accompanied by a sense of dependence on the infinite reason is religious thought. Activity alone cannot be religious; but activity carried on under a sense of absolute dependence upon infinite power is religious action. In a word, it is this peculiar mode of feeling pervading all our powers, faculties, and inward phenom­ena, which gives them a religious character; so that we may cor­rectly say, that the essence of religion lies exactly here."- pp. 93,94.

These extracts show clearly enough that we do Mr. Morell no injustice in saying that he makes religion originate in the emotional side of our nature, find its essence consist in senti­ment, or sensible emotion. The emotional element is distin­guished clearly, as we learn from the author's psychological table, from the intellectual element, and the will, we have seen, is the soul itself, in its essence, the vis agendi, underlying alike intellect and emotion. So the particular emotion in ques­tion cannot be regarded as an affection of the will, in the sense of our theologians, therefore not as an affection of the rational soul at all; otherwise the author would be obliged to identify it with cognition, from which he expressly distinguishes it. Noth­ing, then, remains but sensible emotion, or affection of the in­ferior or sensitive soul. This is evident, again, from the fact, that the author makes the emotional element, which, according to him, is the seat of religion, the seat of instinct and of ani­mal passion. This is what, when reviewing Mr. Parker, we showed is the fact with all Transcendentalists. This emotional nature is what is commonly called the inferior soul, sometimes the sensitive soul, the animal soul, and is termed by St. Paul the fleshy in distinction from the spirit, - the carnal mind, not sub­ject to the law of God, - concupiscence, which the Holy Coun­cil of Trent declares remains after baptism to be combated. Mr. Morell, perhaps, little thinks, that in making this the seat of religion, and the very essence of religion to consist in one of its affections, he virtually raises the flesh above the spirit, and sense above reason, - the very thing Satan is perpetually tempting us to do, and against which the Christian is obliged to struggle as long as he lives, and against which, without grace, he must struggle in vain. There can be no doubt that this nineteenth century is the age of progress, and has already ad­vanced far enough to warrant us in applying to it the words of the holy prophet,-" Woe to you that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness ; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter. Woe to you that are wise in your own eyes, and prudent in your own conceits." - Isaiah v. 20, 21.

There is another doctrine in these extracts worth remarking, namely, that the character of an action is determined by the feeling or emotion with which, or from which, it is done ; or, what is the same thing, that " the aim and direction of our energies " are given by our feelings and emotions, instead of being given by reason and free will, as we had supposed should be the case. This doctrine would have made some of our old moralists stare not a little. The character of an action is determined by its motive, or by the end for which it is per­formed, and we had supposed it a censure rather than a com­mendation to say that a man's activity receives its "aim and direction" from his feelings and emotions. These are blind, and activity, the author himself says, is blind, and therefore true wisdom consists in the blind leading the blind ! Has the author forgotten that, " if the blind lead the blind, they shall both fall into the ditch" ? Does he not see that his whole doctrine puts reason and will to the service of the feelings and emotions, and makes their proper position that of mere instru­ments or slaves of the passions ? Does he mean this ? We know not; but if his words are a true index to his sense, he certainly does mean it, and intends to teach the doctrine of Charles Fourier, that the passions are the governing power, and that intellect and will are merely instrumental faculties, to be employed in the service of the passions, having no office but to do their bidding ; that is, man is in his normal state only when he is the slave of his passions ; for passion is only feeling intensified, or emotion prolonged !

Mr.  Morell's definition of religion, borrowed from Jacobi and  Schleicrmacher, is a real curiosity.    " The essence of religion is the absolute feeling of dependence, and of a  con­scious relationship to God, originating immediately from it." Why does the author add the epithet absolute to feeling ?   Can feeling be more or less than feeling ?   Are there feelings which are feelings only secundum quid, feelings which are not ab­solutely feelings, but only relatively feelings ?    What is the meaning  of "feeling   of dependence"?    Does   dependence feel ?    The phrase  must mean, either that dependence is the subject of the feeling, or that feeling is an obscure perception of dependence, and therefore of that on which we depend; for rela­tion is unintelligible without intuition of the terms related, since without the terms it is nothing.    The author cannot mean the former, and the latter contradicts his own doctrine ; for feeling, as a perception, however obscure, is an intellectual operation, and the author would imply by it that the essence of religion is in cognition, in which he says it is not.    But the essence of religion is not in the absolute feeling of dependence alone, but also  in the   absolute   feeling  " of a conscious   relation­ship to God."    What is the sense of absolute feeling of a con­scious relationship ?    Feeling, distinguished from intellection, perception, or  intuition, is purely subjective, and has and can have no object.    It may have an external cause, but it is the intellectual, not the emotional element, that  takes cognizance of it.    Feeling of relationship.    What is the difference be­tween the feeling of relationship and the feeling of dependence ? Is not dependence a relationship, and the dependence in ques­tion precisely our relationship to God ?    How can the two feelings then be two ?    Again, the absolute  feeling of a con­scious relationship to God is said to originate immediately from the absolute feeling of dependence.   How can one absolute feel­ing originate from another, or how can a feeling be derived and yet be absolute ?    " The absolute feeling of a conscious rela­tionship."    Is the relationship conscious, or are we conscious of it ?    The latter we presume is meant.    But to be conscious is to know, is an  intellectual act, and a conscious relationship must mean a knoion relationship.   What is the meaning of the absolute feeling of a known relationship, originating immediately from the absolute feeling of dependence ?   Or what is the mean­ing of feeling of consciousness ?     We may be conscious of a feeling, that is, know that we feel so and so, but to feel that we know this or that is something we do not understand. We do not feel that we know; hut if we know, we know we know. A feel­ing of conscious relationship can mean no more nor less than that we are conscious of it. The ahsolute feeling of dependence, the author elsewhere says, is equivalent to a sense of the Dei­ty, that is, to an obscure perception of God, for sense, as here used, means obscure perception, and is an intellectual, not an emotional fact. The author says the essence of religion is not in the intellect; but his definition, if rendered intelligible, neces­sarily asserts that it is ; for the only intelligible meaning of his definition is, The essence of religion is in the feeble or obscure perception of God, and of our absolute dependence on him. But this is, we take it, precisely what the author means to deny, in denying that religion is any form of knowing, and assert­ing that it is essentially emotion. Really, Mr. Morell, as well as Plato, becomes inconsistent and puerile the moment he breaks from the traditions of the Fathers.

Mr. Morell's real inquiry, as we understand it, is, What is the peculiar psychological principle of religion, regarded, not as doctrine, but as a virtue? He considers religion on its subjec­tive side, as a simple fact or phenomenon of human experience, and wishes to determine, psychologically, what it is generically and differentially, what constitutes a fact or phenomenon of experience religious, and distinguishes it from every fact or phe­nomenon that is not religious. If he had not been misled by his psychologisin, he would have known beforehand that this is not psychologically determinable, for, as we have already re­marked, the faculties of the soul are not themselves psychologi­cally determinable. They are all ontologically determined, that is, characterized by their respective objects. Religion, as a purely psychological fact, does not exist, is not conceiv­able, as the author himself, if he understands himself, implies in his very definition ; for he includes in his definition cog­nition of the object, - " conscious relationship to God." The essential and distinctive character of religion is derived from its object, and its psychological principle is determinable only in the determination of its ontological principle ; for, till it is known what it is that religion requires of us, we cannot know what special faculty of the soul must be exercised in order to fulfil its requisitions.
Here is the fact that our neologists, reared under Evangelical influences, overlook ; and hence, in spite of their talents, learn­ing, and industry, their failure to attain to anything solid or valliable.    Evangelicalism, a species of pretended illuminism, is itself nothing, at bottom, but mere psychologism, and proceeds always on the supposition, that the subject determines the ob­ject, - that the object, or objective truth, is to be concluded from the conception, the internal sentiment, or affection.    We need not be surprised, then, that Jacobi, Fries, Schleiermacher, De Wette, Parker, Busbnell, Morell, and others, who have outgrown the earlier Protestant dogmatics, should follow the psychological method in religion, as well as in  philosophy. These men have discovered, what all their brethren are begin­ning to discover, that the earlier Reformers, by asserting that man  lost  his  spiritual  faculties in the Fall, virtually denied grace, which they professed to extol, by leaving no subject of grace, and that, in order to be the subject of grace, man must retain his spiritual faculties ; they have also discovered that the sensist philosophy, so rife in the last century and the begin­ning of the present, really denied all knowledge by denying all cognitive subject, and that in order to  be  instructed, and  in­structed to some end, man must have the inherent power  to receive and  use instruction.    Thus far they have done well. But they conclude, from the necessity of asserting the spiritual faculties in order to  assert man as the subject of grace, that these faculties suffice without grace, and thus run into pure Pelagianism, the very error of denying grace they intended to escape.    They conclude, also, that the power to receive  and use instruction suffices without instruction, and that, to possess such power, man must have in himself the germs of all truth, needing only external influences for their development.    They thus  make all  knowledge purely subjective, which  is virtual skepticism, and reach, by another route, the very error of the sensists, which they proposed to avoid.     They wished to get rid of the Protestant dogmas and the sensist philosophy, which made man nothing, and to substitute for them a doctrine which should make man count for something ; but, misled by their psychologism, they have seen no way to do it, but by making man count for every thing ; and in making him count for every thing, they make him, in their turn, count for nothing, and fall into pure nullism.

Unaware of the conclusions which an enlightened and vigor­ous logic must draw from their premises, and taking it for granted that all religion, faith, science, and truth are in the soul, needing only to be developed, brought out, they proceed by way of psychological analysis to detect and determine the peculiarly religious phenomena, and from them to determine their peculiar psychological principle, or, in other words, to deter­mine what must be religion by determining what is its psy­chological subject. Yet we should suppose that a moment's re­flection would suffice to show them that nothing can be more unscientific than their method. How are you to know what are religious phenomena, if you know not their principle ? and how are you to know their subjective, if you know not their objective principle ? Suppose you find, by analysis, that we have cogni­tions, volitions, emotions, and various classes of emotions, how are you to decide in which of these is the subjective character­istic of religion ? You may say it is in this or that, - is not in cognition, and is in emotion; but how do you know that what you say is true? Is religion something independent of man, or is it nothing? If nothing, what is the use of your inquiry? Man is man, and religion is the same, whatever the conclusions you may draw, or in whatever class of psychological facts you may place it or not place it. If something, how, unless you know what that some­thing is, determine its psychological principle ? If you know not what religion requires you to know, to do, or to feel, how are you to be sure that you do not mistake its psychological seat ? Noth­ing, then, can be more evident, than that it is religion as object that must determine for us the psychological principle of relig­ion ; and if Mr. Morell and others prove to be right in the ac­count they give, it can only be by a happy accident.

Religion as a virtue cannot differ essentially from virtue in general. Virtue is not a cognition, nor an emotion, but an act, and, as the word itself indicates, a human act, that is, an act performed by the human person. The human person is all in the rational nature, for person is, by its very definition, " an in­dividual substance of a rational nature." Virtue is, then, a ra­tional act, and therefore cannot have its seat in the emotional element, for that element is irrational, is the animal as distin­guished from the rational nature, as Mr. Morell himself must concede, since he distinguishes it from the intellectual element, and makes it the seat of "animal passion." This is conclu­sive against the sentimentalists or emotionalists. The rational nature lias two faculties or modes of activity, understanding and will, or free will. Rational nature must be intellective, and its characteristic as activity is to act propterjinem,- not simply ad jine.m, which is common to all animal nature, butpropterjinem, that is, in view and for the sake of an end, - and therefore it must be free activity, or free will. As understanding, it pre­sents the end and the motives for seeking it as free will ; it elects, wills the end, or rejects it. To virtue both faculties are necessary, the understanding to present the end and its mo­tives, and the will to elect it ; but as the act is specially in the act of election, the virtue is placed primarily in the will, and no act is virtuous except it is an act of free will. Hence, when we inquire whether a man is virtuous or vicious, we look al­ways to his will, and seek not what he has done externally, but the will with which he has done it, and we pronounce him vir­tuous or vicious according as that proves to have been virtu­ous or vicious. The act, as the subject of the predicate vir­tue or vice, as praiseworthy or blameworthy, is purely an act of the will, and hence moral theologians throw out of the ac­count all except the internal act. Thus they speak of acts of faith, of hope, of chanty, of contrition, which are pure inter­nal acts, and may be performed any time, and as often as one chooses. The virtue of religion partakes of this general char­acter of virtue, and is always an act of free will, done in view and for sake of an end, as is and must be every act of free will. But we have not yet the distinctive character of virtue, - have not yet found that which makes an act virtuous, and dis­tinguishes it from all other acts. Virtue is an act of free will, a voluntary act for an end intellectually apprehended. But not all voluntary acts for an end, or acts of free will, are virtues ; for every sin is an act of free will, a voluntary act, done for the sake of an end intellectually apprehended ; and therefore, by psychological analysis, do our best, we can make no valid distinction between virtue and its opposite. Hence it is, that psychologism results usually, and, with not a few of its cultivators, avowedly, in the denial of all distinction between vir­tue and vice, as well as between truth and falsehood. To deter­mine the distinctive mark of virtue, we must look beyond the sub­ject to the object; for the character of the act is determined by the end for which it is done, and the end for which an act must be done in order to be virtue can be determined only as we are taught, mediately or immediately, by our Creator. According to Christianity, and even philosophy or reason itself, man can no more exist without a final than without a first cause, and nullity can no more be his end than his beginning. No created existence can be its own finality, or the final cause of any thing, and therefore the final cause of all existences is and must be God. God is the origin and end of creation. The irrational portion of creation tends to him by its intrinsic and necessary laws ; the rational portion are required to seek him voluntarily, as their freely chosen end. If they do, they gain the end for which they were made, and find their supreme good, the Supreme Good itself; if they do not voluntarily, if they voluntarily refuse to do it, their action bears them from God, that is, away from their supreme good, away from all good, into unmitigated darkness and evil, which is hell ; for men create their own hell, and damn themselves. The end we are to seek is our final cause, and hence the end we must seek in order to be virtuous is God. A virtuous act is there­fore an act of free will, done for the sake of God as its end ; or, more simply, virtue is voluntary obedience to the will of God because it is his will, or the voluntary compliance with his commands because his commands.

The virtue of religion is distinguishable from other virtues only by the fact that God is the immediate object to which it is directed.    All virtues are acts done for God as the end, or ultimate end ; but some are directed to God immediately, and others immediately to ourselves, or to our neighbour.    The im­mediate object of morality, as distinguished from religion, is the preservation of our own life and health, the proper care of our families, the assistance of the needy, the preservation of society, the promotion of social and political well-being, &c. But these acts, whatever they may be, and however conducive they may be to the welfare of ourselves or our neighbour, are virtuous only in so far as they are done for God's sake, with the intention, explicit or implicit, of fulfilling his commands, because his.    If I preserve my life and my health only for my own sake, my act is selfish, not virtuous ; if for the sake of be­ing serviceable to my neighbour, or to my country, it is benev­olent, or patriotic, but still not virtuous ; and my act rises to virtue only when I do it because God commands me to do it. There must be always reference to God as the ultimate end of the act, - the intention of doing his will, because his will. This, too, must be the case  in those acts which are specially religious, done immediately for the honor and glory of God. If I perform the external duties of worship, but not for the sake of God, my act wants the essential character of virtue ; for God  is always the ultimate end of all virtuous acting. This  granted,  whatever distinction we  may for convenience' sake  make   between  religion and   the  other virtues,  or be­tween religion and morality, no real distinction between them exists, and we should always bear in mind that the specific acts of religion, such as prayer, praise, thanksgiving, private or public worship, assistance at the Holy Sacrifice, partaking of the Sacraments, are an integral part of morality, or general ethics,- as truly so as succouring the needy, practising temperance, forti­tude, and prudence, and giving to our neighbour his dues. No man is moral except he fulfils the law of God, and to fulfil that law is to keep all its precepts, whether they are made known to us through natural reason, or by supernatural revelation. He who refuses to believe the mysteries which God has re­vealed, if we rightly consider the matter, is, to say the least, as immoral as he who picks his neighbour's pocket, or violates any of the precepts of justice. We insist on this, because there is in our days a tendency to institute a divorce between religion and morality, and it is important to show wherein the two are identical, rather than wherein they are distinct. No divorce between them is admissible or conceivable. An im­moral religious man, or an irreligious moral man, is a contradic­tion in terms. Morality is nothing but the practical application of theology, or of religious dogmatical teaching. Religion, as doctrine, is the supreme law, and conformity to it in practice is morality, or religion as virtue. In practice all virtue is relig­ious, and all religion is virtue, though no act is religious or vir­tuous, in the full Christian sense, unless done from divine grace, which elevates the actor above the natural order, and places him on the plane of a supernatural destiny.

We are saying nothing new ; we are only repeating, in our own imperfect way, what all Christian moralists have uniform­ly taught from the beginning. But the view we present is pre­cisely that which offends Mr. Morell and his fellow-neologists. It is precisely to get rid of the conclusion to which we come, thai they psychologize, and seek a new definition of religion. They have been brought up in modern Evangelicalism, and find themselves unable or unwilling to believe the Evangelical theol­ogy, and they wish to be free to reject it without forfeiting their religious character. They confound the theology of their sect or sects with Christian theology, and therefore, for the same reason and on the same condition, wish to be free to reject all theology, or doctrines addressed to the understanding. Their real aim is to secure all the freedom of denial claimed by unbe­lievers, and at the same time not forfeit their Christian charac­ter in the estimation of their co-religionists, and perhaps in their own, for it is not improbable that they are as unwilling to think themselves unbelievers as they are to be thought so by others.    They therefore, after the exnmple of the early Protestant  Reformers, confound free will with liberty a coactione, define it as the general activity of the soul, or the soul itself, the vis agenda and represent it as underlying all the mental opera­tions.   As nobody of any note thinks of making religion a mere cognition, or supposing that the mere hearers and not the doers of the law are religious, they place the essence of religion in emotion, feeling, or sentiment ; for, after understanding and free will, there is no other psychological element in which they can place it.  Placed in emotion, which is purely subjective, a mere sensitive affection, which demands no distinct cognition of the object, and no exercise of the understanding in regard to objec­tive truth, they feel themselves able to assert that they have, providing they have the sentiment, all that is essentially and dis­tinctively religious, whatever the intellectual doctrines they be­lieve or   disbelieve.      Hence   Schleiermacher,  in his  lieden uber die Religion, resolves the Church into general society, and religious worship into the kind feelings and pleasant conversa­tion of friends casually meeting of an evening at a neighbour's house ; and maintains that belief in the personality of God and the personal immortality of the soul is by no means essential to true and acceptable religion.    Dr. Bushnell, our own country­man, if he follows out the principles he adopts, must go as far. M. Cousin reproaches the pantheist Spinoza with being too de­vout, too much absorbed in the thought of God.     We have heard some of our Protestant friends term the poet Shelley, who ostentatiously wrote"AOeos, Atheist, after his name, one of the most devout worshippers God ever had on earth.    And we have known others go so far as to call the pagan Goethe a sec­ond Messiah, and to praise his lascivious fVahlverivandtschaft-en as eminently pious, and admirably adapted to spiritual edifi­cation.    And, indeed, there is an unmistakable tendency among the most eminent of modern Protestant authors to rehabilitate all the ancient pagan superstitions, not excepting disgusting fe-tichism, and  to  place them, as religion, on a level with Chris­tianity.    Intellectually considered, these superstitions may have been   very   defective, and, no  doubt, bear witness to a low state of culture, and the rudeness of the tribes or nations that professed them; but as religion, as evincing the activity of true and  acceptable religious feeling, they were to their adherents all that Christianity is to us.    The negro worshipping his Mum-bo Jumbo is as truly worshipping God, as the Christian saint offering up the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, or prostrating him­self in devout prayer before the altar of the Almighty.    Not only do our Protestant authors, philosophers  in their own es­timation, divorce religion from morality, but they also divorce it from knowledge, and suppose  a man may be truly religious who is ignorant of every article in the Creed, and breaks every precept of the Decalogue, - making it necessary for us to de­fend against them, not only the orthodox faith, but even ordi­nary intelligence and morality, the very elements of civilization. But, after all, these neologists do not quite succeed in their attempt.    Mr. Morell, as much as he wars against intellect or understanding, ¦- the logical  understanding, as he calls it, - finds himself obliged, as the indispensable condition of religion, to assert intuition of God, as its object, and he can frame no definition of religion that excludes cognition.    He cannot, for a moment, maintain his pretence, that the activity of the emo­tions is the will, for nothing is more certain than that emotions are neither voluntary nor rational, and that we are, morally or religiously speaking, no farther interested in them than we de­liberately excite or assent to them. Man is not to be regarded as one simple nature, but, so to speak, as two natures united in one person, the rational and the animal.    The rational acts propter finem, and therefore rationally from free will; the animal acts ad fmem, according to its own intrinsic necessity, as does all animal  nature.    It is only on  the supposition  of these   two natures in one person, that we can explain the fact of temp­tation, or that  internal struggle  between reason and passion, judgment and inclination, which, since the Fall, rends the bosom of every man.    Not otherwise is the language of St. Paul, in the seventh chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, susceptible of an intelligible meaning, or is there sense in the often-quoted words of the heathen poet,-

" Video meliora, proboque: Deteriora sequor.'1

To place religion in the animal nature, though our author does it virtually, is too gross a violation of common sense for any one with his eyes open. Then it must be placed in the rational nature. Then all religious action is for God as final cause, and then it is necessary to know God, as the end, and also the means of attaining unto him or gaining our end. To know our end we must know our origin, for our final cause is unintelligible without a knowledge of our first cause. Here is all theology, for theology is nothing else than the knowledge of our origin and end, and of the means of gaining our end.   It is idle, then, for a man to fight against theology, or to pretend that knowledge is not requisite to religion, -not only to its perfection, but even to its existence. It is a hard case that we, benighted Papists, who are accused of maintaining that ignorance is the mother of devotion, should have to defend tjie common cause of intelligence against the philosophers who claim to be the great lights of the age. Perhaps by light they mean darkness, and suppose that forgetting is acquiring knowl­edge.

The difficulty our Protestants feel arises, not from the ne­cessity of theology, or doctrinal instruction, to the religious character, but from the false theology taught by their sects, and which they mistake for Christian theology. We are not sur­prised that Protestants rebel against Protestant instruction, or regard Protestant theology as a let and hindrance, at best as superfluous ; for it really is an anomaly in Protestantism, and has no relation to the general economy of Protestant life. The Christian doctrines which Protestants profess to retain and incorporate into their theologies are really incredible and absurd when taken as Protestant doctrines, severed from the body of truth to which they belong, and on private judg­ment or private interpretation. This is a point of great im­portance, and one which cannot be too often insisted upon. We find Protestants professing certain doctrines which they have retained from us, and we are apt, at first sight, to suppose that these doctrines mean for them what they mean for us, and are as credible when they profess them as when we profess them ; or, if we do not so suppose, Protestants themselves do, especially those Protestants who admit to themselves that they are unable to believe these doctrines. But the fact is, that the Christian mysteries professedly held by Protestants are not really the mysteries we believe ; for they are taken as isolated doctrines, and differ as much from ours as a branch severed from the trunk, withered and dead, differs from a branch united to the trunk, living and bearing its fruit. On Protestant principles, they serve no purpose in the economy of religious life, they have no connection with Protestant notions of sanctity, are destitute of that beauty and grandeur which pertain to them when seen in their proper place as parts of an organic whole, which rests on a solid and adequate foundation. With us they receive a practical meaning by virtue of their relation to other truths which we hold, but which Protestants reject, and are credible because asserted on a sufficient authority. With Protestants no peculiarly Christian truth' has any practical meaning, or is supported by any authority sufficient for a revealed doctrine. Hence it is that in the bosom of every Protestant sect we see always a party protesting against the nominally Christian doc­trines retained by the sect, as relics of Popery, denouncing them as anomalies, inconsistent with Protestantism, and calling upon the sect to clear them away. This is as it should be, and we see not how an intelligent Protestant, not wishing to profess to believe what he does not and cannot, as a Protes­tant, believe, can do otherwise. To be called upon to believe a mass of doctrines which have no practical connection with life, throw no light on our duties, and furnish no motives to their performance, is an affront to good sense ; and we wonder not that so many are found to resist, and labor either to reject or to explain them away.

But, if these intelligent and consistent Protestants - con­sistent, we say, for they are consistent as Protestants - could be persuaded to. look at the Christian doctrines in their unity and integrity, as an organic and living whole, as held by those who have been commissioned to keep and teach them, they would at once see that all their objections are mis­placed and puerile. They would then see that he who wars against the understanding, or doctrines addressed to it, is too un­reasonable to be called a madman. We grant the doctrines they reject are incredible as Protestant doctrines, but nothing is more credible as Catholic doctrines, because as Catholic doctrines they are in their place, and receive their true signifi­cance.

There is much more in Mr. Morell's book on which we might remark, especially his application of his philosophy to the explanation of inspiration and the Christian mysteries ; but we have said enough to show that his doctrine is fundamentally false, and hostile to the very conception of religion, and it is not necessary to pursue and refute it in detail. The whole book affords us only a melancholy instance of the impotence of great abilities and respectable scholarship to construct, with­out the aid of that scientific and theological tradition which has come down to us from Adam, any thing deserving the name of a moral or a religious code. The greatest ability, the most creative genius, and the most varied and profound erudition, operating outside of the traditional wisdom of the race, can produce nothing that can abide for a moment the test of enlight­ened criticism. Man out of unity is weak and helpless, and can originate nothing but puerility and absurdity.    The reason of this is, that man has not the source of knowledge and wisdom in himself, and is nothing save as he is taught and educated by his Maker. Pride may revolt at this, and men, puffed up by a vain philosophy which only darkens the understanding and per­verts the heart, may revolt and blaspheme, but the experience of six thousand years proves that it is true.

Our Maker has never deserted us, and has always been near us to instruct us, if we would but sit down at his feet and listen. Some he has always instructed, and always have those who chose to learn been brought to the knowledge of his will, and informed with his truth. The great body of true doctrine, re­vealed and natural, has been from the beginning within the reach of all men, is incorporated into the speech of all nations, and preserved in its unity, purity, and integrity in the infallible speech of the Church. There we may learn it, and if we learn it not there, we shall learn it nowhere, and be as heterodox in philosophy as in theology. We have neither to create nor to invent truth ; we have only to consent to be taught it. What fools we must be to refuse to learn ! What greater fools we must be to suppose that all who have preceded us have been fools, that science and wisdom were born only with us, and that our minds are the first on which truth has ever dawned ! There were brave men before Agamemnon, and wise men be­fore Schleiermacher and Morell. The race has not lived six thousand years without a moral or religious code, or with one that now needs to be reversed. Let our philosophers reflect on this, and know that they can reverse the wisdom transmitted us only by putting evil for good, folly for wisdom, and dark­ness for light. It has been only to arrive at this moral, and to enforce it by a striking example, that we have introduced Mr. Morell's work, and called our readers to its false and immoral teachings and speculations. Such works are instructive, and teach us wisdom as the Spartans taught their sons temper­ance, by exhibiting the disgusting spectacle of the drunken Helots. From the folly and impiety of even the distinguished among Protestants, let us learn to love our Church still more, and still more humbly adore the grace that permits us to call ourselves her children.