Parker's Discourse

(Please note well that this article was written approximately two years prior to Dr. Brownson's conversion to Catholicism, thus explaining all seemingly heterodox assertions found within it.)

Boston Quarterly Review, October, 1842
  
Art. I.  A Discourse on Matters pertaining to Religion. By Theodore Parker, Minister of the Second Church in Roxbury, Mass. Boston : Charles C. Little and James Brown. 1842. 8vo. pp. 503.

This volume consists substantially of the Five Lec­tures, which Mr. Parker gave in Boston about one year ago. intended to bring out more fully, to illustrate, and defend the doctrines he had broached in his some­what famous South-Boston Sermon, reviewed in this Journal for October, 1841. The Lectures were listened to, when delivered, with attention and interest, by a large, intelligent, and highly cultivated audience ; and if we have them here without the charms of the Lec­turer's elocution, we have them enlarged, elaborated with greater care, and accompanied by numerous notes, bibliographical and critical, of no slight value, and which prove at least the variety and extent of the au­thor's reading.

In accordance with the original division into Lec­tures, the work is divided into Five Books, or Dis­courses. The first Book is entitled Religion in general, or a Discourse of the Religious Sentiment and its Man­ifestations ; the second, The Relation of the Religious Sentiment to God, or a Discourse of Inspiration ; the third, The Relation of the Religious Sentiment to Jesus of Nazareth, or a Discourse of Christianity ; the fourth, The Relation of the Religious Sentiment to the greatest of Books, or a Discourse of the Bible ; the fifth, The Relation of the. Religious Sentiment to the greatest of human Institutions, or a Discourse of the Church. It will be seen from the titles of the several Books, that the subjects discussed are the Foundations of Religion, Inspiration, Christianity, the Bible, and the Church. These are great topics. None are or can be more so. We hope, therefore, our readers will not be displeased to find us taking them up one after another, and discussing them with a little profound­ness, with as much fulness of detail and illustra-t|pn, and to as great a length as permitted by our limits.

We say in advance, that whatever the judgment that may ultimately be formed of the peculiar views which the author has put forth, no one possessed of tolerable independence, and mental fairness, can fail to acknowl­edge the earnestness, learning, ability, and eloquence with which the work is written. Mr, Parker deserves high praise for having sought for the truth with all diligence, under circumstances not always the most favorable, and for not hesitating, at risk of his reputa­tion as a minister of religion, and of his standing as the member of a particular denomination, to publish freely, boldly, and without apology for so doing, the convictions to which his studies have brought him. He has spoken indeed at his peril, for it is not a light thing for a man to speak, on these great topics, opinions of his own, and whoever speaks on them is account­able for what he says ; but he has shown that he has been willing to take the responsibility, as every man who is in earnest and has convictions will never hesi­tate to do ; and all that concerns us or others is to take up his word, and determine, if we can, its value, both in relation to the circumstances in which it was spoken, and in relation to its intrinsic truth.

In examining this volume, we shall exercise all the freedom shown by its author; we shall aim to say nothing unkind, or uncharitable, for we see nothing in the book that it is worth one's while to be angry with or about; but we shall claim the right to treat the author as a full-grown man, able both to give blows and to take them in return. He who publishes such a work as this has the right to demand respectful and fair treatment, but no generosity, no indulgence. He chal­lenges the closest scrutiny, the severest tests : and where he is found wanting, lie has no right to complain if exposed without mercy. We trust that these remarks will assure him that, though we make no profes­sions of regard, of sympathy, or of tenderness for his feelings and the like, yet in whatever we may say, there will be no want of respect for his intentions, his un­derstanding, or his ability, and no disposition to sly aught which he or his most partial friends may con­sider unfair, or uncalled for. V\re shall treat him as we think we should be willing to be treated. We shall take up his work, book by book, and in some instances chapter by chapter, both out of respect to what he himself advances, and to the intrinsic importance of the topics discussed.

I.
GROUNDS OF RELIGION.
The First Book is divided into seven chapters. I. An Examination into the Religious Element in Man, and the existence of its Object. II. Of the Sentiment, the Idea, and the Conception of God. III. Extent and Power of the Religious Sentiment. IV. The Idea of Religion connected with the Science of Life. V. The three great Historical Forms of Religion. VI. Of Cer­tain Doctrines connected with Religion. 1. Of the Primitive State of Mankind. 2. Of the Immortality of the Soul. VII. The Influence of Religion on Life.
1. The aim of the author in this first book, and especially in this first chapter, is to establish the doctrine, that religion has its ground in the permanent and inde­structible nature of man, in a special religions element in man's constitution ; in opposition, on the one hand, to the infidel philosophers, who contend that religion is an accident in human history, springing from causes purely local and temporary; and on the other, to those supernaturalists, who contend that religion is some­thing miraculously superinduced upon human nature. According to his view, man is religious, not supernatu­ral ly, not arbitrarily, not accidentally, but naturally, by virtue of his original constitution as a man. '• Thus, then," he says, "it appears that induction from notori­ous facts; consciousness spontaneously active; and j^ilosophical analysis of man's nature ; all equally lead to some religious sentiment or principle as an essential part of man's constitution.''  p. 19.
The doctrine, that man is religious by a law of his nature, or a special element of his nature, when inter­preted so as to mean that man is, and can be religious, without any transformation of his nature, or superinduc-tion of a new principle upon his nature, is unquestionably sound, and worthy of all acceptation. Man was intended by his Maker to be religious ; he has a natural capacity for religion ; has a natural need of it; and cannot fulfil his destiny as a man without it. Perhaps this is all that Mr. Parker means ; but it is not all that he seems to us to assert. He does not, as we understand him, merely assert that man has naturally a religious aptitude or capacity, nor merely that religion is a constant and universal fact of human history ; but that man is relig­ious by virtue of a special religious nature, a peculiar element of his nature, which may be regarded as a sort of sixth sense, having very nearly the same relation to the spiritual world that the sense of sight, the sense of hearing, or the sense of touch has to the material world. In a word, we understand him to assert in man, as the principle of the religious phenomena, a funda­mental element of man's nature, distinct, peculiar, sui generis, which he calls the Religious Sentiment, and defines to be the sense of dependence. This theory is not without its plausibility, and is almost sure to captivate at first sight; but we have much deceived ourselves if it will bear the test of rigid investigation. Mr. Parker relies for its support on, 1. Induction from notorious facts ; 2. Consciousness spon­taneously active ; 3. Philosophical analysis of man's nature. The second sround of reliance must be aban-doned at once, for it is a misapprehension of the fact of consciousness. Consciousness can have no spontaneous activity, for it is not a being, nor a faculty, nor yet a fact sui generis. It is simply what Leibnitz calls " ap­perception/' the recognition by the me of itself in the phenomenon as the subject of the phenomenon. The activity, the causative force, in consciousness is the me ; and therefore the spontaneous activity of the conscious­ness is the spontaneous activity of the me, which is in no wise distinguishable from its general activity. To say the me acts spontaneously, is only saying in other terms, that it acts : for all acting, of whatever subject predicated, is spontaneous, that is, the actor acting from itself, from its own centre, and from its own in­herent force or energy. The assertion of Mr. Parker therefore amounts to this, the me in acting, or in the phenomena of life is conscious in itself of a peculiar religious element, which is an essential part of its con­stitution. This-is not true. We are conscious only of being the subject of certain phenomena, not of what we are in ourselves. We are merely conscious of ex­hibiting religions phenomena, not, we venture to state, of the peculiar power or essential clement by virtue of which we exhibit them.
There remain, then, only two sources of evidence of the reality of the religious element,induction of a religious principle, from the exhibition by man of relig­ious phenomena, and philosophical analysis of man's na­ture. But leaving these for a moment, we must state what is to us an a -priori objection to Mr. Parker's view. He calls the religious element in man a sentiment,"or a principle. To be what lie represents it, it should be called principle rather than sentiment, because sentiment is a fact of life, and not an element of na­ture. But assume that religion originates in a principle of human nature. Man then is religious by virtue of this distinct, peculiar principle. This prin­ciple is ontological, not phenomenal. A man then is re­ligious, not, as Mr. Parker himself seems subsequently to contend, in proportion to the quantity of his obedience, but in proportion to the quantity of his being. The quantity of a man's being, according to Mr. Parker, is always the same ; consequently the amount of a man's religion must always be the same, whether obedient or disobedient, active or inactive !

But passing over this, and assuming that Mr. Parker is right in affirming, that man is religious by virtue of a religious nature, or a special, peculiar element of his nature, we must nevertheless assure him, that the ac­count he has given of it is one that we cannot accept. He calls it a sentiment ; and that he means sentiment, when he so calls it, is evident from the fact, that he tells us what sentiment it is : namely, the sense of de­pendence. " We feel conscious," he says, page 16, "of this element within us. We are not sufficient for our­selves ; not self-originated ; not self-sustained." True ; but one thing is the fact that we are dependent, and another thing the power by which we feel it; one thing is the power by which we feel it, and another thing the fact that we do feel it. This last only, is properly termed a sense of dependence. It is not an ontological principle, but a simple fact of experience, a simple phenomenon of life. Now, unless Mr. Parker confounds the plienomenon with the principle, the eii'ect with the cause, the actor with the act, and asserts the identity of the two,  which is the principle of either pantheism, or of atheism, as it is asserted from the point of view of the cause, or from the point of view of the effect, he cannot make the sense of dependence an element of man's nature, " an essential part of man's constitution." No sentiment is a principle, and certainly few people will believe that the mere feeling that we arc dependent beings, which is all that can be meant by a sense of dependence, is an ontological prin­ciple, an element of man's very being.
Bat even if we could admit the sense of dependence to be a principle of human nature; instead of being, as it is, a fact of experience, Mr. Parker would not have made out his case. His doctrine is that there is a reli­gious nature in man, a special element of man's nature, that is the principle of the religious phenomena. This element, special religious nature, must be the principle of these phenomena alone, and their sole principle. The religious sentiment must be proved to be a principle sui generis, manifesting itself in the religious phenome­na only, or nothing is proved to the purpose. The whole question is not, are there religious phenomena? but, are these phenomena, or are they not, to be as­cribed to a peculiar element in man, "an essential part of man's constitution/' and which may be called a spe­cial religious, or spiritual nature ? If the phenomena are shown to proceed from a principle, common to them and a great variety of other phenomena, then they do not warrant the induction of a peculiar, religious ele­ment in man as their principle ; or if the principle as­sumed be common to them and a great variety of other phenomena, then is it proved not to be that principle, even admitting such principle to exist.

Now, the sense of dependence, admitting it to be what we shall soon proceed to question, the eminent characteristic of the religious phenomena, is at least not peculiar to them. All the phenomena of life conceal at their bottom, in a greater or less degree, the sense of dependence. Man is a limited, an imperfect, a de­pendent being, and as such he enters into all the phe­nomena of his life, and as such he must recognise him­self in all the phenomena of his life sufficiently marked and vivid to be ranked as apperceptions. All the appe­tites, passions, ailections, desires, involve the sense of dependence. There are probably few of our phenomena in which we have a deeper feeling, a more realizing sense of our dependence, than hunger and thirst, when dying of one or the other, and no food or drink at hand, or to be procured. Are hunger and thirst reli­gious phenomena ? If not, the sense of dependence does not constitute every phenomenon in which it ap­pears a religious phenomenon. If they are religious phenomena, then there are no peculiarly religious phe­nomena, and then no peculiarly religious element in man.

But so far is the sense of dejiendence from being- pe­culiar to the religious phenomena, it is not even their emi­nent characteristic. No man. not even Mr. Parker him­self, will pretend that the simple, naked sense of de­pendence is a religious feeling. No doubt, appeals to our sense of our own insufficiency, to a sense of our dependence, are among the most successful in arresting men's attention, fixing it on religion, and in leading them to desire religion, and to struggle to obtain it; but with ail deference to Mr. Parker, we must insist that this sense of dependence is not the most prominent feature in the higher religious experience. The man who has really been redeemed, sanctified, united by a living faith to Christ his living Head, is not chieily af­fected by a sense of his dependence. He is, no doubt, humble, but his soul is filled with a sense of majesty, with reverence, love, joy, and peace. The Divine In­fluence flows continually into him, and he feels that he can do all things, for he dwells in God, and God in him.
Mr. Parker, we admit, has the high authority of Schleiermacher for calling the religious sentiment a sense of dependence : but in the first place, Schleierma­cher does not fall into the absurdity of ascribing onto-logical existence to a sense of dependence, of making it a principle of human nature, instead, as it is, a fact of human life ; and in the second place, the pur­pose he had in view  the reconciliation of the culti­vated among its despisers to religion  required him to define religion rather according to the principle of identity, than the principle of difference ; from what it has in common with all other phenomena, rather than from what it has peculiar to itself. With these explanations, we are not disposed to reject Schleiermacher's definition: though when taken, as in the work before us, as an independent definition, designed to include what is peculiar to religion, and exclude what is com­mon to it and ty> other subjects, we hold it to be faulty and mischievous.

No man will, as we have said, pretend that the mere naked sense of dependence constitutes all that is essen­tial to the religious sentiment; certainly not all that is essential to the religious phenomena. Why then as­sume it as the basis or principle of these phenomena? In actual life, and it is only in actual life that there is any religious sentiment at all, in actual life the religious sentiment is never the naked sense of dependence. Then it is necessary to include in our definition of it something besides tiiis sense of dependence ; not only this, but all else that in actual life is essential to the sentiment.

This erroneous definition has resulted from the at­tempt to carry analysis beyond its legitimate bounds. The fact we analyze is never the fact of actual life, being^ver at best only a fact of memory. " We mur­der to dissect." We must kill the fact as a phenome­non of actual life before we can analyze it, and from this analysis we can never obtain life ; at best only death. To seek-to carry analysis beyond actual life, to dissolve the living synthesis, and to detect and seize separately its abstract elements, will result always and necessarily in declaring the religious sentiment to be iu itself of no value ; and that whatever value we may as­cribe to it, must be ascribed to the elements with which, in the living phenomenon, it is actually associated. We see this very plainly in Mr. Parker himself. "The le­gitimate action of the religious sentiment." he says, but does not show any reason for saying, "produces reverence." The religious sentiment, be it remem­bered, is the sense of dependence. The legitimate ef­fect of feeling oneself dependent is to revere. How know we that? In a very hungry man, who has no money, it may lead very legitimately to the stealing of a loaf of bread ; or in a vain man to holding ont false appearances, designed to make him pass in piety, learn­ing, and philosophy, for more than he is worth; or more legitimately still, as the sense of dependence is but another name for the sense of wtakness, it may lead him who lias it strong to sit down, while the world lieth in wickedness, at his ease, with the feeling that he can do nothing, and that it is useless for him to make an effort. Moreover, we know that the sense of dependence never exists and operates in the human mind alone,  never, save in combination with other phenomena. According to Mr. Parker himself, it com­bines with love and wisdom, or with ignorance and hate. When found in combination with the first, its results are good ; when with the second, they are bad. But in the first case was it the sense of dependence, or the wisdom and love, that produced the good? The wisdom and love, unquestionably ; for Mr. Parker him­self ascribes the bad to the ignorance and hate.

More we could say, but it is unnecessary. If Mr. Parker in all cases had in his own mind, when he used the phrases, '''element of man's nature." "religious na­ture," "spiritual nature," and the like, substituted what according to him is the equivalent phrase, "sense of dependence," we have no doubt but he would have been the first to reject his own definition. We are not prepared in this stage of our examination to give a com­plete definition of religion ; but we should define, not religion, but the religious sentiment, instead of a sense of dependence looking out for some arm on which to lean, to be an aspiration of the soul to the Infinite, and a sense of its moral obligation to do its best to realize the Ideal, or form under which the Infinite reveals it­self to man's view. Man has always, to some extent, an Ideal ; an ideal Truth, Beauty, Good, which in their synthesis may be termed with sufficient exactness, an Ideal Righteousness, or an Ideal Holiness. This Ideal is to him who has it the Form, in which to him the In­finite, the perfect, the ever-living God reveals himself. The aspiration of the soul to this Ideal, the veritable Word of God, the delight of the soul in contemplating it, and its struggles, and its sense of its obligation to struggle, to realize it in art, science, industry, the fam­ily, the state, and property, in every department of life, constitute, in general terms, what we understand by re­ligion regarded as a sentiment.

lint waiving, for the present, all further objection to the account Mr. Parker gives of the religious sentiment, and assuming that it is a principle of human nature, we must still dissent from the doctrine, that on this ground it implies the existence of its object. Mr. Parker pro­ceeds on the assumption, that the religious sentiment is a law of man's nature ; or in other words, that man con­tains in himself the cause of the religious phenomena; and he concludes with apparent unconcern from the ex­istence of an element in man's nature, which is their principle, to the existence of their object, or the exist­ence of God. But when he makes the principle of these phenomena a law, or an element of human na­ture, he makes it purely subjective; and a purely sub­jective principle, we need not tell him, is, and can be of no authority out of the sphere of the subject. W, as he contends, we have given us in the very nature of man, as an essential part of man's constitution, an ade­quate cause of the religious phenomena, we have and can have no occasion to go out of man to explain their existence, or appearance ; and to conclude from the ex­istence of the religious sentiment, in this view of the case, to the existence of God, would in no wise differ from concluding to his existence from the solitariness of the lion, or the gregariousness of the sheep. The as­sumption of man is sufficient to account for the religious phenomena, without the assumption of aught beyond. Hence it is that we find many professedly atheistical phrenologists, admitting the reality of the religious sen­timent, while they deny that of its object. They say it is as easy to account for the sentiment without a God, as it is to account for man himself without a God.

"The belief m the relation between the feeling within us, and its object independent of us, comes un­avoidably from the Jaws of man's nature." p. 20. The same principle of reasoning. Mr. Parker is intent on what is unquestionably a truth, namely, that this belief is not accidental, arbitrary, nor in the common accepta­tion of the term, miraculous ; but in asserting the truth, he has asserted m addition, as the conditions of that truth, what overthrows his whole argument. The sen­timent he says implies its object, for the belief in the relation between the religious sentiment and its object "comes unavoidably from the laws of man's nature" and is, therefore, to speak the language of Kant, a cate­gory of the reason, or a necessary form of the under­standing. But to declare any belief a category of the reason, or necessary form of the understanding, is to declare it subjective, and of no authority out of the sphere of the subject; for as yet philosophers have not succeeded in discovering a passage from the subjective to the objective. The categories are categories of a subjective reason; not of an objective reason, but of reason as a faculty of human nature. They imply  directly the reverse of the doctrine Mr. Parker needs  that the me can find its own limitations in itself, be its own object, and has no need to go out of itself in order to live. The'ME then is self-living, independent, and the sense of dependence, of which Mr. Parker makes so much, must be a great falsehood. Once admit that the me may be its own object, that it can find its own limi­tations in itself, or that there may be a single phenome­non of life, the slightest imaginable, that is purely sub­jective, and you are in absolute Idealism, where Kant's Critique of Pure Reason confessedly ends, and which, whoever has the courage to follow his logic to its le­gitimate results, will not be slow to translate, with the bold and daring Fichte, into absolute Egoism.

And yet we agree with Mr. Parker, that the existence of the sentiment is ample evidence of the reality of its object, but not when we regard it as a category, law of mart's nature, or element of his constitution, instead of a fact of experience / for then we can find the cause of its existence without looking beyond man. But when we take the sentiment as a simple fact of experience, or phenomenon of life, it does imply its object. The me can never manifest itself alone, never find its own limitations without going out of itself. To the slight­est manifestation of the me, that is, to the production of the slightest phenomenon, the object is as necessary, as indispensable, as the subject. In every phenomenon, then, necessarily enter as its elements, as its indispensa­ble conditions, both subject and object. The subject is always the me ; the object, then, since it is opposed to the me, is always the not-me. A purely subjective phenomenon is impossible. Every fact of experience, every phenomenon of life, depends for its production on the not-me no less than on the me. This is the grand discovery of modern philosophy. Let it not be lost sight of.

According to this statement, every thought man thinks has necessarily a basis of reality, both subjective and objective ; that is, in every thought, that is to say, in every phenomenon that rises to an apperception, there is the recognition of the me, or subject, and the ac­tual perception of the not-me, or object. Every thought, then, has a basis of truth, and of objective truth, or truth independent of the thinker, though the form of the thought, that is, the notion the mind forms in the act of thinking, of itself and the object it is thinking, may be obscure, partial, in a word, inadequate. In point of fact, the form of the thought, or what Leibnitz calls the notion, must always be inadequate, for the reality to be noted is infinite, while the intelligence that notes is finite. Nevertheless, absolute truth lies under every notion, the feeblest, obscurest, the most inadequate con­ceivable; so that it is impossible for us to think pure, unmixed falsehood.
Man never thinks without thinking objective reality. Add to this that in thinking he thinks as sensibility no less than as intelligence : that he never does, and never can manifest himself as an intelligent force, without manifesting himself at the same time and in the same phenomenon, as a sentient force ; nor as a sentient force withont manifesting himself as an intelligent force. He must in all his feelings, thoughts, acts, operations, phe­nomena, manifest himself as he is ; and he is, in his very essence, indissolubly, sensibility and intelligence ; a force which is at once sentient and intelligent. Then no blind feeling, no naked intellection. In every per­ception there is feeling, in every feeling perception.
Hence it follows that, in the religious sentiment, there is really and necessarily actual perception of its object. God, the object, reveals himself to our perception  intuitive perception, if the term be preferred  under the form of the Ideal; and under this form the soul sees and recognises him, and experiences the emotion, which is the prominent feature in the phenomenon called the religious sentiment. The religious sentiment is therefore as positive evidence of the reality of its ob­ject, as sensation is of the material universe.

On this view of the case, the religious phenomena, which according to Mr. Parker warrant the induction of a special religious nature in man, warrant a higher assumption, namely, that man is a sentient-intelli­gent force or being, capable of perceiving and as­piring to God in the Ideal ; a being of that order of intelligence which is able, as Leibnitz says, to :< think God." The religious phenomena are universal and constantly recurring facts of human experience, not be­cause they are facts of mairs natural history, but be­cause the conditions of their production are permanent and universal. God is always and everywhere present, always and everywhere, in a degree, reveals himself under the form of the Ideal, to all men, speaks to " every man in his own tongue, wherein he was bora," and is the i: true light which enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world.'5 We agree fully with Mr. Parker, that the religious phenomena are universal and constantly recurring facts, that man is everywhere their subject ; but we cannot agree with him in calling them facts of man's nature, nor in ascribing them to a pecu­liar religious element in man, an element sui generis, as their principle ; for in our view they are universal, and constantly recurring facts of experience, and are so be­cause man by his general power of intelligence is able to perceive their object, and because their object is ever present to his perception : because their object exists always and everywhere, and always and everywhere in an intelligent and sentient relation with their subject.

This, after all, should be a perfectly satisfactory ex­planation of the religious phenomena to even Mr. Par­ker and his friends. It is true, in our view he is wrong in professing to be able, by philosophical analysis and induction, to establish a special religious nature in man ; but the establishment of this special religious nature is not the primary object. He has learned that the reli­gious phenomena are universal and constantly recurring facts of human life. Man, wherever found, in some degree experiences them ; lias some sort of religious worship. This cannot be by accident, nor from local and temporary causes, whether natural or supernatural. The cause must equal the eifect. The essential point, then, is to make out the universality and permanence of the cause, not that the cause is a special, a peculiarly religious element of man's nature ; and it would never have been assumed to be such element, had any other adequate solution of the phenomena suggested itself. We, on our view, secure this universality, and this per­manency, to say the least, as well as Mr. Parker does on his hypothesis, while we escape the very serious ob­jections which lie against that hypothesis, and are spared all necessity of resorting to an hypothesis at all; for we rest on the great fact which lies at the basis of all life  namely, the utter inability of the me to manifest itself in any degree, save in conjunction with a not-me.

Mr. Parker says philosophical analysis of man's na­ture leads to some religious sentiment or principle, as an essential part of man's constitution. If he be right in this assertion, which we deny, his own philosophical analysis has nevertheless failed to detect such sentiment or principle : for what he takes to be it. is the sense of dependence, which, as we have seen, is not an element of man's nature, but a fact of man's life. Furthermore, he says, induction from notorious facts leads to the same conclusion. Induction in his hands has simply led to a phenomenon of human life, and it cannot lead to the principle in question, unless it be assumed as a fact that the me is self-living; that is. independent, the sole cause of all the phenomena of which it is the sub­ject. But this no man whose opinions are of the least weight can assume ; for life is, as we have on more oc­casions than one proved, at once subjective and objec­tive ; that is, an objective cause is as indispensable to the production of a phenomenon, as a subjective cause. But his failure is really his success. Nothing was fur­ther from his wishes, or his thought, than to weaken the foundations of religious belief; and yet, had he suc­ceeded in proving that belief to be a mere category of reason, or a law of man's nature, he would have proved it to be of no objective validity, at least of no authority out of the sphere of the subject. On the view we take, the religious phenomena become direct evidences of their object, because, according to the very principle of all phe­nomena of a dependent being, the object is as essential to their production as the subject. The view we take, then, ends all controversy on the matter. On the one side, it finds in man's intelligence one of the conditions of the production of the religious phenomena, and on the other, in the fact of their production, it finds the reality and presence of their object.

2. But it is time that we proceed to the second chap­ter of this first book, which treats " of the sentiment, the idea, and the conception of God." Of the senti­ment we have already spoken, and we have found it, not as Mr. Parker seems to regard it, a mere feeling, but as an actual perception of God, and aspiration to him in the Ideal, or under the Form of the Ideal. It therefore necessarily implies all that Mr. Parker means by the sentiment, the idea, and the conception of God. For we cannot have the perception and aspiration, without there being at the same time in our minds a belief that 
God is, and some conception of what he is. But not to dwell on this, Mr. Parker means, we take it, by the idea of God, the belief in his existence, or knowledge of his existence ; and in what he here alleges, his main purpose is to show the genesis of this belief or knowl­edge, and the inadequacy of our broadest and noblest conceptions.

The genesis, or origin of the idea, the belief or knowledge of the existence of God, Mr. Parker con­tends, is the result neither of the argument a prioriy wot of the argument a posteriori, nay, of no argument, no reasoning at all; but a fact given us by the very nature of man, coming from the legitimate action of reason and the religious sentiment, called in the language of philosophy, an intuition of reason ; a revelation from gob, in the language of the elder Theology, pp. 21, 22. What he really means here to assert, we hold to be true, and of great importance. The substance of his statement, or the truth in his mind, which he has stated as best he could, we suppose is, that our belief in or knowledge of the existence of God is not an infer­ence, an induction, a deduction, nor a belief or knowl­edge obtained by any logical process whatever ; but is a primitive fact, given us directly, immediately, and which is incapable of being resolved into any other facts more ultimate, or which may serve as its basis and support. This we hold to be the truth. Man believes in God not by virtue of any process of reasoning, but by the simple virtue of thought. He believes in the existence of God for the very reason he does in his own, because he thinks it, and cannot think without thinking it.

Nevertheless, we cannot accept Mr. Parker's state­ment. He evidently means, notwithstanding a partial disclaimer, to teach that the idea of God is innate. What else does he mean, when he says it is "a fact given us by man's nature?" But an innate idea, in the sense of belief or knowledge, is a solecism, a con­tradiction in terms. Belief or knowledge, take which you will, is a fact of man's life, not an element of his nature or being. The phrase, intuition of reason, when reason is used as Mr. Parker uses it in this connexion, reason acting spontaneously, independent of us, accord­ing to its own laws, p. 21, is inadmissible, though we have ourselves so used it; for the subject of the intuition is not an impersonal reason, but the reasonable or intel­ligent me. In calling the idea of God an intuition, Mr. Parker seems also to countenance the notion of its in-nateness; for according to him, intuition is not the act of looking at or upon, or knowledge by looking at or upon ; but it is something which the reason contains in itself, lying perhaps dormant or latent in it, and making its appearance only on occasion; but yet something which the reason contains, not something which it, or rather the subject of reason, beholds. This seems to be, as near as we can come to it, the sense in which our trans-cendentalists generally use the term intuition. And yet both philologically and philosophically, whether we recur to its etymology, or to the psychological fact it designates, it means neither more nor less than looking at or upon, knowing by simply beholding the object, and is really applicable to every act of knowledge, whether by reasoning, or through the organs of sense, whether of bodies, events, or ideas.

The idea is never the intuition, but always the ob­ject of the intuition, and therefore is objective and not subjective. Reason is to be understood in two senses. The first sense is that of a faculty of the me, our power of intelligence, or of intelligencing; in the second sense it is the Logos of the Greeks and primitive fathers ; the world of necessary and immaterial Truth, or of ab­solute ideas, according to Cousin; and tho Ideal, the Word of God, or form under which God reveals him­self to man, as we choose to say. In the first sense, ideas are objects of reason ; in the second sense, they are contents of reason: not something which reason beholds, but something it contains. Ideas do not re­side in the human mind, but in the Divine mind; and though not God, they are, in the beautiful language of Plato, his Speech ; are in fact to him very nearly what our conceptions are to us. 

We touch here a point of very great importance. Mr. Parker does not treat the subject of ideas with as much sagacity, or as profoundly, as we could have wished. He seems to us to be unconsciously affected by the old doctrine, which makes the idea something intervening between the object known and the mind that knows it. Philosophers have almost from the first assumed that the mind can know only what is present to it; and assuming also that the mind some how or other is shut tip inside of the body, they have inferred the impossibility of its knowing anything not capable of penetrating the body, and reaching the seat of the soul. But as external objects are really out of the body, and therefore out of the reach of the mind, they can be known only by virtue of some intermediary. Hence the old doctrines of intelligible species, forms, and phantasms. All. or nearly all modern philosophy, sav­ing Dr. Keid's honorable protest in behalf of Common Sense, from Descartes down to M. Cousin, has called this intermediary by the term idea, and understood by idea a somewhat in the mind, and which in all the operations of the mind is the object with which, in the language of Locke, the mind is immediately conver­sant. It is not the object, whether of the material world or of the spiritual world, that we see, perceive, or immediately recognise ; but the idea of the object. Hence the question has been asked, whether there be any objective reality out of the mind to correspond to the idea in the mind. A more absurd question it is not possible for man to ask ; for it is simply asking, whether that which is the object of the mind in its operations be or be not objective.

We know of no author in our language who has treated the subject of ideas Avith more sagacity, depth, or justness, than Cndworth in his very valuable Inquiry concerning Eternal and Immutable Morality. Cudworth was familiar with Plato ; but he read him too much through Proclus and Plotinus, and has failed to some extent to perceive the real doctrine of Plato ; or at least to set it forth. He confounds the idea with the intellection or mental conception, and thus makes it subjective, even while contending for its objectiveness. He seems to forget that whatever is in the me is sub­jective, and that nothing that is not subjective can be in the me.

Now in our view, and in this we believe we fol­low Plato, whom on the subject of ideas the world has not yet outgrown, ideas are never contained in the mind, nor furnished, as Cudworth contends, by the mind, " vitally protended and actively exerted from within itself." No donbt, the mind is active in relation to ideas, but active not in the production or generation of them, but simply in the perception of them. They are objects of the mind ; never the mental conception, but its object. In perceiving them the mind is active in the same sense, and only in the same sense, that it is in perceiving any other objects, whether bodies or events. How the me perceives ideas, or how indeed it perceives anything, what is the actual modus operavdi of perception in the world of ideas, or in the world of events, or in the world of bodies, is more than we know, more than philosophy is in the condition to ex­plain, perhaps more than it will ever be able to explain ; but that we do perceive ideas, we have precisely the same evidence we have that we perceive anything else ; and that they are really objects of perception we know, because we know that we perceive them ; that is, think them.

Ideas are the form under which the spiritual or tran­scendental world reveals itself: or rather they are the transcendental world, the non-material world. We know only in the concrete ; but in the concrete there is always that which is not concrete; namely, that which is concreted. This is the idea. The three an­gles of a triangle are equal to two right angles. Here is affirmed a relation of equality. This in this case is I lie idea. It is not a mental conception, does not <xist i'i the mind that perceives it, and is in no wise dependent on that mind ; for the truth asserted is a truth just as much when not seen and contemplated, as when it is. " Every effect must have a cause." " It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be." " We ought to submit to the dictates of reason." " We are bound to obey God." That which in each of these propositions is affirmed, is the idea. It is the outward and eternal truth which the mind perceives, but does not create. By outward, we mean of course, not out in space, but out in the sense of being inde­pendent of the mind that perceives it, in the sense of not being in the me, as its creation, or as one of its ele­ments, or as a part of its original garniture.

What we call, after Plato, ideas, have been known in philosophy by other names. With Cudworth. who to some extent follows the old Coneeptionalists, they are intellections, or conceptions, though asserted to have objective validity: with Kant they are termed categories ; Reid, whom Mr. Parker seems to follow, calls them principles of common sense, or constituent laws of human nature : Leibnitz, who seems to have best comprehended them, calls them eternal truths, (vcrites eternelles). According to him they are not merely the nnemata of the ancients in contradistinction from the pltantasmata and aistliemata,intellections in distinction from imaginations and sensations ; but the object of the intellection in distinction from the object of sensation or of imagination. He makes them in no wise dependent on the mind that perceives them ; but tells us that ': their ultimate foundation is in that Universal Mind, whose existence cannot fail, and whose understanding, to speak truly, is, as St. Augustine with so much force contends, the region of eternal truths. And in fine," he continues, '; that recurrence to them may not be supposed to be unnecessary, we must con­sider that they contain the determining reason, the regulative principles of even existences, in one word, the laws of the universe. Being anterior to the exis­tences of contingent beings, they must needs have their foundation in a necessary substance. It is here that I find the original of the ideas and truths which are engraved on our souls.'' *(footnote: * Nouveaux Essais, Liv. iv. c. 11, § 14.  ) Setting aside the expression, engraved on our souls, (gravees dans nos dmes,) this would serve us for our account of what we mean by ideas. Leibnitz, however, like Cudworth and Mr. Parker, has been affected by the doctrine of innate ideas : yet he never meant to teach that we are actually born in possession of ideas; all he meant was what Descartes had taught before him, that we are bora with what Cudworth calls the vis cognitrix, or power of furnishing ideas when the occasion demands them. Cudworth says, the mind furnishes them by its own force and vigor ; Leibnitz, that they come from our own funds (nos fonds;) but what they really meant is best explained, not by calling the vis cognitrix the power of furnishing ideas, but of perceiving them ; so that in the noemata, or intellections, there is actual perception of the object, and that object as much out of the mind as in the pliantasmata or the aisthemata.

By ideas, varying the terms of our definition, we understand those objects of human knowledge which, though appearing only in the material existence, or with it, yet transcend the material existence, and with­out which the material existence would be incompre­hensible, in fact, as if it were not. In every concrete existence, as we have said, there is that which is not concrete, that which concretes, the vis creatri.v of the concrete, that which makes it what it is, and is its pos­sibility of being more than what it is. This in relation to any given concrete, sensible existence, is its idea, the ideal as distinguished from the actual, though not from the real. This we have the power of perceiving, dimly, feebly, confusedly, no doubt, but still in some degree : and perception of this is the noesis, intellection, of the Greeks, in distinction from phantasia, fancy, and aisthesis, sensation, and which Cudworth and nearly all modern philosophers fall in some sort into the error of confounding with it; making the act of perceiving and the object perceived, nay, the agent perceiving and the object of the perception one and identical. Cudworth even emotes Aristotle to the ef­fect, that " actual knowledge is in reality the same with the thing known, or the idea of it, and therefore insep­arable from it; it being nothing but the mind being conscious of some intelligible idea within it: and hence," he says further on, " the primary and imme­diate objects of intellection and knowledge are not things existing witliout the mind, but the ideas of the mind itself actively exerted ; that is, the intelligible ra-tiones, reasons of tilings." This confusion of thought re­sults from not perceiving that objects may exist out of the mind, and independent of it, and yet not for that exist in space ; and from retaining traces of the old doctrine already mentioned, that the soul can see and know only where it is, that is to say, in it itself; that as Plotinus contends, " the immediate t« vor,Tui objects of knowledge and intellection, are not things without the mind acting upon it at a distance, but contained and comprehended within the mind itself."*(footnote:  * Cudworth, Immutable Morality, 1. iv. c. 1, § 2, d seq. )

But after all, Cudworth does not mean what he as­serts, that the objects of knowledge and intellection are the me. He evidently conceives ideas to be objects of intellection, and he regards them as existing inde­pendent of the me, and therefore, in our sense, out of the me ; or else how could he hold them to be rationes, reasons of things ? Reasons of things are not in the mind, for man might cease to be, and the reasons of things remain as they were ; the mind merely perceives them, without creating them or containing them.

There is a truth in the doctrine of Aristotle of the identity of knowing with the object known, which, though misapprehended by Cudworth, is worthy of very profound meditation. The real doctrine of Aris­totle on this point, perhaps, is for the first time ex­plained in modern philosophy, and explained too by being reproduced, in a remarkable essay on the t; Crisis of Modern Speculation," in Blackwood s Magazine for October, 1841, an essay which for originality, acute-ness, depth, and importance, is unsurpassed by anything we have lately seen from the mother country, and must have been the product of a metaphysical genius of the very highest order.

We assume now, without further comment, that ideas exist out of the mind, are eternal verities, and instead of being conceptions of the human mind, as nearly all modern philosophers contend, and as is main­tained by our countryman Upham, in his popular but superficial work, which we are sorry to learn finds its way into some of our more respectable universities, are objects which the human mind perceives, and perceives in the intelligible world, transcendental world, or world of absolute reason, in relation with which we were created and still subsist. The intuitive power of the soul is the power of perceiving these ideas, not as de­tached, not in the abstract, but in the phenomenon, in the concrete, particular, contingent existence that re­veals them, and represents them. When they were supposed to be in the soul itself, the soul's own garni­ture or funds, the intuitive power was supposed to be a peculiar power of the soul to look into itself, select out from its stock, and bring forward the particular idea demanded by the occasion ; but taking now, as we do, the true Platonic doctrine of ideas, we must cease to regard intuition as a peculiar fact, or as the product of a special faculty.

Ideas, we admit, are intuitions, if by intuition we are careful to understand not the act of knowing, but the object of knowledge ; not the looking upon, but that which is looked upon. They are unquestionably intuitively perceived ; but in this respect, as we have already said, they are not distinguished from other ob­jects of knowledge. There is no division of the cog­nitive faculty. To know is always the same phenom­enon, whatever its sphere, object, or degree.

On this point, as on the preceding, philosophers have fallen into some errors, which Mr. Parker has not. always escaped. " Looking," he says, " even superficially but earnestly upon human affairs, we are driven to confess that there is in man a spiritual nature, which directly and legitimately leads to religion; that as man's body is connected with the world of matter, rooted in it, has bodily wants, bodily senses to minister thereto, and a fund of external materials, where­with to gratify these senses and appease these wants ; so man's soul is connected with the world of spirit ; rooted in God ; has spiritual wants and spiritual senses, and a fund of materials wherewith to gratify these spiritual senses, and to appease these spiritual wants." p. 15. " We are," he says in another place, "mixed beings, spirits wedded to bodies. Setting aside the re­ligious nature for a moment, and for the present purpose distributing our faculties into the animal, intellectual, affectional, and moral,'' &,c. p. 184. This doctrine of a division of our nature, and of our faculties, runs through the whole of Mr. Parker's book, and vitiates the greater part of his reasoning. All this talk about an animal nature, an intellectual nature, a moral na­ture, a religious nature in man, when we choose to speak otherwise than loosely, vaguely, is unauthorized. Man has but one nature, and that nature is identical in all his phenomena, whatever their character. He has no animal nature, and what in him seems to be the an­imal, is the animal transformed. Every function in him, which seems to correspond to a function observed in the animal world, is never the same, but is trans­formed by his humanity ; nor has man an angelic or a divine nature, as some would have us believe.

"Man, thus compounded and formed by God, was an abstract or model, or brief story of the Universal; in whom God concluded the creation, and work of the world, and whom he made the last and most excellent of his creatures, being internally endued with a divine un­derstanding, by which he might contemplate and serve his Creator, after whose image he was fort nod, and endued with the powers and fac­ulties of Reason and other abilities, that thereby also he might gov­ern and rule the world, and all other God's creatures therein. And whereas God created throe sorts of living natures, (to wit,) Angeli­cal, Rational, and Brutal; giving to angels an intellectual, and to beasts ;t sensual nature, he vouchsafed unto man both the intellectu­al of angels, the sensitive of beasts, and the proper rational belong­ing unto man: and therefore, (saith Gregory Nazianzene,) Homo est utriusque nalvrm vinadum; Man is Hie bond and chain tohich tietk together both ntUures ; and because in the little frame of man's body there is a representation of the Universal, and (by allusion) a kind of participation of all the parts there, therefore was man called microcosmos, or the little world. Deus igitur hominem factum, velut altcrum quendam mundum, in hrevi magnum, atq ; exiguo ioium in ter-ris statuit. God therefore placed in the earth the man whom he had made, as it were another world; the great and large world in the small and little world. For out of the earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, therefore heavy and lumpish; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable; of which Ovid:
" Inde genus durum sumus, cxperiensq ', laborum, Et documenta damus quo simus origine nuti. From thence our Kind hard-hearted is, enduring pain and care, Approving that our bodies of a stony nature are."

" His blood, which disperseth itself by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the earth ; his breath to the air; his natural heat to the inclosed warmth which the earth hath in it­self, which, stirred up by the heat of the sun, assisteth nature in the speedier production of those varieties which the earth brin»eth forth. Our radical moisture, oil or balsamum, whereon the natural heat feed-eth, and is maintained, is resembled to the fat and fertility of the earth; the hairs of man's body, which adorn or overshadow it, to the grass which coveretb the upper face and skin of the earth ; our generative power, to Nature, which produceth all things; our deter­minations, to the light, wandering, and unstable clouds, carried every­where with uncertain winds ; our eyes, to the light of the sun and moon ; and the beauty of our youth, to the flowers of the spring, which either in a very short time, or with the sun's heat, dry up and wither away, or the fierce puffs of wind blow them from the stalks ; the thoughts of our mind, to the motion of angels ; our pure understand­ing, (formerly called mens, and that which always looketh upwards,) to those intellectual natures which are always present with God; and lastly, our immortal souls, (while they are righteous.) are by God himself beautified with the title of his own image and similitude."*(footnote:  * Sir Walter Raleigh, History of the World, c. ii. § 5.  )

We can relish a passage like this, which we have quoted partly for its exquisite beauty, and the rich po­etic imagination it discloses in its distinguished author; and we have no objections to poets and even philoso­phers seeking and pointing out the analogies, real or fancied, of man to nature, to animals, to angels, or to God ; but we must always remember man is not a beast, not an angel, not a divinity, but simply man, with one only nature, and that nature none other, and nothing else than human nature. When man is low and base, sensual and selfish, it is not a lower, an animal nature at work within him, but he himself acting in a low, base, sensual, selfish manner. When he is moral, religious, upright, noble, praiseworthy, it is not by vir­tue of another nature, a higher nature, but by virtue of the right and proper direction, or rather activity of the self-same nature, whose misdirection had made him a sinner, vicious, guilty. Man is rightly regarded by Leibnitz as a monad, a simple unity: but a monad, or soul of a given order, endued with certain properties or qualities, which separate him by kind from all inferior, and all superior monads, or orders of beings. It is always one and the same active force, one and the same subject, that acts in all our phenomena, however diverse they may be.

If we object to this division of man's nature, we by a stronger reason object to a division of his faculties. We recognise a distinction of man into three faculties, the power to know, to feel, and to do, and we also re­cognise various modes of feeling, knowing, or acting ; but how acting, feeling, knowing, can be fundamentally dif­ferent from acting, feeling, and knowing, notwithstand­ing alL that phrenologists have said and done to make it clear and evident, is altogether more than we can con­ceive.

On this point, philosophers of no mean note seem to us to have fallen into absurdities, hardly less gross than those of the phrenologists, who give us as many dis­tinct faculties of feelings as they can discover different modes of feeling, and as many distinct, nay, separate faculties of knowing, as there are classes of objects to be known: kindly accommodating us with one faculty with which to know things, another with which to know events, another with which to know a?talogies, and still another with which to know the special rela­tion of cause and effect. Thus Locke divides the knowing faculty into Sensation and Reflection, Kant, Jacobi, and Coleridge into Understanding and Reason, a division apparently accepted by Mr. Parker, and to which he adds, in order to carry out the analogy, the division of the sensibility; or power of sensing, the vis sentiendi, into senses for the material universe, and a sense for the spiritual universe !

Philosophers have been betrayed into this absurdity, or if they please, mischievous error, by making, or call­ing the physical organs senses; as if the power of sen­sing was secreted by them, or at least resided in them. These physical organs are not senses, nor are they the seats of the senses, or more properly of sense. The vis sentiendi, or power of sensing, resides in the me, is the me, and is one and identical, however numerous or di­verse its organs ; and facts go to prove that it is con­fined to no special organs as the media of its operations. There are certain states, natural or artificial, as the mesmeric experiments, and numerous other facts ob­served by the ancients and the moderns, seem to us to establish, when the whole body, or the whole nervous, or more strictly, perhaps, the whole ganglionic system, becomes all one organ, and the soul sees, hears, tastes, smells, touches, without the aid of special organs, which warrants the assertion, that the five senses, so called, are at bottom only one and the same sense, one and the same power of the soul, and that it resides not m the physical organs, but in the sou] itself, which can at times dispense with them even as instruments.

Assuming, then, that the power of sensing is always one and identical, whence comes the division into senses for the material world, and senses for the spiritual world? Surely, Mr. Parker will not contend that the religious sentiment is an organ, ns are in truth what we commonly call the senses. For in such case it would be cither a material organ, or a spiritual organ. If it is a material organ, where is it located ? l( a spiritual or­gan, what is a spiritual organ ? But an organ for seeing the spiritual world, in the sense of a medium, he more­over cannot admit; for he contends that we see that world immediately, by open vision, without any me­dium. He even contends that we can rise directly to God himself, and as it were commune with the Infinite face to face. Hence his rejection of the doctrine of a mediator, and his sneers at the thought of approaching "heaven by attorney."  It is following the same division, transferred from the power of feeling into the power of knowing, that has led to the prevailing distinction between perception and intuition. We require for perception a medium; but in intuition we know immediately. We know in per­ception by means of sensation, and in intuition by vir­tue of reason. Hence, perception is used exclusively of the external world, and intuition exclusively of the spiritual world. The first marks our mediate knowl­edge, the second our immediate knowledge ; in the first the vis cognilrix is the understanding; in the second, it is the reason. Admirable ! How systematic nature is ! One would think she was made for the express convenience of philosophers ! And yet this is by no means the true statement of the case. Not only is the knowing faculty always one and indivisible, but the knowing itself is always the same, and no more medi­ate or immediate in relation to one world than the other. The knoiuivg. taken strictly, is always intuitive. In the longest chain of reasoning, notwithstanding what has been said to the contrary, we venture to alliim with Locke, that each link is intuitively perceived. For, after all, what is reasoning, but stripping a subject of its envelops, de-wonslrating, that is, showing it, point­ing it out to the mind free from these envelops, so that it may be seen for precisely what it is. In sensation also the perception is intuitive. The senses, the or­gans, the pictures, images, species, phantasms, the ap­paratus discovered or invented by ancient or modern philosophers, serve merely to bring the object more or less distinctly before the mind.
Then, on the other hand, in precisely the same sense in which our knowledge of the objects of the material universe arc mediate, so is our knowledge of the spirit­ual universe. It is a great mistake, if we suppose that we have any pure perceptions of the spiritual world. We see always through, a medium,pe?--cipio, not capio. The purely abstract is never an object of our facul­ties. We cannot attain to it. The spiritual is seen only in the material, the purely intellectual only in the sensible. This is what Locke himself has recognised, and it is this fact which makes the glory of his school, and is that, too, which has misled and ruined it. The grand error has been in attempting to divide our mental phenomena into noemata, intellections, and aisthemata, sensations, as if there could be the one without the other. Man recognises the Ideal only in the Actual; it must be concreted, incarnated, made flesh, before it is open to the action of the human mind. The error of Transcendentalists is in overlooking this fact, and at­tempting to obtain pure intellections, to detach the Ideal, the spiritual from the material, the abstract from the concrete, the universal from the particular, the ne­cessary from the contingent, the eternal from the tran­sitory, the Divine from the human, and to see and know it as thus detached and pure, which is impossible ; the error of the Sensualists has been not in .asserting that we know only the sensible fact, but in asserting that in the sensible fact there is nothing but the material, the contingent, the particular, and the transitory ; in failing to recognise the Ideal, which is the basis and possibility of the particular concrete, contingent existence m ques­tion. To say that one part of the fact is sensible, and the other uon-sensible, we hold is to speak without understanding oneself. All knowledge is by sensation, and in every fact of knowledge is that which is not sensation ; but the sensible does not stand opposed to the Ideal, nor to the spiritual. Sensibility is as truly a medium through which we rise to God, as through which we attain to nature. If any one doubts this, let him contemplate a rich and varied landscape, a noble work of art, an act of heroism or of disinterested affection, or listen to one of Beethoven's Symphonies. What touches the sensibility, enlivens sentiment, and exalts the soul, is a medium of com­munion with " the First Good and First Fair." Hence the moral and religious influence of Art, and the neces­sity and justification of forms of worship, and forms beautiful, solemn, and imposing.

We have dwelt long, perhaps even to weariness, on this point, because we deem it one of great importance. Serious mischief arises from seeking to divide the knowing faculty, and trying to make it appear that we know the material world by one division of it, and the spiritual world by another division of it; one by sensa­tion, and the other by intuition. Prom this arise those vexatious disputes, those never ending disputes, among philosophers, concerning the origin and validity of our ideas, of our beliefs, of our knowledge ; disputes which, when passing from philosophers to the mass of the peo­ple, undermine the foundations of religious and moral faith, and generate a species of theoretical unbelief, which they are seldom slow to translate into practice. These are to be ended only by returning to the unity of the soul, and the identity and indivisibility of its faculties, and learning that the soul in all its operations acts always as one. It is always the me that knows, and by virtue of its own inherent vigor and energy, in conjunction with the not-me, and knows ideas as well as sensible facts, and sensible facts as well as ideas, but never one detached from the other, but both to­gether, indissolubly, in the same phenomenon. Let no one, then, try to abstract the Ideal from the contingent existence which represents it, and think to make it, thus abstracted, an object of knowledge ; and let no one try to confine himself to mere contingent existence ; for unless he recognise its Ideal, he cannot recognise even it. We hope that we have repeated this so often, that it will be remembered.

Mr. Parker, however, it is but justice to say, does not understand by the idea of God precisely what our re­marks on the word idea would seem to indicate. He uses the word idea in a subjective sense, and makes it the synonyme of belief, or knowledge. His purpose is to prove that our belief in the existence of God is a simple intuitive belief. This we too believe, when our explanation of intuition is taken. But what we protest against, is making this belief an innate idea, a {'act of man's nature, or a law, or the effect of a law of his constitution. We protest, with what energy we have, 
against making the facts or the laws of man's nature a basis or a source of ideas, or of beliefs. This was the grand defect of Reid and the Scottish school, and it is the damning vice of Benjamin Constant's otherwise invaluable work on Religion, a work to which Mr. Par­ker has been indebted all that he acknowledges. It results from the attempt to study man as we do plants and animals, and to convert psychology into a sort of natural history of the man-plant, or the man-animal. But man is not a plant, nor an animal. When we have in the plant or animal generalized all the facts we can observe, and traced them to a fundamental law, or "habit," of the one or the other, we have learned of the plant or animal all it concerns us to know. But in the case of man, after we have done all this, we have still to go behind the law, or the habit, and ask what is there. Our work is not, merely to ascertain what are our habits, but whence come they ? Whither do they tend ?

The real genesis of belief in the existence of God, in Mr. Parker's language, of the idea of God, we have al­ready given, at least so far as we can without trenching upon the subject of Mr. Parker's second book, namely, Inspiration, without which, in our view, man would never have attained to a knowledge of God. All we say now is, that, man is created an intelligent being, and when stimulated, naturally or supernatuvally, we stop not at present to inquire which, sufficiently intelligent, as Leibnitz says, to " think God ; " that is, to perceive him in the Ideal, the Word, or Revelation, of God, in which we are, as it were, immersed, and in which we live and move and have our being. We are made sufficiently intelligent to perceive the Ideal in the Actual, its basis and possibility, and this perception is the origin and foundation of our belief in the existence of God,  a belief which we may fail to name, may fail to perceive is belief in the existence of God, but which we never lose, and therefore do we never become atheists, save in the misinterpretation of our own actual beliefs. Hence the Scripture is not so far out of the way in alleging that it is " The fool who hath said in his heart, there is no God."'

It is impossible to have the perception of which we have spoken, without having at the same time some be­lief in the existence of God, and even some sort of con­ception of what God is. But this conception, though inseparable, yet distinguishable from the belief in the existence of God, Mr. Parker does well to say, even under circumstances the most perfect, must fall short of the reality. And yet he seems to us to be not duly impressed with the extreme inadequacy of the concep­tion. Man is percipient by nature, and therefore per­ceives always ; but he is conscious only in the small number of perceptions, so marked, so vivid, and distinct, as to be apperceptions. In all these, that is to say, in every thought, there are always three elements, subject, object, and form. The subject is always the me; the object is always xot-me : the form is the notion, or the view which the me, in the act of thinking, takes of both subject and object. The notion, that which the mind notes of the two elements of the thought, subject and object, is often taken for the thought itself, and some­times as the idea, the mental representation of the ex­ternal object, and is supposed by Locke and others to be the object with which the mind in its operations is immediately conversant. But this is a mistake. The mind in thinking converses directly with the object, and indirectly with itself, which it sees rellected in the phe­nomenon, as a man sees his face reflected in a glass. Under the notion, or form of the thought, are then al­ways both the me and the sot-jie. Me, and not-.me, here, is assuredly all reality. All reality is, then, un­der the form of every thought; all infinitude, God and man, are under every notion, and are indispensably necessary as the basis of the smallest, least significant thought. Of such grandeur is thought! But the no­tion, being the view taken by the me of the reality pre­sent to its perception, must be proportioned to the in­telligence of the me. As that intelligence is finite, and as we have said the reality to be noted, is infinite, it follows that the notion must always be infinitely inade­quate, must on all sides, as it were, shade off into infi­nite darkness. The notion is the view the mind takes in thinking ; conception is the view it takes in remem­bering its notions. Notions are, if one may say so, the materials out of which the conceptions are formed. As the notions are infinitely inadequate, so must be the conceptions. Do our best then, finite beings as we are, we can never have any adequate conceptions of God. He everywhere infinitely surpasses our comprehension. In the language of the Psalmist, He makes darkness his dwelling place, and clouds and thick darkness arc round about him.
On this point, then, we are able to agree with Mr. Parker. All attempts to define God will be fruitless, for how define the Indefinable ? How compress within a form of words Him, whom the heaven of heavens cannot contain, who embosoms all things within himself, and whose works, all magnificent as they are, are but the hidings of his power ? Nevertheless, we are sorry to find that the conception of progress, we mean the pro­gress of the race by continuous growth, seems to find no favor with Mr. Parker. He leaves us in the midst of despair. The doctrine of the progress of the race, which he nowhere recognises, would come to our relief, by showing us that, however inadequate our notions arc and always must be, they are ever becoming less and less so.

3. But we must proceed more rapidly, or we shall fill up our whole Review before getting through the first Book, and we have five Books to examine. The third chapter is on the extent and power of the Religious Sentiment, and saving what necessarily grows out of the author's hypothesis that the sentiment is an element of man's nature, a religious nature, written in man him­self by the Almighty's hand, which is altogether better rhetoric than philosophy, is for the most part able, elo­quent, and just. The religious sentiment is as univer­sal, as powerful, and as indestructible as he alleges. 

4. The fourth chapter of the first Book is on " the Idea of Religion as connected with the Science of Life." This chapter must detain us a moment. " The legitimate action of the religious element," says the author, "produces reverence. This may ascend into Trust, Hope, and Love, which is according to its na­ture : or descend into Doubt, Fear, and Hate, which is against its nature. It thus rises, or falls, as it coexists in the individual, with wisdom and goodness, or with ignorance and vice/'  p. 44. This is a remarkable statement, and worthy of being pondered well. In the first place, we are told that the legitimate action of the religions element produces reverence. Where is the proof of this ? Surely not in Mr. Parker's philosophy, nor in history, as he has transcribed or interpreted it. Then we are told it may descend to Doubt, Fear, and Hate, which is against its nature. The element, we must remember, is the sense of dependence; whence the proof that it is against the nature of the sense of dependence to doubt, fear, and hate ? The sense of dependence is but a polite phrase for a sense or feeling of weakness. Now if the most active element in the production of doubt, fear, and hate, be not a sense of our weakness, and if their occurrence is not most fre­quent in those who are most conscious of their own weakness or deficiency, we confess thut we have studied human life to very little purpose. Experience, we apprehend, proves the reverse of Mr. Parker's state­ment ; and he has made that statement, because his un­conscious reverence for religion recoiled from its oppo­site.

But this is not the worst. We have the religious sen­timent separated from wisdom and goodness. It is not the basis of wisdom and goodness ; is not necessary to their production ; nay, does not contribute to their pro­duction, but rises into trust, hope, love, if they hap­pen to exist in the individual that harbors it. Now, if this sentiment is thus disconnected from wisdom and goodness, if its action be good or bad, salutary or pes­tiferous, according to the qualities it finds, so to speak, in the breast, where it takes up its residence, what, we would ask in all sincerity, is its value ? Whence comes its mighty power ? It is in such a case not a positive element, but a negative clement ; and it is idle to talk of its power and indestructibleness. We had thought, all the world, till quite recently, had thought, that religion, or, to speak more in accordance with the theory we arc considering, the religious sentiment was of a purifying nature ; and that when once kindled into action, instead of playing a subordinate part, being nothing save in its combinations, it would assume the mastery, take the lead, and convert doubt, fear, and hate, into trust, hope, and love, by generating In the life wisdom and good­ness. What, in all conscience, is it for, if not to pro­duce wisdom and goodness, and to destroy, by so doing, ignorance and vice ? What else have mankind es­teemed it for ? and whence, but in the belief of its power to do this, its wide and terrible dominion over the human heart ? Out upon the notion, that the re­ligious sentiment is the slave, or that it can be the slave of ignorance and vice. Why it is,  and this is its glory,  the very power of God in the soul, with which to overcome ignorance and vice, not to succumb to them. It is a perpetual aspiration to the All-Good, All-Perfect, All-Holy. It burns with an undying llame. It may not at once overcome all the evil it finds, but consumes u ever, till all is consumed. The soul that is conscious of it knows no decline, no resting place, no peace, but in working its way upward to its native heaven. As the hart for the water brooks, it panteth for the Lord; its heart and llesh cry out for the living-God ; and its hourly exclamation is, ': I shall be satisfied when I awake in thy likeness ! " No, no, religion does not descend with ignorance and vice,  is no down­ward tendency,  never has dragged man, nor suffered itself to be dragged downwards; but from the first moment of man's existence it has been to him an angel of God, ministering to his weakness, raising him upward, and whispering to his failing heart in the soft but kindling tones of heaven, i: Aspire, aspire ! "

But we pass over this, to consider the new definition of religion, which Mr. Parker proposes in this fourth chapter. In the first chapter we had religion denned, so to speak, ontologically: we have it now defined phenomenally : there as a principle of human nature, here as a fact of human life ; there as the cause, ground, or source, here as the effect, consequence, or result • there in reference to its abstract elements, reduced to its lowest denomination, here as a concrete, living power. There we were told from the abstract point of view, that religion was the sense of dependence: we are now told from the new point of view, that it is a '''volunta­ry obedience to the law of God, inward and outward obedience, to that law he has written upon the nature of man, revealed in various ways through instinct, reason, conscience, and the religious sentiment."

This would seem at first sigiit to be unexceptiona­ble, and we believe it is so in the mind of Mr. Parker himself. Hut when he puts forth a definition, it must be considered independently of any mental reservations of his own, and interpreted in the light of his general theory. To us it embraces more than is warranted by the previous definition given, and therefore he has had no right to adopt it: and moreover in our judgment it does not include all that is essential, nor what is pecu­liar to religion.

When Mr. Parker assumed the ground, that religion depends on a special religious element in man, and de­fined that element to bo the sense of dependence, he precluded himself from the right io embrace within re-lieion, as a fact of life, anything which could not be traced to a sense of dependence as its principle. But so far is religion, as now defined, from depending sole­ly on the sense of dependence for its principle, that in order to obtain it, Mr. Parker himself lias felt obliged to introduce, besides the conceptions of volition, law, obedience to law, the additional elements of instinct, reason, and conscience. Are these reduceable to the sense of dependence as their principle.

Mr. Parker gives us this definition, ¦ voluntary obe­dience to the law of God,  as the definition of absolute religion. To us it is objectionable, because it de­fines religion solely from the subjective point of view ; whereas religion is objective, as well as subjective, and is the law no less than the obedience. It is also objec­tionable inasmuch as it leaves out all distinct recogni­tion of religion as sentiment, and especially of religion as an aspiration to the infinite, which last is its cbief peculiarity regarded as purely subjective. We have been surprised, that with all his deep and gushing sen­timent, with all his sensibility to beauty, material and spiritual, to observe how little of genuine sentiment Mr. Parker suffers to enter into his conception of relig­ion : and still more surprised, that with his bold and lofty spirit,  a spirit that seeks the highest excellence, in practice no less than in theory,  should yet never view religion at all as an aspiration of the soul. We do not now recollect, an instance, in which this deep longing of the soul for the perfect, this inward thirst of the soul for the holy, and unceasing struggle to re­alize it, is ever looked upon as religion, as religious, or as in any way pertaining to religion. His conception of the truly religious man is of one who can stand un­moved amid all the storms of life, '¦' a statue of tran­quillity, with forefinger pointing to heaven/' But this, notwithstanding an exquisite sketch of it, a la Iletsch, by a highly esteemed friend, shown us the other day, we must say is to us cold and freezing. We do not want men to be statues of tranquillity ; we do not want them to be statues at all: but living, moving, thinkins, feeling, joying, grieving, loving, aspiring men, to whom all is living, and who have life to impart to all. Mr. Parker has not given the name religion to what is purest, holiest, most praiseworthy in his own life. We can extract from his life a better religion than we find in his book.
But waiving this, we have another difficulty. The law of God, voluntary obedience to which is said to constitute religion, which at first promised something, turns out, on closer examination, to be nothing but a law of man's nature, and therefore man himself. Mr. Parker defines it to be that law which God has " writ­ten on the nature of man." This means, if anything, that the law of God we are to obey is a law of our own nature, and is a law of God, because God is the author of our nature, and shows what he wills us to do, by giving us such a nature as he has. The laws of man's nature are not separable, nor are they distinguish­able from man himself. They are the man. Hence, to obey the law of God, written on my nature, is to obey the laws of my nature, that is, to obey my nature, that is, again, to obey myself. Hence, absolute relig­ion, defined to be voluntary obedience to the law of God, proves to be nothing but a voluntary obedience to oneself; which, as we said when reviewing Mr. Emerson's Address to the Students of the Divinity School at Cambridge, we must needs believe is no im­provement upon the Cliristian rule, " Deny thyself."

That we do not misinterpret Mr. Parker, we think evident from the fact, that his whole theory is what he calls the " natural-religious view," and from the fact, that he says it is through instinct, reason, conscience, and the religious sentiment that this law is revealed. We hardly know how to make intelligible what we feel in regard to this "natural-religious view." As we understand it, while it by no means denies the exist­ence of something above man, it asserts that what is above man, instead of revealing itself to him by a special act or supernatural mode of activity, reveals it­self only in and through his nature. Mr. Parker would be the last to deny that God reveals himself to man. No man believes, or believes that he believes, more firmly in Divine Revelation than he. We state this thus emphatically, because it is but justice to him that we should, and because that we would by no means lose sight or suffer others to lose sight of the fact, that he so believes. The question at issue between Mr. Parker and others on this point in his own mind relates solely to the mode of this revelation. He considers it a natural mode, others a supernatural mode.

But what is the meaning of a natural revelation.  The only answer we are able to give is, that God re­veals to us what his will is concerning us, by the in­stinctive promptings of our nature. Whatever is natu­ral, whether in thought, feeling, word, or deed, is then in accordance with the will of God. For did not God make our natures ? Did he not make them as ho pleased ? and are they not the expression of his will ? Then to obey our natures, that is, to do whatever our natures prompt us to do, is to obey his will, to conform to his law. This is the only interpretation we can give to the doctrine in question. God does not speak to us in harmony with the laws of our nature, that is, with­out suspending or changing the laws of our nature, but he speaks through our natures, so that the voice of our nature is to be taken and considered to be his voice. Hence Mr. Parker calls, what in one place he expressly declares to be an essential part of man's constitution, in another, a revelation from God. The voice of na­ture is to him the voice of God. Now what is the voice of man's nature but his natural wants, tenden­cies, desires, appetites, propensities, inclinations, pow­ers, and affections ? However nature utters her voice, whether through instinct, reason, conscience, the re­ligious sentiment, it is the voice of God, and therefore obligatory.

Now will Mr. Parker admit that there are. or that there can be, any such things in the life of man as 1111-natui'al phenomena? Does, or can, man act,  when all conceptions of supernatural influences, and of all in­fluences below man's nature, or of diabolical influence are excluded, against his nature, and thus get out of his nature ? Of course not ; for we cannot place man at one end of the list and man's nature at the other, and have them run a tilt one against the other. Man. we suppose, always includes and takes with him his nature, go he where he may, and act he how he may. It must be always by virtue of his nature that he does that which is sometimes said to be against his nature. When I follow a sensual desire, however strong that desire may Lie, or however destructive it may be, I am following my nature, obeying the law of God written on my nature ; and when I resist this desire, I am still obeying my nature under another of its aspects, or another of its elements.
Exclude, as " the natural-religious view " does, both divine influences and diabolical, and we must say not only that man obeys God by obeying his nature, but we must say that in all his acts, in all the manifesta­tions of his being, he does obey God, and with the strictest fidelity conceivable, as faithfully and as strictly as the needle turns trembling to the pole, or as the stars obey him in their courses, or the ocean in its heaving billows. Is Mr. Parker ignorant of the fact, that the doctrines of supeniaturalism. against which lie so in­dignantly protests, have for ages been felt by the human race to be necessary to save us from this dark and withering conclusion, to whicli his natural-religionism would reduce us? Has the world lived up to this day with­out learning that man, left to his nature, that is, to himself, with no influences to reach him either from above his nature or from below it, can never get out of his nature, nor be in opposition to his nature, or do aught else than obey his nature, and therefore that all his actions, whatever their character, must be natural ? And if natural, needs it any remarkable logical power to be able to perceive that they must be right, such as are well-pleasing to God, if the voice of man's nature be the voice of God?

Mr. Parker, while adopting the '-'natural-religious view," and excluding all supernatural influences, wheth­er supernatural or supernatural, still looks upon man as being in a very wmiatural state. He speaks of the re­ligious sentiment as rising into trust, hope, lovc7 which is according to its nature, and of its descending into doubt, fear, and hate, which is against its nature. Here is man restricted to his nature, yet acting against his nature. But on his theory man cannot get out of his nature, cannot oppose it, cannot act against it. This fact he seems to us to have everywhere overlooked, and by so doing has given us, under his natural-religionism, nothing but sheer naturalism, which, we suppose, we have no occasion to tell him, necessarily destroys, in theory, all moral distinctions. The only difference between his view and old fashioned naturalism, is, that he is more consistent than were his predecessors ; for he thinks man is acting out his nature in the religious phenomena, no less than in appetite, propensity, pas­sion, love, or hate.

We do not suppose by any means that Mr. Parker intends this result, or that he will accept it ; but we can obtain no other from his premises. The law we are to obey is written, he says, on our nature ; it is made known to us in our instincts, reason, conscience, &c. God reveals himself to us in the nature with which he constitutes us. Its laws, which are the la.ws of our natural development or activity, are his laws, the expression of his will concerning us. Obey them and we obey him. To obey them is to obey our­selves, the promptings of our nature. Here, do the best we can, is the conclusion to which we come. And here we see not why hate is not as natural to him who hates, as love is to him who loves, and therefore as re­ligious; nor why lust is not as natural to the lustful as chastity is to the chaste, and therefore, again, as re­ligious.

Nor is this all. Even passing over this, and assum­ing the law to be really the law of God, we still object to the definition. Religion " is voluntary obedience to the law of God.'' This, while it makes no distinction, and leaves no real distinction possible, between religion and morality, excludes from the character of religious the greater part of our acts, and those too the purest and best, and which in the clearest and most striking manner evince our sanctity and likeness to God. Volition is predicable only of those actions which are performed, we will not say with deliberation, but with distinct con­sciousness. In volition there is not only perception, but apperception. But these comprise only a small portion of actions. AVe act in all the phenomena of life. We act in desire, in affection, in passion. Moreover, we act always with intelligence. Man is intelligent in his es­sence, and hence he cannot act at all without acting as intelligence. And hence again his accountability, and tiie moral character of all his actions, his involuntary actions no less than his voluntary actions. Hence, too, the moral character of our desires, our affections, our passions, our thoughts, and, as these all determine them, of our opinions. This moral character extends to our earliest and our latest actions, making the infant and the old man alike accountable, in a degree, that is, in some degree, with him who is in the vigor of his manhood, the full energy of his faculties. Our desires, our affections, our passions, all o( which are actions, but for the most part involuntary actions, are those which reveal our real characters, and tell what we are in ourselves. The sin of the sinner does not consist mainly nor chiefly in his sinful volitions, but in his un­chaste desires and unholy affections.

So on the other hand, the sanctity of the saint does not consist in his always willing to obey God ; for the good one wills to do, one often does not; and the evil one wills not to do, that often one does; but in having, as it were, his very nature so conformed to the will of God, that all his natural, all his involuntary emotions and actions shall be holy. The saint is redeemed not only from the curse of sin, but from csin itself, is sanc­tified, finds it his meat and his drink to do the will of God. Now the greater part of tho acts of this man, so redeemed, so sanctified, are involuntary; that is to say, unconscious, and yet are they not all religious? Pie obeys God not only voluntarily, but involuntarily. This is what is meant by Christian perfection ; the be­ing raised by grace to that state in which all the natu­ral promptings of the soul are acts of obedience. Mr. Parker, it strikes us, is too narrow in his definition ; and by confining religion to voluntary obedience, he would, on the one hand, restrict sin to merely acts of voluntary disobedience, and, on the other hand, would exclude from religion all those acts of deep and ardent. piety, of unreserved devotion and lofty enthusiasm, in which the soul seems to lose all consciousness of itself, to act without the least rejection, and to How on with the stream of Divine Influence, inseparable, and almost indistinguishable from it: when it is transformed, so that it is no vain boast, but a real truth, that it utters, when it says " not my will, but thine be done." The great truth we here try to bring out, but which we feel our inability worthily to express, Mr. Parker him­self recognises, to some extent, in a subsequent defini­tion that lie gives of religion, in which he defines it being good and doing good.

Mr. Parker says that "a sharp analysis separates be­tween the religious and moral elements in man." Mo­rality he defines to be "the harmony between man's action and God:s la\v.'; p. 48. What is the dilference between this and the definition of religion, '•' voluntary obedience to the law of God?" We can understand no possible distinction between the meaning of the phrase •'obedience to the law of God." and i: harmony between man's action and God's law." The only dif­ference then possible for us to conceive between religion and morality, according to the definitions given, is, that religion includes only those actions in which man vol­untarily conforms to the law of God. and morality in­cludes all in which he conforms, whether voluntary or involuntary. In this case, his morality is broader, rich­er, and altogether more desirable than his religion.

The true distinction between religion and morality, is very conceivable. Religion, viewed objectively, is the law man is bound to obey ; subjectively, his aspira­tion to the truth, beauty, and goodness of tho law, and his eilbrts to realize it in life : morality is his realization, or rather the form in which he realizes, or seeks to re­alize it. A man's morality is the expression of his re­ligion, his cult us exterior, by which he seeks to realize and express what is purest in his feelings, truest in his conceptions, ami loftiest in his aspirations.

Mr. Parker proceeds in this same chapter to draw a distinction between Religion and Theology, and to de­clare the first absolute, identical, permanent, while the second is variable and transitory. If we understand by religion a mere sense of dependence, unqueslionably we may distinguish religion from theology, and speak of it as being always the same, or as diifering only in de­gree, as more or less; so also as we consider religion, it is always tine same. The law we are to obey is always the same law, and the aspiration to the Infinite, under whatever form we aspire to it, is. no doubt, always one and the same aspiration. In this sense we may say very truly that there is but one religion, and distin­guish this one religion from theology; for there have been, and are, many theologies. But it is impossible to have religion without a theology. In the religious sen­timent, we have shown that there is always a percep­tion of God under the form of the Ideal, and therefore necessarily a belief in the existence of God, and some sort of a conception of what God is. This belief and conception, which must needs coexist with the reli­gious sentiment, constitute theology. They are our theory of God. Our theologies may be, and will be as various as our conceptions, and all of them must be as inadequate as we have shown the conceptions must be. Now, when we speak of religion in general terms, in­dependently, we mean ordinarily, religion in the sense that includes both the sentiment, the conception, and the idea: consequently, in a sense that allows no dis­tinction between religion and theology. Moreover, it is practically impossible to separate them; and they who seek to depress theology, in order to elevate religion, will find that as they depress the one, so do they the other. He is a novice in religion, who has yet to learn the importance of maintaining the form of sound words. They who attempt to be religious, without cultiva­ting theology, will cither waste away into a flimsy sentimentalisin, weak and weakening, or they will sink into entire religious indifl'erency. If theology is not essential to religion, why has Mr. Parker written this book to correct our theology, and reduce it to a science ? Mr. Parker's assertion, that religion marks the practical tendency, and theology the theoretical, seems to us not well founded. They who cry out against theory, and in favor of the practical, are the greatest theorizers in the world ; having not only a theory for their practice, such as it is, but a theory even against theory- True wisdom requires a man to seek and insist on the theory that will lead to practice, and to right practice. Let us be careful how we fancy that there is in man a moral, or a religious nature, to be exalted above the intellec­tual. Man is one and identical.

Nevertheless, we fully subscribe to the doctrine that,
"Though religion itself ho the same in rill, the forms of reli­gion, or mode of worship, and the practice of religion which is mo­rality, cannot, be the same tiling in any two men ; though one mother horc them, and they were educated in the same way. The concep­tion we form of God, our notion ahout man, the relation between him and God, the duties which grow out of that relation, may he taken as the exponent of all the man's thoughts, feeling*, and life. They are, therefore, alike the measure and the result of the total de­velopment of u man, an ago, or a race, [f these things are so, then the phenomena of religion, like those of science mid art. must vary from age to age, with the varying civilization of mankind ; must be one thing in New Zealand, and the first ccnturv, and something quite diiferent in New England, and the fifty-ninth century. They must vary also in the same individual ; for a inaifs. wisdom and gen­eral character n fleet the phenomena of his religion. The religion of the boy and the man, of .Saul (he youth and of i'nul the aired; how unlike they appear! The boy's prayer will not fill the man's heart, nor the stripling son of Zchedco comprehend the devotion and life which he shall enjov, when he becomes a saint in mature years." p. 50.

5. Chapter fifth considers the three great historical forms of religion, Fetichism, Polytheism, and Mono­theism. We have not read this chapter critically, be­cause we have presumed it designed to be merely an historical verification of the principles we have been considering- in the preceding chanters, in the main, we believe his view of Fetichism and of Polytheism just, and it certainly indicates much reading, and fine powers of historical criticism. We, however, doubt whether he does not fancy traces of Fetichism in Judaism some­times, where in reality there are none. We think also the attempt to obtain the monotheistical system of the Jews from the preceding systems, by natural genesis and growth, will prove historically as fruitless as it must be philosophically and scripturally unwarranted. Some­thing more than the natural development and growth of the human mind, we apprehend, will be necessary to account for the appearance of the Mosaic system, at the early epoch we find it, and before there was any har­mony between it and the general intelligence and vir­tue of the race.
C and 7. The sixtli and seventh chapters all inviting as they are, and the much they contain that we approve, and the much that we do not approve, we must pass over without a word of comment, in order to come as soon as possible to the second Book on Inspiration.

II.
INSPIRATION.
To give an analysis of this Book is more than we have leisure to do ; and to take it up chapter by chap­ter and comment upon all that we deem worthy of re­mark, would require a space not at our command. We may say, however, that it professes to treat of the Rela­tion of the Religious Sentiment to God, or to be a Dis­course of Inspiration, and is subdivided into eight chap­ters. 1. The Idea and Conception of God. II. The Relation of Nature to God. 111. Statement of the Analogy drawn from God's relation to Nature. IV, The General Relation of Supply to Want. V. Statement of the Analogy from this; Relation. VI. The Ration­alistic view, or Naturalism. VII. The Anti-Rational­istic view, or Supernaturalism. VIII. The Natural-Religious view, or Spiritualism.

1. The first chapter merely goes over ground already traversed in ihe second chapter of the first book. It reiterates the inadequacy of our conceptions of God, and infers from it that we ought not to ailirm either the personality or the impersonality of God : and that we should hold on with all our might to the idea of God, winch, as here explained, is. utter all. only a conception ; the conception of something not dependent, cause, life, being, and substance of what is.

Mr. Parker denies the personality of God, not so much because he consciously denies what all the world means by the personality of God, as because he falls into the very vulgar mistake of regarding human personality as the equivalent of human limitation. "Our conception of personality," he says, p. 161, "is that of finite per­sonality; limited by human imperfections: hemmed in by time and space ; restricted by partial emotions, dis­pleasure, wrath, ignorance, and will." We leave to him to show, in his second edition, the reasons he has for placing will in the same category with "partial emotions, displeasure, wrath, and ignorance ; " and for regarding it as a restriction of our personality. We had supposed that will, the power to will, that is, the power to act with consciousness, with understanding, inten­tionally, which in a great measure distinguishes wise acting from foolish, constituted not a limitation of the being possessing it, but its chief glory.
Then our conception of personality is not the con­ception of finite personality. If it were, why should Mr. Parker feel the need of adding to the term person­ality, the epithet finite ? The word personality would express finiteness of itself. The "partial emotions, the displeasure, wrath, and ignorance," of which Mr. Parker speaks, are not, as he supposes, necessary ele­ments of our personality, but its limitations; the con­ception of them is not the conception of personality, but the limitation of that conception. The limitation of a thing, we hardly need say, is not it, nor essential to it. We are not persons because we are the subject of these phenomena; but we are the subject of them because we are only limited, finite, imperfect persons. So far forth as we are persons, we are free from them.

So far from thinking it improper to affirm personality of God, we hold, and are ready to maintain, that our personality is for us, always and necessarily, the repre­sentation of God ; and Mr. Parker himself, in rejecting our conceptions of God, and insisting only on what he calls the idea of God. gives us God as represented by human personality. -At the end of the analysis," he asks, "what is left? Being, cause, knowledge, love, each with no conceivable limitations. To express it in a word, a Being of infinite power, wisdom, and good­ness." Will Mr. Parker tell us what this is. but the conception of human personality freed from its limi­tations, in human knowledge, in all the phenomena of life, the rn:. as Mr. Leroux has well contended, re­presents the infinite, not the finite, as Mr. Cousin had maintained. It is in its own eyes the one persisting, indentical, universal, immutable, and eternal force. From it we obtain all our conceptions of God. It is from il we obtain our conception of substance or being. Our conception of power originates in our own causali­ty : of permanence in our own persistence : of immu­tability in our remaining one, and identical, however various and variable our phenomena; and of eternity in the fact, that we are always present to ourselves. The me thus represents the infinite, but undoubtedly in a finite manner. Our conceptions of personality are finite conceptions of infinite personality.

But '¦' we can have no image of God in our mind." True ; but our minds are an image of God. Man was made in the image of God, and is. as an old writer says, "the Shekinah of God." This is not to anthropomor­phize the Deity. To anthropomorphize the Deity is not to ascribe to him personality; but the limitations of our personality; which limitations mark the absence and not the presence of our personality.

'¦'But do these qualities [infinite power, wisdom, and goodness] exhaust the Deity?" p. 108. That is, do infinite power, infinite intelligence, and infinite love exhaust God, or include the whole of the Divinity? Most assuredly ; but our knowledge of these qualities does not exhaust them. We know that infinite power, intelligence, love, are God ; and. so to speak, God all entire; but what infinite power, intelligence and love contain : what they really are, we know only the little that we have experienced of them in man and nature.  All that people mean, when they ascribe personality to God, is that he is a free, intentional causality. No­body supposes that he deliberates, reflects, doubts, hesi­tates, and is finally resolved ; but that he does what he does with infinite freedom, consciousness, and design : and that he is not a mere fate, necessity, dark, inscru­table, overwhelming ; but a Will, that can do, and do-eth as seemeth to him good ; who is not only a Will, but a Providence, that careth for all; and not only a Providence, but a Father, who lovelh all his children, heareth them when they cry unto him, and hath com­passion on them in their distress; and not only a Fa­ther, but a Redeemer, who has mercy on the sinful, redeems them from sin, forgives their transgressions, and sanctifies them.

Mr. Parker, we presume, will smile when he reads this passage. " We cannot," lie says, "say that God hates, is angry, or grieved ; repents ; is moved by the special prayer of James and John: that he is sad to­day, and to-morrow joyful: all these are human, limita­tions of our personality, and no more to be ascribed to God than the form of the reindeer, or the shrewdness of the beaver." p. 168. It is a limitation of our person­ality, that is, it is a weakness or a defect in us to be moved or affected by prayers and entreaties ! And it is as absurd to suppose that God hears and answers prayers, as it is to fancy him with the form of the rein­deer, or the shrewdness of the beaver !

We cannot say of God that "he thinks: that is, to reason from the known to the unknown." p. 107. To reason is unquestionably to think ; but that all thought is a reasoning from the known to the unknown, is cer­tainly something which we have now learned for the first time. To think, we had supposed, was to act, or that thinking is the action of aa intelligent and sentient force, and when performed by that force alone, it im­plied its infinity.
"As the absolute cause, God must contain in himself, potentially, the ground of consciousness and personali­ty ; yes, of unconsciousness and impersonality.'' p. 101. 

We were not aware before that mere negatives could have any ground. Unconsciousness and impersonality, we had supposed, were mere negatives, mere limitations of the positive, and therefore without any ground of being ; for how could that which is no being, but the negation of bein^;, have a ground of being? Can we conceive of a ground of nothing?

2. We are sorry that we are obliged to hasten so rap­idly over the second chapter, which treats of the Rela­tion of Nature to God. A more confused or exception­able chapter we have rarely read in any work from a source at all respectable. It is a sad mixture of con­flicting and irreconcilable elements, of jarring and hos­tile theories. What in the world was Mr. Parker think­ing of, when he laid down his proposition about God's being in space? Does God dwell in space? Would it be space if ho dwelt in it, and filled it ? We had sup­posed that God does not dwell in space, that he inhabit-fth eternity; that he embosoms space arid its contents, if space can have contents, and still be space,  as we embosom our thoughts ; not that space contains him, or that he can be said to be in space, save in a loose and vague way of speaking.

The doctrine of this chapter is. that God is the imma­nent causi-: of nature. What Mr. Parker means by im­manent cause, we may gather from his saying of God that '•¦ He is the substantiality of matter.'1'' God is the cause of matter, then, by being its substance. Matter, then, is a mode, or accident of God. What may be said of matter, may be said of the entire universe ; it is a mode or accident of God. Is not this Spinozaism ? Does Mr. Parker knowingly, intentionally advocate the pan­theism of Spinoza? We deny that God is the substan­tiality of matter. Matter, we own, is not itself a sub­stance, but an assemblage of substances, if one might so say, a continuity of substantial points, which sub­stantial points are immaterial, and very properly termed monads by Leibnitz. But without insisting now upon monadology, more ridiculed than understood, and which philosophy is rapidly reproducing ; we say, that we are no longer willing to call God the immanent cause of nature. When we so call him, we cannot possibly es­cape pantheism. We regard him. as the permanent, persisting, unfailing cause of nature, and he is present to all nature ; not as its ground, its substance, being, but as its creator. Creation is not emanation, but the actual production of substantial beings where nothing was before. Substance is whatever can support acci­dents. The number and variety of substances which God may create have no conceivable limit. All these have a real but limited existence. There is no step be­tween this view and pantheism.

3. The third chapter, is the statement of the Analogy drawn from God's relation to Nature. If God be pre­sent in matter, the analogy is that he may be present also in man. "If it follows from the idea that he is immanent in the material worldin a moss; it follows also that he must be immanent in the spiritual world  in man." God is the substantiality of matter ; there­fore of a moss, and therefore of man. He is as present in the moss as in the man ; for he is as present "in the eyelash of the emmet, as in the Jewish holy of holies ; " and being the substantiality of each, and equally present in each, wherein, then, does man differ from a moss? Does God differ from himself? Is he not identical wherever present? If so, we would like to be shown wherein one phenomenon can possibly differ from another. Man is a moss, and a moss is a man ; for are not both at bottom God? Or is not one and the same God both in the moss and the man ? Does Mr. Parker propose to have us retrograde to the pantheism, to the dead unity, excluding all plurality, of Xenophanes aud the old Eleatics?

Creation is, undoubtedly, in many respects mysteri­ous ; and the precise relation between God and the universe no one can altogether explain. We see where we are when we call God the immanent cause of the universe. We, for ourselves, usually draw our analogy from the relation between a work of art and the artist. Creation is the Art o[ God. In creating, God actualizes 
out of himself, not himself, but his own Ideal, as the artist realizes ou the canvass, in the statue, column, dome, poem, or melody, his conception of the Beauti­ful. Seize in the work of art what and only what is from the artist, and the relation between that and him, is in our view the image of the relation between crea­tion and God.

4. The fourth chapter is on the general Relation be­tween Supply and Want. The doctrine of it we had in the fourth chapter of the first book. ;i We find," says the author, "in nature every want supplied. That, is, there is something external to each created being to an­swer to all the internal wants of that being. This con­clusion could have been anticipated without experience, since it follows from the perfections of the Deity, that all his direct works must be perfect. Experience shows that this is a rule in nature. We never find a race of animals destitute of what is most needed for them, wandering up and down, seeking rest and finding none. The supply answers the demand." p. 1S3. This rule holds good in relation to man. In his case there is a natural supply for all his natural wants. And moreover he is furnished with the faculties, instinct and understanding, which enable him to avail himself of the supply. This is as true in regard to man's religious wants as to any other class of wants. Man has naturally religious wants, for which there is a natural supply, and which supply he has the natural faculties requisite for obtaining.

Here, is the essence of Mr. Parker's whole doctrine. Man is created perfect. He is created with religious wants. There is a supply for those wants. If he is perfect he must have the natural ability to obtain that supply. Hence no need of supernatural aid to direct him to the supply, nor to enable him when discovered to possess himself of it. Here we have this novel theory, which this volume of live hundred and three pages was written to bring out and establish. The great aim of the author is everywhere apparent,  it is to get rid of supernaturalism. There is no use in disguising it. Supenmtnmlism is the demon ho seeks to exorcise, and nature the divinity he seeks to enshrine, and whose worship lie would institute. What he means is, that each race of created beings is created with all that is requisite to enable it to fulfil its destiny. And yet, strange to say, he makes religion consist in a sense of dependence. Man is created with a natural supply for all his natural wants, ami with the natural powers of obtaining that supply, and yet the glory and excellence of his nature is to feel himself dependent on God for life, breath, and all things!

But let us examine this theory. " Supply answers to demand/' There is not only a natural supply, but a natural power in each race of beings, and, therefore, we presume, in each individual, to obtain it. These are the premises. Man has certain wants, which no one can question that ho seeks to satisfy. He must then satisfy them, that is. obtain a supply, if in his power. It is in bis power, as Mr. Parker expressly maintains, p. 185. He therefore does obtain it. Whence then the disproportion we all experience between our wants and the supply? "The supply answers the de­mand." And yet. all poetry, all history, all life, is one long, loud, monotonous wail of the human heart over de­sires unsatisfied, wants unsupplied. It is this dispropor­tion between the want and tlie supply that creates the universal uneasiness of all creation, and all life's tragedy. We experience it everywhere. As students, as seekers after knowledge, burning with the eternal thirst to know, we are never satisfied. We stand ever on the borders of a universe of darkness, which, no ray of light furrows, oppressed with a sense of the vanity of all that we have as yet. learned. In our alfections we are never satisfied. Oh, who has found that sweet ideal of his young dreams, which the heart could take in and feel that it was enough! The purest are not pure enough : the Gentlest are not gentle enough. Love is an everlasting craving, stretching away and beyond all finite things, satisfied with nothing below the infinite, nor even with the infinite, till it is incarnated in the finite, when it becomes too small to satisfy it. How reconcile all this to the position, that supply answers to demand, and that the supply is within man's power?

We may be told that Mr. Parker means only that there is a supply to every natural want. Be it so. But we have already shown that on his theory there can be no wmatural, as there can be no supernatural, no sub-natural wants. The essence of Mr. Parker's theory is in excluding all that is c-.r/m-natural as necessary to the proper development, growth, and perfection of the being or race concerned. God appears to it, aids it only in the nature, he gives it. How then can, as we have already asked, the being get out of nature, or exhibit any ////natural or extra-m\\uxi\\ phenomena? All our phenomena must be natural. All our wants then must be natural. It is idle to talk, on this theory, of artificial wants. Then for any and every want we experience there is a natural supply, and within our reach : we know where it is, are able to get it, and try with all our might to get it. and yet all life is. as we have said just now. one long, loud, monotonous wail over wants unsupplied !

We do Mr. Parker no injustice. He assumes as his starting point, that greatest o[ all absurdities, the ¦per­fection of nature, in each genus and species, and there­fore of necessity  unless we have forgotten our logic,  in each individual. This, he says, could have been anticipated from the perfections of the Deity, all of whose direct work's must be perfect. He proceeds on the supposition, that whatever, is done by a perfect be­ing must be perfect. God is perfect. Therefore all his direct works must be perfect. Why direct ? Can perfection produce imperfection indirect! 1/ any more than direct!)/ ? Assume that all God's works are per­fect. Then each race of beings must be perfect, and then all the phenomena of that race must be perfect. Whence then the imperfection and evil we see in the universe, and mourn over in ourselves ? If u perfect God implies a perfect nature as his work, perfect nature must imply perfect phenomena as its work. And hence 
the impossibility of imperfection is demonstrated. And yet what is the fact ?

Now, we deny Air. Parker's premises. We go so far as to say, that God not only has not made nature per­fect, but that he could not have made it perfect. The perfections of God are an insuperable barrier to the perfection of his works. The grand error in all ages has been in assuming perfection in nature, in creation, as the proper point of departure. But when we have begun by such assumption, we are wholly unable to account for the origin of evil. The old explanation, by means of a fallen angel for tempter, and the fall of man consequent upon the temptation, will avail nothing,, unless the original imperfection of man, even as man, be presupposed. But what is creation ? We have de­fined it to be God realizing out of himself his own Ideal. That Ideal, as the Ideal of an infinite Being, must be infinite. Its complete realization would be an infinite creation. But an infinite creation is an impos­sibility. Infinite is that which is unbounded. But the Creator must always bound, mark, define his own creation, and consequently his creation must be finite. To assume that creation is infinite, would be to assume that God could create that which he could not bound, that which would surpass himself; which were not on­ly to make the effect greater than the cause, but to de­ny infinity to God : which, again, would be to assume that a finite creator is equal to the creation of an infi­nite universe. If God be finite, he cannot create an infinite universe ; if he be infinite he cannot, because he must always be greater than his work. The paint­er is greater than his picture, the poet than his song.

But if creation be finite it must be imperfect, and not only imperfect as a whole, but in detail. We can­not then assume perfection as the starting point of any given race of beings.

But God's Ideal is infinite. There must be in him then an infinite tendency to its realization, manifesting itself in an infinitely creative effort. Consequently, creation, the universe, must be infinitely progressive, 
as a whole and in all its parts. Here is the basis of the great and kindling doctrine of progress, on which we here, and everywhere, so earnestly insist. He who would arrest progress, would, if he could, arrest the creative action of God himself. But progress implies imperfection as the point of departure. If a race of beings were created perfect, that is to say, all it could become, in full possession of all lying within its possi­bility, which is the only conceivable definition of per­fection when predicated of a limited being, there could be no progress. Hence, we say that each race of beings has its idea, which is the basis of what it is, and its in­finite possibility of being more than it is. The idea of man is the basis of man, and his possibility ; that which lie is ever actualizing, but which ever transcends his actuality; so that man may always be something more than he is. That is to say, each individual man shall continually take in. as human nature, as humanity, a larger and a larger idea, and have before him to realize ever a loftier and a loftier Ideal.

This is the conclusion to which we come by reason­ing from cause to eil'ect, by strict demonstration, the only really solid reasoning. But experience, as far as it goes, sustains this conclusion. We see nowhere in nature the perfection boasted. The earth on. which we tread, what is it but a crust of ruins ? Are there no pestilential damps, no noxious eflluvia. no earthquakes, volcanoes, blights, mildews, abortions? The "whole creation." says Paul. " groaneth in pain." Heligious men have everywhere noted! these marks of imperfec­tion, and have accounted for them, by supposing that when man sinned, all creation fell with him. that all nature for his sake was cursed. This way of account­ing for these imperfections may not be satisfactory, but its vogue proves, at least, that the experience of man­kind is against the hypothesis of the perfection of all the Creator's works. Then, on the other hand, we are able, to a limited extent, to trace empirically the progress of man, the earth, and several races of beings beside man.

We therefore dissent from Mr. Parker's naturalism, not. only because it destroys, as we have seen when commenting on the fourth chapter of his first book, all moral distinctions, but because it is contrary to both ex­perience and sound philosophy. We do not then accept the data from which he infers that supernatural inspira­tion is not necessary. In order to make out his case, and show that there is always, so to speak, for man a natural supply of God proportioned to his natural need of God, he has been obliged to assume the perfection of nature, which would be to transfer infinity from the Creator to the creature; to deny all progress, leaving therefore all creatures without employment, which would be their death ; and also to deny all imperfection, there­fore all evil, and therefore again, all sin, contrary to the universal testimony of the race, and the painful experi­ence of every man. This doctrine of supply answering to demand is all a rhetorical illusion. The assertion that we never find a race of beings wandering up and down, seeking rest and finding none, is unfounded. No race of beings, no being throughout God's universe, but wanders up and down seeking rest, which it finds not. All creation is struck with one universal Unrest. Not a heart but throbs ; not a leaf but trembles ; not a solid rock but heaves and throes. Man was born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward. For six thousand years has the poor child, with aching heart and bare and bleeding feet, wandered up and down God's universe, seeking rest  some spot on which to repose but for a moment ; but none, none. O mock not the poor child by telling him that he has never sought rest without finding it.
Man finds rest only in union with God; peace for his soul only in approaching God. He may be eternally drawing nearer to God, but never can become, strictly speaking, one with him. Always then must he sigh for a repose he finds not, and aspire to a good rising far above and stretching far away beyond him. Let no man dream that there is for him here, or hereafter, per­fect bliss, any more than there is complete and absolute misery. 

We have here given Mr. Parker's theory of natural-religionism, as we understand it, and drawn from it such inferences as it seems to us to warrant; but we ought, in justice to him, to say that he by no means draws, or will accept these inferences. In asserting the gener­al principle of supply answering to demand, he has not meant to assert, what his words imply, that there is never any disproportion between the actual want, and the actual supply: but that for every natural want, there is somewhere, potentially at least, the needed supply ; that is, the external object to which the want points, or needs for its satisfaction. Hence, he lays down the axiom, " A natural want of man's constitution im­plies satisfaction in some quarter."

As a principle thus broadly stated, this is not true, as we have already seen. A want is either a deficiency or a desire. A natural want of man's constitution is nothing more nor less than a natural or constitutional want, natural and constitutional in this connexion mean­ing the same. " A natural deficiency implies satisfac­tion in some quarter." Whence this conclusion ? "A natural desire implies satisfaction in some quarter." This can be so only on the condition that for every natural desire there is provided a satisfaction. The poor wretch they are leading to the gallows desires, and very naturally, too, not to be hung. Is there sat­isfaction for this desire? The mother, pale and sorrow­ful, sits watching by her starving boy. She desires, very naturally, too. a morsel of food, that her dear one may not die. She shall obtain it, and the child shall live ! All this is very comforting ; but alas, men are hung, and children, notwithstanding the desires of their mothers, do starve. i: The tendency to love implies something lovely for its object." The same principle of reasoning, again. The tendency to love implies our inability to find and enjoy ourselves in ourselves, and the necessity we are under, in order to live, to go out of ourselves and bind us indissolubly to another. But that it implies that another really exists, we are not so cer­tain. Many of us make wide and diligent search through life for the '-'lovely object/' without finding it. If Mr. Parker had said, love implies the perception of something lovely, and perception is impossible where there is no object, he would have expressed the truth.

Mr. Parker labors hard to establish his right to con­clude from the want to the supply, but to no eifect. He begins by attempting to prove empirically, or rather by asserting, that in all cases, except that of our religious wants; supply answers to demand : and then, by way of analogy, infers that the same must hold good in the case of these wants ; that for them also there must be the requisite supply. Analogy, when made out, is no certain evidence ; and what is worse, as wo have seen, Mr. Parker fails to make it out ; so that he has not even analogy in his favor. We are far from questioning the fact, that there are objects which respond to the religious wants of our souls : but we do most unequivocally deny the right to conclude from the want to the object. To conclude from the want to the object, is only another form of concluding from the subjective to the objective, which is, and can be allowable in no case whatever. Where the objective is not given along with the subjec­tive, as an indissoluble part, an integral part, o( the same phenomenon, it is not attainable.

Mr. Parker also thinks, we presume, that lie escapes the naturalism we have charged him with, by making God the immanent cause of man and nature. No one is further from intending to assert man's suiiiciency for himself, or independence of God. h\ all he says of re­ligion, he seems to himself to imply man's strict de­pendence on God for life, breath, being, and all things. We shall do him great wrong, if we suppose him desti­tute of religious feelings, the common religious expe­rience, or as in any way in his own mind, according to his understanding of himself, making war on what any­body holds to be essential to religion. We are al­ways to remember that we arc reviewing the works of a religious man, and of a minister of religion, and there­fore that if they contain aught against religion, it was not by him so intended. We repeat, then, that he by no means regards himself as asserting or as implying man's sufficiency for himself. He assumes everywhere man's dependence on God. But this dependence is a natural dependence, and the aid man receives is everywhere a natural aid ; that is, not aid coming from an extra-nat­ural source to him in harmony with the principles or laws of his nature, but in and through his nature. This, however, he thinks is not naturalism in any oflen-sive sense, because God being the immanent cause of man, is at the bottom of man, the very ground and being of man ; so that it is always God that speaks in and through the tendencies of man's nature. But this avails nothing, because it destroys all distinction between God and man, save that of substance and mode, and loses God in nature, or nature in God. But God is not the ¦immanent cause of nature, although we by no means separate him from nature. We have, it is true, our be­ing in God; but our being is not his being, our sub­stance is not his substance, any more than I am my thoughts which I remember.

5. We have, in these remarks, anticipated pretty much all we had wished to say of the four remaining chap­ters of this second book. What we have said com­prises our leading objections to Air. Parker's natural-re­ligionism, or spiritualism. Of the three views he mentions, we. for ourselves, adopt, thouu'k by no means as he slates it, what he calls the anti-rationalistic view, or supernaturalism. substantially the view taken by the catholic church in all epochs of its history. We should often except to the statements and explications of this view made from time to time, as well by its friends as its enemies ; but we have satisfied ourselves that it is substantially true, and that it is impossible to explain the life and growth of man without assuming the supernatural, the miraculous intervention of Divine Providence. And in coming to this conclusion, we do not feel that we have abdicated any of our rights as a man, or surrendered any of our independence as a thinker. Some Jew additional remark's in vindication of this position, and explanatory of our views of Inspiration must close what we have to say on this part of Mr. Parker's Discourse.

1.   Life consists in growth. We say growth, not de­velopment. The modern doctrine is expressed by the term development, and presupposes that man contains in himself, from the first moment, the germs of all that he can be, and that his whole life consists in simply de­veloping and maturing these germs. But this we hold to be false fact and false analogy. The acorn contains the law, or, if we might so speak, the idea of the oak, but not the oak itself. It will never become an oak unless it have the aid of light, heat, moisture, and ap­propriate food, all of which, though capable of assimila­tion, are derived from sources extra-natuxni, that is, for­eign to the nature of oaks. So of man. He can grow, that is, he can live, only by virtue of a medium extra-natural, foreign to his nature, to his humanity ; and whatever is foreign to his nature as a man, to his hu­manity, we take it, is supernatural.

2.   We have already remarked that all creation grows, or is infinitely progressive, by virtue of the infinite ten­dency, we would say, if we did not fear the term would be misapprehended, the infinite necessity of the Creator, a necessity in himself, not a necessity imposed upon him,  to create or realize out of himself his own Ideal. In consequence of this, not man only, but all creation grows, is in progress, lives, goes forward. But it is progressive; it grows, or it lives, not in this case by virtue of ils own inherent energy ; but by virtue of the infinite tendency of the Creator to perfect his works, if we may so speak, to continue the effort to realize his own Ideal. Man, as a part of creation, lives, grows, is progressive, advances, then, by this continuous crea­tive effort of God. The power then that carries him onward is not his own, not the power of his own na­ture, but the power of God, and therefore supernatural. What a moment ago we termed e:t-7ra-natural3 we may now term super-ivdldml.

3.   According to the very law of life in a dependent being, and according to what is implied in the very con­ception of dependence, we can never live in and of our­selves alone. We have shown that Thought is simulta­neously and indissolubly subjective and objective. That is, in thinking, we think, in the single phenomenon, both subject and object. Let no one suppose that this is a fact restricted to the phenomenon usually termed thought. It is equally true of every phenomenon of life, of all dependent life, whatever its character, however feeble or obscure. What we call our life,* is not all our own. It is a one life, but resting upon a double basis, that of subject, and that of object. It is the result of the com­munion of subject and object; of me and not-me. Where no subject, no life : where no object, equally no life. Life, then, must be looked upon always as the joint product of subject and object.

4. According to this law of life, it is to be borne in mind, 1. That the object is as actively exerted in the production of the phenomenon, as is the subject. There is no passivity in nature. All existences are active forces, causes. The object is not, as a New-York editor in criticizing an Essay of ours supposed, the end or goal of the subject, that for the gaining of which the sub­ject exerts itself; but a joint cause actively exerted with the subject in the production of the plienemenon, as essential and as causative in its production, as the subject itself. The alkali and acid are both equally necessary to the formation of the neutral salt. 2. It must also be borne in mind, that the phenomenon, that is, the life, partakes equally of the character of the subject and of the object. With a low and worthless object, it is as impossible to have a high and worthy life, as with a low and worthless subject. <! Evil communica­tions corrupt good manners." So the hand of an apostle of Jesus laid on the head of the neophyte, the Holy Ghost enters into his heart, and creates him anew. 
  
 * See tho article on Leroux's Humanile in the last number of the Boston Quarterly Review, and the Letter we recently addressed to Dr. Charming; especially Leroux's work itself. 
  
5.  From this it follows that there can be no growth, no advance, no progress, and therefore no life, if both subject and object remain altogether unchanged. To obtain any new fact of life, you must have always ei­ther a new subject, or a new object, or what is the same thing, the subject or the object under a new aspect, one or the other in some respects changed.

6.   Man's life results from the communion of the me with the not-me. But man communes with God and nature never directly. He communes with God, only through a medium, or mediator, as we may by and by show, and with nature, only through the medium of his body, the direct object op his communion, then, is other men. His natural life is the result of his communion with the members of his race. They are his object, and he is theirs. But they, as his object, can impart to him only the life they live, and he, as their object, can impart to them only the life he lives. That is to say, if left to their natural life, they can im­part to him only what the race, at the epoch assumed, is already living, and he nothing else to them. Conse­quently, confined to this natural life, the race must come to a stand still: no more progress, no more advance. Individuals would grow up from infancy to the level of this natural life, and there stop, struck with the curse of eternal immobility, which is eternal death.

7.  Now, of two things one: Either no progress, and therefore no life, or supernaturalism. The race, we see, contains in itself no self-germinating principle. Therefore, in order for it to germinate, to grow, we must obtain for it foreign aid, a power to concur with the power of the race : and to go out of the race, that is, out of human nature, is to go out of nature. The whole machinery must stop, unless there be a su­pernatural change or enlargement of the object, or of the subject. The last, we conceive, is done, but through the medium of the supernatural change, or enlargement, of the object; and it is by this, that human nature itself becomes enlarged, that the race rises to a higher and a truer life. 

8.   The object to be changed or enlarged is other men ; that is, a member of the race. This leads us directly to what we term, in one point of view, Providential Men, and in another, Special Inspiration. If we assume the perfect equality of all men, as our point of depart­ure, and are able to keep them equal, we place mankind out of the condition to be progressive. If no one rose above the level of the mass, or stood out from the multi­tude, the prophet and iustituter of a higher life, the race would be struck, as we have said, with endless immo­bility, because it is always man that is the object of man. But one man can stand out thus from the multitude, or rise thus above the level of the mass, by virtue of no natural principle, as yet discovered or conceivable. fYo man can rise, in his life, above the combined worth of both subject and object. No man can then, naturally, rise above the level of his race.

9.   We have now established the necessity of chang­ing or enlarging the object ; that, is, of having for the progress of the race individuals, who stand out from their brethren, rise above them : and these individuals we cannot have naturally; that is, while confined to simple human nature. If they are to elevate their race, they must have communed with a superhuman, that is, a supernatural object, and therefore, become possessed of a superhuman life, a superhuman worth. Hence, in order to provide for the life and growth of the race, we are obliged to assume individuals supernaturally en­dowed, or inspired.

10.   These individuals are Avhat we term providen­tial men,what Carlyle calls Heroes. Their production is miraculous, cannot be otherwise than miraculous. God, by a miracle, raises them into direct communion with himself, or at least with superhuman excellence. The individual thus exalted into communion with a super­human object, by virtue of the law of life already ex­plained, receives into his own life, up to a certain point at least, the life and character of that superhuman ob­ject : and therefore comes to live a superhuman life, which nevertheless in him, by virtue of his subjectivity, becomes a human life. This life becomes, then, a new and a higher life, and is in its elements a life lit­erally, truly, indissolubly human and divine. He who lives this new, this higher life, is the inspired, the Prov­idential Man, the Prophet, the Messiah, the Regenerator of his race, the Father of the Future Age. Such was Noah, Abraham, Moses, Socrates, Paul; and in a degree, mediately, Luther and Calvin, Fox and Penn, Wesley and Swedenborg. Jesus we are hardly willing to place in the same category. All those are indeed his breth­ren, among whom he is the first-born or chief: but in him dwelt all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. He seems to us to have lived from the moment of his con­ception in the womb of the virgin, if we may so speak, in direct, immediate communion with God, and so had in its fulness, what these had only in a degree. They are images of him, he the express image of God.

11.   This individual, this inspired, providential man, this prophet, this messiah, whom God has selected from the mass of men, called, qualified, and sent forth, be­comes, through the individuals who have personal ac­cess to him, an object of communion to his race; and by virtue of their communion with him, imparts to them his higher, diviner life, which they, his disciples, through the communion of man Avith man, and generation with generation, send out through the race, and down to the latest posterity. Thus God inspires the race through inspired individuals.

12.  This inspiration we have called that of Life. The end sought by it is the introduction of a higher life for the race, through which all men may be re­deemed and sanctified. It is a life, because all inspira­tion must needs be by a life. We attain to truth, as well as to moral worth, only by living it; and the truth, which transcends the life we live, is to us always in­comprehensible. Man, moreover, is a unity, and life, therefore, implies the activity of his whole nature. He enters with his whole nature into every one of his phenomena. Purify and exalt the life, then, and you clarify and extend perception. Hence, Jesus makes doing, that is, living, the test of the truth of his teach­ings, No man ever comprehended the falsity of a doc­trine, which he had not at one period of his life believed, or seen under a point of view in which it appeared to him not false. Hence it is said the pure in heart shall see God. If, then, the kind of inspiration we have sup­posed introduce a higher order of life, it necessarily introduces higher conceptions and juster views of all the objects of human knowledge, whether they pertain to God, man, or nature. It is the fact we here state that justifies the world in persisting to believe in a con­nexion between false opinions and an immoral lifea connexion which we hold to be very real, but which has been grossly abused, because men are always more ready to conclude from the opinion to the life, than from the life to the opinion.

13. Supernatural aid conies to man in two ways ; or, there are two modes of supernatural inspiration. God, we have said, reveals himself to man in the Ideal. By this Ideal the race is inspired. But by the fact already mentioned of the continued or continuous effort of crea­tion, which follows necessarily from the infinity of the Creator, this Ideal must be always enlarging, and con­sequently presenting itself as a new object of aspiration. It therefore becomes to the race an inspiration inces­santly renewed, which renders it in fact a universal and continuous inspiration of mankind : and is therefore some­times assumed to be natural. It is the Logos, or Di­vine Reason of St. John, which enlighleneth every man that cometh into the world ; the inner Light of the Quakers, which they are careful always to distinguish from human reason : it is the Supernatural Inspiration we contended for under the name of spontaneous rea­son. that is. the spontaneous activity of Reason as the Logos or Word of God, not man's reason,  in Charles Elwood, and in our review of Mr. Parker's South Boston Sermon. By virtue of this, humanity is inspired. Hence what the Germans call the Weltgcist, the spirit of the .times, an age or an epoch, and the cause of the fact so often remarked of men in different parts of the globe, without communion with each other, lighting at the same time upon the same thoughts, the same discoveries in science or morals, and the same reforms in church, state, or society. This universal, never failing inspira­tion of humanity is, perhaps, too little considered by the Christian Avorld, and the value of the recent theo­logical discussions, in this country and in France and Germany, consists in their tendency to bring it more distinctly to the notice of theologians, and to install it in its rightful authority in the Church.

14.   The second mode of inspiration is that by in­spired individuals, or providential men. We here may regard as the inspiration, either the influence of these on the race, or the miracle of their own endowment. We regard them as raised up, specially qualified, to inspire their race, and lead it onward to higher, more advanced life. This special inspiration and the other are not two different kinds of inspiration, but two different modes of one and the same inspiration, by which God carries on his plans, and effects the progress of mankind,

15.   The evidence that a man is thus specially called, designated, and qualified to inspire his race, is very ob­vious, and very certain. All life is subjective and ob­jective A man who lives a life above the life of his race, in his own epoch, according to the principles Ave have established, lives such life only by virtue of com­munion with a superhuman object. It becomes, then, a simple historical question, whether he does or does not live such a life. Take Moses, as an instance. We, who live now, may see in Moses nothing preternatural. or superhuman, as we find humanity to-day. But this is nothing to the purpose. Did Mosey, iu his day, live a life above the life to which the human race had then attained? That is, in any aspect of his life did he present phenomena, that required for their production a higher object than he could then find iu other men ? If so, his claim to be a providential man, or supernatu­ral ly inspired, is established : so of any one else.

16. Hut will not this imply that every great man is supernaturally inspired? What mean you by a great man ? Shakspeare, for instance. He was unrivalled in his epoch. Or say Bacon, or Newton. But did Shak­speare, Bacon, or Newton, live a life above the life al­ready in the race by virtue of the mission of Jesus? We do not find that either of these surpassed, much less equalled this. Shakspeare's works are marvellous ; but who would name his writings in the same day with the New Testament ? or compare the Novum Organum with the Gospel of St. John ? or the Principia with the Pauline Epistles ?

Shakspeare, Bacon, Newton, then, do not need to go out of the race. Already is there a life circulating in the veins of humanity above their loftiest attainments. Brine forward one who lives a life surpassing that of Jesus, and we will admit him to be supernaturally inspired ; but any other, since the time of Christ, we can admit to be only mediately inspired, through communion with the Holy Ghost, which is the Life of Jesus embodied in the true Catholic Church,

These are but loose hints on a subject which would require a volume to be treated at full length, and a vol­ume, we hope, one day to devote to it. But few and somewhat disjointed as these hints arc, they will indicate, we trust, to the thoughtful, the outlines of a doctrine on inspiration, which, while it is orthodox in its main features, contains nothing to which any man who really believes in God need object. In reviewing Mr. Parker, who rejects the authority of the Bible, and usually pre­fers to express bis religious views in the language of heathens rather than of Jews and Christians, we have not felt at liberty, nor that it was necessary, to justify our views by scriptural quotations. Yet we believe they will be found eminently scriptural ; and if we have endeavored to establish them philosophically, it is not because philosophy is with us paramount to religion. Philosophy with us is not the judge of religion, having the riu;ht to acquit or condemn it. Religion is the high­est authority we acknowledge, and philosophy is mere­ly the form our religion assumes, when subjected to oiti own mental action. 
Mr. Parker, we are aware, objects to all special inspiration ; or rather, he objects to all inspiration but that which in our view is no inspiration at all. When we mean something totally different from what the world means by inspiration, we should call it by another name. There is a morality in the use of names, which writers would do well to remember. Inspiration is never something which man attains unto, but some­thing which is given him. It is breathed into a man, not forth from him. We leave Mr. Parker to talk as much as he pleases about inspiration, proportioned •" to the quantity of a man's being and the quantity of his obedience." We have no scale or dividers by which to measure its quantity, or ascertain its proportions. All we know of it is, that it comes, when it comes, as a cloven tongue of fire, and he who feels it speaks words which are a mystery unto himself, which take hold of the heart of mankind, and are mighty through God to overcome the world, destroy sin, and establish right­eousness. It depends not "on a man's own will, nor on the faithful use of our faculties," but on the grace of God, who selects now the royal David, now the courtly Isaiah, and now the rustic Amos from his herds, touches their lips with a live coal from olF his own altar, and sends them forth the messengers of his truth, his justice, his love, and his mercy. Not unto us, not unto us the glory, O God. If we have spoken words which shall letch their echos from eternity, it is because they were words which thou gavest us, and thine be the glory and the praise. We are wearied with this everlasting eifort to get rid of God, and make it out that man is all and in all. Feeble worms that we are : what were we, if God were to abandon us to our­selves ! It is man's glory to humble himself and exalt his Maker. Alas, the more we see of life, the more we know of our own weakness, the more significance do we discover in that old Myth, which made pride the pri­mal sin, the primal curse of the angels, and the cause df man's first disobedience. In re-reading, since the above was written, the chap­ter on " the natural-religious view," we have felt it due to Mr. Parker to say that, though he makes not the proper distinction between faith and inspiration, predi­cating indifferently of one what belongs only to the other, he has yet described many of the phenomena of inspiration with great justice, and with a depth and earnestness of feeling, a grace, beauty, and force of ex­pression, which assure us that better things than this Discourse lie in the man, and will one day come forth. In simple sooth, his book is far beneath him, and his philosophy does no sort of justice to the purity, strength, and fervor of his religions feelings.

We very readily confess that we think most persons who read this chapter, and our account of his views, will feel that we have misrepresented him. In fact we have felt so ourselves for a moment, and have asked ourselves, if it be not true that we have misapprehend­ed his meaning. When one year ago we wrote our re­view of his South Boston Sermon, we presumed his views and ours of the subject of inspiration were very nearly, if not exactly, the same. We found him speak­ing of inspiration, divine inspiration, God's inspiring men, and inspiring all men, in language very nearly the same we had for years been in the habit of using, and it did not occur to us even to ask, if he used this lan­guage in the same sense we did. We, therefore, as­cribed to him our view on the subject, and developed and defended that view as his. Knowing our own doc­trine to be that of supernatural inspiration, we had no suspicion that he was advocating a system of mere nat­uralism, and we repelled with indignation the charge of doing it, whenever we heard it brought against him by others.

But when in the early part of last October we list­ened to the first two Lectures of his Course, here ex­panded into the first and second books of -die work be­fore us. we became instantly convinced that we had misapprehended him ; and that notwithstanding the great similarity of his language and ours, he and we started from opposite poles. We saw, then, too, that as his language had led us to suppose that he accepted our su-pernaturalism, so our language might have led him and others to suppose that we adopted his naturalism. From that moment we changed somewhat our phraseology, which has led some to accuse us of having changed our belief. But we have not changed our views of in­spiration at all, although we may have modified to some extent our manner of explaining and setting them forth. We seemed to ourselves to teach the same doctrine on inspiration in Charles Ehvood, under the head of Su­pernatural ism, that we do in this article. We have al­ways, ever since known to this community, in the strictest, in the most orthodox sense of the word, be­lieved in supernaturalism ; and instead of its being true, as some have supposed, that we have been trying to pre­sent our naturalism so as to commend it. as much as possible to supernaturalists, we have been doing exactly the reverse, trying so to present our supernaturalism, as to win the attention, and ultimately the affections and the belief of the supporters of naturalism. We shall gain no credit for this statement, and yet it is true, and the real key to much that we have written oil'eu-sive to our more orthodox friends. Mr. Parker seems to us to be a naturalist, struggling to express his views in the language of supernaturalists. While therefore we should demand for ourselves the credit or discredit of being more orthodox than we have seemed, we should claim for him that of being less so.

It is this experience driving us to this conclusion, that has led us, upon second thought, to fear that after all we have done Mr. Parker no injustice. He speaks of both universal inspiration and special, and predicates many things of each, which are true and worthy of note. But his inspiration is divine only in the sense that man is divine. It is natural inspiration, and he calls it divine inspiration only because he conceives God to be the immanent cause of nature. With him inspiration has its source in the man, and not out of man in God. " It is," he says, p. 227, "co-extensive with 
the faithful use of man's natural powers. Men may call it miraculous, but nothing is more natural; or they may say it is entirely human, for it is the result of man's use of his faculties: but what is more divine than wisdom, goodness, religion?" Wisdom, good­ness, religion, then, instead of resulting from the proper use of man's natural powers, aided by the grace of God, are these powers themselves; are faculties of man's nature. Whoever before called wisdom, goodness, or religion, a natural power or faculty of man? Really, we are tempted perpetually, in reading this volume, to believe in sober earnest that its author recognises no distinction between a fact of life arid an element of being, that is, between the actor and the act, the cause and the effect; for he is continually confounding the two.

Nor is this all. The view he here takes makes wis­dom, goodness, religion, the source, not the effect, of inspiration. Is the author aware of the singular doc­trine he teaches in this? "A foolish man, as such," he says, "cannot be inspired to reveal wisdom, nor a wicked man to reveal virtue, nor an impious man to re­veal religion. Unto him that hath more is given. The poet reveals poetry, the artist art, the philosopher science, the saint religion. The greater, purer, loftier, more complete the character, so is the inspiration." p. 221. A man's wisdom, goodness, religion, are the sources of his inspiration ; what then is the source of these ? If Mr. Parker were asking by what means one man could inspire other men, he would not be so far out of the way. But this is not the question. Whence the inspiration which the man himself experiences ? not, Whence that which he imparts ? If a man is in­spired only as the result of his wisdom, goodness, and religion, or piety, that is, as the result of the faithful use of his faculties, then it follows that he does not need to be inspired in order to make a proper use of his faculties, or to be wise, good, and religious. What purpose then does inspiration serve ? If the poet's in­spiration conies from his power, his excellence as a poet; what is it that makes him a poet ? And after you have got the poet without any dependence on inspira­tion, what need of the inspiration? If we have the saint, what need we care for the inspiration ? We had supposed poetic inspiration necessary to constitute the poet, but Mr. Parker has discovered that the poetic in­spiration is the result of the fact, that one is a poet. We had thought inspiration necessary to enable one to be wise, good, religious; but Mr. Parker corrects us, and assures us that it is necessary to be wise, good, and religious, in order to be inspired. The great end of life, we presume no one will question, is fulfilled, when one is truly wise, good, and religious. We ask again, then, the use of inspiration ? Surely, it is bad econo­my to produce a thing so costly, when we can make no use of it : when it can serve no purpose, and is not needed to enable us to fulfil the great ends of life. We have observed, from the beginning of this volume to the end, an apparently studied effort to represent all that lias usually been considered by religious people as es­sential, to be entirely unnecessary. Tims religion it­self is made to derive its character, and all its worth, from the wisdom and goodness it finds in the breast where it lodges. So we do not need religion in order to be wise and good. What then do we need it for, but to make us foolish and wicked? And now inspira­tion is made to depend on our wisdom, goodness, and religion ; consequently we have no need of inspiration in order to be wise, good, and religious. What then do we need it for ; to be foolish, wicked, and irreli­gious ? By and by we shall see the same thing when we come to Christianity. We shall have Christianity distinguished from absolute religion ; absolute religion declared to be the only religion necessary, to be also easily ascertained, while a relative, historical form of religion, like Christianity, is exceedingly difficult to learn, and one hardly knows when he has learned it. If absolute religion is enough, and Christianity is not that religion, what need of Christianity? If a knowl­edge of absolute religion is plain and easy to be acquired, and that of Christianity difficult, why trouble oneself about Christianity at all ? Is Mr. Parker aware whither all this leads ? If so, it will be hard to clear him of disingenuousness: if not, he writes with an. almost inexcusable degree of carelessness.

"Now, as in the days of Adam, Moses, Jesus, he that is faithful to reason, conscience, and religion, will, through them, receive inspiration to guide him through all his pilgrimage." p. 234. Very true ; so he, who will exercise his reason, will be cured of his insanity. Nothing more true. But alas, the inability to exercise reason is the insanity ! ': Reason, conscience, religion, mediate between us and God, as the senses do between us and matter." p. 227. Here is the key to Mr. Par­ker's theory. The natural activity of reason, con­science, religion, (piety ?) is precisely what he means by inspiration. The activity of reason, conscience, religion, is the mk, ourselves, ourself. Consequently when we act reasonably, conscientiously, religiously, we are inspired  act by inspiration. "We have the natural ability so to act, and therefore the natural abili­ty to be inspired. There is no more need of any su­pernatural aid to be reasonable, conscientious, and reli­gious, than to eat, drink, or sleep. All may be done in accordance with and by virtue of natural laws. If this is not excluding God, as a i'rec providence, from the moral world, we know not what is. This, we think, justifies us in calling Mr. Parker's system sheer natural­ism, and proves that we have not misinterpreted his view of inspiration.
But to make the matter doubly sure, let us hear Mr. Parker still farther, and penetrate if possible his secret thought. Speaking of the fact of inspiration, he says, p. 223, <: It takes the rose out of the cheek, turns the man in upon himself, and gives him more of truth. Then, in a poetic fancy, the man sees visions ; has wondrous revelations; every mountain thunders; God burns in every bush ; flames out in the crimson cloud ; speaks in the wind; descends with every dove; is All in All. The soul, deep-wrought, in its intense struggle, gives outness to its thought, and on the trees and stars, the fields, the floods, the corn ripe for the sickle, on man, and woman, it sees its burthen writ. The Spirit within constrains the man." That is, the soul struggles to utter what it feels, constrained by its own intense, earnest spirit, and what it reads as the "burthen of the Lord," is merely what it has projected from itself in endeavoring to give outness to its thought. Once for all, does Mr. Parker recognise any distinction between the soul of man and God, or does he not? We feel al­most authorized, from his apparent delight in designa­ting God as the great Soul of all, to say that he does not. If he does, how can he call the struggles of the soul to give outness to its thoughts, and in poetic fancy writing them on trees, stars, fields, iloods, corn, man, and woman, the receiving of the truth of God into the soul ?

The man "is full of God. While he muses the fire burns; his bosom will scarce hold his heart. He must speak, or he dies, though the earth quake at his word. Timid flesh may resist, and Moses say, I am slow of speech. What avails that ? The Soul says, Go, and I will be with thy mouth, to quicken thy tardy tongue." p. 224, This is very kind in the soul, for if it should refuse to go with him, Moses would be obliged to go without his soul. Really, this is carrying the poetic license a little too far. We can take much by way of joke or pleasantry; but when a man in dovnright earnest, in a passage as high wrought as the one from which we quote, talks about a man's soul rising up and telling him not to be faint­hearted, not to hesitate because he is not of a ready speech, for it will go with him, be with his mouth, and quicken his tongue, we hardly know whether to grieve or to laugh.
Mr. Parker unquestionably admits degrees of inspira­tion, and that some are more inspired than others, because they are more obedient, and because they were created with a greater quantity of being. Is not. God unjust, partial, capricious, in creating one man with a greater quantity of being than another? But let that pass. These men, for " inspiration, then, is the consequence of a faithful use of our faculties," p. 220,  are not se­lected out from among their brethren, and specially called and qualified by their Maker through his grace to be his agents, messengers, or ministers in the accom­plishment of his purposes. Indeed, according to Mr. Parker, there does not seem to be any grand providen­tial scheme or plan in the universe, which God is ful­filling, and for the fulfilling of which he raiseth up whom he will and putteth down whom he will, making one vessel unto honor and another unto dishonor; or indeed if such plan there be. God raises up no special agents for carrying it on, but makes use of such agents as he finds already furnished to his hand. Thus the specially inspired arc not specially inspired to accom­plish God's purposes, but are chosen to accomplish those purposes because they are specially inspired, that is, specially qualified by their own wisdom, goodness, religion, or the faithful use of their own faculties. Hence, they, who have believed that God selects, calls his agents before they are born, and sanctifies them from the womb, are greatly mistaken. We bear the " burthen of the Lord/''" because he sees that we are strong and able ; and he chooses us to bear it, because he sees that we are able. This is the doctrine we are now to subscribe to ! See me, who venture to stand forth in the eyes of the world, the herald of new views. The world denounces me, society scowls upon me, my brother abandons me, but why shall I feel it, or be cast down ? Has not God chosen me to be the messenger of his truth? and ine, of all men, because I am wiser, better, more religious ? Was ever a doctrine more flatter­ing to human pride ? O, my brother, if you and I have been chosen to speak to this age words of which it hath need, and to bear the reproach, it is not because we are better, or dearer to God than our brethren, nor because we are stronger or more able to bear the ;; bur­then ; " but because God's providence requires certain individuals to be selected, and it might as well be us as any others ; and which of us would not, if we could, like Jonah, flee from the face of the Lord, and so escape the terrible mission of rebuking one's age, and denouncing the judgments of God upon one's own city ?

O my brother, bear with me. This view of thine may seem to thee wise, just, beautiful; but to me, alas, who know what it is to feel my own weakness, and the damning brand of guilt on my heart, and the deep hell of remorse burning in my bosom, this view brings nothing but the blackness of despair. A God, who does nothing till man takes the initiative, and ap­points none to a work to which they have not appointed themselves, is to us as no God at all. We want a mor­al Governor in this universe. We want a Father, a merciful Redeemer, who does not wait for our tardy movements, and frown upon us till we, unaided, have become pure and blameless in his sight; but that comes to us, all defiled as we are, that says to us, all outcasts as we are, weltering in our own blood, Livf.. O, leave us the hope that there is in heaven One mighty to save, for the arm of flesh fails us. 0, leave the poor sinner, eating husks with the swine, the thought that he has yet a Father, and a Father's house to which he may re­turn. Think well of it; if in thy zeal thou art not sweeping away every hope that was left us. To thee, who mayst not have felt the burden of sin lie heavy on thy conscience, this may be all foolishness; but I tell thee, my brother, that though I should be unable to sweep away the sophistry that hides my God from me, though 1 had nothing to answer to thy cold and freezing doctrine of human ability, 1 would not, I could not em­brace it. I know something of the pride of the phi­losopher, and of the reasoner ; but I would forswear philosophy, reason, and even, if possible, thought it­self, sooner than the sweet hope of a Saviour's love, which makes the heart of the humblest believer glad. 

III.
CHRISTIANITY.

We come now to the Third Book, entitled The Rela­tion of the Religious Sentiment to Jesus of Nazareth, or a Discourse of Christianity. It consists of seven chapters. I. Statement of the Question and the Meth­od of Inquiry. II. Removal of some difficulties. Char­acter of the Christian Records. III. The Main Features of Christianity. IV. The Authority of Jesus, its Heal and Pretended Source. V. The Essential Peculiarity of the Christian Religion. VI. The Moral and Reli­gious Character of Jesus. VII. Mistakes about Jesus  his Reception and Influence.

A glance at the titles of these chapters will satisfy any one, that for Christianity Mr. Parker understands something very different from the Christianity of the Church, and that he forms a totally different estimate of it from that usually formed by Christian ministers. We have no room left us to follow him as closely as we could wish, and must content ourselves with touch­ing, in the briefest manner possible, a few of the more important doctrines lie sets forth.

1. The question to be asked and answered in relation to Christianity is very simple. Religion originates in, and depends upon, a special religious element in man, namely, the Religious Sentiment. That which ex­hausts the Religious Sentiment, or answers exactly to all its demands, is absolute religion,  religion as it ex­ists in the facts of man's nature, everywhere and al­ways the true religion, the only true religion, and all the religion man needs for the perfection of his character.

The simple question as to the relation of the Religious Sentiment to Jesus of Nazareth, or to Christianity, then, is, Did Jesus, or did he not, teach absolute religion ? Does Christianity, or does it not. coincide with absolute religion ? If the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, which are Christianity, conform to absolute religion, they are true and authoritative ; if not, just so far as they do not, they are false and without authority.
The question itself suggests the method of inquiry, or way we must take to answer it. It is a plain, sim­ple question of history and criticism. We do not ask, what is religion? is Christianity true? is it, or is it not, sustained by miracles? but simply, what is Christianity? In settling this question, miracles and the character of Jesus are of no account. We have only to consult the records of Christianity, whatever they be, wherever de­posited, and to the best of our ability ascertain from them what Jesus really taught, what Christianity really is. Having done this, we are to compare it with abso­lute religion, and note the agreement or disagreement.
This is very plausible, and may seem to many quite conclusive; but it proceeds on an assumption which we cannot allow; namely, that man, independently of Christianity, is in possession of absolute religion. Mr. Parker makes absolute religion the standard-measure by which to try Christianity. This evidently presupposes that we have absolute religion in our possession, other­wise we could not use it as a standard. But absolute religion is all the religion we want. If we can have that, nay, if we actually have that without Christianity, what is the use of Christianity ? What need of troub­ling ourselves about it, even so much as to inquire whether it agree with absolute religion, or not ?

But is it true that we arc in possession of absolute religion, independently of Christianity ? " Absolute re­ligion is perfect obedience to the law of God." p. 241. No man can possess it, then, since in this case it is a fact of life, not an element of nature, without actually yielding the perfect obedience required. To yield this perfect obedience, is to attain to the perfection of the human character. If then every man is in possession of absolute religion, it follows that every man yields per­fect obedience to the law of God, and is perfect. Will Mr. Parker admit this conclusion ?
But it may be said that Mr. Parker does not mean to assert, that every man possesses, as a fact of his life, absolute religion in the sense here assumed; but that every man has by virtue of his natural powers, inde­pendent of Christianity, or any other professedly super­natural religion, a true conception and knowledge of what is absolute religion. It is not the religion, but the knowledge of it, that every man possesses. Well, be it so. We know by living ; no man knows love but by loving ; obedience but by obeying. Consequently, in order to know what perfect obedience to the law of God is, one must be perfectly obedient. Hence, we return to the same conclusion.

Absolute religion is all that is essential to the per­fection of the human character. But knowledge itself is an element of human perfection, consequently an element of absolute religion. A perfect knowledge of absolute religion would imply, then, all the knowledge a human being can possibly possess. A character, which has not attained to the utmost limits of its possibility in all directions, is not perfect. This implies that it must attain to its utmost limits m knowledge, as well as in anything else. Consequently, so long as there is any knowledge possible, not yet attained, the character is imperfect. Hence, the assumption, that man has a perfect knowledge of what is absolute religion, involves the assumption, that he already has perfect knowledge ; that is to say, he knows all that it is possible for a hu­man being to know. Surely he, who knows what is absolute religion, may be said to know all that man can know, or needs to know. Every man knows this, according to Mr. Parker's assumption. Why then talk of ignorance? Why write startling and eloquent ser­mons, essays, lectures, and huge volumes for the en­lightenment of the people, when every man, woman, and child is already in possession of all possible knowl­edge ? Why berate so unmercifully even our American priests, who stand in our way, and intercept the light that would shine in upon us from the newly risen theo­logical sun of Germany ?

But this is all idle. Even Mr. Parker, with all his learning, philosophy, and natural sagacity, aided by all the helps, natural or supernatural, to be obtained from hu­man experience, cannot pretend to a full or even a com­petent knowledge of absolute religion. In the first place, what he defines to be absolute religion, we have shown leaves out several important elements of reli­gion. But waiving this, taking his definition as sub­stantially correct, we must still be told much more than he tells us, before we are told what it really is. "Per­fect obedience to the law of God." What is obedience ? What is the law of God? What are all its practical requirements in the several departments of life ? for the law of God extends to every thought, word, and deed. Can Mr. Parker, can any man answer these questions ? At best, only imperfectly; for it needs infinite knowl­edge to answer them perfectly. Who can tell in every instance what is the exact thought the law of God re­quires him to think ? the exact word to speak ? the ex­act deed to perform ?
We must therefore obfect to Mr. Parker's statement of the question. On hiiJ own ground, the question is one of mere idle curiosity, and not worth considering; and since we are in possession neither of absolute reli­gion, nor of an absolute knowledge of what is absolute religion, we cannot assume absolute religion as the standard by which to try Christianity. The question of the agreement or disagreement of Christianity with absolute religion is not then an open question. No mortal has the right to ask it; for no mortal, in point of fact, has the power to conceive it, much less to an­swer it.
The true question is, Do our views of absolute reli­gion agree or disagree wijh Christianity ? We do not assume in this statement that Christianity is the full, the ultimate expression of absolute religion. For aught we know, there may be higher revelations than those made by Jesus. On that point we assume nothing, one way or the other. \Ye merely assume that Christianity is the fullest revelation that has been made to us, and therefore our highest authority for what is absolute re­ligion. Mr. Parker seeks an authority for Christianity, when in fact Christianity is itself the highest authority he has by which to test it. Instead then of assuming an ideal standard, by which to try Christianity, we take Christianity itself as the ideal standard, by which we are to try all our own conceptions of truth, beauty, goodness.

" By what authority do you assume Christianity as the Ideal of truth, beauty, and goodness; and therefore as in all cases the law men must obey?" We reply, that we suppose it will be conceded us. that a man's Ideal is his Ideal. What then in point of fact is the Ideal of all men, born and brought up in Christendom? Is it not Christianity? Has any one in his loftiest flights been able to soar above or beyond the Christian Ideal ? No. Mr. Parker will not pretend it; and if he does, we defy him to name us a conception transcend­ing the Christian Ideal. The question then is answered. Our authority for taking the Christian Ideal is. that it is the Ideal. The question is really as inappropriate, as it would be to ask one, what is his authority for be­lieving that what is the highest to him, is the high­est to him? The authority of Christianity is es­tablished the moment it is conceded to be the Ideal. The Ideal is given us by our Maker. It is the Form under which God reveals himself to mankind, and Christianity is the Form under which the ideal comes to us. It is for us the absolute. It is Immanuel, God with us. It is itself the sovereign, and therefore has uo need to appeal to an authority beyond itself. Our question then is not, what right have we to assume the Christian Ideal to be the Ideal; but, how far have we realized, and how can we continue to realize more and more the Christian Ideal, in industry, science, art, ia every department and act of life ?

Here is the question. The great mistake has been in fancying the authority of Christianity an open ques­tion, or a question at all. It is no question, and save in words it cannot be asked, and never can be asked, till some one arises, who discloses to us an Ideal above Christianity, which shall be a standard by which to try Christianity. Till then, Christianity is sovereign Lord and Judge. We see this everywhere. Wrangle and fight as we may, we never transcend the Christian Ideal. Shakspeare, Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Locke, never go beyond it. Voltaire, the English Heists, Ger­man Rationalists, .American Transcendentalists; have none of them disclosed an Ideal above the Christian, and therefore dethroned the Christian. Christ stands supreme as yet in the whole life of Christendom, and the arrows aimed at him by his infidel foes are stolen from the quiver of the Gospel, if the Ideal of the infi­del assuming it possible for an iuiklel to have an Idealdiffers from the Christian, it is not by rising above it.
We are far from thinking with Mr. Parker, that con­siderations of the miracles, and the character of Jesus and the Bible writers, may be waived, as having no bearing on the question before ns. They have indeed no bearing on the question which he asks ; but this is not the true question. Our great need is not to be able to determine, whether Christianity agree with absolute religion or not, but to be instructed in relation to the practical requirements of absolute religion itself. In­stead of its being, as Mr. Parker says, no difficult mat­ter to ascertain what is absolute religion, we hold that this is precisely the difficult matter, and the only diffi­cult matter. This is the question which all men in some form or other are asking ; to which, with what skill and force are in them, they are seeking an answer; and to which no man has ever yet found a full and sat­isfactory answer. All answers, the best even, must be only proximate, and these we have shown can be ob­tained only supernaturally. To say, then, that it makes no difference who or what were the instructors, is to fall into the grossest of mistakes. For none but. mi­raculous persons, or supernatiually inspired individuals, can possibly give us any instructions worth-having ; and these instructions, as we have already demonstrated, in discussing Inspiration, are, and must be communicated to the world through the medium of a life. 
The error of those whom Mr. Parker wars against, and which has occasioned his own, has not been in contending for the necessity of supernatural revelation, to enable us to perceive religious truths, but in con­tending that, after we do perceive these truths, we need miracles, or the authority of a miraculous person to endorse them, before we have the right to call them truths. Truth needs no backers. The office of the miracle, or of the miraculous personage, is not to en­dorse the truth, to assure us that we may believe it without any impeachment of our morals or our under­standing ; but to elevate us by inspiring us, exalting and purifying our sentiments, to the perception of the truth, that would otherwise be beyond the reach of our intelligence. When we are once elevated to its percep­tion, the work is done. We are made capable of know­ing the truth, when we see it. This is what is implied in the simple fact of knowing. We know the truth by perceiving it; intuitively, by looking on it. This is the doctrine of Jonathan Edwards, and of the great body of Christian writers in all ages of the Church. It is the doctrine Mr. Ripley. whom Ave consider in metaphysics or theology an authority second to none in this country, maintains in his controversy with Mr. Norton ; and it is the doctrine which we in our humble way have uniformly maintained from the first estab­lishment of this Journal. Hut all truth docs not lie, to borrow Mr. Parker's expression, " in the plane of man's consciousness." Man is created capable of knowing the truth when lie sees it, but not capable of seeing all truth, nor all truth needful for him. He needs miracles and miraculous persons as revelators, as media by which he can rise to the perception of the truth, but not, as we have understood Mr. Norton and others to contend, to be an authority for believing tiie truth after the mind has grasped it.

This distinction between miracles to reveal the truth, and miracles to authorize us to believe the truth, which is the distinction insisted on by Mr. Parker's friends, and which they hold to be of great importance, Mr. 
Parker himself does not appear to have noticed at all ; and he seems to have taken it for granted that those of us, who have contended for man's power to know the truth by seeing it, have meant, that we have the natu­ral power of seeing all truth needed for us, and there­fore have no occasion for supernatural aid, either to re­veal the truth, or to be our authority for believing it. If Mr. Parker had fixed clearly in his inind the distinc­tion we have here pointed out, we think he would not have separated from his friends, and put forth a doc­trine which, so far as our knowledge goes, none of them have ever entertained.

2. But we suspect that, after all, we differ radically from Mr. Parker in our conceptions of Christianity. We differ radically from him in our conceptions of man himself. Mr. Parker views man as in and of himself competent both to know and to do whatever is required of him by absolute religion. That the first assumption is unwarranted, we have sufficiently proved : that the second is also unwarranted, is evident from the fact, that, the world over, man's power to do falls short of his power to know.
In our view, man stands in need of two things : 1. Instruction as to what is God's law and its require­ments ; and 2. Strength to obey that law, to conform practically to those requirements. Both, so far as he comes to possess them, are acquired by growth ; and growth, we have seen, is possible only by means of the conjunction of the natural and the supernatural. These two things, in harmony with our natural constitution, it is the design of Christianity to furnish. Christianity assumes man to be ignorant and weak, and it proposes to make him wise and strong. But according to Mr. Parker, all it does or proposes to do, is to say to man, Be wise, be strong ; imparting to him never a particle of wisdom or strength. According to our view, it is wisdom and strength ; Christ is the power of God and the wisdom of God ; made of God unto us wisdom, righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption. Yet this, so insisted upon by St. Paul, Mr. Parker nowhere contemplates. He asks no favors; he will receive nothing through grace. He condemns popular theology, because, as he says, "its heaven is a place no man has a right to. Would a good man willingly accept of that which is not his? pray for it?" p. 8.

But if Mr. Parker wants Christianity neither as a medium of knowledge nor of strength, for what does he want it? One is almost tempted to say, he wants it for nothing at all : wants nothing of it, save what Diogenes wanted of Alexander; that is, that it should stand out of his sunshine, so that he may receive, with­out their being intercepted, the clear light and cheering warmth of absolute religion. But not to insist on this, what after all is in his view the essential peculiarity of Christianity; which again must, since he has identified Christianity with it, be also his view of the essential elements of absolute religion? His statement, like most of his statements, is in a form so negative, that it is not easy to answer this question ; but we will answer it as well as we can. As near as we can come to it, it is, 1. Freedom from all and every obligation to obey anything but the law of God, ivritten on the soul of man. pp. 2S2, 2S3. 2. It is not a system of religion and life, but a Method of religion and life. p. 284. 3. It is eminently practical, p. 28G. Setting aside the strange inconsistency of declaring absolute religion, or Christianity which is absolute religion, to be the way of religion, and not religion itself; these three state­ments, reduced to a common denominator, mean, obey God's law written on the tablets of the heart ; obey the law of thy nature: that is, obey thyself; that is, do as thou listest. This is, no doubt, a rule eminently practical. But does not Mr. Parker perceive that this rule is a safe rule to be followed, only on the hypothe­sis, that man has a divine nature, is perfect, and never voluntarily does or desires to do what is not pure, just, and holy? But we have denied to man this divine na­ture, and all who have any experience of life know by their own internal struggles, by the lusting of the flesh against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, that he does not possess it. It is the design of Christ so to purify and exalt us, as to make us what Mr. Parker as­sumes that we are without it. But we come to that sanctified state, in which all our emotions, passions, de­sires are holy and safe to be followed, only through grace, through the redemption in Christ Jesus.
In assuming Christianity to be merely the method, that is, the way of religion and life, Mr. Parker entirely mistakes it. Jesus says, " I am the way, the truth, and the life." It will not do to understand this, as Mr. Parker does, to mean, simply, that Jesus pointed out the true way to life. This would assume that the only relation Jesus bears to the salvation of the world is that of a teacher of righteousness. This is not the scriptu­ral view of Jesus; and if this were the true view to be taken of him, Mr. Parker's eulogium on him would be altogether exaggerated. Under this point of view, we confess that we should be unable to award him any pe­culiar praise. Mr. Parker himself shows, and takes great satisfaction in showing, that Jesus taught no doc­trine, and gave no precept, not taught and given by others long before him. The only merit we can find, that Mr. Parker allows him, is that of having exhorted us to obey the law of God written in our souls, instead of the law written in the ordinances of men ; that is, as Mr. Parker interprets the matter, in recommending absolute individualism, which, when absolute, is the real Satan and Adversary of souls. But Jesus, so far as such protest is warranted, was not the first to protest against human ordinances. Isaiah, Micah, and the au­thor of the fiftieth psalm, had done it in stronger and more explicit terms, than he did. What then were his peculiar merits? We see no answer that it is possible for Mr. Parker to give to this question.

This difficulty comes from not taking Jesus at his word, and from attempting to be wise above what is written. Jesus says, " I am the way, the truth, and the life ; " two very important things, which Mr. Parker leaves out. He makes Jesus simply the way, the method of religion and life. Jesus himself says lie was, in addition, the truth and the life. Here is the difference. For ourselves, notwithstanding the charges which have been brought against us, we have never, since our reconversion to Christianity, regarded Jesus in the simple light of a teacher of the true way of life, whether as teaching by precept or by example. la our Discourse on Christ before Abraham, written and preached in this city, in August 1637, and published in the very first number of this Review, January, 1838, the original, as some have thought, and as we ourselves thought till quite recently, of Mr. Parker's South Boston Sermon, avc expressly reject the view, that regards Je­sus as saving the world by merely teaching the truth ; and we lay down the doctrine, which we have recently set forth in our Letter to Dr. Channing, that Christian­ity is not a doctrine, but a life ; not an exemplar life, a life to be imitated, copied : but a life literally imparted or communicated by Jesus through his own life to the world. This life we defined to be the life of pure, dis­interested love, which redeems the world by being lived. We did not then understand how this life was or could be communicated literally to the world. This occasioned some confusion of speech ; in all other re­spects, the doctrine of that Discourse, the view taken of Christianity, of the aid it gives, of what that aid consists in, was precisely the doctrine we now contend for.

We say, then, as we have always said, that Christi­anity is not only the way of life, but life itself. It is not a mere example of the life we are to live, although it is that; but it is the identical life itself. Christianity is a life communicated, by the law of life already ex­plained, to the world. Jesus imparted it to his dis­ciples, made it an indissoluble part of their life, through their personal communion with him. They commu­nicated it to others through personal communion with them ; and by means of the communion of man with man, and generation with generation, the way is open for it to become ultimately the life of all men.  Now Christianity being the infusion, so to speak, of a new life into the life of humanity, it cannot be sep­arated and considered apart from the character of him who instituted it. What is Jesus to us but his life? Let us be understood. Life is the term we use to de­signate all the phenomena exhibited by an individual or being. In every phenomenon we perceive a subject; but we know the subject only so far as he enters into the phenomena, and of him only what they reveal. Our knowledge of a man is limited then to his phe­nomena ; that is, his life. When we speak of a man, it is of his life, the phenomenal man, that we in reality speak. So when we speak of Jesus; it is not of the being, the esse, but the phenomenal Jesus ; that is, his life. Back of the life is unquestionably the csse, das Seyn of the Germans ; but that transcends our view, save so far as it enters into the life. Jesus is to us all in his living, his life, the phenomena of his being. Now, in this sense, in the only sense in which Jesus exists to us, save as an abstraction, he is not the author of Christianity, but is it. Then the whole value of Christianity depends on what he was. The question of what he was is the identical question, what is Chris­tianity? and so from the first has the Church felt, and in one form or another asserted. There is no separa­tion between Christ and Christianity possible, or con­ceivable even.

Now, on what condition can Christ redeem us, or the infusion of the new life prove the redemption and sanctification of the human race? On two conditions, and two only. 1. That the life of Jesus or the Christ be a Divine Life; and 2. That the communion of man with man be everywhere in time and space free and uninterrupted. The first even Mr. Parker asserts ; the second, without having precisely understood it, has been from the first the one steady aim of the Church. But Jesus could live a divine life only by direct com­munion with God; and this direct communion, being born of woman, he could have only miraculously. This is the significance of the miraculous conception, a great and pregnant mystery, which whoso rejects, re­jects Christianity. The miraculous or supernatural character, or life, of the man Jesus, must then be as­sumed in the very outset, as the only condition on which we can get for the race a life sufficiently above the life of the race, to be through ils reception the re­demption and sanctification of mankind.

We are speaking of the life of Jesus ; the Wesen, not the Seyn : the livings not the csse; the phenomenal, not the ontological. In this view Jesus is the indisso­luble union of God and man. What know we of God ? Not the absolute Being itself. We know only God in the phenomenon; that is, not the being of God, but, if we may so speak, the life of God. The term God-man means then, literally and philosophically, the union of the Divine life and the human, or a life the resultant of the direct and intimate communion of man with God. All life is two-fold, or rather all life is a one life resting upon a double basis. It partakes equally of the nature of the subject and of the object. Jesus com­munes directly, miraculously, with God, and it is by virtue of this communion he lives. This life, that is to say, the life resulting, which is after all what we mean, what all men really mean, by Jesus, must be what the Church has always contended, indissolubly human and Divine. We are obliged then to assert even the Divinity of Christ, in order to state truly what Christianity is. The Church has been nearer right than most of us have supposed. Her error, if error she lias had; has not been in asserting the proper Divinity of Christ, but in affirming this Divinity of the ontological Christ, of whom we know nothing directly, instead of the phenomenal Christ, the only Christ to us.

Christ being the life, and as we now see, by virtue of his Divinity, the true life, we at once comprehend how by being formed within us he becomes our Saviour. We have true life just so far as we partake of him. The medium of his reception is communion with him in those, within whom he is formed the hope of glory ; that is to say, we receive him through union with the true Church. But more of this by and by, We see now that, in order to assert a sufficient Chris­tianity, we must assert the supernatural, the miraculous character of its founder. The proof of that miraculous character is, as we have already stated, in the fact that Jesus lived a life above the life of humanity in his epoch. That Jesus did live such a life, or was such a life, is evident historically, and from the fact, that he is, as we have seen, even yet the Ideal,  none of the race being able to conceive of a higher than he.

The question of miracles is now easily disposed of. Did Jesus work miracles? It is a simple historical question. He was himself a miracle, and that he could work miracles, is evident from the fact, that he was su-pernaturally endowed. Life implies feeling, knowing, and doing. Increase the power to feel, and you neces­sarily increase the power to know and to do : the power to know, you increase the power to feel and to do ; and the power to do, you necessarily increase the power to know and to feel, or to love. A miracle is that which transcends the natural, the generic power of the being of whom it is predicated. Exalt that being above his kind, as we have shown is the fact with every provi­dential man, and you have clothed him with the power to work miracles. The historical question we cannot go into now, but we have no doubt of the fact, that Jesus did work miracles. Were these miracles proofs of the truth of his doctrines? No. They were 'media by which God made known to men the truths of abso­lute religion, and raised them to the perception and recep­tion of a higher and a diviner life.

With these remarks we must leave what Mr. Parker has to say of Christianity in this third book, with the single exception, concerning the doctrine of a Mediator. Throughout his whole work, Mr. Parker sneers at the idea of a Mediator. il Who would go to heaven by attorney? " Now this is not merely in bad taste, but is very wretched as philosophy. Man can be saved or sanctified, we take it for granted, only by com­munion with God. Now, can man commune directly with God, as it were face to face ? We commune never with that which transcends our perception. Do we perceive God? Where do we perceive him? In himself; in the abstract? No such thing. We see God only in the Ideal, and the Ideal only in the Actual. By means of the Actual we commune with the Ideal, and through, the medium of the Ideal with God. Then the Ideal was not the Mediator till it became incar­nated. Here is the whole doctrine of the Incarnation, and of the Mediator; a doctrine essential not only to Christianity, hut to man's redemption and sanctification. The Ideal is the Logos of St. John. The Incarnation of the Logos is Jesus, or the Life, the Christ, the Son of God, the Saviour of the world. Now, if Mr. Parker will show us any way by which we can approach this Ideal, but by living the Life, or God, but through the Ideal, Logos, Word or Speech of God, he will show us what we as yet are unable to conceive of, and we will then cheerfully acknowledge to him that man may per­haps commune directly with God, without a mediator, or medium of communion.

IV.
THE BIBLE.

Mr. Parker's Fourth Book is entitled The Relation of the Religious Sentiment to the Greatest of Books, or a Discourse of the Bible. It is divided into five chapters. I. Position of the Bible  Claims made for it  Statement of the Question. II. An Examination of the Claims of the Old Testament to be a Divine, Miraculous, or Infallible Composition. III. An Exami­nation of the Claims of the New Testament to be a Divine, Miraculous, or Infallible Composition. IV. The Absolute Religion Independent of Historical Docu­ments the Bible as it is. V. Cause of the False and the Real Veneration of the Bible.

The subject of this Book is one of great extent, and surpassing importance. We cannot pretend to treat it with any sort of justice. Mr. Parker himself has hur­ried over it, hinting rather than stating, and stating rather than developing and demonstrating his views. A full discussion of the whole subject he promises us in a work, which he is passing through the press, and which we are waiting for with no little impatience. Moreover, we not only want room to treat this subject as we would, but we have treated it so often and so thoroughly in the pages of this Journal and elsewhere, that we really have very little to add to what we have already laid before the public.
We say in the outset, that we by no means accept the Protestant view of the Bible against which Mr. Parker contends. We do not accept the Bible as the only sufficient rule of faith and practice, nor do we ac­cept the doctrine, that every word of it was dictated by a universal and infallible inspiration. On these two points Protestants have set up claims for the Bible, which never have been, and never will be sustained. We think we sufficiently refuted the claims of the Bi­ble to plenary and infallible inspiration, in our re­view of Mr. Parker's South Boston Sermon in this Journal for October last, and to that we refer our readers.

But while we say all this, we are equally far from accepting Mr. Parker's view of the Bible. We believe him wrong in his estimate of the Bible, and otherwise than wrong he could not be with his views of Inspira­tion. By admitting only natural inspiration, he of course could admit, no claims of the Bible to be a divine, a miraculous composition : and must ascribe its superior truth and beauty, not to the influx of the Divinity into the hearts of its authors, but to their greater fidelity to their own moral and religious natures. This in fact is his theory of the Bible. He regards it as the greatest of books ; he sees and admits its wide and lasting in­fluence ; feels and owns its vast superiority over all other book's, and finds no language so appropriate as its for the expression of what is deepest, truest, and holiest in his experience : but he after all looks upon it as a 
human work, produced by human ability and genius, by the human heart and soul speaking out from their own finite depths. His friend, Mr. Emerson, in his poem entitled. The Problem, a most remarkable pro­duction, which we are astonished to find exciting no more attention, published in the Dial for July, 1840, and which we have quoted already more than once, may be thought to express his view :

"Out from the heart of nature rolled The burdens of the Bibio old, The litanies of nations came, Like the volcano's tongue of flame, Up from the hurnin<x cove belo"', The canticles of love and woe."

And after all, these beautiful lines seem to us to take a higher view than Mr. Parker's ; for according to Mr. Emerson, it is not man that speaks out from himself, but the mighty Over-Soul  answering very nearly to what we term the Ideal; that hovers over man, under­lies him, thinks in his thought, loves in his love, and lives in his life. This is the mighty, the one, univer­sal, living Spirit, Nature, what you will; the Power from which all forms proceed ; the form in which the infinite I An is revealed. This is the Creator. Tt is one, whether it create in what men call nature, or in what they call art ; whether it bloom in a violet or in a Madonna; rear an Andes,'or with human hands a St. Peter's. All genuine, all authentic productions are its creations. Human utterances are true, genuine, au­thentic ; are out from the heart, and can reach the heart, only as they are its utterances, the out-flowing of its influx. Man, to be able to speak a living word, must sink back, as it were, into the Ideal, and become an instrument or organ of the great Soul, which is one and universal. He then speaks with a more than mor­tal tongue. A higher than man speaks then through man, out from the deep, living heart of all, u the canti­cles of love and woe." The Bible comes from no vaiu or frivolous thought, is no production of human will, human weakness, or human caprice, but of the universal Soul ; is the Speech of that very Power that plants the forests, upheaves the Andes, rears the pyramids, guides the chisel of Phidias, the brush of Raphael, and builds with Michael Angelo and Sir Christopher Wren. There is then a divinity in the Bible. It has its source in the source of all that is true, genuine, authentic in nature and in art, a source which men may seek to name, but which to the truly devout soul is always the Unnameable.

We say this of Mr. Emerson, because we wish to note the difference between his views and those of his disciple, and because we have certain suspicions that, in our criticisms on his writings from time to time, we have not always done him the justice we intended. We are every day led to suspect that his thought lies deeper, and is altogether broader than we have usually given him credit for; and in doubting his religious faith or religious feeling, we have done him great wrong. The more progress we seem to ourselves to make in true philosophical science, the more do we dis­cover in his writings, and the profounder is our rever­ence for his genius. He has been the subject of much foolish detraction, and equally foolish praise ; but he is, beyond question, one of the most remarkable men con­nected with our literature, and altogether more of a Chris­tian, than he owns or even suspects himself to be. We apprehend that it will ultimately be found, that his seem­ing denial of God comes from his deep sense of a uni­versal Presence which he stands in awe of, before which he shudders with fear, love, and delight, but which he does not name. And is not God to every devout soul the Unnameable ? To name, is it not in some sort to define? But how define the Indefinable ? Before the awful Majesty of Nature, is it not the highest wisdom, as the deepest reverence, to be silent ? Mr. Emerson, may we not say, appears to us often irreligious, in con­sequence of the very excess of his devoutness? Our reading public little suspect the deep significance of his volume of Essays, which he published some few months since,  Essays which will live as long as the language in which they are written, and of which they are one of the richest specimens to be found.

lint lo return : Mr. Parker seems to us. while struck with the fact, which Air. Emerson somewhere mentions, of our inability to iell where man the effect ceases, and God the cause begins, to fail to note what, after all, Mr. Emerson really aims to keep always in mind, the dis­tinction between nature in this sense of Over-Soul, of cause of the visible universe, and what may, in a more strict and definite sense, be termed human nature ; and therefore confounds in his argument tin; individual man with that which transcends all individuals, and loses all that is individual in its own unity and universality. Hence, he allows to the Bible only a human origin. The men who wrote it were, v> doubt, extraordinary men; but extraordinary, not bee ase supernaturaUy en­lightened, but because they were able to speak with greater fidelity to their own genuine experiences, than is the case with ordinary men. Consequently, the Bi­ble is to be placed in the same category with all other books, and judged of as we judge of all others : received as authoritative, where judged to be true, and rejected as of no authority, where judged to be false.

iNow from this view we dissent, and very widely. We dissent from any, and every view, which admits nothing supernatural, miraculous in the oiigin and pro­duction of the Bible ; and therefore we dissent not on­ly from Mr. Parker's view, but from that which we have ascribed to Mr. Emerson, all superior to Mr. Par­ker's as it really is. We have already demonstrated, if we have demonstrated anything, that the human race goes forward only by the aid of Providential Men,  men supernaturaUy raised up and endowed to be the lights and the iuspirers of their race. Such men there have been. The Bible, in our view, is, in part, the produc­tion of men of this class, and, in part, a genuine, an authentic record of their sayings and doings.
On any other hypothesis than this, it would be diffi­cult to account for the position the Bible has held and now holds in the estimation of the race ; for its wide, and deep, and lasting influence over the most cultivated and enlightened nations of the earth. Indeed, this in­fluence, Mr. Parker may well say, is a very surprising phenomenon. View it in what light you will, the Bi­ble is the basis of all our jurisprudence, philosophy, theology, and literature. It is in every department of life the grand Statute Book of Christendom. It is our standard of faith, and even of taste. Oar whole life is more or less exactly modelled after it. Without it, without the thought, the taste, the principles, the cul­tivation we owe to it, we were still the rude old Teutons in the Black Forests of Germany. Shakspeare's finest passages are but successful imitations of its poetry ; and Bacon's, and Locke's, and Kant's philosophies are but loose paraphrases of a few of its significant texts. Byron sings sweetest, in his purest and loftiest strain, when he takes his key note from its compositions ; and the pious soul can find no words so meet for the utter­ance of its holy aspirations, as the Psalms of David. Is not all this surprising ? If the book were a mere human production, produced in the darkness of the semi-barbarous state, in which the Jews were down nearly to the time of our Saviour, the production of a petty tribe, inhabiting the mountainous districts of Pal­estine, shut out from general intercourse with mankind, always despised by its neighbors, and in modern times held as a by-word and a hissing in all the earth,if the Bible were a mere human production, and of indi­viduals from such a tribe as this, held in the estimation this always has been and is, on what principles shall we account for its influence ? Whence came these in­dividuals with the power to produce such a book ; and whence this universal agreement of mankind to adopt the Book as their supreme law ? It would require a greater miracle to give to anything human so wide and so deep an influence as the Bible confessedly has, than is needed on the hypothesis of its supernatural origin and production.

Then, again, where else in ancient or modern times have human genius and ability produced aught to compare with the Bible ? No critic will place Homer or Shakspeare above the Hebrew Bards, or admit any equality in whatever pertains to the grand, the severe, the sublime, the tender. The Book is our Ideal. In every department of thought, if we except the mere physical and mechanical sciences, we are far, very far below the Bible. Assuming, then, the doctrine of pro­gress, which we have demonstrated, and which is the authorized creed of our age, we hold it demonstrably impossible that this Book could have been produced in the age in which it was, without the supernatural in­tervention of Providence. We say this not in the cant­ing tone of the ordinary believer, but as the deliberate conclusion of the free thinker and the philosopher. Our right to be heard in questions of pure, philosophy, we trust, our countrymen will not readily dispute, and no man has come more reluctantly than we to own the supernatural origin of the Bible. We have felt for that sacred Book the greatest possible aversion ; we have fairly detested it, and felt that we were derogating from our dignity as a man in quoting a single text from it, without at the same time expressing our strong disap­probation of it. Slowly, and only by the hardest, have we come from that state of deep dislike to our present state of faith and reverence. The Bible is to us now our classic ; we love to quote it not merely for authority, but for its aesthetic beauty and effect. A felicitous quotation from the Bible, in our judgment, is a finer mark of literary taste and skill, than a felicitous quotation from Homer or Horace. We have therefore come not only to believe the Bible, but to admire it, and to love it. We study it as our highest intellectual and literary standard. Between this view and the for­mer one mentioned, there is a distance. What has produced the change ?

Formerly, we looked at the Bible from too low a stand-point, and saw in it only the mere letter. Time, study, experience, and God's grace, have enabled us to perceive in the Book a significance, which we once did not and could not see in it. We have been enabled to perceive its immense superiority over all other books, and we have found that all our own moral and mental growth consists in our becoming able to understand and appropriate more and more of its mean­ing. We survey the present state of mankind : we take an inventory of their intellectual wealth, and wo find that with all their progress they have not outgrown the Bible. The Remains of that astonishing Hebrew Literature still suflice for the human soul, and the thought which pervades them is still in advance of the most advanced thought of the age. From this im­portant inferences may be drawn. But we go back to the age when the Bible was produced, to the people among whom it originated, and ascertain what was the summit then reached by human life. We find the age. the race, was in its highest achievements far below the Bible. Arrived at this conclusion; the question is set­tled. All life, we have shown, rests upon a double basis; must be at once objective and subjective. A life beyond the summit of one/s ago, or country, can be lived only by virtue of an object transcending that age or country. The authors of the Bible could have pro­duced a book transcending the summit attained by the race in their day, only by communing with a superhu­man, and therefore a supernatural object, The whole question as to the supernatural origin of the Bible is, therefore, reduced to a simple question of fact: Was it, or was it not, in advance of the race at the epoch or epochs of its production?

The proof, then, of the supernatural origin of the Bible is complete ; as complete as we have shown it to be in the case of the supernatural inspiration of Provi­dential Men : for it is precisely the same. But it does not follow from the fact of the supernatural origin of the Bible, that its inspiration is full and infallible. The inspiration is unquestionably infallible as far as it goes, but it has its limits. This last fact our Protestant di­vines are accustomed to overlook. Since the inspira­tion must needs be infallible, they assume that the in­spired must also be infallible ; and therefore that all their sayings, on whatever topics, must be authoritative. Hence, their assertion that the Bible is the only and the sv[fi<'ieut rule of faith and practice. But the inspi­ration, and therefore the authority, of the Bible cannot transcend that of the Providential Men who wrote it, or whose payings and doings it records ; and the inspira­tion of these wTe know to have been a limited inspira­tion. Had it not been limited, it would have implied their omniscience, and omniscient they were not.
Moses, we assume, was a Providential Man in the full significance of the term. He lived a supernatural life, and was aide to comprehend a superhuman truth, wisdom, beauty, goodness. The only miracle there was about him was in the fact of his living a super­natural life. There was nothing miraculous in the mode in which he acted, wrote, or dictated his laws. He in all respects acted from the fulness of his own life, naturally, in harmony with the laws of human na­ture, as we all do ; but living a supernatural life, he was aide, naturally, to give laws, to write books, and to perform deeds which transcended the wisdom, discern­ment, genius, and ability of ordinary men. In this transcendent superiority consisted the supernatural char­acter of his laws, his writings, and his deeds, and this superiority lie could not have shown, had he not been supernaturally endowed. So far then Moses is super-naturally inspired, and therefore infallible. But was Moses able to comprehend all wisdom, all truth, all ex­cellence? By no means. Jeremiah and Paul both al­lege the imperfections of his system, and in the name of the Lord promise a New Covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah. However high Moses rose above his own epoch, he fell far below Jesus. Christianity, all must concede, is an advance on Ju­daism. The inspiration of Moses was not complete. His law was imperfect. It required another and a greater than lie. to magnify it and make it honorable • to fulI'd it. His glory pales before the star of Bethle­hem, and we remember him, still love and reverence him. only because he was ihe type and promise of the Messiah. 
Now this, which we say of Moses, we may say by a stronger reason of Joshua, and Samuel, and David, and Solomon, and Isaiah and the prophets, who, though inspired, were rather inspired through the medium of the Mosaic life and inspiration, than originally, imme­diately from God : as we may say that Augustine, Fen-elon, Fox, Penn, Swedenborg, and Wesley are inspired by the life of Jesus, or the Holy Ghost embodied in the Church. Of Jesus and his apostles we may speak very much as we do of Moses and his followers. "We have no right to assume that Jesus, we mean the man Jesus, the son of Mary, living, suffering, preaching, dying for man's redemption, possessed, in an absolute sense, all knowledge. Jesus was, and is to man the full and complete manifestation of God in the flesh ; and we are unable to conceive of aught that goes beyond him, or that will in the lapse of ages render another manifesta­tion necessary. Ln point of fact, we believe the Gos­pel kingdom to be an everlasting kingdom, and that Jesus will reign forever; for in him dwelt all the ful­ness of the Godhead bodily. We do not look for another Messiah in the sense in which lie was the Mes­siah. He seems to us to have infused true eternal Life into the life of humanity, and that now through com­munion we may, as a race, be said to possess in our­selves a principle of eternal growth. Yet we ought not to assume that new and higher manifestations of divine life may not, in the lapse of ages, be needed, and be made. Be this, however, as it may, certain is it that the inspiration of Jesus, so far as the Bible contains a record of it. does not extend to all subjects, nor furnish an answer to all possible (questions. The same may be said of the inspiration of his apostles. It extends far and en­larges the interior life of its recipients, so that they com­prehend what far transcends ordinary vision : but we have no authority for saying that it so enlarges that life, as to enable it to comprehend the Infinity, in the bosom of which we are lost as in the bosom of infinite dark­ness. They saw far, but always is there an infinity beyond them. This assumed, we can claim for the authors of the Bible only a partial inspiration. God raised them up, endowed them with special spiritual gifts. He enlarged without changing their natures, and so enlarged them as to enable them to comprehend as much of true, eter­nal Life, as suited his purpose, through them to infuse into humanity. This was merely so much added to their natural ability, from which in their own minds it was absolutely indistinguishable. Under its influence, and by its aid, they went forth and uttered what was in them ; but always according to the ordinary laws of humanity. They spoke from their own minds, ac­cording to their own peculiar habits and tastes, and mixed up with what was supernatural all they had that was natural. Of what they said part only transcended the ordinary powers of human beings, and the part so transcending was far from including all that transcends our natural powers. Of this which so transcends, and which their inspiration did not comprehend, it would be rash to say that we have, and ever shall have, no need. Consequently, it would be false, on the one hand, to say that the whole Bible is given by inspiration of God, and rash, on the other hand, to say that it contains all that is or can be essential to faith and practice. We repeat it, then, that we do not adopt the Protestant view of the Bible.
In the next place, our Protestant divines not only as­sert the sniliciency of the Scriptures, but also the suffi­ciency of the individual reason to interpret them. This last assertion is at the foundation of Protestantism, and passes in the Protestant world under the name of the right of private judgment,  a right which, if once ad­mitted, in its full extent, involves the destruction of all social, moral, and religious order,  a right directly hos­tile to the other Protestant principle, the sufficiency and authority of the Scriptures. Mr. Parker's book is a fine specimen of Protestantism refuting itself. Taking the right of private judgment as his point of departure, he demonstrates but too easily that the Scriptures are not necessary, and that the Protestant idolatry of the Bible has even less excuse than the Catholic idolatry of the Papacy. I have the right of private judgment, on­ly on condition that I have the ability to judge for my­self. But I have the ability to judge for myself, only on condition that I possess in myself a perfect measure of truth, or am already in possession of absolute knowl­edge of what is absolute religion. But if I have this, I have no need of the Scriptures. I know all 1 can know, or need to know, without them. The right of private judgment, then, necessarily negatives the au­thority and sufficiency of the Scriptures.

But if we deny the right of private judgment, we must also deny that of the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures. The Scriptures are not alone sufficient and authoritative, if we need for the understanding of them an authorized or an authoritative interpreter. They can be sufficient and authoritative, only on condition that each man is competent to interpret them for him­self. We cannot assert this competency without assert­ing the right of private judgment to its fullest extent. Consequently we cannot assert the sufficiency of the Scriptures, and declare them to be the only authorita­tive rule of faith and practice, without at the same time asserting, as the necessary condition of this, another principle which destroys it, by superseding the neces­sity of the Scriptures. Thus ^lr. Parker, starting with the Protestant principle of the right of private judg­ment, has overthrown the Protestant principle of the authority and sufficiency of the Scriptures. The truth is, Protestantism from the first has been divided against itself. Hence its want of organic power; hence the multiplicity of its sects, the anarchic life, which is but death, it has originated; hence its no distant final disappearance from Christendom, foreshadowed in the fact, that it has really made no progress on Catho­licism since the peace of Westphalia.

For ourselves, we are no Protestants. We believe the problem for our age is Catholicism without Papacy, on the one hand, and Liberty without Individualism, on the other. We can consent to install neither the Pope, 
nor the Bible, nor the individual Reason. Of the three we prefer, as the readers of all our writings for the last eight years must have inferred, the first. But Popery-died a natural death with Leo the Tenth ; we do not believe that it ever can revive ; and certainly we see no reason why it should. The time has gone by, when a poor old bishop, often but the tool of those who have placed him, through their intrigues and for their selfish purposes, in the papal chair, can command throughout the Christian world that respect for his decisions essen­tial to the existence of the Papacy. Of Individualism we have, for the last three hundred years, seen enough. The world has grown wearv of it. It can found noth-ing. In theology it gives us at best only the Natural-Religionism of the volume before us ; in morals it gives us nothing better than unmitigated selfishness ; in poli­tics it denies the state, and results legitimately in No-governmentism. If you concede me the right of pri­vate judgment, I demand of you by what right you presume to enact laws for governing me. or to require me to obey any law my judgment does not approve ? The Bible cannot in the Protestant sense be made the sove­reign, even admitting what we, to a certain extent, de­ny, its plenary and infallible inspiration, because it is nothing to us save as it is interpreted. " Understand-est thou what them readest ? How can 1 except some man should guide me ? " There must be, and in spite of us there will be, an authorized interpreter of it. This interpreter is the real authority ; and it is, in our judg­ment, neither the Pope nor the individual Reason ; but the Church. What we mean by the Church, we shall soon proceed to state. The Bible is to us the authentic account of God's dealings with his chosen people, the Jews, and of the sayings and doings of the men, whom he raised up to be the revelators of his will, and his agents in the advancement of mankind. But its real significance we obtain only from the commentaries of the Huly Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, the Comforter, which is the living Jesus, who was to be with us unto the end of the world, and of which the the Church, the one Catholic Church, is the real, literal, and living body. In other words, the interpreter of the Scriptures and their authority, without which they would be to us a dead letter, without life or meaning, is the Ideal of which the true Church of Christ is the living ex­pression. But more of this by and by. The right of the individual to judge is in his union with the Church, and not in his separation from it.

Taking this our view of inspiration, that it consists in the miraculous life of the inspired, which, though superhuman, is in no case, unless we except that of Jesus, a full, complete, eternal life, we easily see that the inspiration must needs be partial ; and if sufficient as far as it goes, does by no means exalt its recipients to the perception of all truth. Assuming the life, which is the inspiration, to be, though superhuman, still in­complete, admitting a life still higher, and that those who lived it spoke from its fulness according to the natural laws of their understanding and imagination, we can easily get over all the difficulties Mr. Parker enumerates in the details of the Bible, without finding aught to impeach its general supernatural inspiration. We would, had we time and room, consider these diffi­culties at length ; but we must pass them over. We can only suggest, that Mr. Parker possibly exaggerates them, and in fact feels them, because he takes too low a view of the Bible, and interprets it from the mere local coloring, one may say, the mere costume, not from its real spirit and intent. He seems to us to deny himself the spiritual discernment, which he actually possesses, and excercises in all other cases. He carps at the dialogue Moses is said to have held with the Lord ; but his objections do not go beyond the dra­matic form adopted by the writer. He does not ask himself, what is the real significance of the passage, nor whether he has aught to object to its real meaning. The case of Abraham offering up Isaac disturbs him. What, God command human sacrifices! By no means ; and the very passage tells us as much. " Lay not thy hand upon the lad, nor do anything unto him." But what means the passage ? What is the moral it teaches? Simply that where the motive is to obey God, and is so strong as to withhold nothing however dear, even though the act. consequent thereupon, should be in it­self as wrong as the offering up of his sou on the altar by a father, God accounts it righteousness. Abraham's act was in itself, viewed objectively, wrong : but the motive with which he acted, Ins willingness to obey God, not only excused the act, but made it impaled or accounted to him as an act of obedience, and an act even deserving reward. For God does not judge us according to tbe consequences of our acts, but according to what we are in ourselves;  the principles and mo­tives from which we act. Has Mr. Parker anything to object to this ? 
  
V. THE CHURCH.

The Fifth and last Book is entitled The Relation of the Religious Sentiment to the greatest of human institutions, or a Discourse of the Church. It consists of seven chapters, on the Claims, the Gradual Formation, and the Fundamental and Distinctive Idea of the Christian Church ; the Division of Christian Sects, the Catholic Party, the Protestant Party, and the Party neither Catholic nor Protestant, and the Final Answer to the Question.
Mr. Parker, we must be permitted in the outset to say, ap-penrs to us to have entirely misapprehended the nature, de­sign, and authority of the Christian Church. We can con­ceive nothing more superficial and unsatisfactory than Ins Statements, unless it be our own past Protestant declamations. With his view of Christianity it was impossible for him to have any just notions of an institution, really Christian in its origin and desiini. With him Christianity is worthy of our regard only so far as it coincides with absolute religion, and absolute religion we may all have, at all times and in all places, without recourse to any foreign aid. Christianity is not wisdom and strength imparted to humanity for its redemp­tion and sanetificution ; but a mere reiteration or republica-tion of the great truths, apparent to us all by the light of Nature. All its value consists in the fact, that we may see what is our duty more clearly through its medium, than we can without it. But it gives us no additional power to perform our duty. Jesus is not " made of God unto us wisdom, right­eousness, and sauctiiication, and redemption ;'; but is an elder brother, of very exemplary character, who in his life shows us the possibility of man. In what he lias clone, we may sec what man may do. This is unquestionably of some advan­tage. Since one of our number, poor and humble in life as any of us, lias done so much, we are encouraged to under­take the same; and what we attempt with confidence, we are the most likely to succeed in accomplishing. With this view of Jesus and Christianity, we can at best understand by the Christian Church nothing more than " an assembly of men and women grouped around" Jesus, as the niodei-nian, " to be instructed bv his words, and warmed by his example." p.

With this view, nothing can be more unfounded than the pretence of the Church, that out of its pale there is no salva­tion, or its claims to authority over the individual, the soul, reason, conscience, and religion. Mr. Parker denies that the Church is necessary at all to the salvation of the race, or of individuals, lie says Christ established no church, and gave no directions for the formation of a church; and a church in our sense of the term is not so much as named in the Gospels. If this be so, it must be altogether wrong to contend in the name of Jesus, that out of the Church there is and can be no salvation.

Equally wrong is it to contend in his name for the authority of the Church. " The Christian Church may be defined a body of men and women, assembling for the purposes of wor­ship and religious instruction. It has the powers delegated by the individuals composing it." p. "SSI. The Church then is a mere congress of independent sovereigns, and has in it­self no entity, is no body, and therefore can of itself have no authority. By what right then docs it claim dominion over the individual, to be the master of the soul, of reason, con­science, and religion? The individual could never delegate to another his own sovereignty to be turned against himself.

Passing onward, from the nature, design, and authority of the Church, to its fundamental and distinctive Idea, Mr. Par­ker finds just as little to commend. This Idea is, he says, that "God has made the highest revelation of himself through Jesus of Nazareth." But what if lie has? Christianity, so 
far as worth regarding, lie lias already said, coincides with absolute religion, and therefore consists not in what one be­lieves, but in what one is and does: that is, in obedience to the law of God written on man's nature. This law, since human nature is everywhere and always the same, is equally revealed to all men. We mav then know the law and obey it everywhere and at all time?, out of the Church as well as in it. What necessity then of the Church 1 If I know the law and keep it. what matters it, whether I Lnlieve that God has made the highest revelation of himself through Jesus of Nazareth, Moses, Socrates, Plato, Appollonius of Tyana, Mahomet, Joanna Southcote, Joe Smith, or through my own reason, conscience, sentiments, and instincts? The funda­mental and distinctive dogma of the Church, then, is utterly worthless, and so must needs be the institution it originates and founds.

But passing onwards still, leaving by the way the Catholic party and the Protestant, party, rejecting entirely the old Church, as needless, and even as mischievous, what are we to have in its place I What is Mr. Parker's "final answer to the question ?" Retells us that our old garments are un­seemly, do not become our complexions, fail to set off the beauty of our forms, restrain our free motions, cramp and dwarf our limbs, and render us deformed and hideous. He, in his love of truth, beauty, and freedom, strips them off, and drives us forth from our old dwellings into the streets, naked and shivering. Well, wherewithal does he propose to re-clothe us? \Vhat new garments has he prepared? or what directions has he to give for preparing new garments?

We would not do him injustice, but, so far as we can col­lect from his volume, garments he is resolved that henceforth we shall not wear. His great aim seems to be to restore us to the simplicity of nature, to live in the innocence of hu­manity, before men and women learned to blush that they were naked, or to seek with such fig-leaf aprons as churches and religious institutions to cover their nakedness. But we must tell him that this world is too bleak and wintry, and withal too full of sin and shame, for us to be able to go through it without some covering. Ask us not, we beseech thee, to he Adamites. Even the " Sartor '' will teach thce better, that institutions for our souls arc as necessary as clothes for our bodies. We cannot lodge naked on the bare ground ; and yet, what else dost thou propose ?
We ask this last question in no vain or captious spirit. We have followed with no indifferent feelings our brave young theological Hercules. Thou wouldst rid the earth, we have exclaimed in our admiration, of all monsters; ihou hast the courage to attack all hydras, chimeras, spectres, illusions; thou makest noble war against all imposture. Fight on, fight on, wield club, sword, spear, axe, or mattock, whatever comes to hand; lay about thee, spare not; but when thy work of destruction is done, the armies of imposture routed, the mons­ters all slain, what then wilt thou have to do? lie too have had our day of destruction; tee too, strong in our youth, and brave through our inexperience and the natural buoyancy of our spirits, went forth in this warfare against the chimeras, illusions, spectres, which make children of us all. We even carried our war into heaven and hell. We would have no God to tyrannize over us; no devils or damned spirits to jabber at us, to mock and torment us. We drove the harm­less ghost from the old churchyard and deserted tower, and the fairies from the green dell where they danced in the moonlight. We would be no longer imposed upon. We would worship no dumb idols, bow down to no gods made of wood or stone, or gods created by men's passions, their hopes or their fears. We would stand upon the firm earth, upon our own two feet, and say " Get behind me, Satan," to what­soever did not come to us in a shape real, solid, rational. All went on gloriously for a while, and answered admirably, till we felt that our work was completed, and we had rid our­selves of all illusions, of all impositions; but then  aye, then ! Then, a sickness came over the soul, and we seemed to stand on a mere point, solitary and alone, surrounded by a deep and yawning gulf, which nothing,filled or could fill. It would have been a relief to have been able to believe it filled with ghosts, goblins, and devils; for these would have been somewhat, and anything is always better than nothing.

A time comes, when we can no longer be satisfied with pulling down old temples and clearing away rubbish ; a time comes to all of us, who have human hearts, human affections, and human interests, when we would erect us a dwelling, settle down, and feel that we have a home, and are at home. We care not who knows it, nor who laughs at us ; but we own that we, for ourselves, have reached this stage in life's journey. Our thoughts and our feelings go beyond the work of demolition, beyond the smoke and dust raised by the fall and crash of old institutions, to something which must take their place. We must have clothing and a shelter. We must have something positive, something that will help us. by the gaining of which we may be saved from our sins, have our hearts purified, and be enabled to commune with our God. We nuisi have something we can grasp, hold on to, and that will not break the moment we need its support, and leave us to fall helpless, hopeless, headlong over the precipice. In deep, solemn earnest have we ourselves sought for this sup­port ; in deep, solemn earnest have we listened to our young prophet, to catch his final answer to the awful question, which not lie only, hut all humanity raises.

Alas, the oracle recoils from its own response. Mr. Parker himself evidently feels the insufficiency of what he has to offer. His conclusion is almost tragic. " Jesus fell back on God; on absolute religion, absolute morality; the truth its own authority ; his works his witness. The early Christians fell back on the authority of Jesus; their succes­sors on the Bible, the work of the apostles and prophets ; the next generation on the Church, the work of the apostles and fathers. Tin: world kutrkads this c;uot;nd. Protestant­ism delivers us from the tyranny of the Church, and carries us back to the Bible. Biblical criticism frees us from the thraldom of Scripture, and brings us to the authority of Je­sus. Philosophical spiritualism liberates us from all personal and finite authority, and restores us to God, the primeval fountain, whence the Church, the Scriptures, and Jesus draw all the water of life wherewith they have tilled their urns." p. 483. But when we have retraced this ground, and left be­hind us the Church, the Bible, and Jesus, what shall we have then'? "Thence, and thence only, shall mankind obtain abso­lute religion and spiritual well-being." In what shall this spiritual well-being consist 1 O tell us that. In the knowl­edge of the fact, that " the soul is greater than the CHURCH."

No, not so; we shall then be restored to God, and derive our spiritual well-being from him. Illusion, illusion all ! All Mr. Parker means, by the restoration of the soul to God, is its restoration to itself, or rather the leaving of it to itself alone, to its own resources, with nothing to aid it upward in its way to heaven. And his absolute religion is absolute sole­ly because it is indefinite, means nothing in particular, in fact nothing at all. But take a more favorable view. Does not Mr. Parker know that the Church, the Bible, and Jesus have been sought as constituting a medium, through which we may rise to God? Admit that they are not true media, nay, reject them as altogether inadequate and false; does it follow that the soul will then stand in immediate relation with God ? Does nothing now separate us from God, but the Church, the Bible, and Jesus? What is it to stand in imme­diate relation with God, to be at-onc with God? Is it not to bear his moral likeness, that is, to be good and to do good? Can we be good and do good, without a medium ? What me­dium does Mr. Parker provide us? His absolute religion at best, even according to the most favorable account which he himself gives of it, merely says to us, "Be good, do right, obey God." With all my heart; but what is good 1 what is right? what is it to obey God ? And how am I, weak and helpless as my sins have made me, and are .still making me, to obtain the strength, the moral force to obey God, and to do right? I am sick, but he brings me no physician ; I am blind, and he says, see, and thy blindness will be removed ; I am dumb, and he says, speak, and thy dumbness will cease to afflict tliee ; I am lame, and he says, walk, and thy lame­ness will be cured; I am dead in trespasses and sins, and he says, be good and do good, and thou wilt have moral life. Thy mockery is too bitter. How without moral life am I to be good and to do good ?

We have looked over Mr. Parker's whole volume to find the Saviour;- we do not find him; we find nothing to meet the wants of the sinner. In speaking of Jesus, he says, "He lived for himself; he died for himself; worked out Ms own salvation, and we must do the same.'' p. 4^7. Jesus then did not come into the world, preach, suffer, and die, that the world through him might be saved ! In all that he did, he had sole reference to himself, and was concerned merely with saving his own soul! And we must do the same. Where then is the Lord that bought us? Where is our Saviour? We liavc no Saviour. We must save ourselves. Here is the conclusion of the whole matte;-, the final answer to the ques­tion. Man must look no longer to Churches, Bibles, nor Messiahs for salvation ; but to his own stout heart, and strong right arm. Alas, man's very diiliculty is the want of this stout heart, and this strong right arm. It is he himself that is lost, and to this very lost self you send him for salvation !

But enough. We have already shown the utter insufficiency of Mr. Parker's Christianity, to meet the wants of the sinner. We, as we have said, differ radically from him in our views of what Christianity is. lie does not preach the same Gospel that we do. Consequently our views of the Church are essentially different from his. We hold the Church absolutely essential to the salvation of the race and of individuals, and we contend that it has supra/ic authority in all that pertains to human life. These are, no doubt, strong positions, but we believe ourselves able to maintain them. In order, however, to do it, wo must begin by stating as briefly as we can what we ourselves understand, not by a Christian Church, but the Christian Church.
1. What is the Christian Church? In one word, the Chris­tian Church is not an assembly of men and women grouped around Jesus as great Model-man, but the real living body oi our Lord. To make this plain, we refer to the doctrine of Life, already alluded to more than once in this discussion, brought out in the article on Leroux's VHumanite in the last number of this Journal, and in our recent Letter to Dr. Channing on the Mediatorial Life of Jesus. Jesus, according to the New Testament, does not save the world, as great Model-man, as great Prophet and Teacher, nor as grand Ex­piatory Sacrifice, though he was all these; but by communi­cating, through fellowship, communion, his divine life to humanity. How he could do this is already explained. All dependent life is at once subjective and objective ; that is, the product of the conjoint and simultaneous action of both subject and object. The name for this conjoint action is co.M.Mrxrox. Jesus, by virtue of the miraculous communion in him of Humanity with Divinity, lived a life at once human and divine. This human-divine Life is the Living Jesus, the Saviour, and saves us by becoming our life, our righteous­ness. Hence, we are said to be saved by Christ's righteous­ness, not by our own.

But the righteousness of Christ does not save us by being imputed to us, being accounted to us for our righteousness, as theologians have falsely contended, but by becoming truly, literally, really, not symbolically, our righteousness, so that we actually have that mind in us, which was in Christ Jesus. This is what is called, having the blood of the atonement personally applied. The righteousness of Christ is true right­eousness. By possessing it,  not through our own works, but by the gift of God,  we of course possess true righteousnesss, and are blameless before God. Theologians, having learned that we are saved by Christ's righteousness, and not per­ceiving how it could become literally ours, have supposed it was ours only by way of imputation, God being pleased to adjudge it ours, for and in consideration of the great merits of his Son. Tliev may now see how it can be literally our righteousness, and abandon their old hypothesis of impu­tation, with which nobody was ever yet satisfied, and oppo­sition to which has induced some mischievous errors.

The righteousness of Christ, which saves, is his Life, and this life is communicated to others by communion. Jesus was in the bosom of the Father, lived, in a miraculous com­munion with God, a life which was by its objectivity the life of God, and by its subjectivity the life of man ; which yet was a single life, and as we have said, by virtue of the sub­jectivity of Jesus, a human life. All divine as it was, then, it could pass naturally into the life of those with whom he communed, or who communed with him. lie was the direct object of communion to the disciples, and through them the indirect object of all who communed with them. Between him and the disciples, and those who had fellowship with the disciples, there must have been then a mutual solidarity, a one life flowing1 through them all.
Now the true Christian Church is composed of all those men and women, who are thus united into one body by the unity of the Life, termed by St. Paul "the uuily of the Spirit.1' At first it consisted only of those who had personally com­muned with Jesus, that is, of his immediate disciples ; and then of those who communed, or lived by communing with these ; and now of all those between whom and Jesus, through the transmission of life from man to man and gene­ration to generation, the Communion has been instituted and preserved, constituting them all one with each other, and one with Jesus, agreeably to his prayer: "Neither pray I for these (the disciples) alone; but for them also which shall believe on me through their word ; that they all may be one ; as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in us ; that the world may believe that thou hast sent me." * And also according to the doctrine of Paul ; " For as we have many members in one body ; so we being many are one body in Christ, and members one, of another•." t " For as the body is one and hath many members, and all the members of that one body, beinsi many, are one body; so also is Christ. For by one Spirit are we all baptized into one body, whether we be Jews or Gentiles, whether we be bond or free." t

No life ever dies. Virtue went out of Jesus through the communion of his disciples with him, never to be recalled. It
* John xvii. 21,22. t Romans xii. 4, 5. t 1 Cor. xii. 12, 13. 

 is the Life that saves, the identical Life to which we give the name Jesus. This, when the man Jesus was on the earth, before " lie went away," was incarnated in an individual body. "The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us." But it, when the disciples saw their Master go up from them, did not ascend, but remained on the earth, embodied in these very disciples of Jesus, whom he treated not as servants, but as friends, on whom lie had breathed, saying, " Receive my spirit." The Life, thus remaining when the personal Jesus departed to his Father, and as Cod with us, is the Holy Ghost, the Paraclete, Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, that was to lead us into all truth, and which is one with the Son, and one with the Father, but, as the Church has always taught, proceeding forth from the Father and the Son. This is what is termed in Theology " the Procession of the Holy Ghost." The Father through the Miraculous Conception takes Humanity into intimate union with himself, and begets the Son, through whom the Holy Ghost is shed abroad in the hearts of all them that believe, or through the Communion are united into one body.

The Holy Ghost, the Comforter, the Spirit of Truth, the Life, the indwelling and abiding Jesus, is one and the same. This was to be the life of every true believer. Hence Jesus says to his disciples, when commissioning them as apostles, "Go ye therefore and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost; teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I have com­manded you : and lo, lam ¦icith-you unto the end of the world." In this way, Christ Jesus really and literall} lives in the life of all true Christians, as much as in the fleshly tabernacle in which he dwelt as Son of Mary, in the days of Peter, James, and John.

The Christian Church is composed of all those who, in any age or nation, by whatsoever name they may be called, live this life; in whom Christ " dwelleth," or is " formed the hope of glory," or who have " that mind in them which was also in Christ Jesus;" to whom Christ is "the power of God, and the wisdom of God ; " to whom he is "made of God, wisdom, righteousness, sanctification, and redemption." In this view of the case, the Church cannot be a mere assembly or aggregation of individuals ; for there is but one Lord, one Spirit that animates them all, and by the unity of the life ot* Jesus they are united, compacted, solidified into one firm and indissoluble body, according to the assertions of Paul, already quoted. It is a one body composed of many members, but all these are members otic of another, and all members of Christ, and united to him as their one living head, from whom is derived all the life of the members. But, if there be only the one life, and all they who live it compose the Church or body of our Lord, it follows that there can be but one Church; and as this one Church must include all who are members of Christ's body, and as men and women be­come members everywhere by virtue of communion with the one and the same life, the Church must not only be one, but Catholic. The modern notion, that there may be churches many and diverse, in any deep, significant sense of the term, is unwarranted ; because it implies that the body of Christ may be cut up, or broken into fragments, and still the warm life-blood circulate uninterrupted throughout the parts. The Church, moreover, is not only one, and catholic, that is, we must not only assert the unity and universality of the Church, as the Roman Catholic Church has always done, but we must also assert its inspiration, and therefore, what has always been called, the supremacy of the Church. The Church is constituted by the indwelling of Christ the Lord, by living not a life like that of Jesus, but the identical life which was made flesh and dwelt among us. This Life is the Spirit of Truth, and just in proportion as it is lived, does it lead into all truth. Inspiration is, we have shown, always through the medium of a life. The Divine Life is in the Church. It is, therefore, inspired through the medium of this Life. Hence, through the Church we have a continuous inspiration, not original and immediate, but derivative and mediate, yet full and authoritative. This is the ground of the authority of the Church, and of the ability, and the right consequent upon its ability, to be the interpreter of the Scriptures, and to exercise authority over the soul, reason, conscience, religion, whatever pertains to human development and growth,

2. The relation of the Church to the salvation of the race, and of individuals, must now be obvious. We have already identified Christ and Christianity. There is no separation possible or conceivable even between Christ and Christianity. Christ saves by giving himself, by becoming "the Lord our righteousness." But Christ without the Church would be to us no Christ at all. We cannot commune, we can have no intercourse, with pure spirit. It escapes us on all sides, forever eluding our mental grasp. We know it, commune with it, only as embodied, incarnated. God outside of the universe is to us an abstraction, a mere nullity ; he is a reality to us only as realized, embodied in iiis works. Abstract cre­ation, abstract the works of God, which are the media through which lie reveals himself, and we could have no conception of him. So, when the personal Jesus ascended into heaven, lie would have been no more to us, than if he had never been, had he not embodied himself in' tlie Church. All life is de­rived from him through communion. But where do we meet him? Where do we commune with him ? We commune with God in his works, especially in man, the direct object of man, and can commune with him nowhere else. Where do we commune with Jesus, but in his works, in the Church, which is his'creation, his body? We can approach him only where he is, and where he is only through a medium. He is in the Church, and to us nowhere else ; and the Churcn, as his body, becomes the medium through which we have access to him, through whom we have access to the Father.

In other words, and perhaps plainer; the Life is the Sav­iour, and the Life is obtained only by personal communion with those who live it. These are the Church. It follows then that salvation is possible only on condition of commun­ing with the Church. The life that saves, and the only life that saves, is in the Church; and, therefore, the Church as­sumes nothing which it has not a right to assume, when it says that out of the pale of the Church there is no salvation. " I am," says Jesus, " the true vine. Abide in me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, except it abide in the vine, no more can ye, except ye abide in me. I am the vine, and ye are the branches. He that abideth in me, and I in him, the same bringeth forth much fruit; for without me ye can do nothing." Now Christ is in these, who through communion have received him, in whom he lives, is embodied. These, we say again, are the Church. We can receive him, then, only by communion with the Church, and can abide in him only by abiding in the Church. Oat of the Church we are as the branches severed from the vine, in which is the life of the branches. Out of the Church, then, no salvation.

The same truth is taught by the parable which likens the kingdom of heaven to Jeaven, which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal till the whole was leavened. On what condition could the whole be leavened? Simply on condition that it remained in one mass. Had the woman divided it into two parts, put her leaven in one part, and placed it out of communication with the other, could the whole have been leavened ? It is plain then if, as we have proved, that we are saved by living the life of Christ, and if we can live that life only by communion, that oat of the Church there is no salvation, for out of the Church no access to the Life that saves. In order to partake of the Life, we must be joined as members to Christ's body.
Here is the profound significance of the Communion, of Excommunication, and of Sects and Schisms. The one slcady aim of the Church, as we have said, has been to bring all men to the Communion ; its greatest dread has always been of Sects and Schisms, and its severest penalty upon disorderly members, Excommunication. Mow profoundly true ! Com­munion is the one thing desirable; for it is the medium of life; sects and schisms are fatal to the life, for they mutilate, cut up, or break into fragments the body of our Lord, and prevent the free circulation of the divine life through all its parts; and excommunication is a terrible penalty, for it cuts off the disorderly member from the Communion, and therefore from all chance of salvation. How true, then, is it, that Jesus gave unto the Church, and to Peter, as the representa­tive of the Church, the keys of the kingdom of heaven ; and that whatsoever it shall bind on earth, shall be bound in heaven, and whatsoever it shall loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven ! Call not this the false assumption of the Popish Church ; it is literally true, and grows out of the very nature and design of the Christian Church. They, who are received into communion with those in whom Christ dwells, do receive of Christ, and by virtue of the Christ received their sins are remitted ; and they, whom the Church cuts oil' from its communion, being debarred from all access to the life, must of necessity remain in the " bonds of iniquity and the gnll of bitterness."

Is not the doctrine we here teach the true doctrine'.' Do we assert, in fact, aught which is not incorporated into the authentic creed of our own age ? What is it that hinders the progress of Christian principles'? Why does darkness still brood over so many lands, and the voice of man's injus­tice to man still ring in our ears and pierce our hearts? Is it not all owing to the want of communion 1 The human family have been broken up into fragments ; and the free, mu­tual intercourse of its members with those who embody the Saviour has been hindered, interrupted by our divisions into 
hostile nations; by family pvidc, fostered by false political in­stitutions, and the unequal, and therefore unjust, repartition of the fruits of industrv. Reorganize the state, family, and property, so as to favor the universal communion of man with man, which is only what the age is strncfglititr for under the name of liberty, national, political, civil, social, and the life will have free course and be glorified in the redemption and sanctitication of all men. Just in proportion as we extend the Communion, do we become more truly Christian. Com­merce and the missionary, literature and the arts, even war and conquest, are in the providence of God made media for extending the intercourse of man with man, and of all quar­ters of the globe with Christendom. Trade and politics, per­haps aided somewhat by philanthropy, have brought the whole world, to a partial extent, under the same system. The pro­gress of the liussians and English in Asia, of the French in Africa, and the growth of America, compel Europe in set­tling her own domestic concerns to consult all quarters of the globe. Bv and by the whole world will be brought under the influence of Christian civilization ; and in each particular nation, national caste, family caste, property caste, the three forms in which Satan wars against the Coinmuu'on, will be abolished ; and then will Christ no longer have any let or hindrance. Then will all things be subject to him, that God may be all and in all.

We hardly need add that by the Communion we do noL mean the Eucharist, but that which the Eucharist symbolizes ; not the symbolical communion, but the real communion; not feeding on God, eating the flesh and drinking the blood of Jesus, figuratively, as Protestants pretend, and with which they seem satisfied, but literally, really, actually, according to the very words of Jesus, " Except ye eat my flesh, and drink my blood, ye have no life in you." The real work of bring­ing men to the Communion is not that of bringing them to celebrate the feast of the Eucharist, but that of so organizing the state, family, and property, that all men may truly com­mune one with another, and so all men come to love one another, as Jesus hath loved us, and given his life for us.

3. The authority of the Church will not detain us long. We have already stated its ground. The true Church, living the life of Jesus, as the body of our Lord, whose indwelling life is the Holy Ghost, the Spirit of Truth, is an inspired body. Its life is Christianity, which we have shown is the 
form in which the Ideal is revealed to us, and therefore is the authority to which we must submit; because the Ideal, in that it is the Ideal, is necessarily sovereign.

All limited beings are imperfect; all imperfection tends to generate disorder; all disorder is fatal to freedom, and there­fore to growth ; therefore to the life of the being con­cerned. The highest freedom, and therefore the highest good of any or all beings, is expressed in that one word, ouHiiit. Where there is disorder there is confusion, clashing, friction, no freedom ; for the action of one is perpetually impeding the action of another. Hence no free and harmo­nious development and growth. Hence the necessity of or­der, which allows all to move on, each in its appointed sphere, without clashing with, or infringing upon, the action of another.

To maintain this order, government is necessary, and must needs be that which restrains the tendency we spoke of, and keeps each in its proper sphere. But by the very fact, that the tendency which renders government necessary, grows out of the nature of the beings it concerns, it follows that these beings cannot furnish the government; and therefore govern­ment must come from a source above them. For if it came from them, it would have the same imperfection, and the same tendency that they have, and therefore would need to be gov­erned as much as they. Here is the absurdity of all Individ­ualism, and of such theories as " self-government," and " government by consent of the governed," whereby gov­ernment must very humbly crave o\ the murderer permission to choke him to death ! Alan can doubtless exercise a con­trol over himself, but only indirectly, through cultivation ; for he is never the direct object of his own activity, as he would be in case he could directlv govern himself. So a people may doubtless govern itself without kings and nobles; but only indirectly through constitutions, state organization, by which a power (hat governs is created distinct from the people governed. For that which governs must of necessity be other than that which is governed. If it governs, it must also be supreme, and must restrain; on any other condition it is not government.

Now, the state must use force in case its decrees arc re­sisted. But the employment of force to compel obedience, except hi a very few cases, cannot be permitted, without pav­ing the way for gross oppression. It must be restrained to the material interests of society and individuals. It must not 
extend to spiritual matters, to men's feelings, sentiments, thoughts, opinions, beliefs. Yet these beliefs, opinions, thoughts, sentiments, feelings, are really the great matters. These constitute the man, and the outward actions, which you submit to the control of the State, are only the outward expres­sion of these. To allow the utmost freedom to these, while you restrain the others, were to act, if we may borrow a sim­ile from Milton, as absurdly as he who thought to keep out the crows by shutting his park gates.
Man needs instruction. But all instruction is, from the nature of the case, authoritative. All instruction should also be in relation to the end for which man was made, and should answer the question, "What is the chief end of man?" What is the destiny of man? But if there be nowhere a power that has authority to teach, and that lias a full right to demand and to compel, by all moral and spiritual discipline, submission to its teachings, how shall we have any instruc­tions at all? How shall we be able to preserve that order in the spiritual world, without which order in the material world is impossible.

Moreover, we deny that a man lias the right to think and believe as he pleases. We deny any man's right to think or to propagate falsehood. He who, having aimed to propa­gate the truth, and done all in his circumstances he could do to ascertain the truth, will doubtless be pardoned for errors of doctrine, as Abraham was for attempting to offer up his son Isaac; for God is just, and never exacts impossibilities, unless they are voluntarily incurred. Furthermore, we .de­ny the ability of the individual, regarded as a mere isolated individual, to decidr lor himself on the great and awful ques­tion, What is the i-:.\n to which man must direct all his efforts? lie will always decide this question according to his own life, be that life what it will ; and therefore if his life be not in the right, be not the true Christian life, his decision will not be the just one.

We have proved over and over again, that we cannot come to the knowledge of the truth but through supernatural In­spiration. This Inspiration, which is through the life of Jesus, we have also proved is in the Church, and it is only by union with the Church that we receive it. He who is sepa­rated from the Church, we are speaking now of the true Catholic Church, is destitute of this inspiration, and there­fore incapable of answering the question. We then become able, as individuals, to know the truth only by becoming members of Christ's body.

Now, if we as individuals become able to judge by be­coming members of Christ's body, how much more shall the whole body itself be able to judge? This life in each indi­vidual is mixed up with that which is local, personal, pecul­iar, but when it is taken as the life of the whole body, it is taken in its unity and catholicity, and therefore in the purest state in which mortals can obtain it. Hence the decision of the whole Church is always superior to that of the individu­al, and also the highest authority we have, or can have, in any case whatever.

We then hold that tho one Catholic Church, as the body of our Lord, is the authoritative body, the governing body, hav­ing, by virtue of the indwelling Christ, ihe right to decide au­thoritatively in all matters touching human life, whatever. Inasmuch as we admit the authority of Christianity, so do we admit the authority of the Church, which is the living ex~ pression of Christianity. We say the Church has the right, the authority to teach, and to say authoritatively what is the end to which we should direct, socially and individually, all our labors, and to make our Christian character and fellow­ship depend on our following its prescriptions.

But do you not sacrifice in this the liberty of the individu­al ? What do we mean by the liberty of the individual ? The freedom to think and do as he pleases? That were license, not liberty. That lie is not accountable for his belief, what­ever it is, and that there is no standard to which he is intel­lectually bound to conform ? We should once have answered this question in the affirmative, because we formerly, in our metaphysics, lost sight of the living synthesis of the human soul, and supposed that man was passive in all matters of faith. But we have learned that human nature is one nature, and that man is active in all his phenomena, and therefore his opinions are deeds for which he is as accountable, as for any other deeds. What then do we mean by individual freedom'? That the individual shall be compelled neither morally nor physically to submit to an authority not approved by his own conscience? But conscience is uniform only in telling men to do right; as to the practical question, What is right? it varies with each individual. Adopt it as your rule, and you have all the disorder we have complained of; you run into absolute individualism, which is incompatible with all social order, and therefore with all good, whether social or individual. What then ? We know individual freedom in no sense, in which it must not be subjected to the action of authority. The only definition of it we can give is, Freedom to do what' ever the sovereign authority eommnnth or permits. In the present case individual freedom is simply the right and the liberty to do whatever is authorized or permitted by Christ­ianity, and practically, by the Church. We do not under­stand, in the spiritual region where we now are, anything of this inherent right to freedom about which men talk. We may say as the Jews did, that " we be Abraham's seed, and were never in bondage to any man;" but still we are free only as the Son makes us free, free in the freedom of the Spirit, of Christ, through the Truth. We know no step between this and abso­lute individualism.

But if the individual is subjected to the authority of the Church, and has no right to depart from its decisions, he has, from the nature of the case, the right to sit in judgment on the question, What is the real decision of the Church? and also on this other question, not less important, What is the meaning of Scripture according to this decision ?

We may also say, for the quieting of those who have not learned that liberty can be enjoyed, only as the result of au­thority which ordains and secures it, that there is never tyran­ny in enforcing a man to do that which he feels is command­ed by the highest authority. The highest authority, the sovereign, we have proved is Christianity, the Ideal, therefore, the Supreme Law of Christendom. The true Catholic Church can and will enjoin only its own Ideal. As this is Christian­ity, it follows that it neither can nor will enjoin only that which every man in Christendom acknowledges to be the law to which lie is accountable. Tyranny on the part of the Church is out of the question. We might as well say that there is tyranny in demanding that a man submit only to the right. There is then no danger to be apprehended to liberty, by any who love truth and progress, though there may be danger to be apprehended by those who love license and an­archy, and who would rather " reign in hell than serve in heaven."

Moreover, we do not assume that the individual may never dissent from the Church. All truth is sacred and authorita­tive, lie who has it has a right to entertain and promulgate it, whether it agree with the Church or not. Cut whoso puts forth doctrines in opposition to, or different from those of the Church, does it at his own peril, and can rind his warrant for so doir.a- only in the truth of his utterances. If he is willing to run the hazard, he will take the responsibility, and speak. If it turn out to be a true word, he will be justified ; it' false, he will be under condemnation. The prophet is superior to the priest, but then he must be a prophet,  show that he speaks by divine commission, by revealing a life above the life of the Church, the which in Christendom, to say the least, can rarely happen.
The authentic creed of the Church of Christ is that which every man is bound, in foro coiisc.icnlid:, to adopt and to fol­low, and the Church can never be oppressive in commanding obedience to that creed. This authentic creed is not in the Thirty-Nine Articles, nor in the Westminster Confession of Faith, nor in the formularies of any of the so-named Churches, whether Grecian, Roman, Anglican, or Protestant. And yet it is drawn up, and easily ascertainable. Jt is written on the very heart of this century, and inscribed on the very front of its literature and science. We read it in every social move­ment of the age, from the terrible French Revolution down to the Chartist outbreak for bread; and hear it in the clear and piercing tones of every young prophet of God. who rises up and demands a fuller manifestation of divine life, a more general effusion of the Holy Ghost, for the glory of God, and the progress of Humanity. We almost dare ourselves ven­ture to give its formula. We gave it six years ago, in two words, Union and Progress, tne mutual solidarity and con­tinuous progress of the race. We give it now in the words of another, :' Christian character consists in unremitting ef­forts to effect the continued amelioration, in the speediest manner possible, of the moral, intellectual, and physical con­dition of mankind, especially of the poorest and most numer­ous class; " or in other words still, Seek to be saved from SIN, AND TO SECURE THE BLISS OF JIF.AVEN HEREAFTER, liY DOING THY DKST TO CUE ATE A 1IHAVEX FOR ALL MANKIND
on earth. This, let men say what they will, is in substance the genuine, the authentic creed of the Church of Christ in the nineteenth century, the only creed that men feel them­selves bound to obey, that they have no right to call in ques­tion; and it is the only creed that has not ceased to make proselytes. The so-called Churches of Christ are the real, living body of our Lord, so i'ar forth as they adopt this creed, enjoin it, and command obedience to it.

The Church of Christ has, by virtue of its being the Church of the Ideal, the right, and as an outward, visible organiza­tion, ought to have the right, to dictate the end here implied, and to declare the means by which we must attempt to realize it ; and it has, and of right ought to have, the power to discipline all those who, whether in ;i private or public capa­city, neglect it, fail to adopt measures which tend to promote it, or pretending to favor it, adopt such measures as they must needs see are hostile to it. There is for us no liberty, and no real advance, but on condition of our hr.ving such an authority. We need it. We need an authority back of us, that shall make the hard, stony-hearted man of the world tremble before his ill-gotten wealth, and feel that he must disgorge his hoards, and give himself and all he ims up to the service of God and man, or have his part with devils and the damned :  an authority which shall arrest the voluptuary, rolling sin as a sweet morsel under his tongue, and make him feel that he can enter into heaven only through the gates of Chastity and Self-denial ;  a power that shall overawe your selfish demagogue, your ambitious politician, seeking power but for his own aggrandizement, and before which lie shall not dare propose other than just ends, or adopt other than just measures. The Church should subject to its severest discipline, or mark with the deepest brand of its utter con­demnation, the false-hearted senator, or the base magistrate, who, under pretence of raising the wages of labor and bene­fiting the workingman, will recommend or support measures, which tax the poor for the rich, and which do necessarily make the poor poorer mid the rich richer. No man should be suffered to wear the Christian character in the commu­nity, who does not use whatever power lie may have been en­trusted with, for the greatest good of the poorest and most numerous class of his brethren. There is more than one prominent politician and leader of the business world in this Commonwealth, its well as elsewhere, steeped in corruption, whose constant study is to make the government a mere in­strument, by which to plunder the many for the benefit of the few, who nevertheless is fawned upon by a professedly Chris­tian community, courted, praised even by men who call them­selves ministers of Jesus ; ZVo pulpit dares rebuke them ; none of our Churches dare subject them to their discipline, to exclude them from the communion, cut them off as gan­grenous limbs from the body of our Lord. But there should be a Church clothed with a power over these sons of Satan, before which they should feel weak and helpless, and which, if need were, could grind its foot into their rebellious necks, as the Pope did his into the neck of Frederic Barbarossa. When the outward, visible organization comes to be the real expression of the true Catholic Church, we shall have a 
Church that can and will exercise this power of disciplining its disorderly members,  its members who forget the rights and interests of humanity,  to the fullest extent, and with the most salutary effect.

Thus much we have ventured, in opposition to the Protest­antism of the country, and the Individualism which we have inherited from our fathers, to say in favor of the unity, cath­olicity, necessity, and authority of the Church. We have not for twenty years labored, suffered, borne reproach and abuse from all quarters, in behalf of liberty, to desert her sa­cred standard now, and go over to the camp of our enemies. We fight under our old banner, all torn by its efforts to stream against the wind, as it may be. We belong to the grand army of Progress, of Universal Freedom to Universal Man, ready to do battle in words, and if necessary, in deeds, at any moment, and against every enemy : but we have learned what we did not always know or consider, that JAbcrtif must be, organized or it is license, and ordained by authority, or it has no basis, no safeguard, no guaranty. In the name, the sacred, the soul-stirring name of Liberty, in which name we feel we have some right to speak, we demand the rehabilitation of the Church. Humanity needs, and has a sacred right to an authoritative Church, that shall inspire a love of mankind, and command all men to labor for the upbuilding and exten­sion of God's kingdom on the earth, - a one Catholic Church, clothed with supreme authority over all matters pertaining to human life, whether; spiritual or material. This Church, in some sort, already exists in Christendom. The Roman Church, to a great extent, was it down to Leo the Tenth. Since then it has been the Church in the wilderness. None of the organisms now extant, though they contain it, as the grub contains the psyche, are it, and they must be all trans­formed before they can be the real body of our Lord.

This, we say in conclusion, is the day of the Second Ad­vent. All signs indicate it, all voices proclaim it. Now the Son of Alan returns, conies a second time; but not in a body as when born of the Virgin Mary. He comes now in the clouds of heaven, as the lightning flashing upon the world, and rendering its darkness visible. He comes a pure disembodied spirit, seeking a new body, for the old is dead and buried in the tomb of the past, The Church then is now not formed, but in a state of Formation; and our ministry, instead of being that of pastors and teachers, is that of Apos­tles and Martyrs. The House of the Lord, the Church,  from Ki-niug and oizuq,is not yet rebuilt, and there is no publicly recognised altar at which we can minister. We are then thrown back on the Apostleship. As Apostles of the Word, we must go forth, in meekness, in love, but bold in the Spirit, justified in the Faith, and mighty through Christ working within, to found the church of the second advent. We must go forth, and preach anew Christ crucified, to the Jews, the members and supporters of old organisms, a stum­bling block, and to the Greeks,  the wise men of this world, supporters of naturalism, relying on their own resources, foolishness ; but to them that are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God, and the wisdom of God; we must speak out from the fulness of the Spirit, under a sense of the awful responsibility we assume, and of our own insufficiency, in sorrow and heaviness of heart, yet not as cast down nor without hope ; and the immortal atoms of a new moral world will soon begin to gravitate around us, and then will be created the new heavens and the new earth wherein dwell-eth righteousness. The new will gradually absorb or trans­form the old, and all things will be made new.

We have ventured to pronounce the words, church op the second advent ; wehave used these words not in the low material sense in which they are used by the Millerites and Latter-day Saints, but in a high, deep, significant, spirit­ual sense, as indicating a new Epoch in the reign of Christ spiritually in humanity, and a new social organism for the re­demption and progress of the race. Young men, men of the Future, behold then your work. This new Church will be founded ; the new House, the second Temple, far surpassing the glory of the first, must be erecte'1, and it is yours to take part in its erection. Thank God, that you are freed from the terrible work which devolved on your fathers, and elder brothers, that of demolishing old institutions, and of living only amid the rubbish. It is yours to bo the workmen in building the new Temple, a work in which you will be sec­onded by the prayers of all good men, by all that is true, beautiful, good, strong, immutable, and immortal on earth or in heaven. The Church universal and eternal will be erect­ed. "The corner stone is laid; the materials are prepared. Let then the workmen come forth with joy, and bid the Temple rise. Let. them embody the true Idea of the God-Man, and Christ will then have come a second time ; he will have come in power and great glory, and he will reign, and the whole earth will be clad."* 
  
 * Now Views of Christianity, Society, and the Church. Boston: 1836. pp. 66. 
  
But loathe as we are to quit this subject, we must draw this article to a close. We have not said all that we wished, nor have we in all cases said what we have, as we would. We have written the larger part of this article under great physical debility, when we were hardly able to sit at our desk. We . have been obliged to prepare it in great haste, or not at all, for the time when we must publish it, was not at our control. In the hurry of composition, it cnn hardly be possible that errors of detail and on minor points have not escaped us. For these we ask indulgence. For all (hat concerns the general argument, and the leading doctrines set forth, we ask only the most rigid criticism. Taken as a whole we regard it as the most important and the most complete of our theolog­ical publications. If read in connexion with the Essay on the Church of the Future, the Review of Charles Elwood, the paper on Leroux's 1'IIumanite, the Letter to Dr. Channing, and the article in the Democratic Review on Schmucker's Psychology, which will appear at. the same time with this, it will give those, who wish to know our religious views, all the information they can really need, and will take away all ex­cuse for misapprehending or misrepresenting us hereafter.
As it concerns the author of the work before us, all we have to say is, that we have criticised him freely, perhaps in some instances severely, yet, we trust, not in malice or wrath. We have meant to treat him throughout with the respect due not jnly from one man or one minister, but from one friend to another. We have had the pleasure of reckoning Mr. Parker among our most warmly cherished friends, almost from his entry into the ministry; and not willingly could we brinf ourselves to feel that we are not so to consider him here-after. We honor, love, and esteem, the man and whenever he shall write a work out from his own life and experience, we know we shall like it. This work is not a genuine produc­tion. It has sprung not from his own life and experience, but from his reading, and is that portion of his various read­ing which his own mind would not digest and assimilate. Deeper in the man is the true religious soul, the high and holy aspiration after truth and excellence. He belongs, not­withstanding the crude speculations of this book, to the great Christian family ; and as a brother in Christ we have hereto­fore considered him, and as such we shall continue to con­sider him, till we find that his life exhibits no evidence of communion with Jesus.
Editor.