And I cursed the senseless drizzle, Others judged differently: they saw in every case of dissent, and in every new dissentient, the harbinger of the New Jerusalem. "The present Church rattles ominously," they said: "it must vanish presently, and we shall have a real one." There have been some vanishings since then. Ah me! how much has vanished! Of that goodly company what heroes and heroines have vanished from the earth! Thrones have toppled, dynasties have crumbled, institutions that seemed fast rooted in the everlasting hills have withered away. But the Church that was present then, and was judged moribund by transcendental zeal, and rattled so ominously in transcendental ears, is present still. It was finally resolved to start a journal that should represent the ideas which had mainly influenced the association already tending to dissolution. How to procure the requisite funds was a question of some difficulty, seeing how hardly philosophic and commercial speculation conspire. An appeal was made. Would Mammon have the goodness to aid an enterprise whose spirit rebuked his methods and imperilled his assets? The prudent God disclaimed the imputed verdure; and the organ of American Transcendentalism, with no pecuniary basis, committed to the chance and gratuitous efforts and editing of friends, if intellectually and spiritually prosperous, had no statistical success. It struggled, through four years, with all the difficulties of eleemosynary journalism; and then, significantly enough, with a word concerning the "Millennial Church," sighed its last breath, and gave up the ghost. I prize the four volumes among the choicest treasures of my library. They contain some of Emerson's, of Theodore Parker's, of Margaret Fuller's, of Thoreau's best things; not to speak of writers less absolute and less famous. Meanwhile, the association, if so it could be termed, had gradually dissolved. Some of the members turned papists, I should say sought refuge in the bosom of the Catholic VOL. LXXXII. -NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. I. 2 Church. A few of the preachers pursued their calling, and perhaps have contributed somewhat to liberalize and enlarge the theology of their day. Some have slipped their moorings on this bank and shoal of time. One sank beneath the wave, whose queenly soul had no peer among the women of this land. Of one "A strange and distant mould Finally, a fragment of this strangely compounded body lodged in a neighboring town, and became the nucleus of an agricultural enterprise in which the harvest truly was not plenteous, and the competent laborers few; and of which, the root being rottenness, the blossom soon went up as dust. What is the lesson of history and private experience concerning revolutions in religion? Ecclesiastical continuity, that we are under tutelage. The Church does not exist by the will of man, but by his constitution. It cannot be abolished by the will of man; it cannot perish by disaffection. Only a new Church can supplant the old. And the new Church will not be an association of thinkers and critics, with correct and rational theories of God, discarding supernaturalism, and planting themselves on abstract theism. Such associations exist under all dispensations; but they have never succeeded in planting a Church, or supplanting one. In India, at this moment, in the midst of the popular polytheism, there exists a flourishing association of this description, - the sect of " Brahmas," pure theists. I received, not long since, a clever discourse from one of this body, entitled "Man the Son of God," in which Jesus Christ and Theodore Parker are coupled together as the two great lights of human kind. Theism is a theory of the universe which may or may not be true, but will never constitute a Church, and will never supplant one. A Church is the embodiment of a spiritual force, which, sallying from the heart of God, creates a vortex in human society that compels the kingdoms, compels the æons, in its conquering wake, and tracks its way through the world with a shining pyschopomp of saintly souls. It seems to me somewhat important to understand this difference between a Church, and a school of religious philosophy. I care not whether a man be conservative or radical in his theology, provided he has sight of this fact; provided also he possesses the faculty of self-criticism, which shall teach him his own limitations, and the limits of his theme. Conservatism is wise, so it be the conservatism of intelligent homage to the past, and not the conservatism of worldliness and self-interest, or fear. But radicalism is wiser: I mean the radicalism of disciplined thought, not of impatience, of pugnacity and self-conceit. Wiser yet, wisest of all, is that historic sense which acknowledges the good in both these tendencies, but is too wide-eyed and selfpossessed to be entangled with either; which sees that both are polarizations of a truth that neither quite comprehends; which recognizes the fact of tutelage, and knows that mankind must have spiritual leaders; and that, of spiritual leadership, the qualification and main constituent is not learning or philosophy or eloquence or any kind of intellectual eminence, but spiritual overweight, attained and attested by entire humiliation; that only to him who, being in the form of God, can take upon himself the form of a servant will every knee bow. ART. II. RECENT GERMAN LITERATURE: AUERBACH. Berthold. Auerbach's gesammelte Schriften. Erste, neu durchgesehene Gesammtausgabe. Stuttgart und Augsburg. J. G. Cotta'scher Verlag. 1857. Vol. I.-VIII. Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten. IX. Barfüssele. X.-XI. Spinoza, ein Denkerleben. XII-XIII. Dichter und Kaufmann, ein Lebensgemälde aus der Zeit Moses Mendelssohns. XIV. Neues Leben, eine Lehrgeschichte, in funf Büchern. XV. Deutsche Abende. XVI. Schrift und Volk. Grundzüge der volksthümlichen Literatur angeschlossen an eine Charakteristik J. P. Hebel's. XVII. -XVIII. Schatzkästlein des Gevattersmanns. Village Tales from the Black Forest. Translated by J. E. TAYLOR. London: Bogue, 1846. Christian Gellert and other Sketches. London: Low, 1858. Post 8vo. The Barefooted Maiden. A Tale. London: Low, 1857. 12mo. Narrative of Events in Vienna. Translated by J. E. TAYLOR. 12mo. Andree Hofer. Geschichtliches Trauerspiel, in fünf Aufzügen. Leipzig: G. Wigand, 1850. Deutscher Familienkalender auf das Jahr 1858. Mit Bildern (Holzschn.) nach Original-zeichn. Von W. v. KAULBACH, L. RICHTER und ARTHUR v. RAMBERG, u.s.w. Stuttgart: Cotta. 8vo. Deutscher Volks-Kalender auf das Jahr 1859, u.s.w. Der Wahlspruch. Schauspiel in fünf Acten. Leipzig: Weber, 1859. Joseph in Schnee. Eine Erzählung von B. AUERBACH. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1860. Joseph in the Snow. Translated by Lady WALLACE. London: Saunders & Oakley. 3 vols. Post 8vo. 1861. Edelweiss. Eine Erzählung von B. AUERBACH. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1861. Auf der Höhe. Roman in acht Büchern, von BERTHOLD AUERBACH. Dritte Auflage. Stuttgart: Verlag der J. G. Cotta'schen Buchhandlung, 1866. In the Black Forest, in Wurtemberg, in the charming valley of the Neckar, is a village called Nordstetten, inhabited by a mixed population of Catholics and Jews, who live together quite in harmony. Berthold Auerbach was born in this village, in 1812, of Jewish parents. And it is to this circumstance of his Jewish birth, and the Christian influences that were about him from childhood, that many of the characteristics of his writings are to be traced. After receiving the rudiments of his education in the Talmud, in the dilapidated little old town of Hechingen, twenty or thirty miles distant, once the capital of the infinitesimal principality of that name, and which the traveller remembers because he drove out from it once to see the castle of the Hohenzollerns, the original nest of that black eagle that now flaps its wings over Germany, - he went to complete his Jewish training at Carlsruhe; but the obscure life of a Rabbi suited neither his tastes nor his ambition. And after having been for a time at the Gymnasium in Stuttgart, he entered the University at Tübingen. But, as he had been faithless to rabbinism, he soon deserted the study of jurisprudence, to which he had at first applied himself, and, under the guidance of the celebrated Strauss, he devoted himself to philosophy. His philosophical studies were continued at Munich, under Schelling; and, at Heidelberg, he studied history under Schlosser. Early involved in the political discussions of the day, in which he took the side of the people, he soon came into collision with the Government, which was as resolute in suppressing all free inquiry in the direction of politics as it was anxious to encourage it in every other. He was arrested at Munich, but was nevertheless soon released from durance; and, even while investigations were going on into the acts of the authors of the troubles in which he had taken part, he was permitted to continue his attendance upon the lectures at the University. In Wurtemberg, however, he did not get off so easily; but was sentenced, in 1835, to expiate his political views in the dungeons of Hohenasperg, where the lives of so many noble patriots and thinkers had wasted away in solitude and misery; and where, but for that precipitate flight of which the story has been but rather recently told, the great genius of Schiller might have been extinguished in the madness of despair. The shadows which lay so dark, however, over the frowning Swabian height, do not seem to have affected the activity of Auerbach's mind; for he wrote in his prison a pamphlet entitled Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur ("Judaism, and the Latest Literature"), - a pamphlet now long forgotten, if indeed it ever had any success. After being released from imprisonment, he set about writing a series of books under the collective title of The Ghetto (the term by which the Jewish quarter is designated in European cities); his purpose being to give a faithful picture of Jewish life in its poetical and historical aspects, before the levelling tendencies in modern manners and thought had |