have shaped the external form and movement, the ecclesi⚫astical continuity, of the "Church of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." It is impossible to pursue at length the discussion of our theme in this direction, nor is it necessary. The actual Church of Christendom already lies under condemnation with all liberal intelligences. It is out of sentiment, and in the way of reverent evasion, that the condemnation is not pronounced in full. Dr. Hedge makes some points of this sentence, enough to indicate the position of things. He says: "For want of counsel and concurrence of reason in time past, theology has builded her house in vain."- "What a really scientific building is to a crumbling Gothic edifice, such is a rational theology to the rotten systems of the past." "While we claim for the Christian religion the peculiarity of a dispensation of grace, it must be confessed, that the gospel has not been so received and so interpreted by the Christian Church. The grace that was in it was soon forgotten, and overlaid with dogmatic additions and ecclesiastical inventions. It would seem as if the Christian Church had made it her special aim to obscure and obliterate this characteristic trait of our faith, to assimilate the religion of Jesus to other religions, by engrafting upon it a sacrificial, expiatory element, entirely foreign to its spirit." * - It is necessary to recognize that an unchristian " special aim," such as Dr. Hedge alludes to, has powerfully controlled, thus far, the historical or outward development of Christianity. This special aim has grown out of the interests or necessities of a scheme of human redemption, at the centre of which we find, as "the Saviour," "the Redeemer," the Atoning and Judging Christ. Dr. Hedge avers, that the more Orthodox forms of Protestantism have given us, instead of the gospel of grace, "a bloody cartel of vengeance and of doom." He is aware that this has been done in good faith, in the interest of Jesus as "the Saviour." If God has been *Reason in Religion, pp. 215, 217, 341. VOL. LXXXII.-NEW SERIES, VOL. III. NO. II. 14 represented more as a devil than as a deity, it has been to demonstrate the necessity of "looking unto Jesus" as "the Redeemer." In fact, there is not the least room to doubt, that the "special aim" of our actual Christianity has been to exalt Jesus, to make Jesus the Lord and Shepherd of souls; and that, in doing this, it has subverted, as Dr. Hedge must admit, the true Christian faith, so far as its statements and its schools are concerned. How, then, can a Church be divine, in any peculiar sense, any more than all human history is divine, which thus fails to apprehend aright its own better nature, and has not yet grasped in idea, much less manifested in history, its own higher law? And why should the Christian Church have been divine? Why should Jesus have been divine? The word of Christian gospel is that God is with men burdened with imperfection and deficiency, not that he is with perfect men. Christian apology should accept and must accept the task of showing that God was with Jesus, though he did bear the cross of human deficiency and imperfection; and that He is with the Christian Church, though it be only a company of erring men; with Jesus and with the Church, not because of what they were, but because in his own nature He is with his entire creation. Because we recognize that Jesus had in the living God a Lord and Master, a Shepherd and Saviour, and that the lot of Jesus in this respect is the lot of every soul, we can heartily consent to find that it has been a mistake from the beginning to put Jesus at the centre of Christianity, in the sense that he, rather than God, the Father of all souls, is the redeemer from guilt and the author of salvation. In the course of our argument, we have had occasion to use, and somewhat criticise, some recent statements of Dr. Hedge. The volume in which these statements appear has been more than once the subject of remark in the "Examiner;" but, in one respect, we think full justice has not been meted out to this last and best of Dr. Hedge's contributions to the literature of our communion. We refer to the singularly fine poetic quality of Dr. Hedge's thought. The poetic form is absent, but it is not needed. The numbers of Tenny son could not render these grand intuitions of a believing soul more inspiring. In the use of logic, Dr. Hedge is often unfortunate, not so much from any lack of logical power as from entire spiritual pre-occupation. The glory of the vision dims the eye of his understanding, while flooding heart and soul with ineffable light. He thinks less of the logical adequacy of the statement than of the spiritual value of his word. In simple statement, where there is no aim but to utter the intuition, Dr. Hedge is a master of expression. It is in utterances incidentally argumentative or critical that he gets very wide of the mark, through the absorption of his attention by the interior sense of his thought. If intending to argue or to criticise, Dr. Hedge will be found just and correct, though throwing no special weight into that form of intellectual demonstration. Usually he does not propose argument and criticism so much as revelation, the simple utterance of intuitions; and not infrequently, as it seems to us, his words do his real thought a serious injustice. And, manifestly, his opinions may sometimes assume, through the inadvertence of which we have spoken, a form and bearing not at all suited to do justice to the profound reason which lies behind them. It is emphatically on the score of religious genius, as an exponent of pure reason, leaving out of view the processes of the understanding, that Dr. Hedge takes the highest rank as a teacher of divine truth. To make his eminence as clear to our readers as it appears to ourselves, it would be necessary to review some of the striking illustrations of religious genius or of poetic power in religion, and to point out the particulars in which Dr. Hedge has conformed to the standard of the great seers and singers of Christian belief. We have not space to do this, even if it were appropriate to append such a discussion to our article. It is in the sober ecstasy of believing reason that Dr. Hedge illustrates the advance which rationalism has secured to mysticism. To examine and illustrate this rational ecstasy, and to separate, in Dr. Hedge's invaluable essays, between the fruits of this and the quite worthless results of inadvertent reasoning, would be a delightful task. We cannot enter upon it here; but, to stimulate the reader to critical inquiry, we will give one example in each kind from the essay on "The Exorable God: "George Müller prayed for pecuniary succor in his charities [that is, of course, begged of all the world, by praying publicly and with an ostentation of faith], and again and again received an answer to his supplications, in pecuniary supplies." That is the husk of bad logic. Here is the pure thought: "The spirit and life of prayer is the consciousness of God, the feeling that we are his, that he is ours, that nothing but the voluntary aversion of our spirits can separate us from him. A feeling of Deity as the power by which we live, the light by which we see, the great reality, in the knowledge of whom is eternal life, and whose participation is the supreme blessing, where this consciousness lives and burns, there is prayer, though not always expressed in words. For the soul, in its highest devotion, is content to repose in the thought of God, asking nothing, seeking nothing; its whole being concentrated in the one, unuttered desire, Thy will be done." The rare poetic quality, that which belongs to thought which prophesies the hidden light of God's presence in the soul, is so full and effective in much that Dr. Hedge has written of "Reason in Religion," as to color richly and wonderfully his fine style. The plain prose "sings itself," in many passages, with beauty like that of Homer's, or solemn music like that of Milton's verse. Philosophy of the wisest and richest kind is the undertone of many of these strains. If any of our readers have not yet afforded themselves the pleasure of listening with Dr. Hedge to the epic story of man's wondrous faith in God, we urge them to resort at once to the suggestive pages of the volume we have imperfectly criticized in these brief remarks. ART. II.-LESSING. The Life and Works of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. From the German of Adolph Stahr. By E. P. EVANS, Ph.D., Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, in the University of Michigan. Two volumes. Boston William V. Spencer, 203, Washington Street. 1866. WE bespeak a cordial welcome for these two handsome volumes. They present Stahr's "Life of Lessing" to the American reader in a shape which reflects great credit on their publisher. The work of translation has evidently been done as a labor of love, and is no mere piece of job-work. We feel it has cost more time and study than are ordinarily spent on a dozen volumes of equal size. With great precision in verbal rendering, it has at the same time an easy flow of style. The collateral sources of information have been carefully examined, and digested in notes which are a valuable addition to the work. It is no easy task to produce so good a translation as this. We owe a debt of gratitude to Professor Evans, for making accessible to the public the life of so grand a personality as Lessing. It will call attention to a man whose character and genius are so remarkable as to constitute it an epoch in every student's life to learn to know him. We trust the work will be widely bought and widely read. No thoughtful man can afford to do without it. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing was born, on the 22d of January, 1729, in Kamenz, a city in Upper Lusatia, Saxony. He came of marrowy old German stock,- German in the best sense of the word, as predicated, not of geographical locality, but of certain sturdy-minded, honest-hearted qualities. No better birthplace could have been hit on for the man who was to rouse his nation to the consciousness of its own inherent resources, and shame it out of vassalage and servile imitation. For here were all about him those basal elements of character, |