tion of the Christian's faith, is the testimony of the Holy Spirit, by and with the truth in our hearts.

Though the author of the Letter to Mr. Norton devotes most of his attention to the refutation of the doctrine above stated, respecting miracles, the feature of the Discourse which seems to have given him and his friends the greatest umbrage, is its denunciatory character; that is, its venturing to assert, that those who deny the miracles of Christianity are infidels. This, it appears, was considered singularly out of taste, and incongruous, seeing the Discourse was delivered. before an association of liberal theologians. Its members, it is said, "agree in the rejection of many articles of faith which have usually been held sacred in the church; a traditional theology has taken no strong hold of their minds; they deem the simple truths of Christianity more important than the mysteries that have been combined with them; but the principle of their union has never been made to consist in any speculative belief; no test has been required as a condition of fellowship; the mere suggestion of such a course would be met only with a smile of derision." The Association" is composed of the alumni of a theological school, which has always claimed the favour of the community, on account of its freedom from an exclusive spirit; its confidence in the safety and utility of thorough inquiry in all matters of faith; its attachment to the principles of liberal theology; and its renunciation of the desire to impose articles of belief on the minds of its pupils."* That the exclusive principle should be adopted in a discourse before such an audience was not to be expected. By this principle, is meant, "the assumption of the right for an individual, or for any body of individuals, to make their own private opinions the measure of what is fundamental in the Christian faith. As liberal Christians," it is said, "we have long protested against this principle, as contrary to the very essence of protestanism. It was not because our exclusive brethren made a belief in the trinity a test of allegiance to Christ, that we accused them of inconsistency with the liberty of the gospel; but because they presumed to erect any standard whatever, according to which the faith of individuals should be made to conform to the judgment of others. It was not any special application of the principle that we objected to; but the principle itself; and, assuredly, the exercise of this principle does not change its character, by reason of the source from which it proceeds."+

*Letter, &c. pp. 5 & 6. † Letter, &c. pp. 23 & 24.

This strikes us as very good declamation, but very poor reasoning. There may be just complaint about the application of the exclusive principle; but to complain of the principle, is certainly very unreasonable. The author of this Letter is just as exclusive as Mr. Norton, and Mr. Norton as the Trinitarians. They draw the line of exclusion at different places; but all must draw it some where. An infidel is a man who denies the truth of the Christian religion. That religion is certainly something. Different men may have different views of what it consists of, or what is essential to it. But all must regard it as embracing some doctrines, or it would cease to be a religion; and, consequently, they must regard those who reject those doctrines as infidels, whether they say so or not. This Alumnus would hardly call Mahommedans Christians, though they reckon Abraham and Christ among the prophets, and believe in God and the immortality of the soul. Would he then call him a Christian who denies the divine mission of Christ, the being of an intelligent God, and the existence of the soul after death, merely because he lives in a Christian country, and assumes the Christian name? This would be to make liberality ridiculous. Yet such claimants of the Christian name are beginning to abound. Mr. Norton, therefore, is not to be blamed, even as "a liberal theologian," for the adoption of the exclusive principle. He may have drawn the line in an inconvenient place; he may have violated the code of Unitarian ettiquette, in making a belief in miracles essential to a belief in Christianity, and thus justly exposed himself to the charge of a breach of privilege; but he can hardly be blamed for making the belief of something necessary to entitle a man to the name of a Christian. We have no doubt, his real offence was in drawing the line of exclusion in such a manner as to cast out of the pale of even liberal Christianity, some who were not disposed to be thus publicly disowned. This is, indeed, distinctly stated. "Your declaration," says the author of the Letter, to Mr. Norton, "that a certain kind of evidence, in your view, establishes the truth of Christianity, and that he who rests his faith on any other is an infidel, notwithstanding his earnest and open professions to the contrary. You thus, in fact, denied the name of Christian to not a few individuals in your audience, although you avoid discussing the grounds by which their opinions are supported. For it is perfectly well known, that many of our most eminent clergymen I will not refrain from speaking of them

as they deserve on account of my personal sympathy with. their views-repose their belief on a different foundation from that which you approve as the only tenable one."* It is plain, therefore, that the offensive exclusiveness of Mr. Norton's Discourse consisted in denying the Christian name to those who deny the miracles of Christ.

It appears to us, however, that the writer of this letter does Mr. Norton great injustice. He accuses him of confounding "two propositions which are essentially distinct:a belief in a divine revelation, and a belief in the miracles alleged in its support. You utterly confound," it is said, "the divine origin of Christianity, and a certain class the proofs of its divine origin."—p. 34. Mr. Norton does not confound these two things; nor does he, as represented by this writer, pronounce all those to be infidels whose faith rests on any other foundation than miracles. He declares those to be infidels who deny the miracles of the New Testament, but this is a very different affair. Many who feel the force of other kinds of evidence much more than that of miracles, and whose faith, therefore, does not rest on that foundation, admit their truth. Mr. Norton's doctrine is, that the miraculous accounts contained in the New Testament are so interwoven with all the other portions of the history, and enter so essentially into the nature of the whole system of Christianity, that they cannot be denied without. denying what is essential to the Christian religion. There is no confusion here of the thing to be proved, and the proof itself. It is true, he teaches that miracles are the only proof of a divine revelation. But this is only one of his reasons for maintaining that the rejection of the miracles of Christianity, is a rejection of Christianity itself. We believe this latter proposition, though we do not believe the former. We believe that miracles are essential to Christianity, though we do not believe that they are the only sufficient proof of its divine origin.

Letter, &c. p. 25. On a previous page, however, complaint is made against Mr. Norton, for proposing to speak of prevailing opinions, and then opposing "the doctrine of the imposibility of miracles," which, the writer says, "is not known to have an advocate among our theologians." And on page 32, he says, though many excellent Christians doubt "whether Jesus Christ performed the miracles ascribed to him in the New Testament," he "cannot avoid the conclusion, that the miracles related in the gospels, were actually wrought by Jesus." The author, therefore, though he belongs to the class whose faith does not rest on miracles, neither denies their possibility nor their actual occur

The Alumnus, moreover, censures Mr. Norton severely, for calling Spinoza an atheist and pantheist. The propriety of this censure depends on the sense given to the terms employed. An atheist is one who denies the existence of God. But what is God? If the term be so extended as to include even a blind vis formativa operative through the universe, then there never was an atheist. But if the term is used in its true scriptural sense; if it designates an intelligent and moral being, distinct from his creatures, whose essence is not their essence, whose acts are not their acts, and especially whose consciousness is not their consciousness, then Spinoza was an atheist. He acknowledges no such being. The universe was God; or rather all creatures where but the phenonena of the only really existing being. It may, indeed, seem incongruous to call a man an atheist, of whom it may with equal truth be said, that he believed in nothing but God. But in the sense stated above, which is a correct and acknowledged sense of the term, Spinoza was an atheist.

"We come now," says the Alumnus, " to a still more extraordinary mistake, which arose probably from the habit, too prevalent among us, of grouping together theologians who have scarcely any thing in common, but the language in which they write. You class Schleiermacher with the modern German school, whose disciples are called Rationalists or Naturalists."-p. 133. This he says is as whimsical a mistake as if a foreigner were to describe the celebrated Dr. Beecher as one of the most noted of the Unitarian school, in New England. This mistake is not quite as whimsical as the author supposes. The term Rationalist is, indeed, commonly employed to designate those who, making reason the source as well as the standard of religious truth, deny all divine revelation. Have the pietists, says Röhr, the superintendent of Weimar, yet to learn that we admit no other revelation in Christ than such as occurred in Socrates or Plato? Of such rationalists, who are in Germany just what the deists were in England, Schleiermacher, and all the transcendal school, were the determined and contemptuous opponent. In another sense, however, the term rationalist is applicable, and is in fact applied, to the transcendentalists of the highest grade. Under the head of the Mystisch-spekulative Rationalismus, Tholuck includes the gnosticism of the first centuries, the pantheists of the middle ages, and of modern Germany.* To this class of mystical rationalists,

* Tholuck's Glaubwürdigkeit der evangel. Geschich, &c. Ch. 1.

Schleiermacher undoubtedly belonged. As, however, the term is generally applied to the deistical opposers of a supernatural revelation, with whom he was ever in controversy, it certainly produces confusion to call Schleiermacher himself a rationalist. As to the question, whether he was a pantheist, as it is a matter about which his learned contemporaries in his own country are at variance, we may well stand in doubt. Few unbiassed readers of his Reden über die Religion, however, could regard him in any other light when those discourses were written. They are, to be sure, a rhapsody, full of genius and feeling, but still a rhapsody, in which the meaning is a very secondary concern; which the reader is not expected to understand, but simply to feel. Such a book may betray a man's sentiments, but is hardly fit to be cited in any doctrinal controversy. Schleiermacher was a very extraordinary man. Though he placed far too little stress on historical Christianity, (i. e. on the religion of Christ, considered as objective revelation, recorded in the New Testament,) yet as he made Christ the centre of his myslical system, exalting him as the perfect manifestation of God, he exerted an extraordinary influence in breaking down the authority of those deistical rationalists, who were accustomed to speak of Christ as altogether such an one as themselves. He was once a Moravian, and there is reason to believe, that the interior life of his soul existed, after all, more under the form thus originally impressed upon it, than under the influence of his subsequent speculations. It was no uncommon thing for him to call upon his family to join with him in singing some devout Moravian hymn of praise to Christ; and though his preaching was of a philosophical cast, yet the hymns which he assigned were commonly expressive, in a high degree, of devotional feeling and correct sentiment. Such a worshipper of Christ ought not to be confounded with such heartless deists as Paulus, Wegscheider, and Röhr.

The Alumnus makes another objection to Mr. Norton's discourse, the justice of which we admit. It does not fulfil the expectations which the annunciation of his subject excites. It is not a discourse on the latest form of infidelity; it is a mere consideration of one subordinate feature of that form, viz: the denial of the miracles of the New Testament.

It was his habit to have these hymns printed on slips of paper and distributed to the people at the door of his church.