Reality and romance.

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dealing with the salient points of life to busk up a fabric far more showy, and working with greater charm upon our sympathies, than what is commonly found in the hard and monotonous course of reality, so it is possible for the preacher who converses with nothing but some of the sublimer features of the gospel to work up lucubrations full of fine sentiment, and exercising a certain higher power of attraction than when men are guided to take the Word as a lamp and light in the path of appointed sanctification and mortification of sin. This may explain the insidious character of much of the German sermonising in this century, which fails to insist on the necessity of trying and ruling the life by the inspired Word. Such preaching may delight men, and it may even benefit believers, but it will neither convert nor save unless supplemented from other sources. It may please and stimulate like a romance, but it never grows into a true life, nourished by that Word which is "profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be perfect, thoroughly furnished unto all good works." We are persuaded that there is no one danger against which men need more to guard in our day than the danger of confounding romance and life in religion, and that no one is more blameworthy in this respect than Schleiermacher, just because he was more successful in leading his people to slight the divinely prepared paths in which alone the sinful heart may be led to that holiness without which none pleases God.

Chalmers's zeal for the Evidences of Christianity, on which he spent so much of his strength, was homage to that right hand of the Almighty, into which he delivered himself as a little child to be conducted to an acquaintance with the unfathomable riches of the contained truth. It was clear to him that the Eternal God has set his imprint upon the Scriptures, that the Word is the rod of his power, before which every intelligence is to bow, and that it must be submitted to and experienced before it is comprehended. He revels in the evidences of Divine majesty with which it is encompassed, and goes forth to meet opponents like a strong man glorying in his might. The objections the world conjures up against the Scriptures are to him so many phantoms, like the tricks of the magicians in presence of the rod of Moses, and require only to

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be firmly grasped to disappear. Where Hume was supposed by his celebrated sophism to have bound the right hand of the Almighty and made it impossible to prove a miracle, as involving in every case a competition between the proverbially variable testimony of man and the unchangeably stable testimony of nature, Chalmers not only meets Hume, but elicits the grand fact that there are laws of the moral world which have higher validity and certainty than the sequences of the material, and that there is testimony of a peculiar kind, like that of the apostles, which stands more firmly than the very framework of nature. When the facts which the nascent science of geology laid bare were turned to undermine the authority of the Bible, and common minds trembled for the consequences, Chalmers went confidently to the record, assured that it would disclose the true method of reconciling the works and the word of God. Having first pointed out the fact that the Bible makes no profession of determining the antiquity of the globe, he turns to seize the deliverances of geology, and converts them, with the proof they afford of successive destructive catastrophes, into a demonstration that the world cannot have been from eternity, but must have been originally stocked with the existing genera and species by the fiat of the Creator. Chalmers's example is a brilliant illustration of the fact that in the appropriation of the truth delivered by God's right hand, a man has not less but more scope for all the energy, and for the freest exercise of the intellect with which God has endowed him, and that this occupation is, both in respect of the exercise itself and its results, as surely to be preferred above the vain roaming of the sceptic after that shadow he calls truth, as the life of cultivated humanity is above that of the savage whose poor existence is divided between the chase of the wild beast and degrading sloth and starvation.

Let us turn to the contrast in Schleiermacher, and consider for a moment one of his first essays in Biblical criticism, which was directed to discredit the First Epistle to Timothy. He had made up his mind to reject that noble Epistle on the ground of its non-Pauline authorship, and it is interesting to contemplate what an amount of argument and proof a fertile mind can accumulate against the best of causes, for it is as well

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to preface that his closest followers (Strauss and Schenkel) have found against him in this instance. While Schleiermacher's proof goes to show that 1st Timothy is the work of some later. plagiarist, who makes a bungling compilation (he uses stronger language still) out of 2d Timothy and Titus, his own school have decided that 1st Timothy must have the same author as the other two Epistles; yet our critic in his wilful pursuit of truth, as he supposes, has reared a demonstration which would put to shame the flimsy objections that some men have lately produced with so much ostentation against the Books of Moses. He cannot deny that the external evidence for 1st Timothy is of the first class, though even here he essays an insinuation that only discloses his evil animus; but, passing from that, he sets to work in earnest. He discovers no fewer than ninety-four words or phrases that are either non-Pauline, or not Greek, or åπağ Xeyoueva, or apocryphal. He maintains that the notice about. Hymenæus and Alexander contradicts that in 2d Timothy about these individuals, that the sentence in 1 Tim. i. 20 must be understood as being to be put in execution by Timothy during the short time he was in Ephesus after Paul, and that Paul cannot be supposed to devolve such a burden on so young a man; that chapters iii. 2 and v. 9 can only be taken. of prohibition of a second marriage, which is a sentiment foreign to Paul's system, and proves that the writer of the Epistle lived between Paul's epoch and that in which the marriage of the clergy was wholly eschewed; that the "double honour" due to elders (chap. v. 17) can only mean "double pay," a motive which Paul certainly never placed before spiritual men; that the mention of Pontius Pilate (chap. vi. 13) in so singular a manner indicates a date for the Epistle after the Apostles' Creed, in which that individual is so prominent, had come into common use, along with a host of other objections that might suffice to overwhelm any one ignorant of the animus that was urging the criticism, and casting wholly into the shade the weak talk and utterly false assertions about priests and Levites, and the universal priesthood of which Israel knew nothing, which have been employed to justify the effort to set aside the claim of Moses to that law which inspired voices have ever called by his name. All this pretentious argumentation has been long ago disowned

by his closest followers as utterly baseless, showing that it had not emanated from clear impartial judgment, but from zeal for some oblique theory. Neither need we go far to discover the cause of this laborious obliquity. This is a fair illustration of the method by which some men have professed by mere philological tact and on subjective grounds to determine authorship. Those who knew the man as he disclosed his esoteric system to De Wette, Lücke, and Brinkemann, so different from that which he publicly professed, will see that the distinct teaching of this Epistle, going in the teeth of his favourite tenets, made it insufferably distasteful to him. The great truths, ch. iii. 16, "Great is the mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh;" the designation of Christ's incarnation as a spontaneous selfdedication, ch. i. 16; the assertion, ch. ii. 6, "he gave himself a ransom for us;" the statements, ch. ii. 13-15, confirming the Old Testament account of the creation and fall as historical facts; the frequent appeals to a living God, who rules in wisdom and justice, taking cognisance of sin and hasting to judgment, all so adverse to his pantheistic creed, as well as the separate mention of the Father, the Son, and elect angels as having part in that judgment of which he would know nothing, ch. v. 20, vi. 13; the adoring mention of electing grace and confession for Paul himself as " chief of sinners;' worse than all, the upholding of the law as having a definite function in the Divine economy, in contradistinction to Schleiermacher, who will allow of no law but that within in the conscience, and who insists under the head of Christ's obedience that he fulfilled the will of God, but not the law; finally the warnings against false philosophy, and the explicit injunctions to adhere to the faith and the duties that had been transmitted in the Church-all this was just as if the Epistle had been specially addressed to confute the novelties by which Schleiermacher was revolutionising the age in which his lot was cast. We have dwelt on this instance, as perhaps the most striking example of the audacity as well as of the failure of that rationalistic spirit, that profanely disports itself within the limits of the canon of Scripture as if on unconsecrated ground-that seeks among ourselves to place Deuteronomy, for example, towards the close and not at the outstart of Israel's national life, as the work of some impostor

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who assumes the name of Moses, as the outcome, and not as God declares its design, as the source of the people's life, amounting in fact to a denial of its true and real inspiration, as the authors of the theory themselves very well know. Such an example as this discovers to us whence this spirit comes, and whither it tends, and should be a warning to those who are in danger of being carried off their feet by the German critics and their Scotch followers, not to attach too much weight to "scholars," and those who have "a name in the world of letters," in religious questions, when we find a man like Schleiermacher so far left to himself as to heap all the terms of a scornful and opprobrious criticism upon a work which the whole Church. ever has held as being a genuine production of God's holy, wise, and perfect Spirit.1

We turn to examine the influence which the principles they embraced had on the formation of the characters of these two great men. Chalmers's career is a proof that energetic acceptance of the truths from God's right hand finds not less, but more, scope for the freest exercise of the intellect.

The Church in Germany was as much at fault as the individual in originating that scepticism which shot up to such a height, in having almost from its cradle fostered the belief that the acceptance of certain theological positions is identical with the truth and the life of truth. When Arndt lifted his protest in the beginning of the seventeenth century, Christian life versus Creed, he found the whole Church against him. When Lessing refers to truth from God's right hand, he has in view those theological enunciations enforced by authority over the domain of the churches he was acquainted with-he knew of no others. In opposition to this system he proposed to himself to find some rival formula on the field of philosophy which would better satisfy the craving intellect.

There was a period in Chalmers's life reaching to his thirtieth

1 Some would persuade their neighbours that Deuteronomy might still be canonical, although discovered to be a forgery of a later prophet in the name of Moses. Those who believe this like to have dust cast into their eyes. It is interesting to hear how Schleiermacher judges of the supposed author of 1st Timothy after having finished the proof that it is not Paul's. He says, "The author has evidently been guilty of a falsehood, as it was his design to make that to appear to be Paul's which was not so. If we then receive it, that in canonical writings the author must be inspired, or at least of an unblemished character, we cannot allow this work to make a part in the canon."-Schleiermacher, Sämmliche Werke, vol. i. (Berlin, 1836).