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we prefer those countries where the processes of nature go forward without such outbursts. Perpetual or periodical hurricane, as in France since 1789, is the awful issue to which they tend. The false prophet is never presented in Scripture, not even when clothed with the grandeur of old Balaam, as a benefit, but as a warning. It has appeared in this parallel, that possession of the truth conveys far higher power in life, a result to be expected, as the intellectual multiplied by the moral must infinitely exceed that which is simply intellectual. We can institute no comparison between the metaphysical systems of Chalmers and Schleiermacher such as is wont to be made between the latter and Fichte or Hegel, for the simple reason that Chalmers, by virtue of his distinction between the "knowable" and "unknowable," eschewed all researches in the regions beyond the limits of the human understanding. He is confessedly the wiser man who perceives a priori that it is a vain as it is a profane thing to seek to comprise the being of the Deity in a definition of the finite understanding, or even to comprehend the metaphysical essence of the world. The popular sense discovers the "bathos" in which these speculations landed when it represents the Hegelian as found with folded hands turned inward to himself, and, when questioned, answering, "I worship myself;" and caricatures Schleiermacher's definition of Christianity as "the sense of dependence," by the inference that the dog is the best Christian. The example of Chalmers shows that the soul that subjects itself to revealed truth needs not yield to any in the ardour with which true science is prosecuted. Had Chalmers never been converted he would probably have lived and died in the service of science, and would have lent his lucubrations a not inferior charm to that which chains us in Schleiermacher's works. His devotion to religion, instead of quenching this scientific zeal, discovered new provinces for its exercise. In one of his public appeals he administers rebuke to the vulgar prejudice on this head:

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"Oh, my brethren, I am afraid that upon this subject there has been a most unmanly surrender of Christianity. that so much authority has been given to the conceptions of a narrow and ignorant bigotry as to have laid open our religion to the scorn of philosophers, and to have brought down upon her the scorn and disgust of the upper classes of society. . .

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What are we to be told that in behalf of Christianity nothing can be summoned up either in the way of argument or illustration to compel the homage and to school the superciliousness of these men? Are we in truckling compliance with the humours of a baseless fanaticism to strip away all learning and cultivation, . . as so many unseemly appendages, from the business of the priesthood? Are we to let down the defences of our faith and to withdraw from it the labours of the understanding, and to mar any one of its legitimate recommendations, and to proclaim in the hearing of the public that instead of being all things to all men, our men of science and scholarship are altogether beyond the range of its artillery, that they may assemble in their halls and sit in the conscious superiority of reason above all the pretensions of their homely and unlettered superstition?"

This appeal might have been designed for Schleiermacher himself, who on his part indignantly protests that religion should no longer profess to come before men on the ground of truth, being a matter of feeling, incapable of demonstration, and having its seat in the devout sense of the church! We think of Solomon's two women, and the proof which was the true mother of the child.

It would have been interesting to cast more than a passing glance on the moral side of the picture in both cases, specially in relation to public questions. There are virtues which the Freethinker claims for his own, objecting that Christianity leaves no scope for patriotism or friendship. Schleiermacher was a patriot and took deeply to heart the degradation of his country under the heel of Napoleon, entering into all the negotiations for organising a revolt without regard to personal danger. But there never was a heartier patriot than Chalmers, or one more wedded to his country and its whole noble constitution. Unless we identify patriotism with the indiscriminate eulogising of worthless kings with Hume, or the hatching of anarchy with Voltaire, we will see a patriotism of a far higher kind in him who was ready, Cincinnatus-like, every moment to sacrifice private ease for the welfare of the people, ceaselessly at work to ameliorate the social or the moral condition of every class in the nation. Schleiermacher had many friends, and, genial man as he was, made himself the delight of the literary and scientific circles of Berlin. We will not dwell upon it that many of his friendships were of a questionable character. But let any man read Chalmers's correspondence with James Anderson, Robert Edie, Alexander Paterson, and Thomas Smith, and judge what such a man must have been

among his equals, and own that the truth from God, which can knit the man of highest science so intimately with the comparatively uneducated, soul to soul, casts men in a finer and nobler mould, making them capable of a friendship as much higher and more durable than that of the world as Christ is above the world and its interests and ties.

The genius of Schleiermacher was of a destructive character, that of Chalmers out-and-out conservative; yet here we see the conservative, when the truth was at stake, ruthlessly cut himself loose from all his moorings, while the other could compromise to have private indulgence. As a boy, Schleiermacher doubted historical fact; Chalmers built on trustworthy testimony as on a rock, and on the first bruit of the Irvingite miraculous tongues, declared himself ready to believe all that was credibly attested. Chalmers had a childlike veneration for all the great and good before him, and could not pronounce the names of Augustine or Bacon, or "Sir Isaac" or Bishop Newton, or Pascal, or Halyburton, without special emphasis. Schleiermacher's overweening confidence in the resources of his own mind led him to perceive little else than the defects of others, and he confesses to admiration for none other than Plato and Homer, so that we must think he has lost sight of Paul and John (Isaiah he seems not to know!). Chalmers held so high the substance of the gospel, that he could overlook all incongruities in the men or institutions that were loyal to it. Schleiermacher felt a resistless impulse to assail whatever could yield shelter to an abuse as outwork or defence; and the supranaturalists who professed to receive revelation because its contents were agreeable to reason were no less the butts of his scorn, than the rationalists who seemed to show regard to the substance of Christianity, while making havoc of all its facts and evidences. Chalmers was forced to be a reformer from zeal to brush away all that dimmed the lustre of the gospel. Sincere Calvinist as he was in all the five resolutions of Dort, he had frequent tirades against that buckram Calvinism that would stint the full and free offer to the sinner. The one inconsistency that Schleiermacher's disciples find in him is that he makes the Christ, from whom the Church's salvation emanates, a historical person rather than an ideal. It will be easily admitted that it gave Schleiermacher an advantage

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with the more aspiring of his contemporaries that he appeared to produce a novel gospel on the ruins of that teaching which had proved effete, and that Chalmers had the more arduous task to invest with a new charm what all knew to be the old doctrines that had been from the beginning. The Bible record was with Schleiermacher a subordinate thing, and he mainly gave currency to the treacherous phrase that revelation existed before the Scriptures, separating Bible and Revelation. To Chalmers the Word of God in the Bible was the revelation of Divine love and truth for the redemption of a lost race, a scheme which the mind, blinded by sin, ever inclines to misconceive, over the purity and perfection of which the teacher has to watch with ceaseless assiduity. Schleiermacher projected a union, founded on general indifference, whereby Lutherans and Reformed were to lay aside concern about those weighty. truths that had severed them. Chalmers led the way to a permanent union by persuading Christians, while holding high every tittle that is revealed in the conscience, to look above and beyond this to the grand verities that are represented in their common name.

The lamentable aberrations of the great German, whose life was a searching after truth which he never found, are to be traced to the same root as those of the apostle of the Gentiles before his conversion-ignorance of the law. For this we must hold the Moravians, among whom he was educated, in great measure responsible. Their aversion to the law is the explanation of the abounding of the phraseology of grace, in combination, in many cases, with a worldly and unsanctified life, such as makes it possible for the aristocracy to delight in the connexion. It is, however, a fierce and systematic antagonism that Schleiermacher discovers to the law of God; so, while accommodating himself in general to orthodox phrases, he will not suffer it to be said that Christ fulfilled the law for us. But the law is God's schoolmaster to bring to Christ. The vision of Christ would have availed Paul nothing, unless the law, applied by the Spirit, had "come" inwardly, as the result of which "coming" the apostle tells us, "I died." Without this all the grand things Schleiermacher saw and taught of Christ were in vain-for Christ is a Saviour from sin, or nothing. Those who are not judged by the law in conscience must and

will cast it off. We are told of Spinoza that he was in the habit of prayer, till one evening, when going over the alphabetical confession of sin more Rabbinico, the thought occurred, "But why confess murder, stealing, lying, etc., when you were never guilty of any of these?" The alternative before this age is the law leading to Christ, or the discarding the Divine gift, and returning to a pantheistic life with the tinsel of Christian phrase and circumstance.

The hollow nature of the Christianity Schleiermacher taught comes to light in the doctrine of his disciples. They teach that the pre-eminence of Jesus over other men is only so long to be recognised till such advances be made in civilisation, that the Messiah of progress be outstripped by those of a maturer age. To our view, he was as clearly the false prophet of the nineteenth century, as Mahomet was of the seventh. As the latter, looking round, saw all religion in danger of being swallowed up by a luxuriant polytheism, Schleiermacher, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, saw this province of humanity in danger of disappearing under the wild hand of rationalism, and thought himself called to undertake the work of reconstruction. The one had as much honesty of purpose as the other. Schleiermacher does not profess to have revelations ;-that is not his style, but he does, in one place, lay claim to have a gift of divining, and we think it could be proved that he considered himself the vehicle of Divine inspiration, when he consciously, and with the best. conscience, remoulded the religion of Christ, so as to accommodate it to the temper and complexion of the age in which he lived. This religion of Schleiermacher is spreading like a snare over the nations, undermining and subverting truth, and leading men to content themselves with a vague devotion or profession, which is evacuated of the substance and power of the truth from heaven. God lifts up voices to wake men, like that of the Jewish poet, Heinrich Heine, in our own day, who, after entertaining Paris and all Europe with genial blasphemies, had the confession wrung from him, in the paroxysms of his fearful disease, that, to be an infidel, men need to be in health, to be rich, and in comfortable circumstances; but men go comfortably and carelessly forward in their godless speculation. For Chalmers, Jesus Christ was the Son of David,

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