The strength of faith in any period and in any community depends on the number of individual souls who accept these truths as practical principles, and the energy with which their inner and outer life are controlled by them. Whether the argument in respect to the other questions and lines of thought seems to be the stronger or weaker, or whether few or more individuals take the unbelieving or the believing side, so long as earnest men believe the supernatural Christ with rational conviction induced by moral and spiritual evidence, and act out their faith in energetic and zealous Christian living, faith can never collapse. It is then in this direction that the activities of all believing men should be turned to gain strength and prevalence for their practical convictions on the broad and obvious grounds by which Christianity must stand or fall. It is in this sense that the truth is always so significant, and preeminently at the present time, that Christianity is not a philosophy, nor a history, nor a theology, but a Life. It is because Christianity is attacked from so many quarters, and what is assumed to be essential in it is assailed with so much zeal and plausibility on grounds that are familiar to but few, that these strong arguments should be brought into the foreground, while those which are limited to specialists or are of inferior significance should be occasionally or sparingly used. It were better to abandon every outwork and redoubt, even the strongest and most capable of successful defence, than to be driven out of a single position. The loss of a weak position is nothing, but the disgrace of not having known it to be defenceless is injurious to any cause. The real weakness of the Christian cause as it is often defended lies in the ignorance on the part of its friends of the real strength of the arguments by which it stands. Whether still other sharp lessons of temporary defeat or disgrace shall be needed to enforce wiser judgments remains to be proved. While the defenders of the Christian faith, as we have argued, have no reason for fear, or even for misgiving, they have no occasion for bravado. The frequency with which these obvious precepts of wisdom have often been disregarded gives point and emphasis to the remark, that one of the most convincing proofs of the Divine authority of Christianity is that it has survived so long in spite of its defenders.

NOAH PORTER.

German Universities.

551

ART. VIII.-The Influence of the German University System on Theological Literature.1

IN

the great Protestant Universities of Germany are to be found wonderful advantages for learned research, a mighty spirit of research, and many and great merits. The Germans, compared with the Hollanders, the British, and even the French, are a poor nation, and both munificent salaries and large incomes are rare among them; so that the endowments and emoluments of their professorships are munificent when viewed in relation to the habits of the people, although very moderate when measured by a British standard. The organisation of their Universities is wise and liberal, the professorships amazingly numerous, and the division of labour accordingly minute. This partition of branches of instruction, with the cheapness of living and of books, and the scale of the libraries, enables scholars to pursue the different departments of literature to their extreme ramifications, with a nicety unknown in any other country. Hence, in German Universities are found men devoting their whole lives to examining and teaching departments which, in other countries, are either not touched, or treated as a brief appendage to some other branch. Studious effort is, moreover, honoured, and literary success valued by the whole people and the governments. The appointing power is, no doubt, usually employed with great impartiality and wisdom to elevate men of real diligence and learning to distinguished chairs.

The genius of the German Protestant people also contributes in a splendid way to the fruitfulness of this vast literary husbandry. Intensely devoted to freedom of speculative thought, thorough, laborious, patient in temperament, they are perhaps the more independent and adventurous in literary inquiry, because they have been allowed so little liberty of political action. This part of Germany is still the Protestant nation—proud of the right of free inquiry, and zealous to exercise it every where they are allowed. In no country of Christendom is the higher education so prominent and so honoured; and

1 From the Southern Presbyterian Review.

nowhere is the trade of scholarship so completely organised, or so persistently plied.

Hence it would be both incorrect and ungrateful to deny the indebtedness of the civilised world to German scholarship. In no department of human learning have the Germans been laggards; in some they have laid scholars under peculiar obligations. In philology, the editing of the classics and the patristic writings, the illustration of the Scripture text, the compilation of accurate lexicons and critical grammars of all the tongues which are taught in civilised countries, they have long taken the lead. And they are now coming to the forefront in the more realistic sciences of law, medicine, chemistry, which men used to consider as the prerogative of the more practical Briton and Gaul.

But in no department have the Germans attracted so much attention as in theology. Men speak of "German theology," sometimes with fear, sometimes with admiration, but often as though it were a something single and unique, and separated from all other schools of theology by uniform traits. Whereas, there are as many German theologies, at least, as there are British or American, differing as widely from each other in merit and in opinions. There is, indeed, so much of a pretext for speaking of "German theology" as a single system by itself, that the most of the writers of that nation, of all the various schools, have a few common traits. One of these is the use of a peculiar philosophic nomenclature, made prevalent among them by the long ascendency of one or another phase of idealism. Another may be said to be a certain boldness of criticism in dealing with inspired declarations, which, to the orthodox apprehension of the Reformed, savours of a degree of licence. But German theology is yet as many-sided as that of Great Britain or America, and there are as wide differences between the good and the bad. Of some of their expositors and dogmatic theologians, it is hard to utter praise too high.

But in settling the weight to be attached by English-speaking Christians to the theological emissions of the German press, there are some very plain facts which must be considered. 1. In German Protestantism, Lutheranism is now virtually dominant. One sufficient cause of this result is the ascendency of Prussia, and her persistent policy of unifying her State

on Theological Literature.

553

Church. The University of Marburg, a small one, is now the only distinctively Reformed or Presbyterian institution left in Germany. It is not asserted that all Reformed divines are excluded from all the rest. But the general rule is, that the Lutherans are preferred, and are in the ascendant. Now, as students well know, Lutheran theology is no longer that of Martin Luther, as to the distinctive points of Calvinism. On these doctrines the most evangelical and orthodox teaching one hears in Germany is as hostile and as condemnatory as that we are wont to hear at home from Wesleyans and Arminians. But this fact is almost trivial, when compared with another, viz., that the present Lutheranism, when not rationalistic, is sacramentarian. The most devout, the staunchest assertors of inspiration, like Luthardt of Leipzig, teach a phase of baptismal regeneration, and the real, corporeal presence in the Supper. The fruits of this teaching there, as everywhere else, are evil.

2. The Protestant Churches of Germany are State establishments; and such are their Universities with their theological departments. The theory of this relation to the State is rigorously Erastian. It is well known in history that at the Reformation the German princes usurped the power of dictating to their subjects a religion, with a tyranny at least equal to that of the Popes. The motto of treaties and laws was, "Cujus regio, ejus religio.” The ruler of the land ruled the religion of the land. The people of an unfortunate State had to change their faith and worship backwards and forwards, from the Reformed to the Lutheran, and from either to the Popish, as the sword or the interests or the lusts of the prince dictated. Nor is the Church in Germany less helpless under an imperious Erastianism to-day. Of spiritual church-government there is simply none. The church courts are either absolute ciphers, or they are but names for what are really bureaux of State administration, as little reflecting a spiritual power as a bureau of police or street-paving. The prostration of church power under the secular received notable illustration as late as 1875-6, when the foul state of the marriage and divorce laws of Prussia (which Bunsen has cited as the one of two grand blots on the Protestant world1) provoked a protest from the Lutheran pastors. The answer was an imperious edict from Bismarck, 1 Hippolytus, vol. ii.

suppressing their protest, commanding them to solemnise the adulterous unions, and ordering them to expurgate the church liturgy, so as utterly to suppress its implied disapprobation of the antichristian law and usage. In England, where a nominally Protestant, but Erastian Church is established by law, the healthy vitality of the national conscience is expressed in DisThe Dissenting Churches embody nearly or quite half the population, and give a place of refuge to honest and manly Christians. In Germany, Dissent is so insignificant as to be practically nihil. The pressure exists in full force there is not enough vitality to evoke this form of remonstrance.

sent.

Hence, with this State subjugation of the Church, and doctrine of baptismal regeneration, every German Protestant child is baptized in infancy, and is confirmed at the approach of puberty, before it is betrothed or conscripted. All are full members of the Church; all have been to their first communion; there is no church discipline in the hand of any spiritual court to deprive to deprive any of membership, although he become infidel, atheist, adulterer, or drunkard. Every member of the Church is, so far as ecclesiastical title goes, eligible to a theological professorship. The appointing power to theological chairs is virtually the State. There is no need whatever that a man be ordained to the ministry, that he have a saving, personal knowledge of the gospel, or make any profession of it. Rather is it necessary that he attain the proper academic degree, defend his Thesis theologica in a Latin disputation, get himself much talked of as a diligent linguist and student, and an adventurous, slashing critic; and that he be acceptable to the Government. The class of theological students, from whom the appointments to theological professorships most naturally are taken, does not pretend to be in any way more spiritually-minded than the body of University students. To require a credible profession of regeneration and spiritual life, as a prerequisite for joining a theological school (or for receiving ordination and a parish, even), would excite in Germany nothing but astonishment: it would be hard to tell whether the feeling of absurdity or of resentment would most predominate in the German mind at this demand. It is not meant that none of this class of students are devout, pray

1 Edinburgh Review, October 1880, p. 270.