IX. NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS, Prof. Goltz's Fundamental Truths of Christianity, Rodrigue's Origin of the Sermon on the Mount, III. ADMISSIONS OF PHILOSOPHICAL SCEPTICISM, VII. NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS, . Krauth's Berkeley's Principles of Human Knowledge, Zeller's History of German Philosophy, . THE BIBLIOTHECA SACRA. ARTICLE I. THEOLOGY A POSSIBLE SCIENCE. BY REV. THOMAS HILL, D.D., LL.D., FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF HARVARD COLLEGE. THERE have been in all ages speculative men whose philosophy has led them to deny the possibility of the human reason attaining to any knowledge of God. Sometimes they have built on atheistic axioms and denied the existence of divine things; sometimes they have been devout believers, and have simply said that the revelations recorded in the Old Testament, and in the New, are the only possible sources of religious knowledge. Some of the great men of France during the last century inclined strongly to the opinion that matter, and forces inherent in it, constitute the sum total of the universe. But the fact was forced upon their attention that in all nations and tribes of men there are religious ideas, more or less distinct; and also that religious opinions easily accepted by children, cling with extreme tenacity to the adult mind; so that they themselves could with the greatest difficulty shake off the belief of their childhood. They attempted to account for these ideas by declaring them the product of the imagination, stimulated by terror at the manifestation of the destructive forces of nature. This ascription of the origin of religion to terror could have been founded upon only a very VOL. XXXI. No. 121.―JANUARY, 1874. 1 careless survey of human nature. It is quite true that fear, or terror, frequently develops religious feeling; but it does not create religious ideas; and faith in God is frequently clearest and strongest in souls that have, through that faith, become entirely devoid of fear. This French theory is now abandoned, even by those who hold to the materialistic philosophy, and it is admitted that terror is as apt to destroy all faith as to develop it. In the first half of the present century Auguste Comte published his system of Positive Philosophy. It has found few disciples; and the vagaries of Comte's later years, when he became, as sober English sense would declare, insane in his worship of mankind in general, and women in particular, have weakened very much the direct power of his name. Yet his writings at one time exerted a great influence; and some of the clearest English and French writers of our day owe to him, indirectly, more than they, perhaps are, themselves aware. Comte's view of religious ideas is that they are an illusion of childhood, outgrown under proper education; and replaced, at first by metaphysical notions concerning physical causes, afterward by an entire suspension of judgment in regard to all questions concerning the origin, or causes, of phenomena. Sensible phenomena themselves are, in his philosophy, the only known, or knowable, things; and he pushes this doctrine so far as, in one direction, to make the mathematics merely an experimental science of measurement; and, in another, to forbid astronomy to meddle with the motions of the fixed stars, because that motion is not sensible to the unaided eye. Things manifest to the senses are the only proper objects of human thought, and the only possible materials of knowledge. The sole work of science is, therefore, to group observations in such wise as to record them in the briefest possible formulae; the accuracy of which is to be tested by seeing whether they embrace also phenomena afterwards observed. According to Comte's pure doctrine, therefore, he and his |