! "The sus girls' schools are one, and that the one is the boys' school." 66 These evils of an identical education the author maintains are naturally increased by co-education. Arranged as our colleges are for men, women cannot be subject to their regimen without serious injury. "It is one thing to put up a goal a long way off, five or six months, or three or four years distant, and tell boys and girls, each in their own way, to strive for it, and quite a different thing to put up the same goal, at the same distance, and oblige each sex to run their race for it, side by side on the same road, in daily competition with each other, and with equal expenditure of force at all times." Co-education, in his judgment, has not been the success which its advocates frequently claim. In proof of this he gives the statement of an intelligent observer, who had taken special pains to trace the post-collegiate history of female graduates, that "co-education of the sexes is intellectually a success, physically a failure." Such is a brief outline of this latest contribution to the much vexed question of female education. The poor health of American women is 1 already notorious, and their heritage of suffering is constantly being augmented for their descendants. If our educational methods are to blame for this, the sooner they are changed the better. Would not our educators do well to heed this plain utterance of an earnest and enlightened physician on a subject of such vital importance? We regard the publication, of this volume as admirably adapted to the present time. It is well-known that a new college for the higher education of women is soon to go into operation at Northampton, Mass. It has for its Trustees, Professors Tyler and Seelye of Amherst College, Professor Peabody of Harvard College; the State Secretaries of Education, White and Northrop; Rev. Phillips Brooks, Governor W. B. Washburn, and others. Such trustees will make a wise use of the principles which are set forth in this volume. They will probably organize an institution, combining the advantages and avoiding the evils connected with schools for the collegiate training of women. THE BIBLIOTHECA SACRA. ARTICLE I. THE FOUNDATIONS OF THEOLOGY SURE. BY THOMAS HILL, D.D. LL.D., FORMERLY PRESIDENT OF HARVard college. Ir is difficult for us to distinguish between our most simple and direct inferences and the perceived facts on which we found them; and this difficulty is as real in the case of sensible as of supersensible objects. Nor is it always important for us to make the distinction; it is, in many cases, enough for us to feel the certainty of our knowledge or belief, and the reality of our emotions, without asking the grounds. As Catullus sings: "I hate, I love; you ask why this I do? My torture only tells me that 'tis true." Sundry modern writers attempt to explain the instinctive desires and aversions on the ground of experience; Spencer calling in the experience of the ancestry to explain the fact that these desires and aversions are manifested at the very beginning of conscious life. The fact itself is patent to all observers, whether in animals or in new-born children. The appetites lead the animal directly, without tentation, to the actions which gratify them, very much as if the animal had an antecedent knowledge of the object, and of the gratification which would be yielded by its possession. In the child free to choose its mode of life the desire infallibly leads to the experience; and, although the knowledge is not innate, VOL. XXXI. No. 122. — APRIL, 1874. 27 it is what has been called inchoate; its foundations are in the soul, and it grows with our growth. Among the native cravings of the human soul is the craving for sympathy, for human society, which seems to imply, and which certainly develops in the child, at a very early period, a knowledge of human beings, and of its own human nature. We know the existence of our fellow men with a certainty like that of intuition or of direct sight. We are certain of the existence of beings with a nature fundamentally identical with our own-with thoughts and feelings, desires and purposes, and with a power of will like unto ours. The ground on which we base our certainty might be assumed, by some persons, to be the cumulative probability in favor of the hypothesis which would explain such an indefinite number of facts in our experience. But a child, certainly, is never conscious of weighing the probabilities whether his father or mother, his brother or sister, exist; nor does the mature mind look at it in that light. We know, of course, that there is every probability in favor of the proposition; but we drop the question of probability, and know the existence of other men as certainly as we know our own. This voice of authority within us is the unrecognized voice of the social instincts; its authority is recognized, but not its origin; that is, we do not here, any more than in other instances, argue consciously from the appetite to the existence of the object; yet it is the appetite that gives the intense faith in its desired object. Thus, also, our filial and our parental love, our craving for sympathy, our attachment to friends, our happiness at home, our gratitude to benefactors, our sense of justice, and other sentiments, give us, without conscious inference, a certainty in the existence of our fellow a certainty as immovable as that of our own existence. In a perfectly analogous manner the religious sentiments give to the soul that is vividly conscious of them a certainty of the existence of the objects of that faith. The existence of the religious sentiment is acknowledged by nearly every men - writer. Even Herbert Spencer, whose psychology is so inadequate to account for religious emotions, declares that contact for countless generations with the unknowable has produced a hereditary awe of the Ultimate Cause, so that men are now born with an aptitude for religious feeling, and that this native religious sentiment is ineradicable. But this sentiment, which Spencer confesses to be, in this generation, inborn and of the highest value, cannot possibly have the form assigned to it by that ingenious writer, of a mere awe of the unknowable. The unknown and unknowable cannot excite awe, for it cannot affect our feelings in any manner-a conclusion which would not be affected by conceding Spencer and Maudesley's doctrine of the hereditary accretion of our mental and moral powers. What is wholly unknown and unknowable to the race cannot affect the consciousness of an individual. Were Spencer right in making all religious emotion consist in awe of the Ultimate Cause, that awe would not arise from the contemplation of the unknowable, but of the known. In recognizing the existence of a cause, we just so far know it as a cause. This is precisely the way in which we know all that is known—as the causes of phenomena; we know the causes in the effects. Spencer says that our belief in an omnipresent, eternal Cause of the universe has a higher warrant than any other belief, that is, that the existence of such a Cause is the most certain of all certainties; but asserts that we can assign to it no attributes whatever, that it is absolutely unknown and unknowable. Yet in his very statement of its existence, he assigns to the Ultimate Cause four attributes, viz. being, causal energy, omnipresence, and eternity. And afterwards he implicitly assigns to it two other attributes-repeatedly expressing his faith that the cosmos is obedient to law, and that this law is of beneficent result; which is an implicit ascription of wisdom and love to the Ultimate Cause. By his own principles, it could be shown readily that these six attributes are absolutely known attributes, and that, therefore the being of God, in the Jewish and Christian sense of that sacred name, is the most certain of all certainties. For when we have arrived at the generalization that the whole universe is moving by intelligible law to the fulfilment of benevolent ends, it it impossible to refrain from assigning its origin to a Being Omnipresent, Eternal, Almighty, All-wise, and All-good. It has, indeed, taken a long course of culture, aided by the sublime word of Genesis, which Spencer ignorantly calls a Hebrew myth, to lead men to this clear perception of the presence of God in the creation; but this does not show that the idea is the mere product of culture. Some of the self-evident truths of mathematics have required thousands of years of the culture of mathematical genius to bring them now to light; yet they were true from before eternity. The unknown and unknowable are matters of absolute indifference to us; we can be made to feel concerning the unknown only by giving us partial knowledge, and awaking the hope of further discovery. The instincts of reverence and adoration are not called into action, as Spencer falsely supposes, by contact with the unknowable, but by what is known, and particularly by sudden glimpses of the indefinite extent of the knowable. The most profound emotions of the sublime are always called out, as Goddard has shown, by a sudden perception of the vast field accessible to us, and never by the perception that a field is wholly inaccessible. Thus with the sublime attributes of the Deity; the more profound our knowledge of the rational, intelligible order of the universe, the higher will be our amazement at his boundless reach of thought; the more full our appreciation of the beneficence of his work, the deeper will be our gratitude for his ineffable goodness; and the clearer our conception of the moral order of the universe and of the righteousness of its compensations, the lowlier will be our adoration of his holiness. When these emotions of adoring gratitude and wonder and praise are fully aroused in the soul, they give, without conscious inference on our part, a certainty to our knowledge |