priests and monks. There is nothing more sad in literary history than the fate of Henry Stephens. The work which he did in a single year as editor, printer, proof-reader, publisher, was enough to fill an ordinary life, to give an author enduring fame, and secure him wealth. Yet he worked constantly at this rate. from 1545 to 1580, was driven mad by pecuniary disappointment, and died in a hospital!

ART. V.-CHRISTIAN APOLOGETICS.*

BY HENRY B. SMITH.

THE Italian philosopher, Giovanni Battista Vico, the founder of the modern philosophy of history, and one of the ablest and most comprehensive of the philosophers of the eighteenth century, develops, in his Principles of the New Science, a theory of civilization embracing what he calls the Law of Returns. Each age runs its appointed course and dies; and after a long period there will be a return of the same process. Though this cannot be called a final law of history (since it neglects too much the law of progress), yet it shows us one of its marked conditions. At different periods, widely sundered, we find

* Apologetik. Wissenschaftliche Rechtfertigung des Christenthums. Von J. H. A. Ebrard, Dr. Phil. et Theol. 2 Theile. Gütersloh, 1874-5. System der christlichen Apologetik. Von Franz Delitzsch. Christliche Apologetik auf anthropologischer Grundlage. stark. Erster Band [all published], Frankft a. M., 1872.

Leipz., 1859.

Von Christ. Ed. Baum.

K. H. Sack, Christliche Apologetik. Hamburg, 1829. [Second edition, 1841.] Von Drey, Apologetik als wissenschaftliche Nachweisung des Christenthums in seiner Erscheinung. Mainz, 3 Bde. 1844-1847. (Roman Catholic.)

Werner Geschichte der apologetischen und polemischen Literatur, 5 Bde. 1861-67. Roman Catholic.)

Dr. Fr. Düsterdieck, Der Begriff und die encyclopädische Stellung der Apologetik two instructive articles in the Jahrbücher f. deutsche Theologie, 1866. Dr. Düsterdieck is a Consistorial Counsellor in Hannover.

Theod. Christlieb, Modern Doubt and Christian Belief. Trans!. by Rev. H. U. Weitbrecht, etc. New York, 1874.

Luthardt, Apologetic Lectures. Three series: On the Fundamental, the Saving and the Moral Truths. Transl. Edinb.

similar historic laws, though working under different conditions The early literature of Christianity was apologetic. The same is true of the present literature of Christianity in almost all its departments. We, like the early church, live in an apologetic era. There is hardly an effective theological work, we might almost say, hardly any great Christian discourse, which does not take on an apologetic stamp.

I.

Apology, Christian Apologetics (not yet to define it more precisely), is essentially Vindication. It seeks to vindicate, and in vindicating to establish, the value and authority of the Christian faith. It begins, in fact, with the Scriptures, the epistles, and especially the discourses, of Paul. In Justin Martyr, Athenagoras, and other Christian writers, it received more. distinct form, proposing to defend Christianity against all gainsayers. All that belongs to the proof of the Christian religion, and all that belongs to its defense, and all that belongs to its counter-attack against its foes, is a part of Apologetics. For Apologetics is not only apology, but onset. It cannot be content with repelling assault, it must assail in return, and dislodge its foes from their camp. It is war in its ultimatum—the breaking down of the strongholds of its foes. It cannot be content with anything else or less. And this must be so, from the nature of the case. The Christian faith, if anything, is everything. And hence, the ultimate object of Apologetics must be to show that Christianity is the absolute religion; that there is salvation. in no other.

We sometimes think it strange-it almost alarms us-that Christianity should be so desperately assailed; but when we come to think about it, it is the most natural thing in the world. Evil will always attack good; error instinctively assails the truth; sin, by its very nature, is opposite and opposed to holiness. Incarnate Love was crucified between two thieves; and the church cannot expect to be better treated than its Head and Lord-it is surely enough for the servant that he be as his Master. Men who cannot find God in nature, cannot find God in the Bible. Men who deny the supernatural, must consider all religious faith a delusion. The secularist who looks at everything sub specie mundi, cannot see anything sub specie æterni

Even a heathen might go on and find God, but a materialist must go back, deny himself, in order to find him. As long as there are sin and unbelief, so long there will be attacks on Christianity; and there must needs be a defense also.

And this, too, is to be considered: that as knowledge grows, as science extends, as the boundaries of investigation and thought are enlarged, man's restless and inquisitive intellect will always be framing new theories about something or other, or about everything. And each infant Hercules must first fight it out with his nurse. Christianity has bred all the new aspirants for omniscience; and the young men and women wish to show that they are wiser and stronger than the authors of their being. This, too, is quite natural. Nor is it all wholly sinful. These sciences and philosophies and criticisms have a right to be; and if Christianity cannot make good its ground against them— where they oppose it—cannot approve itself as wiser, stronger, and better-it must so far forth give place to them. If it cannot appropriate all that is good and true in them (however new it may be), and still preserve its lordly sway, then it is not the wisest and best system for mankind, and will give place to what is better. But it has the prescriptive right of possession and favor; its roots are imbedded in the depths of the broad earth, and wind round among its ribbed rocks, and its branches. wave high, overshadowing and fruitful, so that the nations of the earth lodge beneath them. And infidelity has got to dislodge them before it can even begin to build its own temple on and with the ruins. Neither the end of the world nor the end of Christianity seems to be very near yet; and there is still a fair chance that the world may end first.

The necessity and importance, now, of the diligent and specific study of Apologetics is seen in part just here, viz.: in this constant progress of the human race in knowledge and in aspiration; in the advance of the sciences and arts, of culture and civilization; in the successive and comprehensive schemes of philosophic speculation, wherein thoughtful men struggle with the grand problems of nature and of humanity, and try to solve them. What is the world? Whence is the world? For what is the world? Whence is man? What is man? and for what? What am I? Whence, and for what? These questions have stirred men's minds from the dawn of thought-elevating, perplexing

often confounding, yet always impelling them. In the darkness of the labyrinth which we call life, the groping hand has been ever in search of the clue no eye could see-feeling after God, if haply it might find him. What wonder if here. many go astray, especially those whose eyes are blinded by reason of sin. What a marvel, that, in spite of every defeat, and of innumerable false lights, the same search is going on from age to age! A new question for every new generation! Yea, a new question for every new soul, struggling in the throes of its higher spiritual birth.

And every new science and every new philosophy-still dealing with the same old, old questions-views them in some new light. And hence the necessity of a renewed, an honest, a patient investigation.

It is true that the questions are ever essentially the same: for God and man and the universe remain essentially the same from age to age; and the questions are ultimately about them and their relations. It is true that the substance of faith and the formal nature of unbelief remain the same, and that sin is sin, and holiness is holiness only, and forever.

But it is not true that the form of the conflict, or its weapons, remain, or can remain, the same; these change with the changes of age and nations and philosophies, just as much and as surely as do the armaments of war.

Hence, Apologetics as a system must, to a certain extent, be reshaped, in each century, with each new class of opponents, so as to adapt Christianity to each new age, and to exhibit its inherent superiority over all that can be brought against it.

And this subject is forced upon us anew every day, not only in works of learning and philosophy, but also in the current popular literature. Many a popular lecturer owes a part of his success to his covert, when not open, attacks upon the Christian system. This shape of evil, this substance of infidelity, often realizes the great poet's apt description of its progenitor:

"If shape it might be called, which shape had none
Distingiushable in member, joint, or limb;

Or substance might be called, that shadow seemed,
For each seemed either."

And the very fact, that infidelity is so subtle and so persuasive, is only another reason for studying it well and understanding its weapons and its arts.

II.

In discussing so wide a subject, there must, of course, be a selection of certain special points to meet the limits of an article in a Review. At present we propose to consider briefly the elements of the conflict-some of the different phases through which attack and defense have hitherto run, and a statement of the main topics embraced in a course of Christian Apologetics. And it will be found that there is in its career a kind of logical process-at any rate, such logic as there is in the development of a system of truth through and by antagonismswhich seems to be one of the laws of all terrestrial progress.

The term infidelity, in its most general usage, covers both skepticism and unbelief; it expresses both the state of doubt and the state of denial, which, though differing in some respects, are often passing over into each other. Doubt tends to denial; it is not always such. The state of doubt in respect to religious realities is different from, though often confounded with, that philosophical disposition which leads to inquiry and investigation; since the latter is chiefly intellectual, while the former is essentially moral, in its nature. When men come to doubt about or deny sin and judgment, the moral law and the moral law-giver, their moral perceptions are already obscured or benumbed. Infidelity consists in the doubt or denial of those moral and spiritual truths upon which moral judgment and personal accountability are dependent. Man is accountable for his belief just so far as any moral truth influences his judgment-just so far as his decisions have respect to sin or holi

ness.

In saying this, we would be far from asserting or implying that all objections to the Bible and Christianity are only signs of man's inborn and inbred corruption; that historical, philological, and even doctrinal criticisms, came only from a sinful unbelief; still less, that when reason and conscience speak, their utterances are all to be set down to the account of a godless rationalism. Far from it. There are undeniable difficulties in regard to history and science, which can be settled only by investigation. There are signs and wonders which would stagger any one, unless the need of them and their historic reality can be clearly evinced. Science has its lawful sphere.