own knowledge or will-so can it be neither shaken nor proved by the arguments of reason.*

But when we speak of the necessity of defending Christianity it is important, first of all, to confirm for believers, on the ground of reason, those truths which have already become their vital forces; after this it is important to prove the untenable character of the ever-newly-presented assumption that Christianity is in irreconcilable conflict with the civilization of the age, and that it is absurd in these our days to affirm that the heavenly dome still stands. The civilization of the age is a certain sum of knowledge and intellectual facilities which have been promoted and made the common possession of the thinking minds in the nation by the progress of the sciences, by the improvement of the mental faculties, and by the enrichment of the mind which art has produced. But knowledge and facilities are in themselves neither believing nor unbelieving; they are the possessions of the intellect and memory, while faith is a fact of the soul. And it is therefore the task of apologetics to show that the civilization of our age, which has been employed by unbelievers as a weapon of attack, can just as well be used by believers as a weapon of defense; that as faith is not a merely knowing or thinking, but is born in that center of our personal life whose ground is the will, so also can unbelief (that is, not the contraction of single theological points, but of the whole doctrine of the Gospel) not conceal itself under any pretended necessity of thought, but comes entirely from the will. It must be granted that this perverted direction of the will is very wide spread among the cultivated minds of the present time. But to wish to conclude from this that unbelief is closely connected with the civilization of the age, would be just as absurd as to charge this civilization with the mania of spirit-rapping or secret medicinal remedies.

Simultaneously with the proof that the irreconcilable contradiction between faith and civilization is a matter of merely empty talk, it will also follow that there just as little exists the necessity, which has been deduced from it, of seeking to counteract this alleged hopeless loss of the age to Christianity by invoking the protection of an external human authority, such as the Romish Church presents.

• Comp. Twesten, "Vorlesungen über Dogmatik," vol. i, 3d ed., 1834, pp. 335ff.

From what we have said, those most likely to attend apologetical lectures are the men in the Church whose disposition to believe has been brought into perplexity by the assurance and scientific display of the modern attacks on Christianity. From this it follows that the method of the apologists must be to indicate, often briefly and inadvertently, those things which, with him who stands fast in faith, must have the force of main truths and real demonstrations; and, on the other hand, to treat with special care those points which are most exposed to the attacks of the present day, and to use the weapons which the civilization of the age presents.

If we now apply what we have said to our special themethat the entire contents of revealed, Christian, saving truth are laid down completely and with divine propriety in the fortynine books of the Holy Scriptures-it is clear from the start that, to one who believes, this theme in particular will require no proof whatever. For both a knowledge of the contents of the Scriptures, (Rom. x, 14,) and the acknowledgment that these contents are given by divine communication, that is, by revelation, are necessary assumptions of faith; this is so very much the case that we cannot conceive of faith without it. Therefore, even in the prosperous times of the Church this foundation of faith has been regarded so very certain in itself that, taking our German Reformers as an example, we nowhere find an elaborate proof of this proposition.* Likewise the earliest teachers of the Church, such as Irenæus and Origen, have said so little of this self-evident proposition that our acute Lessing could be led into the remarkable error of supposing that the Holy Scriptures had never been regarded as a rule of faith until after the Council of Nice.† Calvin teaches expressly that the self-proof which faith has of the divinity of the Holy Scriptures the witness of the Holy Spirit in our hearts-is the only thing which has force; all other things are only additions and supplements to this. And even such an impartial witness as Goethe corroborates the profound and far-reaching

* Comp. Marheinecke, System des Katholicismus, II, p. 224f. 1810.

† Comp. the Refutation of Lessing, in Sack, Nitzsch and Lücke, über das Ansehn der Heiligen Schrift, p. 121ff. Bonn, 1827.

Compare Calvin, Institutio Religionis Christianæ, edit. Tholuck. T. I. P. 57ff Berol, 1846. Also Schleiermacher, der christliche Glaube, I, p. 112. Berlin, 1821.

truth of the Scriptures by saying in his autobiography, with special reference to the Bible, that no criticism will be able to perplex the confidence which we have once entertained of a writing whose contents have stirred up and fructified our vital energy by its own.*

Faith, from this stand-point, will also not be at a loss to account more specially for the ground of this confidence. (1 Peter iii, 15.) It will say, "The Scriptures have for me a divine authority, because they have arisen by God's giving the thoughts to the sacred writers, and then causing them to write them down." And if faith be questioned as to the ground of its support of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures, it will simply refer to the declarations contained in them. It will say, "I see in the prophets, the historians, and the poets of the Old Testament, and in the apostles and evangelists of the New, the purest will to say just what they feel; I see in them also a reverent submission to the truth which they proclaim, as if they had not received it from themselves, but from some One to whom they voluntarily subjected themselves. I nowhere see in them a disposition to exaggerate, and slavishly submit to, conscience by self-fabricated words. I see that they are chiefly simple-hearted and lowly-born men, whose sense of truth was not decomposed and dissolved by any false culture, or by any exercise in rhetorical, sophistical, and dialectic arts. I see in them, finally, a mighty and utterly unselfish desire of their spirit to help the men for whom they speak to the salvation of their souls. Comp. 1 Cor. vii, 35. And when these menwhom I must call holy men, because of such a pure effort, (2 Peter i, 21,) and for whose words and writing of them I can find no earthly motive, for they were confronted only by pain of heart at contempt, (Isa. liii, 1,) the hate of the multitude, (John xvii, 14,) and martyrdom,† (Luke xi, 50)-when these men say that the Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, (2 Tim. iii, 16; 1 Peter i, 10ff.;) when it is to them a solemn doctrine, (Deut. xxx, 11ff,) that God's word does not come like the oracular voices of the heathen from the air, nor

• Werke, XXII, P. 75f. Stuttgart, 1840.

† Comp. Menken, Versuch einer Anleitung, zum eignen Unterricht in der Heiligen Schrift, 3d ed., p. 21ff. Bremen, 1833.

Comp. Van Oosterzee, in Lange's Commentary on the Bible, in loco.

6

like the inspiration of the Pythian Apollo from the earth, and must be brought from far beyond the sea, but that it is produced in the heart and mouth of man; when the prophets always precede their statements by Thus saith the Lord,' and the apostles asseverate that they do not speak from human wisdom but by God's power, (1 Cor. ii, 4f,) I would call it blasphemy to stand out against all this with a hostile or doubting heart. I would do this all the more because the best witness of an inward event is he who has experienced it; and when I read the writings of the sacred authors I experience in my soul a confirmation which does not come from myself, that the same Holy Spirit which draws me to God must have produced these words: It is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth.' 1 John v, 6."

To the believer this proof from the declarations of the Scriptures will be sufficient of itself. But if we turn toward unbelief and the vacillations of faith, and therefore against the will whose peculiar power has become diseased, or even dead, and which cannot feel that immediate impression of the Scriptures any more, we will be met by this objection: "You are arguing in a circle by wishing to prove that the Scriptures are given by God, and then taking your proof from the Scriptures." This objection is sophistical, as will be plain on closer examination; for, in proofs from the declarations of Scripture, we have not yet appealed to the declarations of the Holy Spirit as such, but only to the words of credible men. But yet we would be satisfied if we succeed in determining the stand-point of faith, because unbelief, from its very nature, has no susceptibility of this demonstrative force; and in order to meet this objection on its own field, we would first of all proceed to answer the question as to what is the most general cause which leads men to oppose the divine origin and authority of the Scriptures, or even believe that they can do without them.

The cause with most men is, that they believe that every one finds in his own consciousness, even without the Scriptures, all the religious and moral truths which the Scriptures contain. In the last century it was found that a large number of religious ideas, as, for example, those of God's love, love of our neighbor, and the creation of the world by God, were already present in the consciousness of every thinking man. And,

according to the manner of that century, these ideas were regarded just as innate as philosophy, right, etc., which were spoken of as innate. From this notion of an innate religion, men began to play the master of the Holy Scriptures, and declared, among other assumptions, that what the Scriptures contained which did not harmonize with their own ideas was only the prejudice of the sacred writers and their accommodation to their times. By this means it was natural that the doctrine of the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures should be gradually reduced to a mere shadow, and it would appear that there was no need of the club-blows that Strauss has inflicted on this doctrine by his philosophical dogmatics in order to strike the shadow out of existence. If religion be innate, then there is naturally no need of a revelation, and therefore also of no inspiration. And that is now the stand-point of most of the opponents of the Gospel, who, indeed, would still be regarded religious.

But all that talk of an innate religion is an unhistorical fiction. Those religious ideas which are alleged to come into the world with man are not at all universally human, and therefore also not innate; but so far as they possess any inward truth, they are all derived from the Scriptures, and have only become so general just because the Scriptures have become a common possession of evangelized nations. If they were innate, then must their presence in the heathen world be proved; and if we grant that their reaching maturity in the rude nations would have been prevented by stupidity, they must at least be found. among the Greeks and Romans, those heathen nations which, according to universal consent, have reached the highest intellectual culture in all other departments. But how does the case stand with them? Quite apart from the specifically Christian doctrine of redemption by the Son of God, which nobody has yet dared to ascribe to natural religion, it is one of the principal maxims of that religiousness which is alleged to come into the world with man, that all men are brethren. But Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of antiquity, at whose feet even to this day every one sits who would make attainments in the knowledge of nature, begins his doctrine of the State by laying down the principle that some men are born to be masters and some to be slaves. The principle of universal fraternity is unheard of outside the realm of the Holy Scriptures; as in the