6 Impeachments of his Belief in Revelation. 491 nent like Dr. Stahl, or even upon their endorsement by a number of journals attached to the same line of ecclesiastical and secular politics. The chosen chairman of the German Evangelical Church Diet (Kirchen-Tag) is, no doubt, to be regarded as speaking, not in his public and representative, but in his private capacity, when, in his reply to the Signs of the Times, he arraigns Bunsen as a worshipper of Rousseau, St. Goethe, and St. Lessing. On the other hand, it is not to be denied that, by his unmeasured and unqualified eulogiums upon the polished French savage, the great pagan poet of our times, and the German Lucian, who, in his Nathan the Wise, attacked Christianity on the stage, our author had laid himself sadly open to the bitter taunt. When, too, Stahl asserts, that in his Hippolytus, Bunsen no longer stands on the ground of the Christian Revelation, but, by his translation of the Biblical expressions for the supernatural out of Semitic into Japhetic language,' has resolved the essential doctrines of Christianity-including the Trinity and the Incarnation, for instance-into certain general ideas of the philosophizing reason, we must sorrowfully own, especially with the light cast upon the former treatise by the book before us, that there is far too much truth in the indictment. The British Quarterly Review, in common with several others of the Christian journals of this country, uttered the note of warning at the time of the appearance of that remarkable, but painfully dubious production. Even Dr. F. W. Krummacher, a man of well-known evangelical sentiments, who in the Stahl-Bunsen controversy, with which Germany has been convulsed during the past year, has taken up a kind of mediating position, with a strong leaning, however, towards the side of religious liberty, reluctantly admits that the champion of that great cause holds very low views of revelation. Indeed, it is evident that on this head, with the exception of the Rationalists, now, happily, only a rump, Bunsen, on his return to his native land, has found himself quite isolated. The men of the school in which he was trained have, for the most part, either died off, or have been carried along by the sweeping reaction which has set in during the interval like a strong flood tide. Faith in positive Christianity, and in the Bible as the miraculous record of a no less supernatural revelation, this faith, once the rare exception, is now, happily, the almost universal rule amongst the German divines. Unfortunately, along with this revival of the religious spirit of the Reformation, there has also been an alarming re-awakening of the old Lutheran intolerance, which * Bunsen und Stahl. Zur Verständigung über den neuest Kirchenstreit. Berlin. 1856.' Rationalist indifferentism was thought to have lulled into an everlasting sleep. Startled by this strange apparition, especially when viewed in connexion with the headlong Romanizing tendencies of this New Lutheran party, and with kindred phenomena in other lands, the Chevalier, whose native instincts in favour of freedom of conscience had been greatly strengthened by his having resided successively in the city of the Pope and in the country of Milton and Locke, had scarcely set foot upon the soil of his fatherland when he resolved, though it should be but single-handed, to beard the resuscitated monster. He published that epochmaking work-as the Germans agree in calling it-The Signs of the Times. We were not amongst the last to do justice to its very great merits, notwithstanding some leaven of errors previously rebuked in our pages; for we saw in it, too, another and a holier leaven, which has worked most mightily for good, and the fermentation caused by which still continues. It would have been well if Bunsen, flushed with his success in this field, had not fancied himself called to undertake another, and a very different achievement. Perhaps, verging as he is towards seventy, it was hardly to be expected that he would all at once. unlearn the transcendentalisms and rationalisms imbibed in the days when Eichhorn and Paulus were deemed, in Germany at least, the dii majores of Old and New Testament criticism. But it argues a want of discrimination not to have distinguished better between the two really opposite phases of the reaction than he seems to have done. That bigotry and superstition have reappeared in the wake of the restored faith in the supernatural, is an old phenomenon, which ought not to have led so profound a student of history astray. That it has unhappily done so we attribute especially to the fact, that in the New Lutheran faction, though made up in great measure of quondam Rationalists of the first water, the loudest, if not exactly the most trusty, champions of orthodoxy, and at the same time the most virulent enemies of the sacred cause he has most at heart-viz., liberty of conscience-are to be found. Their newborn idolatry of the letter has generated, as usual, the other extreme; and furbishing up all his old Rationalist weapons, which perhaps otherwise might have been left to rust, he has stepped forth as its iconoclast. The result is a work which, whilst it bears ample marks of the new era in German theology, in the concessions which it makes both in matter and in style to the more positive beliefs of the time, is yet manifestly an elaborate attempt to lead it back to Schleiermacher, or even beyond him. The author having lost his latitude in the new circum stances in which he suddenly finds himself after a long absence Bunsen's Pantheistic Bias. 493 from his native land, and being unable himself to go forward, passionately calls upon his countrymen to hark back. What adds to the oddity of the case is, that his heart is after all with the very vanguard, and it is only his intellect that is in the rear. His head cannot clear itself of the cobwebs of an exploded philosophy, or, perhaps, there is no man living better fitted to be the lay reformer of his countrymen, the Ulrich von Hütten of the nineteenth century. The present work makes us more angry than ever with Rationalism, for giving so fatal, a warp to so fine a mind and so noble a nature as Bunsen's. It abounds with the loftiest sentiments most eloquently expressed, sparks of the choicest wisdom set in purest gold. But, alas! the trail of Pantheistic speculation dims all that is brightest and fairest, and the stock petitio principii of Rationalism, that nothing which human reason cannot grasp can be entitled to belief, meets us either openly or covertly at every turn. The God whom Bunsen finds revealed in all history, in the same sense and at best only in a lower degree than in the Bible, is, so far as we can see, the Great Reason of the Chinese; and he is incarnate in all mankind no less than in Jesus Christ, only that in Him, as the leader of the race, the ideal man, this identity of nature with the Godhead attained to distinct self-consciousness. It is the old bait: Ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.' The Hegelian apotheosis of man, the doctrine of human omniscience, as at all events our destiny, even if modesty must admit that we have not quite reached the goal as yet, this is what underlies the whole. As a consequence we have the reduction to a minimum, if not to nil, of the supernatural element in Scripture, as something which the great 'I' cannot make out, and which, therefore, must be got rid of somehow or other. For this purpose we see once more dished up the cold crambe of the great discoveries' in biblical criticism made by Eichhorn, Hitzig, Knobel, Ewald, et omne genus id, with the addition of a few original ones by way of garnish to set them off, or of zest to get them down. It must be granted that the talented maitre d'hôtel has shown much tact in seasoning these somewhat stale delicacies so as to hit the popular taste. He has avowedly aimed to bring down the results arrived at by the researches of his favourites to the level of the commonest understanding. Indeed, it is this which constitutes the distinctive feature of his work, and which gives it more importance than-viewed simply in a controversial aspect-it would otherwise possess. In raising once more the drooping standard of Rationalism, his tactics evidently are to appeal to the reading public at large against the ever more and more unfavourable sentence of the schools. Learning has become orthodox, so that heterodoxy has no other chance than to invoke the echo of the erudite unbelief of former days, which still lingers amongst the crowd. Illuminism, checkmated in the academical senates-witness Herzog's Protestant Theological Encyclopædia, with its hundred professorial pens, of which six volumes are already published, has descended into the streets, and it is Bunsen (proh! pudor) who heads the new revolt. That in spirit and in candour he contrasts very favourably with some former leaders, we gladly concede. But, in plain terms, that is our view of the significance of his book. The following passage from his Preface will afford any thoughtful and attentive reader, we imagine, some inkling of his stand-point in relation to what all, save our modern Gnostics, understand by revealed religion: 'Let us consider the problem before us more closely and in a more concrete shape We have before us a world-historical development of enlightened individuals (Personlichkeiten) and nations during almost three thousand years before Christ,* from Abraham onwards, and during eighteen centuries after Him. Mankind's consciousness of God (Gottesbewusstsein) throughout this development is grounded on the assumption of eternal laws regulating the moral Cosmos. The faith of all historical religions flows from this assumption of a moral, living order of the world, apprehended in God, according to which the good is at the same time the only true, and the true the only good. 'Here five questions force themselves upon our attention: First, Is this faith actually attested in the world's history according to the facts in our possession? Secondly, Do the phenomena of this consciousness of God develop themselves in an organic series? "Thirdly, Is Christianity really the religion for the world? Fourthly, Can its present ecclesiastical formulæ and forms be regarded as normal and healthy? Fifthly, Will the devotional element-religion considered as worship-cease, and philosophical contemplation be its heiress? Should the first two questions be answered from the stand-point of universal history in the affirmative, two truths of immense significance would be acknowledged; one relating to the destiny of mankind, and another which concerns the divinity and the laws of the moral Cosmos. For, if the first question be replied to in the affirmative, it must at the same time be owned by every man who thinks logically, that that consciousness of God and that faith before spoken of is an innate common-good, the inheritance of mankind, not something accidental or conventional, but something original, and accordingly that it is and abides a perpetual necessity of mankind. This is Bunsen's chronology, founded on the break-neck speculations propounded in his Egypt. We, of course, do not answer for its correctness. History identical with Revelation. 495 'If the second question be, in like manner, answered in the affirmative, it must be acknowledged, according to a like inward necessity, that the consciousness of God is not merely a phenomenon of finite existence, and accordingly nothing more, perhaps, than a subjective belief, but that there corresponds to it an objective truth. In that case there is revealed in the history of the world nothing less than the Divinity itself, and the laws of the intellectual Cosmos are just as positive, and still more comprehensible, than the laws which regulate the movements of the heavenly bodies; they are divine, like those of the physical Cosmos, and within the cognizance of our intellect, just as that is. 'Supposing the third question also to be answered affirmatively, and the acknowledgment made that Christianity, as revealed in the Gospel, is the true religion, we thereby acknowledge also the fact, that it cannot but prove itself true philosophically, no less than historically. The recognition and presentation, as truths of reason, of the doctrines historically revealed therein, must be the scope of the philosophy of the intellect, and their realization as such in the State must be the final purpose of revelation and of history-or Christianity is not true. But its study in the light of the world's history proves it to be true. 'Accordingly the fourth and fifth questions also are answered, viz., in the negative. Thus the partition-wall between History and Revelation, between Reason and Faith, falls to the ground. But in like manner also must be given up, as wholly inadequate, every view according to which the historical facts of the religious development would be destitute of any other value than an elementary and pedagogic one. Thus, then, down goes Scholasticism in the first place, both that of the Greek and Latin Churches, and that of the Protestant, the Lutheran especially; and, in like manner, the dream of Romanticism and the Middle Ages. But not less does the Vulgar Rationalism of the last century fall to the ground, which sees in Revelation, just as in the whole of history, nothing more than outward facts, just as though there could be a higher revelation of reason than that which we find in history. In the next place must be given up, as unfruitful, all unhistorical philosophy of religion, no less than the unphilosophical treatment of religion as though it were an outward history or outward institutions. But the chief thing is the downfall of every pretension on the part of any outward institution to the possession of infallible authority for the truth of the present formula and forms, in so far as, although in conflict with history and philosophy, they claim to be essential. But there stands unshaken, and surrounded with a glory never beheld before, the most ancient truth; and four eternal realities present themselves in their full divine import. First, Christ, as the personal realization of the idea of humanity. Secondly, the moral and rational Personality, as the subject of the religious consciousness, aware of its responsibility to God. organizing itself synodically and nationally, in other words, humanity, Thirdly, the Congregation, K K 2 |