you will be, or the less superstitious. But if the fountain above be not fed, there will be no worship to flow from it, and your pure comprehension of God will be - but a vain image, before which no knee bows, no heart adores. There will be in your soul a statue of truth, beautiful and chaste in its proportions as the hand of a Praxiteles may chisel, but after all cold and lifeless; a representation in passionless marble of that whose greatest and truest beauty is life and action. The life of religion is the warmth and glow of feeling. The fire of fervid feeling radiates often from that phase of religion which enlightenment calls superstition! If superstition be fixed by the amount of knowledge, what is our relig ion but superstition to the angels, as the religion of birds toward their bird deity would be superstition to us? An infant's religion centres in its parents, and has no thought beyond them. Is not this superstition? Yet it is such perfect religion, that there is nothing left us but to imitate it. Wherever you find the human race, there is the same tendency to religion. Religion is as wide-spread as the atmosphere: it is like the clouds which swathe the whole earth with their moist garments, which send down at the pole the feathering snow-flake, or build up the sharp and glittering pinnacles of the iceberg, but at the equator temper the heat of a sultry sun, and glow in the leaves of the palm and the orange. It adapts itself to all parallels of latitude, and to all periods of time. Here it springs up in one form, there in another. Here it erects altars to Baal, there it kneels between the bare and empty walls of a Puritan church. Here it asks no other temple than the mountain peak, no other God than the golden sun; there it wreathes its spiritual yearnings into the fantastic spires of the Gothic temple, while within the spirit of God speaks through the arches in the pealings of organ-music, and the eye is filled by gorgeous garments and smoking censers, and the heavenly features of "the Mother of God."

Through all these forms there runs the same connecting line; under all these varieties there exists a unanimity. They are all expressions of the same burning want and weakness, they are all the product of a resist less tendency to combine certain attributes, and worship them as an independent being. It is the same cry to

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the Father of men which rises on the banks of the Euphrates and the Hudson; amid the din of gongs, or from the minarets of the mosque, or with the solemn bass of the organ. And is the whole human race deceived, and has Feuerbach alone, with his "left wing," found out the illusion?

The two chapters on the nature of man and of relig ion in general are simply introductory; but religion, in the common sense of the word, is annihilated long before we get through them. We have in them the pow der and shot, and we think, with such effective means, a man may knock down for himself; Feuerbach (his name is suggestive of his temper) does it for us in two parts, long and diluted. The first, interspersed with violent philippics against the old automaton, fills by far the larger part. On these two parts the author dwells with some complacency in his preface. He calls them respectively development and battle. "The development proceeds slowly, swiftly the struggle; for at each station the development is self-satisfied, but the struggle only at the end. Thoughtful is the development, but resolute the struggle. The development kindles light, the struggle fire; hence the variety of the two parts."- p. 13.

In accordance with the general principles already laid down, it is shown that the various doctrines of Christianity are natural suggestions of the human soul, and the inference is drawn, that such a religion must be a dream, an illusion. Christianity, to our minds, appeals with justice to her adaptedness to man's position, to her satisfaction of his aspirations in the future, as proofs of her essential truth. We have faith in a religion which assists our development, and contributes to our happiness; faith in the mutual correspondency between that and man, as between the rose, the light, the atmosphere and temperature of a northern climate. But, No! says Feuerbach; you dream, and that very correspondency demonstrates your illusion. What you imagine the gift of a superior wisdom springs spontaneously from your own desires, and you are the victim of a miserable self-deceit. He then lays bare the principles of human nature, and explains the office they have performed in religion. We are taught how the incarnation of God and the idea of God as a sufferer sprang from the wants of the affecVOL. XLIX. 4TH S. VOL. XIV. NO. II.

21

tionate portion of our nature. God as law, God the Father is the God of the understanding: God as love, God the Son is the God of the heart. We find discussed here, in accordance with the same principle, the doctrines of the Mother of God," of providence, of miracles, of faith, of regeneration, of celibacy and monasticism, of the Christian heaven and personal immortality. "We have now," says he in closing (p. 253), "reduced the superearthly, supernatural, and superhuman being of God to the component parts of man's being, as its own component parts. We have in conclusion come back to our beginning. Man is the beginning of religion, man the middle point of religion, man the end of religion."

The second part is a series of thunder-and-lightning chapters, in which Ludwig amuses himself by knocking in pieces our most disjointed structures of theological faith. He demonstrates the contradiction in our various doctrines and ceremonies. He has previously shown their natural origin; he now shows them to be essentially false. Blow follows blow, in such rapid succession, that, almost before we have had time to think, we are standing dizzied and bewildered, with the fragments of our old homestead scattered and smoking. We lay aside the book, with a sense of pity for its complete desolation. We feel that it would rob us of much that is dear, and give us nothing in return. We feel, too, that he has dealt unfairly by us. He has dragged up and galvanized doctrines which have been dead for ages; he has harped on points peculiar to sects, and made much show of dogmas which we esteem no part of Christianity. We are safe in saying, that the author of "Das Wesen des Christenthum" has studiously avoided discussing that which is commonly regarded by all Christians as the true essence of their religion. He has a specious frankness, which is the most dangerous weapon of a wily man, and a skill which mingles true and false that it may slay the two together. He either misunderstands or wilfully perverts Christianity, and, pretending to treat of its essence, fills his pages with ridicule of the errors that have been appended to it.

When we have protested against the fundamental affirmative doctrine of the book, we are ready to sanction much that follows. The weapons of his satire fall point

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less and harmless among us, for the dogmas aimed at have long been dead. The vigor and power of the attack we admire, and close the book with a conviction of the author's genius. To our minds, it is the sharpest, deepest, and most attractive exposé of theological error we have ever seen, and the controversialist may find there a store of weapons which, well used, will prove most effectual against the effete dogmas which burden Christianity.

H. D.

ART. VI. FURNESS'S HISTORY OF JESUS.*

WHEN, in the year 1836, Mr. Furness published his "Remarks on the Four Gospels," we well remember the delight with which we read those living pages. The book differed from every other work of criticism and commentary on the New Testament in this, that it trembled all over with life, vital in every part. It did not give us dead learning, it did not accumulate the dry details of antiquated criticism, but it seemed as if written by one who had just come from personal intercourse with Jesus himself. The acuteness of its observations illustrated many obscure points of the Gospels. The earnest interest which hung lovingly over every word and act of Jesus often detected what a less loyal and affectionate study had overlooked. Reading the book gave a new sense of reality to the whole of Christ's history. One felt nearer to Jesus, better acquainted with his character, and more intimate with that holy mind, in consequence of these studies of Mr. Furness. Upon those of us, especially, who were then young, this book made a deep impression, and we owe to it a large debt. In fact, like every live book, it made an epoch. It excited inquiry, opened new questions, and stirred the earth around the roots of old controversies.

After an interval of fourteen years, Mr. Furness speaks to us again, and again upon his favorite subject. We

* A History of Jesus. By W. H. FURNESS. Boston: William Crosby & H. P. Nichols. 1850.. pp. 291.

cannot expect a second book like the first. Only once in any man's life is he capable of writing out of such an overflow of thought and feeling. The second book will not make an epoch, but it will throw a steadier, calmer light on many points of interest. It is, as we might expect, written in a more equal, less excited tone. There is as deep an interest in Jesus running through it, and as earnest a desire to engage others in his story. But as in the first work we had the exuberant spring, with its multitudinous blossoms, and the joyous year rising like the ocean-tide around us, so now we have the calm days of autumn, its steady airs, its wide-waving harvests, and its fruits ready to drop into the lifted hand. Mr. Furness has more carefully considered his early theories, he has fortified some points and abandoned others, and now presents us in a compact form, not discussions, but results; not investigations, but conclusions.

In the same truth-loving spirit in which the book is written we wish to examine it. And if we devote more of our attention to fault-finding than to merit-finding, it will certainly not be because we undervalue the great merits of the work, but because we think that the times demand the examination of a special question in theology. This is the question of Naturalism and Supernaturalism, a question lying back of most other questions now mooted in theology,-lying behind the discussion of miracles, of the inspiration and authority of the Bible, of sin and salvation, of providence, faith, and prayer. Our view on this pivotal question colors necessarily our views upon these others, and determines necessarily, though often unconsciously, our conclusions concerning them. It is because this seems to us no mere verbal dispute, but a question of real differences of opinion, working a radical divergence of thought, that we think it deserves a new and thorough examination in this periodical.

And since Mr. Furness, with his usual frankness, has in the present work distinctly taken the ground of Naturalism, it seems to us that the notice of his book necessarily involves the examination of this, its fundamental principle, and furnishes a proper occasion for this inquiry. But we will first briefly state what we conceive to be the chief merits and defects of the work.

The merits of this "History of Jesus" are these. It