good that lies before us, as a free united people, seeking no sectional or class predominances; and enters into an unwise strife, pushed to the verge of treason, in behalf of human debasement as a basis for a narrow geographical and oligarchical supremacy. Let us hope that the intensity of this aberration is a symptom of its brevity. Like the Indian revolt, it will in due time give way; and imagination can hardly portray the grandeur of our westward march as a great UNION, until our noble states shall stand, hand in hand, smiling upon the shore of the beckoning Pacific. X. THE WESTMINSTER REVIEW, January, 1858.-1. African Life: 2. Spirits and Spirit Rapping: 3. Morayshire: 4. Shelley: 5. The Religious Weakness of Protestantism: 6. The Crisis and its Causes: 7. The English in India: 8. State Tamperings with Money and Banks. THE article on The Religious Weakness of Protestantism is remarkable. The Westminster's irreligion has usually a subdued scholarly vail of critique and scientific candor, by which it seeks to appear the resistless result of rigid à priori principles. But in this piece the unmitigated Thomas Paineism unmasks its impious death's head. While Protestantism is extending its gradual area by civic conquest over our hemisphere, recovering its lost theological grounds in central Europe, and preparing by increasing missionary energy, sustained by the predominating forces of Protestant civilization, to spread her principles over the Asiatic and African, as well as the European and American continents, this periodical has been for more than twenty years auspicating the decay of Protestantism, with a sonorous persistence unsurpassed since the days of the Aristophanic bull-frogs. ΒΑ. βρεκεκεκεξ κοὰξ κοάξ· Of his inauspicious prophecies of the downfall of Protestantism, the wish is the inspiration. But his croak will turn to a death-rattle, ages before the accomplishment of its omens. Protestant Christianity has in no age possessed such strength, with the elements of still increasing strength, both intensive and • We here add the very spirited substitute rather than translation, by Mitchell, of the imprecation upon the Attic frogs: Now fires light on thee, and waters soak; And March winds catch thee without any cloak, From the tail to the snout, Thou'rt nothing forever but croak, croak, croak! For all the unfortunates whose precincts are sadly infested by any of the genus croaker, we furnish the following supplication, from the same author, to be learned for quotation upon the proper occasion: My dear little bull-frog, do, prithee, be still, "Tis a sorry vocation, that reiteration, extensive, as at the present hour. It is stronger in its battle with Romanism; stronger in its battle with infidelity; stronger in its battle with heathendom, than at any former period of its history. If we look to our own country, the proportion of infidelity to Christianity at the period of our Revolution, when even Yale College had almost repudiated Christianity, was immeasurably greater than now. No great Christian organisms, auxiliary to our Churches, then existed; and infidelity was triumphant over a lifeless Church. Passing down to the period of our own recollection, since the time that Frances Wright unfolded her splendors in New-York, and was able to win so brilliant a satellite within her attractions as Orestes A. Brownson, infidelity, open and self-announced, has made no respectable demonstration. It has not a single university. It has not a single periodical that commands public deference. It has no commanding center of publication. It has no organization that faces the light of day. Theodore Parker alone, under guise of the Christian profession, assuming the ministerial name, and entering a professedly Christian pulpit, has, indeed, by force of rare personal talent, and by the prominent assertion of high moral aim, been able for a while to trumpet forth a modified anti-Christianity. He has for a while palmed an irreligion upon our public, by christening it religion, even an absolute religion. But a resistless wane is coming over the disk of even this luminary. It is impossible for blank naturalism, with all the aid of the popular topics of the day, to hold its listening congregations through the successive weeks of long years. Or if Theodore Parker can do this during his natural life, let him send forth his apostles and see whether, with the best average talent a ministry can command, naturalism could compete with the poorest Christian denomination in our American republic. And as to the philosophical socialists, who would found a society upon irreligion, we submit to them the following problem. Upon their profoundest theories the experiment has been tried some dozen times, under the ablest masters, under the fairest conditions, upon the free soil of our own virgin continent, and of all their labors not a shred remains, not a fragment of broken architecture to memorialize its beauty or its order. On the other hand, an ignorant and aged female, called Mother Ann Lee, founded, upon a religious basis, a small social system, amid a hostile community, under the severest conditions possible for human flesh and blood, with no philosophical theory, and excluding the possibility of self-perpetuation by natural posterity. Yet that system blooms in the freshness of its original creation. XI. THE BRITISH AND FOREIGN EVANGELICAL REVIEW, January, 1858.-1. Professor Baden Powell on the Study of the Evidences of Natural Theology : 2. Revision of the English Bible: 3. Miracles: 4. Pharmakides and the Ecclesiastical Independence of Greece: 5. Final Destruction of the Earth by Fire: 6. Kingsley's Two Years Ago: 7. The Holy Land: 8. Old Orthodoxy, New Divinity, and Unitarianism: 9. Sir William Hamilton on Philosophical Necessity, and the Westminster Confession. THIS elegant Quarterly seems to present to our American review writers, a medium for presenting their thoughts to the British Christian public. Of the present number, Articles 1, 2, and 9, are original, and very able. Of the remainder, No. 3 is from the Southern Presbyterian, No. 6 from the New-England er, No. 7 from the Christian Examiner, No. 8 from the Princeton Review, and Nos. 4 and 5 are from the Methodist Quarterly Review. Our own Review alone furnishes two articles; one by Mr. Baird of Princeton, and the other by Professor Cobleigh. The ninth article discusses Sir William Hamilton's views upon philosophical necessity and Calvinism; with much ability and erudition so far as the point of Calvinism is involved; with great bitterness so far as Sir William Hamilton or any other opponent is concerned, and with marked failure whenever the psychological doctrine of free-will is discussed. So many and so monotonously reiterated charges of blundering, ignorance, and wickedness, upon one who has so lately gone beyond the arena of selfdefense, the sod upon whose grave is yet so fresh, are very unnecessary. From the comfortable distance at which we stand from those venerable documents, the standards of the Scottish Church, we should have been prone to assume a priori that predestination and necessitarianism would stand as the Jachin and Boaz of the structure of their well-defined fatalism. Yet there are expressions which occur in these documents, which on the surface seem to justify Hamilton and Stewart in saying that they repudiate the doctrine of necessity, and affirm the principles of free-will and contingency of secondary causations. It is the purpose of the present writer, which he seems to accomplish with complete success, to show, historically, that beneath the surface, there is a meaning in those documents which is consistent with necessitarianism, and affirmative of fatalism. In all ages of its existence, theological fatalism seems to construct its nomenclature on the theory of Talleyrand, that "words are made to conceal our meaning." The Confession of Faith of the Church of Scotland says: "God from all eternity did, by the most wise and holy counsel of his own will, freely and unchangeably ordain whatever comes to pass. Yet so as thereby neither is God the author of sin, nor is violence offered to the will of the creature, nor is the liberty or contingence of second causes taken away, but rather established." Said Confession further saith: "God hath endued the will of man with that natural liberty, that it is neither forced, nor by any absolute necessity of nature determined to do good or evil.” At start, we may remark on the first of these extracts, that to affirm that God is the preordainer of sin, and yet not the author of sin, is as good as to affirm that a figure is square without right lines or right angles. It is saying that the subject, God, is and is not the same thing. A horse is black; yet so that he is no way sable, or dark colored, or otherwise than white. The reviewer assures us that "the Church of England writers of the last century, who belonged to the school of Whitby, Jortin, Tomline, and Mant," were "the most incompetent bodies of persons that ever undertook to discuss theological questions." We beg to be permitted to join this body of incompetents-incompetent to the task of affirming the primal contradiction of Genevan predestination. Our main purpose, however, in regard to the above passages from the Confession, is to lay before our readers their sub-sense of fatalism, as shown by this FOURTH SERIES, VOL. X.-21 author, overlaid with the verbiage of freedom and contingence. When the confession denies that "violence is offered to the will of the creature," it does not mean to deny that the creature's volition, in a given case, is decreed, fixed, and absolutely limited to be one sole certain way, with an impossibility of being any other way. It only means that such fixing or limiting that one way, annihilating all alteriety, is not violence. It is in accordance with the laws and nature of will; by which indeed it is alone possible that said sole volition should go forth. And when it is denied that "the liberty of second causes is taken away," it means that the liberty of choosing solely as it does and must choose-Hobson's choice-is not taken away. Just so a mathematical square is free; it has the liberty to possess four equal sides and four right angles. It has the liberty to be a square, to possess all the properties of quadration, to retain them unchangeable so long as it is a square. And when the Confession denies that "the contingence of second causes is taken away," it means that whereas some causes are in their own nature, in some sense, contingent, so God, in foreordaining everything, foreordaines them to be contingent. In what sense a thing pre-ordained and FIXED can be contingent, the Confession does not say, nor does our author explain. So far as we can see, just as the Confession's liberty is a liberty limited to a sole and singular act and course, so its contingence is a fixed contingence, a contradiction, a nothing in the world. Take next the second of the above extracts from the Confession. The contrast between the super-stratum of words and the underlying sub-sense is still more striking. One would suppose (with so great a master of thought and language as Sir William Hamilton) that there was a denial of the doctrine of philosophical volitional necessity in the words, "nor by any absolute necessity of nature." Our author completely fails in showing that this is not the sole possible force of the language. He only succeeds in showing historically, that the author, in words of that sole force, meant to cover another meaning. Under phrase of freedom, they intended to wrap thought of bondage. The words conceal the meaning. So far, indeed, do they carry this strange double entendre, that they appropriate the words to a meaning which they absolutely refuse to express. There is a necessity to use other words to impart to them a meaning they can never accept. The whole quibble consists in this. The Scotch doctors verbally oppose to each other the two terms necessity of nature and choice, as being in themselves antithetic. Necessity of nature appears in mere inanimate causes and causation; choice appears in living agents. The absence of the necessity of nature in the latter case, consists purely and simply in its being choice. Necessity of nature, in an event, is the absence of choice; choice is the absence of necessity of nature. So when they deny a necessity of nature they mean nothing in the world more than that the event is a choice and nothing but a choice, whatever choice may be. But this is not denying, so argues our reviewer, that in the very nature of choice the philosophical necessity of Edwards is a constituent. A distinction, Mr. Reviewer, without a difference. The most lifeless causation conceivable, has no greater "necessity of nature" than this, that the antecedent in the given case be limited to one sole possible consequent. Philoso phical necessity affirms this of will or choice, and so contradicts the language of the Confession in any of its possible meanings. The difference lies not in the necessity, but in the subject of the necessity. The two subjects are dead causation and choice; the natural necessity is in both cases the same. The reviewer uses language to imply that necessitarians hold to a freedom of the will, though a freedom of the will different from that maintained by "libertarians." But when we come to see the definition of the necessitarian freedom of the will, it proves itself a non-existence and leaves necessitarians deniers of all freedom of will. It is uniformly the liberty of doing as we will. But this is liberty of doing, not of willing. It is located out of the will. It is not a property of the will, but of something else, namely, a something which is not the will, but which acts according to the will. A liberty of the will which does not belong to the will, and is not a property of the will, is a contradiction. ART. XI.-QUARTERLY BOOK-TABLE. It is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth to have a vigilant eye how books demean themselves as well as men, and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors; for books are not absolutely dead things, but do contain a potency of life in them to be as active as that soul was whose progeny they are.-MILTON. I.-Religion, Theology, and Biblical Literature. (1.) "The Harmony of the Divine Dispensations, by GEORGE SMITH, F. A. S." (8vo., pp. 319. New-York: Carlton & Porter, 1857.) The design of Mr. Smith's able work is to trace, through the successive dispensations of God to man, the Scripture representations of the great work of redemption by the incarnation and atonement of the promised Redeemer. Commencing with the fall, these representations in symbolic form, or their reality in living form, stand at the center of Patriarchism, Mosaicism, and Christianity. The fall in Paradise was forthwith followed by the tokens of redemption. The promise of the "woman's seed" was God's prophecy of redemption to Adam. Adam's naming the woman Eve, or Life, was Adam's prophecy of redemption in the ear of the woman. Eve's exclamation, "I have gotten a man, even a Jehovah," was the woman's profession of faith that Jehovah was to become incarnate. The very expulsion from the garden was followed by a planting of the cherubim at its margin, not merely to exclude man from the entrance, but to open an access to him whose dwelling is "between the cherubim." Between these cherubim, as Mr. Smith traces the occult line of history, God dwelt, not momentarily, but through the whole period, and was approachable by the Church of the Patriarchal Ages. Those cherubim were not angels, as is often dreamed; but attendant symbols of the Divine presence. When Israel went down to Egypt, he carried the mediatorial cherubim thither in his habitation; and when Moses set up the tabernacle, he transferred (not originated) the cherubim to that abode. These Edenic symbols, traditionally retained among the fallen nations, have been found among the remains of their antiquity, as developed by modern re |