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quent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt.

If your American chief be a man of ambition and abilities, how easy is it for him to render himself absolute! The army is in his hands, and if he be a man of address, it will be attached to him, and it will be the subject of long meditation with him to seize the first auspicious moment to accomplish his design; and, sir, will the American spirit solely relieve you when this happens? I would rather infinitely—and I am sure most of this convention are of the same opinion-have a king, lords, and commons, than a government so replete with such insupportable evils. If we make a king, we may prescribe the rules by which he shall rule his people, and interpose such checks as shall prevent him from infringing them; but the President, in the field, at the head of his army, can prescribe the terms on which he shall reign master, so far that it will puzzle any American ever to get his neck from under the galling yoke. I cannot with patience think of this idea. If ever he violate the laws, one of two things will happen: he will come at the head of the army to carry everything before him; or he will give bail, or do what Mr. Chief-Justice will order him. If he be guilty, will not the recollection of his crimes teach him to make one bold push for the American throne? Will not the immense difference between being master of everything and being ignominiously tried and punished powerfully excite him to make this bold push? But, sir, where is the existing force to punish him? Can he not, at the head of his army, beat down every opposition? Away with your President! we shall have a king: the army will salute him monarch; your militia will leave you, and assist in making him king, and fight against you: and what have you to oppose this force? What will then become of you and your rights? Will not absolute despotism ensue ?

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JOHANN GOTTFRIED VON HERDER

(1744-1803)

OHANN GOTTFRIED VON HERDER was born at Mohrungen, East Prussia, August 25th, 1744-five years before the birth of Goethe, with whose great work as the regenerator of German literature, he was intimately associated. At a time when literary Germany was almost completely dominated by French taste, Herder turned from the artificiality of Parisian models to study the simplicities of the popular creative instinct, illustrated in such ballads as those of Scotland, and such lyrics as the 'Folk-Songs of Germany.' He taught Germany to study the Odyssey' and the 'Book of Job' and to look for models of perfection among simple and natural people rather than among the polished and polite. In place of the literary courtliness which Germany was attempting to imitate from Paris, he gave it the idea which made possible Goethe and Schiller. Herder's father was the schoolmaster of his native village. The family were poor, and Herder's education was obtained largely through his own exertions. After graduating in Divinity he was a teacher at Riga from 1764 to 1769. In 1771 he became Court preacher at Bueckburg, and in 1776, through the influence of Goethe, he was called to the same office at Weimar. He died in 1803, and on the cast-iron tablet over his grave were inscribed as his epitaph the three words: "Licht, Liebe, Leben "— Light, Love, Life! Had not Herder's influence as a reformer of taste made possible the best work of Goethe and Schiller, he himself might have ranked as the greatest literary man of Germany in his day. He was a poet of no mean talent, with an oratorical faculty worthy of his education and his gifts.

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THE MEANING OF INSPIRATION

(From a Sermon on Romans xv. 4-13)

ow what do we mean, my hearers, when we call the Bible the word of God? Do we mean that these are just God's thoughts, which he thinks upon this and that subject? Is it that he so speaks with himself? that this is his mode of conception? Is this what we mean? Not the least in the world. VII-157

With God, the All-Knowing and Perfect One, it is all one thought. He thinks without words, without a series of reflections. He thinks all things from the centre outward, and not simply as we think them from the outside. We learn everything through the senses, and therefore know them from without, from the surface, from one side. We learn first to think by means of speech, and from our youth up we repeat the words of others, and so think according to them. All general truths, all abstract propositions, all deliberations of the understanding can be entertained only through words. We speak with ourselves while we think; we reason with ourselves while we speak. But with God there is nothing of all this. He knows nothing of that weakness which demands words for thoughts; he thinks without the husks of words, without meagre confusing symbols, without any series of conceptions or classes of ideas. With him all is one single, perfect thought.

Every one who has understood me sees that the Bible is not called "The word of God" in the sense that it is a series of such thoughts as God speaks with himself, for God speaks not. Or as if it were the dialect of the gods and of heaven, as the heathen called that of their poets; for God has properly for himself no words with which he must reckon as with counters, and teach himself as with ciphers. And how nugatory now becomes the charge which is drawn from the lowliness of the words in which God is said to have revealed himself. Thou fool! so far as it pertains to God himself, even the highest, the most majestic, the most significant words are for him imperfection. They may be crutches on which we, limited men, can hobble along; but the Deity, who is all thought, needs them not. They are the tokens of our imperfection: and wilt thou lend them to the perfect God? Thou wilt listen to his thoughts, and what words are worthy of expressing them? Thou fool! before God there is no word, no speech worthy of him.

Now if we suppose that God wished to reveal himself to man, and yet otherwise than in his essential nature, how else could he do it but by human agency? How can he speak to man otherwise? to imperfect men, otherwise than in the imperfect, defective language in which they can understand him, and to which they are accustomed? I use far too inadequate a comparison for our purpose, when I say that a father speaks to a child only in a childish way; for between them both there still exists a

relationship. Father and child are yet both akin, who can think no otherwise than by words, and have a common language of reason. But between God and men there is no correspondence; they have, as it were, nothing at all in common as a basis of mutual understanding. God must, therefore, explain himself to men altogether in a human way, according to our own mode and speech, suitably to our weakness and the narrowness of our ideas; he cannot speak like a god, he must speak altogether like

a man.

Had this been considered, how could men have pried into so many useless subtleties connected with this subject-into mysteries and things which they absolutely could not understand? Let us take, for example, the history of the creation. The wisest, most learned, most experienced physiologists, if they are honest, have readily and openly acknowledged that they have not even advanced so far as to be able to conceive how it is possible for a material body to exist; much less, how it comes into existence; and more than all is it impossible for them to conceive how a spirit exists according to its inmost essence-what it is, and how it comes into existence. And if this is a matter absolutely inconceivable for man, in what way can he comprehend how a world, which was not, should be; that a world of living spirits should come into existence and continue, and that each one should in himself enjoy the whole world, and each thing in it be a world? What human understanding can comprehend this when it is so difficult for us even to seize it in our imaginations? What human speech can express it? How must God, therefore, in his own revelation concerning the creation, have been constrained to stoop far lower to our apprehensions than we do when speaking with children! And what foolish children are we if we rack our brains about that which is not at all for us to comprehend, and which God could not have revealed to us without our ceasing to be sensuous men and becoming as gods! And how wretched, therefore, are all our subtle queries and doubtings upon this subject, when we undertake to solve the origin of the world out of nothing, and speculate respecting time and eternity-how they separate themselves, and flow into each other; respecting the destruction and the end of the world; respecting the mode of the Trinity in God and his operations out of himself; respecting the essence of human souls and of all spirits; and on these subjects wrangle and charge each other with heresy, and thereon

oppose or mangle the Scriptures, when we should rather acknowledge that concerning all this we can know nothing, conceive nothing!

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If God has revealed himself to men, how could he do it otherwise than in the speech and forms of thought belonging to the people, the region of country, and the period of time to I which his voice was made known? Now it is obvious that the modes of thought and of expression are not the same in all nations, and still less in all ages. The Oriental expresses himself differently from the inhabitant of a colder clime; he has an entirely different world around him; he has gathered in his soul a treasure of entirely different conceptions; and through the training of nature around him has acquired an entirely different tendency, tone, and form of spirit from the inhabitant of the North or the West; and this difference extends throughout, from his physiognomy and dress, even unto the most subtle and hidden workings of his spirit, in the broadest manner conceivable. This point is too well known and avowed for me to enlarge upon it here.

Now this religion has been revealed in an Eastern land; how, then, could it be revealed except in a manner intelligible to Orientals, and consequently in those forms of thought prevalent among them? Otherwise God would have failed entirely in his object. Our Bible, therefore, carries upon every page of it all the traces of Oriental habits of thought. Its style, especially in the Old Testament, and for the most part in Job, the Psalms, and the Prophets, is full of lofty, bold, and fervid imagery. Even the history of creation is narrated in this elevated tone and garb; also the journeyings of the Jews through Arabia are recorded in this glowing and figurative language. Their history also and the records of their kings in Canaan, together with the writings of Solomon, all-all bear this character of Eastern floridness and picturesque drapery.

It is not well, indeed, my hearers, that we should in this way undertake to prove the divinity of our books; for on like grounds do the Turks claim the same thing for their own Koran, so poetically written. But it is still less fitting that we take occasion from this to attack or deride the divinity of our books. A little reflection will convince us that every one who wishes to be understood must adopt the style of his hearers, of his country, of his century; otherwise he becomes unintelligible. Now since

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