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it to us. If he fails in this, the Bible holds him accountable; and if his meaning is better than his words, let him look to it. We would set the most unlearned man in the church, being converted, to judge in this matter, and his judgment would be correct. Paul makes the Galatian converts, recently recovered from heathenism and nakedness, preeminently debased and foolish, the “Gallos indociles" of Hilary, judges of Christian doctrine, and thinks them competent; and John gives to the whole Christian brotherhood tests by which to distinguish the false prophets that had gone out into the world in his day. We have no disposition to charge Mr. Beecher with a conscious breach of good faith in retaining the position of an orthodox preacher of the Gospel. In his own estimation he is- we can easily believe — the very soul and centre of the last and divinest illumination — the incarnation of human progress-heaven-appointed iconoclast great prophet and apostle of universal enfranchisement; while in the church whose pastor, in his simplicity, holds on to the old truths, and carefully shuts the doors and windows of the fold against the "every wind of doctrine," and the hurricane of political agitation, he sees, with honest eyes, only "a green mantling pool of what they call orthodoxy, with a minister croaking, like a frog solitary." (Sermon in the "Independent," Oct. 11, 1860.) Men who turn aside from the simple truth of the Gospel are always under a delusion, especially if they be men of genius and a stirring eloquence. Seeing indistinctly, and not afar, in the dust which they raise, the whole world appears to be moving with them; or, if any stay behind, they are like the forsaken ark on Mount Ararat, from which every living thing has made haste to escape forever. So have we seen little children sailing smoothly down a stream, and thinking, in their simplicity, that the heavens and the great mountains moved with them-never dreaming of the possibility of danger. Alas, neither childish simplicity, nor force of illusion, can save them from the bitter end. The heavens above, and the great mountains on their everlasting foundations, will still remain, when they shall plunge down the fatal cataract, or disappear forever in the broad expanse of the dark and turbulent waters.

ARTICLE IV.

OLD UNITARIANISM AND NEW ORTHODOXY.

Ir anything is orthodox, it must be the theology of the Thirty-Nine Articles, and the piety that is nurtured by those articles cordially received; for example, Old English Oxford and its numerous sons who had been, par excellence, illustrations and defenders of the faith for several centuries.

If anything is new in this orthodoxy, it is the phase which has recently been given to it by certain Oxford Professors and others in the Church of England in sympathy with them, most of whom hold their honorable positions and draw their rich livings only as they swear by the old faith, which in these recent writings they are laboring to destroy.

If anything can be called old in so recent a thing as American Unitarianism, it must be what the denomination held thirty or forty years since in distinction from their current notions; or that which some few of their elders now hold in distinction from what their juniors generally hold and preach.

The new orthodoxy of which we speak is set forth in a volume of some four hundred pages, written by seven Englishmen, and entitled Essays and Reviews-a very neutral name for a very positive substance. While their ostensible object is, by a reverent yet fearless criticism, to strengthen the prevalent faith in Christianity by ridding it of some of its antiquated and rotten "evidential" supports, leaving its whole weight to fall upon, and thus strengthen the arch of its internal reasonableness or accordance with the "inner light" and "verifying faculty" of man, its covert intent is indicated by the fact that that irreverent freethinker, the "Westminster Review," immediately gave it an able and hearty, but withal satirical welcome, as having laid down principles which the inevitableness of logic would ultimately drive to their own destructive conclusions.

The "North British" and "London Quarterly Reviews " regard the book as an enemy sailing under false colors, and have accordingly opened their heaviest columbiads upon it; and their thunder has been reëchoed by lesser ordnance on both sides of

the Atlantic, down to a still running fire from our graceful, scholarly, but highly denominational neighbor, the "Church Monthly."

In a prefatory note, the writers solemnly affirm that "they have written in entire independence of each other, and without concert or comparison." Nevertheless, the reading public will be slow to believe that seven such essays from as many men in the Established Church could have fallen together thus in the form of a crystal, with its cutting point towards the very heart of the current religious faith in that church, without something equivalent to previous concert and comparison among the component particles. We have no faith whatever in such fortuitous generation. And this which we at first strongly suspected, is now distinctly affirmed by the "Church Monthly," professing to speak from personal knowledge.

It is not our purpose to add another to the numberless reviews' of this work which have already appeared, but the rather to quote so many characteristic passages from it as will give our readers a clear idea of its main tenor, and then to notice particularly how it has been received and treated by the two extremes of Unitarianism in this neighborhood, which process will also show how much more orthodox on some cardinal points is old Unitarianism than this recent orthodoxy. Dr. Hedge, of Brookline, a leader on the extreme left, or rationalistic wing of Unitarianism, hastened forward an American edition of the "Essays and Reviews," under the new title of "Recent Inquiries in Theology;" and in a brief but significent Introduction to the same, gives it his hearty God-speed in such terms as these. Referring to the late Puseyite controversy, he says, (p. xiii.)

"The full development and thorough application of the principles involved in it necessitate, as recent defections from the national communion in favor of Romanism have shown, the entire abandonment of the Protestant ground. The future of the Church is committed to another interest, and a different order of minds. The life of Anglican theology is now represented by such men as Powell and Williams, and Maurice and Jowett and Stanley. Its strains and promise are apparent in these Essays."

Of this monument which he calls the "Broad Church,” he testifies thus:

"Rationalistic it is, inasmuch as it is Protestant; for, of Rationalism, the only alternative is Romanism. Yet assuming in Christianity, itself the perfection of reason, and believing that the truest insight in spiritual things is where the human intellect, freely inquiring, encounters the Holy Ghost, and that such encounter is afforded by the Gospel, it goes about to analyze and interpret, not to gainsay or destroy; currently listening, if here and there it may catch some accents of the Eternal Voice amid the confused dialects of Scripture, yet not confounding the latter with the former; expecting to find in criticism, guided by a true philosophy, the key to revelation; in revelation, the sanction and condign expression of philosophic truth. May this spirit, which is now leavening the Church of England, find abundant entrance into all the churches of our own land; and may this volume, its genuine product, though very imperfect exponent, contribute somewhat thereto ! "

Thus explicit and cordial is the testimony of Mr. Hedge that this new leaven in the old English Church is kindred to his own, and admirably suited to help it rise. So short and direct. is the new highway opened from Oxford to Tubingen. This, then, is the latest, the present fashionable phase of Unitarianism in this neighborhood.

But how do these "Recent Inquiries" strike the minds of some of the fathers and elders in this denomination? Let Mr. Bowen, formerly editor of the "North American," speak for them. In the January number of that Quarterly he reviews this book under the running title, "The Oxford Clergymen's Attack on Christianity." Observe, he does not call it Essays and Reviews, or Recent Inquiries in Theology, but an Attack; and not an attack upon certain commonly received evidences, or upon certain doctrines of Christianity, but upon Christianity itself; and his whole paper, — which is one of the calmest and most comprehensive protests which the book has called out, treats it as a subtle and dangerous foe to the whole supernaturalism of the Gospel, and thus to all revealed religion. With the slight exception of a few lines, it is an article whose high religious tone and vigorous defence of miracles would abundantly satisfy the demands of our own journal. So far forth, it is Puritan, and worthy of primitive New England. But, by how much it is orthodox on the subject of the Bible. supernaturalism, by so much is it apart from the recent faith

of the denomination. By how much it approximates our own theological standpoint, by so much it widens the gulf between himself and the more numerous -not to say more popular — leaders of his denomination.

Let us now illustrate and fortify this point by quotations from the book, and from Mr. Bowen's review of it. Passing by many loose and ruinous principles concerning the interpretation of the Bible generally, we will examine more particularly its doctrine of miracles as developed in Baden Powell's article upon the "Evidences of Christianity," with some brief allusions to the views of his co-laborators, touching the supernaturalism of the Bible:

"What is alleged is a case of the supernatural; but no testimony can reach to the supernatural: testimony can apply only to apparent sensible facts; testimony can only prove an extraordinary and perhaps inexplicable occurrence or phenomenon. That it is due to supernatural causes, is entirely dependent on the previous belief and assumptions of the parties." (p. 121.) "The entire range of the inductive philosophy is at once based upon, and in every instance tends to confirm by immense accumulation of evidence, the grand truth of the universal order and constancy of natural causes as a primary law of belief; so strongly entertained and fixed in the mind of every truly inductive inquirer, that he can hardly even conceive the possibility of its failure." (pp. 122, 123.)

"The enlarged critical and inductive study of the natural world cannot but tend powerfully to evince the inconceivableness of imagined interruptions of natural order, or supposed suspensions of the laws of matter, &c., &c. . . Such would be the grounds on which our convictions would be regulated as to marvellous events at the present day; such the rules which we should apply to the like cases narrated in ordinary history." (p. 124.)

Is the Bible narrative an exceptional case? Then its miracles shrink from a scientific, critical examination, and retreat within the sacred precincts of mystery, thus:

"Yet there seems an unwillingness to concede the propriety of such examination, and a disposition to regard this as altogether an exceptional case. But, in proportion as it is so regarded, it must be remembered, its strictly historical character is forfeited, or at least, tampered with; and those who would shield it from the criticisms to which history and fact are necessarily amenable, cannot, in consistency, be