do not want, contribute nothing to the solution of any pending difficulty. The influence which they may exert,-that of sympathy and spiritual response,-can operate only in the way of diversion from the problems of fact and thought, whence the whole ferment comes. We are perpetually referred to the "Living Witness and Interpreter" of Divine things. That "Living Witness" we reverently own. But, for all that, the chronology and incidents of Matthew's and Luke's Introductions remain at variance; Galatians and Acts stand at issue as before; the Last Supper cannot both have been and not have been the Passover; and the prophecies of the Second Coming passed their date and outlived their meaning without fulfilment. In such matters there is no diviner interpreter than the pure and single eye of a truthful spirit, that can see things as they are, and has no optical tricks for either severing the harmonious or blending the contradictory. Mr. Maurice, addressing his brother clergymen, says:

"Why waste the short time in which you are able to work in speculation? Why argue and debate, when you might proclaim good news to your fellow-creatures? You talk of the value of testimony and antiquity in establishing certain propositions. Cannot you trust God to testify of them as He did of old? You say the evidence of miracle and prophecy is conclusive. Let it be conclusive. Then speak out the conclusion. Set forth the miracles as they are set forth in the Gospel, as witnesses of Christ's kingdom over men. Study the prophets, and learn what words they spoke to the people in their day respecting the living God and His government over men. See whether their words are not mightier than all the evidences that have been deduced from them." (No. II. p. 20.)

Excellent advice for an undoubting clergy among an undoubting though it may be a heedless-people !-only, in that case, quite superfluous, since such a clergy are not given to "speculate," or at all slow to "proclaim." But, as a remedy for shaken or undetermined belief, as an escape from the perception of difficulties and the force of discovery, the course recommended is morally irrelevant ;—ineffectual, if applied to a questioning people; if followed by a questioning clergy, dishonest. Were Mr. Maurice consulted by persons in doubt about the "Resurrection of the body,"—still more, had it lost (as is understood to be the case with many German divines) its decisive hold upon his own faith, we are sure he would not be content to go on "proclaiming ;" he would not set aside "antiquity" and its witnesses, in expectation that "God would testify;" he would have to "argue," probably even to "speculate;" and would find that a faith, once disturbed by legitimate intellectual processes, can be reinstated only by resort to them

again. It has been said, in benevolent apology for Mr. Spurgeon's pulpit style, "True, it has its taint of vulgarity: but vulgar people exist, and must have their religion.' It seems to be forgotten at the other end that men of letters and science exist, that hosts of academic and professional youth exist, and, being human, must have their religion. The culture of the age preoccupies their minds with habits of thought variously traversing the "message" of the Church, and with many distinct objections to parts of the Bible and the creed. Is no notice to be taken of this state of mind? Do you expect that, on hearing the message, it will die out of itself? Will you treat it as a delirium,—as a mere fretful illusion,--to be coaxed into cure by changing the subject and speaking home to another part of the nature? Or is all sympathy to be withheld from the mental strife of the intellectual classes? and are they to limp on as they can in the rear of a faith, that will not turn its face to answer them a word?

We should better understand the attitude of our "Tractarians" towards questions of critical and scientific theology, if their own faith were unconcerned in the issue of such inquiries. If they were prepared to say outright, "The Living Witness will in any case suffice for us: we want no outward testimony from other times to tell us what we know: be the Bible what it may, we love it simply because it communes with us in spirit and draws from us a deep response: but the revelation of God is eternal and depends on no book;" then certainly, critical problems would be indifferent to them; they might look past them, as not in the line of their religion; and very properly use such language as the following from the Religio Laici:

"Men may satisfy themselves,-perhaps, if I have time to give to the study, they may satisfy me, that the Pentateuch was the work of twenty men; that Baruch wrote a part of Isaiah; that David did not write the Psalms, or the Evangelists the Gospels; that there are interpolations here and there in the originals; that there are numerous and serious errors in our translation. What is all this to me? What do I care who wrote them, what is the date of them, what this or that passage ought to be? They have told me what I wanted to know. Burn every copy in the world to-morrow, you don't and can't take that knowledge from me, or any man. I find them all good for me; so, as long as a copy is left, and I can get it, I mean to go on reading them all, and believing them all to be inspired." (No. I. p. 25.)

If Mr. Hughes can be so independent of the date and authorship of historical books like the Gospels, he cannot, one would suppose, be particular about the trustworthiness of their narrative parts: for this surely depends a little upon the age

and person of the historian. However much the portraiture and words of Christ may carry their own credentials, the record of what happened to him, the birth and infancy, the death and resurrection,-owes all its value to the testimony on which it rests and loses its historical character if, instead of being contemporary and first-hand, it is the work of later anonymous compilers. Yet, with strange inconsistency, the author who is so free and easy with the witnesses, and cares not to ask who they are, rests his whole faith upon the thing attested-viz. that the Son of God became incarnate, being "conceived by the Holy Ghost, and born of the Virgin Mary." He distinctly says, "The Incarnation is for me the support of all personal holiness, and the key to human history" (p. 19). Is it nothing to him, then, from what hand he receives this key? Does he hold it as a mere working hypothesis, which, once started in the dark, recommends itself sufficiently by fitting the phenomena? Or, resting on it as a Divine fact, known historically or else not known at all, can he be indifferent to its solidity? Nor, considering the extent of the prophetical element in Scripture, can we understand how the "date" of books can be a small matter to an author who evidently identifies prophecy with prediction. How but by "date" do we know real foreannouncement from vaticinia post eventum? The truth is, this school has never succeeded in settling accounts between the Eternal Divine facts spiritually revealed by the ever-living Witness, and the historical phenomena of the past, which, however connected with religion, are cognisable only through human testimony. In the joy of having found the former, even Mr. Maurice forgets the different tenure of the latter, involves them in the same feeling and treatment, as if they, too, were entities, apprehensible to-day, independently of yesterday, and free from the contingencies of probable evidence. He wraps up in the same folds of ontological language the purely spiritual and the simply historical elements of the creed with the tacit feeling and assumption that the permanent carries the transitory not only into being, but into knowledge. The Personal life of God in the world, of which his sense is so deep, seems to guarantee for him the particular Divine acts. and manifestations enumerated in the Scriptures or the formularies of the Church and his one standing appeal to us is,"Believe in Him who is signified, and you will believe the signs." Yet it is plain that no prior apprehension of God would enable us to divine, before they came, the forms in which his agency would express itself; or, after they have come and been reported, to separate the threads of reality from those of fiction in a narrative of mixed tissue. For knowledge

of the Divine events, taken one by one, we are not less dependent on human attestation, than for the biography of an Emperor or an Apostle and it is vain to treat them as if they were deducibles from the primary spiritual truth, and sure to stand or fall with it. Frequent as this assumption is in the Maurician writings, there are times when the reasoning is just inverted; and we are told that, did we not know the facts enumerated in the Apostles' Creed, we should have no escape from atheism or pantheism. If so, the premisses of all religion are historical, not spiritual: the most tremendous consequences are staked upon the security of the history and, in place of indifference or disparagement towards a testing criticism, a consistent believer will rather hang upon its processes with vigilance at once anxious and hopeful. Our authors play fast and loose with these opposite lines of thought: at one time saying, "Let the critics have their way; God lives and will witness to Himself;" at another, "Take away from us the story of the miraculous conception, and we are stripped of our belief in a Living God."

It has always been the favourite logic of divines,-"Take your choice: either with us, or without God:" though ninetenths of the thoughtful portion of mankind have variously ranged themselves between the atheist and the orthodox, and made the interval habitable at innumerable points. Our new Tractarians, we regret to observe, are not ashamed of again plying the worn-out dilemma, and using the hobgoblin of Positivism, to drive people to the asylum of the Nicene Creed. "Which you please," they say to us, "either dead laws, or the Incarnation." Mr. Hughes distinctly asserts,-"With our Lord must go all belief in a personal God" (p. 14); and what he means by our Lord," is evident at once from the connexion, and from the following paragraph:

"This loyalty I could never have rendered, no man can ever render, I believe, except to a Son of man. He must be perfect man as well as perfect God to satisfy us-must have dwelt in a body like ours, have felt our sorrows, pains, temptations, weaknesses. He was incarnate by the Spirit of God of the Virgin. In this way I can see how he was indeed perfect God and perfect Man. I can conceive of no other in which he could have been so. The Incarnation is for me the support of all personal holiness, and the key to human history" (p. 19).

This astounding claim for the Incarnation,-that it alone discloses the personality of God, has often been advanced by writers like Dr. Newman (see his University Sermons), who make all determinate religion a matter of external authority: but comes strangely enough from those who insist on the eter

ness.

nal self-witness of God. We protest against its levity and rashIf it be true, our escape from "dead laws" is indeed precarious. For there is no guarantee for the alternative doctrine except the opening chapters of Matthew and Luke; whose narratives contain in themselves, and play off against each other, every conceivable difficulty that can bring suspicion on an historical relation: they contradict each other's chronology, genealogy, geography, and whole substance as well as order of both natural and supernatural events: they stand at variance with authentic secular history: they are without support from the other evangelists, even him who had taken Mary to his home; and reappear in no subsequent allusion throughout the New Testament writings, not excepting the very gospels in which they are found. Narratives of this kind, strongly impressed with a legendary character, in which nameable angels appear upon the scene, and men and women speak off-hand in original hymns, and public as well as private miracles surround the person of the future Saviour with an insulating glory, entail, if received, insuperable difficulties on the subsequent history, or, if critically examined, suffer greatly by comparison with it. Not produced till more than half a century from the incidents they report, not pretending to come from contemporary witnesses, though full of detail and speeches which even first-hand testimony could scarcely authenticate, they cannot for a moment be put upon the same footing with the accounts of the ministry of Christ. Yet this is the chosen ground on which to rest the foundation of all religion! The assurance of a personal God is to stand or fall with the massacre of the Innocents and the census of Quirinus!

But further, the plainest facts refute this claim for the Incarnation. Had the Jewish people, prior to the Advent, no knowledge of a personal God? Does the human conscience bear no witness to his Moral Government? and have the wise Heathens only dreamt, whom the shadow of guilt or the authority of goodness has startled into this belief? And surely the Apostle Paul was neither pantheist nor atheist yet there is not the slightest reason to attribute to him the doctrine expressed in the words, "conceived by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary." On this point, indeed, there is more than the negative evidence of silence. Both of the human lineage of Christ, and of the Spirit's relation to him, the Apostle speaks in terms which exclude the idea of miraculous conception: "The Son of God," he says (Rom. i. 3, 4), "sprung from the seed of David according to the flesh" (requiring Joseph as connecting link), and "declared to be the Son of God in power according to the Spirit of Holiness from the resurrection of the dead."