Absence of the Missionary Spirit.

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an organized form, and unfurled its own proper standard, we discover the same lack of the heroic virtues that marked the fathers of the sect. We find it so in America, we find it so in Europe. The rise of the Unitarian body as a distinct denomination was nearly coeval with the commencement of a period which promises to be one of the most wonderful in the annals of Christianity. The closing years of the last century ushered in a new age to the church,-a new age of activity and of conquest, when her sympathies and works of love would be seen, as they had not been since apostolic times, to embrace the wide world of humanity. We need not describe how the spirit of missions has spread from sect to sect until it has pervaded nearly the whole of Christendom, nor do we need to enumerate the noble institutions to which it has given birth in every Christian land, for the diffusion of light and liberty, or to tell of the glorious victories they have won in the darkest lands of Paganism.

But we may ask what part has Unitarianism ever taken in any one of these beneficent schemes, these crusades of Christian zeal and love? Individual members of the denomination, a Pierce, a Packard, a Tuckerman, have doubtless co-operated with them, but in proposing this question we refer to the body as a whole. We utter the simple truth when we say that it has never had, it has never sought, a place among those sacramental hosts that have been and are now seeking to turn the heathen from dumb idols to serve the living and true God. The fields on which Unitarianism is employing all its energies are the perfectly safe and comfortable ones of Protestant Europe and Protestant America. In this missionary age it could not avoid having its mission boards, or associations for "diffusing the pure light of rational Christianity," how comes it to pass then that its messengers are unknown in every heathen land. and have rarely, if ever, visited the poor and scattered frontier settlements of our own? "There never was a system"-said a Unitarian writer-"which bore so invasive a character as Christianity in its earliest days. Every preacher was a missionary, proclaiming the acceptable year of the Lord. We are sure, therefore, that the spirit of missions is the spirit of Christ." Now if Unitarianism be primitive Christianity, it must stand on the page of church history, for the astonishment of all thoughtful minds; first, that the bigoted and deluded professors of a corrupt and

* Within the last thirty years the English and the American Unitarians have each sent one missionary to India. But neither of them ventured beyond Calcutta, and we believe that both have long ago ceased from their work.

idolatrous creed went forth to convert the nations in the East and the West, that they boldly took up their abode in the darkest regions of the earth, amid filthy and savage cannibals, and after years of toil, privations, suffering, saw thousands of these once degraded barbarians elevated into the dignity and purity of Christian men; and secondly, that the only true Christians of the missionary age were the only men who took no part in the glorious enterprise.

Again we say, the fact is undeniable, and we ask how it is to be explained? It cannot be pretended that the door of entrance into the Pagan world is not open, for the missionaries of every sect have been on the ground for more than half a century, and have gathered hundreds of churches there. It cannot be urged that the Unitarians are too poor to bear the expense of such a work, for the denomination is in proportion to its size one of the wealthiest in Christendom. It surely will not be said that it is more important to utter a feeble protest against the unsound theology prevalent in the Christian world, than to convert the heathen, who are well enough off as they are, for this would look very much like setting aside that supreme command of the Author of Christianity, "Go, teach all nations." Is it owing to the pervading and incurable indifference of the Unitarian body of the moral condition and prospects of the heathen nations? Or is it to be ascribed to the secret but settled conviction, that if its missionaries were sent out to measure arms with the Brahmins and Boodhists of the East, or to convert the savages of Africa, they would find themselves, with their system of religion, really powerless for good? Be the cause what it may, the fact itself is beyond dispute that the spirit of Unitarianism, as the Unitarian writer before quoted sorrowfully confessed, is not now and never has been the spirit of missions; and it is equally certain that, to this hour, neither in Europe nor America has it given a solitary recruit to the company of heroic Christians who have borne the banner of the cross into Pagan lands, and the lamp of life to the darkest regions of the earth.

As we intimated in an early part of this article, not a few of the portraits in this volume are exceedingly venerable and lovely, and we were therefore not surprised to find a notice of the work in a rather "liberal" yet orthodox journal, in which the critic said that, on the whole, Unitarian and Orthodox piety seemed to be essentially the same, and that the one system appeared to be about as favourable to its culture as the other. With all respect, we insist that this judgment is unfair to orthodoxy, and it attributes to Unitarianism, i. e. the system as defined by its own modern

advocates, results in which it has no proper claim. It is a judgment founded on the biographies of men who, in that sense of the name, were not Unitarians; who, indeed, for reasons which we need not discuss, allowed themselves to be ranked with that body, but who in their views of the gospel and in their manner of preaching it were far more nearly allied to Trinitarian than to Unitarian Congregationalism.

We have only to add the expression of our unfeigned delight that Dr Sprague has been enabled to bring out this admirable volume even before the confusion and alarm of civil war had ceased to be heard in our land. It is a pleasing proof that his "natural force is unabated." And our hearty desire and hope is, that by the close of another year he may have it in his power to complete that noble array of Annals of the American Pulpit, which, we are confident, will secure to its author enduring usefulness and fame.

ART. VI.-The Incarnation: Was it necessary apart from the existence of sin?

History of the Development of the Doctrine of the Person of Christ. By Dr J. A. DORNER, Professor of Theology in the University of Göttingen. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1861.

Reformers before the Reformation, principally in Germany and the Nether lands. Depicted by Dr C. ULLMANN. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. 1855. The Life of the Lord Jesus Christ: a Complete Critical Examination of the Origin, Contents, and Connection, of the Gospels. Translated from the German of J. P. LANGE, D.D., Professor of Divinity in the University of Bonn.

IT

was quite customary in this country, not very long ago, to pronounce indiscriminate censures on the schoolmen, and to hold them up to derision. The question, "How many angels could stand on the point of a needle ?" whichi is the example given by Dr Thomas Brown of the frivolousness of their inquiries, must appear to every person acquainted with their writings to be as unfair a representation of them as the paring of a nail would be of the marvellous structure of the human body, or as a splinter of stone would be of the architecture of a great building. Many of the speculations of the schoolmen were of a high character, and such as could only have been undertaken by intellects of the first order, in vigour, in acuteness, and in capacity, for continuous and prolonged exertion. In these

respects, the writings of the schoolmen will never cease to command the admiration of all minds who are at once acquainted with, and qualified to appreciate them. By the very nature of their speculations, they did a great and a good work for the human race. In consequence of the abstract nature of their disquisitions, they were, generally speaking, allowed full scope by the church, whose interests were not affected by anything that lay wholly within the realms of the ideal and intelligible worlds. By exercising their mental powers on these high questions, they preserved alive, in all its sharpness of edge, if not in all its depth and breadth, the reason of the western world. This would otherwise have been softened, and relaxed, and benumbed by the torpedo strokes of infallibility, and by the demand of implicit faith in all matters of practical and concrete intelligence, and would consequently have been rendered incapable of starting up responsive to the great light of the Reformation, which, in happier times, was to shine upon the peoples who "sat in darkness."

1

At the same time it must be admitted, that even when they made matters of pure revelation the subject of their discussion, the schoolmen were essentially rationalists, they treated all questions deductively, and not inductively. Even in regard to the doctrines of Scripture, they were indebted for their conclusions fully as much to speculation as to exposition. They do not at first survey the matters of faith with the eye of faith, as something that was objectively one unchangeable, infallible, and divine, and then deduce inferences by reason from what faith has discovered. They first surveyed their subject in its separate parts by reason, and by a mental anatomy they abstracted all the parts from the whole, and dissected them separately, so that the result was a multitude of parts with no vital bond of connection, a number of branches, which formed not a living tree, a number of members, but not a living body. This defect of the scholastic mode of discussion has been strikingly represented by Bacon as one of the diseases of learning. The second disease," says he, "is worse in its nature than the former; for, as the dignity of matter excels the beauty of words, so vanity of matter is worse than vanity in words, whence the precept of St Paul is at all times seasonable: Avoid profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science, falsely so called." He assigns two marks of suspected and falsified science: the one novelty and strangeness of terms; the other, strictness of positions; which necessarily induce oppositions, and thence questions and altercations. And, indeed, as many solid substances

As Treated by the Schoolmen.

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putrefy and turn into worms, so does sound knowledge often putrefy and turn into a number of subtle, idle, and vermicular questions, that have a certain quickness of life and spirit, but no strength of matter or excellency of quality. This kind of degenerate learning chiefly reigned among the schoolmen, who, having subtle and strong capacities, abundance of leisure, and but small variety of reading, their minds being shut up in a few authors, as their bodies were in the cells of their monasteries, and thus kept ignorant both of the history of nature and times, they, with infinite agitation of art, spun, out of a small quantity of matter, those laborious webs of learning which are extant in their books. For the human mind, if it acts upon matter, and contemplates the nature of things, and the works of God, operates according to the stuff, and is limited thereby; but if it works upon itself, as the spider does, it has no end, but produces cobwebs of learning, admirable indeed for the fineness of the thread, but of no substance or profit.*

Never was there a better example of "sound knowledge putrefying and turning into a number of subtle, idle, and vermicular questions," than in the discussions of the schoolmen upon one of the greatest of all theological questions, THE INCARNATION OF THE SON OF GOD. The beauty and grandeur of this august subject were completely dissipated by its being subjected to every possible form of inquiry. Thomas Aquinas, for example, discusses the Incarnation under thirty-four greater divisions, called questions. Under these, he has no fewer than one hundred and eighty-seven lesser divisions, called articles. Under each article a separate head of doctrine is treated, both affirmatively and negatively, with the author's own conclusion or judgment appended. It will easily be conceived, that many of these questions were frivolous, and some of them by no means free of irreverence. "Was the Incarnation expedient? Was its principal design to remove original sin rather than actual? Ought the Incarnation to have been at the beginning of the world? Ought it to have been at the end of the world? Was human nature more assumable by the Son of God than any other nature? Was the flesh of Christ assumed from Adam? Was the flesh of Christ obnoxious to sin from his ancestors? Did Christ pay tithes in the loins of Abraham? Did Christ begin to merit from the first instant of his conception ?" This is a sample out of nearly two hundred questions on the Incarnation, which continued to be discussed by the followers of the schoolmen within the

* Bacon's Advancement of Learning, Bohn's Edition, r. 45.