and Leibnitz and Locke; it embraced the latter and liberal writings of Whitby; it embraced the labors of Waterland and Hoadly, of Bingham and Bishop Butler, of Lowth and Lardner and Prideaux and Middleton; it embraced the earnest philosophy of Berkeley, and the mystic piety of Law..

A marked difference in the character and aims of leading Churchmen, divides, as Mr. Pattison admits, the second half of the century from the first. To the writers above named succeeded a generation of men who brought quite other powers to quite other tasks. With one or two honorable exceptions, like that of Herbert Marsh, whatever of learning or of insight English theology then could boast was outside of the Anglican Church. The problem which mainly occupied the theological mind of the time was the attempt to prove the truth of the gospel by demonstrating an external relation between it and God. Christianity, whose fundamental postulate is the inner light by which it manifests itself as the truth of God, was advocated on the ground of certain facts, which, if true, would prove God to be its Author, and belief in it obligatory on pain of damnation. The student of the history of opinions might trace here a legitimate result of the then prevailing philosophy of Locke. A germ of mischief lurked in the immortal "Essay," whose fructification had so infected the intellectual atmosphere of the time, so vitiated its conceptions, so dimmed and confused the consciousness of God, that, instead of the divine Inpresence and informing Word of the old theologians, a prodigy in nature was held to be the only possible mediator between God and man, the only possible voucher and vehicle of revelation. Christianity was to be received on account of its miracles, not the miracles on account of the more commanding truth of Christianity.

Nor did the decline of faith stop here. The very being of God was no longer a self-evident truth, but a question of logic,

to be tried and settled by the understanding. The living God was become a probable being; belief in God, the result of induction. To crown all, morality itself, the absolute right, was virtually denied, and moral obligation reduced to the expediency of obeying a being who possesses the power to harm us "in another world." And since the existence of such a being, for the human subject, was supposed to depend on a demonstration, moral obligation ceased, according to this view, for all whom that demonstration should fail to convince. The religious philosophy of unbelief reached its climax in Paley, exhibiting in him the strange phenomenon of a right-minded, Christian man, a preacher of the gospel, endeavoring to rear a system of ethics on a virtual negation of the fundamental distinction of right and wrong; a result commensurable only with the recent attempt of Mr. Mansel to base religion on Pyrrhonism.

The practical evil attending this degraded theology, the apathy and irreligion of the "Georgian era,” found a corrective in the rise of Methodism. That new dispensation of the gospel re-acted with healing power on the Church. Its intellectual aberrations encountered a check in the new turn of religious thought which dates with Coleridge. The " Aids to Reflection," fragmentary and unsatisfactory as a system, contained in its fruitful suggestions the germ of a new life, whose development is now in progress.

Another contemporary re-action, of a more demonstrative kind, is that represented by Dr. Pusey, and popularly known by his name. But this movement, whose tendency is rather liturgical than theological, diverges too widely from the providential current of the time, and the genius of the people, to be any thing more than an episode in the history of the Church whose theoretical contradictions it has served to illustrate, and whose order it has so profoundly agitated. 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 strain and promise are apparent in these Essays.

The term Broad Church has been used to designate the new phase of ecclesiastical life, whose characteristics are * breadth and freedom of view, an earnest spirit of inquiry and resolute criticism, joined to a reverent regard for ecclesiastical tradition and the common faith of mankind. The spirit of this theology is at once progressive and conservative; careful of all essential sanctities, careful also of the rights of the mind, of the interests of science, and the "liberty of prophesying;" carefully adjusting old views with new discoveries, transient forms with everlasting verities; regarding symbols and "Articles" as servants of thought, not as laws of thought; as imperfect attempts to articulate truth, not as the measure and gauge of truth.

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; reverently 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!

F. H. HEDGE.

BROOKLINE, Aug. 14, 1860.

THE EDUCATION OF THE WORLD.

BY FREDERICK TEMPLE, D.D.

IN

Na world of mere phenomena, where all events are bound to one another by a rigid law of cause and effect, it is possible to imagine the course of a long period, bringing all things, at the end of it, into exactly the same relations as they occupied at the beginning. We should, then, obviously have a succession of cycles, rigidly similar to one another, both in events and in the sequence of them. The universe would eternally repeat the same changes in a fixed order of recurrence, though each cycle might be many millions of years in length. Moreover, the precise similarity of these cycles would render the very exist ence of each one of them entirely unnecessary. We can suppose, without any logical inconsequence, any one of them struck out, and the two which had been destined to precede and follow it brought into immediate contiguity.

This supposition transforms the universe into a dead machine. The lives and the souls of men become so indifferent, that the annihilation of a whole. human race, or of many such races, is absolutely nothing. Every event passes away as it happens filling its place in the sequence, but purposeless for