INTRODUCTION TO THE AMERICAN EDITION.

THE favor with which " Essays and Reviews" a very significant volume with a very insignificant title-has been received on this side of the water, suggested the following reprint, with altered name, for American use.

The seven dissertations, on as many distinct topics of theology, which compose this volume, are severally the productions of English Churchmen, writing independently each of each, and unconnected, save by the fellowship of a liberal faith. Some of the writers occupy conspicuous stations, and are men of distinguished repute. Two are professors in the University of Oxford; one is professor in St. David's College, in Wales; and one is successor to the late Dr. Arnold, in the headship of the Rugby School. The names of Jowett and of Rowland Williams are favorably known to American readers in connection with a volume of "Theological Essays," edited four years since by Professor Noyes. That of Baden Powell is no less eminent in physical science than in sacred learning.

The news has just reached us of scholar. The University of Oxfor ments, and the cause of liberal ti advocate.

at death of this eminent of its brightest ornaf England its ablest

These Essays have a value distinct from, and transcending, that of the speculations or conclusions they embody. They represent a new era in Anglican theology. The topics here discussed are handled with a frankness, a breadth, and a spiritual heroism, long unknown to ecclesiastical England. The sincerity which speaks in them recalls the better days of a church, which in Catholic ages, and as a branch of Catholic Christendom, could boast such names as John Scotus, Anselm, Duns, Alexander of Hales, and Roger Bacon, and which numbers a More and a Cudworth among her Protestant divines.

The apathy into which the Church of England had fallen toward the close of the last century, her indifference to all theological inquiry, her barrenness of all theological learning, up to the time of the late Tractarian movement about a quarter of a century ago, are notorious and disgraceful alike to church and nation. It was during this period, precisely, -from the middle of the eighteenth century to the third decade of the nineteenth, that German theology, ranging through an illustrious pedigree of profound scholars, from Semler and Griesbach to De Wette and Ewald, explored every field of biblical, ecclesiastical, dogmatic inquiry, and accomplished its great revolution.

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In these investigations and their results, the Church of England had no part or interest, and no faith; regarding in her supineness every inquiry which did not presume the inviolable truth of her own prepossessions, and confirm the status quo of the canon and the text, as made in the interest of infidelity. The period immediately preceding this (17001750) was, notwithstanding the condemnation in which the author of the sixth of these Essays concludes the entire century, an era of wide and beneficent activity. It embraced the works of Samuel Clarke, the worthy compeer of Newton

and Leibnitz and Locke; it embraced the latter and liber writings of Whitby; it embraced the labors of Waterlan and Hoadly, of Bingham and Bishop Butler, of Lowth an Lardner and Prideaux and Middleton; it embraced the ear nest philosophy of Berkeley, and the mystic piety of Law.

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

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

Ir will readily be understood, that the authors of the ensuing Essays are responsible for their respective articles only. They have written in entire independence of each other, and without concert or comparison.

The volume, it is hoped, will be received as an attempt to illustrate the advantage derivable to the cause of religious and moral truth from a free handling, in a becoming spirit, of subjects peculiarly liable to suffer by the repetition of conventional language, and from traditional methods of treatment.