really possesses all the attributes here ascribed to him, it would ap pear necessary that so wise and good a Being should have a nearer relation to his creatures, and give them some surer guide in reference to divine things than human reason, which teaches so many various and inconsistent doctrines, and which, beyond the limits of Christianity, has never yet presented the idea of God which Christian deism contains. The rationalist acknowledges the objective nature of morality; but for his certainty on this point he is indebted to revelation, and yet arbitrarily rejects the doctrines of the fall and of redemption through Jesus Christ. In this way he is led into another difficulty. Whence is evil? the rationalist is obliged to refer it to God, that through the struggle between good and evil the former might be promoted. Whilst the denier of a revelation makes God the author of evil, he gives no explanation of the manner in which evil can be rooted out of the heart of man. His blindness on this point arises from his having no deep and proper knowledge of good or evil. The positive part of rationalism thus consisting of Christian doctrines deprived of their glory and consistency, is equally unsatisfactory for the human heart and human understanding, particularly in reference to the doctrine of evil.

The rationalist undertakes, however, to prove, not only that Christianity is improbable, but that it is contrary to reason, and entirely inadmissible. In this effort its weakness is most clearly exposed. It proceeds from the principle that God never works without the intervention of secondary causes, and therefore an immediate revelation is impossible. Revelation can only be mediate. and consist in a development of what already lies in the nature of man. Hence arises the distinction between naturalism and supernaturalism; the former regarding every religious communication as mediate, consisting in the development of what is in man, the latter maintaining an immediate communication of divine truth, not derived from the human mind itself. The rationalist assumes that God, at the beginning, formed the world as a machine, with whose powers, having once set them in motion, he never interferes. This view is in the first place false, but admitting its correctness, the conclusion drawn from it by the rationalist is by no means necessary. For, granting that God does not interfere with the world, it does not follow that he cannot and will not. At most, the improbability, but not the impossibility, of an immediate revelation fol lows from this view.

But the view itself is false; God is not a machinist, who, having finished his work, retires behind: the life in the universe cannot be regarded as absolutely distinct from the life of God. God continues and supports the world by a continual creation, for such in fact is preservation. The life of the world is the breath of Jehovah; its active powers, the working of its omnipresence; the laws of nature are not therefore fixed once and for ever. Augustine says, Lex naturae est voluntas Dei, et miraculum non fit contra naturam, sed contra quam est nota natura. The laws of nature are

mere abstractions, which men make from the usual operations of God. It can, therefore, by no means be said, that his unusual operations, as in immediate revelations and miracles, are violations of the laws of nature. There is no essential difference between immediate and mediate operations; it is merely the difference between unusual and usual. And if God would reveal himself as a living and personal Being, these extraordinary operations of his power are essential, as they contain the proof that nature is not a piece of dead mechanism.

But the rationalist also endeavours to show the improbability of a revelation upon moral principles He says it would prove that God had made man imperfect, if later communications and revelations were necessary. But in this objection it is overlooked that man is not now, as he was originally created. In his primitive state, an immediate revelation might not have been necessary, but in his fallen state the case is essentially different. The rationalist further demands, why was the revelation not made immediately after the fall, before so many generations had passed away? To this we may answer, that God appears to have determined to conduct and educate the whole race as an individual, and in the idea of education lies that of gradual progress.

Finally, it is objected that the revelation is not universal. In answer to this we may say, that the difficulty presses the deist as much as the Christian, because it affects the doctrine of providence. The deist makes religion and refinement the greatest blessings of men; but why has God left so many ages and nations destitute of these blessings? If the deist must confess his ignorance upon this point, why may not the Christian? Besides this, Christians themselves are to blame, that the revelation has not been more extensively spread; why have they only within a few years awaked to the importance of this work? And why do the rationalists, of all others, take the least interest in it? It may further be remarked, that the New Testament does not teach that those who have never heard the Gospel are (on this account) to be condemned. The apostle says that God winked at the times of ignorance, that those who sin without law shall be judged without law. And it may be hoped, as Christ is the only means of salvation, that those who have not heard the Gospel here, may hear it hereafter. Peter says. that the Saviour communicated the knowledge of his redemption. to those who had died before his appearance.

See in answer to Roehr's Letters on Rationalism, Zoellich's Letters on Supranaturalism, 1821; and see Tittmann on Naturalismus, Supernaturalismus, and Atheismus; Leipzig, 1816.

Bockshammer's Revelation and Theology, Stuttgart, 1820.

ESSAY XXII.

TRANSCENDENTALISM.*

Ir is, we think, undeniable, that since the death of Doctor Thomas Brown of Edinburgh, metaphysical research has been at a stand in Great Britain. In the southern part of the island this had been the case for a much longer period, but the sharp and sceptical enterprise of the Scotch kept philosophical debate in motion for a time, so that a sect was formed, and we speak as familiarly of the Scotch school as we do of the Pythagorean or the Eleatic. But that line seems to have reached its term, and the few who publish at this time are either the lowliest compilers from Stewart and Brown, or, as is more frequently the case, such as have gone off in a direction altogether different, in search of a profounder philosophy. Of the latter sort there are some among ourselves, and we have it now in view to point out some of the causes which may account for the essays to introduce a modified transcendentalism

In America, the earliest school of metaphysics was founded by the followers of Locke; and, with the clew of this great inquirer in his hand, Jonathan Edwards ventured into a labyrinth from which no English theologian had ever come out safe. By the just influence of his eminently patient, and discriminating, and conclusive research, this greatest of modern Christian metaphysicians put his contemporaries and their descendants upon a sort of discourse which will perhaps characterise New England Calvinism as long as there is a fibre of it left. In speaking of Edwards, we distinctly avow our conviction that he stands immeasurably above many who have followed in his steps, and attempted his methods. If the species of reasoning which he introduced into American theology is susceptible of easy abuse, and if, in fact, it has been abused to

* Published in 1839, in review of the following works:

1. "Elements of Psychology, included in a Critical Examination of Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, with Additional Pieces. By Victor Cousin, Peer of France, Member of the Royal Council of Public Instruction, Member of the Institute, and Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy in the Faculty of Literature. Translated from the French, with an Introduction and Notes, by the Rev. C. S. Henry, D. D.”

2. "Introduction to the History of Philosophy. By Victor Cousin, Professor of Philosophy of the Faculty of Literature at Paris. Translated from the French, by Henning Gottfried Linberg."

3. "An Address delivered before the Senior Class in Divinity College, Cambridge, Sunday, 15th July, 1838. By Ralph Waldo Emerson."

disastrous ends, we rejoice to acquit this great and holy man of willingly giving origin to the evil. And in what we shall cursorily remark concerning New England theology, we explicitly premise that we do not intend our Congregational brethren indiscriminately, but a defined portion of them, well known for many years as daring speculators. The theology of this school has always been in a high degree metaphysical; but the metaphysics is of a hyperborean sort, exceedingly cold and fruitless. In the conduct of a feeble or even an ordinary mind, the wire-drawing processes of New England theologizing become jejune and revolting. Taught to consider mere ratiocination as the grand and almost sole function of the human mind, the school-boy, the youth, and the professor, pen in hand, go on, day after day, in spinning out a thread of attenuated reasoning, often ingenious, and sometimes legitimately deduced, but in a majority of instances a concatenation of unimportant propositions. It has too often been forgotten by the disciples of this school, that a man may search in useless mines, and that it is not everything that is worth being proved. Hence the barrenness and frigidity of the sermons which were heard from the pulpits of New England during the latter half of the last century. Many of these, and many of the dissertations and treatises which poured from the press, were proofs of remarkable subtilty and patience of investigation, and showed how easy it is to draw forth an endless line from the stores of a single mind. For, in this operation, it was remarkable that the preacher or philosopher relied almost exclusively on his own stores. There was little continued unfolding of scriptural argument, and little citation of the great reasonings of ancient or modern philosophy. Each metaphysician spun by himself and from his own bowels. The web of philosophical argument was dashed with no strong woof from natural science, embroidered with no flowers of literature. Where this metaphysics was plied by a strong hand, as was that of President Edwards, it was noble indeed; deriving strength and honour from its very independence and self-sufficiency. In the hands of his son, Dr. Edwards, there were equal patience, equal exactness, equal subtilty, but no new results: still there were undeniable marks of genius; as there were also in the controversy which then began to be waged among the dwindled progeny of the giants, on the great questions of liberty and necessity, moral agency, and the nature of virtue.

But when the same products were sought in a colder climate, and from the hands of common and unrefined men; when every schoolmaster or parish clergyman found himself under a necessity of arguing upon the nature of the soul, the nature of virtue, and the nature of agency; when with some this became the great matter of education, to the neglect of all science and beautiful letters, then the consequences were disastrous; and a winter reigned in the theology of the land, second only to that of the scholastic.

age, and like that dispersed only by the return of the sun of vital religion.

In the hands of a subtle errorist, such as Emmons, these metaphysical researches led to gross absurdities, some of which still survive. We believe a few of the elder and less sophisticated preachers of New England are to this day teaching, and that their staring auditors are to this day trying to believe, that the soul is a series of exercises; that God is the author of sin; and that in order to escape damnation, one must be willing to be damned. Others, running away with an error less innocent because lying nearer the source of moral reasoning, and less alarming in its guise, reasoned themselves and their hearers into the opinion, that all sin is selfishness, and that all holiness is the love of being in general. Taking the premises of the great Edwards, they deduced a system of false theology, which under its first phase as Hopkinsianism, and under its second phase as Taylorism, has been to our church the fons et origo malorum, and which, in union with the Epicureanism of the Paley school, has assumed the name of Calvinism to betray it to its enemies.

It is only great wisdom which can avoid one extreme without rushing to the other. The golden mean, so much ridiculed by zealots, is precisely that which imbecility could never maintain. In philosophy, as well as in common life and religion, we find individuals and bodies of men acting on the fallacy that the reverse of wrong, as such, is right. Human nature could not be expected to endure such a metaphysics as that of New England. It was not merely that it was false, and that it set itself up against our consciousness and our constitutional principle of self-love; but it was cheerless, it was arctic, it was intolerable: a man might as well carry frozen mercury in his bosom, as this in his soul. In a word, it had nothing cordial in it, and it left the heart in collapse. If it had remained in the cells of speculative adepts it might have been tolerated; but it was carried into the pulpit, and doled forth to a hungry people under the species of bread and wine. No wonder nature revolted against such a dynasty. No wonder that, in disgust at such a pabulum, men cast about for a substitute, and sought it in tame Arminianism or genteel Deism.

The calculating people of our country, in certain portions of it, have long been enamoured of a system of ethics which is reducible to the rules of loss and gain. It is much more level to the apprehensions of such to say that two and two make four, or that prodigality makes poor, or that doing good makes profit, or that gain is godliness, or that virtue is utility, than to plead for an imperative law of conscience, or for an eternal distinction between right and wrong, The former systems came home to the business and bosoms of the calculator. Though he had learned to speak evil of Epicurus, yet he clasped Paley to his bosom; and as all men admitted that this philosopher and divine was a mighty reasoner, and a fascinating writer, so the calculator went further, and