church history, in short but characteristic and pointed sketches.. This indifference of Neander however to the beautiful as such, is fairly balanced to a great extent by the advantage on the other hand, that he does not allow himself to be repelled, like polite wits and worldlings, by the homely and poor estate, in which the Divine is often veiled upon earth, but knows how to appreciate the heavenly treasure in earthen vessels, the rich kernel beneath even a rough shell, or as he himself says in relation to Tertullian, "discerns the stamp of divinity in real life and brings it into view from what serves to obscure it in the present world."

From the same point of view lastly are we to judge also of Neander's style; which moves, heavily forward, as is well known, with tedious uniformity and wearisome verbosity, without any picturesque alternation of light and shadow, without rhetorical elegance or polish, without comprehensive classification, like a noiseless stream over an unbroken plain, and so far can by no means be recommended as a pattern of historical delineation; but which on the other side again, by its inartificial naturalness, its contemplative Gemüthlichkeit, its quiet presentation of the subject in hand, interests sound feeling and forms a true mirror of the finest features of the great man's character, his simplicity and humility. What is right here appears to us to lie somewhere in the middle, between the unadorned and uncolored plainness of a Neander and the dazzling brilliancy of a Macau lay.

In spite of all the faults now mentioned, Neander still remains, when we take all together, the greatest church historian which the nineteenth century thus far has produced; great too especially in this, that he never allowed himself, with all his reputation, to lose the sense of that sinfulness and infirmity which cleaves to every work of man in this world, and with

Preface to the second edition of his "Antignosticus or Spirit of Tertullian," p. xi. Comp. also the striking remarks of Hagenbach, 1. c. p. 589, f., who for the completion of historical science rightly demands, that it "should take up in a living way the most different impressions of all times into the mirror of the fancy, copy the past with artistic treedom, create it as it were anew, and breathe into long since departed states the power of a fresh life, without suffering itself still to be blinded by their charm. This is the bond of poetry with history, towards which the modern age strives." Comp. the touching close of his Words of Dedication to his friead Dr. Julius Müller, in the second edition of Tertullian, written one year before his death: "although with you I well know, that no man is worthy of celebrity and honor, that in all we know or do we are and remain beggars and sinners."

2

all his comprehensive knowledge regarded himself, with right self-appreciation, as among many others a forerunner merely of that new creative epoch of Christianity, old and yet forever young, towards which he so gladly stretched his vision, with the prophetical gaze of faith and hope, from the midst of the errors and confusions that surrounded him in the present. "We stand," says he,3" on the confines between an old and a new world, which is about to be called into being by the eternally old and eternally new Gospel. For the fourth time a life-epoch for the human race is in preparation by means of Christianity; we can furnish accordingly in every reipect but pioneer work for the period of the new creation, when after the regeneration of life and science the mighty acts of God will be proclaimed with new tongues of fire."

Mercersburg, Pa.

P. S.

Preface to his Leben Jesu, 1st ed. p. ix, f. VOL. IV.NO. VL.

37

CHURCH SKEPTICISM.

WE said in our previous article, that the church as a divine constitution, embodying and thus making continuous the force of the incarnation, must ever work as a supernatural principle, taking up and incorporating into itself, by virtue of its own power, the entire life of the world, which as natural cannot by any process within itself reach or even apprehend the supernatural. Under this aspect we have conceived the church to present herself as an object of faith in the Creed. She comes from above, challenging our regard as containing in herself the full revelation of the kingdom of God. The whole force of the new creation in Christ, becomes operative in her bosom only, as the proper channel of its continuation, and the living organ of its development.

This whole view, it is plain to be seen, bases itself upon the fact, that in the incarnation the possibility of this is in some way made real; for if we have here no supernatural force entering in a real and living way into the constitution of nature, answera ble to this purpose, we must discard both the church and the incarnation as proper objects of faith, at least in the sense of the Creed. If the incarnation does not prove itself to be a divine fact, containing in itself the sure evidence of its perpetuity, and necessitating by its very existence and nature an organism like that of the church, to carry forward and accomplish its own design by being permeated at every point with its own force, we are absolutely compelled to consider the church a human institution merely, capable, it is true, of being an object of experience, but never an object of faith. In this latter view, of course, the church cannot as in the Creed stand over against the world, by carrying along in her own bosom a new order of life, but must be taken to be the product only of the world's life, humanizing but never in the proper sense christianizing. The law of her being, in this sense, must be simply the natural workings of that power of subsumption, by which the free selfconscious activities of the individual are made to subserve necessarily the interests and advance the development of humanity as a whole. Instead of being a new creation, filled with the powers of the world to come, and whose atmosphere is holiness, which is in itself far beyond the power of human will or reason, she must be taken to be but a confederation, having for its highest end the advancement of civilization and the culture of morality. Her cultus can thus have no divine significance

or force, into which we can enter in the full submission of faith: neither can her unity in this sense be at all organic or even

necessary.

If we adopt this view, it is evident that we must completely surrender our faith, for this involves in its very nature the consciousness of the presence of such a new order of life, as that contained in the church, according to the idea of the creed, together with an acknowledgment of it in the way of submission to its authority; for only in this submission is there any possibility of our becoming subjects of its redemptive force."Believe and be baptized, and ye shall be saved," is the divine command, based upon the divine commission going before; which gives us an absolute assurance, that the kingdom of God is actually at hand for the purpose of this salvation. The objective itself here determines the act of faith, making the very trial of faith to consist in an unreserved acknowledgment of its force. "This is the condemnation, that light has come into the world, but ye prefer darkness:" that the powers of the world to come are here set before you in an outward visible way, and that ye are self condemned if ye do not, in the obedience of faith, renounce your own self judgment, and submit to be ruled by their force and directed by their guidance. It is impossible here that experience should first determine the conditions of such faith, for only in the exercise of it is Christian experience at all made possible. Submission here is the prior act, which introduces us into this new world, which alone can answer the capacity of faith or afford material for its appropriation and its experience. Equally impossible also is it, that nature should in any sense determine that which is thus above nature; for reason cannot even apprehend this new order of existence, only as it is pervaded by its power. As well might the vegetable comprehend the animal, or the material the immaterial. Hence by destroying the proper object of faith, we destroy faith itself, and the theory which leads to this properly constitutes, as we have said, church skepticism.

To avoid a theory of this kind, which regards the church as properly no object of faith, and which therefore is so infidel in its character and so pernicious in its consequences, we have endeavored to maintain that the incarnation is a divine fact, and that the church as perpetuating its divine force, is fully commensurate with all the purposes of salvation. In doing this we have necessarily made the doctrine of Christ's person the fundamental ground, as determining the nature of the church, and fully illustrating the idea of Christianity. Such a position we

have conceived it to hold in the mind of the church in her earliest period, and to this end have examined somewhat minutely the general spirit of the epistles of Ignatius. In these we have found that the church is made to rest immediately upon the person of Christ, who " was anointed that he might breathe into her incorruptibility." Every where is the church represented as the organ in which Christ's life can alone become available, and in which his authority alone rests. Only with such a conception as this does Ignatius declare, that "where Christ is there is the catholic church;" making, without the least hesitation, the one to grow out of the other. Christ's life is in itself organific, necessitating by its presence an organism at once catholic and divine. Again, under the infinence of a faith precisely of the same nature does he say: "If any one be not within the altar, he is deprived of the bread of God," Christ being that bread which has come down from heaven to give life unto the world, and which now resides in the Holy Eucharist,' to afford in truth to the hungry soul the divine "pabulum of immortality" and the actual "antidote of death." Such a view of the Eucharist is itself necessitated by the conception, that the church contains in her constitution the mysterious power of the incarnation. Only in this mystery can a sacrament have any real foundation or force, and aside from this it is only a thing appointed without containing any thing in itself to accomplish the design of its appointment. The very reason which Ignatius assigns for the doctrine of the Eucharist as held by the church, is that it is the flesh of Christ, who died and rose again, and hence he who opposes this doctrine contradicts the divine significance of the church itself, which is a virtual denial of the death and resurrection of Christ; for only in the church is Christ's sacrifice made "once for all," that is, made continuous and effective through all time. In his epistle to the Philadelphians, c. iv, he says: "Be zealous to use one Eucharist, for there is one flesh of our Lord Jesus Christ, and one cup in the unity of his blood." The design of this is to show the absolute necessity of unity in the church; but this is enforced by the fact, that there is but one flesh of Christ and therefore but one organism in which this flesh can be vivific, one Eucharist

"They (Heretics) abstain from the Eucharist and prayer, because they do not agree with us, that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins.” Εύχαριστίας καὶ προσευχῆς ἀπέχονται, διὰ τὸ μὴ ὁμολογεῖν, τὴν εὐχαριστίαν σάρκα είναι τοῦ σωτῆρος ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ, τὴν ὑπέρ τῶν αμαρτιῶν ἡμῶν παθοῦσαν, Epist. ad Smyr. c. vi.

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