It was with pleasure we learned that it was precisely Neander who had made their names known to the Germans. Since the death of Schleiermacher, no name among Protestant theologians has in Germany acquired so much distinction as that of NEANDER. It would have been otherwise, we fear, in England. Had a Jewish convert on his baptism assumed the name of Newman, he would hardly have added to the distinction that name has recently acquired from the eminent attainments of brothers of very opposite character,-the most distinguished of the recent converts to the Roman Catholic Church, and author of that very able paradoxical and perhaps suicidal work, the treatise on Development; and the late Professor at the Manchester College, who has now succeeded to the Latin chair at the London University College.

In Germany, the learned author of the Church History which has been in part translated into English, is the acknowledged head of the newly constituted Prussian Evangelical Church, in which character he is known to have been the prime suggester of a public act equally honourable to the Prussian Government and advantageous to literature and truth. He procured the suppression of a Government prohibition of Strauss's Life of Christ, declaring it to be the work of a scholar and an earnest and sincere man, and therefore entitled to the rights of the press, and wrote in refutation of it his own Life of Christ. He is one of the principal writers in the Berlin Annals of Criticism, in which he lately wrote three articles on three English writers, whom he was pleased to consider as representatives of three great classes, indicating three directions of the mind which characterize the age :-that of the traditional, which holds fast to the established, represented by we know not whom-we guess Newman; that which mistakes solution (or negation) for progress-Blanco White; and that which " draws from the depths of scientific theology, and elaborates into a new creation," the truth which lies between those opposite extremes-Thomas Arnold.

The numerous friends and admirers of Arnold will hardly concur in such a characteristic, or in such a position among English theologians. Admirable and exemplary were his practical applications of divinity. both as a parish priest and as a pedagogue; but he would himself have rejected any praise given him as a profound biblical critic or a metaphysician. When Neander speaks of Arnold as the representative of a new theology, “arising in the very land where the old order of things is shaken to its base," and elsewhere as "indicating the dawn of a brighter future," such estimations must be understood, not of the material or substance of theology in its connection with philosophy, but of his mode of using it as a practical divine. Arnold was an admirable preacher, and his sermons to schoolboys (his pupils at Rugby) are unique in pastoral theology. With this practical interpretation, there is nothing in Neander's praise of Arnold in which we cannot concur. He says of Arnold's mind, that it was "akin to the scientific method of Germany;" and though he acknowledges that Arnold possessed" all the attainments and qualifications that were requisite to the character of a great theological reformer," yet he insinuates that Arnold might have been influenced by an acquaintance with German theology. We very much doubt this; as we also doubt whether the intellect of Arnold was akin to the German-that is, in any point cha

racteristic of the German mind. It is true, he had contracted a very warm and influential friendship with one of the most distinguished Germans of the present day, the Prussian Minister, the Chevalier Bunsen; but then, on the other hand, we happen to know that he had but a feeble perception of the transcendent genius of Göthe, who is as decidedly the representative of the German intellect now, as in their respective ages were Dante in Italy and Cervantes in Spain. We should certainly refuse to acknowledge, as the representative of the English mind, any one who was indifferent to the works of Shakespear or Bacon. Neander presents a rapid summary of the life of Arnold, in the course of which he incidentally adverts to those points for which he is especially the subject of his admiration-such as Arnold's opinions concerning the Episcopal Office, the Priesthood, the Sacraments, Apostolic Succession, Tradition and the Church. No thanks, it may be said, are due to Germans for their applause of such opinions. These are precisely the doctrines as to which the Anglican Church is all but Papistical, and the denial of which renders the German Protestants so odious to Anglican High-Churchmen—that is, the real Churchmen. On the single, but very intricate and slippery, question of the Sacraments, the Protestant and Reformed Churches of Germany have been ever at variance, and so will remain, in spite of the compulsory union between the Lutheran and Calvinistic Church, carried into effect at the bayonet's point.

Neander also praises Arnold for distinguishing the Unitarianism which is engaged with dogmatic notions, from that which undermines the Christian life itself; which concession, it will be recollected, was in a measure forced from him. Neander shews his appreciation of the practical character of Arnold's exegesis by quoting the admirable letter to Mr. Hearn, I. 356; and he refers with seeming concurrence to Arnold's quotations from Coleridge's posthumous "Confessions of an Enquiring Spirit," in which the profound thinker annoyed his new patrons, the orthodox Churchmen, by some very troublesome suggestions on the nature of inspiration.

Finally, Neander declares himself to be in decided opposition to him as to his view of the proper identity between Church and State. We have understood that Arnold's friend, Archbishop Whately, was equally decided in his opposition to this opinion. Now, bearing in mind that Arnold in this doctrine had the concurrence of two such pre-eminently great men as Hooker and Burke, it is certain that at all events this cannot be a vulgar error. We are driven to the conclusion that this

is one of those questions on which the disputing parties have never come to a right understanding of each other; the subject being one purely practical in its bearing, resting on none of the mysterious elements of nature or man, but concerning only that which, after all, is men's own making, that is the ideas attached to words. The ideas which the words Church and State raise in our minds, are themselves a product of mind: and it can only require a sufficiently cool and candid study of the thoughts those words raise, to come to the conclusion whether those words really indicate two things essentially different, or but modifications and variations in one thing. We are not going to attempt to adjust what our betters have left unsettled, and content ourselves with a few obvious remarks.

Dr. Arnold's favourite position, that the State is a Christian State, in which none but a Christian is entitled to political power, (hence his singular hostility to the emancipation of the Jews, and his consequent abandonment of the London University,) must have led to consequences ludicrously impracticable; for he maintained that none but a Christian I could sit in either House of Parliament. Were this carried out, it would be a ground of petition against an M. P. that he is not a Christian, of which a Committee of the House must be a judge. Now the correct Church notion must be, that none but a member of the Church can be a Christian; and though Arnold rejected that notion with indignation, and allowed of no other test of Christianity than a recognition of the Scriptures, interpreted any how, yet many would have clung to his first doctrine and rejected all the others. This strange notion sprang out of another, of seemingly opposite character, a denial of the distinction between priest and layman,—all Christians, he held, being alike priests, except as that appellation means a minister or a scholar.

On the other hand, Neander has set up a definition against Arnold, by which Arnold would not have been disturbed :-"Our belief is, that the State's office is only to ensure the conditions necessary for the free growth of all human good, and therefore the free growth of the Church." This definition would be valid at Rome, and would answer the purposes of the clergy as well as any other; for it obviously admits of the construction that the civil power exists only or chiefly in order to be the handmaid and servant of the Church. Now, while by the Church the clergy are understood, a more mischievous doctrine cannot well be advanced; but it is very different when by the Church we understand the religion, morality and intelligence of the community, represented by its most distinguished members,-not a race like that of the Levites, or a caste as among the Hindoos, or a self-elected body perpetuated by an apostolic succession. And if by the State be meant, in like manner, the will and the power of the community represented by its political organs, a civil magistracy and its military instruments, whom it is a mere abuse and perversion to consider as of necessity a family reigning by divine right, and exercising absolute and arbitrary power, then it seems, at all events, a harmless doctrine, that there is one community or public body to which we may indifferently give the name of Church or State, according to the point of view taken and the elements of social life brought under consideration.

We proceed now to Neander's third article, which is not without significance entitled, "On the Life of Blanco White." It is a psychological essay, and a main object of the reviewer is to shew how one in whose mind a longing for faith as well as a tendency to scepticism was an element, and who never ceased to be under the influence of the purest love of truth, came to arrive at so sad a conclusion.

Having convinced himself (this is Neander's representation) of the falsehood of the Romish system, he was exposed to the danger of being again subdued by the Romish element in the new form of the English Church. This he was himself apprehensive of, and he was so far misled 66 as to confound the Church, a free community in which the Spirit of God operates through the word and the Sacraments, with the Church of priests, a hierarchy." Rejecting the infallibility of the Church,

he earnestly and painfully pursued his study of the Scriptures. In the course of this study, says Neander, he was led by his opposition to two prevalent errors into the opposite errors. "The first of these was the prevailing notion of Inspiration: that the whole of the Bible is one uniformly inspired codex of humanity given to mankind, that out of it there should be drawn a precise system of dogmata by which every thing was to be decided." Now in the Old Testament he was met by many difficulties, and in the New by contradictions; and it seemed to him that a new Scriptural infallibility was set up in the place of the Church infallibility, and with this he was even less satisfied.

66

Neander quotes from Blanco White's Life, II. 136, the well-known words of Coleridge concerning bibliolatry, "the English vice." His quotations on this point are manifestly made con amore; but he imputes to Blanco White the falling into the other extreme, of rejecting the supernatural in religious development, "instead of forming a just idea of inspiration by means of a correct apprehension of the relation which the Divine bears to the Human, and by means of comparison with the analogies supplied by antiquity." He was further unable to distinguish between the real essence of Christianity and the system of creeds erected thereon." 66 Insight into the essential character of religion generally, the relation in it between knowledge and faith, the peculiar essence of Christianity which distinguishes it from all religions, and is the spring of its whole development in the formation of the Church, might have led to juster notions and to repose of mind."-In fact, there hovered perpetually before his mind the truth that Christianity is rather an affair of life, from which every thing must proceed, than of thought. "With this, too, was connected the mistake of supposing that that faith in Christ which constitutes the essence of Christianity and gives a form to life itself, was inseparably connected with a certain (the Athanasian) doctrine of the Trinity; and as on an investigation of the pretended [sogenannter] proofs from Scripture, the one was shaken, the stability of the other was shaken also."

"When Blanco White was led to doubt in that resurrection of Christ on which Christianity rests, his faith in an eternal life of a verklärt* personality was also lost. He was further led to deny truth in contending against error. He rightly denied that Eudeemonism which degrades the moral by making it the mere instrument of enjoyment," (one of the nobler points, by the bye, of Kant's moral philosophy,)" and was so led to dispute the fact, that, as Paul says, Christians would be of all men most wretched if there were not hope of the resurrectionthat is, if man had no faith in the actual realization of the idea of a Christian life- a truth which has lived in the Christian conscience of every age." "In the idea of a divine or eternal life, the antithesis of the present and the future is removed."

Neander appears to have a melancholy satisfaction in pointing out the affinities of Blanco White to the great men whom German philosophers in the present day most delight to honour. He had at one time adopted the principle, professed alike by Pascal, Schleiermacher

*There is not a word for which the German language is more to be envied than this. Unluckily, the English pastry-cooks have got hold of it. It is properly clarified, and may be rendered enhanced, purified.

and "the great Hamann," - this great Hamann being one of the German thinkers least known in this country, and in whose words it is thus suggested as a question,-"Whether the pearl of Christianity must not be a hidden life in God, a truth in Christ the Mediator, and a power which consists neither in words nor in usages, nor in dogmata, nor visible works, consequently cannot be measured by any dialectical or ethical rule."-But, adds Neander, "by the side of every truth stands its associated error; and the deeper and more fruitful the truth, the more dangerous may the error become, if the truth be misunderstood or misapplied." And he shews how that moral internal element of truth, which in fact lies at the root of Quakerism and in the hearts of all enthusiasts and of highly spiritually-minded individuals, and was also in the mind of Blanco White, was in him "volatilized (or evaporated) by being separated from an objective historical truth;" that is, a belief in the resurrection of Christ. Now the characteristic of German thinking is a dwelling upon the idea, too often with a disregard of the fact. This, indeed, lies in the very nature of philosophical studies; and it is remarkable that though Neander asserts that a profounder study of the German philosophy would have served to correct the errors into which Blanco White fell, yet it would seem that his mind fell into those errors from what would generally be considered as the German character of his mind. And Neander, while he is adverting to the distinction between the historical and the doctrinal in Christianity, quotes with approbation the American Unitarians, Norton and Channing, from Blanco White's Life, III. 119. It is well known that there is now a class of Germanizing Unitarians in America. If ever Neander should deem them worthy his critical examination, we expect that he would protest against their right to the appellation. And yet he agrees with the most eminent of Germanizing English thinkers, Coleridge, in a reproach which Coleridge of late years delighted to cast upon Unitarians. In a parenthesis, Neander distinguishes Dr. Channing from the "Unitarier der gewöhnlicher einseitigen verständigen Richtung,"—a sentence which cannot be well translated without a remark. The orthodox have no better term to express their antipathy to Unitarians than by calling them rational Christians. Now the constant charge brought by Coleridge against Unitarians and a much larger class of minds is, that they have no reason (vernunft), but only (verstand) understanding; and it unluckily happens that our English language, which is sadly deficient in words expressive of the varieties of psychological experience, has not two current adjectives formed, like vernünftig and verständig, from the substantives, and therefore, in rendering the German sentence by" Unitarians of the ordinary, one-sided (that is, narrow-minded), reasoning direction," we do but approximate to the author's sense. Without flattering ourselves that we fully enter into the spirit of this distinction, which deserves to be investigated, we are nevertheless satisfied that in this reverence for reason we have much to learn of our German friends. The faculty is at least a part of ourself, and serves as a protection against that claim of obedience and submission to themselves which has in all ages been put in by priests as a privileged order, either being by descent and inheritance the heads and the organs of the Church, or as the privileged interpreters of Scripture. It is a subject of gratifying remark, that in these writings by one who occupies so