of the Doctrine of Christian Faith, in which the study and thought of his life found expression. The influence which Dorner is destined to exert over Protestant Christendom is thus epitomized by Professor C. C. Everett in the Unitarian Review. "To all who are interested in the religious life of the present, the work of Dorner may bring inspiration. It may bring the inspiration of greater faith in the advancing thought of the world, and the inspiration of a more tender regard for the past. It may bring to all a fresh confidence in the possibility of a science of religion, and a fresh interest in the more profound problems of Christian. thought. The church has reached that point where criticism should be the instrument of construction, where the negative should give place to the positive. We need not merely theological opinions, but theological thought. This thought should be free, reverent, and devout." LUDWIG LAVATER (1527-1586). Lavater was, like Klopstock, a poetic genius and full of feeling, but his imagination was less rich, and he had more tenderness than power. Together with a breadth and versatility for the reception of outward impressions, he exhibits a vigorous concentration upon the central part of his mental life, and it is the loyalty of a grateful heart which binds him to the Person of Christ. His chief concern is not exactness of doctrine, but that higher life which emanates from Christ. He, too, favors the view which regards Christianity as the religion of humanity, but he seeks the true man, and finds only wretched ruins of the true human image where this has not been reinstated by the Saviour. His lyric poetry, like his other literary productions, aims at something more than to describe and to please; it does not satisfy him to collect all that is great and beautiful in history, nor to idealize reality through the power of imagination; he is concerned. for a real idealization, a moral transfiguration of the disfigured and obscure image of man. His desire is that his words and poetry may exert an influence, and his is not merely a lyric but an ethic pathos, which, however, but too often delights in rhetorical flights. But though he too contributed to the formation of that mental atmosphere and temperament in which the age became susceptible of freer and deeper views of life and of religion, he also was deficient in the possession of solid objective truths, of truths which are not only established, but have also been assimilated by the reason, in that philosophic mind and in that feeling for historical criticism which alone can secure lasting influence. Renouncing the quiet but safe path of scientific thought, ever seeking after fresh excitement or feeling, and straining his ideal emotions to their highest pitch, Lavater was betrayed both in his doctrine of prayer and in his theory of physiognomy into extravagances which had the effect of limiting his influence.- History of Protestant Theology. JOHAN GEORGE HAMANN (1730-88). Hamann is a kindred spirit of Klopstock, on account both of the profundity and inwardness of his Christian feeling and of his enthusiasm for Christianity, which he proclaims not in verse, but like one exercising the gift of prophecy in the primitive church, in language unconnected, indeed, but often sublime, and still oftener enigmatical by reason of its fulness of matter and abundance of allusion. . The freedom and largeness of his views raised him above the anxieties entertained by the pious of his age, because deeply rooted as he was in evangelical Christianity, he was firmly persuaded of its intellectual superiority to the whole kin of neologists, and could look with triumphant certainty of amusement at their efforts to overthrow it. Himself well versed in classical antiquity, he recognized the affinity of Christianity to all that was eternal in the classic world. While to the mass of his contemporaries, Christianity and humanity, historical and eternal truth, the human and the Divine, -- are terms expressing irreconcilable opposites, he is able to perceive their unity. His favorite thought is, omnia divina et humana omnia. The whole world is to him full of signs, full of meaning, full of the Divine. Man is a tree whose trunk is nourished by two roots, one of which turns to the invisible origin of all things, the other to the earthly and the visible. In history. and not merely in the history of revelation in the Old and New Testament he sees the historicalization (Geschichtlichwerden) the incorporation of the eternal; and faith is, in his view, the faculty of perceiving God's acts in history and his works in nature, the power of beholding the unity of the metaphysical, the eternal and the historical, and of intuitively discerning the divine in the temporal. His mysticism is not merely the subjective mysticism of the feelings, but is open to objective concrete matter from nature and especially from history; in fact it is theosophy. Thus faith being the focus which comprehends in its entireness, and therefore grasps at its centre of gravity that which unbelief separates in either a nondenial or material manner, he finds in such faith the truth of things (Hypostasis), and therefore the source of true knowledge. Herein it is that he radically differs from the rationalism of the age, which acknowledges none but eternal truths and accepts none but the mathematical mode of proof. He sees in such notions only superstition, delusion, and philosophic juggling. He is, however, no less opposed to the mere experience of the senses, for he perceives that this tends to materialism and atheism. Flesh and blood know no other God than the universe, no other spirit than the letter. He also discovers the inward relation between the intellectualism of orthodoxy and the rationalism of the age, which alike resolved the higher spiritual life into a work of the understanding. The main thing is that that religious susceptibility which forms the very basis of our existence should attain assurance; and be united with God by realities which are their own evidence, and which bring with them conviction to the soul. Thus are we transferred from mere reasoning, or from the impulses and perceptions of the senses, to the atmosphere of true life. And here it is specially by means of the documents of the history of revelation that according to Hamann we become conscious of the presence of God in history. God, at whose bidding are the storm, the fire, and the earthquake, chooses for the token of His presence a still small voice which we tremble to hear in His word and in our own hearts. Grace and truth are not to be discovered or acquired, they must be historically revealed. Revelation takes the form of a servant both in Christ and in the Scriptures; the eternal history bears a human form, a body which is dust and ashes and perishable, the visible letter; but also a soul which is the breath of God. And it is by such self-humiliation of the Spirit of God to the pen of man, such self-abnegation of the Son of God, that the Spirit and the Son dwell among us. to us. Creation itself is a work of God's word. The wish, "speak that I may see Thee," is fulfilled by creation. All God's works are tokens of His attributes, all corporeal nature is a parable of the spiritual world. At first, all God's works were a word of God to man, emblems and pledges of a new, an unutterable union. But sin interposed. Separated from God, the world became an enigma The knowledge of God, without which love to God is impossible, acquaintance and sympathy being necessary elements of love, is no longer possible through the contemplation of His works, which less know, and less reveal Him than we ourselves. But the books of the covenant as well as the book of nature contain secret articles, and these God has been pleased to reveal to men through their fellow-men. Hence revelation and experience, which are intrinsically harmonious, are the most indispensable crutch, if our reason is not to remain hopelessly lame. God's word is heard in nature and in history; and the noon of history, that is God's day, is in Christ. Judaism had the word and signs, heathenism reason and its wisdom, but Christianity is that to which neither the men of the letter nor the men of speculation could attain; it is the glorification of manhood in the Godhead, and of the Godhead in manhood, through the Fatherhood of God. He regards religious spiritualism, which was then appearing in a deistical form, religious material ism, and literal traditionalism as inwardly allied. He holds poetry, religion, philosophy, history, scripture, and spirit to be intrinsically united, but this union he only perceives intellectually and indirectly, without the power of making an orderly and connected statement of the reasons which induce this view.- History of Protestant Theology. ORR, JULIA CAROLINE RIPLEY, an American poet and novelist; born at Charleston, S. C., February 13, 1825. Her mother died while she was an infant, and her father, William Ripley, a merchant of Charleston, returned to his native State of Vermont, where he became known as a promoter of the development of the marble quarries of Rutland Julia married Seneca M. Dorr, of New York, in 1847; and the same year her husband taking a particular liking to one of the many poems which she had been writing from her early childhood, sent it to the Union Magazine; and thus appeared her first published poem. The next year Sartain's Magazine gave her a prize of $100 for Isabel Leslie; and thus was brought out her first story. In 1857, she removed with her husband to Rutland, where she became the centre of literary life, and where she founded the Rutland Free Library. Her published works include Farmingdale, a novel, published in 1854, under the pseudonym of "Caroline Thomas," her mother's maiden name; Lanmere (1855); Sybil Huntington (1869); Poems (1871); Expiation (1873); Friar Anselmo and Other Poems (1879); The Legend of the Babouskha (1881); Daybreak (1882); Bermuda (1884); Afternoon Songs |