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works are those which they would be very unwilling to spare from their library or their table. Of this class, the writer would of course be likely to think and to speak well, as he would count himself in their number, and if the epithets which he has affixed to them be too flattering, they may be ascribed to a very natural

cause.

The next are the parasites of Coleridge, the undigesting recipients of all that he says, without the attempt to explain or to understand it, except by repeating his own praises and confounding you with his terminology. A parasite of any man is always offensive, especially an unthinking retainer of any metaphysician, but most of all of such a philosopher as Coleridge. The pretensions are so magnificent, the learning so imposing, the terminology so appalling, that when it comes up in the form of an "ass's load of lumber," the contrast between the bulk of the burden and the sorry figure of the bearer, is striking and ludicrous.

Another class may be called the figurative philosophers, or more precisely those who philosophize by illustrations rather than by reasoning. Coleridge is not the only philosopher who has introduced this intellectual fashion, but he is greatly responsible for it. It consists in propounding a theory or speculation or course of argument, which may be true or may be false, which may be original or which may be borrowed, which may be sense or which may be nonsense, but which shall be imposing by its mysterious way of announcement and which is sure to be arrayed in the lively and piquant air of pointed illustrations or in the gorgeous robes of splendid imagery. When you look for the truth in the midst of these magnificent appendages, it is possible that there is no truth to be found, and that the substance and accidents, the body and its dressing, are but empty air; or if you do find it, it may prove not to be worth finding. There is a strong tendency in the public mind to call this philosophy. Our educated men who ought to know better will shout," this is original, this is philosophy;" and the students of some of our literary institutions have been known to be strangely bitten with a mania for this kind of philosophizing. There are two reasons for this. Our national aptness for guessing with our disposition to praise the successful guesser, and the absence of a thoroughly learned class who are able and ready to discriminate between scholarship and preten sion. If we do not read Plato and Aristotle and Lord Bacon and Cudworth, we can talk about them, and with the help of quickness and tact we can often guess aright; or if we do not, Cole

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The Tendency of the spiritual Philosophy.

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ridge and such as he can tell us what to say, and then how magnificently we can say it!

Even when the philosophizing is of a higher character, and the merit more real, it is an ill sign in a man who sets up for a philosopher, always to speak in figures, never to face a syllogism and to dread the precise avowal of his opinion, in severe and well-defined statements. And it is a sadder sign, for the commonwealth of letters, if this is to pass as genuine and profound philosophy. It is one thing, to be able to shed various and pleasant lights around an old truth or a happy suggestion, and quite another, to go down into the depth of the mine and bring up the heavy ore. It may seem to be a strange charge but we believe it is true, that the tendency of the so-called spiritual philosophy has been to render superficial and to popularize our science. Its contrary influence has been urged in its favor. This is no philosophy for boarding-school misses, say its friends, and yet more zealous Coleridgites than sundry misses of sixteen. or thereabouts we have never seen. Guessing and pretension, mys. tery and splendor, go well with the people on this side the water. Itinerant ministers will exhaust all their reading about Plato and Aristotle on the immortality of the soul, before an audience of a dozen in a log school-house, and they shall pass for very learned men. That this philosophy gives facility for similar operations on a larger scale and before a more respectable audience, we need not stay to argne.

So too it has begotten in many a sad and almost savage intolerance. There are sundry defenders of the faith and of right principles against infidelity and error, who planting themselves upon the eternal principles of the spiritual philosophy, treat their antagonists with no stinted measure of contempt, if not of railing. The appellations, utilitarian, priestly, infidel, principles of the sensual school, are distributed in every variety of combination, and with labored efforts to overwhelm their antagonists beneath a storm of contemptuous expression and of violent language. Where there is so much violence we may always suspect some confusion of thought. When the words are so bitter, though the direction of a man may be right in the main, yet there appears to be less conscious strength in the argument. But these men of the spiritual school, do not analyze; they affirm; they will not argue, but they will overwhelm you with a hail-storm of contempt. The cause of truth owes but little to such defenders. The next variety which we name, are the voluntary mystics. VOL. IV. No. 13.

15

These are the men who in order to believe enough, will believe more than enough, who are not content with interpretations that are at once logical and scriptural, but delight in supposing some additional meaning, they know not what. Faith and the union of the soul with Christ, and the indwelling of the spirit and the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, these and other truths give them ready opportunity to exercise the believing, or more properly the imaginary faculty, to their heart's content, and for it all they have the sanction of their master and the spirit of the school. This in the view of many is a harmless tendency, and tends to orthodoxy and spirituality. We do not think so. The man who will believe more than by the laws of sound interpretation he feels bound to, would under other circumstances believe less. Besides, the imagination is as likely to have as much to do with this mystical faith, as the conscience has; the fancy, as the conscious wants of the soul.

The name we

Next come "the artful dodgers" in theology. own is not very dignified, nor is the occupation. These are the men who take advantage of the many-sidedness of Coleridge's theology to be on no side of any disputed point, or who by a strange and most inconsistent eclecticism, merge into their own faith ingredients the most opposite, and materials the most irreconcilable. They are High Churchmen, and yet Congregationalists, bigotedly conservative, and laxly libertine. Strongly Calvinistic, and yet grossly Pelagian. Stoically rigid in their practical views, and loosely Epicurean. Or if pressed to any logical conclusion, they find their refuge in some Coleridgian term, and hide themselves from their pursuers in a convenient mist.

We name next the Prelatic or Episcopal variety, the men who from reading Coleridge have contracted a strange sympathy with the English church, and whose heads have been turned by his allusions to his mother the church of England. This has been carried so far by not a few that they have disowned their Puritan ancestry and their Puritan baptism, forgetting that Coleridge blessed the Puritans in his heart, and rendered to them the high meed of his worthy praise. Men are indeed to be pitied, who could so pervert the lessons of such a master, on such a subject.

Last of all we name the Coleridgians, par eminence, who show their zeal for their master, by their Babylonish dialect. Who with hardly a thought that can be precisely expressed, can yet pile up mountains of barbarously compounded words into sentences of complicated construction, and can so go forward, page after page, and

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perhaps volume after volume. The wonder is, by what magic of patient labor, by what mystery of intellectual toil, these sentences are ever written. It is no matter of wonder, how they can ever be read, for we are sure that they are never subjected to this operation.

If there are other varieties than these which we have named we know them not. With this enumeration, we conclude our remarks. We have spoken freely, but we hope not unkindly, plainly and perhaps pointedly, but we trust not inconsiderately nor unfairly.

ARTICLE VII.

THE STRUCTURE OF THE HEBREW SENTENCE.

THE subject named at the head of this Article should not be left wholly out of view, in a course of Hebrew instruction. Every biblical student should endeavor to ascertain and classify the principles which regulated the expressions of thought among the Hebrews. Without this, there can be no radical acquaintance with Hebrew syntax in general; and without it, even the meaning of the sacred writers cannot always be fully apprehended. If any one supposes that the Hebrew sentence is so simple as to afford no opportunity to exercise his powers of analysis; or that it is so stereotyped in form as to exclude any very striking exhibition of variety, he entertains probably the common opinion on the subject, but one which is not correct. As compared with those languages which carry the system of inflection to such an extent, for example, as do the Latin and the Greek, the Hebrew moves in this respect, it must be confessed, in a restricted sphere; its sentence is, certainly, both uniform and simple. But without possess. ing so much flexibility as we see there, it has still left to it a wide range of movement. The inquisitive scholar has opened to him here an interesting field of study; and, after performing the necessary preparatory work, he should advance to it and add to his other knowledge that which may be gained from extending his inquiries in this direction. In truth, the greater the uniformity which may distinguish a language in the construction of its sentences, the more important and significant must be any departure

from it, which may at any time appear. The cause of such a virtual resistance to the prevailing spirit of the language, must lie deeper in the thoughts and feelings of the writer, than where such variations belong rather to the outward forms of speech, and may be taken up by him, therefore, as a matter of accident or habit, and so be entirely unmeaning. This remark is specially true of the Hebrew. When a writer or speaker here deviates from the ordinary mode of expression which the laws of the language impose so rigidly upon him, it is because he is urged by a special impulse; he breaks over the external restraint in the impetuosity of his feelings; he makes not only his words but the very order of them expressive of the state of his mind; and, in order to enter into this, to sympathize with him, to catch the exact reflection of his thoughts, we must know the difference between the ordinary Hebrew style and that of earnest, impassioned discourse; we must be able to see what new meaning belongs to the new posi tion; we must understand the laws of that subtle, mental empha sis which prescribed to the words their unwonted order, so that as we read we may fill our ears, as it were, with the very tones with which the old prophets spoke, and bring back again the looks and gestures which gave to their language such power over those whom they originally addressed.

Perhaps no writer has treated the subject adverted to above, so well as Ewald in the last edition of his Hebrew Grammar. He has there allotted much more than the usual space to the consid eration of this topic. His remarks extend over 130 pages of his work; and they deserve the careful and reiterated perusal of every one who would be master of this important branch of Hebrew syntax. The view also which Nordheimer has given of this subject in his Grammar, is replete with instruction. No system of rules, however, which another may compile, can supersede the necessity of personal observation and study. They may be of service, especially at first, in giving direction to inquiry; but will not answer even this purpose, unless constantly verified by the student for himself. In this way, possibly, the following summary of the principles which are to be observed in the construction of the simple Hebrew sentence, may not be without value to those who take an interest in such studies. It is drawn up chiefly in conformity with the views of Ewald, and rests, therefore, essen

1 Ausführliches Lehrbuch der Hebraischen Spache des alten Bundes, von Heinrich Ewald. Fünfte Ausgabe, 1844.

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