ART. VIII.—THEOLOGICAL SCIENCE IN AMERICA.*

"AMERICA is, as yet, merely on the threshold of its theological existence; but the future of Protestantism greatly depends upon the further development of this powerful nation, delivered, as it now is, from the curse of slavery. It is on this account that the maintenance and increase of its acquaintance with German theology and its acquisitions is of incalculable importance. At present the disruption of parties is great, and their opposition often more a matter of caprice or external interest than one likely to result in earnest scientific controversy. But the more a feeling for theological science increases, and with it that power of reasoning in which a unifying power is inherent, because its aim is the universally and absolutely true, the more will many of the existing denominations necessarily disappear, and others enter upon such a process of mutual understanding as will secure a common history of their intellectual and religious life, which, like that of Great Britain, may vie, on equal terms and with fruitful results, with German theology."-Dr. Dorner's History of Protestant Theology.

Dr. Hodge's Theology and Prof. Fisher's History of the Reformation are among the latest American theological works, and they may be taken as an evidence of the independent interest and activity in theological science in this country, and an earnest of what we may expect in this direction. The former of these two works we have already briefly noticed as it was leaving the press. It is now completed, and consists of three large volumes, the first treating of Theology proper, the second of Anthropology, the third of Soteriology and Eschatology.

* SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY. By Charles Hodge, D. D., Professor in the Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey. Vols. I. II. III., New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co. London and Edinburg: T. Nelson and Sons, 1873.

THE REFORMATION. By George P. Fisher, D. D., Professor of Ecclesiastical His tory in Yale College. New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co., 1873.

We refer to it now again as a specimen of the independent activity and research beginning to show themselves in theological science in this country. Dr. Hodge's Theology has been favorably received and noticed both in this country and in England. It is an epitome of old Calvinistic theology, somewhat modified, though to no large extent, by the progress of theological thinking in our own times.

Prof. Fisher's work is a contribution to historical theology, which is at once a credit to its author and to the study of Church history in this country. It is all the more significant that it comes from Puritan New England. That section has not been behindhand, as we well know, in intellectual activity and work. What they did in the early colonial times in the interest of education, in founding colleges, and what they have done in more recent times in liberally endowing their institutions of learning, affords abundant testimony in this respect. New England has been the thinking head for a large portion of this country, and Boston, as we know, claims to be the literary metropolis of the American Republic. New England, too, is distinguished for the theological activity of its earlier times. The senior and junior Edwards, Hopkins, Bellamy, Emmons, Dwight, and Taylor, were divines who made no small stir in the provincial life of New England in their day. But Puritanism was constitutionally narrow and contracted from the beginning. It did not breathe the free air of the Reformation as a whole, but employed its energies in asserting its freedom from English conformity. It was not a part of the original reformation, but a much smaller movement in the secondary stages of that great Awakening.

The Puritan theory of the Church was exceedingly narrow and weak. Of a divine constitution or economy of grace, having a real objective existence in the world, they seemed to have no idea whatever. Their only thought was of the conversion of individuals, and these congregating together, and entering into covenant with God (not He with them, after the Scriptural examples) constituted a Church. Each congregation formed an independent Church. There was no thought of an organic

body, in union with which all the parts must stand. There was little comprehension of the sacraments or mysteries of the kingdom of grace. As a consequence of such individualistic or atomistic theory of Christianity, there could be little sense for the meaning of Christian history. Of Christianity as an organic unfolding or process, reaching in living succession and unity from the Apostles down through the ages, they had no conception.

Thirty years ago the puritans of New England regarded the Apostles' Creed as a fossil, or relic, of an age with which the Church of the present has nothing to do. The Bible took the place, for them, of the Apostolic Church, and Primitive Christianity after the apostolic age was in their eyes a barren desert. And yet it is from Prof. Fisher, of New England, that we now have a profound work on the Supernatural in Christianity, and also this History of the Reformation. What, it may be asked, is there strange in all that? The strange thing is the manner in which our author approaches his subject, compared with the New England method of viewing the Church thirty years ago.

After the manner of German writers, Prof. Fisher devotes no less than eighty pages of his book to the preparation for the Reformation. Let us follow him in his treatment in this introductory chapter: "The Protestant movement," he tells us, "is often looked upon as hardly less preternatural and astonishing than would be the rising of the sun at midnight. But the more it is examined, the less does it wear this marvellous aspect. In truth, never was a historical crisis more elaborately prepared, and this through a train of causes which reach back into the remote past. Nor is it the fact that such events are wholly out of the reach of human foresight; they cast their shadows before; they are the objects of presentiments more or less distinct, sometimes of definite prediction." Then the author gives us different theories which profess to account for the Reformation. While the superstitious attributed it "to a certain uncommon and malignant position of the stars, which scattered the spirit of giddiness and innovation over the world; others have looked upon it as a squabble of monks. Guizot

considers it "an insurrection of the human mind against the absolute power of the spiritual order." Others again see in it a transitional era, paving the way for free thinking or unbelief. Over against all these theories, the author regards the Reformation, first of all, as a movement within the domain of religion.

Tracing it to this central current of history, he finds it to possess a negative and a positive character; negative in denying the errors of Rome, and positive in asserting its own principles, the authority of the Scriptures, and justification by faith alone. "It is evident, also, from the foregoing statement, that in Protestantism there was an objective as well as a subjective factor." So the terms "objective" and "subjective" have become domiciled in the English of New England! "As Protestantism in its origin was not an isolated event, so it drew after it political and social changes of the highest moment. Hence it presents a two-fold aspect. On the one hand, it is a transformation in the Church, in which are involved contests of theologians, modifications of creed and ritual, new systems of polity, an altered type of Christian life. On the other hand, it is a great transaction, in which sovereigns and nations bear a part; the occasion of wars and treaties; the close of an old and the introduction of a new period in the history of culture and civilization."

Next we have a brief review of the rise of the Roman hierarchy and of its history during the middle ages, all in the line of Christian history. It is the Church still, not the Synagogue of Satan, even though it is marked with error and corruption. But it is especially in presenting the causes of the Reformation that he has brought out the idea that Protestantism is the legitimate outgrowth of the better life of the Romanism of the preceding ages, directed, of course by the Holy Ghost. The development of the national languages, which followed the chaotic period of the ninth and tenth centuries, with Dante and Petrarch in Italy, Langland, Wickliffe, and Chaucer in England, and others in Germany and France, shows how the new tongues were taking the place of the Latin.

"Teutonism was holding its first initiatory struggle with Latin Christianity." The development of the science of jurisprudence raised up a class of legists who could defend the rights of the State against the encroachments of the Church. The long political struggle to become free from a hierarchy which, while calling itself spiritual, placed its heel upon the necks of kings and emperors, at length broke the spell by which the peoples of Europe seemed for a thousand years to be bound.

Coming to the inner circle of causes, we have confronting us the reaction in the sphere of the Christian religion, the theologians before the Reformation, breaking loose from the bonds of a dead scholasticism, and the uprisings among the people in various sects. The spread of mysticism, and with it humanism, together with the great revival in letters and learning, and the wonderful inventions and discoveries of the age, marked this as one of the great epochs in the history of the Church.

The writer moves here somewhat in the same spirit as Dorner in his introductory Chapter to his History of Protestant Theology, or Dr. Schaff in his Principle of Protestantism. Here is a wonderful step of progress for New England. When this. theory of Church History, the theory of historical development, was given out from Mercersburg over a quarter of a century ago, it was regarded as dangerous, Romanizing. Now it has become familiar in the theological literature of this country, and quite at home even in New England.

In the latter portion of the work the author devotes a chapter of thirty-seven pages to the struggle of Protestantism in the seventeenth century, and another of some thirty pages to a sketch of the history of Protestant theology. This chapter is necessarily general and brief. It does not present the movement of theology in the deep, penetrating, and forcible way Dr. Dorner presents the subject in his work; but it shows, nevertheless, that the author grasps the underlying principle of the Protestant history down to the present time. Here is development, too. We no longer stand in the age of the Reformation. Three centuries intervene. While that epoch or age was formative for Protestant faith, and always will be