ART. I.-CHRISTIANITY: THE INDUCTIVE PHILOSOPHY: MODERN PROGRESS.

(1.) Dr. Tulloch's Discourse at the opening of St. Mary's College, St. Andrew's, Scotland, Nov. 20, 1864, on the Study of the Westminster Confession of Faith.

(2.) Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius IX, Issued from Rome, Dec. 8, 1864.

EVERY close observer of the times has noticed the rapid strides which Infidelity is making in our day, as the result of what is popularly termed Modern Progress, or Modern Civilization. We shall not stop to prove that this Modern Civilization is the natural fruit of the Inductive Method of reasoning. Neither shall we stop to show, that this Modern Civilization is a real achievement over the Past. Rome denies this. We affirm it. There is, undoubtedly, a tendency in the Inductive Philosophy towards Materialism. It naturally fosters breadth and superficiality; not depth of attainment and character. It makes encyclopedic men, not men of robust intellect, and stout heart, and cultivated taste. These come alone from the severe study and discipline of the old regimè. Still, the evils from

the Inductive Method are abuses only. They spring from a wrong estimate of its place, and a false estimate of its value. Its unquestionable triumphs have too strong a hold upon society to be discarded now, at the bidding of despots of any

sort.

We have another object in view, however, now, than a defense of the Inductive Philosophy. All about us, men are rising up, literary men, scientific men, men who mould public opinion, who are exhibiting, some of them a disbelief, and some of them an intense hatred, of the received Christianity of the last three hundred years. This is the point on which we propose to offer a few considerations.

A few years ago, men of this stamp set themselves to work at the business of constructing Society on a new basis, and we were about to have the "Coming Church," the "New Evangel," suited to the spiritual and economical wants of this Nineteenth Century. The "Brook Farm Association" was one of these experiments; and such persons as Ralph Waldo Emerson, and William H. Channing, and Charles A. Dana, and Parke Godwin, and George William Curtis, and George Ripley, and John S. Dwight, and Margaret Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, really thought they were about to more than realize the Alchymist's dream, and convert the alloy of our modern society into pure gold.

The "Brook Farm" bubble exploded. The work of construction did not prosper in the hands of these men. The edifice, so stately and magnificent in its proportions, as it had stood in prospect before the eyes of these strong-minded men and women, lacked both foundation and cohesion, and fell to pieces, from internal weakness,—a mass of ruins; and so these modern apostles of the new dispensation came to the conclusion that construction was not their forte. Still, there was one thing which they regarded as yet in their power. It was the work of destruction. They could at least sap the foundations of Society, the Family, the Church, and the State, in the confidence and affections of the people. And then, they argued, amid the debris of all Social Systems, the wreck of Constitutions, which are the forms of Social life, stern neces

sity might perchance build up, where genius had proved an utter failure. At any rate, they would be rid of the restraints of Supernaturalism,-a consummation fervently, if not devoutly, hoped for. And so these men scattered, still one in aim and purpose. They have occupied, for the last twentyfive years, some of the most influential posts of influence in this country. They have edited and controlled newspapers, and made Encyclopedias, and written Novels, and delivered "popular" Lectures. They have crowded themselves, sometimes at the expense of the proprieties and courtesies of Society, into positions of prominence, and then they have printed and puffed each other's speeches. Like the two tailors of London, whose petition to Parliament commenced, "We the people of England," so these gentlemen affect the heroic and magisterial style, in their communications to the public. And yet as, according to the Fable, half a dozen toads in a pond make more noise than fifty oxen feeding on the shore, so the great mass of the people, out of New England, have neither known nor cared anything about this perpetual egotistical din, and the two Tooley Street tailors really believe, at this day, that they constitute pretty nearly all there is in England that is worth talking about.

Allied to this class, in sympathy and aim, and really doing the same work, are men who essay a still higher walk of influence; men who talk oracularly, and teach Science and Philosophy; the Buckles, and Drapers, and Spencers and Darwins, and Lyells, and Huxleys; not to name the second and third rate sciolists, who attempt to imitate their air and gait, and echo their sayings. These are found in almost every city and village in the land, and are the swaggering scouts of the crusade against Christianity. Every priest of the Church, and intelligent reader of our pages, can at once point his finger at the persons we are describing. And yet, beneath the drapery of learning and culture, with which a few of these apostles of Infidelity are clothed, the cloven foot may always be seen protruding. We say a few; for, with nearly all of them, knowledge is limited to a single department. Non omnia possumus And with the greater part, the show of wisdom is but

omnes.

Real

"the contortions of the Sybil, without her inspiration." scholars in Natural Science, like the Humboldts, and Whewell, and Dana, &c., &c., find no such contradictions between Science and Revelation.

But this intense bitter hatred of Christianity is witnessed in the class of men to whom we refer. It attempts to undermine the very foundations on which Society rests, with a sardonic grin. It administers the fatal virus with its sugar-coated pills. Alas! in some of this class of men it betrays the Son of Man with a kiss. It does its work the more effectively, because stealthily and imperceptibly. We stand pledged to prove that this is the characteristic of not a little of that current literature which is found on the centre-tables of thousands on thousands of Churchmen. It is nothing more or less than deadly poison. Let Bridget have it for the grate,―stories, poetry, pictures and all. Better still, let it alone in the outset. Expose your children, if you will, to the contagion of Cholera, Fever, and the Plague, for these can only kill the body, but these abominable malaria are death to the soul. In previous Numbers of this Review, we have tested the armor wherewith some of these warriors are clad, even the strongest of them, and have, as we think, said enough to strip them of their pretensions, and rob them of their power as assailants of the citadel of the Faith. They are harmless, cowardly men, when met boldly and thoroughly. This is one phase of the general subject before us.

There is another, and in some respects a more alarming one. It need not be disguised, that at the very heart of Protestantism there is a wide-spread conviction that its conception of Christianity, as expressed in its Formulas, is fundamentally wrong. In France, Germany, Switzerland, England, and in the United States, the same process is going on, of rejecting their Christianity, as embodied in the Creeds and Confessions framed at the Reformation. Even in Holland, a late writer says:

"The state of things here now is such, that ministers of the kirk deliver lectures to show that the Gospel of St. John was not written by the Apostle whose name it bears. Everywhere, on Sunday, you

may hear preachers tell their congregations that this or that part of St. Matthew's Gospel, is a later addition, and of this or that Epistle of St. Paul, that it was not written by him; in a word, the authenticity of the whole Bible is openly assailed. Since the radical changes in the sixteenth century, the prevailing genius of Dutch Christianity, even its orthodox' type, has been abstract and drily speculative. But now the points brought into discussion are such as these:-Ought we to believe in Christ's Divinity, in His Miracles, in his Immaculate Conception, in His Resurrection?""

The most remarkable exhibition, however, of this disbelief, is indicated by the publication at the head of our pages. Principal Tulloch, at the opening of St. Mary's College, in his discourse on the "Westminster Confession of Faith," set himself to show that that Confession is not adapted to the present Civilization, and to the prevailing habits of thinking. The whole burden of his argument is to prove, that "it is not possible to hold the freshly quickened Christian thought of the Nineteenth Century, in the nomenclature of the Seventeenth." Speaking of the Westminster Assembly, he says:

"They were men peculiarly under the influence and the prejudices of their time-men whose intellectual and spiritual life, as they can yet be traced, were scored deeply by the pervading lines of its special currents of thought and feeling, and who have transferred these lines every where to the dogmatic structure which they built up in committee, slowly, amidst many interruptions, in the Jerusalem Chamber-a fair room in the Abbey of Westminster. Many signs

warn us that we must no longer, as a Church, repose in a mere blind traditionalism, under the impression that our fathers have settled the sum of Christian knowledge for us, and left us only to follow in their steps. My own profound conviction is, that religious thought in Scotland, no less than in England, has already entered upon a movement which is destined to remould dogmatic belief more largely than any previous movement in the history of the Church, and that it is well-nigh impossible that the old relation of our Church to the Westminster Confession can continue."

And again he said :—

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Lately, and indeed for many years, my mind has been much occupied with this subject. I have long seen that the day is approaching when the claims of all creeds and confessions to hold the place they have hitherto done in the estimation of the Church, will be keenly canvassed. We are even now on the eve of this day. The saying of Principal Robertson, when he retired, towards the close of last century, from the active part which he had taken in the Church's affairs,