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everlastingly good. God is goodness unceasingly active, in what the holy man does, lives, and loves, God appears in His own immediate and efficient life. Nor in man only does God appear, but in all nature the soul purified from the love of the transitory and unreal may see Him immediately present. Through that,' says Fichte, which seems to me a dead mass, my eye beholds this eternal life and movement in every vein of sensible and spiritual nature, and sees this life rising in everincreasing growth, and ever purifying itself to a more spiritual expression. The universe is to me no longer that eternally repeated play; that monster swallowing up itself only to bring itself forth again as it was before. It has become transformed before me, and bears the one stamp of spiritual life; a constant progress towards higher perfection in a line that runs out into the Infinite. The sun rises and sets. The stars sink and re-appear, and all the spheres hold their circle-dance, but they never return again as they disappeared. And even in this lightfountain of life itself, there is life and progress. Every hour which they lead on; every morning and every evening sinks with new increase upon the world. New life and love descend from the spheres, and encircle nature as the cool evening encircles the earth.'

Are

Wherefore should man doubt of life and immortality? they not clearly revealed to the soul that loves the true life? Being passes through its phases, but it does not cease to be. A dark soul not recognizing its root in the Godhead may be troubled at the changes in nature, and made sad by the passing away of that which to it alone seems real. But is not all death in nature birth? In death itself visibly appears the exaltation. of life. There is no destructive principle in nature, for nature throughout is free and unclouded life. It is not death which kills, but the new life concealed behind death begins to develop itself. Death and birth are but the struggle of life with itself to assume a more glorious and congenial form. And my death,' said Fichte, speaking as one who participated in this blessed and unchanging life. 'How can it be aught else but birth, since I am not a mere sham and semblance of life, but bear within me the life which is one, true, original, and essential. It is impossible to conceive that nature should annihilate a life which does not proceed from her: nature exists for me, I do not exist for her.'

Fichte did not profess to derive his doctrines from Christianity, yet he did maintain, that between them and Christianity the

identity was complete. He lived in that life in which Christ lived, and drew his inspiration from the same fountain of truth. All true men have found their strength there, and Christ above all others because He was supremely true. Christianity then is no external revelation, but God speaking and working in humanity. By Christianity, however, Fichte only meant what he called the Johannean gospel. He rejected S. Paul and his party as unsound teachers of Christian doctrine. They were but half Christians, and left untouched the fundamental error of Judaism and Heathenism. S. John was the disciple who had respect for reason. He alone appealed to that evidence which has weight with the philosopher-the internal. If any man will do the will of Him that sent me he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God.' The preface to S. John's gospel is not to be regarded as a merely speculative prelude to an historical narrative, but is to be taken as the essence and stand-point of all the discourses of Jesus. In the sight of John this preface is not his own doctrine, but that of Jesus, and indeed is the spirit, the innermost root of the whole doctrine of Jesus. And what is the doctrine of that preface? Its subject is creation. Precisely that on which Judaism and Heathenism had erred. Compelled to recognize the absolute unity and unchangeableness of the Divine Nature in itself, and being unwilling to give up the independence and real existence of finite things, they made the latter proceed from the former by an act of absolute and arbitrary Power. The Jewish books begin:-'In the beginning God created.' No, said S. John, in express contradiction to this. In the beginning; in the same beginning which is there spoken of; that is, originally and before all time, God did not create, for no creation was needed, but there was already 'In the beginning was the word; and all things were made by it.' In the beginning was the word; in the original text the Logos, which might be translated reason, or as nearly the same idea is expressed in the book called the Wisdom of Solomon,' wisdom. John says that the Word was in the beginning, that the Word was with God, that God Himself was the Word, that the Word was in the beginning with God.

Fichte asks,- Was it possible for John to have more clearly expressed the doctrine which we have already taught in such words as the following: - Besides God's inward and hidden Being in Himself, which we are able to conceive of in thought, He has another existence which we can only practically apprehend, but yet this existence necessarily arises through His in

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GOD IS THE WORD OR REASON.

ex

ward and absolute Being itself; and His existence, which is only by us distinguished from His Being, is in itself and in Him not distinguished for His Being, but this istence is originally before all time, and independently of all time, with His Being, inseparable from His Being, and itself His Being, the Word in the beginning, the Word with God, the Word in the beginning with God, God Himself the Word, and the Word itself God. Was it possible for Him to set forth more distinctly and forcibly the ground of this proposition, that in God and from God there is nothing that arises or becomes, but in Him there is only an IS; an Eternal Present, and whatever has existence must be originally with Him, and must be Himself? "Away with the perplexing phantasm,' might the Evangelist have added had he wished to multiply words. Away with that perplexing phantom of a creation from God, of a something that is not Himself, and has not been eternally and necessarily in Himself; an emanation in which He is not Himself present, but forsakes His work-an expulsion and separation from Him that casts us out into desolate nothingness, and makes Him an arbitrary and hostile Lord.'

The immediate existence of God is necessarily consciousness— reason. In it the world and all things exist, or as John expresses it, they are in the Word. They are God's spontaneous expression of Himself. That Word or consciousness is the only Creator of the world, and by means of the principle of separation contained in its very nature, the Creator of the manifold and infinite variety of things in the world. This Word manifested itself in a personal, sensible, and human existence; namely in that of Jesus of Nazareth, of whom the Evangelist truly said, He was the Eternal Word made flesh.' In and through Him, others were to be partakers of the divine nature. His disciples were to be one with Him as He was one with the Father. This is the characteristic dogma of Christianity as a phenomenon of time; as a temporary form of the religious culture of man. But the deep truth which it reveals is the absolute unity of the human existence with the Divine. Christ does not constitute that union, but reveals to us the knowledge that it exists. Before Him, it was unknown, and all who have since known it, may ascribe that knowledge to Him. The philosopher may indeed discover it, but it is already revealed to him in Christanity. All Christ's discourses as recorded by John are full of it. We must eat His flesh and drink His blood- that is, we must be transformed into Him.

We must live His life, not in imitation merely, but in a faithful repetition. We must be like Him, the Eternal Word made flesh and blood. For those who repeat the character of Christ He prays that they all may be one as 'Thou Father art in me and I in Thee that they also may be one in us.' One in us-all distinctions are laid aside. The whole community, the Firstborn of all, with His more immediate followers, and with all those who are born in later days, fall back together into the one common source of all life, the Godhead. Thus Christianity, its purpose being obtained, falls again into harmony with the absolute truth and maintains that every man may, and ought to come into unity with God, and in his own personality become the divine existence in the Eternal Word. No man had ever a higher preception of the identity of Godhead and humanity than the founder of Christianity. He never supposed the existence of finite things; they had no existence for Him. Only in union with God was there reality. How the non

entity assumed the semblance of being, the difficulty from which profane speculation proceeds, He never cared to enquire. He knew truth in Himself, He knew it solely in his own existence. He knew that all being is founded in God alone, and consequently that His own being proceeds directly from Him. When He showed His disciples the way to blessedness, He told them to be like Himself, for He knew of no blessedness but in His own existence. They were to come to Him for life, and they were to find it by being in Him as He was in the Father, and being one with Him as He was one with the Father.

SCHELLING.-With Fichte the reality of the object had disappeared. The non-I was only the production of the I. Here he departed from Kant, who left subject and object as correlates; the one giving validity to the other. At the same point Schelling departed from Fichte. The arguments which rendered the existence of the object uncertain prevailed equally against the existence of the subject. But, why should we not believe in the existence of the external world, or why should we doubt our own existence? After all our reasonings, the fact still remains that we do exist, and with our existence emerges face to face an existence which is not We. The I and the non-I continue to assert their being-the subject as validly as the object, and the object as validly as the subject. Is either of them real, and which? Fichte said, the subject. Schelling said,—both are real, but they have their reality in the identity of the two. The thinking process reveals to us not merely a

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THE DOCTRINE OF IDENTITY.

subject or an object, but both as one-the mind thinking, and the thing thought. We cannot separate them, because we cannot have the one without the other. The I is then evidently a subject-object. It is a mind possessing in itself the potentiality of all that is out of itself, and in its own spontaneous evolution evolving the potential into the actual. Thinking is thus identical with being, for there can be no thinking without a thing thought, and this thing thought cannot be separated from the mind thinking. There can be no knowledge without a thing known. A true knowledge, therefore, can be only a knowledge of self as subject and object-in other words, a selfconsciousness. What is thus true of the human I is equally true of the I of the universe-the absolute or fundamental I. It too is a mind knowing, identical with the things known, an absolute reason in which all things exist as potentialities and come forth as actual. That I, to use Fichte's expression, is an absolute activity whose movements are represented to us in time and space. The activity of the finite I is the result of its being acted upon by the I of the universe. The world spirit is knowing itself as subject and object in every individual, so that in his internal essence every man is real and actual; but, as to his form and personality he is imaginary and unsubstantial.

We have just said that Schelling at the point of the reality of the external world departed from Fichte, yet only to give reality to the external world from its necessary connection with the ideal. It may be maintained, and justly, that as yet he is on Fichte's stand-point, for nature is wholly deduced from the essence of the I. Schelling's earliest writings do not show a sudden departure from Fichte, but a gradual development, imperceptibly it would seem, to the author himself, from the doctrine of the I to a philosophy of nature. In the later writings, the stand-point is frequently changed. Schelling felt that among real philosophers the harmony was greater than the difference. In every new form which the expression of his own philosophy took, he identified it with that of some other philosopher who had gone before him. Having died without giving to the world the long expected exposition which would show the agreement of all the forms his doctrines assumed, we have no alternative but to follow them in their historical development.

This is divided by Schwegler into five periods. In the first, Schelling agrees with Fichte. In the second, he has advanced to the recognition of a science of nature as distinct from the