baugh's book itself; although he takes a great deal of pains appaently, to set aside the doctrine of the middle state entirely. It is however, a question of place with him in the end altogether, and not properly a question of state. His object is to make out that the souls of believers do at their death pass into glory; which involves to his mind, an entrance locally into a certain fixed region called heaven, the same that is to be occupied by saints after the resurrection. But in all this, he simply locates the theatre of the intermediate state in heaven, instead of giving it a locality in the under world, or some where else. The state itself he is still forced to acknowledge and allow. His disembodied spirits exist in heaven on very different terms, from those which hold in the case of the full and proper heavenly life, as it is to be reached after the resurrection. They have no clear sense or apprehension of the realities around them; no full self-consciousness, answerable to their local condition; it is a potential rather than an actual occupancy they have of heaven after all, like that of the present world by the infant still unborn. It is a state "analogous to, but, of course, higher than a state of ordinary sleep, with active dreaming." Nay, farther it is allowed to be, under this form, an inward preparation, " celestial pupilage," for the resurrection life, carrying out and completing the preparation previously begun in the body. "While the saint is in this world, in the body, he becomes conversant with material things, and habituated to them; now, in the other world, in a disembodied state, previous to the resurrection, he will become conversant with and habituated to purely spiritual existence, so that after the resurrection, when soul and body are again united, he will be able to hold converse and communion with either material or immaterial existences at pleasure." But what less, we ask, is all this, than the very idea of the middle state itself, which the author seeks to exclude? Locate it where we please, in hades or in heaven, the fact remains at last substantially the same. The state between death and the resurrection, as it differs widely from our present life, differs widely also from the life that is to follow. It is not heaven itself, in the full sense, as it is to be revealed hereafter; but an undeveloped, relatively embryonic condition, rather, according to this book, in which souls are matured by

inward exercise for that higher order of glory. We find no occasion then, to defend the reality of the intermediate state, against Mr. Harbaugh; for he himself allows it, in language which all must confess to be sufficiently strong.

We think, however, that he obscures the true force and value of the doctrine, by insisting too far on the local identity of the 'two states which he owns to be so materially different in their interior constitution. Heaven of course involves the conception of place; but we have no right to think of it as holding only 'under such local relations and limitations, in this form, as are found to characterize our present mortal life. The idea of place may admit far other modes of relation to it, than any of which it is possible for us now to form a conception. Place itself becomes what it is, by the way in which it is occupied and apprehended; a new sense imparted to us, (like sight for instance to the consciousness of a world born blind,) might of itself be sufficient to change our existence, immeasurably more than a translation without it to the most remote part of the universe. So it is quite easy to conceive of the whole theatre and form of our existence undergoing a revolution, first at death and then again at the 'resurrection, without any vast migration in space after our present fashion of thinking, which nevertheless may involve in each case such a universe of change as no image of any such mere outward migration can even adequately represent. The idea of state here is of incomparably more account, than the notion of place; for the simple reason that this last must necessarily be conditioned, in its whole real determination, by the powers and capabilities which are comprehended in the first. The Scriptures certainly open to our contemplation thus three states, in the case of man, which are very differently related to our world, while yet they all belong to the same grand process of space and time for which the world serves as a theatre. The idea of this process requires the full triumph of humanity, according to the proper sense of Gen. i, 26; Ps. viii, 5-8, and Heb. ii, 5-10, over all the limitations with which it is called to struggle in the world as it now stands. This end is reached by redemption. Hence a mortal state, doomed to sink under the law of sin and death; an intermediate state, in which the reign of death continues,

but all is ripening at the same time for the outburst of a higher life; and finally a resurrection state, in which this mortal shall put on immortality, and man stand forth as the perfect and last sense of this earth, organically conducted to its own glorious consummation by Him who made it in the beginning for such use. What more the idea of Heaven as introduced by this last state may include, into what new relations and correspondences it may bring its happy inmates with other spheres and climes of God's universe, either immediately or at some subsequent epoch, we know not; the Scriptures shed no clear light on what lies beyond. But so much at all events the idea includes, as related to what lies on this side; Heaven is the true end and issue of the problem which God is conducting to a solution in the world as it now stands, and the very form in which at last the stream of its history is destined to roll the full volume of its sense into the ocean of light, and holiness and love, which it is formed to seek from the beginning.

The doctrine of the intermediate state of course then is no point of curious speculation merely, but a most deeply practical interest for Christian faith. In proportion as it falls out of view, the historical realness of the new creation in Christ Jesus is made to suffer in the mind of the Church. A living christology, a quickened sense of the mystery of the Church, must ever require it as a necessary part of its consciousness and hope. It is only an abstract Christianity which finds it easy to part with it altogether, or that turns it into a nullity, by erasing all real distinction between the state before the resurrection and the state after it. Such abstraction, however, strips in this way the doctrine of the resurrection itself of its significance, and so far saps the very foundations of the Christian faith.

But the subject is too broad for us, to pretend to take it up here at all in its details. We may find occasion possibly to return to it, as a direct and separate theme, some time hereafter. Some have an invincible propensity to confound the idea of a middle state with the idea of a probation after death, purgatory, &c. But the two conceptions are by no means the same. The first is taught in the Creed, and we are bound to believe it. The question, whether any of the human race will have a probation

extended to them after death, is one which our Church allows us not to meddle with in any positive way. Mr. Harbaugh, if we take his meaning right, consigns the untold millions of the heathen world to hopeless perdition. This, however, is going too far; we have no right to affirm absolutely, one way or the other. Infants, dying such, Mr. Harbaugh of course considers saved, without any such probation as implies the possibility of their being lost. Still he would admit, no doubt, that this salvation must include an evolution of reason and will in a human way; the knowledge of Christ in some way preached or made known; and a free closure, as the old divines say, with the terms of life presented in his person; otherwise all would become magic.

On the subject of the Church, as we have before said, as well as in its whole christological theory, the little volume before us is far enough removed from the abstract spiritualism, which has become so common in our modern divinity. One great object of the writer seems to be indeed, to expel such spirituality of the mere intellect from our minds, and to make us feel that the mystery of the new life, as it is unfolded to us in Christ, is no less real, and concrete and near to the world as it now stands, than are the palpable existences that surrounded us in the sphere of N.

sense.

ART. XXVI.-MORELL'S PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION. BY J. D. Morell, A. M., Author of the History of Modern Philosophy, etc. New York: D. Appleton & Co. Philadelphia: Geo. S. Appleton. 12mo. pp. 359.

THE author of this work has come recently into favorable notice by his History of Philosophy; which is, undoubtedly, the most successful attempt that has yet been made, to exhibit in English form an intelligible outline of the marches and countermarches,

achievements and exploits, of modern mind, in the regions of pure thought. The difficulty with these historical sketches among us generally is, that they are wholly outward and mechanical in their character; the product of a purely empirical reflection, which has never come to understand what speculation means, much less to have any inward sympathy with its processes and wants; and which affects, accordingly to take the size and measure and contents of a system of philosophy, much as some shrewd Yankee understanding, made up of lines and figures, would go about the business of constructing a table of statistics. No wonder that the whole subject should be turned more or less, in this way, into solemn caricature and nonsense; especially, if the case require a transfer of thoughts out of one language over into another, the profound ideas of Kant, for instance, or Schleiermacher, or Hegel, from German over into commensurate and fairly intelligible English. Such translation is, under any circumstances, a most difficult and delicate task; but in the province now before us, the difficulty approaches the character of desperate impossibility. At all events, no power can overcome it, even in part, that does not involve an actual entrance into the world of thought which is to be described, and a living reconstruction of its forms and relations in the life of the reporter. Only as the thoughts are thus truly mastered and made his own, and are brought in this way to force out for themselves a proper utterance and representation in the language he speaks, can it ever be possible for him to mediate at all between them and the thinking of other minds. Such qualification for writing a history of philosophy, Morell must be allowed to possess in a rare degree. He has himself a deeply philosophical mind; feels the necessity and dignity of speculation; owns within himself the authority of a divine call to think. His philosophy has taught him to look with reverence to the thinking of others; he has read and studied much, with living insight into systems and books; he has become widely catholic thus and free, without losing at the same time his own separate independence. No one can charge him with a disposition to undervalue or wrong the claims of English philosophy; he is far enough removed from all blind veneration for what is foreign; whether French or German, as such; while, however, the claims