Testimony of Müller. us, is the tree of knowledge. And the latest voice of history only re-echoes his own earliest word, that in the day we depart from him and eat of that tree, aspiring to know as he knoweth, we do surely die. Well does Julius Müller say, "There is but One perfectly free from error and free from sin CHRIST. He alone could lay claim to the faith of men in himself as one who spoke the truth, on the ground of his moral purity; and he therefore can pronounce judgment upon whatever does not receive and harmonize with him, as a wandering into the paths of darkness; he alone can analyze its connection with a depraved bias of will. That which Protagoras the sophist said of man subjectively, that he is the measure of things,' is objectively true of the MAN who is our Lord and our God. But as for us, seeing we are never free from sin, and are therefore continually liable to error, it is our highest wisdom not to trust ourselves, still less to make ourselves the 'measure of things,' but to rise above ourselves to Him who alone is holy, and who, as he is the life, so is also the truth.”1 1 Christian Doctrine of Sin, B. I., Pt. I., Chap. III. lator of Plato, and the great Berlin preacher who had such power to lift the minds of men up into heavenly realms of truth, escaped from the abyss of pantheism into which he early fell. But Julius Müller concedes as much, probably, as the strict truth will bear, when he says, "The truly Christian view of sin and redemption, which Schleiermacher adopts in his superstructure, is in direct contrast with the foundation of his theory. Firmly agreeing with Schleiermacher as to the superstructure, we are obliged to reject the theoretic foundation of his doctrine." Net result. While thinking of the system of Spinoza as perfected by Hegel, and of the way in which all divine and human institutions, and the realities of the external world, vanish in its embrace, it seems to us like a mighty ocean, heated by the rays of a vertical sun; into which the Bible, the Church, the State, history, nature, society, as if they were but so many tall and resplendent frost-vessels, are forever moving down to melt out of sight, and to blend with its weary, aimless, ever rolling, and unfathomable waters. Lesson of now taken. The lesson of this brief and fragmentary survey of Neo-Spinozism is plain. In the midst of the garden in which the Lord God has placed 1 The following is Schleiermacher's eulogy of Spinoza, the first sentence of which I have already quoted: "Offer up reverently with me a lock of hair to the manes of the rejected but holy Spinoza. The great Spirit of the universe filled his soul; the infinite to him was beginning and end; the universal his sole and only love. Dwelling in holy innocence and deep humility among men, he saw himself mirrored in the eternal world, and the eternal world not all unworthily reflected back in him. Full of religion was he, full of the Te Ghost; and therefore it is that he meets us standing alone in his above the profane multitude, master in his art, but without disci Philosophy cannot be separated from religion. LECTURE IV. THE PANTHEISTIC CHRISTOLOGY. THE questions of philosophy are always closely related to those of religion. This is no more true when the relation is one of sympathy than when it is one of antagonism; no more true of pantheism than of positivism. Even a sensuous philosophy opens anew the whole field of religious thought by denying its reality. The human mind, while gratifying its natural thirst for the discovery of truth, either concerns itself directly with the primary facts of religion, or with theories which involve the question of their existence. Naturalism does not, any more than transcendentalism, remove us from the realms of theism. The inevitable recoil of our antipathy, as surely as any direct impulse of sympathy, is constantly bringing us to those realms. This necessary connection is more apparent, however, in the case of the a-priori philosophy. The material on which Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel wrought, is the same as that of Christian theology. The nature of God and all more mani- existence, and the origin and tendency of things, were the themes on which they speculated, in common with Augustine, Anselm, and Descartes, though in a different spirit. Pantheism itself is no less a This con nection fest in transcendentalism. religion than a philosophy; a religion to reverent and poetical natures, which love to look at truth through the haze of the affections or prism of fancy; a philosophy to purely inquisitive minds, which study all subjects in the dry light of the intellect. In one view of the case, therefore, it might seem superfluous to consider the attitude of pantheism towards the doctrines of religion. Why go on beyond it to speak of that which lies within itself? But we use the If Two uses here. The religion substantially the which is same as pantheism. word "religion" in two senses. There is a natural religion and a revealed religion; a subjective religion of the human consciousness, and an objective religion of authoritative precept; an idealistic religion, and an historical religion. It is the former of these that constitutes the essence of the pantheistic system: what becomes of historical religion, under the handling of pantheism, is a question still to be considered. The nature of its investigations is such as to make this, almost of necessity, our first inquiry from its point of view. it is to have any development at all, if it is not to be forever a fountain without an outlet, it must begin to flow forth by this channel. Pantheism takes us through the whole realm of religious ideas, and claims to bring us, at last, to a universal solvent. If that solvent is not to lie in our minds unused, but to be applied to the phenomena of human life and society, the particular historical religion which we may happen to hold, will naturally be the first thing to come under its power. If Hegel had lived in China, and made disciples there as he did in Ger many, his philosophy would have been applied to the |