to be now losing ground under the powerful influence of evangelical truth and reformation principlesMay it speedily be sent back to "its own place," and never be permitted again to escape thence, to pervert and destroy the souls of

men.

FROM THE ARCHIVES DU CHRISTIANISME.

1. EVANGELISCHE KIRCHENZEITUNG, &c. The Evangelical, Ecclesiastical Gazette, edited by a Society of German Divines, under the direction of Dr. Heugstenberg, Professor in the University of Berlin; a semi-weekly paper of 4 pages quarto, commencing 1st July, 1827.

2. TÜBINGER ZEITSCHRIFT FÜR THEOLOGIE, &c. A Periodical devoted to Theology, by the Professors of the Faculty of Theology in the University of Tubingen, and published by Dr. J. C. F. Steudel; 1828. No. 1. 291, pp.

8vo.

In order duly to appreciate the value of a literary production, it may be considered in two different points of view. Regarded in itself, it is the intrinsic value of it, and the service which it renders to the branch of knowledge to which it appertains, that must be taken into account; and the critick who analyzes it, will endeavour to exhibit what the work which he announces adds, in principle or in method, to the riches already acquired to the science of which it treats. Under another aspect, a new publication, even when it presents no claim to this sort of merit, has a just right to the attention of men who love to watch the movements of opinion, when a generally felt need of such a publication has called it forth, and when it manifests the tendency of received principles. It is evidently under this latter position, that a new journal demands our consideration; and if its professed principles differ from those which prevail in universally accredited

contemporary periodicals, its success will offer a higher title to curiosity and interest. The Ecclesiastico-Evangelical Gazette, published at Berlin, is, in many respects, a moral phenomenon, in a high degree worthy of attentive consideration. To view it in all its importance, we must be well acquainted with the scene in which it makes its appearance; but it is difficult to give a just idea of it to those who have only a superficial knowledge of the theological literature of the Germans. Meanwhile, the principal end of the Archives of Christianity, does not permit us to pass in silence a publication so remarkable. To account for the exception which we believe it due to make to the rules which we have prescribed for ourselves, and which prohibit all discussion of a nature rather literary than religious, we think it proper to describe some of the features which are particularly prominent in the state of German theology, such as it has presented for observation during half a century.

About the year sixty of the last century, two influences combined to work a revolution in the manner of studying and teaching Christianity. The one, purely exterior, issued from the court of a great king, who forsook his labours, and sought a respite in the society of some men of foreign letters-the slaves of the pleasures of a corrupt refinement, and skilful to conceal from themselves, and from their admirers, their moral misery and abasement, under the illusions of an elegant and frivolous scepticism. However, the game which the wits of infidelity played at Potsdam, could not have been able to disturb the faith of an educated and serious people, and the ascendancy of French opinions and manners would have left fewer traces in Germany than in England, where they had been diffused among the higher classes by the courtiers of

* The King of Prussia, Frederick the Great.-EDIT.

the Stuarts, and more lately by Bolingbroke, if the theological innovators, to whom the literature of France gave an impulse of which they were in a great measure unconscious, had not found under their hands, arms, with which the more distinguished schools of divinity and philology in their country had furnished them. The German literati, very far from nourishing sentiments hostile to the Christian religion, as did those writers for whom they entertained still more dread than sympathy, and intending to defend rather than do it injury, imposed upon themselves by the illusion that in removing from it all that shocked, if not reason, at least the professed interpreters of reason, they would restore to Christianity its lustre, reduce all scoffers to silence, and save the lightened vessel from shipwreck. The greater portion of them, belonging by their talents to the first rank of the classical authors of their nation, esteemed for the services which they had rendered to its literature, and respected on account of their situation in the church, and for their private virtues, saw themselves, from the commencement of their projects for reform, singularly aided by the German Bibliotheque Universelle, a journal, which, by a real superiority of style and taste, not less than by the celebrity of its editors, seized upon the good opinion of the studious classes; and for more than thirty years, exercised a species of dictatorship in the whole round of moral science and literature. The empire of this journal over men of the world and scholars, was perpetuated and extended by a great number of other periodical sheets, which adopted the same principles, and continued the work of reducing or purifying the dogmatical part of Christianity, amidst the plaudits of learned bodies, and of almost all the directors of instruction.

They only, who have lived in the universities of Germany, and followed the march of mind and theological learning during the last two generations, can form any idea of the overwhelming influence which carried them to the adoption of every conjecture, of every hypothesis, opposed not only to ancient orthodoxy, but to all revelation, and to all religion founded upon a historical basis. To acquire reputation, and obtain preferment, it became necessary that they should distinguish themselves by some ingenious combination, some bold assertion, which shook the credit of some one of the data, or the authenticity of some one of the writings, upon which the defenders of the ancient faith depended. For these labours only two things were requisite,-that they should be learned, and that their results should cast uncertainty upon facts, or points of doctrine, which had been before admitted.

Circumstances inherent in the German universities, contributed singularly to favour and accelerate this revolutionary movement, in the field of old established belief. The young professors had small salaries. In order to procure a subsistence with tolerable ease, and to open the way to places of greater emolument, it was necessary that their teaching should attract by its brilliancy, a crowd of students and the attention of the publick. It was their business to allure both the one and the other; but longwinded researches, labours ripened by time and reflection, such as those to which the Coryphei of erudition, the master criticks of the seventeenth century, and in general the learned and more liberally recompensed English and Dutch, had consecrated the whole of a laborious life,-would have been entirely too tedious to conduct to their end young men, who were in haste to ameliorate their humble and precarious condition. It was necessary for them to arrive prompt

understanding and speculative rea

son.

If, already, by their nature, and by the tendency which they impress upon their disciples, philology and philosophy are in a state of blind hostility to religious faith, how much more injurious still will their influence become, to the belief which reposes on sentiments of another origin and which wounds the pride of theoretical reason, when these branches of knowledge are taught to youth by instructors, who, if not infidel, are at least disposed to extend the jurisdiction of science to the detriment of Christian faith, and are exceedingly indifferent about what may weaken and undermine it? One must have necessarily remained an utter stranger to what the glory of lettered Germany has accomplished in modern times, to be ignorant of the immense empire that the philological and philosophical schools, which have rendered that country illustrious within half a century, have exercised over the tendency of principles and doctrines. Those of Heyne, and F. A. Wolf, changed the face of historical criticism, and displaced the points of view, under which men were accustomed to see the origin and the phases of civilization, institutions, worship, &c. and to form a judgment respecting the principal epochs of antiquity. The school of Kant still more deeply turned up the ground cultivated by his predecessors. One may say, that he operated a complete overturn in the philosophical aspect of human affairs, and accustomed almost the whole body of his countrymen to consider the faculties of man as the model, the measure, the arbitrators of all things, and reason as the competent judge, respecting the moral and religious interests of our species, from which there is no appeal. From these schools issued that immense,majority of the learned, which, for more than forty years, composed the faculties of letters and theology in

Germany, and which furnished both the ministers of religion, and the professors who filled the chairs in the universities of the centre and the north of that classick land of erudition and philosophy.

Another circumstance adds new weight to our exhibition of the order of studies which was prescribed to the future ministers of the gospel. The greater part of them, uncertain as to their destination, obliged to seek situations as instructors in noble families, or in secondary schools, waiting until they should be called to the ecclesiastical office, considered the holy ministry only as a remote and subsidiary occupation, an easy application of knowledge acquired in the gymnasia and at the universities, and directed their attention seriously to it, only from the moment when they entered upon the possession of a benefice, and the actual discharge of pastoral duties. Frequently, the attractions of the studies of history and philosophy, and the habit of devoting to them the chief part of their time, accompanied them into their new situation, and the pastors, pre-occupied with their academick recollections, readily joined in the combats which were carried on in the fields of philology and metaphysicks, and gave preference to the journals in which the truths of the gospel were kept in subordination to the results of historical criticism and the philosophy of the day.

And what are the principles which reign throughout the whole province of these investigations? To render every thing subordinate to the human understanding, to admit nothing which it cannot comprehend and trace to its cause, to consider as doubtful, or suspected, whatever is not reducible to clear notions, and to facts, not only attested by unobjectionable testimony, but also conformed to the laws of the psychology and metaphysicks in vogue,-these form the supreme rule, the applica.

tion of which decides the credibility of events, and the truth of doctrines in these divisions of knowledge. In thus consecrating their best years to these pursuits, years in which we contract for life intellectual habits, and adopt objects and labours with an affection which is commonly exclusive, the ministers of the gospel will bring to the studies and offices which impose upon them new duties, a spirit and dispositions prejudicial to the articles of a revealed religion-articles which demand positive belief.* Accustomed to submit to the laws of the understanding only, and inclined in all things to yield the pre-eminence to scientifick interest, they will unconsciously comply with the propensity to repel, or to attenuate and enfeeble, every thing which they cannot entwine with their favourite sciences, and incorporate with the system of ideas which has become an integral part of their moral life. In all questions concerning matters of faith, being prepossessed judges, they will lean to those decisions which have some analogy to the operations to which their previous studies have accustomed them; the practical importance of these decisions, and the pernicious effects which they may produce upon the morality and the tranquillity of the people, will disappear before the urgency of abstract principles; the spur of curiosity, the desire of extending the domain of intellect, the satisfaction of seeing enlarged the limits of investigation, in which reason prides itself, at the expense of the natural and obvious sense of the holy Scripture, will exercise a secret and corrupting influence; the preponderating voice of these will impose silence on the clearest words of the sacred authors, as well as upon the most evident moral interests. A combination of learned men calling

That is, a belief which rests on the divine testimony, and not on the deductions of our natural reason; a belief in supernatural facts.-TR.

into doubt the integrity or authenticity of a book, or passage, hitherto uncontested, a bold conjecture, an ingenious explanation, which takes away the force of a text as a doctrinal proof-will meet with minds greedy of such hypotheses, and prepared to embrace them as the conquests of reason and of true knowledge.

That result which this course of studies, this order of labours, this succession of eras in the career of a German theologian, are calculated to produce, is presented to us as being actually realized in the history of religious doctrines during the last generations. Issuing from the schools of Heyne and Kant, and regarding as an offence against sound criticism, as high treason against reason itself, the admission of any fact, of any proof, which broke the natural series of historical events, and the natural process of the development of the human mind, the candidates for the holy ministry entered upon their theological course, and at last upon their public functions, with the determination to see, in the annals of the Hebrew people, mythical traditions only, which must be disengaged from their symbolical investiture, and translated from the language of antiquity into ours, in order to take the air of an ordinary and rational narrative; and to see, in the appearance of divine love upon earth, in the advent of the Redeemer, only the highest degree of moral energy to which man may attain, by his own efforts, and with the aid of a provident education. With a few exceptions, the most celebrated universities very soon admitted to academical and pastoral offices, as to a literary course of life, those young men only, who placed Moses and Homer, the Hebrew judges and the heroic age of Greece, prophets, reformers, and magnanimous tribunes, all upon the same level-and who venerated, in the person of the Saviour, a Jewish Socrates, an organ of the truth, and a mar