imself, however, that he had discovered a principle by which at once to indicate his own church and condemn others, when he alleged, that its unders desired no innovation in religion, but only a return to the doc ines professed by those who lived at the outset of the Christian system," at is, the fathers of the first three centuries. His acute antagonist thus ontroverts the assumption that the Fathers are the best expositors of Scrip

Ire :

"He who can speak thus, can certainly never have cast a look upon the ritings of the Fathers of the three first centuries: for the author comes down low as the council of Chalcedon. As to the apostolical Fathers as they are alled, Hermas, Barnabas, Ignatius, Clemens Romanus, they contain, with re exception of the Recognitions, no developement of Christian doctrine, of hich we can make any use whatever; they refer, as every one knows, very rely to the words of Jesus and his apostles, and occupy themselves chiefly ith the Old Testament, which they expound allegorically, and which their norance of Hebrew prevented them from understanding. As to the Reognitions and Clementine Homilies, the author cannot possibly have read em, if he thinks they contain a genuine testimony to the meaning of Divine evelation. Will he, on the authority of the Clementines, admit that the ld Testament has been corrupted in a multitude of places, and contains any false and dangerous positions; or will he agree with Barnabas, who bles in the fifth chapter of his Epistle, that Jesus chose the most sinful of H men for his apostles, (τοὺς ἰδίους ἀποστόλους ἐξελέξατο ὄντας ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν patíav dvouærépous,) or will he, with the same author (ch. xii.) believe, that e fourth book of Esdras contains divine prophecies of Christ, and that the legorical interpretation of the Old Testament is the higher wisdom of Chris

ans?

Or will he, with Hermas, say, (Past. i. 3, 10,) Fast, and thou halt receive divine revelations; or, with the same author, (ibid i. 4, 2,) The Lord sent his angel who presides over the wild beasts and is called legrin; or that the apostles, after death, baptized in the invisible world? b. iii. 15.) If we advance beyond the apostolic Fathers, we find things still ore strange, and which it is impossible to receive as a true exposition of ivine revelation. So Justin Martyr says, (Cohort. ad gent. p. 19,) that the evil in Paradise persuaded Adam and Eve that thay were gods, and this was e origin of idolatry; that dæmons communicated magical books to men, Apol. i. p. 44,) and that the divination of the pagans was accomplished by eans of the souls of dead men, over whom they obtained power by incantaions, and that the Logos or Son is the second power after God. (Ib. p. 59.) "I am not, however, going to write a history of doctrines; it may suffice o say, that the result of the perusal of the Fathers, down to the year 325, is 10 other than this; they had not the doctrine of the Trinity, of hereditary sin, of the inability of man to perform any thing good, or of the satisfaction of Christ; they had no clear conception of the atoning virtues of the death of Christ, and they held a variety of opinions respecting the origin of evil, and had many superstitious notions respecting angels, dæmons, the millennium, and other things. Such are the witnesses whom Mr. Rose would have us receive as the most credible interpreters of divine revelation, as the best expositors of Scripture !"-Pp. 32-35.

In our Review of Mr. Rose we noticed briefly the injustice of which he had been guilty, in classing together, and condemning under the common name of Rationalists, all who had departed in any degree from the antiquated doctrines of the Augsburg Confession. Dr. Bretschneider animadverts very

severely on this:

"The incompetence of Mr. Rose is obvious in his very defective knowledge of German theology, and the form which it has assumed since 1750. In order rightly to understand and fairly to judge of it, it is necessary to at

VOL. I.

31

Church has been protected against the evil which has befallen the Germans by its articles, its church government, and its liturgy, and yet eonfesses that this evil has struck a thousand roots among his countrymen! Far be it from me to institute any sort of comparison between our modern theologians and those English Freethinkers whose aim is to ridicule Christianity and its history, and of whom one had the audacity to enter into a calculation of its probable duration, and to fix, if I mistake not, the twentieth century as the time in which it will cease to exist. What is the Episcopal Church benefited by the controul which she exercises over the faith of her members and her clergy, when, in this land of orthodoxy, the numbers of the church are constantly diminishing, and Unitarian, Methodist, Quaker, and Independent congregations are daily rising up and increasing their numbers?"-P. 21.

Mr. Rose had reproached the Protestants of Germany with claiming for themselves the liberty to alter their religious system, as the progress of knowledge furnished them with juster views; and, assuming, according to the usual practice of orthodox writers, that these juster views are merely arbitrary and wanton changes of opinion, charges them with exalting their own reason above the authority of the word of God. To this Dr. Bretschneider makes an admirable reply, applicable not only to Mr. Rose, but to every one in whose mind Christianity is so identified with the articles of his own church, that to attack the one is to him to be an infidel to the other.

"Mr. Rose has entirely misunderstood the point to which the words of Schröckh refer; he is not speaking of religion or Christianity, or the divine contents of the Bible, but of the theological system of the church, a thing to be carefully distinguished from Christianity. The doctrine of the church, whether the evangelical or any other, is nothing else than the declaration of a certain number of Christians, how they understood the doctrine of the Bible, and what they believed it to be; and a Confession of Faith only shews what a certain church thought at a certain time respecting the sense of that divine revelation which is contained in the Scriptures. Let not Mr. Rose imagine that this is a modern view of the matter, for the Augsburg Confession, the Catechisms of Luther, and the Articles of Schmalcalde, do not pretend to be any thing more than historical documents, shewing in what manner the teachers of the church understood and expounded the Scripture at a given time. (Form. Conc. epit. p. 572.) The clergy are then fully entitled to examine these opinions and interpretations, and, believing the authors of them to be fallible men, they could not do otherwise consistently with their reverence for divine truth. The two things which Mr. Rose confounds, the doctrinal system of the church and the doctrine of the Bible, are widely different indeed. Let him produce, if he can, a single passage of the Old or New Testament, in which is found the word Trinity, Persons in the Godhead, Satisfaction, Arbitrary Election and Reprobation, Hereditary Sin, &c., or a passage in which it is declared that the Son is the second person in the Godhead, the Holy Ghost the third, the Father the first; or that the Son and Holy Ghost are God equal to and proceeding from the Father; or that Jesus has made satisfaction for sin; or that mankind, by Adam's fall, have lost the use of their reason and freewill. All this is nothing more than the church's system respecting the declarations of Scripture, a proof of the manner in which she interpreted the Bible at the time when these doctrines were laid down, and of the inferences which she drew from certain passages which are found in it; and to examine whether she was right or wrong in so doing is not only a right but a duty.”Pp. 27-30.

Mr. Rose found himself at a loss for some ground on which to justify the separation of the English Church from the Romish, and yet deny the right of other churches or individual Christians to exercise the same freedom on those articles of faith which the first Reformers preserved. He flattered

himself, however, that he had discovered a principle by which at once to vindicate his own church and condemn others, when he alleged, that its founders desired no innovation in religion, but only a return to the doctrines professed by those who lived "at the outset of the Christian system," that is, the fathers of the first three centuries. His acute antagonist thus controverts the assumption that the Fathers are the best expositors of Scrip

ture:

"He who can speak thus, can certainly never have cast a look upon the writings of the Fathers of the three first centuries: for the author comes down as low as the council of Chalcedon. As to the apostolical Fathers as they are called, Hermas, Barnabas, Ignatius, Clemens Romanus, they contain, with the exception of the Recognitions, no developement of Christian doctrine, of which we can make any use whatever; they refer, as every one knows, very rarely to the words of Jesus and his apostles, and occupy themselves chiefly with the Old Testament, which they expound allegorically, and which their ignorance of Hebrew prevented them from understanding. As to the Recognitions and Clementine Homilies, the author cannot possibly have read them, if he thinks they contain a genuine testimony to the meaning of Divine Revelation. Will he, on the authority of the Clementines, admit that the Old Testament has been corrupted in a multitude of places, and contains many false and dangerous positions; or will he agree with Barnabas, who fables in the fifth chapter of his Epistle, that Jesus chose the most sinful of all men for his apostles, τοὺς ἰδίους ἀποστόλους ἐξελέξατο ὄντας ὑπὲρ πᾶσαν dμaptíav droμaτépous,) or will he, with the same author (ch. xii.) believe, that the fourth book of Esdras contains divine prophecies of Christ, and that the allegorical interpretation of the Old Testament is the higher wisdom of Christians? Or will he, with Hermas, say, (Past. i. 3, 10,) Fast, and thou shalt receive divine revelations ;' or, with the same author, (ibid i. 4, 2,) The Lord sent his angel who presides over the wild beasts and is called Hegrin;' or that the apostles, after death, baptized in the invisible world? (Ib. iii. 15.) If we advance beyond the apostolic Fathers, we find things still more strange, and which it is impossible to receive as a true exposition of divine revelation. So Justin Martyr says, (Cohort. ad gent. p. 19,) that the devil in Paradise persuaded Adam and Eve that thay were gods, and this was the origin of idolatry; that dæmons communicated magical books to men, (Apol. i. p. 44,) and that the divination of the pagans was accomplished by means of the souls of dead men, over whom they obtained power by incantations, and that the Logos or Son is the second power after God. (Ib. p. 59.) "I am not, however, going to write a history of doctrines; it may suffice to say, that the result of the perusal of the Fathers, down to the year 325, is no other than this; they had not the doctrine of the Trinity, of hereditary sin, of the inability of man to perform any thing good, or of the satisfaction of Christ; they had no clear conception of the atoning virtues of the death of Christ, and they held a variety of opinions respecting the origin of evil, and had many superstitious notions respecting angels, dæmons, the millennium, and other things. Such are the witnesses whom Mr. Rose would have us receive as the most credible interpreters of divine revelation, as the best expositors of Scripture !"-Pp. 32-35.

In our Review of Mr. Rose we noticed briefly the injustice of which he had been guilty, in classing together, and condemning under the common name of Rationalists, all who had departed in any degree from the antiquated doctrines of the Augsburg Confession. Dr. Bretschneider animadverts very severely on this:

"The incompetence of Mr. Rose is obvious in his very defective knowledge of German theology, and the form which it has assumed since 1750. In order rightly to understand and fairly to judge of it, it is necessary to at

VOL. I.

3 I

tend partly to the very different directions which it has taken, partly to the men by whom the impulse has been given, and partly to the degree of approbation which their respective opinions have obtained. For if these are not discriminated, but all deviations from the system of the church are thrown together under the title of a mass of pernicious opinions,' (according to the energetic expression of the English theologian,) gross injustice is committed, and ignorance of theology and its history betrayed. Even a superficial knowledge of its history, since the middle of the preceding century, would have furnished a four-fold distinction in the investigations respecting Christianity. First, there were some, in whose opinion revelation altogether was nothing but superstition, Jesus either a well-meaning enthusiast or an impostor, and Christianity a mass of errors, and who therefore thought they were doing a meritorious act in undermining its authority and exposing its weakness. These were the successors of the English and French Freethinkers, of whom, however, there were in Germany very few, and not one theologian among them. To this class belong Wünsch (the author of Horus) and the jurist Paalzow. A second class is formed of those who wished to promote natural religion at the expense of Christianity, who admitted the historical existence of Jesus, but no divine operation of any kind in his religion, and thought they could explain its origin and the events of his own life entirely by natural causes. They, therefore, represented the life of Jesus as a romance, himself a member of secret societies, and treated the Holy Scriptures as merely human books, which have been preserved by accident, and in which no word of God is contained. To this class belonged chiefly C. F. Bahrdt, who was, indeed, originally a theologian, but was soon removed from his office; the laymen Reimarus, author of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, and Venturini, author of the History of the great Prophet of Nazareth. Perhaps Brennecke may be reckoned in the same class. A third and very different class is formed by those whom we commonly denominate Rationalists. They agree in rerecognizing in Christianity an institution at once divine, beneficent, and intended for the welfare of mankind; in Jesus, a messenger of Providence; and they believe that in the Scripture a true and eternal word of God is contained, which is destined to be preserved and diffused by means of Scripture. They only deny that in this there has been any supernatural and miraculous agency of God; they consider it to have been the object of Christianity to introduce into the world, to establish and to diffuse, a religion, to which reason is capable of attaining, and they therefore discriminate in Christianity the essential from the non-essential, the local and temporal from that which is of perpetual validity. To this class belonged among philosophers Steinbart, Kant, and Krug; among theologians W. A. Teller, Löffler, Thiess, Henke; and of living authors, J. E. C. Schmidt, de Wette, Paulus, Wegscheider, Röhr. Lastly, there is a fourth class, who regard the Bible as in a higher sense a divine revelation than the Rationalists do, assuming an agency of God in making it known, different from his ordinary Providence, while they at the same time carefully distinguish the periods of this divine instruction, and rest the divinity of the gospel more on its internal evidence than on miracles, and especially discriminate between the doctrine of Scripture and the belief of the Church, reform the latter according to the word of God, and subject revelation so far to the test of reason, that they hold that the former should contain nothing that is contrary to, though it may what is above reason. This is the ground on which Doederlein, Morus, and Reinhard took their stand, and which Ammon, Schott, Niemeyer, Bretschneider and others continue to occupy. It is not less necessary to attend to the degree of credit enjoyed by the respective defenders of these four classes of opinions, and the extent to which they have been adopted by the theologians of Germany. The fancies of Bahrdt and Venturini, the attack of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments, Eck's explanation of miracles from natural causes, and Brennecke's hypothesis that our Saviour lived twenty-seven years on earth after his supposed ascension, never obtained much currency, and have been long con

igned to oblivion. The conjectures and doubts of Semler respecting both the Bible itself and the most ancient works of the Christian Fathers were never generally adopted, and though the genuineness of several of the books of the New Testament has been called in question, none of them have been impeached on sufficient grounds, except the Epistle to the Hebrews, which even the ancient church rejected as not having proceeded from the Apostle Paul. On the other hand, systematic Rationalism, that of Röhr and Wegscheider, has been adopted indeed, but only by the minority of theologians; while the opinions of the fourth class have acquired for themselves a permadent footing amongst the majority, and their prevalence, not only among the clergy but also the laity, may be regarded as the decided result of the theological investigations of the last eighty years. The class of blind zealots for every thing which the symbolical books contain-doctrines not capable of proof from Scripture and repugnant to reason-the class in which are found the denunciators of all rational theology, is every day becoming more insignificant, and must by degrees die out."-Pp. 45, et seq.

After this clear and candid statement we trust that no one, who has any regard for his own character, will repeat Mr. Rose's accusations of a denial of the divine authority of Christianity against the great body of German theologians. Dr. Bretschneider, who, from his station and experience, must know the fact better than one who has travelled hastily through the country, conversing of course by preference, where he could find them, with those blind zealots whose race is becoming extinct, assures us, that the class which comprehends the majority of the present German clergy, admits an agency of God in the revelation of Christianity, different from his ordinary Providence, that is, they are not antisupernaturalists. This information will be very unwelcome to those who would fain persuade men that faith and reason cannot be conciliated. We trust, however, that their love of truth will get the better in this instance of their hatred of reason, and that they will not persist in reiterating charges, advanced by a writer who could have no means of knowing their accuracy, and denied by one who has had the best opportunity of ascertaining their falsehood. We subjoin Dr. Bretschneider's concluding remarks:

"We forgive Mr. Rose, as an Englishman, his inconsiderate attacks on so many respectable men, and on a whole order who are justly deserving of estimation. A thorough-bred Englishman easily takes the form for the essence of things, and considers the essence as in danger of being destroyed if the form is lost. He would think there was an end of all justice, if judges and barristers did not come into court in the gowns and wigs of elder days, and that the constitution of his country was ruined, if the Lord Chancellor did not sit in parliament on a woolsack. Just so Mr. Rose thinks there is an end of religion, if theology lays aside the stiff garb of the symbolical books, or the liturgy ceases to speak in the language of the sixteenth century, and that the ruin of the church is impending, because the clergy choose rather to take the Apostles for their teachers, than the theologians of the Reformation. The weakness of mankind has always led them to confound their notion of religion with religion itself, and to prophesy its destruction when any change took place in the mode of its conception. Christianity is in danger,' was the cry in the time of the Waldenses, of the Hussites, of Wickliff, and of the Reformation; and yet it was only the system of the Romish church that was in danger, and not religion, which, on the contrary, by means of these reformers, was invested with a garb more suited to the age, and inspired with new and more widely beneficial activity. Human modes of conception are ever changing; and had religion been so poor and narrow a thing that it could only exist in some one of these modes, it must long since have perished. It is not given to man to bind the Spirit of God in the letter of a liturgy or a confes