male and female, came in little parties to gaze on the remains of their departed father. Dissolved in tears, they passed the bedside of the holy dead, and took the last look of that countenance which had long beamed upon them with unutterable love. On the evening of the same day the funeral took place, the largest ever seen in Madras. Every demonstration of profound respect for the memory of a great and good man, a Christian hero who had fallen nobly in the field, was made, both by the European and native community. On the following Sabbath Venkataramiah preached a funeral sermon from the words, "Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord." "He described," says Mr Braidwood, "the rest and the reward of Christ's servants, and drew from a loving heart and sound judgment a true and impressive portrait of Mr Anderson, and shewed how God gifted him, sustained him, employed him, and at length had satisfied him with everlasting blessedness."

The Madras Free Church Mission, the origin and progress of which we have thus traced, still bears the impress imparted to it by its two first missionaries. Their heroic and devoted labours bear blessed fruit at this day, and will be felt at Madras for generations to come. They were cut down in the midst of their career, but they were enabled to do a work which was sufficient to crown with honour the longest life. It is not by mere length of days that usefulness is measured, but rather by the quantity and quality of the work done. Anderson and Johnston, loving and lovely in their lives, and in their deaths not long divided, lived fast and laboured hard in the service of their great Master. By the time they had reached the ordinary meridian of human existence, they had become veterans on the field, ready to be summoned away to their reward. They had also laboured to such purpose, and so filled their chosen sphere with their own noble spirit, that others who enter upon their labours cannot fail to be stimulated by their example, and to toil with energy like their own for the good of that Mission which they founded.

The history of that Mission is its best vindication. It was, as we have seen, entirely educational in its origin, but it has been highly evangelistic in its results. Like the kindred missions at Calcutta, Bombay, and Nagpore, it has furnished a powerful lever for elevating the Hindu mind, and been the honoured instrument in the conversion of many Hindu souls. Its operations and methods have been signally blessed from first to last, and we cannot conceive what valid objection can be urged against the principles on which it is based. The production and preparation of a native Christian agency for the spread of the gospel in India are points on which most intelligent supporters of missions are now agreed. And if the neces

sity and advantage of such an agency are now recognised generally over the church of Christ, the success of this Madras Mission has very largely contributed to such a result. We forget not the high claims of the Calcutta Free Church Mission, and the signal services of Dr Duff in defending the missionary system, which must ever be associated with his name; but the labours of Anderson and his colleagues appear to have been peculiarly useful in flinging the strongest light on all the details of the educational method, and in meeting effectually the most plausible arguments that can be urged against its principle or its working.

Mr Braidwood has performed his task in a spirit of love and reverence. He has done full justice to the memory of his sainted friends, letting them speak for themselves, and be seen in their works. But he has not done justice to his own share of the missionary work which he records. He has forgotten himself in his zeal to do honour to the departed. Yet his own name will never be forgotten at Madras; it will always be mentioned with the deepest respect, and held worthy to be joined with the names of Anderson and Johnston. This biography is alike honourable to his zeal and his accomplishments. The spirit of a man of faith and true missionary breathes in every page. The book, doubtless, like almost every other of its kind, admits of some improvement. Some little historical links that we miss near the beginning might very properly be supplied. The materials bearing on the progress of the Madras Mission might occasionally also be more elaborately wrought up. But the book itself is an interesting and valuable contribution to our missionary literature. It is fitted to help the cause of missions over the church of Christ, and to kindle a missionary zeal in our theological halls. If it be the means of raising up more true missionaries for India, especially for the loved Madras field, one great aim of the excellent author will doubtless be accomplished.

ART. VII.-Dorner on the Immutability of God.*

On the Right Conception of the Dogmatic Idea of the Immutability of God, with special reference to the mutual relation between God's supra-historical and historical existence. By J. A. DORNER.

IN the inner depths of the cultivated world of Greece, even at its most flourishing period, there lay the consciousness that it had acquired its wealth, as it were in an illegitimate way, by robbery from the divine. This is strikingly expressed in the legend of Prometheus, and in the recollection of a breach with an earlier religion, which is also connected with his name. The beauteous Hellenic world knew that it had come into being not under the blessing of the old gods, but in some measure under the disfavour of the new, whose chief was conceived of by the spirit, or rather by the accusing and excusing thoughts of the evil conscience, as jealous of the power of the emancipated human spirit. Thus, amongst the Greeks, the enjoyment of the bright present was mixed with a presentiment that it, and along with it the rule of the self-made gods of Olympus, would ere long pass away. Below the fair surface of a free, elevated life, there was a deeply-rooted consciousness of bondage and unhappiness; and it may be said, that in this tradition, the spirit of the Grecian people confesses itself to be at once fettered and free, we know not which most emphatically. It doubts the right of its gods; it doubts not less its eternal right to exercise itself freely in politics, art, science; and it doubts the endurance of its works. That the new stage of its spiritual life is not blessed and consecrated by the old stage of its faith, and has therefore not brought about a lasting advancement in the knowledge of God, but a further departure from the divine-that is the reason of the deep schism which the deeper spirits of Greece, such as Eschylus, feel and express.

This restless and unquiet age of ours, pressing so boldly forwards, and yet after all so weary, has something Promethean in it. It also is a living contradiction, in which a feeling of increased freedom is united with the unbreakable fetters of a deep discomfort, an inner desolation and unhappiness of heart. The feeling that our cultivation, too, has not an altogether good conscience before God, is more widely spread than is supposed. The gifts of this cultivation have not been blessed and conse

This article is translated, with considerable abridgment, from the Jahrbücher für Deutsche Theologie, vol. i., part 2, 1856, and vol. iii., part 3, 1858, and is of great value as a review of German opinions on the subject of which it treats. -ED. B. & F. E. R.

crated by the faith of our fathers, but the free consciousness of the outer world has been developed to a disproportionate strength. One of the two hereditary forms of the doctrine of God in its abstractness and pure spirituality does not, it is true, offend the "cultivated" spirit of the times, but, at the same time, it affects it so little, that it is only natural that in its newest phases it should ignore it, and seek a less distant God in its own breast or in nature. The other form, full of life as it has always been in the simple faith of Christians, seems, to modern cultivation, offensive, unworthy, yea, childish, from its faith in a particular providence, which makes God dependent on the interests of the world, and especially on the prayers of believers. Evil intention is not always, perhaps indeed rarely, the origin of this. Theology must bear its share of the blame, for it has too little sought to heal this deep schism in our popular life, and to arrive at a clear and fixed doctrine of God. Such a doctrine, it is true, is not necessary to the existence of faith, but only to its increase. For "the cultivated world," however, it is in the highest degree necessary, that it may not lose through spiritual dulness its point of connection with the Christian faith. The world of the present day, regarded in the mass, is not without the sting of conscience reminding it of God; but, on the one hand, it is not in a position to sacrifice the great results of human culture to the old faith; nor, on the other hand, can it maintain this faith along with them. There is something Titanic in this age of ours; something Titanically bold, yea, daring; something, too, Titanically unhappy. That faith in God, which blessed and guided earlier times, is shaken for thousands. The idea of a living God has become a phantasm, a terrifying, spectral form; and already, as man cannot live without a God, different forms of deification of the world. spring up to fill the empty place of faith with superstitious belief in matter or in humanity, or in its works, politics, art, and science. While this process is going on in every stratum of our people, and the foundations not merely of Christian but of human existence are being undermined, hundreds in the different stories of the superstructure, find time to dispute with their brethren about minute questions of confessions, but wonderfully few hands are raised in the department of thought and science to check the undermining which, if it were to succeed, would bury us all in ruins. Science alone, certainly, cannot counteract the danger which is prevailing so strongly amongst our people. The church must double her exertions, her love, and care; and she practically does so in some measure in her home missions, and otherwise. But science must not be idle, if the preaching of the church is to be enlightened and accommodated to the spirit of the times. The evil is to be traced

to the want of speculative thought among the people. The awakened senses of the time hunger and thirst for Realism after we have so long lived in Idealism. This in itself is not to be blamed, but to be praised. If the old scientific doctrine of God can be shewn to have suffered in general from an idealism which withdraws God from the world into an abstract elevation, the theological doctrine of God will be furnishing its proper contribution to the wants of the time, if it vindicate for the idea of God a powerful realism, which shall fill with new spirit and life the powerless abstract conception of Him.

We will in what follows take into consideration only one point of the doctrine of God. It is the point, however, on which, in the present state of matters, the greatest weight seems to rest,-the scientific formation of the doctrine of God. It is one which concerns most closely the interests of religion; and so many questions gather round it, that a satisfactory treatment of it may be regarded as a condition of the renewed establishment and authority of the living Christian idea of God in "the cultivated world" of the present. We will discuss the correct conception of the dogmatic idea of the immutability of God, with special reference to the relation between his supra-historical and historical existence, without pretending to completeness. If, in doing so, we are obliged to oppose many views which bring forward doubtful propositions contrary to the traditional doctrine of the divine immutability, our meaning, as the subsequent course of this article will sufficiently shew, is not that that traditional doctrine of God in the Dogmatic of our church needs no purifying development, but that we need improvements, which can be shewn to be so in truth.

It is now frequently said, that the interests of philosophy and of science in general, are opposed on this point to the interests of piety. We shall have to put this saying to the proof, for an essential difference between the two, about the first principles of the doctrine of God, must make a final separation between them, and lastingly injure both.

Until recently, it was specially the idea of the personality of God, about which the philosophical and theological doctrine of God was occupied. The more noted religious philosophers of the present day, teach and demonstrate, almost without exception, the absolute personality of God; for example, H. Ritter, Chalybäus, Weisse, K. Ph. Fischer, Fichte, Ulrici. They recognise that neither is the infinite truly thought, if it is conceived of only as the limitless res extensa, nor consciousness, if it is so conceived that the infinite cannot be an object of it. Nothing definite, however, is expressed as to the more concrete idea of this personality in itself, and in its relation to the world.