the same chapter as to the reception of the Credenda of the Catholic Church. These Credenda are of course objects of notional assent in so far as they can be conceived by a Protestant to be objects of assent at all. If any elements of knowledge in the world are more purely logical in form than others, the propositions of the Tridentine Creed, and indeed of any great creed, may be pronounced to be such. And Dr. Newman does not deny this. But, he argues, they are at the same time, in their particulars, objects of real assent-not indeed directly but indirectly-through faith in the Church. He who believes in the Depositum of Revelation believes in all the 'doctrines of the Depositum;' . . . and granting that the Canons of Councils and other ecclesiastical documents are 'really involved in the Depositum,' then the conclusion necessarily follows. For no Catholic can doubt that the dogmas of the Church are virtually contained in the Revealed Word.' The Church says that they are; and the word of the Church is the word of Revelation.' That the Church is the in'fallible oracle of truth is the fundamental doctrine of the 'Catholic religion; and "I believe what the Church proposes "to be believed" is an act of real assent, including all particular assents, notional and real.' It is exactly the case of the Medicago sativa over again in application. My mother is true; therefore whatever she says is true. The Church is the depositary of truth, and, therefore, whatever she teaches as truth is to be received; although veracity can no more guarantee knowledge than good intentions can secure rectitude of conduct, and although Dr. Newman's idea of the Church, as at once veracious and infallible, is the very point to be proved. To prove the details of the Roman Catholic theology by the assumption of the Roman Catholic dogma of the Church, is no doubt a remarkable feat in logic; but it was hardly worthy of Dr. Newman's ingenuity. And supposing the assumption to be as irrefragable as he believes it to be, an Essay in aid of a Grammar of Assent' was hardly necessary. An assent that does not recoil from the proposition, I believe what the 'Church proposes to be believed' cannot well need to be taught how to broaden and enlarge its area of belief.

We have nearly exhausted our criticism. It is sufficiently evident that we are unable to rate Dr. Newman's work highly as a contribution to the cause of Religious Philosophy. To do so appears to us plainly to misconceive its purport and the essential character of the principles on which it is based. A Grammar of Assent' which only vindicates Assent at the expense of reason, and secures Certitude by isolating it from

the processes of thought out of which it comes, may make a foundation for credulity; it can never help us to render a reason for the Faith that is in us. What the world needs is a Rationale of Belief in the face alike of scepticism and superstition. The latter, still more than the former, is independent of intellectual vindication.

Had Dr. Newman addressed himself on rational grounds to the advocacy of Faith-or Assent on its spiritual side-as a valid, ineradicable element in our human nature, he would have adventured a great and opportune task; and there are passages in the present volume which show with what felicity he could have touched at least some of the aspects of such a subject. But as we did not expect such a work from him, so we have not received it. We thank him for whatever he has said that is true or beautiful in behalf of man's spiritual constitution and the great elements of natural religion which at once attest the reality of our spiritual life, and point towards a higher Revelation as alone able to complete and satisfy it. So far his book is a significant protest not only against Positivism and its materialistic conceptions, but also against the negations of the New Oxford School, which has unhappily misconceived the basis of religious thought in ignoring, or at least comparatively ignoring, the great principles of Personality and Design which speak so loudly from the depth of our conscience and reason. We thank him also for the impressive force with which he has shown that an antecedent faith or religious disposition must go before, or along with, any due examination into such a subject as the Christian Evidences. But this has been done supremely well before by such thinkers as Pascal, Neander, Vinet, and Coleridge; who, if they have not written-not even Pascal-with a more felicitous pen, have yet grasped the spiritual position with far more balance and justness of thought than our author. Especially they have kept clear of the unhappy attempt to work a spiritual organon into an intellectual instrument; to convert the living power of faith and love which goes upward towards the transcendental Personalities of religion into an Assent to Propositions and Inferences. For this is the double vice of Dr. Newman's system. He has not only failed to seize the essentially rational character of every valid act of Assent, but he has turned religious Assent from its special function of apprehending personal Realities, and made it do the service of a mere logical drudge. What he has said of the personal characteristics of religious Assent is true of it, but only in its directly spiritual and transcendental relations. Propositions can never be too closely examined and

judged; inferences can never be too formally construed. But, as in ordinary life, the apprehension of personal realities is often a peculiar gift transcending logic, so in the higher unseen life with which religion is conversant, faith is a special faculty going forth with a force all its own to the apprehension of its appropriate objects. But then, as in the lower life, these objects are ever Persons, and not Doctrines. All the firmness of faith's adhesion, and all the guarantee of its validity, come out of this. One spirit has touched another and a higher Spirit, and knows that it has done so. The act may be essentially rational-indeed the highest expression of our rational nature--although transcending all inductions of the mere formal Reason. But, reduce even the highest apprehensions, as Dr. Newman does, to Propositions, or bring them otherwise under the forms of logical knowledge, and they can only be tested by logical rules. In short, an act of religious Assent in conversancy with the highest Objects may be rational although not logical; but no assent directed to the meaning of doctrines or the quality of inferences can be otherwise than bound by strictly logical conditions. The religious conclusions which Dr. Newman, by the aid of his Grammar, would impress upon his readers, only serve to show this in a clearer light. An irrational Creed is the best commentary on an irrational scheme of Assent.

It must also be remarked, from a general point of view, how entirely Dr. Newman has missed the peculiar problem of our modern Scepticism: the difficulty, namely, that is felt by many in passing from the Visible to the Invisible, from the Natural to the Supernatural. The difficulty, we dare say, may be unfelt by one all whose life has been so grounded in the spiritual and supernatural. Still it is the special form of religious perplexity which now presses upon many minds; and a mere assumption of the spiritual Life, and of the Church as a supernatural Reality guaranteeing its own Dicta, does not give much help to such minds immersed in, or overpowered by, the inductions of Science, and puzzling over the awful uncertainties behind the veil' and the things which are seen. Any hint of a principle of Certitude which would avail us here would have been worth many chapters of verbal exposition, however acute and interesting.

We should have rejoiced had we been able to welcome Dr. Newman more in the character of a Christian Philosopher, and had this work, which may probably close his career of authorship, deserved a place beside the few great Christian Apologies which have at once vindicated the Rights of Reason and of

Faith-the reality of our higher spiritual being and of the supernatural Contents on which alone it lives or can live. But we forget that in this case he would neither have been the author of the History of my Religious Opinions,' nor of the Grammar of Assent. It is clearly impossible that any Philosophy of Belief for our modern world can come from a system which has at once abandoned Philosophy and materialised Belief. Whatever may be the activities of Romanism in social and political directions, it is utterly dead and inept as a Power of Thought. It has lost the key to the door of the world's progress, and can only grope amidst the strewn wreck -the dogmatic débris-of the path by which man has advanced. And of this there cannot be any more signal example than this very volume-the product, perhaps, of its finest mind-in its intellectual havoc, and the audacious yet hopeless dogmatism which it teaches.

ART. V.-1. Erinnerungen aus dem äusseren Leben von Ernst Moritz Arndt. Leipsic: 1842.

2. Meine Wanderungen und Wandelungen mit dem Reichs• freiherrn Friedrich von Stein. Von E. M. ARNDT. Berlin: 1858.

3. E. M. Arndt's Schriften für und an seine lieben Deutschen. 3 vols. Leipsic: 1845.

4. Gedichte von Ernst Moritz Arndt. Vollständige Sammlung. Berlin 1860.

THE

HE history of mankind can scarcely present a spectacle parallel to that which we have just witnessed in the German rush to war. Not that the Teutonic race has ever been slack to battle, from the days of the Hermanns-schlacht till now; nor that opportunities of fighting have been wanted, for these have rarely been absent; nor again is it that wondrous efforts of patriotism have been unknown or unappreciated in Germany; for none can look back on the spirit that evoked, that waged, and that won the great war of liberation in 1813, without a feeling of reverence and awe for the men who engaged in it. But this war of 1870, in which we see for the first time One Germany rising in its strength, gathering, in its avalanche of excitement, all its manhood to battle, all its old age to guard, and all its womanhood to tend and heal the wounded and the sick, presents this striking con

trast with the only rising like it which history can record. The German unity of 1813 was a unity of extremity. It was only when one nation after another had been overthrown, when one effort after another had proved unavailing, when all the meanness, all the dishonesty, all the treachery of king after king, minister after minister, party after party had been exhausted and exposed; when the power of the first Napoleon, like the scourge of God, had trampled on the rights, and bowed the strength, and chained the limbs of Germany one by one; when the iron had entered into the very soul of the race, and the French yoke had become intolerable; it was after all this, in the very agony of wretchedness, that the prostrate giant, in a huge convulsion of anguish, sprang up mightier than he had fallen, and, like a Samson, burst his heavy bonds. But this war of 1870 begins where the war of liberation ended. To unite and marshal Germany against the first Napoleon needed a long discipline of desolation; the men who fought at Leipsic had felt the bitterness of servitude, and those who raised the shout of freedom had long been uttering the groans of slavery. And these things happened nearly sixty years ago;-sixty years of time in a century incalculably rapid in every kind of progress. How is it that the Germans of to-day, who rush so eagerly to defend their country, leaving home, property, calling; knowing no fear save that here and there one German may prove less patriotic than they feel themselves-how is it that they should do this great thing, not in a last struggle, but at the very first breath of danger, and at the very first clear trumpet-sound of war? There can be but one answer to this question. It is that a mighty spirit animates the race; a spirit compounded, if we may say so, of three different sentimentsmemory of French wrongs, hatred of French rule, and longing for German unity. Nothing less than this could avail to bring all classes from all parts of the German land under a single standard, and make her most distant sons swarm by the hundred thousand to defend in battle the noble river which has become as sacred in their eyes as the Jordan or the Ganges to nations of the East.

It is in the nature of things, when we see so striking a combination of feeling take bodily possession of an entire race, that we should inquire as to the means and the men by whom it has been effected; and it is in answer to such an inquiry that we are about to place before our readers the following sketch of the life and influence of Ernst Moritz Arndt, the man to whom, more than any one other, the great enthusiastic union of the German race is due; the man who, even in his well