men off from being in parties or from narrow notions." His "Natural Religion" might have afforded illustrations of his broad views, and shown his theological sympathy with more than one member of the "Platonic School." Although educated at Oxford, he was in more ways than one connected or associated with Cambridge, and for the year preceding the restoration (1659) he was master of Trinity College in the latter university. Tillotson, in prefacing his "Natural Religion," (1674) paid a tribute to his merit as "establishing the principles and duties of religion upon their true and natural foundation."

As to Tillotson himself, one need not read far in his works before he traces the sentiments of one who held that "it is a great mistake to think that the obligation of moral duties doth solely depend upon the revelation of God's will made us in the Holy Scriptures." Tillotson's theology came in the next century under Whitefield's reprehension, whether justly or not is not the question here, but it was obnoxious probably on the same grounds upon which Dr. Tulloch would com

Yet Tillotson was educated at Cambridge, and his biographer assures us that it was Chillingworth's book that "gave his mind the ply, that it held ever after, and put it upon a true scent." Nor is his connection with the Platonists overlooked.

There are other names associated with Cambridge and its Platonic School, which, at a subsequent date, gave evidence of the abiding impression that had there been made. We can here only refer to Dr. Thomas Burnet, a pupil of Tillotson, and educated under Cudworth at Clare-hall and Christ's College, Cambridge. In 1661 he was senior proctor of the University, and we have good evidence that to the "rational" element of the Platonists, he was far from being indifferent or unsusceptible. In 1692 he published his Archæologia Philosophica, which he dedicated to the King. But its Rationalism was too pronounced for even such a dedication, or his own reputation as a profound and accomplished scholar, to save it. It was in vain that in a new edition he directed the printer to omit the imaginary dialogue between Eve and the Serpent. No emendation could save the work from damning criticism. Rather, it dragged its author down, and if Oldmixon can be relied on, lost him, on the death of Tillotson, the succession to the See of Canterbury.

It was in the next year after Burnet's book was published that Blount's "Oracles of Reason" appeared. A large part of the latter is simply a translation from the former. The Theist borrows and is proud to borrow from the Rationalist. Burnet's latitudinarianism thus became doubly offensive. He had put arms into the hands of the skeptic. But Blount was not indebted to Burnet alone. His commendation of Hales, and quota

tions from his writings, indicate his connection with Dr. Tulloch's Rational Theologians. He illustrated the pertinence of his own simile, "that human reason, like a pitcher with two ears, may be taken on either side." The Platonists laid hold upon one, but he of the other.

Blount lays the stepping stone from the platform of the Rational Theologians to that of the later Deists. With Hales he held expressly that "heresy and schism as now commonly used, are two theological scarecrows," and with Minucius Felix, "He is the best Christian who makes the honestest man." Among the most noticeable of his positions are these: "Morality in religion is above the mystery in it," hereby anticipating Toland and Tindal. There is no need of a mediator. Things are good or evil "antecedent to human compacts," hereby harmonizing with Cudworth and Clarke-"All vice and wickedness is but a denial and disowning of God to be the supreme infinite good "-in this retaining the better elements which Lord Herbert had commended before him.

With such antecedents fairly apprehended, we are prepared to follow out the sequel of the great Deistic controversy, which reaches down to about the middle of the last century. The Platonic school at Cambridge stood in a direct relation to this development of " Free Thought," and its history cannot be adequately written without going over an extensive field, the outline of which we have merely indicated. The subject is one that has peculiar claims upon the student of the historical development of Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy. It has never yet been properly investigated. Dr. Tulloch has given us several valuable, but fragmentary, chapters of it, and he pauses at just the point where our interest is greatest to have him proceed. We trace with him the course of a stream, which we know cannot be absorbed and vanish like a river in an African desert, and we actually discover far beyond the point at which he leaves us, glimpses of the silver thread, which assures us of a progress more important still, that yet remains to be traced.

But while saying this, we are not insensible to the value of the service which Dr. Tulloch has rendered. His aim is obvious enough. His criticisms render it transparent. His eulogy of a "national" Church as the only one in which there can be safe elbow room for thought, thrusts it rather unpleasantly upon our notice. He evidently delights, too, to make the seventeenth century teach the nineteenth to articulate and spell. He would familiarize us with the boldness of “modern thought," by teaching us to bear the “Rational Theology" of Taylor, Chillingworth, Stillingfleet and the Cambridge Platonists. For all this we confess that we feel under no special obligation. But he has done more. He has lovingly uncovered features that have been long obscured, on which it is a privilege to gaze. He has recovered important facts and presented them in

to

new connections. He has helped us to a more familiar acquaintance with men and writings that deserve to be remembered, and he has given us his biographical and critical sketches in a perspicuous and elegant style. Sometimes, either he or the printer has erred, and sometimes we think he has misjudged either from lack of proper examination or from "moderat sympathies, as in the case of Jeremy Taylor. But even though we are be kept in ignorance of the contradictions of the great poet preacher, or are to be told that the queen of Charles I. was "the sister of Henry IV.,” we are not disposed to deny the merits of a work which as a series of kindred and almost contemporary portraits has beguiled the fleeting hours, and carried us back to the most productive age of our ineological literature, and the tragical yet heroic period of English history.

ART. IX.-HAMILTON'S AUTOLOGY.

AUTOLOGY; An Inductive System of Mental Science; whose Centre is the Will, and whose Completion is Fersonality. A Vindication of the Manhood of Man, the Godhood of God, and the Divine Authorship of Nature. By Rev. D. H. Hamilton, D. D. Boston: Lee & Shepard. New York: Lee, Shepard & Dillingham.

Dr. Hamilton's antecedents in authorship are unknown to us. He has now suddenly emerged from comparative privacy with one of the most massive and exhaustive volumes on philosophy which has lately been produced in the English tongue. Although of a very different type, yet it more nearly approaches Porter's Human Intellect in exhaustiveness than any work we have met with for a long time. This is none the less so, although it is in many ways obnoxious to criticism. Nevertheless, it has solid and enduring worth, and must command a place in the libraries, as it will certainly repay the study, of all votaries of high philosophy. The author is bold and original in his doctrine and method, and quite unceremonious at times, if he were a weaker man we should say almost flippant, in his treatment of acknowledged masters and established methods in psychology and metaphysics. He deals with Kant, Edwards and Hamilton as if he were a giant tossing pigmies. He is not much afraid of the argumentum ad verecundiam. Indeed we think he would be all the better if he felt it more; and his book too, even on rhetorical grounds if no higher, were it blemished by fewer passages like the following, however trenchant and slashing:

"The great questions of human liberty which Edwards suffocated in the 'slough of despond,' and of human capability which Kant beheaded

outright, and whose carcasses have been gathered up and subjected to a post-mortem examination and a coroner's inquest, and pronounced dead and beyond any possibility of a resurrection by Sir William Hamilton, and which have been interred by him with a devout burial, and mutterings of 'mental impotency,' accompanied with protestations against mendacity, and with pious exhortations to 'humility and faith,' will not thus be strangled and slain." pp. 658-9.

In quite a different style of intense expression does he magnify the powers of Reason, while more formally setting forth its prerogatives, thus:

"Reason is the consciousness ensphering itself; Consciousness is a red and blazing star glowing with internal fires; Reason is a brilliant flame, a bright, self-ensphering light, blazing from the centre and enwrapping the whole orb of being in a pure, white, all-comprehending, and all-penetrating effulgence, making it all a transparent globe. The full orb of the intellect is thus self-seng and all-seeing, all comprehending, and translucent, surpassing egen the sun in the heavens, because full of light within as well as without."

If this dazzles quite as much as it allumes, by "excess of light," those of us who dare not yet lay claim to a faculty thus "all-seeing, all comprehending and translucent," it prepares us for some other assertions as to the reach and scope of human reason, which are only the logical sequence from it, and which swing as far toward the extreme of human omniscience, as do Kant and Hamilton toward the opposite extreme of human nescience, e.g: "The question, 'what is truth?' must ever be an open question, and no authority of man or God can ever take it out of the court of human inquiry, or so settle it as to silence or supersede the voice of reason and experience. After a revelation is introduced and vouched for by a reliable and admitted miracle, then still it must demonstrate itself as true to human reason and experience by actually doing and producing what it professed, and what the miracle promised it would do. . . . The same is true of inspiration; if an inspired book shows itself true to the reason and experience of men; then it needs no longer the help of inspiration to sustain it in the world, for it stands on the higher ground of evidence for its truth; viz., the evidence of experiment and practical use," p. 598.

It would, however, be very unjust to the author and his system, not to add that, whatever his meaning in the above, he so holds it as to say on the same page, "The revelation of God in the Bible, is the infallible rule of faith and practice for all men, and ever will be so received by men, yet this revelation itself is presented to the human mind, to be considered by it, judged of as to its truth, usefulness and rectitude."

The author's statement on this subject is at fault, not because necessarily false in every possible interpretation of it, but as misleading through indistinctness and inadequacy. It is true that the word of God is addressed to human reason. It is the prerogative and duty of man in the candid exercise of reason, to judge whether it is indeed the word of God, and evinced to be such by adequate evidence, external and internal; also what it declares and means, and to find or bring about the utmost possible accord between its own judgments and God's declarations. But here the province of human reason ends. Once settled that God has declared anything, and human reason may no longer question it, whether it can or cannot comprehend or understand it-nay however unreasonable it may seem. If God has said it, that supersedes and overmatches all seeming counter evidence. "Let God be true but every man a liar." This is the one absolutely conclusive ground on which that faith rests which is the "evidence of things not seen," i.e. not provable nor explicable on any natural principles by sense or reason; but established solely by the testimony of God. The contrary view exalts the human reason to a sort of omniscience, or infallibility equal or superior to the divine-a pretension alike unwarranted and dangerous, to say no more. But it is quite in the same vein when the author tells us, p. 409, that "it is not the infinite which is incomprehensible but the finite," and, in a different way, God's incomparable greatness is dwindled down, even in the assertion of his superiority, in such language as the following: "God is the most talented, the most loving, the most influential, most unerring, and has the best cause, and therefore can inevitably master Satan, and the soul itself, in the matter of persuading it to life." p. 100. The italics are ours.

We have referred to these passages to show that while our author justly asserts against the sensuous and the idealistic theories of nescience the power of the mind to know truth through its self-evidence or other proof, and by its own "essential intelligence," within its proper sphere of cognition, he tends to the opposite extreme of exaggerating this insight and comprehension, and stretching them beyond their true sphere. But still, whether or not logically consistent to his own satisfaction or that of others, he, as we have seen, harmonizes. this with the normal and supreme authority of the oracles of God, and with fundamental Christian doctrine. We avail ourselves of the occasion offered to repeat and emphasize our protest against a wrong and mischievous use of the word "supernatural,” introduced from some German writers by Coleridge, and adopted by several authors of note among us as well as by Dr. Hamilton. He says, p. 654,"the mind is spiritual and supernatural, and homogeneous with God and immortality." "The mind of man is the only supernatural thing to