ed as, according to his best judgment, unwise, and brutal, and terribly wrong!

In like manner, frequently among the hierarchical churches, and occasionally among those that are not hierarchical, we hear people rejoicing in some supposed victory which God has given to their faith over their reason. He has enabled them, for instance, to believe some religious doctrine, though to their best judgment the doctrine seems absurd! Or he has led them to violate common-sense in the performance of some fancied religious act!

Now such victories are not of faith over something else, but of imagination over faith. That is not genuine faith which believes against evidence. That is a horrible vagary of mistaken fancy which prefers what to the best of our judgment seems false rather than what seems true; what, so far as we can see, appears wrong rather than what seems right. When Abraham raised the knife to slay his son, the deed doubtless seemed horrible to his recoiling senses. Had this been all, he should have been convinced by it and have flung away the knife. But this was not all. He had other proof. He knew, with a perfectly rational knowledge, that he was acting rightly, and wisely, and kindly.

Be

A different set of utterances amount in the end to very much the same thing. Abraham had God's testimony in the matter. But that testimony appealed to his faith and not to his reason. According to reason all the verities were against his sacrificing Isaac. But faith in God's testimony overcame his reason. hold the divinely wrought victory of faith over reason! And then follow a succession of exclamations, and apostrophes, and other exploits of sacred rhetoric, all glorifying faith, the conqueror of reason.

The one fallacy here is the assumption that the testimony of God does not appeal to reason as well as to faith. Put it in this form, "God's requirement was contrary to the verdic tof reason as based on all the other evidence in the case except the requirement itself," and we have a true statement. But it is none the less true that reason must at once have reversed its verdict, the moment it looked on all the evidence including God's requirement. The victory was not that of faith over reason but of faith and reason well informed over the same not so

well informed. Abraham knew certainly that God understood matters better than he. When, therefore, he certainly knew that God commanded him to sacrifice Isaac, he also certainly knew that all reasons to the contrary were insufficient. God's word was the stronger evidence. It was rational for him to take that. It would have been irrational for him to do otherwise. Common-sense required him to act as he did. Sound judgment demanded that he should take Isaac and start. He would have acted an unreasonable part, had he refused to lift his knife. It would have been a very human part; judged by the standard of ordinary human attainment, it would have been quite pardonable. Yet it would have been the part of a silly, credulous man, fooled by the illusions of the moment, and turning aside to them from what he knew to be the realities of the case, a part like that of the fond, weak mother, who, when her child's limb is broken, will not suffer the surgeon to hurt her darling by setting the limb.

Doubtless such teachings as have just been criticized, often do good in awakening us from lethargy, and especially in arousing the emotional religious element when it has been overspread by the merely intellectual element. Doubtless the Spirit often so aids us, that we receive benefit from such teachings, without being greatly injured by the poison they contain, yet they are poisonous, nevertheless, and people are often poisoned by them. They justify unbelievers in saying, "What kind of thing is this religion which defies all genuine knowing, and in the name of God, contemns the laws of God? It is fanaticism. Religious people have lost common-sense. They are not to be trusted!"

God made the reason. He requires us to reason on sacred subjects. He says, "Come now and let us reason together." He has not given revelation to supersede reason, but to help reaThe only reasoning which Christianity opposes, is that which rules out God's testimony, or perverts it, instead of accepting it. And that, surely, is unreasonable reasoning.

son.

ART. V.-ONE HUNDRED PROTESTANT THESES.*

By DR. CARL IMMANUEL NITZSCH, late Professor in the University of Berlin. Translated from the German by Lewis French Stearns, M. A., Newark, N. J.

[The publication of Möhler's Symbolik, in the year 1832, created great excitement throughout Germany, and marked the beginning of a new epoch in the history of the Roman Catholic controversy. If previous to that time Protestant theologians had been inclined to set a low value upon the polemical writings of Romanists, this work was sufficient to prove the possibility of successfully employing the methods and results of modern scientific culture in the defense of the Church of Rome. Möhler may be regarded as the father of that type of liberal Catholicism which is now represented by his distinguished pupil, Döllinger, and the "Old Catholics" of Germany.

This powerful attack upon the principles of the Reformation called forth rejoinders from some of the ablest Protestant theologians. Baur replied from the standpoint of the Tübingen school in his work on the "Doctrinal Differences between Catholicism and Protestantism." Nitzsch, professor of theology at Bonn (later of Berlin), answered in the spirit of evangelical Protestant Christianity. The reply of the latter, which has long been considered one of the ablest evoked by the controversy, first appeared in the Studien und Kritiken, and was afterward published in separate form in the year 1834. (Eine Protestantische Beantwortung der Symbolik Möhler's.) To this essay were appended the One Hundred Protestant Theses, which are here translated. They are designed to set forth, in the form of concise propositions, the distinguishing truths maintained by Protestants in opposition to Roman Catholic assumptions.

This translation is made from the "Gesammelte Abhandlungen von Dr. C. I. Nitzsch, Gotha, 1871."]

I. The knowledge of true Christianity flows solely from one source-the Apostolic Tradition, as we find it preserved in the Holy Scriptures of the New Testament.

II. The Apostles of Jesus Christ, Peter, Paul, John and Matthew, continue to this day to exercise the functions of their

* The great value of the following terse and pregnant summation will be obvious to our readers, notwithstanding occasional phrases which they might prefer to modify. -EDITORS.

office; and no one either needs or has authority to take their place.

III. These Apostles still proclaim repentance and forgiveness of sins in the name of the Lord; they testify to all creatures, even to the end of the world, the Resurrection of the Crucified One; they remit and retain sins; they lay the foundation of the Church; they instruct missionaries and preachers, rule in the congregations, and preside without vicars in all truly Christian synods.

IV. As regards the extent of their instruction, the Apostles taught more orally than by writing; as regards its substance, their oral instruction contained nothing different and nothing additional.

V. Even though they had orally taught or enjoined anything substantially different from, or additional to, their written instructions, nevertheless, at the present day, no one could, with truth and certainty, produce a single syllable of it.

VI. Even if anything of this nature could be found in the more or less doubtful writings of the so-called Apostolics or Apostolic Fathers, and provisionally acknowledged, it would still have to be further tested by its agreement with the unquestionably authentic teachings and writings of the Apostles, i. e. with the Canon, before it could be received.

VII. The post-apostolic tradition is of great value, but in having become the property of bishops, synods or theologians, it has lost its apostolic character; and even admitting that it might be conceived and presented from any single point of view in such a connected system as the apostolic tradition, it does not constitute a canon which can be conditioned with the latter.

VIII. By apostolic tradition was sometimes understood the fundamental doctrines of Christianity, the objective Christian consciousness, the ever uniform and self-consistent statement of Christian faith, from the basis of which no doctrinal development can detach itself, and which must be kept distinct from all questions of contested interpretation, and regarded as the norm by which they are to be regulated. This conception, as far as it is true and valid, does not conflict with Protestantism. For Protestantism makes the Scripture its doctrinal basis, not because it is Scripture, but because it is the documental source of the Apostolic Canon.

IX. The founders of Catholic Theology, Irenæus and Tertullian, with reason appealed directly to the general sense of Christendom against the spirit of subjectivity, to the spirit of historical investigation against the gnostic method of procedure. But the universal doctrine could not of itself prove its divine origin, and therefore had to demonstrate that it was not a mere pretended hereditary tradition by reference to the primitive doctrine. For this reason even the earliest Catholics, in order to complete their anti-gnostic argument, had recourse to the words of the Apostles, as they appeared in the Holy Scriptures.

X. The transition of the Churches from their dependence upon oral teaching to dependence upon written teaching was a gradual one, so that the various Scriptures afforded a mutual test, and for the most part no interregnum of mere oral tradition ensued.

XI. The Church, born, as it was, of the living word of God, possessed a spiritual instinct and taste for the truth, by means of which it recognized and gave its sanction to the writings of the Apostles. This recognition and sanction is not an exercise of authority, but rather a submission to authority.

XII. The Church, as the guardian of the historical proof of the genuineness of the canonical books, is so far from exercising divine authority, that in this capacity she can competently perform her task only in conjunction with history in the wider sense of the term.

XIII. The Protestant Church has received the Holy Scriptures, not from the Catholic Church of to-day, nor from that of the Sixteenth Century, but by transmission from that Catholic Church, in the bosom of which she traces the uninterrupted progress of her own previous history.

XIV. In all periods of Church History where a critical and hermeneutical treatment of the Canon prevailed, and its dissemination and preservation were most extensively promoted, Protestantism was most truly present.

XV. When Basil the Great assumed an esoteric, dogmatic, and liturgic tradition by the side of the written exoteric tradition of the Apostles, he was no less deluded than were the Gnostics, when they traced back the higher Christian knowledge to the secret instructions of the Apostle Matthew.

XVI. The well-known declaration of Augustine, "I should not believe the gospel, if I did not believe the Catholic Church,"