ART. XI.-QUARTERLY BOOK-TABLE.

Religion, Theology, and Biblical Literature.

Ten Great Religions: an Essay in Comparative Theology. By JAMES FREEMAN CLARKE. 12mo., pp. 526. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.

In our notice of Hardwick's "Christ and the Other Masters" we called attention to the probability that the new and yet incomplete department of Comparative Theology is yet to occupy an important place in our course of sacred study. Skeptics like Dr. Draper have, indeed, predicted that the approaching contact of the various religions of the world would enable them to cancel each other; but the present volume clearly indicates that such a contact would afford new force to the Christian argument, and, doubtless, result in the final predominance of that religion which exhibits the conditions of universality in its system.

Mr. Clarke makes too unqualifiedly the statement that until lately it has been the orthodox method to pass a relentless sentence of damnation upon all without the pale of Christianity. Such was the course of Eusebius, Augustine, Calvin, and the followers, of Calvin, uniformly, until a very late day. On the other hand, Justin Martyr, Clemens Alexandrinus, the great Arminian leaders in Holland, the Cambridge divines in England, as Cudworth, Whichcote, John Smith, and others, the Arminian side of the Methodistic movement, as Wesley and Fletcher, have firmly maintained the probable salvation of many a so-called heathen. In our chapter upon "Probational Advantages" we have advocated the same view; and Dr. Cocker, in a volume respectfully noticed and quoted by Mr. Clarke, does but illustrate the Arminian view in reference to the Greek philosophy.

Mr. Clarke's volume is a very valuable contribution to the growing science of Comparative Theology. It is in many respects a step in advance of any thing heretofore published in that department. It is clearly a labor of love, and he has laid under contribution a large mass of reading to furnish the result. His catalogue of books consulted is a valuable guide to the student. The Ten Religions are, besides the Christian, the Chinese, the Egyptian, the Brahman, the Buddhist, the Zoroastrian, the Grecian, the Scandinavian, the Jewish, and the Mohammedan. With the exception of Christianity all these are ethnic, that is, national or race religions; they possess each its excellence and its defect; whereas Christianity possesses in its fullness the excellence of each without the defects, and is, therefore, entitled to absorb and can

cel them all, as the future universal religion. Besides the value of the work as a historical survey it claims to be both an argument for the truth and a prediction of the final universality of Christianity.

Mr. Clarke nearly ignores, if we have read him correctly, any proper direct supernaturalism in any religion. The whole ten are the proper outgrowth of the mind of man as a constitutionally religious being, Inspiration is but vivid intuition of genuine religious truth. Abraham and Moses and David, and, far above all, Jesus the Christ, possessed the purest and clearest intuition, and have attained for men the most truly absolute religion. The prophets were eminent both in their religious intuitions and their presentiments, so that beyond doubt they did foresee and predict Christianity. Hence, though criticism may freely reject much of the Old Testament as unauthentic or untrue, and even though there be myth and legend in the New, still Christianity does present the fullness of religious truth adequate for human wants and for human good.

All this is a survey of the field from the stand-point of what Dr. M'Cosh calls, perhaps not happily, the "Boston Theology." Of Mr. Clarke's illustrative circular diagram of the ten religions, forming the elegant frontispiece of his book, "the Hub" should have been put in the center, and the cross, as it is, nowhere. We should suppose St. Paul's Epistle to the Romans struck from his canon. Mr. Clarke's work, therefore, finally assumes the aspect of an ingenious argument for the Hub theology. It says to the nine religions, You see how from our center we are able to flow forth and drown you out; it says to Christianity, You see how easily you can conquer if you accept the Hub. The whole religious world then becomes one great pyramid, crowned with the Hub upon its apex!

Seven Homilies on Ethic Inspiration: or, on the Evidence supplied by the Pagan Religions of both Primeval and Later Guidance, and Inspiration from Heaven. By the Rev. JOSEPH TAYLOR GOODSIR, F.R.S.E. Part First of an Apologetic Series, and a Sketch of an Evangelic Preparation. 12mo., pp. 320. London: Williams & Norgate. 1870.

Mr. Goodsir's book would, at first sight, seem to be an intended complement of Mr. Clarke's "Ten Religions." It maintains from an earnest, evangelical stand-point the salvability of many a righteous man without the pale of Christendom. It does not so much contemplate other religions as a preparatory to Christianity, though that view is maintained, as seek to trace historically the supernatural elements, the divine revelations vouchsafed by God,

over and above the biblical, and to other than the chosen people. Of these revelations, primitive and traditional, or scattered through the ages, Mr. Clarke says nothing. Yet what rationalist or scientist has solved for us the undeniable and specific traditions of the Deluge, with their minute traits plainly identical with the Genesis history?

Mr. Goodsir begins with Egypt; and, holding the Septuagint chronology to be the true measure of historic time, he finds in the Great Pyramid clear references to the history of the flood, a plain identification of the time of the event, and manifold traces of a primitive degree of science to which modern ages have but lately attained; a science either communicated by revelation or received from the antediluvian civilization. Mr. Goodsir does not hold the first chapter of Genesis to be intended as a scientific anticipation of modern geology and astronomy; but he maintains that it is written for a religious purpose, yet in a consistency with science such as no other ancient cosmogony presents, such as no purely unscientific and uncivilized fancy could devise. Nay, the whole Old Testament, while using the language of popular optical truth, is nevertheless preserved from statements truly at war with science, (such as laying the earth on a tortoise,) and that this preservation arises from that primitive scientific truth of which the Great Pyramid is a monument. To the peculiarities of the Great Pyramid there are passages in the Old Testament which can be clearly interpreted no otherwise than unequivocal allusions; so that, in his view, the Pyramid is the sacred antithesis to the idolatrous tower of Babel. In the bosom of primitive Egypt, in connection with the Pyramid, there was a body of revealed truth, traditionally brought from the ancient seats at Shinar, parts of which, being retained among the arcana of the priesthood, were learned from them by Pythagoras, Plato, Herodotus, and others. Other parts were selected by Moses as truths to be taught in his system, or rites to be embodied in the institutes of Abraham's race.

From this, the Egyptian starting-point, we may range over other Nearer to the primitive abodes, the Shemite portion of Persia retained a grand unidolatrous Theism, the Edenic revelation of a future Redeemer, a distinctive if a more varying angelology, and even a clearer anticipation of a future judgment than Moses unfolded in the letter of the law. Passing to Greece and Rome, we have abundant traces of primitive truth. First, in the mythology of both countries, besides the detailed fragments of the

diluvian tradition, there are numerous myths which it is useless to deny to be relics of primitive truth brought from the ancestral seats in Asia. It is wonderful how writers like Mr. Clarke skip over the true significance of the ancient oracles, scattered as they were at memorable points in Egypt, Greece, and Italy, revered by the wisest statesmen and philosophers, and recorded by the best historians of antiquity, Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, and Tacitus, as furnishing predictions beyond all question verified. Then in Greece the mysteries of Eleusis were the depositories of supernatural truths, and the sibylline books are well attested to have been derived from the earliest ages, deposited in the capitol, and revered by the highest minds of Rome as possessing supernatural predictions of the future, and a higher, holier order of truth than belonged to the vulgar mythology.

Historically and theoretically we believe Mr. Goodsir's to be the true view. We believe with Mr. Clarke in the intuitional nature of man; but we do not believe in the chilly and twilight space never to be overpassed, which he interposes between God and man. Mr. O. B. Frothingham pronounces miracles as being a violation of nature's laws-"a monstrosity." But we believe that a God fettered and bandaged by nature's laws, laws of his own imposing, is the "monstrosity." Material nature is not the god of God. If it be, then to matter itself is our worship due, if to any thing, and idolatry, fetichism, is the true religion. Worse, if worse can be, is Pantheism. Dr. Hedge is reported as saying in Boston: "The popular Theism supposes a God existing outside of the universe which he has made-a Creator who once in time called a universe into being, and has been ever since a spectator and director of its on goings, having no substantial connection with it, but only a providential and governmental one. The God of Pantheism is immanent, interfused, all-penetrating; the ground of all dependence, the life of all life."

Now Theism, "the popular theism," the theism of the Bible and of the great body of Christian thought, teaches the omnipresence and the perfect immanence of God-God "all in all." It does believe that God is also "outside" of matter; for as matter is finite and God infinite, God does stretch infinitely beyond the limits of matter as the ocean stretches immensely beyond the little islet it embosoms. What truth or propriety is there in Dr. Hedge's thus denying that our Theism teaches the all-pervading, indwelling presence of God in nature? Pantheism teaches, as Theism does, not only God's immanence in matter, but it teaches,

as Theism does not, God's identity with matter. Largely the God of Pantheism is made of oxygen gas. The difference between

Theism and Pantheism is this: Theism teaches the immanence of God in matter and the immanence of matter in God, yet the infinite distinctness in essence between matter and God, and the infinite omnipresence of God" without" and beyond the limits of matter. Pantheism teaches the identity of substance, both bodily and spiritual, of God with that of every finite object, whether inanimate, as a rock, or animate, as a cat. Both Mr. Clarke and Mr. Goodsir agree with Max Müller that the primitive creed was Theism. Hence men first apostatized, as in Egypt, to Pantheism, and thence, by strict logical sequence, to fetichism. Rigidly and rightly inferring from her premises that every animal was a manifestation and a part of God, Egypt believed that the animal is to be worshiped. Certainly it is absolutely impossible for a Pantheist to worship his entire god without including in that worship swamps, rocks, cats, dogs, crocodiles, murderers, and prostitutes. Corporeally and spiritually the prostitute is the Pantheist's god. And it is by this route that the great share of licentious idolatry in Egypt, Babylon, and various parts of the world, was attained. Against all these logical and historical results Christianity protests; and by her pure theism she is able to maintain that sublime ideal of absolute holiness which every other religion obscuring lets the human race down into sin and death. Maintaining the infinite distinctness of God from matter, she separates God from all community with the sins of the flesh; maintaining the distinctness of God from the finite free-agent, she separates Him from all the sins of the spirit and the will. She enthrones him as the omnipresent God, the absolutely holy God, before whom can be no allowance for sin.

American Religion. By JOHN WEISS. 12mo., pp. 326. Boston: Roberts Brothers.

1871.

Mr. Weiss is, we believe, the biographer of Theodore Parker, whom he entombed in two huge octavoes, covered with multitudinous flowers of a very forced and tawdry rhetoric. He is a prominent member also of the Boston Radical Club, a coterie that periodically gushes forth in streams of thin and watery twaddle, overflowing into the columns of certain sympathizing newspapers. Mr. Weiss is a weak and scattered thinker, who attains notoriety only by attacking settled opinions. A log floating down a stream is a very quiet wooden thing; but let it stick fast, become a snag