IN perusing The Tale of Goethe, a piece which is wonderful even among the works of that supreme literary artist, and which his worthy exponent and interpreter, Mr. Carlyle, has deemed, no doubt with perfect correctness, a picture, in the colors indeed of fantasy and dream, yet, to the seeing eye, nowise indefinite, of the whole future, attention can scarce fail to be arrested by the destiny there appointed for the Christian religion. In the Temple of the Future, the little hut of the fisherman, to which former and darker generations had looked for aid in every great emergency of existence, still found a place. The light of reason entering in breathed through it a new life and an immortal beauty. "By virtue of the Lamp locked up in it, the hut had been converted from the inside to the outside into solid silver. Ere long, too, its form changed; for the noble metal shook aside the accidental shape of planks, posts, and beams, and stretched itself out into a noble case of beaten ornamented workmanship. Thus a fair little temple stood erected in the middle of the large one; or, if you will, an altar worthy of the temple." The whole passage, of which this forms a part, is perhaps the finest illustration to be found of a certain wide-spread and multiform intellectual phenome

non of our time. In the higher walks of modern literature, an attitude is not unfrequently assumed toward Christianity which, in these ages at least, is new. It is concluded by the serene worshiper of reason or of man, that the Christian religion may now be treated with that polite and complimentary tolerance with which a generous victor treats the distinguished prisoner whose sword he has hung on the side of his tent. We are told that Christianity is the highest thing man has "done," that it is the purest of earthly religions, that it has given voice to the deepest emotions in the human breast. Language, which reaches the gorgeousness, and force, and sweetness of poetry, has been woven into wreaths to crown it; intellect, which, in the width of its domain and the greatness of its might, suggests comparison with the central power of imperial Rome, has shrined it in a temple, or offered it a vassal throne. And how are Christians bound to receive the haughty condescension of all this praise? They are not left without an example by which to shape their conduct; their fathers taught them how to act in still more trying circumstances. We have not forgot the ancient offers, tacit or express, which were made to the religion of Jesus, and the wrath which awoke on their rejection. It might have obtained a seat on Olympus, a niche in the Pantheon of the ancient world; it might have sheltered itself under the wide wings, dropping gold and manna, of the Roman eagles. That the Crucified of Judea should be deemed mightier than the Jupiter of the Capitol, that the words of a few fishermen were to be esteemed more worthily than the ancient voice of the Sybil, and the mystic whisperings of a thousand sacred groves; this astonished and incensed the Pagan world, this cut to the heart the pride of Rome. But the declaration of the smitten Galileans was explicit and unchanging: the Gospel of Jesus is

every thing or nothing; if true at all, every god and oracle must absolutely vanish before it. Our answer now can be no other than that given of old. Christianity either lives a divine life or dies; until the concession is made that it is divine, in no qualified sense but to the express intent that it came down from Heaven, no approximation is made to what it demands. It will not enter that temple, arrayed, as it is, in the still artisic beauty of Greece, which Goethe has reared for it; it either fades utterly, or that temple crumbles into the dust before it.

There are but three hypotheses on the subject of the exist ence of the Divine Being, and our relation to Him, which in our time deserve attention; those of atheism, pantheism, and monotheism. Of the first of these, we do not now speak. The tone of unbelieving tolerance to which we have just referred, is used chiefly by the disciples of that great school of pantheism which originated in Germany in the last century, and the ramifications of whose influence, more or less disguised and modified, we think we can detect very widely in our present literature. Its principal philosophic representative in Germany was Fichte; its greatest embodiment in our country is in the works of Mr. Carlyle. The former of these may be called its originator, although it is our strong impression from what we know of the Kantian philosophy, and from the fact that Fichte was at first a disciple of Kant, that its original suggestion was found in the self-contained and self-sufficient law, the categorical imperative, of that philosopher. We do not intend to enter upon the exposition of this pantheism. We consider it now in one point of view, in application to one problem; and we mean to evolve the essential points of its solution of this problem, in contrast with that which we purpose briefly to sketch, the solution offered by Christianity. This

problem is the formation of individual character, or rather the procuring for its formation a vital principle and solid basis.

Long and careful study of the works of Fichte and Mr. Carlyle give us assured confidence in defining the essential starting-point and characteristic of Fichtean pantheism. It is its assertion of the divinity of man. This is of course broad and explicit in the philosophy of Fichte. It is not so clear and definite in the works of Mr. Carlyle; that great writer, although giving evidence of a powerful influence from Fichte, having experienced one still more powerful from Goethe, and having clothed his doctrines, not in the statuesque exactitude of philosophic terminology, but in the living language of men. It were, however, we think, difficult to conceive a more perfectly worked-out scheme of pantheism, in application to practical life, than that with which Mr. Carlyle has furnished us, and its essential principle ever is, the glory, the worship, the divinity of man. In our gencral literature, the principle we have enunciated undergoes modification, and for the most part, is by no means expressed as pantheism. We refer to that spirit of self-assertion, which lies so deep in what may be called the religion of literature; to that wide-spread tendency to regard all reform of the individual man as being an evolution of some hidden nobleness, or an appeal to a perfect internal light or law, together with what may be called the worship of genius, the habit of nourishing all hope on the manifestation of "the divine," by gifted individuals. We care not how this last remarkable characteristic of the time be defined; to us its connection with pantheism, and more or less close dependence on the teaching of that of Germany, seem plain, but it is enough that we discern in it an influence definably antagonistic to the spirit of Christianity.

The great point to be established against pantheism, and

that from which all else follows, is the separate existence of a Divine Being. We shall glance at the evidence of this in one of its principal departments-a department in which, we think, there is important work to be done-that of conscience.

There has appeared, in a recent theological work, what we must be bold to call a singularly shallow and inaccurate criticism of Butler's doctrine of conscience. It has been spoken of as depending on "probable" evidence, and certain problems which it enables us to solve are alluded to as momentous or insuperable difficulties. The former of these assertions seems to us plainly to amount to an absolute abandonment of what Butler has done, to a reduction of it to a nonentity or a guess. As Mackintosh distinctly asserts, and as might be shown by overpowering evidence, his argument is based on the "unassailable" ground of consciousness-on that evidence which is the strongest we can obtain. Even the author of the Dissertation, however, has fallen into palpable error in treating of Butler; and we must quote the following clauses from him, both to expose their inaccuracy and to indicate wherein consist that definiteness and that precision which the author to whom we first referred desiderates in Butler's masterly demonstration:-"The most palpable defect of Butler's scheme is, that it affords no answer to the question, 'What is the distinguishing quality common to all right actions?' If it were answered, 'Their criterion is, that they are approved and commanded by conscience,' the answerer would find that he was involved in a vicious circle; for conscience itself could be no otherwise defined than as the faculty which approves and commands right actions."

Let us hear Butler:-" "That your conscience approves of and attests to such a course of action, is itself alone an obligation. Conscience does not only offer itself to show us the way