THE AGE AND CHRISTIANITY. * THIS work originated in a request
of the Trustees of Coward College to Dr. Vaughan to deliver a course of lectures " on some of the aspects of the times as affecting Christianity." The subject was thus in a great mea- sure fixed by the terms of the prospectus ; but the nature, extent, and treatment, were of course with the lecturer. On those points Dr. Vaughan has shown his usual ability; but the Hanover Square Rooms is not per- baps the best atmosphere for topics of divinity-logic and divinity- learning; so that the Age is on the whole better handled than the Christianity.
The division of the book is fourfold. Dr. Vaughan first examines the characteristics of the present age both in relation to the past and abso- lutely ; especially as regards its scepticism, its materialism, and its over-
* The .Age and Christianity. By Robert Vaughan, D.D. Published by Jackson and Wilford.
weeping estimate of itself, with the reactions these characteristics have tended to produce—as Tractarianism. He next considers what he terms the "characteristics of the present age in relation to the proofs of Christi- anity "; but which is rather an examination of the reasons adduced by modern scepticism against Christianity, or the theories that modern Tran-
scendentalism has set up in its stead. The truths of Christianity, com- pared with the views advanced by the same class of philosophers, are next investigated. The last division is a survey of the distinguishing religious forms of the present time—as mysticism and formalism.
The work differs from many other books of a controversial kind in the closeness with which the author confines himself to the Age. In his arguments or illustrations there is no commonplace generality, and little consequently that is hacknied. He deals with the scepticism or philosophy of the present, and defends Christianity not by reproducing the old argu- ments, but by looking at the theories of the modern school as the highest efforts of what reason can reach, and answering them. It is a comparative argument nearly throughout. " This is all that human reason can do : see how it fails positively, when considered simply by itself as a system ; how much greater the failure is when compared with Christianity; and how all the arguments which you direct against the religion of the Scrip- tures can be retorted on yourselves, unless you take refuge in downright Atheism." It is not meant that some of the arguments do not take a general character—as those upon miracles ; but the great feature of the book is its application to the feelings, reasonings, and systems of the day : it could not have been written in any former age.
The usual merits of Dr. Vaughan are displayed. There are his search- ing and rational observation of the characteristics of the times, his wide acquaintance with general history, and, what he has not so fully dis- played before, a knowledge of the religio-philosophical speculations of dif- ferent writers, from Emerson and Carlyle to Strauss himself. There are also his breadth and his clearly flowing style. An appearance of super- ficialness may sometimes be found, very probably owing to the class of auditors the lecturer was addressing; and, as we have intimated, Dr. Vaughan is more successful in exposing the weakness of his opponent's case than in advancing his own. In the historical part of the argu- ment on miracles, for example, he does not see that miracles are not so much made the test of truth, as our belief of the truth is made the test of the miracles. The mere testimony or evidence is stronger for many of the alleged miracles of the Romish Church than it is for those of Scripture : but Protestants say the miraculous power of the Church ceased at the close of the Apostolical age, and therefore we reject the mi- racle in despite of evidence ; the Scripture records a revelation, and therefore the miracles are true. We do not mean that this is the form of the logic, but it is the essence.
Two main modes of Dr. Vaughan's consideration are the Transcen- dental theory based on our internal nature, and the rejection of an his- torical revelation by the same school and by similar schools. This na- turally leads to a survey of religious history, and the influence which se- cular affairs have had upon Christianity. In the treatment of this topic Dr. Vaughan is upon his own ground, and exhibits a wide and judicious spirit rarely displayed by churchmen of any denomination. This prdcis of the action and reaction of religion and the world on each other may be taken as an example of the spirit we speak of.
"Here it becomes us to pause for a moment, and to mark that Christianity as we possess it has come down to us mixed up with this wide stream of general history. That it has descended to us pure, while mingled, and from so remote a distance, with waters so impure, no thoughtful man will suppose. Secular history may be accounted a profane thing; but no man may know the real history of the church who does not know the history of the world. The history of religious things, apart from the history of secular things, must be to a large extent a his- tory of effects without causes. The Divine Author of Christianity has pledged himself that his religion shall not fail on the earth ; but he has not promised that it shall be perpetuated in any given place, nor that it shall be wholly proof against any one form of possible corruption. His doctrine rather is, that the mission of his truth is altogether a spiritual mission; and that his followers must not be offended if it should appear at times to have suffered much from its contact with influences the reverse of the spiritual. In judging, then, con- cerning the Christianity that has been transmitted to us from the remote past, it becomes us to look with care to that past—to its general characteristics. The influence of Christianity on the general affairs of those bygone ages may have been great, but the influence of those affairs upon it has also been great. It has given its impress to the times, and the times have given their impress to it. It has subdued a world of maladies, but it has not come forth from its perilous la- bour wholly without infection. In its polity, its forms, its doctrines, its spirit— in all these it has undergone more or less of change from this cause. We see it now with the signs of the hot wars through which it has passed everywhere upon it. To see it as it should be, and as it once was, we must study it in its own re- cords. Of course, what the characteristics of the past have been in respect to Christianity, the characteristics of the present must be."
There is the same sound philosophy in the following account of false religions ; which too many clergymen, especially sectarian clergymen, are in the habit of stigmatizing as entire tissues of imposition and fraud. The passage also furnishes a specimen of the author's argument.
"It is a great mistake to suppose that the systems of religion which have ob- tained in the world owe their existence, or anything very considerable in their substance, to the devices of priests or of kings. It has not been within the power of these functionaries to create this religious tendency in man, or to make it really other than it has been. They may have used this element, but its exist- ence and characteristics have come from a higher source. The divinities of the heathen which bring evil on man are the natural offspring of the moral nature of man. The Loke of the Northmeu, the Sheeva of the Hindoo, the Ahriman of the Persian, and the evil powers which according to the Greek and the Roman dispensed their judgments in this world but reserved their fury for the next—all these owe their origin to the imperishable operations of human thought and of the human conscience, strengthened as these thinkings and susceptibilities have been by see- ing so much physical evil pressing everywhere closely upon the heels of so much moral disorder.
"It may be demonstrated that all this evil proceeds from the action of natural laws. But such demonstration brings no relief. It is still felt that these laws must have a maker and an administrator, and thus the whole difficulty returns. War, pestilence, famine, earthquake, storm, sickness, sorrow, death, all are here, and together bring out the retributive features of the Divine government in a manner rendering it fully as difficult to believe that our world is the product of 'infinite perfection as to believe that Moses was 'a prophet. We speak advisedly when we say, there is nothing in the bitter invective directed against the Jehovah of Moses, in the extract just cited, that may not with equal fitness be directed against the author of the providence of this world, by whatever name that exist- ence may be designated. This abounding of natural evil is the effect of the Divine abhorrence of moral evil, as asserted by Moses, or it is not: if it be so, then the Pentateuch and nature are so far in harmony; if it. be not so, then nature is immeasurably more confounding in its moral mystery than revelation, inasmuch as it leaves us all the suffering without any adequate recognition of sin as its cause."
Our last extract is an example of the manner in which Dr. Vaughan deals with more expository subjects.
" Pantheism, in some of its forms, is the matter of faith with very many, per- haps with the majority of persons in our age who profess themselves philoso- phers. Nor is it at all surprising, for reasons that will presently be stated, that it should be so.
" The Pantheist is distinguishable enough from the Atheist. The Pantheist be- lieves in a God. His God, moreover, though commonly spoken of as a substance, is held to be a spiritual subsistence. This spiritual substance exists from itself. All other substances exist from it. But by substance, the Pantheist does not mean body or matter, in the vulgar sense. He means simply, substans '—that is, something which stands ' or exists ' under all the forms both of mind and mat- ter, as these are known to us. The one substaris'—the one existence which has its place beneath all other existence, as its source and sustaining power—is God. God is thus in all nature, and all nature is in God. God is the one essence of being, and all apparently separate being is only so much modification of this great unity of existence. Extension and thought are eminently his attributes. Mere attributes, it is argued, these must be, inasmuch as extension always sup- poses something extended, and thought always supposes a thinker. The extended everywhere is God—the thinker everywhere is God. The great substans ' that lives under all extension and all thought is uncreated, but creates from a neces- sity of his own nature—creates, not according to the popular idea of creation, but according to the manner possible to him. Strictly speaking, the Pantheist has a God, but no universe—innumerable existing things, but all as being nothing more than so many modes of the One existence embracing All! "To the ears of many this language may sound strange—very strange. Nevertheless, there must be something plausible in the reasoning by which men have been conducted to such conclusions. Hindooism and Buddhism, the faith of more than three hundred millions of our race, are founded on this doctrine. These millions, moreover, have been the disciples of this creed for some three thousand years. No subtlety on the part of kings or priests could have sufficed to give this prevalence, this perpetuity, to such a doctrine. It would seem that to con- found God with nature must be a besetting tendency of the human mind, wherever man is left to become a revelation to himself. There must be some sense of fitness, some craving, some feeling of want in man, to which these ideas, strange as we deem them, strongly commend themselves."
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