But these men gave a single impact like that which is conceived to have first set the planets in motion. Christ claims to be a perpetual attractive power, like the sun, which determines their orbit. They contributed to men some discovery, and passed away; Christ's discovery is himself. To humanity struggling with its passions and its destiny he says, cling to mecling ever closer to me. If we believe St. John, he represented himself as the light of the world, as the shepherd of the souls of men, as the way to immortality, as the vine or life-tree of humanity," (p. 177.) He ends this beautiful passage, of which we have already quoted as much as our limits allow, by saying that "He instructed his followers to hope for life from feeding on his body and blood."

O si sic omnia! Is it not hard, that, after following with pleasure a train of thought so calculated to warm all Christian hearts, and to create in them both admiration and sympathy for the writer, we must end our notice of him in a different tone, and express as much dissent from him and as serious blame of him as we have hitherto been showing satisfaction with his object, his intention, and the general outline of his argument? But so it is. In what remains to be said we are obliged to speak of his work in terms so sharp that they may seem to be out of keeping with what has gone before. With whatever abruptness in our composition, we must suddenly shift the scene, and manifest our disapprobation of portions of his book as plainly as we have shown an interest in it. We have praised it in various points of view. It has stirred the hearts of many; it has recognized a need, and gone in the right direction for supplying it. It serves as a token and a hopeful token, of what is going on in the minds of numbers of men external to the church. It is substantially a good book, and, we trust, will work for good. Especially, as we have seen, is it interesting to the Catholic, as acknowledging the visible.

church as our Lord's own creation, as the direct fruit of his teaching, and the destined instrument of his purposes. We do not know how to speak in an unfriendly tone of an author who has done so much as this; but at the same time, when we come to examine his argument in its details, and study his chapters one by one, we find, in spite of, and mixed up with what is true and original, and even putting aside his patent theological errors, so much bad logic, so much of rash and gratuitous assumption, so much of half-digested thought, that we are obliged to conclude that it would have been much wiser in him if, instead of publishing what he seems to confess, or rather to proclaim. to be the jottings of his first researches upon sacred territory, he had waited till he had carefully traversed and surveyed and mapped the whole of it. We now proceed to give a few instances of the faults of which we complain.

His opening remarks will serve in illustration. In p. 41 he says, "We have not rested upon single passages, nor drawn from the fourth gospel." This, we suppose, must be his reason for ignoring the passage in Luke ii. 49, "Did you not know that I must be about my father's business ?" for he directly contradicts it, by gratuitously imagining that our Lord came for St John's baptism with the same intention as the penitents around him; and that, in spite of his own words, which we suppose are to be taken as another

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single passage," "So it becometh us to fulfil all justice," (Matt. iii. 15.) It must be on this principle of ignoring single passages such as these, even though they admit of combination, that he goes on to say of our Lord, that "in the agitation of mind caused by his baptism, and by the Baptist's designation of him as the future prophet, he retired into the wilderness," and there "he matured the plan of action which we see him executing from the moment of his return into society," (p. 9;) and that not till then was he "conscious of miraculous power,"

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(p. 12.) This neglect of the sacred text, we repeat, must be allowed him, we suppose, under color of his acting out his rule of abstaining from single passages and from the fourth gospel. Let us allow it; but at least he ought to adduce passages, single or many, for what he actually does assert. He must not be allowed arbitrarily to add to the history, as well as cautiously to take from it. Where, then, we ask, did he learn that our Lord's baptism caused him "agitation of mind," that he "matured his plan of action in the wilderness," and that he then first was "conscious of miraculous power"? But again: it seems he is not to refer to "single passages or the fourth gospel;" yet, wonderful to say, he actually does open his formal discussion of the sacred history by referring to a passage from that very gospel-nay, to a particular text, which is only not a "single" text, because it is half a text, and half a text, such that, had he taken the whole of it, he would have been obliged to admit that the part which he puts aside just runs counter to his interpretation of the part which he insists on. The words are these, as they stand in the Protestant version: "Behold the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world." Now, it is impossible to deny that "which taketh away," etc., fixes and limits the sense of "the Lamb of God;" but our author notices the latter half of the sentence, only in order to put aside the light it throws upon the former half; and instead of the Baptist's own interpretation of the title which he gives to our Lord, he substitutes another, radically different, which he selects for himself out of one of the psalms. He explains "the lamb" by the well-known image, which represents the Almighty as a shepherd and his earthly servants as sheep-innocent, safe, and happy under his protection. "The Baptist's opinion of Christ's character, then," he says, "is summed up for us in the title he gives him-the Lamb of God, taking away

the sins of the world. There seems to be, in the last part of this description, an allusion to the usages of the Jewish sacrificial system; and, in order to explain it fully, it would be necessary to anticipate much which will come more conveniently later in this treatise. But when we remember that the Baptist's mind was doubtless full of imagery drawn from the Old Testament, and that the conception of a lamb of God makes the subject of one of the most striking of the psalms, we shall perceive what he meant to convey, by this phrase," (pp. 5, 6.) This is like saying, "Isaiah declares, 'mine eyes have seen the king, the lord or hosts; but, considering that doubtless the prophet was well acquainted with the first and second books of Samuel, and that Saul, David, and Solomon are the three great kings there represented, we shall easily perceive that by seeing the king,' he meant to say that he saw Uzziah, king of Judah, in the last year of whose reign he had the vision. As to the phrase the lord of hosts,' which seems to refer to the Almighty, we will consider its meaning by and by :"-but, in truth, it is difficult to invent a paralogism, in its gratuitous inconsecutiveness parallel to his own.

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It

We must own, that, with every wish to be fair to this author, we never recovered from the perplexity of mind which this passage, in the very threshold of his book, inflicted on us. needed not the various passages which follow it in the work, constructed on the same argumentative model, to prove to us that he was not only an incognito, but an enigma. "Ergo" is the symbol of the logician-what science does a writer profess, whose symbols, profusely scattered through his pages, are "probably," "it must be," "doubtless," "on the hypothesis,"

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we may suppose," and "it is natural to think,” and that at the very time that he pointedly discards the comments of school theologians? Is it possible that he can mean us to set aside the glosses of all who went be-`

fore in his own favor, and to exchange our old lamps for his new ones? Men have been at fault, when trying to determine whether he was an orthodox believer on his road to liberalism, or a liberal on his road to orthodoxy: this doubtless may be to some a perplexity; but our own difficulty is, whether he comes to us as an investigator or a prophet, as one unequal or superior to the art of reasoning. Undoubtedly, he is an able man; but what can he possibly mean by startling us with such eccentricities of argumentation as are familiar with him? Addison somewhere bids his readers bear in mind, that if he is ever especially dull, he always has a special reason for being so; and it is difficult to reconcile one's imagination to the supposition that this anonymous writer, with so much deep thought as he certainly evidences, has not some recondite reason for seeming so inconsequent, and does not move by some deep subterraneous processes of argument, which, if once brought to light, would clear him of the imputation of castle-building.

There is always a danger of misconceiving an author who has no antecedents by which we may measure him. Taking his work as it lies, we can but wish that he had kept his imagination under control; and that he had more of the hard head of a lawyer and the patience of a philosopher. He writes like a man who cannot keep from telling the world his first thoughts, especially if they are clever or graceful; he has come for the first time upon a strange world, and his remarks upon it are too obvious to be called original, and too crude to deserve the name of freshness. What can be more paradoxical than to interpret our Lord's words to Nicodemus, "Unless a man be born again," and of the necessity of external religion, as a lesson to him to profess his faith openly and not to visit him in secret? (p. 86.) What can be more pretentious, not to say gaudy and even tawdry, than his paraphrase

of St. John's passage about the woman taken in adultery? "In his burning embarrassment and confusion," he says, "he stooped down so as to hide his face. They had a glimpse perhaps of the glowing blush upon his face, etc." (p. 104.)

We should be very sorry to use a severe word concerning an honest inquirer after truth, as we believe this anonymous writer to be; and we will confess that Catholics, kindly as they may wish to feel toward him, are scarcely even able, from their very position, to give his work the enthusiastic reception which it has received from some other critics. The reason is plain; those alone can speak of it from a full heart, who feel a need, and recognize in it a supply of that need. We are not in the number of such; for they who have found have no need to seek. Far be it from us to use language savoring of the leaven of the Pharisees. We are not assuming a high place, because we thus speak, or boasting of our security. Catholics are both deeper and shallower than Protestants; but in neither case have they any call for a treatise such as this "Ecce Homo." If they live to the world and the flesh, then the faith which they profess, though it is true and distinct, is dead; and their certainty about religious truth, however firm and unclouded, is but shallow in its character, and flippant in its manifestations. And in proportion as they are worldly and sensual will they be flippant and shallow. But their faith is as indelible as the pigment which colors the skin. even though it is skin-deep. This class of Catholics is not likely to take interest in a pictorial "Ecce Homo." On the other hand, where the heart is alive with divine love, faith is as deep as it is vigorous and joyous; and, as far as Catholics are in this condition, they will feel no drawing toward a work which is after all but an arbitrary and unsatisfactory dissec tion of the object of their devotion. That individuals in their body may be

harassed with doubts, particularly in a day like this, we are not denying; but, viewed as a body, Catholics from their religious condition, are either too deep or too shallow to suffer from those elementary difficulties, or that distress of mind, in which serious Protestants are so often involved.

We confess, then, as Catholics, to some unavoidable absence of cordial feeling in following the remarks of this author, though not to any want of real sympathy; and we seem to be justified in our indisposition by his manifest want of sympathy with us. If we feel distant toward him, his own language about Catholicity, and (what may be called) old Christianity, seems to show that that distance is one of fact, one of mental position, not any fault in ourselves. Is it not undeniable, that the very life of personal religion among Catholics lies in a knowledge of the Gospels? It is the character and conduct of our Lord, his words, his deeds, his sufferings, his work, which are the very food of our devotion and rule of our life. "Behold the Man," which this author feels to be an object novel enough to write a book about, has been the contemplation of Catholics from that first age when St. Paul said, " The life that I now live in the flesh, I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered himself for me." As the Psalms have ever been the manual of our prayer, so have the Gospels been the subject-matter of our med tation. In these latter times especially, since St. Ignatius, they have been divided into portions, and arranged in a scientific order, not unlike that which the Psalms have received in the Breviary. To contemplate our Lord in his person and his history is with us the exercise of every retreat, and the devotion of every morning. All this is certainly simple matter of fact; but the writer we are reviewing lives and thinks at so great distance from us as not to be cognizant of what is so patent and so notorious a truth. He seems to

imagine that the faith of a Catholic is the mere profession of a formula. He deems it important to disclaim in the outset of his work all reference to the theology of the church. He eschews with much preciseness, as something almost profane, the dogmatism of former ages. He wishes" to trace" our Lord's "biography from point to point, and accept those conclusionsnot which church doctors or even Apostles have sealed with their authority-but which the facts themselves, critically weighed, appear to warrant." (Preface.) Now, what Catholics, what church doctors, as well as Apostles, have ever lived on, is not any number of theological canons or decrees, but we repeat, the Christ himself, as he is represented in concrete existence in the Gospels. Theological determinations about our Lord are far more of the nature of landmarks or buoys to guide a discursive mind in its reasonings, than to assist a devotional mind in its worship. Common-sense, for instance, tell us what is meant by the words, "My Lord and my God;" and a religious man, upon his knees, requires no commentator; but against irreligious speculators, Arius or Nestorius, a denunciatian has been passed in œcumenical council, when "science falsely so-called" encroached upon devotion. Has not this been insisted on by all dogmatic Christians over and over again? Is it not a representation as absolutely true as it is trite? We had fancied that Protestants generally allowed the touching beauty of Catholic hymns and meditations; and after all is there not that in all Catholic churches which goes beyond any written devotion, whatever its force or its pathos? Do we not believe in a presence in the sacred tabernacle, not as a form of words, or as a notion, but as an object as real as we are real? And if in that presence we need neither profession of faith nor even manual of devotion, what appetite can we have for the teaching of a writer who not only exalts his first thoughts about our

Lord into professional lectures, but implies that the Catholic Church has never known how to point him out to her children?

It may be objected, that we are making too much of so chance a slight as his allusion in his preface to "church doctors" involves, especially as he mentions apostles in connection with them; but it would be affectation not to recognize in other places of his book an undercurrent of antagonism to us, of which the passage already quoted is but a first indication. Of course he has quite as much right as another to take up an anti-catholic position, if he will; but we understand him to be putting forth an investigation, not a polemical argument and if, instead of keeping his eyes directed to his own proper subject, he looks to the right or left to hit at those who view it differently from himself, he is damaging the ethical force of a composition which claims to be, and mainly is, a serious and manly search after religious truth. Why cannot he let us alone? Of course he cannot avoid seeing that the lines of his own investigation diverge from those drawn by others; but he will have enough to do in defending himself, without making others the object of his attack. He is virtually opposing Voltaire, Strauss, Renan, Calvin, Wesley, Chalmers, Erskine, and a host of other writers, but he does not denounce them; why then does he single out, misrepresent, and anathematize a main principle of orthodoxy? It is as if he could not keep his hand off us, when we crossed his path. We are alluding to the following magisterial passage:

"If he (our Lord) meant anything by his constant denunciation of hypocrites, there is nothing which he would have visited with sterner censure than that short cut to belief which many persons take, when, overwhelmed with the difficulties which beset their minds, and afraid of damnation, they suddenly resolve to strive no longer, but, giving their minds a holiday, to rest content

with saying that they believe, and act ing as if they did. A melancholy end of Christianity indeed! Can there be such a disfranchised pauper class among the citizens of the New Jerusalem?" (p. 79.)

He adds shortly afterward:

"Assuredly, those who represent Christ as presenting to man an abstruse theology, and saying to them peremptorily, believe or be damned,' have the coarsest conception of the Saviour of the world," (p. 80.)

Thus he delivers himself: "Believe or be damned is so detestable a doctrine, that if any man denies it is detestable, I pronounce him to be a hypocrite; to be without any true knowledge of the Saviour of the world; to be the object of his sternest censure; and to have no part or place in the holy city, the New Jerusalem, the eternal heaven above." Pretty well for a virtuous hater of dogmatism! We hope we shall show less dictatorial arrogance than his, in the answer which we intend to make to him.

Whether there are persons such as he describes, Catholic or Protestants, converts to Catholicism or not-men who profess a faith which they do not believe, under the notion that they shall be eternally damned if they do not profess it without believing-we really do not know-we never met with such; but since facts do not concern us here so much as principles, let us, for argument's sake, grant that there are. Our author believes they are not only "many," but enough to form a "class;" and he considers that they act in this preposterous manner under the sanction, and in accordance with the teaching, of the religious bodies to which they belong. Especially there is a marked allusion in his words to the Athanasian creed and the Catholic Church. Now we answer him thus:

Part of his charge against the teachers of dogma is, that they impose on men as a duty, instead of believing, to "act as if they did" believe: now in fact this is the very