FIRST glance at these sturdy volumes of Biography and their illustrations suggests the reflection that to the subject thereof, the lot of humanity certainly fell in pleasant places.' A man who has always looked at life out of the windows of such abodes as Palazzo Caffarelli and Villa Piccolomini, Carlton Gardens and Hurstmonceaux, the Hübel at Berne and Charlottenberg on the Neckar, must needs be hard to please if he find it not a pleasant prospect. Assuredly not among such dark-souled ones was Karl Christian Bunsen. Only to look at his beaming countenance on the title page with its broad brow and smiling lips and large blue eyes à fleur de tête, suffice to make us recognise him as a perfect type of the sanguine temperament, a born disciple of that school of philosophy which never fails to find

Sermons in stones and good in everything.

Bunsen was a gifted, energetic, successful man, healthy in body, superabundantly healthy (were such a thing possible) in mind and heart, and peculiarly fortunate in the chief relations of life. He was happy ; and if piety, earnestness and warmth of human kindliness merit happiness, he deserved his pleasant lot. It is good to come close to such a life now and then, to be frotté de bonté et de bonheur as the French wit would have said,and to warm ourselves for a few moments at such a hearth of kindly affections and fervid enthusiasms. We shall think none the less but rather the more of his last great book, which it is the main purpose of this

paper to review, if we pause for a few moments over these tomes of loving recollections. Not for us be the criticism which prejudges that because a man was unusually sound in heart and head, unusually full of faith in God and in the Good which is

the final goal of ill,' therefore his judgments ought to be suspected and his conclusions set down to the score of unreasoning optimism. If we find what we deem errors in Bunsen's book we shall not lay them at the door of his happy temperament, but account for them (as we most justly may) as the result of the hurried labour of a life rapidly drawing to its term. Is there cause to marvel if the reaper on whom the night is closing fast, eagerly panting to fulfil his task, should fill his bosom, not only with much ripe corn, but also with a few idle flowers and weeds?

Bunsen was born in 1791 at Corbach in Waldeck; his father a soldier, his grandfather an advocate. Having completed his studies at Göttingen, he travelled to Paris, and thence migrated to Florence and Rome, where his early friend Brandis was secretary to the Prussian Legation, then headed by Niebühr. Bunsen's talents were almost immediately recognised by the great critic, and ere long, through a series of well merited promotions, he passed from the rank of an attaché to that of a secretary and finally himself became Minister; a position he held with honour for many years. A visit of the King of Prussia, then Crown Prince, to Prince, to Rome Rome originated friendship almost romantic, which

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the sovereign afterwards testified by the highest possible honours offered to Bunsen on the occasion of a journey to Berlin in 1827. Meanwhile Bunsen had married an English lady of birth and fortune (Miss Waddington) whose pen now records in widowhood the unbroken happiness of their union. Their residence in the beautiful Palazzo Caffarelli in Rome with its splendid view over the Forum, the Coliseum, and the long stretches of the Appian Way, was soon brightened by the presence of a numerous family and by the frequent visits of that choicest tribe of European Bedouins who find their way each winter to the City-Eternal, at all events, in its attractiveness. Bunsen was also specially fortunate in the members of his Legation, among whom his secretary Count Guido Usedom, now Prussian Minister at Florence, became his life-long friend. His affectionate nickname for him used in one of his letters, the Prophet Jeremiah,' points very truly, as Madame Bunsen says, to Count Usedom's 'mirror-like descriptions of persons and events;' but assuredly not to any tendency to 'Lamentations' in that kindliest of gentlemen and most genial of diplomats.

Difficulties, arising out of the question of civil marriages, having occurred between Prussia and the Papal court, Bunsen's mission terminated in 1838, and he visited England to find all her doors open to him, and soon to form for the country of his wife an attachment only second to that which he bore to that of his fathers. On the next change at the embassy, the wishes of the English court aided the king's desire to pass over Bunsen's lack of the usual rank for so high a mission. He represented Prussia thenceforth in London for a long series of years, beloved and honoured as, perhaps, no other foreigner has ever been amongst us.

To the social world, he was the amiable and courteous gentleman, overflowing with a kindliness all the more delightful, inasmuch as it surpassed by several degrees the warmth of manner which would have been expected, or perhaps admired, in an English statesman. To his diplomatic brethren, he was an able and honourable confrère. To the orthodox Protestant camp he was the champion who had withstood the Pope on the question of the concordat with Prussia, and had negotiated the establishment of the Anglo-Prussian Bishopric of Jeru salem. Lastly, to the liberal party in the English Church, the Broad Church of Arnold, Maurice, and Hare, he was the beloved friend and associate who united the learning of a recluse scholar with the practical power of a man of the world, and a freedom of critical judgment equalled only by the enthusiasm of his Christian piety.

At last, his public career brought to an honourable close, Bunsen retired to spend his last years in study at Heidelberg and at Bonn, with occasional visits to the shores of the Mediterranean. In the society of his wife, family, and friends (among whom the translatress of his chief works was among the most welcome), this good and happy man passed his elder life, neither deeming that few nor evil had been the days of his pilgrimage. Just ere completing his three score years and ten, after a decline marked by little suffering, he died surrounded by his children, and with his last strength reiterating the expression of his fervent faith in God, and Christ, and immortality.

Of Bunsen's chief legacies to the world, his Description of Rome, his Hippolytus and his Times, his Egypt's Place in Universal History, his Signs of the Times, Church of the Future, and his God in History, we can only here speak of the last, which the affectionate labours of

his friend Miss Winkworth have now given to the English public in a very perfect translation. To this work, then, we devote the remainder of our space.

When Bunsen was a young man of twenty-six, he wrote in his journal a prayer, of which the substance lies in these words:

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What in childhood I yearned after, what throughout the years of youth grew clearer before my soul, I will now venture to examine. The revelation of Thee in man's energies and efforts, Thy firm path through the stream of ages, I long to trace as far as may be mitted to me even in this body of earth. The song of praise to Thee from the whole of humanity in times far and near, the pains and lamentations of earth and their consolation in Thee, I wish to take in clear and unhindered. Preserve me in strength and truth of spirit to the end of my earthly existence if Thou seest good, and should I not finish what I shall have begun, let me find peace in the conviction that nothing shall perish which is done in Thee and with Thee; and that what I have imperfectly, however imperfectly conceived and indistinctly expressed, I shall yet hereafter behold in completeness, while here some other man shall perfect what I have endeavoured

to do.'

It would truly seem as if the holy desire of his youth had remained the aim of his life, and that before he left the world he was permitted in great measure to fulfil it, and to leave behind him the record of the 'Song of Humanity,' such as his ear had caught it echoing across the wide plains of history. Of the four last years of his life, three were spent in the composition of this book. If in our examination of it, along with much that is of great and durable value, we find what seem in our eyes blemishes and shortcomings, at least we may have faith that as the former part of his youthful prayer has been accomplished, so has also the latter; and that what on earth he imperfectly conceived and indistinctly expressed, he now beholds in completeness,'

looking over all from those higher ranges of thought, those clearer heights of contemplation where the Immortals dwell.

God in History has a magnificent idea for its theme. It aims to survey the whole field of human religious consciousness for the purpose of proving the unity of the Divine plan in the moral order of the world. In reading it we seem to see the writer wearied with the cares of statecraft, quitting in his honoured age the camp of contending parties, and climbing up in solitary study to a Pisgah height, whence he could look down, not indeed on the Promised Land of the Future, but back over the long desert of the Past, through which the cloudy pillar of Providence has led our race by many a devious road. Then, as if in haste lest his days on earth should be too short for the work, with the eagerness of one who felt the importance of that which he had to tell, and with somewhat also of the authority of one who had beheld a vision and only announced what he had seen and heard, he dictated this book, through long successive hours, like another Milton, to his daughters. A book produced under such circumstances has a peculiar and exceptional value. It is not the value of a Critical History of Religion: that greatest of histories must wait yet many a day for a pen able to trace even its outlines. But in a true and important sense Bunsen's work has a merit beyond that of even a perfect cyclopædia of theologic history: it is in itself a Lesson of Theology. Let us explain our meaning, as near as may be, in his own phrases.

The question may be treated as an open one: Is there, or is there not, a moral unity in the history of humanity? Has there been a development of the higher elements

of our nature under any law of progress?

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In carrying out the project of such a philosophy of religious his tory as should demonstrate the reality of a moral order of the world, Bunsen assumes a position towards Christian and heathen religions which in some respects is peculiar to himself. On the one hand, he allots to Christ the place of the uniting bond of two worlds;' no product of the ancient world, yet its consummation; no mere herald of the new world, but its abiding Archetype, the perennial wellspring of life to humanity through the Spirit.' The Bible is the 'Book of Humanity.' Christ is set 'between the two halves' of history, and the Hebrew religious consciousness as traced in the Bible is made the keynote and standard of all that follows.

On the other hand, Bunsen is far indeed from denying that it was the same divine inspiration which spake through the poets and philosophers of Greece, and the prophets of Eastern heathendom, as in the seers and apostles of Palestine. The second, third, and fourth books of God in History are devoted to a most candid and sympathising study of the religious development of the Gentile races of Asia and Europe; and had the work no other merit, it would deserve our gratitude for the noble extracts which it contains from the best literature of the ancient pagan world, and the striking observations of the author upon them. Nor let it be forgotten, that twelve years ago, when Bunsen's task

was undertaken, such true liberalism was far less common than now. Men still thought, then, that they went very far on the road of toleration if they admitted that human reason, unassisted reason' (that singular invention of Protestant piety which Plato would have deemed a blasphemous absurdity)—

if 'unassisted' reason had taught to heathens the existence of God and the ruder elements of morality. The idea that God inspired heathens had as yet hardly been whispered in the churches, nor the doctrine that in any sense He 'led' Greeks and Hindoos as well as 'Israel' like sheep. The whole history of opinion in this matter, in truth, is most curious, and worthy of a moment's recall, if we would understand how large was the heart of Bunsen, which, already brimming over with Christian enthusiasm, had room also for warm recognition of the Divine, wherever he found it outside Christianity.

In old classic days the polytheistic nations were always ready to admit that other races besides themselves were Divine favourites. The Greeks looked with respect on the Thracian Xamolxis, the Assyrian Bel, and the Egyptian Isis and Osiris. The Romans were only too enthusiastic in welcoming to their Pantheon the gods of conquered nations; Mithras of Persia and Serapis of Egypt; and when they thought they had identified their own gods with the local deities of other lands

Jupiter with the Druids' Hesus and Mercury with the Egyptian Thoth-no sort of jealousy seems to have disturbed them. The Gods were good to all. Higher minds among them reached to the faith in One equal and omnipresent Benevolence, as Lucan makes Cato ask while passing by, unconsulted, the oracle of Ammon:

Canst thou conceive the vast Eternal Mind To rock and cave and Libyan waste confined?

Is there a place which God would call His

But it has been the opinion of modern Christendom that between the fortunate souls born on the hither side of the pale, and the hapless spirits outside it, a great gulf is already fixed. The Divine Light has been constantly described by our divines as if it fell upon the earth, not through the open blue expanse, with nothing hid from the heat thereof, but through some chink or cranny of a subterranean cave, lighting up the small round spot of Europe and Palestine, and leaving all the rest of the planet in Egyptian night. God has been habitually magnified from our pulpits, and infant lips taught to praise Him, not because his mercies are over all his works, but precisely on the contrary, because we enjoy the entire monopoly of the best of them, and because each babe among us might boast:

I was not born, as thousands are,
Where God was never known,
And taught to pray a useless prayer
To blocks of wood and stone.

But a voice has arisen at last recalling us to better thoughts of the Divine Father. A century ago men misdoubted Pope's Christianity, because he prayed to the Father of All, in every age and every clime adored.' But in our day, such an invocation would merely imply that the speaker had escaped beyond the doors of the very narrowest conventicle of obsolete orthodoxy. Thousands of Englishmen have dwelt in heathen and Moslem lands; England's empire includes a hundred millions of Brahminists and Buddhists; and English scholars, with their French and German allies, have opened to us the marvellous tomes of Eastern literature, till we have been driven to feel, as never before, that these 'heathens' were indeed 'men of like passions with ourselves;' men who joyed and sorrowed, and struggled and aspired, and prayed and wrestled

with the dread mysterics of life and death and sin and suffering, even as we have done. Then we have seemed to hear a voice from those tens of millions of our brother men; a cry like that of Esau of old, a remonstrance with God: Hast thou but one blessing, O my Father? And our hearts have answered,Not so! For them also the Father, from the depths of forgotten time, ere yet the earliest Vedic hymn invoked His light-for them also He has had a blessing.'

And as the modern natural philosopher with his spectrum proves to us that in sun and planet and star there exist the same elementary substances we have known upon our world, so does the new theologian, like Bunsen, from the refracted lights of truth and love shining from the poetry and the prayers of men of far-off lands and distant centuries, demonstrate to us beyond all doubt or cavil, that in their souls existed the self-same elements as in our own. We recognise at last that we have no more monopoly of God's love than of the sunlight; of His spirit than of the winds of heaven.

The work which Bunsen undertook, we think, he has in a great measure accomplished. He has shown that there is a moral unity in history; that there exists a Continuity of Forces in the spiritual world; that the same Divine light has been more or less shining, the same Divine work more or less rapidly going forward, in all lands and centuries. He has shown that through the ages one increasing purpose runs,' and that history, fairly consulted, justifies the oracle in our souls which bade us believe

One God who ever lives and lores,

One God, one Law, one Element,
And one far-off Divine event,

Towards which the whole creation moves.

This is the work Bunsen has done.