school of thinkers, who were, some at least, full skeptics. Luther found such at Rome among the priests. Some of these fleeing afterward into Protestant lands, as more tolerant of divergent opinions, aided, we think, in giving a rationalistic bias to the reform in Poland and Hungary. In England, at a later day, the freer interchange of opinion allowed open vent to the skepticism, which in Catholic countries though more mute was certainly not less active. Lord Herbert, then Hobbes, and still later, Tindal and Collins, and yet after them, Lord Bolingbroke gave utterance in Britain to skeptical views. It was from England, visited by Voltaire, who there had the acquaintance of Bolingbroke, that the great Theomachists of the French nation borrowed largely the arms which they wielded. But yet Bayle, and Montaigne, and Rabelais, the national predecessors of these French infidels, were not English. And whilst much of French skepticism was imported across the Channel, as traditional, very much was indigenous to the soil. It was in a country, which Papal persecutions had weeded of all Protestant defenders of the Gospel, where neither pulpit nor school felt longer the healthful emulation ministered to an earlier generation of Romanists by the Protestantism in that day tolerated-it was in a country that had harried and worried the more spiritual and the more scriptural portion of their own Catholic brethren, the Jansenists; that Skepticism began to sow and to reap its largest harvest. If Romanism were Christianity, it was an age in French history most Christian, because most intensely and most exclusively Catholic; when Romanism pure, Romanism the extruder of Protestantism, and Romanism the persecutor of Jansenism, had become dominant, and reigned unrivaled. But, then, as never before and never since, Skepticism struck deep its roots, and spread widely its branches. The king, Louis XV., is a bigoted Romanist, Dubois is not Huguenot or Jansenist; and he is the Premier of France, and a Cardinal of Rome. And then Atheism grows luxuriantly. "Was it for this," France might have said to the Vatican," that I gave my Huguenots by myriads to the dragonade and the galleys at home, or to exile abroad? Was it for this, that I tore out my own entrails, to fatten, with my own loss, England and Germany, and Holland and transatlantic America? Was it for this, that I saw my St. Cyrans, and Arnaulds, and Quesnels, denounced, incarcerated, or expatriated the glory of Jansenist intellect, and of Jansenist piety? Was it all, but for this, that thou mightest give me a Dubois for a Prelate and Cardinal; and lift my Voltaire to become the very Patriarch of impiety?" And soon, over throne and altar, over baronial mansions and lowly thresholds, went rolling in blood, the avenging torrents of an exasperated Atheism.

Infidelity had, from the influence of French literature and genius, spread to some extent into Protestant Germany, and into Protestant England. In the first country, it had a royal patron in Frederic the Great. In the last, it had its native advocates in Hume, Gibbon, and

Paine. It is, we believe, now generally acknowledged, that the two later Stuarts, of England, had been in the pay of France while on the British throne, and hoped to overturn, in their own land, its free constitution and its Protestant faith. Now, had they but in their earlier age succeeded, and a dominant Romanism been continued by the Stuarts of England in conjunction with the Bourbons of France, what must have been the result in Britain at the era of French impiety? We see no reason for doubting that had England then been Catholic, as the Stuarts had long before hoped to make it, the infidelity and anarchy on the one side of the Channel would have swept the other side also. Had England been infected when France was thus scourged, to become in turn the scourge of the Continent, what would have been the loss to civilization and to the race.! But Protestantism was the breakwater that turned the rising inundation-an Evangelical Protestantism, such as the Puritans and Nonconformists, and such as, after them, Watts, and Wesley, and Whitefield, and Wilberforce, within and without the Established Church, had labored and were laboring to cherish and to diffuse. This stood the onset and rolled back the submerging tides of Revolution, Anarchy, and Atheism. Now if Protestantism be the especial parent and persistent ally of Infidelity, how is it, that, in England especially and traditionally Protestant, she did not reap the whirlwind harvest, which, according to her Romish accusers, she had especially sown; but of which France, so boastfully and fiercely Catholic, was in fact the great reaper for all Europe? Whereas England it in fact was, which, having in an earlier age welcomed Huguenot refugees from the rage of French Catholicism, now, in a later age, opened her island home to shelter the refugee Catholic priests from the butchery of French Atheism. Tried by those two eras in their national annals, the Protestant land it was that sowed Charity and that reaped Peace; the Catholic people were they who sowed Romanist Persecution, and reaped Infidel Persecution; and having given Superstition her unlimited seed, time, saw Skepticism appear uncontrolled in the harvest field.

But it is said Germany is now the great center of Infidelity, and with her it is the development of Protestantism. The earlier movements of German scholarship in that direction, we reply, were in connection with translations from English Deism, but its more advanced, attended similar incursions of French Deism and Atheism. Its still more progressive stages have, with the many-sided erudition characteristic of the land, borrowed philosophy from the recreant Jew of Holland, Spinoza, and from the old Pantheism of Persia and India. Goethe, so powerful a name in the national literature, admired and emulated, probably, Voltaire, more than any other of the earlier celebrities. Infidelity was, in a very marked degree, in Germany, an exotic transplanted from foreign nurseries; and of those nurseries, besides the Hebrew and Oriental, the French contributed, and more largely far than the British, the seedlings. In this, more than in any land, Skepticism invaded the University, the

Pulpit, and the Theological School. The scourges of Providence, in the wars following the French Revolution, soon drove men to straits, where it was felt that Materialism could not satisfy the soul's cravings, and that Society needed Providence as a refuge and a ruler. Men looked again to a shelved Bible, a forgotten Heaven, and an exiled Redeemer. Scholars like Stolberg, Schle gel and Novalis sought, in the Romish church, truths that Rationalism had overlaid in the Protestant communion. It was like Naomi, agoing down, when famine reigned in Judah, to seek bread in the land of Moab. But in the Protestant churches of Germany evangelical truth was recovered, apart from all such changes of Romish proselytism: and in those Protestant churches, the gospel has had, in men recently dead or yet living, some of its ablest modern apologists.

In the last great commotion of European commonwealths, the Pantheistic and Socialistic elements, in German literature, seemed to prove their own flagrant incompetency for the crisis they had invoked. The nation, in just dread of such leaders, shrank from ameliorations and emancipations they might else have welcomed. Having ruined the cause of political freedom at home, some of these errorists, having migrated to our shores, insist on recasting the liberties we have retained, on the model of those which they wrecked abroad, by our surrender of the Sabbath, and the Bible, and the Christian ministry, that we may accept Spinoza as our prophet, and Pantheism as our creed. We know not that Evangelical Protestantism has shown itself, in any measure, behind Catholicism, in resisting such crusaders.

In Germany itself Romanism, quite recently, has done much to provoke and feed Skepticism. The exhibitors of the Holy Coat of Christ at Trèves, called out the German Catholic movement, one mainly and essentially Rationalistic and Socialistic. Promising much, this new body accomplished little; unless it were the unintended demonstration, that Romish extravagances of superstition may provoke as fierce an onset on all Christian verity and life, as ever grew out of a debased Protestantism. In France the nominal return of a people, wearied and scarred with the results of Materialism, to the forms of the Catholic church, has not renewed, in the higher philosophers or men of science, any measure of religious principle and devouter feeling, at all equivalent to that found in the same class of thinkers and investigators in Protestant Britain. If Protestantism be the true parent of Infidelity, how is this singular and incontrovertible fact to be accounted for?

Our last and hurried reference shall be to the relative merits and achievements of Protestantism and Romanism in counteracting Skepticism. Let it be remembered how early Protestantism appeared in that field of Christian evidences in the person of one of the most illustrious heroes and statesmen of the old French Huguenots, Du Plessis Mornay. Later, Grotius of Holland, and Abbadie, the French Protestant, did

eminent service. Did Huet, the learned Catholic Bishop of Avranches, in the same field, or did Fénélon, surpass them? And for the decision of this question, turn to the great collections of works on Christian Evidences, edited by French Catholic scholars, the earlier by Genoude, the later and larger by Migne. It will be seen, that a very considerable proportion of the most able and effective treatises, in both these Catholic compilations, are by Protestant authors. Genoude, at first a publicist, and in his later years an ecclesiastic, of acknowledged talent and weight, remarks frankly, that no nation has produced a larger amount of able reasoning against infidelity than the English: and observes, that it may be because Protestants make their faith to lean so much upon reason. Butler, Bentley, Lardner, Halyburton, Lyttleton, Paley, Chalmers, Jenyns, Watson, and Wilson, where are they surpassed with the exception of Pascal? And how much in Blaise Pascal was intensely Protestant? When he said-as from his private notes, for the first time but recently published, it appears that he did say-referring to the condemnation of his letters at Rome: "If my letters be condemned at ROME, they are not condemned in HEAVEN," was it not, in effect, to renounce trust in the Vatican as the seat of Infallibility, and to deny the Pontiff as Vicegerent of the King of Heaven? Was there no echo of Wittenberg and of Geneva, in the heart that poured out from its profoundest musings, the unmatched "Thoughts on Religion?"

We would not deny to living Romanists, like Wiseman and Maret, the honor of their efficient labors in the defense of the Gospel. But the ablest of all the modern defenders, among Romanists, of Christianity against Skepticism, was the great Abbe La Mennais, for power of thought and splendor of diction, compared by them to Bossuet. As in a former century, the great Catholic scholar, Huet, had sought, by showing the weakness of Human Reason, to drive men over to the authority of the Infallible Church, so, but with more energy of intellect, and with more beauty and wealth of language did he. It was, we think, with both, a false and untenable ground. The church is, after all, but Human Authority. Scripture, in the exposition of Evangelical Protestants, asks men to rely, directly and personally, under the personal guidance of the Holy Spirit, in the exercise of their own best reason and inmost conscience, on a Personal, Faithful, and Omnipresent God. It is Divine Authority, accessible to every penitent and devout inquirer. Ask my faith in an Omnipresent CHRIST. I see the right of the claim. Ask my faith in a Church, which, though visible, is neither omnipresent nor Divine and you ask my reliance on Human Authority. The foundation is inherently unsound. It gave way beneath that great writer, La Mennais himself. His old age was Rationalistic and Skeptical-more Pantheistic, we fear, than Christian. His first writings tinged with superstition, in his deference to the Vatican, and his last with Skepticism -they were but bifurcations of the same error-an undue reliance on

Human Authority,—in the first instance, as incorporated in the Church; in the last instance, as individualized in the solitary student.

So in the great movement, welling out from the great English University of Oxford, a similar parallel divergence was exhibited. The loftiest intellect among the leaders of it, John H. Newman, on the current of Human Authority-the authority of the early fathers of the Church, developing in them and from out them-was swept into the Roman communion. His own brother, Francis W. Newman, upon another branch of the same stream, another bough of the same crotch-holding also the power of Human Authority, but in the shape of the reason developing out of the individual man-finds his way forth into the boldest, blankest Rationalism, denying the perfection of the moral character even of Jesus. In the same movement, another pair of brothers illustrated the same forkings of the road of Human Authority. Froude, whose diary, published after his death, was the first bold proclamation of the Romeward longings of the Oxford Tractarians, has left a brother who has turned along the same pathway into the other bifurcation; and Human Authority, in the shape of the individual reason, makes this latter brother intensely skeptical. The Absolute Reason of the Pantheist, and the Absolute Church of the Ultramontane Romanist, are, after all, sustained on the same common trunk of Human Authority. It is easy to migrate, with La Mennais, from Romanism to Rationalism. So had Gibbon done, and so Bayle, long before. Or, on the other hand, a man begins to credit the Church rather than the Head of the Church, and soon he believes in the melting blood of Saint Januarius, the migrating house of Loretto, and the Holy Coat of Trèves, as well as in the Gospels or the Sacraments. And so a man who indulged but lately in vaunts of skepticism may become, by no very tedious process, a devotee of the winking Madonna, like the Abbe Ratisbon. He who doubted of God may come to adore the bread wafer. An implicit faith in Voltaire may be changed, as easily as the garment of a by-gone fashion, for a faith as implicit in the Vatican.

What, then, are our auguries? They are simply these: JESUS CHRIST, the very God incarnate in our human nature, YET LIVES, Ruler of the centuries, nations, and schools, and Head over all things to His own spiritual Church. Our faith is not in the Church, but in Him, its Life, its Light, its Might-ever present, almighty, and unchanging. This Christ will outlive the Superstitions that would cover Him over, and the Skepticism that would fain thrust Him out. Just as His prophet Isaiah will, in his writings, survive all the Rabbinic commentaries that overlay the seer, and all the Rationalistic interpreters that would wash out his visions; so the Great Redeemer, Isaiah's theme and Lord, will outlast the Decretals that supplant, and the oracles of Reason that contradict Him.

In God's having reserved to our own times the key to the hieroglyphics of the land of the Nile, and of the arrow-headed inscriptions of Bab