"The key of the whole Christology," he says, "is this, that the subject of those predicates which the Church ascribes to Christ is not to be regarded as an individual, but as an Idea; a real Idea, however,

not as, according to Kant, an imaginary one. Considered as existing in an individual, in a God-man, the attributes and offices which the doctrine of the Church ascribes to Christ are inconsistent with each other; in the Idea of the species, they agree together. Humanity is the union of the two natures, it is God become man; the Infinite Spirit renouncing its infinity and becoming finite, and the finite spirit conscious of its infinity.* It is the child of the visible mother and the invisible father; of Spirit and of Nature. It is the worker of miracles; inasmuch as, in the prog

* This language refers to the doctrines of Hegel, whose metaphysical system is of the latest fashion in Germany, and who maintains the unity of Spirit, human and divine, as the element of the universe; or, in the words of Strauss (Vol. II. p. 709), which cannot be rendered into English so as to give a show of meaning; "dass der göttliche Geist in seiner Entäusserung und Erniedrigung der menschliche, und der menschliche in seiner Einkehr in sich und Erhebung über sich der göttliche ist"; "that the Divine Spirit in its renunciation and abasement is the human, and the human in its withdrawal into itself, and its elevation above itself, is the Divine"; or, as he elsewhere expresses it, that "God and man are in themselves [essentially] one": "Gott und Mensch an sich sind Eins."

ress of man's history, the spirit is continually obtaining more full mastery over nature, both in man and around him; nature becoming subjected to its activity as a powerless material. Humanity is the sinless; inasmuch as the process of its development is blameless; pollution cleaves only to the individual, but in the species, and in its history, is thrown off. It is Humanity that dies, and rises from the dead, and ascends to heaven; inasmuch as, through the negation of its naturality [what in its composition belongs to nature], it is continually attaining a higher spiritual life, and by throwing off its finiteness, as a personal, national spirit, a spirit of this world, its unity with the infinite spirit of heaven is brought out. Through faith in this Christ, particularly in his death and resurrection, is man justified before God; that is to say, through the quickening of the Idea of Humanity within him the individual becomes a partaker of the divinely human life of the species; - conformably to the fact, that the negation of naturality and sensuality* — which is but the negation of a negation, seeing that they are but the negation of the spiritual — is the only way for men to attain the true spiritual life.

"This alone is the absolute purport of the Christology. That this appears connected with the person and history of an individual, belongs merely to its historical form." *

Such a passage is adapted to give a strong impression of the state of intellectual action in a country, where writing of this kind, instead of being received with universal wonder and derision, was regarded as matter of grave discussion, and as belonging to the highest department of philosophy.

The latest development which I have seen of the results to which the new theology has arrived is in the work of Strauss, before mentioned, on the "Doctrines of Christianity," which appeared almost simultaneously with the fourth edition of his "Life of Jesus." In that work he maintains the doctrine of Hegel concerning what Hegel calls God, and defends it, against some of his mistaken disciples, from the imputation of resembling the Christian doctrine, or that of any believer in the personality of the Supreme Being. The concluding chapters of the work are occupied with an attack on the belief of the future life, and of the immortality of the soul. His last words are

these:

* Leben Jesu (4th ed.), II. 709-711.

"If now the question be asked, what there is positive to set against these negations [involving the denial of the immortality of the soul], the whole answer (as Hegel too remarks) amounts to this; —that immortality is not to be conceived of as something future, but as a present quality of the spirit, as its inherent universality, its pow er of raising itself above all finite things to the Ideal. If men are accustomed also to give the name of Eternity to the life after death, this involves essentially the same requisite to its right apprehension. Hence, thinkers, who are in other respects on the right track, at once take a wrong course when they sometimes so express themselves as if, after the manner of the ancients, they would make immortality consist in posthumous fame, in the continued results of noble efforts, or even in being propagated through one's descendants, in the reappearance in another of the Idea of Humanity [Idea constituting a man], which had perished in one individual. The blessed results of the actions of eminent men after their death, and

*This language

none

one cannot say the conception, for there is

- is borrowed from Spinoza, according to whom men are only ideas; an idea in God constituting their "essence and existence." See particularly the Second Book of his Ethics, from the seventh to the eleventh Proposition.

the continuance of their names, are only a reflex of what was to them during life a present enjoyment of eternity, occupation, namely, with essential interests, labor in the Ideal. So, too, the continuance of the species is a reflex of the present enjoyment of family love; — and the metamorphosis of the universe is, not in its endless course, but as something recognized, and thus, consequently, apprehended as present, an eternalization of the spirit. The exhortation of Schleiermacher, ‘In the midst of finiteness to become one with the Infinite, and to be eternal in every moment,' is all that modern science has to say about immortality.

"Here, for the present, our business ends. For the other world is, in all respects, the one enemy, and, in its aspect as future, the last enemy, which speculative criticism has to encounter, and, if possible, to overcome."

"AND this, then, is thy faith!" And he who announces it, and anticipates its victory, instead of veiling his head in abasement and utter desolation of spirit, is contemplating with complacency a time when God and religion shall be dispossessed of the world, and nothing shall remain but atheism, despair, the lowest moral and mental degradation, and German philosophy,