French Reviews.

REVUE CHRETIENNE.-February 15.-1. PRESSENSE, The Religious Bearing of the Concordat. 2. ROLLER, Italy and the Italians. 3. Puaux, The Death of Louis XIV. 4. ROSSEUUW ST. HILAIRE, Conferences on the Life of Jesus.

March 15.-1. ROSSEUUW ST. HILAIRE, The Duke of Alva in Flanders. 2. BERSIER, A New Commentary [by F. Godet] on the Gospel of St. John. 3. GUERLE, The Future of the Liberal Party.

April 15.-1. KUHN, the Unpublished Letters of Sismondi. 2. HOLLARD, The Monologues of Schleiermacher. 3. ROSSEUUW ST. HILAIRE, The Church and the Revolution. 4. BERSIER, The Causes of the Deposition of Adolphe Monod.

The Protestant papers of France have had recently an interesting discussion on the deposition, in 1832, of Rev. Adolphe Monod, the great French pulpit orator, by the Consistory of Lyons. As the rationalistic party are charging the Presbyterial Council of Paris with intolerance for having dismissed the Rev. Athanase Coquerel, jr., (to which case we refer more fully in our department of Religious Intelligence,) they are reminded that in 1832 a rationalistic consistory dismissed one of the most gifted preachers of the Church for preaching against "unworthy communions," and for demanding that the Consistory should take measures for having all the persons wishing to take the communion examined, in order to exclude those whose lives did not correspond to their profession of faith. It appears that Mr. Martin-Paschaud, the same rationalistic pastor whose suffragan Mr. Athanase Coquerel, jr., was until his recent dismission, was at that time member of this Consistory of Lyons. The comments on this fact by the Protestant press of France have called forth a letter from Mr. Martin-Paschaud, in his organ, ("Le Disciple du Jesus Christ,") in which he gives a very detailed account of the occurrence. It appears from this account that the two reasons above stated were the only ones adduced by the consistory for the act of deposition, and not the subsequent refusal of Monod to distribute the Lord's supper, though this latter act is mentioned in the decision by which the government (the celebrated Cuvier at that time was charged with the administration of the Protestant worship) confirmed the deposition.

REVUE DES DEUX MONDES.-February 1, 1864.-1. QUATREFAGES, Natural History of Man: The Polynesians and their Migrations. 2. D'ASSIER, The Mato Virgem," Scenes and Reminiscences of a Journey in Brazil. 4. MAZADE, "Le Maudit," a Novel on the Religious Habits of France. 5. FORGUES, Cotemporaneous English Novels. 6. REVILLE, The Ancestors of the Europeans in Ante-historic Times: the Arian People according to Modern Science. 7. E. DU HAILLY, The French Antilles and Liberty of Commerce.

February 15.-3. QUATREFAGES, Natural History of Man, (second article.) The Origin and Migration of the Polynesians. 4. E. RECLUS, The Poetry and the Poets of South America since its Independence. 5. LANGEL,

Philosophical Studies in England: Herbert Spencer. 9. L. DE LAVERGNE, The Elections of 1789.

March 1.-1. EsQUIROS, England and English Life, (twenty-third article.) 6. MONTEGUT, Historical and Moral Character of Don Quixote. 9. WoLOWSKI, The Finances of Russia.

March 15.-2. F. LENORMANT, Greece since the Revolution of 1862. 4. PAYEN, Chemical Industry in the Nineteenth Century.

April 1.-1. PAVIE, Devadata, Scenes of Hindoo Life. 5. E. DE LAVELEYE, Rural Economy in the Netherlands. 6. AMPERE, End of Liberty at Rome. 7. MAZADE, Liberal Ideas and Modern Literature.

April 15.-1. SAINTE BEUX, Sketches of Cotemporaneous Poets. 3. L. DE LAVERGNE, The Bank of France and the Banks of the Departments. 5. SAVENCY, The Forces of Italy.

ART. XI. -QUARTERLY BOOK-TABLE.

Religion, Theology, and Biblical Literature.

A History of Christian Doctrine. By WILLIAM T. SHEDD, D.D. 2 vols., 8vo., pp. 408, 508. New York: Charles Scribner. 1863.

Dr. Shedd's history has already, we understand, attained a second edition. With his clear, terse, grave style, the expression of stern and positive opinions, aided by Scribner's liberal margins, bold type, and broad spaces, the work affords pleasanter and easier reading than hard theology usually presents. Nor is it by vailing the stern features of his system that Dr. Shedd wins our attention. It is the rich ebony luster that constitutes a main attraction.

His history is professedly history written from a special stand-point, and with an honorable frankness he avows this specialty. "I have felt," he says, "a profound interest in the Nicene trinitarianism, the Augustinian anthropology, and the Anselmic soteriology, and from these centers have taken my departure." As the Augustinian anthropology is pregnant with a doctrine of necessitated will, transferable guilt, and predestination, it is readily seen that Dr. Shedd occupies the standpoint of high Calvinism. The purpose of the work is to present such a view of doctrinal history as shall be soft and easy to a Calvinistic eye. It is a difficult task. That system is no doctrine of the general Church. Taking its origin with Augustine, unknown to the primitive Church, rejected by all the oriental Churches, traceable only as a narrow streak adown the ages of the Western Church, it is condemned by the almost unanimous voice of Christian history. Hence the object of the present work required the sacrifice of all symmetry, the prominent expansion of the narrow and the exceptional, and the flinging the main field into the background. This task Dr. Shedd has performed with masterly skill. His object is of course attained very much by the sacrifice of the claims of the work as history. His pro

duction can scarce be quoted without distrust as historical authority. It is polemics; and viewed as such it is replete with interest, and may occupy an important place in our doctrinal literature. It needs to be answered by counter history; and the debate may then be held and the truth be vindicated as effectually upon historical as upon exegetical and logical grounds.

Dr. Shedd constructs his history not so much by Periods as by topics. Each single doctrine is selected, and its history is singly traced from the Christian era to the present day. His topics are, Christian Apologetics; the Trinity, including Christology; Anthropol ogy, including the doctrines of Will and Depravity; Soteriology, including Atonement and Predestination; and Eschatology. It is thus not so much a history as a series of historical dissertations.

Of Augustine, Dr. Shedd's theological idol, we admire rather the great talents and massy volume than the theological soundness. There is scarce a character in Church history from whom we inherit so disastrous a theological legacy. His conversion from Manicheanism seems ultimately to have consisted in slicing away the better half of his double God, and spreading the black deity over the firmament of Christian theology. To his ingenium atrox we trace the accursed dogmas of infant damnation, transferred guilt, the identification of depravity with sexual appetite, and predestination. Pelagius was the better man, and not doctrinally the greater heretic. The former relaxed the moral nerve of man; the latter diabolized God. The former was a practical rationalist; the severer doctrines of the latter, while they repelled and made infidel the highest reason of man, when fully accepted, resulted often in a self-immolating but reasonless piety, none the less selfish for its self-immolation, resembling the self-consecration of an oriental pantheist. True Christian doctrine lies between the two; is neither Pelagian nor Augustinian; rejects the self-sufficiency and disregard of gracious divine aids of the former, and the God-dishonoring fatalism of the latter. It is this golden mean of true theology which the whole Christian Church of the first three centuries held; which, with minor variations, the great body of the Christian Church, Eastern, Roman, and Protestant, holds; the Protestant, with the exception of those sections which have come under the influence of the Genevan forger of the decretum horribile. Dr. Shedd's great art consists in bringing out into monstrous prominence the narrow and exceptional, so that Church doctrinal history consists largely of a history of doctrines which the Church did not hold.

When he comes to the anthropology of the entire Christian Church eastern and western, from the time of the apostles to the time of Augustine, Dr. Shedd is obliged to exert his utmost ingenuity to evade

the undeniable but stupendous fact that all the peculiarities of modern Calvinism are utterly contradicted and condemned, and that the entire Christian body was what would now be considered substantially Arminian. The Eastern Church, Syriac and Greek, he is compelled to surrender outright. Its theology was not far from the sub-Arminianism of Limborch and Curcellæus. Under a prattle about "germs" and "tendencies" to Augustinism in the early Western Church, etc., he endeavors to disguise the fact that its pre-Augustinian theology was not above the level of the Arminianism of Arminius himself. Of this he tells us Augustinism was a development; which is as true as that Princeton theology is a development of Wesleyan theology. Dr. Shedd's phrase, "the Latin or Augustinian theology," is a plump historical mistake. Augustinian theology never was "the Latin theology." It was, even in the West, generally the theology of a slim minority of fatalistic ultraists. But what we wish specially to emphasize and spread out for deliberate contemplation and permanent memory is this: Even in the West before the teaching of Augustine the entire Church rejected the doctrine of hereditary guilt, necessitated damnability, irresistible grace, predestination, unfree will, and unconditional election. This whole brood of cockatrice's eggs was hatched in the Church by the evil genius of the fervid African. The primitive Western theology was not the theology of Calvin, nor Twisse, nor Hodge, nor Shedd; but rather of Arminius, of Cranmer, of Wesley, of Watson, of Wilbur Fisk, and of this our Methodist Quarterly Review. Dr. Shedd's explication of Augustine's doctrine, which is of course his own, abounds with self-contradictions and absurdities, of which we will specify a few.

He confounds again and again the voluntary with the volitional. "Voluntariness consists in willing." Vol. ii, p. 58. Now a voluntary act is an act (generally corporeal) in accordance with and consequent upon a volition; not the volition itself. Hence "voluntariness" does not "consist in willing," but in obeying the will.

Again, Dr. Shedd denies that freedom consists in a "power of contrary choice." That is, a free choice is a choice other than which no choice could be put forth; that is a choice which the agent could not help putting forth. Now how is such a choice any more free than any other event which cannot be helped, or the different of which cannot be, as a clock stroke or waterfall? A splendid liberty is that; the liberty of doing what you cannot help doing!

Again, he places much emphasis upon the difference between a depravity of the will and a depravity of the sensibilities. And yet he tells us, (p. 61,) "Voluntariness has not perished in the sinner, because he sins with delight, and delight is voluntariness." If delight

is voluntariness, (volitivity,) then a delight is a volition and the will and sensitivity are one, for delight is a sensitivity. In what consists then the difference between a depraved will and a depraved sensitivity? And how is will any more free than a desire or perception?

Again, he tells us that freedom consists in uncompelled self-motion. But how is an act which cannot be avoided otherwise than compelled; or at any rate the more free for not being compelled? Compulsion to an act can do no more than render it an act which cannot be helped or cannot be otherwise. Or how is a self-motion which cannot be helped any more free than any other kind of motion? Self-motion or not selfmotion, it is still motion that cannot be helped. A caused motion can be nothing more than a motion the agent cannot help, and that much the self-motion is. A self-motion that cannot be helped is, if not a compelled self-motion, certainly a necessitated self-motion; and a selfmotion necessitatively tacked to me is no more free than a motion caused by a cause other than the self. A necessitated self-moved volition is no more free than a gravitating water-drop.

Again, he elaborately maintains that sinning is a free act because the will creates sin, de nihilo, from nothing. But what difference does the material or non-material, wrought upon by the will, make in regard to the freedom of the volition? A volition which cannot be helped, to create out of nothing, is no more free than such a volition to create out of something.

Again, he tells us, (p. 61,) that in the Greek anthropology freedom is "indetermination or indifference." Now no anthropology, Greek, Latin, Dutch, or English, ever held freedom to be " "indetermination' itself. It consists, according to the Greek anthropology, in a power to will either of several ways; hence, though it may exist in the mind's state of indetermination, and be exerted in the act of passing from that indetermination, yet it is very absurd to say that the freedom is the indetermination itself.

More we might say; but is more needed to show Dr. Shedd's utter failure to master these questions? This results from no deficiency of intellectual power, but from the necessity of his position. Augustinism is inevitably theological self-stultification. None of that narrow school ever dealt with these topics without groping like the blind-struck men of Sodom at the door of Lot.

In regard to Dr. Shedd's direct treatment of Arminianism we can realize that "blessed are those who expect nothing, for they shall not be disappointed." The random statements contained in his "Discourses" warned us of his unacquaintance with a theology which he imagined himself to be opposing, when, in fact, he was only misunderstanding and misstating. Dr. Shedd's reading, like his writing, has