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"enthusiasm," in the mouth of Cousin, suggests no reproach, but rather implies a reason which flies while the syllogism creeps. It must be conceded also that this slower method is, by its very nature, debarred from ever demonstrating the infinite, and thus solving the most essential problems of religion and philosophy; for by the syllogism we can advance to no conclusion except through a more general conception. The term which must thus be included under another cannot contain the Deity, or satisfy the conditions of monotheism. The Highest, therefore, cannot possibly be reached through formal reasoning, and some other resource must be depended upon for this necessity of the soul. Nothing but Jacobi's intuitive cognition can yield the personal apocalypse of God.

When the clear testimony of consciousness is universally recognized as valid, then not only will Jacobi command an unqualified respect among philosophers; but objective science, as well as religion, will find a rational foundation, and, according to the claim of Drobisch, we shall realize in the philosophy of religion "the key-stone of the philosophical arch."

NOTE. Further expression and some modification of Jacobi's views will be found in the writings of J. G. Hamann and Jacob Fries, as well as those of Herder, Schleiermacher and Hamilton. Compare also Wesley and Mansel, who have much in common with these doctrines.

ART. V.-ALZOG'S CHURCH HISTORY.

Manual of Universal Church History. By Rev. Dr. JOHN ALZOG, Professor of Theology at the University of Freiburg. Translated, with additions, from the ninth and last German edition, by F. J. PABISCH, Doctor of Canon and Civil Law, etc., Mount St. Mary's Seminary, Cincinnati, O., and Rev. Tнos. S. BYRNE, Professor at Mount St. Mary's Seminary. In three volumes. Cincinnati: Robert Clarke & Co. 1874, 1876, 1878.

1. In his inimitable "Constitutional History of England," Canon Stubbs remarks: "The roots of the present lie deep in the past, and nothing in the past is dead to the man who would learn how the present comes to be what it is."

When we understand how any thing has become what it is we understand its history. Indeed, its history is the process of becoming what it is, and the record of this process constitutes its recorded history.

This was the thought which insensibly actuated the Magdeburg Centuriators when they determined to justify the Reformation of the sixteenth century by giving a complete sketch of the history of the Christian Church. By showing how Rome had become what it then was, Christian Europe would best understand how wide had been the departure from the simplicity and purity of the primitive Church as established by Christ and his immediate apostles, and would best feel the necessity of returning to this normal condition of faith and life. While the Catholic view of the Church is that she is the same "yesterday, to-day, and forever"-only extending the sphere of her operations, but never losing or changing her spirit-the early Reformers, and the Protestants of to-day, affirm that between the apostolic times and our own there have been introduced into the Romish Church an almost innumerable multitude of innovations which entirely set aside her claim to spiritual and doctrinal unity-semper eadem. The Centuriators believed that what was given as a perfect germ by Christ and the college of apostles would be developed, unfolded, and expanded under the providence of God during the succeeding ages, and thus the Church become what she is destined to be the guiding and saving force in human history. To point out, by a continuous narrative founded on original authorities, how Rome had perverted this purpose, and, instead of being an ever-increasing light and a leavening power for good, she had brought the Church into an ever-deepening shadow, into a gloomier superstition, and into a more shameful life, was the immediate object of this association of Protestant scholars. The key to this whole movement is found in their estimate of Rome; namely, that she is antichrist, and that, as antichrist, she has misled and deceived the elect of God. Nearly every thing which they wrote was influenced by this opinion; hence, very considerable extravagance is found in portions of their history. Nevertheless, few can examine the writings of these almost pioneers in the work of Church history without admiring the keenness of their insight; the thoroughness of their analysis of evidence; the readiness with which they set aside a multitude of pretenses of the Romish Church which had grown hoary with the centuries; the prompt rejection of the foundation of the whole superstructure—the primacy of Peter; the sharp analysis of the

historic evidence of the visitation of Peter to Rome at all; and the clearness with which they show how absurd and arrogant is the claim to build a fabric so massive and overshadowing on a foundation so narrow and so sandy. The view which these men entertained was evidently that of a dualism: that good and evil, light and darkness, truth and error, had been struggling for the mastery during the entire enactment of the Christian history. Their conception of the uses of writing a good Church history, and of placing it in the hands of the members of the Christian communion, is noteworthy. It was this: By this means the idea of the Christian Church will be placed before the mind as in a picture; the persistent agreement of all ages in certain articles of religious confession will appear; the origin and progress of errors and wickedness, especially the beginnings and growth of antichrist, will become evident; the correct and invariable standard by which heresies are to be judged will be discovered; the origin and nature of the government of the Church will be seen; how much of what was original has been retained, how much this original has been departed from, can thus be judged; the marks of a true Church and of a false Church, and especially how the latter has, by its fearful might and error, overslaughed the former, will be furnished. Thus will also be clearly seen how God, from time to time, has raised up heroes, by whose devoted efforts the pure doctrines of the Saviour and of his apostles have been repreached, and the purity of worship has been again restored. With these Centuriators dogma was the one grand, all-important thought. Their attention was directed, with an all-absorbing earnestness, to the determination of the truth or falsity of doctrine. In their belief this was the occasion of that manifest dualism in Church history which must become more and more marked until antichrist shall be destroyed by the brightness of the coming of the Son of Man.

How successfully these scholars accomplished the task which they had proposed is best seen from the fact that their history was the veriest fire-brand in the Romish fortress, and called forth in reply the most remarkable historical work which the Romish Church has ever yet produced. It required thirty years of almost incessant toil for Cæsar Baronius to traverse the ground over which these Magdeburg scholars had passed, in order to

write an answer to this terrible historical charge against the unfaithfulness and apostasy of the Church of which he was so eminent a cardinal. He, too, recognizes and defends as sharp a dualism in Christian history as the Centuriators themselves; but with him the heretics and Protestants are antichrist. While scarcely recognizing, either in the preface or in the body of his work, his able opponents, Baronius boldly maintains the primacy of Peter, and defends the genuineness of some documents which have long since been proved spurious by Catholic historians themselves.*

These two pioneer works in the department of Church history were diligently worked out, and were very similar in the spirit which actuated their preparation and publication. Both alike recognize a system of dualism in the earthly history of the kingdom of Christ; both deal in strong charges and countercharges; both affirm and deny with about equal confidence; both proceed upon the thought that the kernel and essence of Church history must concern dogma; and both about equally overlook the fact that a true spirituality and purity of thought and life must be the abiding criterion of the genuineness of any Church.

Ofttimes has the inquiry been started whether there cannot be found some middle ground upon which these two confessions may meet, and where the sharp and violent contradictions which now are noticeable between these two opposing Church histories may find their reconciliation and harmony. Must there necessarily be in the history of the Christian Church this manifest dualism which each of these systems equally and most strenuously insists upon? Can there be any possibility of evolving from these two an essential unity, where no sacrifice of truth will be necessary, and where the Church may truly appear as the bride of Christ, decked with the jewels of beauty and 'purity? The answer to this most important question, however painful it may be to those who are forever picturing some outward and constrained unity, must be this: So long as the Papal Church shall tenaciously hold to its dogma of tradition, so long must these sections of the Church remain disunited. If the

*See Baur, "Epochen der kirchlichen Geschichtschreibung," 2ter absch. s.s. 39-84. To this work we have been indebted for many statements in this section of the paper.

Christian Church must be a stranger to development and progress; if every thing is declared to be fixed, immobile, as it was in the beginning; if the parable of the Lord-"first the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in the ear" (Mark iv, 28)— is regarded as but a vexing mockery; then must Protestantism continue its protest, and Catholicism can take no other view of Church history than the one so thoroughly developed by Baronius, and which has been followed, with few departures from his essential principles, for the last two hundred and fifty years. Modern Catholics have been more or less affected by the spirit of progress, which fills the very air in these later times, and their historians have put on an appearance of liberality. The unification of Italy, and the secularization of the education of her peoples, have placed within the reach of scholars sources of information which were closed for centuries. The commission recently issued by Leo XIII. to Cardinal Hergenröther, to submit a new plan for arranging the Vatican archives in order to make them more accessible to scholars, promises to be of incalculable value to the future historians of the Church. But all this has come from without, and has not been a spontaneous movement even of the present liberal pontiff. The demand of the awakened and newly energized Italian scholars is that these, and all historic materials, shall come to the light to tell whatever story they may, irrespective of the fame or good name of pope or prince. But we are reluctantly forced to believe that this seeming liberality of the more recent historians of the Catholic Church pertains for the most part to merest secondary and non-essential forms and fashions, while essentially the same spirit now breathes through their writings which is found in these annals of Baronius.

2. If, then, we are to find truest and essential progress in the treatment of Church history, we must seek it outside of the Catholic communion; indeed, we should expect it in a communion which accepted progress and development as the great underlying law of the life of the Christian Church. It would, therefore, also appear that the problems proposed by the Protestant ecclesiastical historian are deeper and truly fundamental. By as much more delicate and subtle as are the problems connected with a living, developing organism, by so much more vital and far-reaching are the problems of history as they are

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