retina, the physical phenomena of vision can be traced no further; they cease or disappear as motion, or physical change, and re-appear at once as intellectual perception-something which bears no discoverable resemblance to any of the physical phenomena of seeing. The chain of causes in all perceptions goes out of sight, some links are hidden.

According to Lotze,* "We shall never be able to prove that it lies in the nature of any motion . . . of itself to cease as motion and be reproduced as illuminating brilliancy, as sound, or as sweetness of taste." The motion here referred to is the sensible or physical part of the phenomena of sensation. The causal nexus between a wave, whether in the eye or in the air, and the mental conception of light, no man has ever discovered, but the scientist and the philosopher alike, together with universal humanity, accept with a practical assurance that cannot be shaken the testimony of their consciousness to the objective reality of the things perceived through any organ of sense. In unscientific terms, then, we may say that we know the things within reach of our senses because we feel them.

Feeling is the function of all the afferent nerves, and in some mysterious way we hear, taste, see, etc., by feeling. All the mechanism of our organs of sense is necessary to bring the physical within the grasp of the spiritual. By the aid of this mechanism we feel, as science insists, not the object, but some quality of the object appropriate to the sense in exercise. The universal consciousness, however, will have it that we feel a body thus and thus conditioned or qualified. Science says we feel the broad waves of light, or, practically, the redness of a physical body. Consciousness maintains that we see a red body. It is hazardous to quarrel with universal consciousness. Moreover, it would be unreasonable to reject, concerning the character of the phenomena, the testimony of the only authority by which its actuality had been, or could be, established. We dare not, therefore, banish the physical universe from our philosophy; we cannot banish it from our consciousness. God himself, in fashioning us so that we are thus compelled to recognize in our daily lives an objective universe, has involved his own veracity in the validity of these intuitions of our consciousness.

* Mikrokosmus, vol. i, p. 161; Leipzig. 1856.

If we admit, as we seem forced to, that mind and matter can communicate, while their natures are so very unlike, much less should it be thought incredible that mind should be able to convey thought to another mind of the same nature. No mechanism can simplify or explain the perception of the physical; it simply makes it mysteriously possible. The same intuitional power that magically reveals to us a physical universe and enforces its acceptance may similarly discover the Cause of the universe and enforce a belief in that Cause. This it does, and no human race is known that has not some notion of God.

Clearer and more full than this universal faith are the direct revelations to the spiritually minded, who, like Socrates and Jacobi, seem to have found a shorter way to the knowledge of God than through the regularly accredited prophets. This personal inspiration seems to resemble, in the strength of the conviction which it carries, that instinct which Kant has denominated "the voice of God." Brute instinct is concerned with nothing but what is essential to the well-being of the species. All this it fails not to supply. Birds know how to build nests, but they do not know how they know, or what principles require them to build as they do. Men know no more about the instincts that supplement reason in their own species. God supplies whatever is out of reach that is essential to any of his creatures. In endowing man with a soul God fixed upon him another necessity quite as urgent as the preservation of his body, namely, the preservation of his soul. The Creator is, then, under an equal, or still greater, obligation to supply whatever is demanded by the interests of our spiritual nature. It is not unreasonable, therefore, that we should listen for the voice. of God in a new revelation. Jacobi and millions more say they hear it. They find revealed in it the Almighty and an endless life. They touch, as it were, the suprasensible, and know it by a sort of spiritual empiricism. They are profoundly convinced. The demonstrations of the spirit are irresistible, but if denied, they can no more be forced upon a skeptic than the axioms of geometry.

We cannot too highly applaud the opinion of Victor Cousin, that "the error of Jacobi's school was not to see that this truthspeaking enthusiasm is only a purer and higher application of reason, in such manner that faith has its root in reason."

This

"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. THOS. 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 innova tions 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 su perstructure-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