scholars, few who enter deeply into the study of the Greek language, into the examination of its structure, of its formations, of its analogies."1

An interesting question here arises. What occasions this marked difference between the Germans and the English? They were originally one. They belong to the same stock, and their languages to the same family. They are alike in the substantial qualities of mental and moral character. Why the prominent existing dissimilarity? England has not been always what she is now. Once the English spirit deeply sympathized with the Platonic. A long roll of revered names might be unfolded that all of us have been wont to love and admire.

A principal cause is unquestionably geographical position. Great Britain is an island, and she has immense colonial possessions in every quarter of the earth. The United States have a very extended sea-coast, with numerous harbors and large rivers. We have thus every incitement to spread ourselves over a large surface. The call to physical effort is loud and unceasing. On the contrary the Germans are shut up in the centre of Europe. Almost everything has conspired to keep them at home. We are the couriers and the carriers of the whole earth. The Germans are the purveyors of mind. They carry on a commerce of intellect. They are psychological adventurers. While we are making ships, they are manufacturing theories. While we are harpooning the monster of the northern ocean, they are defining the limits of old and new Platonism, or demonstrating that the chorus in the Agamemnon of Eschylus consisted of twelve old men, and not of fifteen.

Another cause is found in the nature of the governments. The British government has been for a long time essentially republican. Freedom of thought and of speech is unfettered. The political world has opened a thousand avenues for practical effort which have been eagerly entered. "A few minor minds may peck with laudable industry at the luxuriant fruitage of German erudition; but our great intellects, our original discoverers, our secret miners and public heaven-stormers are all in the senate."2 It is not necessary to say how different is the state of things in Germany. An iron-handed government there controls everything. Liberty means what the royal vocabulary makes it mean. There are no Burkes nor Chat

London Quart. Rev. No. 101.

2 For. Quart. Rev.

hams. There is no Junius nor Wilkes to set at defiance the powers that be. The great engine of freedom-the newspaper press-is an insignificant affair. The mind is necessarily turned inward. Meditation, reverie, or prying investigations into old and distant objects become a fixed habit. One mode of action being effectually barricaded, the soul breaks out with violence into another.

An additional occasion of the difference in question lies in the antagonist systems of philosophy. In the British world, Bacon, Locke and Paley have long been the masters. The end which Bacon proposed to himself was fruit; it was the relief of man's estate; it was to enrich human life with new inventions and powers. Philanthropy, he says, was so fixed in his mind that it could not be removed. Wherever Locke has been read, men have not fallen into the errors of the Middle Ages. He has promoted anything rather than the building of cloisters or the re-publication of Plato. The influence of Paley, perhaps, has been equally great with that of Locke; it certainly has been entirely correspondent. The Germans, however, have launched forth to the other extreme. It is said that Kant's system is in ruins; but Kant's influence is not. Other systems, it has been observed, have rolled over his, and have been themselves in turn displaced. Yet all these systems have conspired to one general effect. They have all been at antipodes to Locke and Paley, they have all made war upon the sensual and the outward. The basis of every theory has been laid upon the internal and the independent powers of the human soul. Hence the German language is so rich in all the terms which are applied to spiritual phenomena.

Another powerful cause is the modern revival of Christianity and the awakened spirit of missionary enterprise which have pervaded England and the United States far more than they have Germany. Multitudes are running to and fro. Almost every land is beginning to feel the practical beneficence of those who speak the English tongue. While the Germans are speculating nobly, and erecting monuments to their patient industry, to their vast and learned research, to their metaphysical acumen, the Englishman and American may point for their memorials to Howard's grave at Cherson, and further on to Martyn's at Tocat; to the raised letters which are giving eyes to the blind-to the Bible Society, sublimer than all the proud achievements of the scholars who rise up by thousands in the universities of the continent.

We may remark, however, that there is no good reason for these two diametrically opposite tendencies. Men were not made merely for action or speculation. In following either course exclusively, they sin against the nature which God has given them. We have no cause to laugh at the airy course of the spiritual philosopher. We need not shrug our shoulders in proud self-complacency when we talk of German mysticism. We are not called upon to identify every form of nonsense, which appears among us, with the name of transcendentalism. We are not authorized to term every outbreak of error in Saxony or Switzerland with the imposing title of the newest fashion in German theology.1 We may well spare such demonstrations of our ignorance and self-conceit. On the other hand, the Germans might well copy our excellent practical habits. An infusion into the German mind of the old, sound, substantial English sense would be of inestimable worth. They ought to read Dr. Dwight's Sermons, and the works of Dr. Paley. They should become familiar with such men as Thomas Scott and Claudius Buchanan. John Newton's Letters and Cowper's poetry would do good service among the followers of Fichte and Hegel. They say that we are incapable of understanding their writings, that we scorn that which we have not mind enough to understand. With equal truth, we might affirm that they do not understand us. They have cultivated one tendency to such an extent, that they cannot see the substantial excellencies of a writer like Dr. Paley. If we have neglected the reason and the imagination, they have undervalued the sense and the practical understanding.

It is the wisdom, therefore, of both parties to adopt a more enlarged course of thinking and action. It would do our young scholars no harm to read the Dialogues of Plato-not so much for any philosophical theory which they contain, not so much for the sake of any immediate practical utility, as to become familiar with the accurate distinctions which he makes on the great questions in morals and religion that he discusses, and especially to become imbued with his noble spirit-to partake in his lofty aspirations, and to be thankful for that better light that we enjoy, but which was denied him. There is much in German literature of the highest value which we might well transfer to our language. How little we know of the great geography of Ritter? How contented are our bookmakers to go on year by year copying Malte Brun? What do we

See a late Letter of Dr. Malan of Geneva.

know of the profound historians Leo, Luden, Schlösser, Wachler, Ranke, Von Hammer-none of them neologists? A long list of writers in other departments we might name, but it is unnecessary. In the preceding considerations, one reason may be discovered for the appearance of the present volume. The translators have cherished the hope that something might be done to break down the wall of national prejudice, and to correct an exclusive tendency which cannot but be injurious. They have wished to contribute something to aid the better feeling, which is beginning to spring up between those who speak the German and the English tongues, and to promote that brotherly intercourse which is so becoming and which may be made so useful to both parties.

There are several additional considerations, which have influenced the translators of the present volume, in thus appearing before the public. One of these is, the well known tendency of acquaintance with foreign authors to enlarge and liberalize the mind. The man who never travelled out of his native county, is apt to be a man of prejudices. A new language is to the inward being what a new eye is to the outward; one sees with it what he could not have seen without it; and by examining such developments of humanity as are not found among his own kindred, he learns to value substance more, and form less. Creatures of custom as we are, we are prone to look upon everything habitual as right of course, and everything uncommon as wrong. Unfashionable is another name for monstrous. When a blind adherence to the standard of present fashion is limited to matters of secular concern, it narrows the mind; but when it extends to theology, it cripples the very sentiments which should be most expanded. It makes men partizans, when they ought to be philanthropists. The Bible is one of the freest books ever written. Its style is as unlike that of our scholastic systems, as the costume of the oriental is unlike the pinching garb of the Englishman. It never intended that men should abridge its freeness, and press it forcibly into the mould of any human compend. We approve of

We may here mention that another volume is in the course of translation which will be entirely devoted to Plato and Aristotle. It will include the Life of Aristotle by Dr. A. Stahr of Halle, and a Comparison of Platonism with Christianity by Prof. Baur of Tübingen. It will also contain an estimate of the character of both these philosophers, with illustrations from the recent commentators upon their writings.

creeds: they are useful, needful; but there is a difference-is there not-between respecting and adoring them. We prefer to see men shaping their creeds so as to suit the Bible, rather than to see them shaping the Bible so as to suit their creeds. There is reason to fear, that while the language of our confessions of faith is in some cases too pliant, bending to interpretations that are subversive of each other, it is in other cases too stiff and strait; giving no heed to some valuable modifications of thought, which reason approves, and allowing no place for some statements of inspiration, which always look somewhat strange alongside of the creed, and which can be disposed of the most satisfactorily by the divine who is most of a lawyer. It is to be feared, for instance, that some special pleading is required for such an explanation of Matt. 11: 21. Luke 10: 13, as will make them harmonize with the inflexible language of certain compends in reference to the doctrine of human passivity in regeneration. It is to be feared, that there is a scholastic mode of stating the doctrine of the saints' perseverance, which can be shown to be in keeping with the inspired entreaties against apostasy, by none but very ingenious and witty men. It is to be apprehended, that many, influenced more by the narrowness of a creed than the freeness of the Bible, when they repeat such passages as Heb. 6: 4-6. 10: 26 -32. 2 Pet. 2: 20-22, secretly look upon them as a kind of manœuvre, rather than as an expression of honest fear. Has not the reader himself been haunted with something like this suspicion of artifice, even when he dared not breathe it to his own conscience ? and have not these passages, when invested with certain technical explanations, seemed to be in a strait-jacket, or at least not exactly at their ease?

Now in measuring our faith by the symbols of any single sect, we are often obliged to cut off some positive instructions, direct or indirect, of the Bible. Robert Hall's Preface to Antinomianism Unmasked, contains several invaluable hints on this topic. "When religious parties have been long formed," he says, "a certain technical phraseology, invented to designate more exactly the peculiarities of the respective systems, naturally grows up. What custom has sanctioned, in process of time becomes law; and the slightest deviation from the consecrated diction comes to be viewed with suspicion and alarm. Now the technical language, appropriated to the expression of the Calvinistic system in its nicer shades, however justifiable in itself,