tion to as beside the scholastic system, and which could not for that reason be thrown into scholastic language. Above all, we find the same development in Father Kleutgen. Not with the eloquence of Mr. Hutton, but with equal clearness and force, he reminds his readers of man's early conviction previous to demonstration. "We must carefully distinguish," he says,* "between the knowledge of God, of which we here speak, and that which is independent of and previous to all scientific argument. Just as a man, as soon as he only comes to the use of reason, by the sight of his own bounded and dependent being, and by the consideration of the universe, is assured of the existence of God without being brought to it by painful proof of the theoretical reason, so he wants no learned teaching to recognize God in the voice of his conscience." In the same place he speaks of "Godconsciousness." Elsewhere he calls it that "spontaneous knowledge of God which may be called immediate, inasmuch as it is imparted without any strained, nay, without any conscious reflection." + "Dig deep enough, and I shall lie among my ancestors," once said a dying Catholic, who was to be buried in an old churchyard, which had become Protestant. Thus too in philosophical questions, while shallow thinkers are wrangling on the surface, men, who by whatever method have once reached the depths where lie the roots of conscience, will soon find out the old foundations which must underlie all natural truth.

Is this true also of supernatural truth? Is it to be found in the earth beneath, by the strength of the intellect? or can we by the sheer force of mind climb up for it to the heaven above? To this a Catholic can only answer with a peremptory negative. Not only must God reveal to us, for instance, the Incarnation from without, but the kinship between that great truth and the intellect must not be stretched so far as to make it possible for the reason, even after the revelation has taken place historically, to find a necessary foundation for it in itself. However the existence of Christ may be said to satisfy all the deepest yearnings of the human heart, no Catholic can hold that it can be proved by reason to be, on the ground that it must have been. This is a question which concerns the relation of reason to faith, of natural to revealed truth. It lies beside our proper subject, yet we must advert to it, for we must not leave our readers under the impression that there are not wide differences between us and the two writers whom we have been glad to praise.

It is therefore impossible to close this article without saying a few words on the position assumed in these volumes of essays towards the Catholic Church, and towards revealed truth in general. There are many arguments used in them which require but little notice, for they rest on a false assumption, which we trust that this article has helped to dispel. Mr. Martineau speaks of an alliance between negative metaphysics and theological dogmatism; he also does but scant justice to Father Newman, when he represents him, of all writers in the world, as advocating an acceptance of religion with too little reference to conscience. We trust that Mr. Martineau will do us the justice to acknowledge that our metaphysics are not negative, and that our system takes in to the full all the deeper and higher facts of human nature. It is, however, mostly to Mr. Hutton that we now refer. He too uses some arguments of which it is really high time to get rid. The day is past when, with any chance of success, dogmas, as such, can be disparaged as empty formulas, when the mistake can be made of supposing that a definite faith is not in accordance with the deepest aspirations of our nature, because it is imposed by an infallible authority, as if what comes to us from without could not receive a response from within. We are glad to find that the last essay in Mr. Hutton's first volume was written before the rest. Great, indeed, must have been the ignorance of the Catholic system prevalent when a man of his ability and honesty could accuse the Roman Church of sighing "for a divine administration, not for a vivid conscious communion with the Spirit of God." He probably would not accept such men as Tauler or Thomas a Kempis as specimens of the state of the ordinary Catholic, but he will believe us when we say that the aim of every Catholic priest is to exhort his children, whether English noblemen or Irish peasants, to a communion of "spirit to spirit" with God. If he had known more of the history of God's Church he would never have written the essay on "Romanism, Protestantism, and Anglicanism." He chose a most unfortunate example for his theory that the "social" aims of Rome influenced her doctrine, and that "her dogma sprung out of her ritual," when he brought forward the "Christian practice of baptism" and its supposed "social influence" as the source of the doctrine of its "mighty regenerating power." Had he not read how the Roman Church in the third century, in the teeth of the greatest saint and martyr of the day, in spite of a supposed apostolic tradition, at the risk of separating from her spiritual dominion half Asia and all Africa, put out of her hands the exclusive administration of that sacrament by decreeing that heretical baptism was valid, on the ground

that the rite, which is the gate of salvation, must have been made by Christ as wide as possible. Here the dogma of regeneration dictated the administration of the rite. If Mr. Hutton had then known the story of the condemnation of Honorius, he would never have argued that Rome cared nothing for "truth as truth," and that dogma was subordinated to hierarchical purposes. If the Roman Church had not preferred God's truth a thousandfold to her own dignity, she would not have acquiesced in and promulgated the anathemas of a council against a Pope, because he had neglected to condemn a heresy.

There is, however, a portion of that essay which we must notice, because it throws light on the views of the author on the relations between philosophy and religion. In his strictures on Father Newman's account of the spread of the doctrine of the Assumption of our Lady, he blames him for laying down the principle that the internal evidences of a dogma supply for the lack of external proof. We cannot think that at that time Mr. Hutton held the views advocated in the rest of his volume. If there is one principle more than another essential to his system, it is the view that Christians accept the doctrine of the Incarnation of our Lord far more on account of its fitting into the yearnings of their nature than on account of the evidence of the fact.

We should, however, be doing gross injustice to Mr. Hutton if we simply used his theory as an argumentum ad hominem. We should pity the man who could read without a deep respect the eloquent words in which he describes the yearning of humanity for the Incarnate God. All honour be to the man who has fought his way by intellectual struggles from a dry Unitarianism to an intense personal love for our Lord God. We must not be too critical on his arguments when the result is so satisfactory. Who would have the heart logically to dissect the wondrous fascination which the gospel of Christ exercises on a religious mind? Nor do we call upon him to offer up as a sacrifice to logic a faith which has evidently become a portion of his inmost life. If we thought that there was any chance of this, we should leave him in good faith. Ours, at least, is not what is called in one of the most characteristic of these essays, "the hard Church." We would rather that he were illogical than impious. But there is no need of such a lamentable alternative. We can sympathize intellectually to the full with one who has " run after the perfumes" of the Person of Christ. It is a valid argument that the vision of Christ is too beautiful to be human. We fully admit that the inmost fibres of man's heart are entwined with the life of the Eternal Word, and that the conscience, nay, the very flesh of man, cry out for theliving God. What haslogic to do with the cry of man's agony, or with the thirst of the wounded hart for the waterbrooks? Who would analyze chemically the fire of the Holy Ghost? But what we do find fault with in Mr. Hutton is precisely that according to his theory, the revelation of the existence of the Son of God is not a supernatural truth, taught by the Holy Ghost, but a truth so natural to man that very defective external evidence is enough to guarantee it, without anything infallible either to originate or transmit it. It is quite plain that in proportion as you diminish the external organs of revelation, you are forced to find its proofs in its internal adaptation to man's deeper nature, and it is further plain that it is possible to exaggerate this fitness so as to confuse the natural and supernatural order. The temptation to do this, we believe, lies deep in all Lutheran theology. The dictum "humana natura capax divinæ" is called Luther's shibboleth by one who knows his writings well*-a shibboleth which contains truth, but which obviously may be so exaggerated as to destroy the supernatural. Indeed, the more you reject the divine mode of transmission through the organ of a Church supernaturally preserved from error, the more you are thrown on man's natural capacity to receive it, and the more you are likely to degrade the supernatural task of the Spirit. That Mr. Hutton speaks of a supernatural Spirit helping us to rise above ourselves, we are well aware; but this Spirit is just as much and just as little supernatural in his teaching of the Incarnation as in his teaching of the natural truth of the existence of God. To the Catholic the Incarnation is a supernatural truth in the sense that it is not a development of an old truth. Mr. Hutton persistently denies its supernaturalness in this sense. In his view it is "a natural complement" of the existence of God (p. 281). It is revealed in exactly the same way as the existence of God itself (p. 271). So natural is it that it is a fact "whose roots of causation we discern running deep into the constitution of man and the character of God" (p. 244). So natural is it that on the imperfect historical evidence of four Gospels, none of which are infallible, three of which contain grave errors, all of which, as they stand, are mixtures of truth and falsehood, the belief in the Incarnation comes out of the soul of man when it catches sight of the historical Christ, just as letters written in invisible ink come out before a fire. No wonder that on this view an infallible Church is superfluous. We yearn for an infallible Church as a safeguard against our own reason, lest it should intrude its human conclusions, not into the evidence for, but into the very conception of the Man-God. Mr. Hutton bids us be of good cheer: individual human nature in its highest aspects is perfectly adequate to the task without any infallible help. Thus the Christian religion becomes a transcendental philosophy guaranteed by historical facts, themselves with very scanty evidence; just as a moral intuition is enough to construct without infallible aid a code of morals out of the practical moral problems presented to it by the outward world. As a man put face to face with a moral question is enabled to make out his duty by the light of conscience, so by the illumination of the deep yearnings of his nature a man discovers the existence of an incarnate God.

We cannot help thinking that such a theory as this is utterly inconsistent with facts. It leads to unexpected results which Mr. Hutton would be the last man in the world to welcome. If there be one fact more than another which has forced itself on the modern Church it is the existence of invincible ignorance. But what room is there left for invincible ignorance in a theory which makes the Incarnation as natural to man's reason as the existence of God or as moral truth? Are all Unitarians then so destitute of the deepest yearnings of man's nature, that they are unable to see the necessity of an Incarnation? If the existence of the Man-God is so natural to man as to dispense to a great extent with external evidence, and altogether with the teaching of an infallible Apostle, nay of an infallible Christ (for Mr. Hutton's Christ is not above error), then surely it ought to be impossible for one, who accepts the facts of the Gospels, inculpably to make a mistake about His Godhead.

We cannot understand invincible ignorance of primary natural truths. That through accidental circumstances, through bad teaching or faulty education, men may be ignorant of some remote deductions from first moral principles or some truths about God, is no doubt conceivable. But we must remember that in Mr. Hutton's view the Incarnation, instead of adding difficulties to God's existence, makes it easier to be believed (p. 283). How, on a large scale, among cultivated men of high character, whose attention is continually fixed upon the subject, invincible ignorance should prevail with respect to so natural a truth we cannot understand. Again, inculpable ignorance of supernatural truths which require external promulgation through a supernatural organ, and which are inaccessible to human reason, is quite conceivable; but we cannot understand ignorance of truths which rest on universal reasons, lying in the deepest depths of man's nature.