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availing himself gratefully of the labours of Max Müller among others. He shows how actual facts disprove the assumption of Pantheism and Materialism, both of which suppose that the human race gradually elevated itself from a state in which there was no moral law, first to a low fetichism, then gradually to mythological polytheism, then to abstract monotheism, then to Christianity, lastly to pantheism. So Hartmann teaches. We are sorry to be compelled to place Max Müller also among those who hold that the human race was originally in a state in which there was no moral law. What else does his language mean when he tells us (pp. 361, 362) that “even the ideas of law, virtue, infinitude, and immortality were abstracted, deduced, derived from sensuous impressons"? His genesis of virtue is as superficial and as radically wrong as his genesis of religion, and deprives moral obligation of its root and life. The idea of "oughtness" that is elaborated out of sensuous impressions is as illusive as the idea of the Divine, to which the same origin is ascribed. The object of Ebrard's work is to confute such theories by the actual history of religion. He claims to have established that "if we pursue the religious history of the civilised nations of antiquity by the help of the thorough researches of Max Müller, Spiegel, Lepsius, Ebers, Schrader, Duncker, and others, we find in all the civilised peoples of antiquity, in proportion as we ascend into the past, a greater approximation to the knowledge of the one, living, holy God, in conjunction with a more vivid ethical consciousness of the difference between good and evil, and a more ardent longing for an expected Redeemer; and that as we come down the course of time we mark a depravation of this primitive religion owing to the diminution of moral earnestness, so that the knowledge of God is corrupted into gross polytheism, which in some peoples passes over into pantheism; and along with this religious depravation we mark a growing moral degeneracy, notwithstanding all outward advances in the arts, in civilisation and culture. And when we engage in the investigation of savage nations, of their condition, languages, and traditions, we find here, too, where we possess any reliable data to proceed on, a constant sinking lower and lower, and at the same time almost everywhere reminiscences of an older and better state; and here and there we meet with visible monu

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ments which bear witness to this former higher condition."(Ebrard, Apologetik, ii. pp. 6, 7.) As the result of his examination, Ebrard can triumphantly affirm that in the ancient records of civilised and barbarous nations we have historical testimony to the fact of man's apostasy from God. The only people of antiquity in whom monotheism was kept pure and living was the people of Israel, and their history demonstrates that they did not raise themselves to the monotheistic religion by which they were of old distinguished from all other nations. Thus we are brought in the way of historic investigation to the conclusion that a primeval revelation was made by God to man. The chief cause of the corruption of religion, as was long ago pointed out, is not the imperfection of the human understanding, it is rather the corruption of man's heart. Man is fallen from his original holiness. This is the witness of history, and this doctrine reveals itself to those who sound the depths of man's moral nature. Tertullian profoundly remarked that the conscience of man is naturally Christian, and the human conscience and heart, when inquired of, concur in testifying to man's apostasy from his Maker, and to his present moral and religious degradation. It is no empty sentimentalism, but a deep truth, which St. Martin1 utters in his L'homme de désir when he thus addresses man: "Tu n'es pas à ta place ici-bas; un seul de tes désirs moraux, une seule de tes inquiétudes, prouve plus la dégradation de notre espèce, que tous les argumens des philosophes ne prouvent le contraire."

DUNLOP MOORE.

ART. III.-The Witness of St. Paul to Jesus Christ.

THE earliest documents of primitive Christianity happen to be at the same time its most authentic and undoubted. At what date the four Gospels were drawn up in their present form, or by whom, will long remain a question open to controversy. Of the Acts of the Apostles the date is hardly less

1 Quoted in Tholuck, Von der Sünde, 7 A., p. 216.

uncertain, the authorship no less traditional; while to the first half of its contents at least many critics still refuse to accord any high degree of historical authority. But from the pen of the busiest, ablest, and most successful propagator of Christianity in the first century, we possess a bundle of letters, the genuineness of some of which is entirely beyond dispute, and the ascertained dates of which show them to be older than any other Christian writing now extant.

For the purposes of a candid historical inquiry into the greatest event of history-the rise of the Christian Churchthe value of these letters is simply incalculable. They lay down just that basis of certain fact to start from, without which historical investigation would be impossible. They bring us face to face with the Christian churches of Asia and Europe within a quarter of a century after the crucifixion, at a time when the events in the career of Jesus were still fresh in the recollection of many living men. Incidentally they acquaint us with a crowd of details respecting certain of these churches, touching not only their creed and worship, but even their office-bearers, their membership, the disputes which agitated and the scandals which discredited them. From the tenor of these letters it is possible to infer with a high degree of confidence what were the accepted data concerning Jesus of Nazareth upon which reposed the faith of all His early followers of whatever school-the chief facts on which they were agreed. By this means they furnish to the apologist his veritable TOV σT-a fixed fulcrum on which his argument for the historical truth of Christianity must turn. Finally, they bring us into the most unreserved intimacy with that remarkable man, who, more than any other, made Christianity a catholic religion for civilised mankind, and out of its primitive religious convictions built up a compact system of theology. Hitherto the doctrinal interest of Paul's Epistles has so obscured as nearly to obliterate or conceal their historical importance. To-day, historical criticism begins to discover that it is precisely upon these Epistles, as its safest no less than its oldest materials, it must initiate its inquiry into the origines of the Christian Faith.

Of the thirteen letters which bear the name of St. Paul, there are four which possess for our purpose the singular advantage of being accepted as authentic and genuine by every

The Four Undisputed Letters.

53

modern scholar of eminence. So long ago as 1845, Dr. Baur of Tübingen wrote of them :

"Against these four epistles there has not only never been raised the very slightest suspicion of being spurious, but they bear in themselves the mark of their Pauline origin so unmistakably that I am quite unable to imagine with what right a critical doubt could ever be maintained against them."1

To this judgment M. Renan added the weight of his great name in Les Apôtres, and in his more recent work on St. Paul he still adheres to it, classifying these four as "epistles indisputable and undisputed."2 Most recently of all, Professor Pfleiderer of Jena, in his important work entitled Paulinismus, accepts them without remark as "the four undisputed epistles."3

It is a fortunate circumstance that these unimpeachable documents are for historical and even more for apologetic purposes the most valuable in the entire series. They are the Epistle to the Galatians, the two to Corinth, and the one to Rome: four letters which are not only the most considerable in point of length, but also the richest in personal and historical references. It follows from this circumstance that we can afford, if we choose, to stand upon these four alone. The testimony which St. Paul has to give to the origin and state of the Church of Christ, to the facts on which it rested, and to the person of its Founder, will not be seriously weakened, nor its extent materially reduced, if we throw out of reckoning all the suspected letters, even such as (like Philippians and First Thessalonians) are accepted by the best critics as certainly Pauline. I need hardly say that in narrowing so much the available materials, I am very far from rejecting any of the professed and canonical Epistles. I only push to its utmost the concession which, for argument's sake, every apologist must make to the spirit of scepticism, by refusing for the present to build upon any document over which the slightest breath of doubt has ever ventured to blow. The letters to Thessalonica, which form the earliest in the series, and those to Philippi and Philemon, which follow next after the undis

1 Paulus der Apostel Jesu, Engl. transl. p. 248.

2 Saint Paul, par Ernest Renan, Introd. v. 1869.

3 Paulinism (Eng. transl.) p. 29. Williams and Norgate, 1877.

puted ones, are not exposed to any objection which in any other field of literature would occasion the slightest hesitation Still they are not essential to supplement, sustain, what we gather abundantly from

in accepting them. however useful to the other four.

The value of these documents as a starting-point is vastly heightened by the fact that their dates are known. The earliest of the four, that to Galatia, is placed by M. Renan (Saint Paul, p. 314) in the year A.D. 54; the latest of the four, to Rome, in the year 58. For practical purposes we may accept this result without hesitation. The letters were all written within twenty and twenty-five years after the Prophet of Nazareth was crucified in Jerusalem. It is the Church and the faith of the first Christian generation into the midst of which we are plunged by the most vivid and trustworthy of possible monuments.

I call them "most vivid and trustworthy;" for there is nothing more precious to the historian than the correspondence of the men who make history. What Cromwell's letters are to the English Civil War, that, and more, Paul's letters must be to the rise of the Christian Church. The man of affairs, hot from the anxieties and collisions of his enterprise, who pens in haste a brief unstudied and unrevised communication, meant to serve some pressing need of the moment, is a witness of the first order. His words reflect the situation just as it stands. They are born of the actual facts, and must be true to them. Allowance, no doubt, may require to be made for the prepossessions of the writer. But, in any case, it is impossible in a letter to feign circumstances which one's correspondents are aware have no existence; to allude to past events as well ascertained and universally accepted which no one has heard of or believes in; to assume, in short, a state of matters which is found only in the writer's brain. So perfectly understood is this among investigators, that it might seem idle to insist upon it, were it not that people often appear to judge those authorities which the Church has termed "canonical" by a different standard from that which is applied to other ancient writings. Books are none the better as historical witnesses for being sacred to faith; also, they are none the worse for it. Strip Paul of his apostolic authority: he was at the least an actor in a great religious movement; and the missives by means

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