quietism of the other, and both being discoverable under different appellations in every mode of religious fanaticism. Warm imaginations, bodily severities, and pertinacious meditation, more especially when the two latter are applied to subdue a constitution naturally and strongly turned into an opposite direction, are almost sure to produce it.

But it is worth while to examine these strange propositions, the lamentable aberrations of a fine understanding and excellent heart, a little more particularly. It must be acknowledged that the love of God is the first and great commandment, and an ability to contemplate supreme excellence, without any selfish consideration, but purely and for its own sake with the highest degrec of complacency and delight, is perhaps the surest test by which to try the heart whether it be rightly constituted, and disposed to its Maker.

The question (says our own profound and devout Bishop Butler, a man not inferior to Bossuet in penetration, or to Fenelon in deep and solemn views of religion) which was a few years ago disputed in France, concerning the love of God-answers in religion to the old one in morals and both of them are, I think, determined by the same observation, that the very nature of an affection, the idea itself necessarily implies resting in an object as an end.'

So thought, and truly thought, this excellent man; but the error of the quietest plainly consisted not in indulging the love of God as the highest object of contemplative delight, but in excluding, as motives of conduct, every selfish consideration-all hope of reward and fear of punishment: for this species of self-renunciation is completely done away by the conduct of the deity to his accountable creatures, as discoverable by natural religion, and as actually declared by revelation. He has, in fact, promulgated a code of reward and punishment-he administers the world even at present, though imperfectly, by that code-we are therefore not only permitted, but required to be influenced by it. But, in the next place, an opposite conduct, whatever a distempered understanding may be wrought to on the subject, is unnatural and impossible. We have heard indeed of an amiable, but unhappy poet, of our own country, who, in addition to this strange opinion, really believed himself doomed to eternal misery, and thought he had attained to such a pitch of submission as not to wish a reversal of the sentence. But it is with such cases, as with insensibility to bodily pain. It is only by insanity that the imagination can place itself in a situation of perfect neutrality without the immediate prospect of pain and pleasure-more especially of such pains and such pleasure (intense in their degree and eternal in their duration) as are held forth by the Christian Scriptures.

The

The fifth proposition, besides being pregnant with mischief of another kind, surpasses all the rest in absurdity,—a personal union with the deity-so as to lose all consciousness of other existence separate from him. In what does this self-renunciation end?—in an horrible blasphemy, that every adept in quietism is transformed into the very and eternal God. Let it be remembered that the Son himself always expressed a consciousness of a separate existence from the Father, in which his personality consisted. But fanaticism never stops till it places the disciple above his master.

These enormities (countenanced as they unhappily were by a prelate so beloved as Fenelon) excited an universal alarm in the church of France, and they were examined with great attention and ability by the prelates of that country. In this investigation Bossuet, as might be expected, took the lead-and here we earnestly recommend to every inquirer into human nature, as in the former instance, to watch the progress of fanaticism; in the present, to attend to that of religious bigotry. In the course of this dispute, Bossuet, from the friend and patron, became by degrees, the inquisitor, the accuser, the persecutor, and the calumniator of Fenelon. We say the calumniator, for to the shame of human nature, his rage and rancour were at length wrought to such a pitch as to attempt to blast the moral character of one of the most angelical men upon earth. In this prosecution, the conduct of Louis XIV. who for obvious reasons hated Fenelon, is equally odious and contemptible. To see an abandoned debauchee governed by women, (whose interposition in matters so far above them, perpetually disgusts an Englishman in the perusal of both these volumes,) who knew no love, but that of the world and the flesh, eagerly interposing in a dispute concerning the love of God, influencing the decision of his own national church, and finally intimidating the Pope himself, must sicken the warmest advocate for the interference of princes in matters purely spiritual.

Thus brow-beaten, however, the sovereign Pontiff, Innocent the XIIth, a man of ability and virtue, acted with a dignity and forbearance which became his situation. The subject was repeatedly and ably debated in his presence, and the final sentence of condemnation, which was unquestionably right, dictated by a spirit of tenderness and consideration due to the virtues of Fenelon.

The whole story is related by Mr. Butler with great clearness and precision—and his reflection is unquestionably just, that the only person implicated in the contest, who escaped without imputation, was the Pope. Of him it must be acknowledged, that he held the theological balance with an equity and steadiness worthy of the common Father of the Churches. Of the two leaders, he affirmed with equal wit and truth, that the one erred from too

much

*

much love of God, the other, from too little love of his neighbour-to which may be added, that the one had a strong head, the other an excellent heart-that the one was more skilled in the rugged paths of positive theology, the other, in the elegant pursuits of polite literature; but that though Bossuet was more haughty and retired, Fenelon more affable and condescending-both in the midst of study and incessant meditation were active and attentive ministers of religion. In this, and in every view but one, they may be commended as examples to their brethren in our own church.

We take leave of the subject by repeating that the purpose with which these elegant little volumes have been given to the world, at this particular crisis, is sufficiently obvious, namely, to represent, by two illustrious examples, the doctrines and the practices of his own church, in the most amiable and attractive point of view. But, alas! decipit exemplar vitiis imitabile.' With equal effect, that is with none at all, we might oppose in their church the names of Maury or Talleyrand to those of Fenelon or Bossuet; and in our own a long catalogue of illustrious prelates, from Cranmer, whom Bossuet has calumniated, to Bull, whom he praised.* The merits of the cause, however, depend not upon examples. Popery, by the confession of all who understand it, contains the essentials of Christianity, and a few such men as these great prelates will ever be found by toilsome perseverance in removing the incumbent mass of rubbish, to reach the vein of pure and shining ore at last while the bulk of the people content themselves with poring on the surface, mistaking every grain of marcasite for gold, and contented to accept as such every substance on which their superiors have impressed the stamp or bestowed the denomination.

Meanwhile, as Protestants, we appeal to the law and to the testimony,' the only assay by which the ore of Christianity can be distinguished from the rubbish, the metal from the dross.

ART. VI. Zur Farbenlehre. On the Doctrine of Colours. By Goethe. 2 vol. 8vo. Tubingen, 1810, pp. 1510; with 16 coloured Plates in 4to.

OUR

UR attention has been less directed to this work of Mr. von Goethe, by the hopes of acquiring from it any thing like information, than by a curiosity to contemplate a striking example

* In a work of so conciliatory a nature as the present, we are at a loss to conjecture why the biographer should have suppressed Bossuet's letter to Bishop Bull, in the name of the Gallican church, to compliment him for the Defensio Fidei Nicænæ.

of

of the perversion of the human faculties, in an individual who has obtained enough of popularity among his countrymen, by his literary productions, to inspire him with a full confidence in his own powers, and who seems to have wasted those powers for the space of twenty years, by forcing them into a direction, in which he had originally mistaken his way, for want of profiting by the assistance of a judicious guide. Having failed of exciting the attention, and obtaining the approbation of mathematicians and philosophers, he has revenged himself for their neglect, by obloquy and invective: and calling in his powers of versification to the aid of his weakness in argumentation, he has overwhelmed the young gentlemen and ladies, who have been in the habit of reading the almanack of the muses, with epigrams and satires, equally demonstrative with the present elaborate work; equally instructive, and equally poetical.

We shall exhibit the symptoms of this curious case of 'hallucination,' in the words of the patient's own very amusing Confession,' after premising a sketch of the plan and contents of the work, which forms so prominent a feature in the malady.

In the first, or didactic' part, the author professes to consider colours, with respect to their physiological, their physical, and their chemical properties. Physiological, or subjective' colours, are ocular spectra, coloured shadows, and, as he is inclined to believe, the halos seen round-candles, especially when the eye is weak; but to us, these coronae appear to depend on particles floating on the surface of the eye, and derived from the secretion of the eyelids, and not to be immediately connected with the physiology of the nervous system. As allied to affections of this kind, Mr. von Goethe mentions the morbid state of the organ, which he calls acyanoblepsia, or the incapacity of perceiving blue light, by which he explains some cases of the confusion of colours, in a manner somewhat analogous to the hypothesis of our countryman Mr. Dalton on the same subject. Physical colours our author thinks little more real than physiological colours, and often merely apparent and transitory. He divides them into dioptric, either by simple transmission, or by refraction; paroptic, sometimes called colours by inflection or diffraction; and epoptic, or depending on the properties of surfaces, as the colours of thin plates. Chemical colours, he observes, are the most permanent; and here he considers the chemical effects of different colours, as nearly related to the subject, together with the chemical properties connected with dying and bleaching. The other divisions of this part contain a connected sketch of the doctrine of colours;' a discussion of the relation of chromatics to other departments of

science

science; and an examination of the effect of colours, with regard to the fine arts.

Colours, in Mr. Von Goethe's opinion, are intimately connected with the phenomena exhibited by the magnet, the tourmalin, the electrical machine, the galvanic battery, and the processes of chemistry. In all these phenomena, as well as in those of colours, there exists, he says, a hither and thither, an inductive separation, a discharge by reunion, an opposition, an indifference, and in short, a polarity; in an elevated, a diversified, a decided, an instructive, and an improving sense.'-Anz. p. 2.

But if we may venture to interpret his opinions into intelligible language, the most elementary of them seems to be, that red is generally and essentially derived from the perception of light, and blue from that of darkness, viewed through a semitransparent medium; a fact by no means universally admissible, and which, where it actually occurs, may be referred to a combination of much simpler causes.

Our author asserts, that colours are the joint production of light, and of the substances exposed to it, or an effect of the modification of light, produced by partial darkness; a modification which, he says, has been overlooked by the authors of the received theories.

The polemical' part, which follows the didactic, is a minute and detailed examination and discussion of the optics of Newton, which our author considers as grossly deficient in satisfactory demonstration, and wholly inadequate to prove the compound nature of white light. In this discussion, he has certainly shown no small portion of courage, though little of the better part of, valour. He gives us, for instance, in his third plate, a number of coloured objects to be viewed through a prism; in his fourth, a representation of the same objects, as seen through the prism: one of the objects is a space, of which one half is coloured red, and the other blue; and in the representation of the prismatic appearance, the two halves are still placed side by side, and terminated by the same rectilinear outline. This is an experimentum crucis: we have looked through a prism, at the identical figure of the third plate, and it does NOT appear as Mr. Von Goethe has represented it in the fourth; but the blue image is manifestly more displaced by the effect of refraction, than the red.

The second volume of the work is occupied principally by a historical abstract of the discoveries and opinions of all philosophers, ancient and modern, respecting light and colours; in which the author has exhibited some industry, but little talent, and less judgment. He does not fail to triumph over the detestable Newtonian doctrines,' on occasion of the discoveries of Dollond; and although he is disposed to admit, that an accident may have given

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