into insignificance when compared with the unspeakable horrors presented to the eyes of the beholder at the courts of Benin and Dahomey, and at Ardrah, Badassy, and Coomassie, the capital of Ashantee; in short, from the western limits of Ashantee to the delta of the Niger. It is not only the common, but almost the daily custom, for the sovereign and chief men in every nation to soak their thrones and footstools with the warm blood of their fellow-creatures; to carry their bones, bared of their flesh, before them in triumph; and to adorn their war-accoutrements, their palaces, their apartments, and, above all, the temples of their deities, with human skulls and bones.'"*

Another, Mr. Pritchard, who had been Her Majesty's Consul, says:-"To form a correct idea of the horrid practices of the heathen, you must see their frantic gestures, hear their hideous. howlings, follow them to the camp of war, witness their licentious proceedings, behold their demon-like objects of worship, and see their altars stained with human blood. I have seen a large extent of ground, where heathen temples formerly stood, literally strewed with human bones from the numerous sacrifices which had there been offered to propitiate their gods. Think of the almost incredible number of infants hurried into eternity the moment they were born. Let me point you to a company, where you may see them, with a kind of fiend-like ferocity, gorging themselves with human flesh, feasting upon the slain and the captives taken in war. I might show you, suspended in the air, on the point of the warrior's spear, children writhing in the agonies of death. Were I to conduct you to their licentious dance, you would witness scenes too debasing, too abominable for language to describe. Pass a little further, and you may see the mutilated fingers and the lacerated bodies of those who are endeavouring, by the effusion of their own blood, to appease the anger of the gods, who, they suppose, have in anger taken from them a relative or friend by the hand of death."

There can be no need to pursue this branch of the inquiry any further. No reasonable man can be found to offer so monstrous an assertion as that any heathen tribe, in any part of the world, has yet, by all their searchings, "found out God."

2. It only remains, then, to ask, what modern philosophy, with all the successive accumulations of science and thought from the days of Gautama and Thales until now,-what the men of active intellect and the freest scope for inquiry,—what they have done, in the full maturity of mankind, to bring us into a real acquaintance with this great Being, whom Socrates and Cicero, Hume and Voltaire, all believed to exist, but with whom

*McQueen's Survey of Africa.

no one of them dared to assert that he had made any acquaintance? The question might easily give rise to a volume; for if any one were to address himself to the work of presenting, in one view, the results of all the lucubrations of German, French, and British philosophers during the last eighty years, nothing less than a bulky discourse could do justice to the subject. But as we have but a small space more to spare, we must confine ourselves to a rapid outline. If those men who, by universal consent, are placed at the head of modern philosophers, if they have done little, or have done nothing, it will be useless to imagine that whole crowds of inferior men might have succeeded better.

Kant was a man of the last century, and we need not go back so far; but Fichte and Schelling and Hegel were of our own time. Comte has left this mortal scene only some ten years, and there are not wanting men who deem him an intellectual giant. Let us ask, then, what these four men, confessedly the greatest, in the present century, of the students of philosophy, let us ask what they have done to carry us farther in the search after God than Socrates and Plato were able to attain? Fichte's philosophy was accused of atheism, and no wonder. It would have required much laborious study to determine whether it leaned most to Atheism or to Pantheism. "What we call the world," said Fichte, "is but the incarnation of our Duty. It is the objective existence of the Ego; we are, so to speak, the creators of it." "God is the moral order of the world; as such we can know him, and only as such. For if we attempt to attribute to him Intelligence or Personality, we at once fall into anthropomorphism. God is infinite; and is therefore beyond the reach of our knowledge." "True religion is merely the realization of universal reason." Such were the results of the laborious searchings of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

66

Schelling endeavoured to explain and recommend Fichte's philosophy, and he only plunged still deeper into Pantheism. Thought," he says, "is not my thought, and Being is not my being, for everything belongs to God, or the All. There is no such thing as a Reason which we have; but only a Reason which has us. If nothing exists out of God, then must the knowledge of God be only the infinite knowledge which God has of himself in the eternal self-affirmation. God is not the highest, but the Only One. He is not to be viewed as the summit or the end, but as the centre,—the All in all. Hence there is no such thing as a being lifted up to the knowledge of God; but the knowledge is immediate recognition." "The Absolute is God. He is the All in all; the eternal source of all existence. He becomes conscious of himself in man; and this 'man,' under the highest form of his existence, manifests Reason; and by this Reason God knows himself."

As Schelling had made God everything, his friend Hegel made God nothing. His favourite idea was, that "Being and Non-being are the same." 'Subject was also Object; Object was Subject; Force was Impotence; Light was Darkness, and Darkness Light." God was before the world, and created it: that is to say, he existed in idea before he assumed any reality. He created the world, because it is the essence of his being to create ;—and hence he is eternally creating it. Creation was, and is, and ever will be. It is the reality of God,—it is God passing into activity."*

Such were the highest flights of German philosophy; for, than Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, German philosophy has no higher names. And what were their achievements? We may sum them up in a brief sentence of St. Paul:-" Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools."

Germany had done nothing for us; so, about 1830, France came once more into the field. She reached the climax of folly by presenting to us, as the great teacher of mankind, a maniac. Augustus Comte, a poor teacher of mathematics, marries with scarcely any means of subsistence, and then, while insanity is already working in his brain, announces that he will give a course of seventy-two lectures "on all the sciences" at his lodgings. He delivers three or four of them, and then insanity appears. He tries to drown himself, and is carried to a lunatic asylum. But after a while his disorder yields to medical treatment; he returns to the world, recommences his lectures, and in the next ten years completes his Cours de Philosophie Positive. A popular view of his system was published in English in 1865, of which it is enough to say, that the man who can read it without being constantly forced to think of lunacy and lunatics must have a singularly constituted mind.

We shall not waste the time of our readers by offering them any general view of this maniacal production: it is enough for our purpose to remark, that Comte gives the plainest and most unequivocal answer to our main question, "Can man by searching find out God?" He confesses, in the most unequivocal manner, that he cannot. In fact, he makes it the very basis of his system that, in searching after the First Cause, we are searching for what cannot be found. Thus, at the outset, he tells us :"The fact of entire freedom from theological belief being necessary before the Positive state can be perfectly attained, has induced superficial observers to confound Positivism with a state of pure negation." He then goes on to disclaim Atheism on the following grounds:-"The tendency of Atheism is to prolong the metaphysical stage indefinitely, by continuing to

* Lewes' Hist. of Philosophy, vol. ii. pp. 516, 528, 554. Vol. 67.-No. 362.

seek for new solutions of Theological problems, instead of setting aside all inaccessible researches on the ground of their utter inutility." He says, in effect, to Atheists, "You insist on wasting time on discussions on the being of a God; I refuse to go into such idle questions. There may be a God, or there may be none; all I insist on is this, that if there be a God, it is quite impossible that we can know anything about him.'

And having thus resolved to thrust God out of his own world, he proceeds to sketch the prospects of what he styles "the New Religion." This religion is to have a worship,-the worship of humanity. And he tells us that "the buildings erected for the service of God may for a time suffice for the worship of Humanity; in the same way that Christian worship was carried on at first in Pagan temples as they were gradually vacated." (p. 370.)

Mr. John Stuart Mill, in the Westminster Review, in describing these follies, observes:-"When we say that M. Comte has erected his philosophy into a religion, the word religion must not be understood in the ordinary sense: he made no change in the purely negative attitude which he maintained towards theology;-his religion is without a God."

Mr. Mill then goes on to describe the Positive Religion, with its "priests of Humanity;" its nine sacraments; and its beatification of its departed worthies. He remarks, that—" Having no eternity of objective existence to offer, M. Comte's religion gives all it can, by holding out the hope of subjective immortality, of existing in the remembrance of and in the posthumous adoration of mankind: and, finally, of being included in the collective adoration paid to the Grand Etre. People are to be taught to look forward to this, as a sufficient recompense for the devotion of a whole life to the service of Humanity."

A brief and rapid survey of the whole field over which we have passed must close this paper. We began by reminding our readers of the conclusion to which Socrates and Plato had found their way; that without a condescension of God to man, man must remain for ever ignorant of the most important of all kinds of knowledge; and we asked whether this belief seemed to be a true one. Instead of searching for reasons for or against this conclusion, we appealed at once to experience. It was certain that in all ages and in all lands there had always been seekers after God: what, then (excluding the Israelitish and the Christian Churches), had been the result of such seeking? Had the wisest or the boldest of men ever succeeded in the search? This inquiry was purely a question of historic fact.

The result our readers have seen. If there be any persons, in these days, who dispute Socrates' conclusion, and hold that man, without any revelation, can discover and understand God, his

nature, attributes, and purposes, we ask of such an one, "Where, in the past four thousand years, do you find the record of such a success? The Eastern and Western nations, from the earliest dawn of history, are everywhere found to be believers in the being of a God, and seekers after the knowledge of him. In most countries, too, we hear of great men, men of commanding intellects, who devoted their whole lives to this search. And when all is done, to what national religion,-to what philosophical creed, can a reasonable man in the present day declare his adhesion? The nations "changed the glory of the incorruptible God into an image made like unto corruptible man, and to birds, and four-footed beasts, and creeping things." They worshipped calves and crocodiles, cats and onions! And the philosophers, looking on in silent scorn, erected altars "to the unknown God," and by the lips of the greatest of them sighed out the sad confession, "All I know is, that I know nothing." They have their successors in the present day, and the final result of all is the concoction, at last, of " a religion without a God." "I am neither a Theist nor an Atheist,' says M. Comte, "for this plain reason, that I hold it to be impossible that we can know anything about the matter." And thus the latest conclusion of the most idolized of modern philosophers precisely coincides with the declaration of Socrates two thousand years ago:-" You may resign yourself to sleep, or give yourself up to despair, unless God pleases to send you instruction." No man can deny, says Paley, that we need a Revelation, because no man will assert that even with a Revelation we have too much light. And if that Revelation is not contained in the Bible, we have been left without one, for none will pretend to look for it elsewhere.

THE COLOGNE REFORMATION UNDER ARCHBISHOP HERMAN. (Continued from p. 19.)

CHAPTER II.

ALL these proceedings of Herman's were hailed by the leaders of the Evangelical body; and especially, both the Elector of Saxony and the Landgrave of Hesse, at the suggestion of Bucer, sent him warm congratulations; while the latter, in a letter from Cassel, in the beginning of January, 1543, took occasion to apprise him, "that in working the work of the Lord, as he doubted not he did, he must trust in the Lord, and not suffer himself to be deterred by fear." Herman replied, March 16th,—“ We