Jewish and Christian dispensations was dwelt upon and illustrated, and the general condition of the world at the time when Christ appeared was stated, amongst other grounds of evidence, as strikingly and beautifully illustrating the manner in which Divine Wisdom had adapted means to ends." Certainly it is a plain case enough that "I might have known" what I was once taught; and it is also possible that, like many another unprofitable student, I may have forgotten what I was taught. But if the reference in this sphinx-like oracle be, as I conjecture it must be, to the lecture-room of a most accomplished instructor and venerated friend now no more, I take leave to say, that I respect and cherish what I formerly learned from that honoured and excellent man quite as profoundly perhaps and gratefully as your correspondent; and if there be one lesson more than another which those wise and enlightened teachings have permanently impressed on my mind, it is this, to value their spirit more than their form, to work on in the power and freedom of the general principle which animated them, rather than to hold myself bound by any particular conclusion into which for the time they might have shaped themselves. I believe that our revered Tutor would consider his memory more honoured by pupils who, in his own candid and truthful spirit, modify or abandon any doctrines once taught by him when increase of light has shewn them to be erroneous, than by such as, in the spirit of unyielding dogmatism, cling with a blind and ignorant tenacity to his whole system of ideas, corresponding, as it necessarily must, to the state of knowledge half a century ago. To accept new light as it comes to us, is not to assume any superiority over our predecessors, but simply to do what they would themselves have done were they living now. This may be done in perfect humility, with the deepest sense of feeble powers and limited attainment, with the consciousness in fact of no other feeling than that of simple allegiance to truth. Thus much I have felt myself obliged to say in reply to charges so confidently made and so singularly ill supported. Your correspondent's oracular tone of rebuke addressed to men who have at least paid as much attention to the subjects on which they write as himself, and the quiet assumption of being undoubtedly in the right which pervades his letter, may raise the question in some minds whether he possesses enough of the judicial faculty which he so highly values, to qualify him to pronounce sentence in this summary way, and whether he is not himself obnoxious to the very censure which he so freely administers to others.

One of the charges brought against the article in question is, that it does not keep the views of Ewald and those of the reviewer sufficiently distinct. In the analysis and criticism of a complex work, it is scarcely possible that some such intermingling should not take place, especially in passages where there is any coincidence of ideas between the reviewer and the subject

of his criticism. Throughout, however, I think it will be found. that what is Ewald's and what is my own are pretty clearly marked off from each other. This is particularly the case in regard to his views about the resurrection. I distinctly give a summary of them, commencing at the top of p. 142 and terminating about the middle of p. 143, with references all through the summary to the pages in Ewald's volume. No reader of common attention can have overlooked the fact, that I am here giving Ewald's opinion alone, without expressing either approval or disapproval. At the end of the summary I add, that "his statements are open to many objections in detail, and that his view of the whole subject is not always consistent with itself." In his account of the appearances of Christ after his death, I further remark, that "he has given utterance to feelings which must often have passed through the minds of thoughtful readers in reference to this part of the evangelical narrative." My allusion, it is obvious, is to the mysterious and fitful character of those appearances, so different from the ordinary manifestation of a human body under the known conditions of terrestrial existence. To this extent I agree with Ewald. In accounting for the impressions so strongly made on the minds of the disciples which led them to believe in the restoration of their Master to life, I differ from him. So far as I can make out his views, which he has shrouded in more than his ordinary obscurity, he considers the whole affair to have been what the Germans would call a subjective process, an intensifying into peculiar vividness of ideas and remembrances already in the mind, without being occasioned by any extra-personal influence. For myself, I do not think this an adequate explanation of the phenomena. I cannot account for the recorded change in the language and conduct of the disciples, without the supposition of some presence visiting them, which they recognized in some way inexplicable by us, as that of a real person from the invisible world, -an impression, therefore, which had a cause outside themselves, and was not a mere product of the working of excited minds. I call this a spiritual fact, from the want of any more appropriate term to express a reality made cognizable and certain to a human soul through some other avenue than the outward senses. difference between my own view and Ewald's is, I should think, obvious enough. There seems to me satisfactory evidence that Christ's resurrection or ascension (ávásaris or áváλnts), whichever term we prefer to adopt (for I regard them as only different forms of expression for one and the same mysterious and unsearchable fact, his passage from the present into the next life), was so witnessed to the minds of believers (not through the violation of any natural law, but in virtue of some deeper law affecting the relations of the seen and the unseen worlds, than we are yet able to trace), that they were convinced of the perpetuity of

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his existence and of the reality of his occasional intercourse with them. My belief, therefore, in the reality of a resurrection historically attested is just as strong as theirs who take all the accounts of the bodily re-appearance in the strictest and most literal sense. Whereas I cannot find that Ewald, though doubtless having a firm general faith in immortality, believes in any direct and extraordinary witness to a resurrection at all.

The views which I have ventured to express on this subject, are not views taken up on a sudden and without much reflection; still less have they been adopted from any blind admiration of great German authorities. They were substantially mine long before I had studied Ewald or even heard of his name. At an early age the question of immortal life haunted my mind as, next to a trust in the living God, the grandest and most solemn interest of our mortal being. I inherited the persuasion, which was all but universal in my youth among our denomination of Christians, that the resurrection of Christ as usually understood was the corner-stone of that belief. I remember well how anxiously I studied the records of it, in the hope of finding perfect satisfaction. If I had prejudices, they were strongly in favour of belief, not of disbelief. The narrative left on my mind conflicting impressions which I could not reconcile. The profound conviction of the apostolic age, inspiring its marvellous sacrifices and heroic martyrdoms, and attested, outside scripture, by manifold witnesses, heathen and post-apostolic, assured me that those early believers must have had some extraordinary evidence of a resurrection. Mere subjective persuasion, possessing simultaneously so many minds, seemed to me an inadequate explanation of the phenomena. There must have been, I felt, some influence out of the usual order of nature at the bottom of the whole affair. At the same time there was something so strange, inexplicable and even inconsistent in the recorded appearances before the ascension and in the ascension itself, that I found an insurmountable difficulty in taking them for simple historical events, and supposed it possible they might have grown imperceptibly into this form under the moulding influence of oral tradition, out of the mysterious report of spiritual experiences, of the kind already described. But the difficulty was a fact, whether I could explain it or not. I let my faith, therefore, rest practically on the evidence, to me satisfactory, that a resurrection had taken place and been witnessed in some way or other to the minds of believers; and I left the accounts of the bodily appearances in the obscurity in which I found them,—as a kind of proof which carried no conviction to my own mind, which seemed to me wholly unsuited to the subject to which it was applied, and on which I could not but feel that a disproportionate and even a mischievous stress had been laid in arguing the momentous question of immortal life. Proof was wanted, not of a renewed terrestrial, but of entrance

into a celestial, life. So it was that my opinions assumed their present form; and I only mention the circumstance to shew that, whether right or wrong, they have not been extemporized, but slowly worked out through many intervening phases of doubt and difficulty, after an anxious comparison of conflicting phenomena, and with an earnest endeavour to get at the truth by placing those phenomena in their proper relation to each other. The result has been increased tranquillity to my own mind, in the conviction that man is essentially a spiritual and immortal being,that he has even here on earth relations real and solemn, though not always traceable by us, with an invisible state beyond the phenomenal world,-and that at a few rare and favoured moments the veil has been pierced and a presence come through it to believing souls, to convince them, on evidence which material sense could not grasp, that death is only a passage into life.

Having replied to personal charges, pointed out the difference between my own views and Ewald's, and attempted to explain in what sense I accept the evidence for the reality of a resurrection, I have accomplished the principal object of this communication, and might here terminate the discussion. I wish, however, to add a few words on one or two other points. Your intelligent correspondent for October, who signs himself "A Unitarian Minister," and whose general ability and scholarly treatment of this subject I willingly acknowledge, though his peculiar cast of mind seems to disqualify him for doing full justice to views opposed to his own,-has put my judgment on the resurrection in the same class with the dreams of Woolston. But there is really no analogy between them, and the comparison is not a fair one. Woolston allegorized the whole of the historical narrative of the New Testament into an emblematical representation of the spiritual life of Christ in the soul. I have done nothing of the sort. I have never questioned in a passing hint the historical reality of Christ's actions and teachings. I have simply argued, from what appears to me the least difficult interpretation of the facts of the case, that Christ's manifestation to his disciples after death must have been something different from a mere bodily restoration from the grave. I understand the same writer to deny that the bodily resurrection of Christ ever could be, or ever had been, appealed to by intelligent persons as any ground of belief in human immortality. "Those," he says, "who have suggested that it was a transition state intermediate between the gross bodily life and the purely spiritual, seem to me not to understand what they affirm, any more than those who point to it as the pattern of our immortal life" (p. 588). This somewhat sharp and sweeping censure includes Neander, if his words have any meaning, to say nothing of other eminent and learned men, and certainly Dr. Priestley. I find others, pretty well acquainted with the history of opinion in our body, agree with myself that

in the earlier part of this century it was certainly the prevalent belief, diffused by the writings of Mr. Belsham, Dr. Priestley and Bishop Law, that the bodily resurrection of Christ was the only reliable evidence of a future life. Indeed in any other view it is difficult to see why such immense stress should have been laid on it. If it was only one among many miracles attesting divine authority, the circumstances accompanying it were less wonderful than those of the raising of Lazarus. I have the most distinct recollection of its being the direct aim of views then current, and maintained by many eminent men, to discredit as of no weight all the natural presumptions in favour of immortality derived from the spiritual nature of man and his filial relationship to the everlasting Fountain of life. The turn given to opinion on this subject in another and, as I believe, a better direction, was due mainly to the effect of Dr. Channing's writings; and I have a tolerably distinct impression that they were objected to at first by some of the older school as mystical. Mr. Furness, quoted by your correspondent (p. 585), says that still "the general belief is that Christ rose from the dead to establish the doctrine of the life beyond the grave." I have before me a wellknown Sermon of Dr. Priestley's, preached in the Assembly-room at Buxton in 1790, in which he sets out with affirming the natural improbability of a future life, and then asserts (p. 6) that "Jesus Christ actually died and rose again as a proof of the reality" "of a proper resurrection of the dead;" and further on (p. 53), that we are to consider "his resurrection as a pledge and assurance of our own, which it is the great object of Christianity to enforce." Now it is to this view of the bodily resurrection of Christ that I object, as having no bearing, that I am able to discern, on the conclusion which it is supposed to establish. What the "Unitarian Minister's" own views are, I find it difficult to make out. They seem to me in an unfixed and transitional state. They are not those which once prevailed extensively in our denomination, and made a bodily resurrection the only sure and solid ground of belief in a future life. He shrouds them in "mystery," which he considers it "mere folly and presumption to attempt to penetrate" (p. 588). Yet about a real body, attested by eating, drinking, handling, &c., how should there be any mysterious uncertainty? It is a simple fact of daily experience which every one readily comprehends. The plain, straightforward understanding of Dr. Priestley would have found no difficulty in admitting it.

The same writer (p. 585) denies that any direct evidence has ever been given, and questions how it can be given, of uninterrupted personal existence in the invisible state which lies beyond this world. Where, then, I ask is the value of the fact of the resurrection in relation to a future life? If it teach us nothing directly, if we are left to get at the truth circuitously, by inference, analogy, elaborate combination and anxious deduction,