without abandoning His own simplicity. By this very act multiplicity is introduced into His inmost being: He contemplates Himself as though He were another. Thus the Infinite must not only apparently but really pass through the step of Finiteness in order to attain to the consciousness of His own Personality. This development through contradictions is no accident to the system; it enters into the very essence of its God. It is considered to account for the existence of the universe. It is an express dictum of Hegel that the world is as necessary to God as God to the world, for the immense multiplicity of creatures is indispensable to the Spirit, in order to think out His own Infinity. In the same way, finite thoughts are necessary to Him, in order to enable Him to evolve the contents of the Absolute Idea, which is Himself. The individual thinker is thus merged in the Universal Reason. What we take for the activity of our own intellect is God thinking in us. That strange dialogue between subject and object which ever goes on in our own bosoms, and which we call thought, is the Infinite Spirit talking to Himself in finite conceptions. Thus the stage of contradictions is passed and the mind rests in the discovery that its intellect is really that of the Absolute. The name of Pantheism is often recklessly used, yet surely to Hegel, at least, it may be most conscientiously applied. We have dwelt on this system in order to lay bare the springs of a theory of development which we fear is very widely spread, as well as to exhibit what is the opposite extreme to the tendency of Anglicanism. It is easy now to see the meaning of the strange terms in which Baur has couched his theory of development. We can understand what appears to be the wild dramatizing of the Idea, and its interchange with Spirit. The objective Being of God compels Him to think out its contents in an inexorable way, and all the history of the Universe is but the self-development of this great Logic. In this process Christianity is but a stage, and each age, even the Apostolic, only one link in the Hence the variations in the Fathers, and even the presence of heresy. Verbal differences are not enough. Contradictions are absolutely necessary. If there were no real change, all the parts of the great drama could not be played series. out. We need hardly say that, considered simply as a theory of development, the theory is baseless; for that out of which all things are developed must plainly be wider and deeper than all. Even, however, if this were not the case, it must be so, at least, with a revelation given once for all. Of course, Hegel does not believe Christianity to be a revelation in this or in any real sense. We, however, believe Christianity not only to have been a revelation, but we believe it to be exclusive in the strictest possible sense. It ceased absolutely with the Apostles. They deposited the faith, their successors only transmitted it. All subsequent definitions of faith* are simply the unravelling of matter given by them. Their state of mind was quite different from that of their successors. Theirs was what we may call inspiration; after them the teachers of the Church had only that special guidance of the Holy Spirit, which was promised them by Christ. The Apostolic teaching, then, was not only the first link in a chain; it was that out of which all future developments came, and in which all were implicitly contained. We cannot exaggerate the importance of this fact, on the subject of which we are treating. It seems to us to follow that the Apostles must have had explicitly in their minds all the future definitions of faith, though not, of course, necessarily in the same terms. They must have so framed their teaching that it was capable of all subsequent developments. If they did so by a conscious intellectual act, must they not have had them before their minds? We can only answer the question in the affirmative. Thus, if the Immaculate Conception of our Blessed Lady was a part of the original deposit given by Christ to His Apostles, it must have been clearly before the intellect of S. Peter. Furthermore, since there has been no subsequent revelation to the Church, that truth must have been transmitted to their successors at least in such a shape that without any extraordinary supernatural interposition, it can be extracted from the propositions left with them. Besides this, these propositions must have in some way reached the understanding of the teaching body of the Church. In other words, the truth must have been really contained in the explicit teaching of the Apostles, and have been really known by their successors at least implicitly. All this seems to flow from the very primary notion of Christianity, as a revelation given once for all. Thus stated, there is little difficulty. The real difficulty begins when we come to analyse our conceptions, and reduce them to scientific precision. Development is the process by which what was given implicitly becomes explicit. From what we have already said, it is quite plain that there may be right and wrong theories of development. On the one hand, it must not be "All subsequent definitions of faith": we are not denying, of course, that the Church often puts forth other infallible determinations, for the purpose of protecting the Deposit. a meaningless, monotonous iteration of terms,-a senseless echo repeating what it does not understand; on the other, it must not be a substantial change. The truth must lie between Anglican death and Hegelian convulsions. It is not a spirit to be evoked out of the "vasty deep" of human opinion, without being interrogated as to whence it comes. It is full of questions, which go down to the depths of great mysteries. It is irritating to see shallow writers on development attempting to conjure with a name which they do not understand, and after walking complacently blindfold, beside red-hot questions which they have never perceived, look back and think that they have done a miracle. The miracle would be in walking unhurt over them, not beside them. The real question, after all, is one of fact; and, as we have said before, it does not seem to us at all hard to point out the idea in the teaching of the Fathers, which really contains, for instance, the Immaculate Conception. It requires, however, a thorough knowledge of the subject, and a patient industry, which all do not possess. In the meanwhile the speculative difficulties are plain enough, and exist not only with respect to Our Lady, but also to the Holy Trinity. After all that has been said, we are now in a condition to apprehend what these difficulties really are, and in part to suggest a solution. It has never been sufficiently remarked, that in his book on Development, Father Newman by no means denies that the consubstantiality of the Divine Word was taught explicitly, and in equivalent terms, from the beginning; not only by the Apostles, but by their successors. We therefore perfectly agree with Mr. Liddon, as we have already said, that it was taught explicitly from the beginning, though not formally imposed by a General Council till the fourth century. The difficulty really lies in accounting for the fact that such important writers as Origen and S. Dionysius should say what is quite inconsistent with an explicit Apostolic tradition. The answer is not as Mr. Liddon thinks, that their thoughts were perfectly in accordance with it; nor, as Baur says, that real contradictions are a part of the essence of Christianity. The truth is, that some peculiar mode of conceiving the idea of the Faith, such as the ouoobotov, may be denied by some writers previous to the solemn promulgation of it by the Church. To what extent they really denied it, we shall see presently; but already it is evident that the whole view of the question of development is altered if the fact be that *E-say on Development, p. 11. the first and second centuries held the ouooúσov, while the hesitations and conflicting statements came later on in the third. Then there is no difficulty in accounting for the facts by saying that the hesitations of these later Fathers were scientific; that is, that they arose not from a wrong idea, but from a difficulty of harmonizing one mode of conceiving the Truth with some other portion of it. This is only what we should expect, if the Faith is left to be elaborated and formed by human intellects. The movement of development thus conceived is by no means a direction in a straight line, where each stage is an ever-increasing progress upon the last; on the contrary, it moves in a circle, and ends where it began. Amidst all the wild theories of Hegel thus much is true, that he has rightly described the movement of development, as a progress the second stage of which is one of conflict, harmonized by a return in the third stage to the unity of the first. The question which remains rather concerns the state of mind of the Fathers whose faulty conceptions cause the whole difficulty. Were they heretics? Did they fully acquiesce in even materially wrong views? How can they be said really to have held the Faith? In what way can we express the relation of their view to the truth? Furthermore, if the right answer be, as we fully believe, that suggested by S. Thomas, that it was known, but known only implicitly to those whose language and whose conceptions were utterly inconsistent with it, then what is the meaning of implicit knowledge? How is it real knowledge? If explicit knowledge means nothing more than the expression in equivalent terms of what was known implicitly, that is, in other terms,— then evidently the whole is a matter of words; and we give up the grand doctrine an easy prey to those who are already too well disposed to look upon it as a squabble about metaphysical terms. If we do this, let us be consistent and take refuge with the Dean of Westminster in the secure haven of picturesque theology. Let us be real, and not use the term development as dust to be thrown in the eyes of a wavering partisan or of a less acute antagonist, making the process meaningless in the case of the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, accretive in the case of the Immaculate Conception. The question is to be looked in the face. How can implicit knowledge be looked upon as knowledge at all? And if explicit knowledge is an addition or an advance, what is added, and in what does the progress consist? Such are some of the speculative difficulties of the case; and we must not be surprised to find that the ground has been to a great extent prepared for us even by the most im VOL. XII.-NO. XXIII. [New Series.] E perfect sketch which we have given of the Hegelian system. The theological requirements which must serve as landmarks to guide us are sufficiently plain; we must keep them steadily in view, and with their help it will not be so hard to thread our way amidst the mazy labyrinth of paths which lie before us. Any theory of development must provide for three conditions. It must presuppose that the whole Faith was left on earth by the Apostles at least in an implicit shape. Secondly, it must provide for some real apprehension of the whole arriving at the minds of their successors: for implicit knowledge is real, and that which is in no way apprehended by the mind cannot be developed. Thirdly, it must show cause why that knowledge is imperfect: in other words, it must point out the need for development, in order to account for the fact; and it must do so in such a way as to save the honour of the Fathers of the first centuries, whom the Church will not consent to consider as heretics. If these three conditions are fulfilled, then the remaining questions lie very much within the compass of philosophy. It is not wonderful that Germany, which is the very classical land of development, should help us to point out those natural processes which are analogous to, and which justify the theological notion. We will draw this out by contrasting as briefly as possible the theories of the two distinguished Catholic writers, whose names stand at the head of this article,— Father Newman and Professor Kuhn, of Tübingen. It will be seen that both in different degrees have used as a means of accounting for the fact of development, that very theory of the human understanding, which Hegel used to account for what he represents to be the inner dialectical movement of human thought. We will begin with Father Newman: which we are the more anxious to do, because without some attention his theory might be mistaken for that which we found in Dean Mansel, though we hope to show that this appearance only arises from the imperfect way in which he has sketched his view. We will give it as much as possible in his own words. Unlike other writers who have covered themselves with the ægis of his name, Father Newman starts with doing the fullest justice to the knowledge possessed by the Apostles. "The holy Apostles," he says, "would know without words all the truths concerning the high doctrines of theology which controversialists after them have piously and charitably reduced to formulæ, and developed through argument" (p. 83). This is allowing far more than a knowledge of what is de fide; it assigns to them a view down to the deepest depths of Christian |