grounded in the original generation. If God had not claimed and acknowledged the relation of Father to the human race, He would never have sent His Son into the world, nor could that Son have been able to say, "I came unto my own,”—His own even when they would not receive Him,—that is, unto those of my own house, my own brethren, bearing the impress of the Godhead. He was sent, however, into the world by the Father that He might make propitiation for the sins of the whole world. This expression, "the whole world," finds its explanation in the thought that man is ideally the centre of the world; in him the world finds the reality of its true idea, and directly in him does God's relation to the world centre. Only because God was already the Father of man, was it possible that His Son should represent the world. this position that the argument must finally rest. God is Father of the Eternal Son, but He is Father also of mankind. Therefore already were the Eternal Son of God and the human sons of God spoken of as brethren, and hence, the Elder Brother in the Father's house may become the representative of man. JOHN MACPHERSON, M.A.

It is in

REPRINTED ARTICLES.

ART. I.-Tulloch's Rational Theology.'

By Prof. E. H. GILLETT, D.D., New York.

Rational Theology and Christian Philosophy in England in the Seventeenth Century. By JoHN TULLOCH, D.D., Principal of St Mary's College, in the University of St Andrews. In two vols. 8vo. pp. 463, 500. Scribner, Welford, & Armstrong, New York.

IN N the study of what may be called the Broad Church element of English Christianity in the Seventeenth Century, Principal Tulloch has fallen upon a congenial subject for his investigations, and he has handled it with marked ability. He has brought forward into clearer light than that in which they have hitherto been seen, some of the most independent and noteworthy thinkers, preachers, and scholars

From the Presbyterian Quarterly and Princeton Review for April 1873.

Parties in the Seventeenth Century.

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of their time. The names of some of these, like Chillingworth, Jeremy Taylor, Cudworth, and Henry More, are familiar enough to theological scholars, and have long been so, but there are others, like Dr Whichcote, John Smith, and other of the Cambridge Platonists, of whom the world has heard little, and whose merit has been buried in an obscurity which Dr Tulloch has done his best to remove.

The position of these men can be understood only by a reference to the views and relations of the religious parties of the time. Dr Tulloch represents them as repelled alike by the two extremes with which the age brought them into contact. He goes back to the Synod of Dort, and sets before us the theological conflict of which that Synod was the scene, and to which, must be traced the rise of Arminianism in England. Here we meet with the famous Alexander Hales, of Eton, not a member of the Synod, but a spectator and reporter of its proceedings. He carries back with him to England an admiration for Episcopius, and a keen sense of the injustice with which the remonstrants were treated, and thenceforth, we presume, whether the expression in so many words fell from his lips or not, he bids good night to John Calvin. His writings indicate remarkable largeness and liberality of thought for his age, and he evidently commands the highest admiration of Dr Tulloch.

Of Lord Falkland, on whom Lord Clarendon has lavished his warmest eulogy, we have a glowing sketch. Although a layman, he was well read in theology, and in his hospitable mansion, men like Chillingworth found sympathy and a hearty welcome. His character commands our respect, and his early fate-a victim to what many will regard as a mistaken loyalty -excites commiseration. His position in relation to Church questions, was much the same with that of Chillingworth and Taylor. He was no extremist, and only by the force of circumstances was he brought to espouse a party in the State. On Church questions he was an Episcopalian, but held moderate views. In Parliament he was indisposed to act with Laud and the High Church on the one side, or with the Puritans on the other.

Here, then, we discern the grounds upon which the "Rational Theology" which Dr Tulloch delineates planted itself. It was a theology developed under peculiar conditions.

It was a combination of reactions from two opposite extremes. It could neither acquiesce in the dogmatical puritanism of the Westminster Assembly on the one hand, nor the intolerant assumptions and bigoted exclusiveness of High Church on the other. It was repelled in almost equal measure by Presbyterian rigidity and Prelatic tything of "mint, anise, and cumin." This is seen alike in Chillingworth's "Religion of Protestants" and in Jeremy Taylor's "Liberty of Prophesying." Chillingworth indeed had passed through a peculiar experience. Loyal to his convictions of truth, and by the logical necessities of his mental constitution compelled to search out the solid foundations of belief, his inability to satisfy himself with the results of his own thinking left him a prey to Jesuit arts. Entrapped in the meshes of their sophistry, he sought the guidance of infallibility in the Roman Catholic Church, and for a short time became a resident at the seminary of Douay. Rome probably never had a more sincere convert, but a very short experience satisfied him of his mistake. Resenting, so far as his calm and impassive nature could resent, the imposition that had been practised on his reason, and making himself a thorough master of the relative position of both parties in the conflict, he set himself to the task of producing that memorable work, which, considered as an argument, is one of the most exhaustive and complete in the whole range of literature. He was under the necessity of asserting the just claims of reason. The claims of an infallible Church had been urged on the grounds of reason and could be judged on earth only at the bar of reason. So that in the entire course of his argument, Chillingworth was really the advocate of a Rational Christianity.

It is obvious, however, that he speaks not in the interest of a party, and although the freedom of his thinking was resented by some of the narrower minds of the Puritan class, we can scarce make him the representative of any theological school. He stands as it were by himself, and is by no means in his mental development a product to characterise the century. It is an unnatural and forced association when Laud, although his patron, is brought into any sort of theological juxtaposition with him.

Of Jeremy Taylor the same can be said only with grave qualifications. His "Liberty of Prophesying" was a genuine

Source of Bishop Taylor's " Rationalism.”

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product of the age, and if we recognise in him the eloquent advocate of liberty of thinking and worship, as well as of latitude of dogmatic belief, we find the explanation of it in the theological collisions which ensued when the Long Parliament wrested from the prelates' hands the keys of that cave of Æolus in which they had so long held imprisoned the controversial elements of English religious thought. "Sects" multiplied to an alarming extent. Should they be violently repressed? Should a Presbyterian despotism, now that Prelacy had fallen, assume the task for which this was no longer competent ? Taylor answered, while himself stinging under what he regarded as oppression, with an emphatic No! His negative was not calmly reasoned out in the still air and under clear skies. The answer he gave was forced from him, and it was given not in the interests of a "Rational Christianity," but under the pressure of circumstances peculiar to the time.

That this is the case, and that Taylor's "Rationalism" belongs to a crisis of English history rather than to the century as a feature peculiar to it, is obvious from some facts to which Dr Tulloch only hastily adverts. When the day of hardship had passed by, and the needy Welsh schoolmaster had become Bishop of Down and Conner, he changed his tone. Dr Tulloch does not say, but he might have said, Taylor flatly contradicts himself. We are not insensible to the charm which the author's genius has thrown over the pages of the only product of the age, which for beauty and eloquence can vie with Milton's "Plea for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing." The wealth of a mind stored with all the treasures of quaint and curious reading, and of an imagination that laid all nature under tribute and seemed to revel at will in every sphere of thought and fancy, has so enriched Taylor's memorable treatise, that in the splendour of its diction, and the fascination of its rhetoric, his later utterances are cast in shadow. And it is scarce too much to say, that neither Heylin nor Sheldon could have found anything fitter to express the severity of their intolerant feelings toward dissenters, than what Irish Presbyterians might have heard with indignation from the lips of the author of "Liberty of Prophesying," when his time of hardship had passed and his time of triumph had come.

With very material abatement, indeed, we may yet bring an analogous charge against Stillingfleet, whose portrait is

number four in Dr Tulloch's gallery of Rational Christianity. It is very significant that when the king returned, Stillingfleet also felt it expedient to palliate the early indiscretion of his "Irenicum." He too was a rationalist-so far as he was one -from the force of circumstances. Under Cromwell's Pro

tectorate, when the prospects of Episcopacy were dark enough, he was ready to accept a modified ecclesiastical system of Usher's stamp. He was a moderate then, and to his credit, be it said, he never became afterward so extreme as some of his associates. But his moderate views were developed in the hot-bed of the Commonwealth administration, and quite wilted away when the heat of royalty beat down again on Prelatic heads and hearts.

In passing on to the Platonists of Cambridge, we come upon a school of thought springing up under the Commonwealth, and continuing on after the Restoration, in which we find the elements of a “Rational Theology" attaining a legitimate development, and possessing something more than the merely temporary significance which we allow to those-Hales excepted-whose names have been already mentioned. As to Whichcote's "Rationalism," we are willing to concede all that Dr Tulloch claims. Indeed, his representations fall far short of the assertion of Toland, who, in his Nazarenus, states that "it was a saying of Dr Whichcote that natural religion was eleven parts out of twelve of all religion ;" and we are tempted to believe that Tuckney had even more reason than the language here quoted from Whichcote would warrant, in finding fault with the extent to which he indulged in rationalistic speculation.

The tone of Whichcote's thought may be inferred from a few sentences in one of his letters addressed in self-vindication to Tuckney: "I thank God," he says, "my conscience tells me that I have not herein (preaching) affected worldly show, but the real service of truth. And I have always found in myself that such preaching of others hath most commanded my heart which hath most illuminated my head. The time I have spent on philosophers I have no cause to repent, and the use I have made of them I dare not disown. I heartily thank God for what I have found in them; neither have I upon this occasion one jot less loved the old Scriptures. I have found the philosophers that I have read good so far as they go; and it