תמונות בעמוד
PDF
ePub

Contemporary Literature.

583

are very fine. One of his happiest arguments is that which he addresses to sacramentarians, in disqualification of their so-called higher reverence before the altar, viz., that even if Christ were corporeally present, as they imagine, His presence there could not be more than His bodily presence was to the disciples, and yet he told them that the presence of the Comforter and His spiritual indwelling, was a higher and more blessed thing than even that.

The Parables, read in the Light of the Present Day. By THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D. London: Alexander Strahan.

Our Father's Business. By THOMAS GUTHRIE, D.D. London: Alexander Strahan.

Dr. Guthrie's volumes are almost as frequent as our own numbers. They are doubtless the publication of material gathered during the years of his public ministry, and prepared for the press now that he is laid aside from preaching. His characteristics are so well known, that both for those who admire them, and those who do not, the announcement of a new volume from his pen is sufficient. He is very little of a theologian, still less a reasoner. He eschews metaphysics, and has no taste for casuistry. He never attempts exegesis, nor is he very minute in the discrimination of thought. He is a bold, popular preacher, with a rich but lawless imagination, clothing his thought with a Babylonish garment of metaphors and anecdotes; giving the reins to fancy and sentiment, and often saying felicitous and telling things. He is, moreover, a catholic, devout, and earnest man, faithful to all great truth on the one hand, and solicitous for men's salvation on the other. Every good thing has his sympathy; simple-hearted, devoted, and practical, he is a lover of all good men, and is, in return, loved by them. We do not think the first of these volumes equal to some of his productions, notwithstanding the congruity of its subjects with Dr. Guthrie's imaginative powers. His admirers, however, will find much graphic delineation in it, and also much practical instruction. It is neither learned nor laboured, but it is pleasant, as sunshine and flowers are pleasant: a book in which imaginative and youthful minds will delight.

The second is more practical. It is a series of discourses on Christian work, denuded of texts, and metamorphosed into chapters. For stimulating and devout religious reading, these volumes may be commended.

Church Constitution of the Bohemian and Moravian Brethren. The original Latin. With a Translation, Notes, and Introduction. By D. SEIFFERTH, Bishop of the Brethren's Church. London: W. Mallalieu & Co.

The title of this little volume sufficiently indicates its general character. The introduction is a brief historical account of the Church of the Brethren, which dates from the fifteenth century, sixty years before Luther began his work; and which, ere the close of that century, had assumed the definite form which is here described-a combination of Episcopal and Presbyterian government.

The code of laws here presented was revised and completed in the general Synod held at Zerawich, in Moravia, in 1616, and was printed in 1632.

584

The notes are chiefly taken from Comenius, sole surviving Bishop of the Bohemo-Moravian Brethren, who reprinted the work in Amsterdam, in 1660, appending to it Annotations.'

The work is interesting and valuable to students of Church history generally, and to admirers of this early and single-hearted Church in particular.

On the Philosophy of Ethics. By S. S. LAURIE. Edinburgh:
Edmonston and Douglas.

The importance of this subject is perceived from the fact that it is equally interesting to the psychologist who would expound satisfactorily the laws of the human mind; to the scientific theologian, who seeks as foundation for his doctrines a correct philosophy of mind and of morals; to the jurist and politician, in their practical application of these principles to the actualities of human life; to the moralist, who would propound a system of moral truths; and, above all, to the individual man, who honestly seeks to conform his conduct to the genuine dictates of his moral nature. Its difficulty also is apparent, from the fact that it has so long employed the most able and earnest minds, and has originated so many questions and discussions, which have resulted in conclusions the most diverse. These two facts will probably account for the attempts to solve the great problems of man's moral nature being so often repeated. The essay before us is the production of one who has thought carefully and independently upon the subject. He does not investigate the genesis of the ideas of right and wrong; he assumes their existence, and therefore starts with the question as to the criterion of rightness and wrongness in acts. To this question only two answers have been attempted, however much they may have been modified by the idiosyncracies of other expounders: viz., the one by the Utilitarian School, which makes some form of the consequences of acts the criterion; the other by the Intuitional School, which makes a moral element in each individual man the supreme judge of the moral merits of all his acts. The writer, though differing greatly from both, manifests strong sympathy with the most important truths held by the intuitional philosopher. He regards man placed in this world in possession of certain desires, sentiments, and activities, which differ in quality. Each has a legitimate object of action, and upon the attainment of their several objects there is a corresponding satisfaction. These objects are classified with sufficient accuracy for moral inquiry, as appetitive, social, intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and religious. In this province of emotional activities the will is the arbiter appointed to mark the limits and rights of these forces. Until there occurs a conflict of one activity with another, there is no moral element in the emotions that accompany them; with its occurrence, however, there ensues the feeling of complacency or displacency; in other terms, of felicity or infelicity. The quantity of the felicity is the criterion in non-conflicting acts, the quality in all conflicting ones. quantity of felicities is measured by an intellectual operation, the quality is determined by a feeling, which he describes as an instructive sentient discrimination of the quality of felicities. This feeling is accompanied with a sense of imperativeness or law. Law does not assume the function of discriminating and indicating the right, it only follows in the wake of the discriminating felicity. This sense of law is a feeling of Force, which is ultimately traced to a sense of pain, and forms the coercive element of law. But there are forces acting upon the will arising from the contemplation of

The

Contemporary Literature.

585

the felicitous end of acts, and these form the attractive element of law. Felicity is, therefore, the great discriminator of the rightness and wrongness of acts. Of these felicities he makes the sentimentsof justice supreme. Such are the principal points in this analytical essay. We accord to the author the merit of having carefully analysed the moral phenomena into their rudimentary, germinal elements, especially on their physiological and psychological side, of having made an important distinction between conscience or moral sense and that inheritance of precepts and rules as the consolidation of human experience, into which we all enter; between transitive and intransitive acts, and between the rightness of acts and the morality of the agents. He has also succeeded in defining more precisely the meaning of several terms in the vocabulary of morals, which, through wear and tear, have become very inexact in their application. But, notwithstanding these manifold merits, we cannot regard the question as set at rest by this most recent attempt. His arrangements of the emotional and intellectual phenomena are too artificial to be true to nature; his physiology outweighs his psychology; the spiritual element in man is made to contribute too little; his analysis is applied to what we believe to be simple, indefinable ideas; we are also of opinion that conscience is a power, and not merely a feeling which is ultimately reducible to a sense of pain as its origin, or made to exercise its functions merely by the quantity or quality of felicities. Science and Christian Thought. By JOHN DUNS, D.D., F.R.S.E., Professor of Natural Science, New College, Edinburgh. London: Religious Tract Society.

If it were not so unphilosophical a thing to read defences of Christianity against the manifold assaults of science, and seriously to consider the force of the arguments of the latter, we should be disposed very strongly to recommend this little book; the value of which is in an inverse ratio to its size and pretension. Dr. Dunɛ, himself a scientific man, not only maintains the truth of the records of Scripture, but he compels science to render to it the homage of her ascertained facts. They are only the hypotheses of science that presume the erroneousness of Scripture, the unequivocal conclusions of science are in perfect harmony with it. A more able handbook to the chief questions now at issue between scientific men and theologians it would be difficult to find, and superfluous to desire.

FRENCH LITERATURE.

Philosophie de l'Art. Par H. TAINE. Paris: Germer Baillière.
1865.

Philosophie de l'Art en Italie. Par H. TAINE. Paris: Germer
Baillière. 1866.

The value of Positivism, in its relation to art, is generally conceived to lie in its genuine eclecticism. And yet there are qualifying elements. A careful re-perusal of M. Taine's latest books have brought these before us with peculiar force. M. Taine we believe to be pre-eminently a justminded man: if not deep, he is clear so far as he goes; he is sober and methodic, and has a certain generosity of his own. If positivism is

NO. XC.

QQ

equal to interpreting art in the widest sense, he, in our opinion, is as likely to succeed as any of his school. But he has one fatal defect. When Goethe said that enthusiasm was the one thing necessary to history he unconsciously intimated the impossibility of such a philosophy as that of M. Taine. Properly speaking, M. Taine's titles are involuntary misnomers: his spirit is directly opposed to the construction of any philosophy of art, that is, such a philosophy as Hegel or Schelling, Kant or Cousin, aimed at; and it is simply because of this that Goethe's axiom so forcibly applies to him. He does not start from certain necessary principles, and from these proceed to facts: from facts he ascends (?) to certain external and merely regulative laws of production' and 'dis'tribution,' which, he persistently deals with in the historic, and not in the philosophic spirit; for he uniformly refuses to classify by essential marks, or to trace phenomena to their deeper and perennial roots. Yet a philosophy of art to be of any value must not only recognise these, but base itself upon them. And, moreover, it is only by reference to some such ground that eclecticism can be truly interpretive. The eclecticism, whose last result is to range works of art on the shelves of a museum (and here we only use one of M. Taine's own figures), where the value attached to each specimen is very much the same, is and can be no true eclecticism; and we prefer to think of Goethe turning away from the antique busts and statues at Dresden, to delight himself with the homeliness and truth of the Dutch pictures.

That the result of Taine's system is such as we have indicated very clearly appears. The law of art-production with him is a sort of natural 'selection,' the all-powerful determining elements being the character and manners of the time. That there could by possibility be a deeper law struggling to reveal itself through these dim and clouded media, or that the essential elements in the artist are those which pertain to all time, he does not even dream. That Eschylus, for instance, remains a teacher even for Christian men, while the mass of contemporary Greek literature is practically dead, for the reason that he wrote a higher something between the lines,' would be scornfully put aside as arrant mysticism. The productions of the human imagination-the finest outcome of the human soul, he persists, can be judged and classified only as animated nature is, by the ensemble of external conditions;' and so by throwing the element of emotion out of view, art loses its distinctive character, and ceases to be differentiated from science. Un certain nom'bre de circonstances régnantes' determine the general state of spirit and of manners; and he proceeds thus to illustrate the law: 'De même qu'il y a une température physique qui, par ses variations, détermine l'apparition de telle ou telle espèce de plantes; de même il y a une température moral qui, par ses variations, determine l'apparition de telle ou telle espèce 'd'art.' And, again, Les œuvres d'art rangées par familles dans les 'musées et les bibliothèques, comme les plantes dans un herbier et les 'animaux dans un muséum. On peut appliquer l'analyse aux uns 'comme aux autres, chercher ce qu'est une œuvre d'arten général comme 'on cherche ce qu'est une plante ou un animal en général.'

[ocr errors]

The element by which the media of production and distribution is being constantly perturbed is thus thrown wholly out of sight. The freedom and unconquerable aspiration of the human race, which is the main factor, the essential determining element in art, not recognised; and the merely circumstantial one- -the character and manners of the time-is erected into its place. Now, as the one has to do with the spirit, and the other with the form, it follows that M. Taine has not co-ordinated

Contemporary Literature.

587

laws, but only ascertained certain facts of form, which may be useful to
those engaged in constructing a philosophy of art, but no more.
here we discover the main element of truth and of value in M. Taine's
And
criticism. The artist can never wholly isolate himself from his own age;
the form of his work will mirror it in its main features to the end of time,
and will have the more historic value the more clearly we can read it
there; but there is a question beyond that of its production-the ques-
tion of its vital life and power of continuance; and whether it shall
continue through the ages a familiar and accredited thing of beauty'
depends upon the measure in which the fly of a period has been closed
in the clear amber of the universal. M. Taine provides the material to
enable us to form such a judgment, if we will take the pains.

[ocr errors]

The Philosophie de l'Art en Italie,' is an attempt to establish these positions by reference to the Art of the Renaissance. some very keen remarks upon the greater paintings, and gives many M. Taine makes interesting extracts from memoirs, and from chronicles and records. On these he descants in a lively way, drawing his own inferences as to the manners and tendencies of the period-the energetic sensuality, the picturesque taste, the poetic feeling, and the love of literature, which then characterised high and low, and out of which sprang the rich blossoming of art, which he is concerned to explain and classify. There are abundant evidences of loving labour and great care, while here and there, too, we have proofs of a tendency to generalise particulars rather hastily because they are true to the strict requirements of the Positivist code. Above all, there is occasionally a fine play of antithetic representations, and the work is interesting chiefly as a piece of clear energetic writing, and a powerful reflection of a remarkable period of European history. We cannot help regretfully feeling, however, that M. Taine's great defect springs from his blindness, and his inability to grasp the mighty significance of Christianity in its relation to all later art. introduced a wholly new element into modern culture, and has supplied a It has new basis for art, having set the human soul above all external conditions, by claiming from all men the same allegiance and bringing to them the same freedom-a fact which, as it lies at the very root of modern life, must greatly modify the spirit of art and extend its limits, making it substantially different from what it was in classic times when the equilibrium between spirit and form was perfect; or, indeed, we might say, when these two elements were identical, and when art could be faithfully read and interpreted from the material or natural side alone. It is not without significance that Victor de Laprade, in his last work, speaks of the grandeur of Christian revelation having so disturbed the classic equilibrium as between spirit and form, soul and body, that sculpture (and was not all classic art in its form statuesque ?) cannot be regarded as a Christian art.

Sermons par Eugène Bersier. 2° Volumes.

Megrueis. 1866.

time, a distinguished
Gifted with eminent

M. Bersier has attained, within a very short position among French evangelical preachers. literary talents, using the French language with unusual skill, uniting a graceful imagination to a sensibility that communicates itself to his hearers, veiling a subtle dialectic art under the elegant simplicity of a clear and animated mode of expression, he employs these noble endowments in the service of Christian convictions that are at once enlarged and steadfast. The bent of his nature has hitherto led him to take up

[ocr errors]
« הקודםהמשך »