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by raillery and scorn, Germany undertook to complete with its ponderous learning and cold ratiocinations. An established church, secure in its position and creature comforts,' accepted and went far to accomplish the unhappy task. In that church Bretschneider held an elevated post, and in that work he performed a distinguished part. But by his natural disposition, Bretschneider was prone to such principles and views as constitute Rationalism. Of that disposition he himself thus speaks: The predominant quality of my mind is the understanding. The occupations which require judgment and discrimination were In virtue of this peculiarity I was I do always the most agreeable to me. always fitted for a learned, rather than a practical, theologian. not lack feeling, but I have always kept feeling under the control of reason. Accordingly, I was born to be a Rationalist.'

His religious doubts began at an early period. When, at the age of fourteen, he was confirmed by the pastor Schubert, after having received the usual catechetical instruction, he held opinions of a nature bold enough for a full-grown freethinker. He thus reports his sentiments: Although the pastor Schubert was a man of talent, his instruction made no permanent impression on me; specially strange seemed to me the Christian way of salvation as then set forth -I mean, the doctrines of a divine call, conviction, repentance, faith, justification, regeneration. So little were they in accordance with my own experience and the moral discipline which I saw in others, that I could not account the views correct, and thought with myself, "It is "" that is not true." Here we have the complete and confirmed not so," rationalist in the boy. His own experience is his sole test of religious truth. In his own reason, howsoever imperfectly informed or disciplined, is the source, the touchstone, and the rule of Christian doctrine. With such presumptions the youth may well have grown up into a confident denier of evangelical truth. And here is an exemplification of one evil in religious establishments; religious instruction is made by them a mere routine, a part of a profession, a matter of course. The Rev. Mr. Schubert was a good man of his kind. Doubtless he expounded the catechism diligently, and duly questioned his pupils. But religion is an affair not of the head, not of the lips, but the soul. Only in part can it be communicated or inspired by human tongues, and not at all, unless those tongues have been touched by the Divine Spirit. Having himself never undergone the great change, how could the teacher aid in the new birth of his scholar? Yet was he set by authority to preach and to teach. There he was in the outer church, bearing all the symbols of spiritual power and authority, yet devoid of the reality; a false guide, a misleader, because his mission was of man, and not of God. And so must it always be, so long as an academical training and a secularized call are the portals to the Church, the pulpit, and the communion-table. From a regenerate, not an established ministry, may the welfare of the flock of Christ be anticipated. In the case of Bretschneider, the truth is, that the boy's mind was preoccupied. He had made solid acquirements in language. He had learned music. Just before his confirmation he had fallen upon and

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devoured a library of what he calls 'polite literature;' the character of which he specifies as, for the most part, romances, historical matters, and poetry.' There was the furniture of his mind, there his real preparation for church-recognition. And it was, for the most part, heathenism. No wonder Christian seed failed to take root in such a soil. Yet such is the soil prepared by the grammar-schools and universities of the Anglican Establishment.

At school the religious influences to which the youth was subjected, were anything but satisfactory. 'As to what concerns my religious education, I came to Chemnitz with the notions which the instruction of my father and pastor Schubert had given. The religious teaching in this school proceeded in a similar spirit, and was dogmatical without anything of a practical tendency. Among the books which I read, were some which might well have interfered with my determination to study theology. Our tutor, Lessing, committed the indiscretion of warning us in the school against "his brother's" books. This excited our curiosity, and the "Fragments," edited by Lessing, circulated among the scholars. I read that portion of them which deals with the miracles of the Old Testament. The resolution, however, to study theology, was the result of accident. My father had so wished it; my mother's brothers were all theologians. I remained, therefore, with theology, though I knew not the nature of that science.' It is difficult to conceive a more effectual way to produce an extreme rationalist. The only wonder is that Bretschneider did not become an unbeliever. Not because he loved the gospel, and from loving it, wished to proclaim its truths; but because his father wished him to be a parson, and because his mother's brothers were all parsons, did he apply himself to studies preparatory to the ministry. And then Lessing's Fragments!'-the work which gave the impulse to the destructive efforts of the most negative school of German theologyread by a youth under the enticements and factitious estimation of a Dominie's prohibition! Well can we imagine with what eager delight the boys huddled together in some hiding-place, chuckled over their disobedience to their usher, and swallowed the precious morsels of forbidden infidelity. Lessing, the Fragmentist, had a literary reputation, and with the boys would, in their dark proceedings, contrast favourably with his unlucky brother, the tutor, and so recommend his theological wares to their acceptance with special force.

Bretschneider's course of theology at the university was scarcely more of a Christian tendency. He shall describe it in his own words.* 'In theology I attached myself chiefly to Beck, Keil, and Burscher, and in Hebrew, to Meisner and Kuinöl. Beck annually read an exegetical course on the New Testament. That course I attended. What I then heard was to me a thoroughly unknown land. As yet I knew nothing of the interpretation of the New Testament, its rules and its aids. I cannot, therefore, set a high value on the good done

Aus Meinem Leben, Selbstbiographie von Karl Gottlieb Bretschneider. Gotha, 1851. Pp. 21, 22, 23, &c.

me by Beck's lectures. I very well remember, however, how troublesome to me in his Exegesis, was the word πνεῦμα (Spirit) πνεῦμα aylov (Holy Spirit), which, according to him, signified now "the Christian feeling," now "mental fervour," and now something else. More satisfaction was given me by Professor Keil's lectures. He recognised the principle that we ought to take the words and phrases of the New Testament in the sense in which they were taken by the Jews, who then spoke Greek, by whose usages their meaning ought to be determined. This principle-the principle of the historical method of interpretation, as Keil named it-approved itself to my mind, and I adopted it fully, and now applied with the greatest diligence to use as a means of explanation the Jewish theology and its modes of speech. A host of arbitrary meanings was thereby set aside. The attempts to banish the devil from the New Testament by the power of Exegesis, to put a moral signification on the expressions respecting the preexistence and higher nature of Christ, or by exegetical artifices to make the miracles of the New Testament into natural events, appeared to me as denials of revealed truth. I could not, however, consider Keil's dogmatical "Canon" true and well grounded-namely, that all religious conceptions which the Jews had had of Jesus and his age, belonged not to the revelation through Christ, inasmuch as they were previously manifest, and that, therefore, when Jesus and the apostles spoke according to those conceptions, their doing so was to be regarded as an accommodation to the ideas of their contemporaries. Thereby Keil accounted the whole doctrine of the Messiah, the doctrine of the Logos, of the Spirit, of the fall of Adam and its consequences, of the sacrifice of Christ, of the devil, of demons, of the kingdom of Christ and his second advent, of the resurrection, as mere Jewish conceptions, representing no permanent reality. Dissatisfied with this accommodation theory, I went to another academical teacher, professor Hempel, who was accounted quite orthodox. I began to hear his instructions in Christian doctrine. I found myself, however, quite disappointed, inasmuch as his method was wholly devoid of system. The senior of the theological faculty seemed to promise to fill up the want I felt-namely, a demonstration of the doctrines recognised by the Church. But how little he was fitted to satisfy scientific requirements all who heard him knew. In his lectures on the Creeds he busied himself with narrating their external history, and never thought of conceiving and exhibiting their theological contents in a systematical form. He, indeed, often attacked the neologists, but, alas! rather with drollery than instruction. Speaking of the fact that some neologists did not consider certain proofs satisfactory, he would say, "let him who holds these scriptural proofs to be insufficient, find others." Such a course of religious instruction might beget curiosity or aid investigation, but it could not and did not "make ready" an apostle of Christ.

In the midst of the negative diversities which occupied the young man's mind, it is not surprising to find that Bretschneider entertained the thought of renouncing theology, on the ground that I felt myself

unable to maintain all the doctrines of the church, as set forth in the formularies of faith.' 'What, however, met the difficulty and satisfied my mind, was what I read in Reinhard's " Morals," respecting the religious oath (declaration on oath of belief in the established creeds); further, the thought that so many great and estimable theologians, as Keil, Rosenmüller, Henke, and many others, widely departed from the opinions acknowledged in the church, and especially that in public and in the learned world "the enlightened theologians" (for the name of Rationalist was not then customary) stood in great respect and enjoyed general estimation. I believed in the continuance of this feeling, and could not foresee that after the lapse of a generation the enlightened theologians would be persecuted with so much bitterness as now takes place; could I have foreseen this, I should certainly have devoted myself to law. As it was, my mind was made up to remain faithful to theology."

His first sermon was in the same style of passive routine with his whole religious training. Religious training? The term religious must be used, however little religion there was in his preliminary discipline. Language has its exigencies, otherwise we should not apply the epithet religious' to a course of instruction which was merely theological, professional-an instruction in the letter and not in the spirit of religion; a discipline which touched only the superficies of the character, and left the heart unmoved and the soul unregenerate. 'My first attempt in the pulpit I made at the end of my second year. at the university in the village Lössnig, near Leipzig, where I preached in the afternoon, instead of the schoolmaster, who was to have read a sermon. The students used to arrange the matter with the schoolmaster. I remember that I preached on the duty of gratitude, that I had spent a fortnight in committing my sermon to memory, and went through it without stumbling, though I was once obliged to look at my manuscript, because a dog ran into the church. Some of my friends had come from Leipzig, who criticised my delivery, which they found not unpleasing.'

With no fixed opinions, and with such opinions as he had of a negative kind, he, in imitation of many of his elders standing high in the Established Church, undertook to explain the passages in the Old Testament which are adduced in proof of orthodox sentiments. With his academical life began also his literary exertions as a writer. I felt the necessity to rouse myself in order partly to make for myself a name in the learned world, partly to gain the means of subsistence.' If anything would surprise one after what has been reported, it would be that in his first work he undertook to set forth, in a systematic form, the several opinions which formed the acknowledged belief of the church. Yet in this engagement is seen the same professional view of religion which ruled his life, and so commonly enters into the very spirit of an Established Church. Religious truths may be regarded in two lights: first, as deep personal convictions; secondly, as historical facts. With them in their former aspect the young lecturer had as little concern as he had sympathy; but in their latter relation he could

speak of them, handle them logically, critically, historically, and that, too, equally without faith and without self-compromise. This is what he did, and in this he received another lesson in personal irreligion. The moment you begin to regard and treat religious opinions as so many counters, to be put together or put apart, to be heaped up or spread out at pleasure, that moment you are in danger of parting with all reverence, and sinking religion into a trade, especially if you shuffle the cards with a view to personal distinction or pecuniary gain. Oh, it is a lamentable, a fatal mistake, to operate on religion as a surgeon operates on a dead body, with the dissecting knife in your hand, and an eye directed to reputation and a comfortable domestic establishment! From such a state of things rationalism, infidelity, anything but a vital faith and a godly life may come.

The studies of his life, undertaken and carried on under the deep impress of early rationalistic views, naturally confirmed Bretschneider in rationalistic principles. These he from time to time set forth in his numerous publications, and even with little modification retained until his last days. Specially was he, in the discharge of his what we may for the sake of being understood by the English reader term episcopal duties, led to the conviction that religion must be philosophically proved before faith in revealed religion can take root in the soul. With this idea he resumed his metaphysical studies, and formed a kind of eclectic system of his own, under which his teachings and writings became more systematic without being more evangelical. And as, in the latter part of his life a reaction was called forth by rationalistic extremes in favour of the ancient opinions of the Church universal, he, in union with other theologians of his school, employed no small degree of his energy in offering a sturdy opposition to the efforts for the revival of religion, and in maintaining the negative views which he had been led to embrace. Naturally enough did he employ his pen to withstand the requirements which seemed to be imposed on all ministers of the Established Church by the forms which attended their admission to the ministerial office. Those requirements were designed to enforce orthodox opinions, to secure their belief on the part of the clergy, and to perpetuate their communication to the people. This coercion Dr. Bretschneider found ineonvenient. In its defence we ourselves say nothing. But we record his opposition as a fact illustrative of a huge evil in ecclesiastical establishments. Not only could this theologian occupy the highest post in his church, without conforming to the avowed opinions of that church, but he also found himself at liberty openly and publicly to assail its doctrines, defy its sanctions, and resist its authority, employing its honours, emoluments, and resources, for a purpose antagonistic to its inherent, its essential, its historical aims and rights.

As his life was that of a virtuous man, so was his death such as morality may occasion. Thus did virtuous Pagans quit life before the gospel shone on the world with its blessed trust and joy unspeakable.' We conclude with the account given by his son of his views and feelings when he was on the brink of the grave. In reference to the