th justice, with omniscience, with omnipresence, with per I existence, in the immeasurable past as well as the ete ure? It is because man himself is pure, wise, benevol t and infinite, for the subject-man-and the object—Go e the same. They are man's projected image," or as an Am n disciple of the same school has said, "God is man's p unced self." To allay any suspicion that might arise t ch absurdities are in part deductions of our own, unwarran this profound philosophy, we add that this same author hi f, in commending and developing this system, says that " a delusion to suppose the nature of man a limited natur If you think infinity and feel infinity, it is the infinity ought and feeling, nothing else. The knowledge of God e knowledge of ourselves, for the religious object is with God is man's revealed inner nature, his pronounced se ligion is the solemn unveiling of the concealed treasures manity, the disclosure of its secret thoughts, the confession its dearest secrets-the relation of man to his own being another being. "The dream of the human soul." In this theory the one step between the sublime and the ridi us has vanished, and they have become as really identical a ject and object. * * * Thou shalt have no other gods before me" must now mean en illuminated by this philosophy, "Thou shalt have n er God but thyself." "For I the Lord thy God am a jealou d, visiting the iniquity of the (idolatrous) fathers upon the Stowe on the Bible, p. 260 &c. children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me"-means "I, the image of thyself, reflected upon thine own imagination, am a jealous God, and I, thy reflected self, will plague thee and thy children after thee to many generations, if thou shalt not pay thyself divine homage.” "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart and soul and strength"is, "Thou shalt love thy projected image, thy pronounced self,' with all thy soul, mind and might.” If these deductions are not legitimate and absolutely unavoidable, we cannot understand the first principles of this philosophy. What a mighty being must Moses have been in the mountain, and how powerful must have been his imagination to have invested with such glory that shadow of himself, as it passed by him in the rock. The old apocryphal author, who makes Terah, the father of Abraham, to have been a pagan in religion and a manufacturer of gods by occupation—tells that Abraham, when a youth, entered the god-factory once in absence of the workmen, and made sad havoc among the deities. But this philosophy is a great saving process, by which, cost as well as labor may be saved to all true Christians, as all may create their own gods, carry them in their own imaginations, beyond the reach of harm. But we hope not to seem irreverent if we inquire of these great men what may be the difference in the process between manufacturing a god and a devil, and what is the real difference between them when produced? Leaving out the doctrine of innate depravity, which of course this man-worshipping philosophy must deny, it must be confessed that there are men, not a few, in this and other generations, whose moral and intellectual image, projected by their own imagination, would produce a caricature of the devil. Ought the subject who has reflected such an object to bow down and worship that and no other being, on pain of reprobation? Yet such is the duty unavoidably inferred from these philosophical principles. Angels and all other spiritual beings are of course to be produced in the same manner, and are to be equally wise, holy and infinite as the Deity, as they are the reflections of the image of the same subject. 66 he honor of having originated the main principle of sophy. By this system there is no moral responsibil ot such as a man renders to himself, and no moral influe hat which he exerts on himself. "In willing, loving, fe &c., says an advocate of this system, "there is no influer of ourselves over ourselves." And again, " All limiting eason rests on error." Again "Every being is all suffici elf." Dr. Voight of Giessen, says, that there can be anent freedom till the idea of God, and all responsibili od, is banished from the human mind. That will d is where this philosophy must sooner or later culminate. quer who is regarded as an able German Philosopher, an uthor of this same school, justifies, so far as we can unde 1 him, these doctrines as we have deduced them from th ciples laid down by Hegel. Prof. Stowe gives a literal tran n from his work on the Evangelists, which we will copy as we were obliged to read it several times before we coul to the bottom of its pellucid depths, we bespeak for it th vided attention of the reader. One thing in it however i ectly clear, viz. that he is a firm believer in the great princi hat the subjective and objective are identical. The quotation follows; The religious spirit is that disruption of the self-consciousin which the essential definiteness of the same, steps over nst the consciousness, as a power separate from it. re this power the self-consciousness must naturally lose f; for it has therein cast its own contents out of itself, and so far as it can still sustain itself as a me for itself, it feels itself before that power as nothing, so as it must regard the same as the nothing of its own self. Nevertheless the me as selfconscious cannot entirely lose itself-in its subjective, secular thought filled with moral ends and willing, it still maintains its freedom; and into this freedom also the religious consciousness, and the historical development of the same are involuntarily drawn. Both the religious consciousness and the free self-consciousness thus come into contact, to interpenetration, without which the first could be neither individually living nor capable of a historical growth. But so as this livingness and growth, after their first contact, become the subject of religious reflection, they are again torn from the self-consciousness, they step before the consciousness as the deed of another, and now also, necessarily, the interposition which had placed them in the self-consciousness as its own movement, becomes a machinery whose bands are guided in another world. No one after having mastered this lesson need ever be at a loss to understand his religious nature and emotions. No one need marvel hereafter about the "me and the not me" of the German philosophy. None need be mystified about how the reflection of one's self by the power of the imagination can become an infinite God before whom one falls down in profound and humble adoration, exclaiming, "I am a worm and no man." But who, after reading such an effusion from the pen of a learned German Philosopher, and making all due allowance for damage by translation, can marvel at the eagerness with which men in our country abandon a simple faith in a simple gospel that they may possess themselves of the revised, improved, philosophical religion of the Germans? To the foregoing quotation we have nearly a parallel, so far can comprehend, in a definition of Religion given by Mr. Wasson of Mass., at a Free Religious Association, lately held in Boston, by what may be regarded as the American branch of the German school. The definition is this, Religion "is the absolute affirmation of spirit made in and by the soul of man. Spirit, pure, universal, free, embracing all necessity and holding all in the everlasting solution of divine freedom This as we ary God of Hegel, Bauer, &c., can regard prayer as anythi than a farce, and providences, revelations and miracles, ything but words without meaning? ne men who put forth this theory may be moral men, a find the restraints of their philosophy all sufficient selves. On this subject we will here raise no questio can this be said of all men? Can it be said of a large pr on of those who will most eagerly drink in their philos -devour it greedily, because of the very fact that it affor a relief from the restraints from vice and incentives e which orthodox religion affords? That this system reall this cannot be reasonably doubted. The opinions of th ious world in general have been, that the Bible is a revela from a living God, a distinct, personal identity, who ha laimed all the principles and precepts contained in it, an hold man to a strict account for their observance-that Go e only lawful object of worship in the universe-that ever is a distinct being, and has a distinct and individual responsi y which he must render to God, whom he must not only but worship and love-not as a myth, a vapor, a phantom dow of himself, but a GOD. there no difference between the influence of a moral cod eeding from one of these sources or from the other? thodox Christianity, (as it is termed) teaches that the hufamily are depraved and must be regenerated before they Love God and virtue, and hate vice and sin, or be loved of This philosophy denies that man has any inherent de |