He proceeds to analyse the meaning of faith, and shows that the controversy vanishes into thin air of itself. With a deeper study of substance, the word-controversies of the schoolmen generally disappear. Even the awful questions of predestination and freewill share the common fate of scholasticism; for reasonable controvertists discover that they either mean fundamentally the same thing, though they use different language, or at worst make different sides of their doctrine predominant. As to the freedom of the will, so great is the difficulty of just expression, that nothing is commoner than verbal and unreal controversy. None who maintain human freedom intend to assert that the will, any more than the arm and hand, is an infinite force; but simply that it has a force of its own, like the hand and arm. The true doctrine is, perhaps, summed up in few words by Professor Jowett, p. 486.

"It is not by abstract theories of freedom, but by the careful observation of circumstances, that we can in any degree control them; in other words, true freedom can only exist by a rational belief in necessity. We must limit ourselves, for we are finite creatures."

Later, in the same essay, he writes :

"A religious mind feels the difference of saying-God chose me, I cannot tell why, not for any good that I have done, and I am persuaded that he will keep me unto the end :—and saying-God chooses men quite irrespective of their actions, and predestines them to eternal salvation: - and yet more, if we add the other half of the doctrine,—God refuses men quite irrespective of their actions, and they become reprobates predestined to everlasting damnation. The first is the expression of Christian hope; the latter of a religious philosophy which has ceased to talk by faith. The first is the temper of St. Paul and of Scripture; the latter the spirit of some Calvinist theologians."—p. 500.

We wish we could give the reader any idea of the noble essay on Natural Religion. We had marked many passages for extraction; but it fills forty closely-printed pages, and we should become insatiable of quotation. A second edition is in preparation; we hope that few who desire will be unable to peruse it. And we of necessity approach the only irksome part of our duty, as to which we are made diffident by our very high appreciation alike of Professor Jowett's moral and spiritual qualities, as of his powerful intellect and comprehensive knowledge. Still, where we are distinctly conscious of moral repugnances and moral alarm, it seems to be our duty to give some expression in this direction. We refer to the essay on Casuistry.

This is naturally divisible into two parts, as the following passage may explain :—

"So far we seem to arrive at a general conclusion like St. Paul's,Whether ye eat or drink, do all to the glory of God. Have the spirit of truth,

and the truth shall make you free, and the entanglements of words and the perplexities of action shall disappear. But there is another way in which such difficulties have been resolved, which meets them in detail; viz., the practice of Confession, and the rules of casuistry which are the guide of confessors. When the spirit is disordered within us, it may be urged that we ought to go out of ourselves and confess our sin to another. But he who leads, and he who is led, alike require some rules for the examination of conscience, to quicken or moderate the sense of sin, to assist experience, to show men to themselves as they really are, neither better nor worse. Hence the necessity for casuistry."p. 350.

All that follows is devoted to an analytical history-very acute, clear, and instructive, of casuistry, as practised in the school of the Jesuits. Professor Jowett's object is to expound and expose the vicious system of meeting conscientious difficulties by formal and authoritative rules. He intends to be an advocate of true and spiritual freedom against what in theory is a rigid enforcement of morals, but in fact an arbitrary licence to sin and crime. The first part of the essay sets forth the method of St. Paul, and seeks to apply it to modern life; the second part virtually denounces a system, which, though a "byword among mankind for hypocrisy and dishonesty," is not the less fostered by Ultramontane Romanism and by certain sections of the Puseyites. So far, in a broad view, we must heartily approve of his essay; but when we consider in detail what he says and what he suggests, in the early and positive half of it, we are constrained to pause, to question, and to remonstrate.

Transferring the apostle's precepts into modern life, Professor Jowett shows how we may be, as it were, forced out of the world by an extravagant fear of being contaminated by evil: as, because slavery is wrong, a man scruples to buy the produce of slavery, or a manufacture into which slave-produce has entered, "and so on without end." Or if I may not practise a trade deleterious to the health or morals of those engaged in it, it is inferred that neither may I let a house to another so engaged.

"Numberless questions of the same kind relating to the profession of an advocate, a soldier, or a clergyman, have been pursued into endless consequences. In all these cases there is a point at which necessity comes in and compels us to adopt the rule of the Apostle, which may be paraphrased, Do as other men do in a Christian country. Conscience may say: He who is guilty of the least, is guilty of all. In the apostle's language, it then becomes 'the strength of sin,' encouraging us to despair of all, because in that mixed condition of life in which God has placed us we cannot fulfil all."-p. 342.

"Quite independently of real sorrow for sin, most religious persons in the course of their lives have felt unreal scruples or difficulties. Honour

or truth seem to be at stake about trifles light as air, or conscience has become a burden too heavy for them to bear in some doubtful matter of conduct.

There are few greater dangers in religion than the indulgence of such scruples. A tender conscience is a conscience unequal to the struggles of life.

In our moral, as in our physical nature, we are finite beings, capable only of a certain degree of tension ever liable to suffer disorder or derangement. No one can fix his mind intently on a trifling scruple, or become absorbed in an eccentric fancy, without finding the great principles of truth and justice depart from him. ."-p. 346.

"In daily life cases often occur, where we must do as other men do, even though unable to reconcile a particular pratice with the letter of truthfulness, or even to our individual conscience. It is hard in such case to lay down a definite rule. But in general we should be suspicious of any conscientious scruple in which other good men do not share.”—p. 349.*

It is with fear that we touch at all so entangled a subject, lest it become necessary to treat it too minutely. That there is such a thing as a morbid conscience, and that Professor Jowett does not overrate its mischief, we perfectly allow; but our first regret is, that he does not sharply distinguish the questions: "Is my scruple needless and overstrained?" and: "Ought I to abandon practices which, after allowing the argument from authority to exert its full influence, I cannot reconcile with moral right?" He appears to us to invest that argument with such extravagant and pernicious importance, as virtually supersedes individual conscience entirely. To be morbidly tender in scruples is the weakness of barely a small fraction of mankind, yet he treats it as a prevalent danger. "To go with the multitude to do evil," is precisely the sin to which we are all prone, even the best of us: yet he accounts it as rather a mark of strength of mind to "brush away scruples." Rightly to proportion the parts of duty; to esteem the near as more urgent than the distant; to elevate the moral and make light of the merely ceremonial; to distinguish when a trifling observance is a mere trifle, and when it assumes moral importance, is necessary for healthy judgment and right conduct. But to confound, under the phrase of "scruples," questions so unlike as, on the one hand, the observance of new moons and sabbaths, the eating of various meats, and, on the other, the hiring oneself to the trade of a soldier or advocate, or having "doubts concerning orders" (pp. 344, 347, 348) appears to us highly adverse to the interests of truth and sound conscience. This whole argument ignores the idea of martyrdom as having any possible claim on us moderns: nor do we see how, according to his principles, there could ever have been martyrs in any time, except among the weak-minded and morbidly scrupulous.

The italics are ours.

Neither could there have been conversions to a new religion; but men would have gone on conforming for ever to old superstitions, if the arguments which he pleads had been allowed to bear sway. We have read, in one of the religious periodicals of the day, extracts from a work on casuistry, officially recommended by a Roman bishop, in which it is laid down that a vendor of milk who dilutes the beverage only as much as he is forced by the necessities of his trade and the competition of rivals, ought to make his conscience easy, and (may we add ?) "brush away his scruples." Professor Jowett's acuteness will perhaps be able to show why such a case is not included in his rule, -Do as men do in a Christian country; but we are apprehensive that very few of his readers will be acute enough to find the distinction; or rather, we feel sure that it cannot be expected of one practically subject to the temptation. If the final consideration-" Supposing I leave my profession, how am I to live?"—is to have as much weight as Professor Jowett gives it (p. 348) with an incipient soldier, barrister, or clergyman, all must calculate that it will be equally weighty with the milkman or grocer. Do as men do in a Christian country! Comfortable doctrine to those "strong-minded" enough to accept it, in numberless evil trades certainly not contemplated by its propounder. It is related of the Rev. John Newton, the friend of the poet Cowper, that while engaged in the slave trade he was driven to the devoutest religious exercises, in order to counteract the carnal temptations incident to the having so many young black females in his absolute power; and that at that time he regarded the trade as a disagreeable, but certainly an honest means of earning a livelihood. England is, in Professor Jowett's view, a "Christian country;" but surely so she was also a century and two centuries ago. If the phrase is to bear any moral influence now, it had an equal right to sway men's judgment then. If to live by hiring out one's tongue to plead either side of a cause, or one's sword for uncertain work, at the bidding of we know not who, nor on what principles, is now practised and defended in a Christian country, and by men so amiable and respectable that we feel ashamed to refuse them the title "good," the same has been true at other times and places, even under Christianity, of many practices which we have generally learned to disapprove.

When the thought flashes across a man's conscience,-" The cause which they are paying me to plead is a scandalous one; the war to which I have hired myself to fight is unjust and hateful;

how can I kill human beings without solemn judgment and sacred verdict?"—such a thought (let us grant to Professor Jowett) may be the morbid scruple of a weak mind; but it can never be justly quelled or brushed away by the topic, that Christendom at large is unscrupulous. We add, it is distressing to find such phrases as "trifles light as air"-"unreal" objections-used in connexion, on the one side, no doubt, with scruples unsubstantial enough, but, on the other, with oblique reference to difficulties of no less magnitude than the piercing question, "Am I becoming the hired despoiler of families? Am I selling myself to secret, unknown, and probably unscrupulous cabinets, to become their tool of murder? Am I professing to preach truth in God's name and by his inward inspiration, but really binding myself to uphold articles of religion which I do not believe, and which I ought publicly to renounce? How can I nourish professional falsehood, and yet be a successful minister of truth?" Surely an infinite chasm separates such scruples from those of new moons, sabbaths, and unclean meats. No analogy at all unites them. Nay, and a grave, painful thought here presses us hard. What earnest Christian but sighs and groans over Christendom? One school flatly denies that countries are Christian at all, and says that only an elect remnant deserves the name. We will not enter that controversy. But, whatever theory be adopted, a heart wise and tender like Professor Jowett's must sometimes be ready to burst with grief at the established vices and atrocities of Christian countries and nations; and what else, we ask, maintains these and makes them possible, except that the individual agents in each case cast the responsibility off themselves on to the system? And, on the contrary, what has ever led to the overthrow of established iniquities, except the acting on precisely the opposite principle from that to which Professor Jowett lends his great influence? When an old Roman Christian declined to conform to the laws of the land and the practice of loyal subjects, by casting a little incense into the censer which burnt before the emperor's image, undoubtedly his friends told him that his scruple was "light as air." We all know what it means (they would say); none of us really think emperors, living or dead, to be gods; it means only that we are loyal. To refuse obedience will be interpreted to mean more than you desire. We admit it is a pity that the emperor exacts this form of observance. We look on this as an evil; but, we pray you, be not insensible [we use Professor Jowett's words] to the great truth, that though we may not do evil that good may come, yet good and evil, truth and falsehood, are bound

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