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النشر الإلكتروني

XIII.

ULRICI ON THE SPIRITUAL BODY.'

"Der Leib der Menschen ist eine zerbrechliche, immer erneuete Hülle, die endlich sich nicht mehr erneuen kann."-HERDER, Philosophy of History.

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THIS morning, the bells of Christian churches on the continents, and of Christian vessels on the great deep, are audible to each other around the whole planet. I am not speaking rhetorically, but geographically, when I say that the Christian Church at this moment encircles the world in her arms. We forget too often what a great continent Australia is, and what a pervasive force her English language and laws may become in the lonely southern hemisphere. But Japan has forced herself upon the notice of the world of late, as the undeveloped England of the Pacific. Her great Mikado congratulated our President, only the other day, on the success of our Centennial Exhibition; and there lay behind the cordial words from the far shore just the sentiment which a Japanese high official expressed lately at Hartford, that the Christianisation of Japan is an event to be expected in the near future. The revolution in that crowded island of sensitive, ingenious men, is in the hands of the cultivated upper classes. It does not depend on count of heads or clack of tongues, and is not likely to go backward. You say Russia and England may come into armed collision in the shadow of the Himalayas, and that the bear and the lion may fill the Cashmere vale with blood. May God avert this! But, even if they do so, it will yet remain sure, in any event, that the days of Buddhism are numbered; and that, so far as Paganism governs Central Asia, it is every year squeezed more and more nearly to its exit from life between the state necessities of Russia and England. Coming farther West, it is significant that the Suez Canal, the key to the great gate of the way to India, belongs now chiefly to Great Britain; and that, even with the Egyptian road to the East in her possession, she cannot afford as yet to take off from Constantinople an eye behind which, for eight hundred years, has rested no inconsiderable portion of authority on this planet, and which now rules a fifth part of the population of the globe.

1 The fifty-eighth lecture in the Boston Monday Lectureship, delivered in Tremont Temple.

Only this morning, from under the sea, we have whispered to us by electric lips great promises by the " sick man " of the Bosphorus. The liberty of Ottomans is to be inviolable. The religious privileges of all communities, and the free exercise of public worship by all creeds, are guaranteed. Liberty of the press is granted. Primary education is compulsory. All citizens are eligible to public offices, irrespective of religion. Confiscation, statute labour, torture, and inquisition are prohibited. Ministerial responsibility is established. A chamber of deputies and a senate are instituted. These two houses, in connection with the ministry, have the initiative in framing laws. General and municipal councils are to be formed by election. The prerogatives of the Sultan are to be only those of the constitutional sovereigns of the West.

In 1453 Islam crossed the Bosphorus with a bound, for the leprosies of its social life had not yet had time to unstring its nerves. Its own poisons have made it now little more than unspeakably flaccid flesh, without a soul. Its promises are very empty. But this time, as never before, the demand for reform is emphasised by the great powers of Europe. This new constitution just promulgated in Constantinople contains no guaranties which the rest of Europe will not ultimately be obliged to secure from the populations of European Turkey. But if Islam must make the changes Europe demands, she must violate the Koran. Let adequate political reforms be perfected in Turkey, and Islamism is sure to unloosen her accursed, leprous grasp from the fair throat of the Bosphorus.

One of our most gifted missionaries and statesmen, Dr. Hamlin, has said lately, "Let Turkey stand, that Islam may fall." No doubt this opinion is a wise one from his point of view; and this morning even we, who are so little familiar with the politics of the Bosphorus, can understand, that, if all the reforms the recent conference of the great powers has asked for are carried, the Koran is a dead letter in Turkey. Dr. Hamlin seems to say that certain political changes are going forward in Turkey under the pressure of her own state necessities and of the demands of the great powers; that these changes cannot be carried through without violating in the boldest manner the political and religious provisions of the Koran; and that, therefore, if Turkey will carry these reforms through, she will undermine the authority of her own sacred book.

It seems probable, however, that Providence is to make shorter work with what Carlyle calls the unspeakable Turk than he would in any way make with himself under the pressure of the necessity for political reform. Is it not pretty clear that Gladstone's advice will ultimately be followed, and that Turkey as a Mohammedan empire will at least have no more armed support from Christian powers? If she must take care of herself, how long can she, who, in one of the fairest regions of the globe, is a treacherous bankrupt now, maintain her position in Europe, face to face with the increasingly angry protest of her own population and of Russia on the north, and of Austria, Germany, England, and France toward the setting sun? Constantinople and Cairo are held by Islam to-day only with faint grasp. Without these cities she will be driven back in her fearful sickness to her deserts. Only most slowly can she be healed there of her terribly poisoned blood. The days of the distinctively Mohammedan power in Europe are numbered.

Looking around the globe to-day, we see, therefore, an unbroken line of Christian influences in the near future, stretching from the Yosemite to the Sandwich Islands, to Australia, to Japan, to India, and past the Suez Canal, and thence to the Bosphorus, and thence to Germany, now possessing political and Protestant primacy in Europe, and so on to England, and then across that little brook we call the Atlantic, only two seconds wide now for electricity. There are no foreign lands.

In this year, America may say of her guests what was said of Portia's suitors:

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Christianity at this hour reads her Scriptures, and lifts up her anthems, in two hundred languages. One-half of the missionaries of the globe may be reached from Boston by telegraph in twenty-four hours. God is making commerce His missionary.

It is incontrovertible that it was predicted ages ago, that a chosen man called yonder out of Ur of the Chaldees should become a chosen family, and this a chosen nation, and that in this nation should appear a chosen Supreme Teacher of the race, and that He should found a chosen Church, and that to His chosen people, with zeal for good works, should ultimately be given all nations and the isles of the sea. In precisely this order world-history has unrolled itself, and is now unrolling. No man can deny this. No man can meditate adequately on this without blanched cheeks. What are the signs of the times which I have recounted on this festal morn, but added waves in this fathomlessly mysterious gulf-current? We know it began with the ripple we call Abraham. It is now almost as broad as the Atlantic itself. What Providence does, it from the first intends to do. We see what it has done. We know what it intended. It has caused this gulf-current to flow in one direction two thousand, three thousand, four thousand years. Good tidings, this gulf-current, if we float with it!-good tidings which are to be to all peoples! A Power not ourselves makes for righteousness. It has steadily caused the fittest to survive, and thus has executed a plan of choosing a peculiar people. The survival of the fittest will ultimately give the world to the fit. Are we, in our anxiety for the future, to believe that this law will alter soon? or to fear that He whose will the law expresses, and who never slumbers nor sleeps, will change His plan to-morrow, or the day after?

On this day of jubilee, let us gaze on this gulf-current, and take from it heart and hope, harmonious with the heart of Almighty God, out of which the gulfcurrent beats only as one pulse.

The difficulties that Christianity has now are chiefly in great cities. They are in the unfaithful members of highly civilised society. They are in that subtle and pernicious inactivity which undermines the nervous force of the world at its centres.

THE LECTURE.

De Wette, the great German theologian, who died in 1849, and who was called the Universal Doubter, said in his last work, published in 1848, that "the fact of the resurrection of Christ, although a darkness which cannot be dissipated rests on the way and manner of it, cannot itself be called into doubt" any more than the historical certainty of the assassination of Cæsar.1 This is the passage over which Neander, the famous Church historian, shed tears when he read it. De Wette was a leader of the acutest school of rationalism in Germany in his day, and denied utterly that there are passages in the Old Testament Scriptures predicting the coming of our Lord. He was coupled by Strauss himself with Vater, as having placed on a solid foundation the mythical explanation of the Bible. Nevertheless, such is the cumulative force of the evidence of the resurrection as a fact in history, that De Wette, listening only to the latest voices of the most laborious, precise, and cold research, affirmed, face to face with the sneers of the rationalism which he led, that the fact itself, although we do not understand the way and manner of it, is incontrovertible.

1 De Wette, Concluding Essay, appended to Historical Criticism of Evangelical History, p. 229.

I am to speak this morning, not of this fact, but of the way and manner of it. I know that the theme is fit to blanch the cheeks.

Before taking up this mystery of mysteries, however, let us, for a moment, glance at the logical value of De Wette's concession. It is a verdict reached unwillingly by long listening to all the public and secret words of history and philosophy-the guides which scepticism is so eager, and which religious science may well be yet more eager, to force upon the attention of the world.

I am accustomed to recite as a part of my private creed these propositions, based on De Wette's concession as to the fact of the resurrection :

1. The intuitions of conscience prove the moral excellence of the biblical system.

2. The moral excellence of the biblical system proves that it is not inconsistent with the attributes of an infinitely perfect Being to give to that system a supernatural attestation.

3. If an historical attestation of this kind has been given to the biblical system, the existence of that attestation may be proved by the established scientific rules of historical criticism.

4. The established scientific rules of historical criticism, severely applied, demonstrate the fact of the resurrection.

5. The fact of the resurrection proves, not the Deity, but the Divine authority of our Lord, as a teacher sent into history with a supreme and divinely attested religious mission.

6. The Divine authority of our Lord proves the doctrines He attested.

7. Among these are His Deity, the Inspiration of the Scriptures, the necessity of the New Birth, the Atonement, Immortality, the Eternal Judgment.

It was my fortune once to put these propositions before the acutest intellect I have ever met in the field of theology, and to ask if they would bear the logical microscope. I remember, that, as I repeated them slowly, the majestic eyes of the listener were lifted from the earth to the horizon, and from the horizon to the infinite spaces of the Unseen Holy behind the azure. When at last I asked if De Wette's verdict did not contain in it all these conclusions, the unwavering reply was, "All, incontrovertibly. But De Wette's concession is the result of the conflicts of eighteen centuries of scholarship. Adhere to those propositions, for they have borne the tooth of time in the past, and will bear all the buffeting of acutest controversy in the future.' Once in his garden at Halle-on-the-Saale, in an hour I shall long remember, I put those propositions before Professor Tholuck, with the same emphatic result.

It is on the way and the manner of the personal continuance of the soul after death that German philosophy now bends an intense, prolonged, reverent gaze. You will not suppose me to indorse everything which I put before you this morning as a part of the latest German philosophy. Nevertheless, I confess my sympathy with the whole trend of that magnificent body of thought which is represented by the Lotzes, the Helmholtzes, the Wundts, and the

Ulricis. Whoever is in accord with this school, which now leads the most intellectual and learned nation of our times, will find himself in most emphatic antagonism to the English materialistic school. This latter, however, has nothing to say that is new to Germany. Gentlemen here who have been accustomed to form their philosophical opinions from an English outlook, will, perhaps, allow me to ask them this morning for once, as an experiment, to occupy the German point of view. I do not request you to take the opinions of the Germans, though they have a far greater fame than the English for philosophical breadth and acumen; but will you not take their point of view long enough to understand that there are two philosophies in the world? If there is one represented by the Huxleys and Häckels, there is another opposed at all points to materialism, and represented by the Lotzes and Helmholtzes, and Wundts and Ulricis,—names which the future is far more likely to honour than those of any of their critics.

1. Lotze, Ulrici, Wundt, Helmholtz, Draper, Carpenter, and Beale, teach that the nervous mechanism in its influential arc is plainly so constructed that we must suppose it to be set in motion by an agent outside of it.

2. Every change must have an adequate cause.

3. Only when involution is equal to evolution in the connection between cause and effect is the cause adequate to produce the effect.

We all agree, and we talk smoothly, as to the authority of the tropically fruitful axiom, that every change must have an adequate cause. But what is an adequate cause? My definition, which I do not ask you to accept, is, Such a cause as makes involution equal to evolution. Sir William Thomson, speaking of the shrewd attempt of materialism to explain living tissues by infinitely complex molecular combinations of merely material particles, says it is for ever sure that we cannot get out of the combinations anything that we do not put into them; and that all science is against the idea that evolution can ever exceed, in the force or the design it exhibits, the involution which must go before the evolution. Involution before evolution is the fact on which to fasten attention, if we would be lifted out of materialism. Let us be involutionists first, and evolutionists afterwards. The astute attempt of Tyndall is to put into matter what he wishes to draw out of it. His whole effort is to introduce a new definition of matter. He would have us think of matter as a double-faced somewhat, having a material and spiritual side; and although, in attempting to do so, we necessarily fall into immeasurable self-contradiction, he is forced to undertake the support of even that, because he knows that evolution cannot be greater than involution. He would put into his theory, therefore, on the one side, that power and potency of all life which he wishes to take out on the other. It is the supreme law of philosophy that involution and evolution are an eternal equation. Materialism is marked by, perhaps, nothing more superficial than the attempt to avoid the force of that law in the explanation of living tissues. Even Tyndall,1 after reasoning in favour of the theory which Professor Frey,

1 Materialism and its Opponents, 1875.

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