natural craving for comfort and happiness comes into collision with his sense of duty. This moral compulsion, which the Christian world simply calls conscience, Kant called, somewhat affectedly, the categorical imperative. Man is unconditionally to follow this; he must do what is good purely for the good's sake, not with respect to recompense either here or hereafter; nor from any fear of punishment, since by it morality is degraded to the means, while it ought to be the end. We have already remarked that Kant by no means denied the doctrines of Immortality and of a Future state of retribution: on the contrary, viewed from the point of practical reason, he required these, and even grounded upon them his belief in God and Immortality; for, just because man's strivings for moral purity were in such contradiction with his just as natural desire for happiness, for this very reason there must be a state of retribution hereafter, and there must be therefore an all-wise, allrighteous, and all-gracious Being who can and will fulfil it. But evident as this is to the practical reason, yet the theoretical reason must inflexibly demand the fulfilment of the moral law on the supposition that there is no such retribution. Man must act, under all circumstances, as befits a free moral agent; and what he puts forward as a law for others, must be one also for himself. Our morality may not be made to depend on promises and threats, its value is in itself. Whilst, therefore, Kant does not put aside religion as a something superfluous, yet he wished assuredly to sever morality from it, and put it on its own footing. The truly moral, he said, should not need the support of religion, should be influenced not by religious, but by pure moral motives only. Now, if these religious motives were actually nothing else than the hope of reward and the fear of punishment, then Kant was right in wishing to make morality independent of such motives. But Christianity teaches us to do good not merely for the sake of reward, and to avoid evil not merely from the fear of punishment. Christianity is not a mere selfish spirit of calculation, but it is the free and loving spirit of childship. But of this spirit of adoption, not a word in Kant's system. The Categorical Imperative is very different from the loving spirit of a child, whereby we cry "Abba, Father."* It is a mere law, and nothing more, a mere "Thou shalt,"-a command of

* "He (Kant) took no notice in his system of the most essential points of Christianity, by which it is a newcreative power, and which we include in the terms Redemption, Atonement, and Grace. For Christianity is not, as a moral law only, a mere 'Thou shalt,' but a fulfilling, a satisfying, a Yea and Amen: not a demand in the name of God, but a Divine power and gift, which, poured into the heart, of itself is the truest source of all moral life.

In saying, as our Lord does, 'I am the Truth,' He says more than if He said, My Doctrine is true;' and when He adds, "I am the Life,' He tells us of Himself as the source of Life, from whence comes the hearty will as well as real power to fulfil the law of God. The Categorical Imperative is utterly dumb before some such word as this: 'Let us love Him, for He hath first loved us.'"-Ullmann, "On the distinctive Character of Christianity."

iron necessity-cold moon-light with no life-giving warmth. Kant's doctrine led him to the same conclusion as that of the Apostle Paul, that there is one law in our minds, and another in our members, which wars against the law of our minds: but to the cry, "O wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from this body of death?" he gives no other answer than, "Physician, heal thyself." To a certain extent, Kant was right in not wishing to make religion a support of morality; meaning thereby a mere outward support of morality--a prop for the morally weak. But there is a mighty difference between the outward support, on which the tree leans painfully, and the root, from whence it draws its sap and powers of growth. That religion is this root, that morality draws from it its purest conditions of life, is a view which is entirely wanting to the Kantian system. That the outward holiness of works does not make a man righteous-does not give him a claim to salvation-that legality is not morality-all this Kant has well proved. He takes a true stand here, opposing Christianity to legal Judaism, Evangelical Protestantism to the holiness by works of the Church of Rome. In all this, he clears away, with much success, a mass of rubbish. But when we ask him about the sources of morality, the fundamental power and motives of virtue, he points man to himself. He can find no place, either in his theoretical or practical reason, for the Grace of God which brings salvation-for the Holy Spirit, imparting Himself to man with His regenerating and upholding power. That was a fresh, free life-the life of faith, which in the days of the Apostles overcame the world, and in the times of the Reformation again displayed its vitality; but it cannot breathe beneath the air-pump of the Categorical Imperative. All life divine, that the Holy Ghost has ever wakened and nurtured among men, is here resolved into a process of reasonable action, according to fixed laws; and Herder's illustration of the automaton is very true, which moves its limbs with great tact, as if obeying the word of command, but has no particle of a Divine soul in it.

No doubt Kant recognises a God, and a real God, a selfconscious, personal God, and not a mere soul of the world. But when we come to facts, this God of Kant's is too extramundane, too much the God of an hereafter: it would seem as if He existed only for the purpose of future retribution, and till then merely waited as a passive spectator of man's actions. The Kantian God is a strict judge, who holds the balance in the day of judgment; but it is not He who gives the momentum to our present actions. According to Kant, He reaps where He has not sown, and demands without giving the power to meet it. But we have seen that Kant distinctly holds that the knowledge of Divine things is unattainable by man's reason; we might ask, therefore, whether the conviction of our ignorance of Divine things, and of the limited nature of our reason, would not at once lead to the reception of a revelation? You your

self have shewn, we might say, that man with his reason cannot know things Divine; surely, then, we should be doubly thankful to God for having given us the means of knowing that which we never could have known of ourselves. Some Kantists had made this conclusion in order to bring their philosophical system into union with Revelation; but Kant never did so, for the idea of a supernatural revelation, from which they started, belonged, according to him, to the things of which reason knows nothing. Whence, he asked,-quite consequentially, on his own suppositions,-can the mind of man know, that that is really a revelation which announces itself to him as such? What are the sure marks (Kriteria) by which he can recognize such a revelation, by which he can distinguish the true from the false? Where are the limits of the natural and the supernatural,-where does the miracle begin, and nature cease to be nature? Reason has no answer for these questions, and therefore Kant had none. The possibility of a revelation, or of a miracle, can, according to him, be neither proved nor denied upon sure grounds; the essence of religion cannot, therefore, depend on the admission or rejection of them. The moral value of a religious doctrine is, according to Kant, the measure of its truth, and the criterion of every revelation; and he fully granted that among all other religions Christianity answered most clearly to the moral demands of reason, and helped greatly thereto; but beyond his own subjective view it had no claim upon him from without. Yet he did not, as many of his followers have done, merely extol the moral doctrines of Christianity; its historical facts had also their value for him, and therefore the Person of Christ. It was well, he said, that the masses should have an ideal in the historical Redeemer, in whom the purest morality appears realized, and of whom they could lay hold. It is well that, by means of the institution of the Church, we can make that accessible to the masses, which the sage derives from reason without this. The idea of a kingdom of God upon earth, i. e. in Kant's meaning, of a moral union of men for the attainment of the highest moral end, was to him a matter of high import; but then the establishment of religion must be carefully separated from its essence. If a Voltaire scoffed at the Bible, the deeper wisdom of Kant recognized in it an excellent means for the furtherance of moral truths. Let the preacher and popular teacher make this book as useful as they possibly can; but, said Kant, their object is less to fathom the original meaning of the Scriptures (which is the province of the learned theologian) than to explain them according to the existing need of their hearers, even at the hazard of bringing forward something out of them more than what was originally meant. A fatal principle, which has led to the most arbitrary treatment of the Bible, and which lets everything be made from it, provided only that there be a moral to be gathered.

Kant had this also in common with Lessing, that, in opposition to the destructive Neologianism of his day, he still discovered in the old doctrines of the Church, a vein of deep truths, which he wisely counselled to make use of. Hence he endeavoured to bring again into repute certain Church dogmas, which had been thrown over, as being not only opposed to reason, but also to Scripture. Among these was the doctrine of original sin: for he had too deep a knowledge of men to become a visionary like Rousseau, and could not reconcile to himself the philanthropic view, according to which man is by nature good and innocent. Rather, according to Kant, man is by nature a selfish being, thinking only of his own gain and comfort. This, therefore, he called the radical evil; and because goodness is not implanted in man by nature, he must be trained up, and formed, for it. But here Kant's doctrine and the Church doctrine quite part company, since, according to his view, man, in the end, must become that by man, which, according to the Scriptures, he can become only by God.

In summing up what has been said, we can say that Christ, Christianity, the Bible, the Church and its doctrines, were not to Kant, as they were to the common deists, subjects of scoffing and contempt; rather, they continued to him objects of respect, at least objects which he deemed worthy of earnest meditation and careful research. On much he, the master, forbore to decide, his scholars did not hesitate to speak decisively. He would not burden his conscience with the open design of tearing away from the hearts of the people, that religion which formed the support of their morality. He looked on it as a support, but only as a support, as crutches for the lame, as temporary levers for those who as yet could not raise themselves without them. But the religion of the Bible, Christianity, had no voice for him. To him it was no living truth; how then could he impart to others what had no life to himself? All we can say is, that he did not designedly wish to rob others of the religion which had no constraining hold on him. But it was with him as with all destructives, who pull down but build up nothing: he could not hinder the scholars from wandering beyond the point where the master attempted to stand still. If it be a matter of doubt whether Fichte, one of Kant's most able scholars, should have said, that in five years Christianity would have lived itself out; yet there is no doubt that something like was said by other of his scholars. If those who honoured him in moderation compared their teachers to Socrates, his devoted worshippers placed him above our Saviour, or they applied to him the words of creation, God said, "Let there be light," and there arose-the Kantian Philosophy. How Kant repudiated all such idolatry, we have already seen; besides, like all truly great men, he had not the design of attracting a crowd of worshippers about him, but of stirring men's minds. His object, he said, was not to teach his CHRIST. OBSERV. No. 211.

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hearers philosophy, but to philosophize. But how could he command the stream, which was ever more and more overflowing its banks? It may seem strange how a doctrine so apparently dry and abstract as the Kantian, a doctrine which few could follow and understand, has yet attained so great an eminence. Yet so it is. The Kantian system, or the Critical Philosophy, as it is called, leavens the literature of the age, both for good and ill. Unfortunately, while it does service in sweeping away cobwebs and scouring away mud, it breaks down the walls of the august temple, and leaves mankind to shiver in the cold moonlight of Pure Reason.

G.

CALVINISM AND FATALISM.

To the Editor of the Christian Observer.

It is marvellous how long a subject of thought or a system of Philosophy or Theology, may stand before the eye of the world, without their coming to just conceptions about it. If there is any subject which has long and habitually employed the minds not merely of Theologians and Philosophers, but of practical men, who may be supposed to be less under the influence of prejudice, it is that of "Calvinism." And yet how little is real Calvinism understood. A Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, is said to have excused his stout refusal, on every occasion, to give Church preferment to any person suspected of Calvinistic opinions, by affirming that "he could see no reason why a nation of Calvinists should not become a nation of pickpockets ;" and, in explanation of this, to have urged, that a man who is fated to a course of action may justly plead his destiny as his apology for a life of crime. I think it would not be difficult to point to some high Ecclesiastical authorities at the present moment-and those among the most amiable, reasonable and devout of those in high places-who at least touch on the confines of the same mistake. I am tempted to put before your readers a few sentences of a letter which I have just received from a Father in Israel, which refer to this subject:-" Does such a person," he asks, "know, or act upon the knowledge of, the difference. between a Fatalist and a Calvinist ? If he has not thoroughly learned and appreciated the difference, he has read Zeno and Calvin (or his followers) with very little effect indeed, and is quite unable to judge, and unfit to speak upon the subject of Calvinism at all. The fact is, that Christianity, in all its branches, is perfectly original, and has no alliance or affiance to anything Pagan, whether Greek or Turk; and the difference lies in the subordination of means,' of which no such Pagan has the re