expressions as "For me to live is Christ "-"Yet not I but Christ who liveth in me "-would prove that the Apostle Paul was a pantheist; but it is patent that on the doctrines of the Trinity and the Atonement, he has given speculative explanations which differ widely from current orthodoxy. One writer states his position in a few discriminating words :"Schleiermacher knew the experiences of the religious life of the Christian, and he felt a powerful reality in them. In many of his speculations he coincided with Fichte, but feeling with him was a stronger reality than speculation. He believed that philosophy is yet far from attaining its true end; and he drew himself back from it, and retired into the province of Christian experience. This experience he vindicated in his systematic theology with the aid of a fine-drawn and eloquent system of dialectics. On the other hand, the rationalistic tendencies of the day in which Schleiermacher commenced his labors, the style of criticism, too, that then prevailed, his own philosophical studies also, particularly his study of Spinoza, undermined his faith in many points of the orthodoxy that has ever been prevalent in the church. Hence it is that he defended the great doctrines of Christianity, and at the same time abandoned many portions of truth, many parts especially of the historical revelation." For these reasons doubtless he is to be studied with caution. He was a great free-thinker in the best sense of the term. But he is not to be judged rashly. In some respects he was more evangelical than many in his time, and many now, who claim to be orthodox; for he preserved the essential thing the life and spirit of Christianity. The center of his system is Christ; is the Gospel; is the Redemption wrought by the life, death, and Spirit of the Son of God; and he, probably more than any other one mind, has brought back modern theology from the rationalistic to the Christian standpoint, and held it there firmly, and more and more will continue to hold it there. He, like our own Bushnell-though they could not otherwise be compared-had great penetrating thoughts of God, which still are influencing men and all Christian thought and life. He cannot, any more than Bushnell, be put into a theological school-closet. He not only regarded himself as being in God, but as God being in him, working in him, loving him, being joined to him in Christ and moulding him spiritually into the

perfection of Christ, who was human as well as divine. The amazing and all-comprehending truth of the Incarnation-of divine life brought into humanity, and, above all, into the puri fied soul of the believer through the Son of man-was the main truth with him.

We are just beginning to feel the strong tides of his influence in this country, and our Puritan theology is destined to be modified by him much more than it has yet been. He was, in his day, as he said in noble consciousness of himself-"the organ, the mouth-piece of many loving and profound Christian natures, the turning-point of the thoughts and feelings, the joys and sorrows, the doubts and hopes of many noble and pure souls;" and this office he still in some sense fulfills, and in an ever-widening power. Thus he moved men, his country, and his age. It has been said of him, that as the German poet Arndt sought to awaken the German sentiment of nationality in a depressed and down-trodden land, and as Fichte sought to erect again the German reason, so Schleiermacher spoke to the German religious life-to the deepest soul of the German people-to their conception of and hold upon God and divine things. As he was a prophet to the people in the time of their greatest sorrow, need, and fear, so should every true preacher of Christ be, and may be, because the love wherewith Christ loves him is in him, because he has that divine sympathy which is ever ready to console and to suffer with men.

We have dwelt so long upon Schleiermacher that we have but few words for Tholuck, who was, nevertheless, as a preacher, in some respects, a better or more practicable model than Schleiermacher.

FRIEDRICH AUGUST GOTTREU THOLUCK was born March 30, 1799, in Breslau, the birth-place of Schleiermacher. He was the son of a goldsmith and was destined to be himself a goldsmith, but his brightness and love of knowledge caused him to be sent from the gymnasium of his native place to Ber. lin to study the Oriental languages, and through his enthusiasm for these studies he is said at that time to have been as much a Mohammedan as a Christian. He made great proficiency in linguistic pursuits, and became also at this time an ardent believer; so that from his promise as a scholar and his earnestness as a Christian, he began to be regarded by the leaders of

the evangelical party at Berlin, such as Neander and Hengstenberg, as an important ally to their cause; and he was appointed Extraordinary Professor of Theology at Berlin University. He wrote a reply to De Wette on a subject connected with the dominant scepticism then in Germany, and was transferred to Halle, where, in 1826, he was named Ordinary Professor of Theology, for the avowed purpose of combatting the Leibnitz-Wolffian form of rationalism then and there prevailing, whose leaders were Wegscheider and Gesenius. For fifty years he sustained an active conflict in support of evangelical views, and lived to see a great change wrought in the religious opinion both of his own university and of all Germany. He was a fertile writer on theological subjects though not taking the first rank as a scholar. One critic says of him: "His Biblical, historical, and practical writings found a considerable cir- . cle of readers, for they are distinguished for richness of thought, learning and sensibility. In spite of the numerous quotations from Christian and heathen authors, both old and new, they indeed lack true thoroughness; in spite of their orthodox coloring they lack consistency; in spite of their keenness they lack clearness. One seldom loses the feeling that the author fails to comprehend clearly what he means to express. And could this be well otherwise? Theologian of compromise through and through, at the same time belonging to the Romantic and Sceptical schools, Tholuck had in fact wonderful receptivity for everything, but no clear, consistent standpoint. As a preacher in the philosophical mantle of Schleiermacher he still could be claimed by the various schools of theology, while he belonged in substance to none of them wholly." Tholuck died at Halle in the summer of 1877.

ence.

As a preacher, Tholuck perhaps wrought his greatest influ There was a free and almost torrent-flow of emotional thought in his sermons-of thought inspired by an evangelic spirit. He often exhibited an impassioned eloquence which bore the minds and hearts of his hearers along with it. "While," says Prof. Park, " he would be called a memoriter preacher, yet he borrowed so much aid from the extemporaneous method, that it is not always easy to classify him. He would dictate to his amenuensis a sermon on one Sabbath morning between five and seven o'clock; review the sermon at the

same hours on the next Sabbath morning and deliver it at nine o'clock on that very morning. His tenacious memory grasped and held a large part of what he had written, but his sentences as they were uttered received a new wealth of beauty from his rich imagination."*

Although a man of varied learning, Tholuck's sermons, like other German sermons, are simple without show of erudition, and though not without interesting thought, are mainly addressed to the heart rather than the head. As most of his sermons were preached to University students, they are stamped. with that free, fresh style adapted to impress young men. There is nothing dryly scholastic in their method or substance. They are living forms of thought. They are shot through with feeling as if caught from the light of that Cross which he loved to hold up before the eyes of men, and especially of those who were accounted wise.

He also exhibited a sagaciousness, a hard, shrewd knowledge of human nature, which is wonderful in a man devoted so exclusively to scholarly pursuits. The main traits of his preaching, we should say, were individuality, boldness mixed with kindness, dramatic power of the imagination, a pointed and homely style of thought, and a truly evangelic feeling that interfused all, and entered into the core and inmost meaning of the gospel. There are now and then sentences in his sermons which take us into the heart of spiritual truth, and we find ourselves making a stand upon them, revolving them and incorporating them into our own thinking, and almost unconsciously adopting them as principles to regulate our modes of belief. Were it not indeed well for us to infuse something of the spiritual life, and of the heart-glow of Schleiermacher, Tholuck, and the best German preachers from Tauler and Luther down to Palmer of Tübingen, Dorner of Berlin, Kahnis and Luthardt of Leipsic, and a hundred others, where, at the same time, there is no want of vigorous thinking-into our more cold, formal, and rationalistic methods of preaching? Yet we are of the opinion that we should not wholly adopt the German style of sermonizing, and lose sight of the best distinctive traits of the New England pulpit-its nobly thoughtful method and its profound grasp of principles.

* Bib. Sac., vol. xxix., p. 377.

ARTICLE VII.-ORIGIN AND AUTHORITY OF CONGREGATIONAL PLATFORMS.

WE propose to show the origin and authority of Congregational Platforms of Church Government, in order to answer the question:-What force has the Boston Platform in our churches and in the civil courts? Does it stand, in its details, solely on the endorsement of the few honored men whose names are affixed to its Preface? or has it the force and authority of the National Council of our churches? The point is an important one in both its ecclesiastical and legal aspects.

I. THE CAMBRIDGE PLATFORM.

1. Origin. It was early felt that "the churches of New England should have a system of their discipline, extracted from the word of God and exhibited unto them with a more effectual, acknowledged, and established recommendation" than the works of private authors, such as Cotton's Keys, and Rutherford's Survey.* To reach this end "a bill was preferred unto the General Court [of Massachusetts], in the year 1646, for the calling of a synod whereby a 'Platform of Church Discipline,' according to the direction of our Lord Jesus Christ in his blessed word, might most advantageously be composed and published. The magistrates in the General Court passed the bill, but the deputies had their little scruples how far the civil authority might interpose in matters of such religious and ecclesiastical cognizance; and whether scaffolds might not now be raised, by the means whereof the civil authority should pretend hereafter to impose an uniformity, in such instances, which had better be left at liberty and variety." These "little scruples" had the effect of changing "the order for the calling of the intended assembly" to "the form of a motion, and not of a command, unto the churches."+

A Synod, thus convened by a motion of the General Court of Massachusetts, met at Cambridge, in 1646; "sat but fourMagnalia, ii. 209.

*Mather's Magnalia, ii. 209.