No

things but that from which they suffer is the deplorable fact, that such habits of thought as we have been deprecating are to be found within the Church. This however is a fact for which no one will account the DUBLIN REVIEW responsible. The practical question which we have had to consider is, whether souls receive greater injury from the utterance of vehement protest against anti-Catholic habits of thought, than would result if such habits were allowed to exercise their poisonous influence unchallenged and unchecked. We confess ourselves surprised that, among good Catholics, there can have been any hesitation on the true answer to this question. one e.g. will doubt (to take the first instance which occurs to our mind out of the thousand presented by ecclesiastical history) that very serious injury accrued to souls, from the protests against Nestorius's teaching which the orthodox members of his flock so energetically and clamorously issued. But still less will any Catholic question, that this injury was as nothing, when compared with the awful disasters which must have ensued, had the heresy been allowed to run a long course without exposure and opposition. Yet neither in the case of Nestorianism nor in any other which can be named is the connection more manifest (in most cases it is less manifest) between evil doctrine and spiritual calamity, than in the instance of that particular heretical tendency which we have been considering throughout this article.

We do not for a moment forget that, in this instance as in others, an individual's pious instincts may, and very often do, indefinitely neutralize the legitimate results of anti-Catholic doctrine: and what we are going to say, must be entirely understood with this explanation. But it is indubitable that there is a certain moral pestilence called "worldliness"; nor do we see how on reflection good men can doubt that, so far as it exists among Catholics, it has a most intimate connection with these unorthodox views of doctrine. If piety is based, as on its very foundation, on a practical appreciation of the importance respectively attributable to things temporal and things eternal, then the spiritual evil of even modified (religious) liberalism is very serious. We have been enforcing prominently in our present article, as is especially the province of a public writer, the calamitous influence of that evil principle on the Church's practical action. But no less heavy and no less well grounded an accusation may be brought against it, on the ground of its intrinsic tendency towards corrupting and degrading the individual soul.

ART. II.-INDIAN THEISM.

1. The Brahmo Somaj Vindicated. Being the substance of a Lecture delivered extempore at the Calcutta Brahmo Somaj Hall, 18th April, 1863. Second edition. Calcutta. 1868.

2. A Defence of Brahmoism and the Brahmo Somaj.* Being a Lecture delivered in Midnapore Somaj Hall on the 21st June, 1863. Midnapore. 1863.

3. Jesus Christ; Europe and Asia. Being the substance of a Lecture delivered extempore in the theatre of the Calcutta Medical College, on Saturday, 5th May, 1866. Third edition. Calcutta. 1869.

4. Great Men. Being the substance of a Lecture delivered extempore at the Town Hall, Calcutta, on the 28th September, 1866. Calcutta. 1868. 5. A Brief History of the Calcutta Brahmo Somaj, from January, 1830, the Date of its Foundation, to December, 1867. Calcutta. 1868.

6. Regenerating Faith. Being the substance of a Sermon preached on the occasion of the Thirty-eighth Anniversary of the Brahmo Somaj, or Theistic Church in India, on Friday, 24th January, 1868. Calcutta. 1868.

7. Deism and Theism; or, Rationalism and Faith. Written on the occasion of the Thirty-ninth Anniversary of the Brahmo Somaj, Saturday, the 23rd January, 1869. Calcutta. 1869.

8. The Future Church. Being the substance of a Lecture delivered on the occasion of the Thirty-ninth Anniversary of the Brahmo Somaj, in the Town Hall, Calcutta, on Saturday, the 23rd January, 1869. Calcutta. 1869.

N a previous article on the Religious Tendencies of India,† we endeavoured to trace the effects of English literature and English education on the people of India generally, and indirectly on the position and prospects of Christian missions, both Catholic and Protestant. The conclusions which we arrived at were that the old conditions of missionary success are rapidly becoming obsolete; that even now Rationalism, Deism, and Materialism are greater obstacles to conversions in India than caste or Hindoo superstitions; that while the force of the latter is visibly declining, that of the former is as visibly on the increase; that Protestantism has long since effected a change of front, and adapted its operations to the new state of religious opinions, so that its ill success

The vernacular words are variously rendered into English either as Brahma Samaj, Brahma Sumaj, or Brahmo Somaj. The former is the most correct, the latter the most common. The pamphlets enumerated adopt sometimes one, sometimes another method of orthography. To avoid confusion we have preferred invariably to follow the more common form.

+ No. 26, October, 1869.

is mainly due to its own deficiencies and inconsistencies; while Catholicity, chiefly in consequence of the impediments and disadvantages under which it has laboured, has hitherto failed to make any adequate appeal to the educated and semi-educated classes. We also gave an account of the Brahmo Somaj, or Theistic Church, a body which, though only numbering some 2,000 adherents, has attracted great attention from its forming an organized nucleus, more or less sympathized with by scores of thousands of unattached Theists throughout the country.

On the present occasion we propose to devote our attention more exclusively to the character of Indian Theism, and the principles which the followers of the Brahmo Somaj (the only Theists who attempt to state and systematize any positive principles) profess to have adopted. Were it our object merely to classify and analyze the opinions of a numerically small section of an Oriental community, it might reasonably be maintained that the subject is worthy of the attention of all religious people in this country, more emphatically so when the section in question is entirely the creation of English rule and education; but we may also base our claim as to the importance of the subject on more general grounds than this. Theism in India is in many respects only an anticipation of a phase of opinion which is every day becoming more and more predominant in European countries, a state of things for which Catholics in England as well as on the Continent must prepare themselves. We lay no claim to originality in enforcing this argument. The illustrious American convert, Dr. Brownson, insisted many years ago on the urgency of adapting controversy to meet the Rationalistic and Deistic point of view, instead of almost exclusively the Protestant; but there is so much in the present state of religious parties in England, and even abroad, to concentrate the energies of Catholics on converting, or at least confuting Christian heresy in its more positive forms, that it cannot be inexpedient to draw attention from time to time to the fact that though anti-Catholicism is and will be as rampant as ever, the day of Protestantism as a doctrinal system is at an end, and in controversy with the better educated classes at least, we must be prepared to rest no argument ad hominem on any Christian principle or doctrine as such.

Indian Theism suffers, it is true, under one disqualification for being accepted as a specimen of what will one day be the chief opponent of the Catholic Church elsewhere, in that many of its ideas and opinions are stamped with national and Hindoo origin;

* An article on the subject appeared in a recent number of the "British Quarterly Review," to which we referred in our last article. Since then the Contemporary Review" of February has devoted an article to this society, under the heading "Indian Theism and its Relation to Christianity."

that it is greatly influenced by Hindoo traditions, even where it professes to have discarded and condemned them. But to counterbalance this, it offers an advantage for purposes of analysis which can be found in perhaps no other country at the present day; viz., that its adherents, while educated in the intellectual atmosphere of modern sciences and civilization, have not been educated in Christianity, and consequently have not abandoned or turned away from it-it is hardly too much to say have never even been confronted with it in its most rational and consistent form.

We must endeavour, even at the risk of appearing to be discursive, to justify the importance which we attach to this distinction. It is almost self-evident that it is not the proximity of a person's opinions to the doctrines of the Catholic Church, but the moral attitude of his intellect, which renders his conversion more or less hopeful and his state of mind relatively more or less acceptable to God. An Evangelical who, on the occasion of some doctrinal controversy among his own party, asks himself whether, after all, it is not more conformable to Scripture and reason to admit a final and authoritative judge of controversy, and sincerely follows up the train of thought thus aroused, is probably much nearer the truth than an Anglo-Catholic who prays to the Saints, goes to confession, and talks of the undivided Church of the first eight centuries, but at the same time eagerly fraternizes with the disloyal members of the Roman obedience, and hunts up, with almost feverish anxiety, any fact or fiction tending to its disadvantage. Still the human mind, when in a state of inquiry and doubt, generally accepts principles or truths gradually, requires to realize one truth before it is able to build upon it the others which properly follow from it it is found therefore in a country like England at the present day, where almost every one is trained to accept Christianity in some shape or other when young, that those who use their free will to give play to the better promptings of their intellect, are drawn on to sympathize with the more dogmatic forms of Protestantism until they are brought face to face with Catholicity; while those who listen favourably to the arguments which eventually land the mind in unbelief, become at an early stage latitudinarians. Hence, though it by no means follows that all Anglo-Catholics (as they are called) are on the way to the Church, the converse may be maintained as approximately true, that most persons on their way to the Church first become Anglo-Catholics, and, as a consequence, a tendency naturally arises among Catholics to regard those who hold High Church opinions as almost the only promising subjects for conversion, an impression which may be not unfounded now in England, but which is very incorrect if accepted in the abstract, or applied to other countries not similarly circumstanced, and which exercises an unfortunate tendency to restrict VOL. XIV.—NO. XXVIII. [New Series.]

the efforts of the best Catholic writers to only one among many important branches of controversy.

It has often been said, as for instance by Dr. Newman in the Apologia," "that there is no medium in true philosophy between Atheism and Catholicity, and that a perfectly consistent mind, under those circumstances in which it finds itself here below, must embrace either the one or the other."* On the other hand, it is also frequently held by Catholics that Deism is a consistent form of belief these apparently contradictory opinions seem to us to be both of them perfectly true and reconcilable. Two radically opposed sets of intellectual principles are constantly appealing to every individual, the one predisposing him to accept, the other to reject divine truth. If a person yields himself to the influence of the former, his bias is to accept the most affirmative form of religion which is practically presented to him, provided its foundation is sufficiently reasonable. If, however, he abandons himself a prey to the latter influence, his bias is to the most negative form of religion which he finds current around him. Opinions on religious problems may, we think, be broadly divided into four great classes. 1. Total scepticism, or non-theism.† 2. Belief in a God and natural religion. 3. Belief in a supernatural revelation. 4. Belief in a divinely-commissioned institution, the custodian and judge of a revelation. Each of these classes may, of course, be subdivided into many sections. Now we most strongly insist on the truth of the principle that the very same kind of arguments, the same train of thought, which lead a man to prefer Theism to scepticism should also predispose him to believe in the existence of a revelation; and again, when consistently carried forward, to accept the claim of an institution to be the custodian and judge of revelation. The evidence varies, no doubt, in degree and cogency, in its different details, but the total effect of it is approximately the same in each case. To any one who is prepared to concede this, it is evident that a man may consistently remain a Theist if not fairly confronted with a revelation which, like Christianity, can be reasonably advocated; but if perfectly honest and consistent, his constant attitude towards revelation should be that of the ancient Patriarchs towards the Messiah,-he should feel his own state to be one of imperfection and unsatisfied want, and a revelation to have, at the least, a strong antecedent probability in its favour.

Now an English Theist has almost invariably fallen from a more dogmatic form of religion to his present position; he has usually

* Page 322.

This is what Dr. Newman no doubt means by Atheism. Atheism, as conveying a positive conclusion that there is no God, is very rare, and glaringly unreasonable.