man, surmising that a higher hand was at work, rejoined, "Indeed, I have truly come alone, your Highness. Whether it may have pleased the great God to place one of His angels by me in this hour, I know not." The Duke beckoned to him with the hand, and dismissed him with signs of the deepest quaking. He who fears God has nothing else to fear.

KANT'S THEOLOGY.

Ar the period of Kant's manhood, theologians of all confessions, philosophers of divers schools, were speculating and wrangling wildly about Divine and human things. From the very first Kant lifted no lance in this strife. Whilst they were contending together, he first went round the lists, and surveyed the field of battle, and considered whether the ground was firm: next he looked out his weapons, and asked how far these arrows would reach, how deep this sword would cut. In a word, he subjected the powers of his mind anew to the inquiry: What can a man know? how far do the powers of his reason reach ? how far may he trust himself to their help? In his great work, which bears the title, "A Critic of Pure Reason," he mainly proceeds on this inquiry; and the conclusion at which he arrived was this,-that all which lies beyond space and time, lies beyond the forms of our sensible powers of knowledge, and can be, therefore, no object of pure thought. This point, clearly pressed home, served mightily to clip the wings of speculation, and was of true service, inasmuch as it led men to call in their forces which were wasting their strength on what was beyond their ken, and concentrate all their powers upon what was within the range of thought. And who will deny that there was a clearer gain in this acquirement of selfknowledge, this self-limiting of reason, than in all the imaginary conquests of airy and uncertain speculations? The old inscription upon the Temple of Wisdom was retouched anew. "Know thyself,” was again the beaconlight amidst the darkness of dreamy philosophers. Many, therefore, have called Kant a second Socrates, whose knowVOL. XIX. Second Series.

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nothing reached farther than the so-called sophist's skill. But while he did good work in upsetting the exhorbitancies of reason, or rather of the understanding usurping the place of true reason, the mournful part is that he pulled down, but built up nothing; and that if we have got rid of one set of old and worn-out formulas, many, calling themselves by the master's name, have taken up with new formulas no better understood. But let us awhile listen to him, and ask, if we may, what he meant by his philosophy, and what was its application to religion?

When Kant defined that which is within the limits of time and space, as the only object of pure thought, he did not mean that all which was out of these had no real existence, that there was nothing infinite, nothing eternal, beyond time and space. Had this been his philosophy, it were indeed a sorrowful one. All he meant was, that we cannot make things eternal the subjects of human inquiry and learned proof; and therefore, in point of fact, he leaves faith as faith, untouched; although, at the same time, he avoids the expression faith, because he had no right place for it in his system. Consequently he denotes God and immortality to be not articles of faith, but requirements of the practical reason, which he distinguishes from the pure or theoretical reason. Strictly speaking, God and immortality do not admit of proof, but we are led to both from the practico-moral point of view. That which is certain to man, even within the limits of time and space, that is his moral nature, his moral freedom, his will. Now, in this self-determining will, there exists to man the pledge of his immortality, and the evidence that there is a God, a rewarder of good and evil. Man, a free moral agent, carries in himself the call to live conformably to this his moral nature, even there, where his 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 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 yourself have shown, 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 (criteria) by which he can recognise 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