them in favor of a supernatural order, you attempt to impeach them by making them testify in favor of what is not. If you believe them, you must believe with us; if you disbelieve them, you must still believe with us,-for then, according to your own principles, you have no authority for believing otherwise. You, as well as we, are bound to presume the documents are authentic; then they must receive a transcendental interpretation, and then they prove transcendentalism, and you must be transcendentalists on their authority, if on no other. Would you be guilty, or have us guilty, of the absurdity, of the blasphemy, of making them testify to what is false or absurd? This is a fair specimen of the mode in which the author of the work before us reasons in regard to the Bible, and is but a simple statement of the exegetical canon he adopts in its interpretation. The force of the argument lies solely in the assumption that there is no supernatural order, which is false, if there be a God; and its beauty consists in assuming the truth of transcendentalism, and then gravely concluding that the Scriptures, for instance, if authentic, must be so interpreted as to teach it, and, if they teach it, those who believe them must believe it. This is what may be called transcenden tal logic, and certainly transcends all the author of the Organon ever thought of commending.

But, after all, transcendentalists must sustain their interpretation of the documents and monuments of religion either by an appeal to the divine and supernatural, or by an appeal to the human and natural. If by the former, they concede what they deny and wish to disprove; if by the latter, they are refuted by the very authority to which they appeal. The human and natural must be collected from their operation; for, so far as inoperative, they are, so far as their authority is concerned, as if they were not. Then, after the divine and supernatural, the assent of the race must be the best and most authoritative exponent of what is human and natural; for it is only in the race that we have a full view of the human and natural in operation. But the race does not sustain the transcendentalists; it agrees, whether believing or not believing, that the sense of the documents and monuments relates to the supernatural. Then the transcendentalists must abandon their interpretation, as contradicted by the only authority on which they can rely for sustaining it. Then they must admit the supernatural order; then supernatural revelation; then positive religious institutions; and

then the Catholic Church; or impeach the documents. This latter alternative is out of the question, as they themselves admit, by their effort to explain them in accordance with naturalism. Then nothing remains for them, if they do not wish to write themselves down what Dogberry wished to be written down, to confess that they have been chasing their own shadow, and to beg God to forgive their folly and absurdity, and to receive them as humble postulants at the door of his church.

We

We have now gone through with what we proposed to say on Transcendentalism, or latest form of Infidelity. have said all we have judged to be necessary to enable our readers to understand its essential character, and all that can be requisite for its refutation. It can hardly be expected that what we have said will have much influence on confirmed transcendentalists themselves; but we trust in God that it may serve to put those who are as yet unbitten on their guard, and make our readers generally more suspicious of the novel principles of modern literature and philosophy. The danger is not, that any man with his eyes open will espouse transcendentalism, when fully developed, and dressed in its own robes; but that specious principles which imply it may be imbibed by well-meaning individuals before suspecting the fatal consequences they involve. In fact, all modern philosophy and literature are more or less tinctured with transcendentalism, and we find not unfrequently traces of it where we are not only sorry to find them, but where we little expected them. The enemy has sown its principles broadcast over the modern world, and they rarely fail to spring up, and flourish, and bear their poisonous fruit. One hardly knows when he is safe in accepting any view or doctrine of a more recent date than the reformation. Let no man fancy, because he can laugh at the absurdity of transcendentalism, when full grown, and displaying itself in all its deformity, absurdity, and impiety, that he is in no danger of countenancing it. Even while laughing, he may find that he is sustaining principles which logically imply it.

But, after all, what is the real sum and substance of transcendentalism, this latest and noblest birth of Time, as its friends regard it, and from which we are promised the universal palingenesia of man and nature,-what is it, when reduced to its simple, positive teachings? We have been led through tomes of metaphysical lore; we have been allured by brilliant promises of a recovered Éden; we have been flat

tered by glowing descriptions of our godlike powers, affinities, and tendencies; we have been transported by the assurance that we may dispense with priests, prophets, intercessors, and mediators, and of ourselves approach the Infinite One face to face, and drink our supply at the primal Fountain of Truth itself; but now, having lingered till the ascending sun has exhaled the dewdrops and exhausted the gems and precious stones which sparkled in rich profusion at our feet, what is the real and positive value of what has so long detained and charmed us? Things are what they are; man is what he is, and by a right use of his faculties may be, do, and know all he can be, do, and know. So far as we are wise, good, and loving, so far we have and know wisdom, goodness, love; and so far as we have and know wisdom, goodness, love, we have and know God, in so far as he is wisdom, goodness, love. He who knows more of these knows more than he who knows less. If the possession of wisdom, goodness, love, be inspiration, then he who has the most wisdom, goodness, love, is the most inspired,—and to be more inspired, he must get more wisdom, goodness, love. To be more inspired, he must be more inspired. If white be white, then white is white; if black be black, then what is black is black; if two be two, then two are two. Or, in two grand formulas from Mr. Parker, "Goodness is goodness," and "Be good and do good," and you will be good and do good! If this is not the whole of transcendentalism, when divested of its denials, its blasphemy, and its impiety, and reduced to its simple dogmatic teaching, then we have given days, weeks, months, and years, to its study to no purpose. Stated in plain and simple terms, it is the veriest commonplace imaginable. It is merely "much ado about nothing," or "a tempest in a teapot." Dressed up in the glittering robes of a tawdry rhetoric, or wrapped in the mystic folds of an unusual and unintelligible dialect, it may impose on the simple and credulous; but to attempt to satisfy one's spiritual wants with it is as vain as to attempt to fill one's self with the east wind, or to warm one's freezing hands on a cold winter's night by holding them up to the moon. Yet its teachers are the great lights of this age of light, before whom all the great lights of past times pale as the stars before the sun. Men and women, through some mistake not in a lunatic hospital, run after them with eagerness, hang with delight on their words, and smack their lips as if feeding on honey. Our Protestant populations, on whom the sun of the refor

mation shines in its effulgence, are moved, run towards their teaching, and are about to hail it as the Tenth Avatar come to redeem the world. Wonderful teachers! Wonderful populations! Wonderful age!

In conclusion; while surveying the mass of absurdities and impieties heaped together under the name of transcendentalism, and which attract so many, and even some of our own friends, whose kindness of heart, whose simple manners, and whose soundness of judgment on all other subjects command our love and esteem, we have been forcibly struck with the utter impotence of human reason to devise a scheme which reason herself shall not laugh to scorn. As often as man has attempted of himself alone to build a tower which should reach to heaven, or to connect by his own skill and labor the earthly with the celestial, and make a free and easy passage from one to the other, the Lord has derided his impotent efforts, confounded his language, and made confusion more confused. Uniform failure should teach us the folly of the attempt, and lead us to ask, if it be not the highest reason to bow to the divine reason, and the most perfect freedom to have no will but the will of God. "O Israel! thou destroyest thyself; in me is thy help."

PROTESTANTISM ENDS IN TRANSCEN-
DENTALISM.*

[From Brownson's Quarterly Review for July, 1846.]

We have no intention of reviewing at length the book the title of which we have just quoted. Indeed, we have read it only by proxy. We have heard it spoken of in certain literary circles as a remarkable production, almost as one of the wonders of the age. The Protestant lady who read it for us tells us that it is a weak and silly book, unnatural in its scenes and characters, coarse and vulgar in its language

*Margaret, a Tale of the Real and Ideal, Blight and Bloom, including Sketches of a Place not before described, called Mons Christi. Boston:

1846.

VOL. VI-8

and details, wild and visionary in its speculations; and, judging from the portions here and there which we actually have read, and from the source whence it emanates, we can hardly run any risk in endorsing our Protestant friend's criticism. The author is a man not deficient in natural gifts; he has respectable attainments; and makes, we believe, a tolerably successful minister of the latest form of Protestantism with which we chance to be acquainted; though, since we have not been introduced to any new form for several months, it must not be inferred from the fact that we are acquainted with no later form, that none later exists.

So far as we have ascertained the character of this book, it is intended to be the vehicle of certain crude speculations on religion, theology, philosophy, morals, society, education, and matters and things in general. The Mons Christi stands for the human heart, and Christ himself is our higher or instinctive nature, and if we but listen to our own natures, we shall at once learn, love, and obey all that our Blessed Redeemer teaches. Hence, Margaret, a poor, neglected child, who has received no instruction, who knows not even the name of her Maker, nor that of her Saviour, who, in fact, has grown up in the most brutish ignorance, is represented as possessing in herself all the elements of the most perfect Christian character, and as knowing by heart all the essential principles of Christian faith and morals. The author seems also to have written his work, in part at least, for the purpose of instructing our instructors as to the true method of education. He appears to adopt a very simple and a very pleasant theory on the subject, one which cannot fail to commend itself to our young folks. Love is the great teacher; and the true method of education is for the pupil to fall in love with the tutor, or the tutor with the pupil, and it is perfected when the falling in love is mutual. Whence it follows, that it is a great mistake to suppose it desirable or even proper that tutor and pupil should both be of the same sex. This would be to reverse the natural order, since the sexes were evidently intended for each other. This method, we suppose, should be called learning made easy, or nature displayed, since it would enable us to dispense with school-rooms, prefects, text-books, study, and the birch, and to fall back on our natural instincts. These two points of doctrine indicate the genus, if not the species, of the book, and show that it must be classed under the general head of transcendentalism. If we could allow ourselves