thoughts, words, deeds, that pass under his observation, a more rigid account of what they are, and of their right to be. And yet he is the first poet of his country, and has written passages unsurpassed for true poetic conception, sentiment, and expression, by any living poet, with whose productions we are acquainted, whether in England, France, or Germany. The man wants but faith, faith in the Son of God, to be the glory of his country, and a blessing to his race. But, alas! wanting this, he wants all. His splendid talents, his keen, penetrating insight, his deep and probing thought, his patient study, and his rich and creative genius avail him nothing. May we not take the wail that now and then escapes him as an indication that he himself is not altogether unconscious of this? O, would that he could bow lowly at the foot of the cross, and consecrate himself, his talents and genius, to the service of the Crucified! May the infinite God, whose goodness is over all, and unto all, bestow upon him the inestimable gift of faith, and enable him to worship the God who in the beginning created the heavens and the earth, instead of seeking to make to himself a god from the unconscious energies of Nature!

Mr. Parker is a very different man from Mr. Emerson. We see that he has read much, that he has a burning thirst for knowledge, that he has wit, fancy, imagination, passion, but that he is not their master. They, each by turns, overpower him, and carry him whithersoever they will. He mounts, indeed, the whirlwind, he rides on the tempest, but he does not direct it; it directs him, and whirls and tosses him as it pleases. He, to no inconsiderable extent, sinks himself, and abandons himself to his instinctive nature. But we feel, as we read him, that he is weak. He has no simple grandeur, no quiet strength, no sedate command. His brow is not imperial. He soars not with ease and grace, as one native to the higher regions, on wings fitted to sustain him, and we fear every moment that they will prove insufficient. His conclusions inspire no confidence, for we see he knows not whence he has obtained them, and has come to them simply as borne onward by the winds and clouds of passion. Never does the man stand above his thought and command his speech. He whirls and tosses with all the whirlings and tossings of his discourse, and we feel that he is not one of those great men whose lives serve to "chronicle the ages."

We think it not difficult now to comprehend the essential character of transcendentalism. It exhorts us to sink our

personality, and abandon ourselves to the impersonal soul, the unconscious energy that underlies it. The essential characteristic of personality is reason, and therefore to sink personality is, as we have seen, practically to sink reason itself. If we discard reason, we must also discard will, for will is not simply acting from one's self as subject, nor from one's self as subject to an end; but from one's self as subject propter finem, to an end and on account of it, which is not possible without reason. Eliminate from man, that is, from what comes properly within the definition of man, reason and will, and nothing remains of man but passion, or, if you will, passion and phantasy, or imagination. At most, then, we have for the impersonal nature, on which to fall back, only passion and imagination; for passion and imagination, together with reason and will, are the whole man, all that can be covered, in any sense, by the word man, or by the term human nature. But, in order to be as liberal as possible, we will gratuitously suppose, after reason is discarded, will remains; it can remain only as a simple executive force, for that is all it is at any time. Reason discarded, it can remain on as the executor of the suggestions of passion and imagination. The plain, simple transcendental doctrine, then, is, passion and imagination are superior to reason. Give loose reins to passion and imagination, and your head will be filled with wilder dreams and stranger fancies than if you subject them to the surveillance and restraints of reason; and these dreams and fancies are to be regarded as superior to the dictates of reason, because these are spontaneous and the dictates of reason are personal!

Passion and imagination, or what remains of man, after the elimination of reason,-are precisely what the schoolmen call the inferior soul, and hold to be the seat of concupiscence. What Christian theology calls the superior soul is the rational nature as distinguished from the sensitive soul, or, as termed by some modern psychologists, internal sensibility, or principle of the sentiments or feelings as distinguished from sensations, or perceptions of sense. It has three faculties,-will, understanding, and memory. To make passion and imagination the superior is simply asserting the superiority of the sensitive nature over the rational. The subject now begins to open, and we approach a territory very well known. The distinction contended for is now quite intelligible, and though not properly a distinction between the personal and impersonal, yet a very real distinc

tion, and one not now noted for the first time. It is the distinction which renders possible and intelligible that spiritual conflict which has been noted in all ages, and which every man experiences who undertakes to live a Christian life. The impersonal soul of the transcendentalists is the "carnal mind" of the Sacred Scriptures, the inferior nature, which, according to Christian faith, has been disordered by the fall, and become prone to evil and that continually, that "old man of sin," the seat of all inordinate desires and affections," the flesh," which our religion commands us to "put off," to "mortify with its deeds," and to bring into subjection to the law of Jesus Christ after the inner man. This is what it is, and all that it is, and under these names it is no new acquaintance.

Now, the peculiarity, we cannot say the originality, of transcendentalism consists precisely in declaring the flesh superior to the spirit; this inferior soul, or what Christianity pronounces the inferior soul, superior to the rational soul, or what Christianity declares to be the superior soul; in giving as its higher nature, noble soul, spirit, instinct, spontaneity, the divine in man, to which we are to abandon ourselves, and which we are to take as the infallible revelation of the will of our Maker, and the measure of truth and goodness, this very carnal mind, flesh, corrupt nature, against which the saint wars, which he mortifies, and through his whole life labors incessantly to subdue, to subject to reason and will, healed of the wounds of the fall, elevated and purified by the infusion of supernatural grace. It makes this struggle not only unnecessary, but wrong; and requires us, as the rule of life, to give up reason, and abandon ourselves to the solicitations of the flesh!

The mist now vanishes; and this transcendentalism, which has puzzled so many simple-minded people, becomes as plain and as unmistakable as the nose on a man's face. It has revealed no mystery, has detected no new facts or elements in human nature, but has simply called higher what the Gospel calls lower, that true and good which the Gospel calls false and evil, and vice versa. It would simply liberate us from the restraints of reason, and deliver us to the license of passion and imagination, free us from the struggle, and permit us to follow nature instead of commanding us to crucify it. It merely gives the lie to our blessed Saviour; and where he says, "Deny thyself," it says, "Obey thyself." It ridicules the notion, that a holy life must be a life of in

cessant warfare against one's self, and teaches that we are to gain heaven by swimming with the current, not against it; a pleasant doctrine, and, if universally adopted and acted on, would, no doubt, produce some effects.

People who do not believe much in the modern doctrine of progress, and who are not aware that we live in the age of light, may be strongly inclined to believe that we misrepresent the transcendentalists; but they should bear in mind that it was foretold thousands of years ago, that tere would come a race of men who would call the churl liberal, evil good, and bitter sweet. The doctrine we charge upon the transcendentalists is but a necessary logical inference from the principles they lay down in the passages we have quoted from their writings. Absolute religion and morality are, we presume, the highest expression of truth and goodness; and absolute religion and morality, Mr. Parker tells us, are "religion as it exists in the facts of man's nature," "what answers exactly to the religious sentiment." By sentiment, we presume also, he means sentiment, for he so calls it, defines it to be a want, and distinguishes it from cognition, discursive reason, and volition; if a sentiment, then a fact of the sensitive or inferior soul, which is the seat or principle of all the sentiments, whether good or bad. If absolute religion and morality answer exactly to the religious sentiment, or if that which answers exactly to the religious sentiment is absolute religion and morality, then the sensitive soul is their measure, and then the measure of truth and goodness.

The transcendentalists, moreover, claim to be spiritualists, and they call their doctrine spiritualism. Their impersonal soul, it is well known, they term spirit, and distinguish, on the one hand, from reason, and on the other from external sense. They pretend to have detected here an element in man, or a faculty of man's soul, which is overlooked by the rationalists and the materialists, as also by the supernaturalists, whom Mr. Parker classes with the materialists. This element or faculty is the principle of their doctrine, and that which characterizes their school. In their view it transcends reason and external sense, and hence their name of transcendentalists. They are pneumatici, differing from those of the old Gnostic stamp only in claiming for all men what the old Gnostics claimed for merely a select few.

Now strike out reason and external

VOL. VI-8

sense, and you have

nothing left of man but this very sensitive soul to which you can possibly apply the term spirit; for these and it are the whole man. Therefore the transcendentalists must mean this, if they mean any thing, by the spirit; for there is nothing else in man they can mean.

That they do mean this is evident enough from the fact that they deny the necessity, nay, the propriety, of strug gling against it. There is, as most men know, an internal opposition between the rational soul and the sensitive, and in order to be virtuous, it is generally held that we should make the latter yield to the former; but this the transcendentalists deny.

"In some men," says Mr. Parker, "religion is a continual growth. They are always in harmony with God. Silently and unconscious, erect as a palm-tree, they grow up to the measure of a man. To them reason and religion are of the same birth. They are born saints, the aborigines of heaven. Betwixt their idea of life and their fact of life there has at no time been a gulf. But others join themselves to the armada of sin, and get scarred all over with wounds as they do thankless battle in that leprous host. Before these men become religious, there must be a change, -well defined, deeply marked-a change that will be remembered. The saints who have been sinners-tell us of the struggle and desperate battle that goes on between the flesh and the spirit. It is as if the devil and the archangel contended. Well says John Bunyan, 'The devil fought with me weeks long, and I with the devil.' To take the leap of Niagara, and stop when half-way down, and by the proper motion reascend, is no slight thing, nor the remembrance thereof like to pass away. The passage from sin to salvation, this second birth of the soul, as both Christians and heathens call it, is one of the many mysteries of man. Two elements meet in the soul. There is a negation of the past; an affirmation of the future. Terror and hope, penitence and faith, rush together, and a new life begins."-Discourse, p. 151.

This, though vaguely expressed, is intelligible enough. It evidently recognizes no corrupt nature to be warred against, and by the help of divine grace reduced to subjection. Many never know any struggle at all; and those who are subjected to a momentary struggle, in consequence of past misbehaviour, have to struggle, not against their own nature, but simply against their past deeds. The sin is simply in the fact that there is a gulf between their fact of life and their idea of life, that is, a discrepancy between the actual and the ideal. The sinner is one who has not realized his ideals. The wrong is entirely in the fact that his actual conduct does not satisfy or please himself. Let him leap