Nitzsch or Ullmann, will find it here in substance reproduced. Many individual eccentricities of a minor nature may be left to slumber undisturbed; and we will not make Dr. Rothe, who writes as none but a devout and fervent Christian could do, the scapegoat for the aberrations which, in some form or other, seem to cleave to his whole nation.

We resist the temptation to enter on Dr. Rothe's discussion of Virtue. He departs in his classification of this entirely from Schleiermacher, and is particularly full on the different shades of both virtue and vice. There is much ingenuity, but also much over-refining; and the German language, with its cumbrous evolutions, can hardly be made to move swiftly enough through its permutations and combinations to satisfy the requisitions of this inquiry.

Nor do we linger on his treatment of the Duties, over which, when he unyokes the fire-horse of his speculation, he travels with great deliberation and minuteness, giving many pleasing and some profound glimpses of human nature, and settling, with much good sense and freshness of Christian feeling, the different cases of conscience that arise in this department. There is in this whole range of discussion very ample honour done to Scripture by a frequent and judicious citation of its moral rules; and the whole is enlivened by extracts from other practical moralists, such as Reinhard, De Wette, Hirscher, Marheineke, and others. Most of the controverted questions which agitated the minds of the more intelligent German public before the late revolution, are touched upon; and we hardly know a book where so much insight is indirectly given into the whole of those perplexed relations in Church and in State which nothing but that revolution could have swept clear. We heartily sympathize with the liberalism of Dr. Rothe, political and religious, since he shews himself greatly ahead of his fellow-theologians, many of whom are still groaning over that catastrophe; and though in much we also differ, and especially in his leading view, that the Church may now sink back into retirement, and give the reins of the moral government of the world into the hands of the State, in this we find a sound view at bottom, viz., that the direct influence of the Church upon the world, through its feudal forms, must now cease, and that it must rather guide the State by silent impulse than by organized authority.

Dr. Rothe laments, in the preface to his last volume, that it had fallen on evil times, and that much of it was already out of date. The revolution of 1848 occurred in March, and it was published in April. This might perhaps have been taken as a gentle hint to German professors to abridge their introductions, to cut down their formulas, and to find their way as speedily as

Future Harmony of Ethics and Christianity.

317 possible into the pith and marrow of a practical science, that their books, after many years' gestation, might not be born a day too late. But we also admire the courage evinced by such a step. It reminds us of Hegel carrying the manuscript of his Phenomenology under his arm through the streets of Jena to his bookseller's, amidst the cannonade of the great battle; or of the Noli turbare circulos meos of the Greek geometer when Syracuse was taken. And Dr. Rothe may take heart of grace. The writers of other laboured and ponderous volumes for many years before were then reaping the fruits of them; and whatever Dr. Rothe has contributed to the sum of human knowledge and improvement, and we think he has contributed something in his close, hard-packed, but, after all, not ungenial work,-will also find its day. We will back the schoolmaster yet with his primer against the soldier with his bayonet; and the philosopher, with his closely written manuscript under his arm, against the sansculotte behind the barricades. Revolution may disturb the sand on which the thinker has expressed his diagrams; but they body themselves forth in other forms, and at length imprint themselves on the institutions of the world. This is as true of Christian science as of all other. Here, too, the weighty saying of one of the fathers holds good," Tradidit mundum disputationi." Its grave and pathetic music, sounding through all history, may well cheer the heart of the solitary inquirer, as he traces the point where the knots and complications of human things that cannot be untied must be cut asunder, and marks out the channel in which reforms and revolutions must flow, if they are to be salutary and permanent.

We have dwelt thus long on these German speculations partly for their own interest, partly that it may be seen how inevitable is the coincidence of natural and Christian ethics when a spirit of inquiry is sufficiently awakened, and partly that we may help to evoke this slumbering spirit in our own country. Our past history in Britain proves that neither speculative ability nor learning need fail; and our forms of life and society are more varied, animated, and fertile than those of Germany, so as to supply richer materials for observation and inquiry. Our growing Christianity certainly requires such an effort to be made, and may hope, by the vigorous and concentrated action of its most earnest and enlarged minds, to master the highest seats of our literature, philosophy, and legislation. Far be it from us, indeed, to make the progress of Christianity dependent on such an auxiliary. Our evangelical Christianity has revived and struggled upward amid the contempt or hostility of our philosophical authorities; and it will make its way still, not by being clothed in the armour of system, but in the might of its own

and liberty. The sun breaks forth from the darkness, and the rainbow revisits the sky, without waiting for any Newtonian theory of optics; and so this leaven will leaven the lump, this grain of mustard-seed expand without any laws of chemistry or vegetable physiology. But it is true, nevertheless, that though life goes before theory, there is a reaction of theory upon life; and that thus a scientific review of the wants and tendencies of our moral nature, and of the Christian provisions for them, may exert a most important influence on our entire civilisation. In this issue Philosophy and Christianity shall alike rejoice; Philosophy, because she sees one of her branches which has always been dwarfed and abortive engrafted upon a more vigorous stock, "to partake its root and fatness;" and Christianity, because she has appropriated to herself a long alienated province of human knowledge, and has enriched it with her abundance. Thus, too, the crown shall be put on our apologetic literature. The felt and demonstrated might of Christianity to transform the world will be her best defence. In her adaptation to man's deepest and truest nature, when the superincumbent mass of depravity is cleared away, she will appear to be, indeed, "as old as the creation," and to be to human history what the Nile is to Egypt, rising in mysterious sources above it, running through its entire length, and while holding on her own heaven-descended course to a wider ocean, sending off innumerable streams through all the inlets of private and public life, to give impulse and advancement to all that contributes to the perfection of society.

Rome and the Italian Revolution.

319

ART. II.-1. Raccolta degli Scritti Politici di Massimo D'Azeglio, con aggiunte e note. Pp. 558. Torino, 1850.

2. Lo Stato Romano dall' Anno 1815 all Anno 1850. Per LUIGI CARLO FARINI. Tomi i. e ii. Pp. 806. Torino, 1850. 3. Scritti Politici di Giuseppe Mazzini. Firenze, 1848-9. 4. Delle Cinque Piaghe della Santa Chiesa: Trattato dedicato al Clero Cattolico, di Antonio Rosmini. Pp. 223. Perugia, 1849,

5. Giornale di Roma. Anni 1849-1850.

WE might fill pages with the names of books and pamphlets which the press of Italy has been pouring out for the last three years on the fruitful subject of Italian Reform. Politics have formed the great and engrossing subject of popular attraction, while the political revolution which has swept over Italy, from Susa to Trapani, has not left untouched her religion and her church. Even supposing that things should settle down again into the old status quo, the Peninsula has at least been ventilated. Abuses have been brought into the light of day that men might look on them, reforms have been effected, constitutions have been granted, the war of independence has been waged, the temporal power of the Head of the Catholic Church has been overturned, the flags of two Republics have waved on the Capitol, and Rome has been nearly eighteen months without a Pope. During this exciting period of political reform and political reaction, when constitutions have been made and unmade, and hopes and fears have alternated, not only the principles of state policy, but great religious questions have been discussed with a boldness and freedom unknown for three centuries in Italy. It must be admitted that the Italian press, during the short period when it was truly free, exceeded all ordinary bounds of liberty, and when the pent-up waters broke forth, they threatened to sweep away more than despotism and superstition. In the first rapture of its emancipation, wondering to find itself free, the press rushed at once. into all the great questions which had been so suddenly brought down from the palace to the piazza, and truly made wild work of it for a time. The people were the new masters to be served and flattered, and served and flattered they were, as if the "divinity that hedged a king," according to the old theory, had passed at once to the many-headed sovereign.

"Tam ficti pravique tenax quam nuntia veri,"

the daily press, especially during the heat of the war of indepen

dence, indulged in outrageous attacks on persons and parties, and trumped up its false reports for crowds of eager and excited politicians, on the principle of the Spanish proverb, that "if a lie should only last an hour, still it is worth the telling." But all Italy was then in a fever, and it is obviously unfair to apply the rules which guide the staid and sober journalism of constitutional countries, to a people-above all an Italian people—in the very heat of their struggle against that oppression which proverbially maketh even wise men mad. Advantage has been taken of such abuses, but notwithstanding, the return to absolutism cannot undo all that has been done so as to leave no trace of the Revolution behind. The principles long before at work beneath the surface of Italian society, have been brought out into an open trial of their strength. Instead of Carbonari conspiracies, fermenting secretly and breaking out at different times and places, in such partial insurrections as those of Naples in 1820, and of Central Italy in 1831, there has been a great national struggle. The absolute, the constitutional, the democratic, have each made proof of their power. The liberal education of the people, or the teaching of the priests and the Jesuits; commerce free from its restrictions, or limited by the exclusive and protective laws of the Dogana; the freedom of the subject, or the espionage of the police; the liberty of the press, or the censorship of the government and the clergy; religious toleration, or the Dominican inquisition; the equality of all in the face of the law, or the clerical immunities of the middle ages; the empire of established laws, or the absolute authority of the sovereign; all these have been brought into contrast and conflict, and if the Sanfedists have prevailed, at least all is not lost. From the more enlightened northern provinces down to the remote Calabria, where

"Non giunge peregrin se non smarrito,"

ideas have made their way. Even Naples cannot forget the 29th of January and the 15th of May, the constitution given to the crowded Toledo, and the massacre by which it was nullified. The press of Tuscany has sustained, in spite of fines and suspensions, a firm opposition to the reaction that has swept away the constitution to which her rulers were sworn. Rome has made bitter proof of her idolized Pope, and learned the full value of a Papa-Rè. The Austrian provinces have taught their imperial mistress that to retain her hold on Italy she needs something more than the terrors of her carcere duro; a nation cannot be sent to Spielberg. If the Revolution had done nothing more, it has at least left Piedmont "practising and prospering" under a constitutional regime, and maintaining her place as a model state