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signed to oblivion . The conjectures and doubts of Semler respecting both the Bible itself and the most ancient works of the Christian Fathers were never generally adopted , and though the genuineness of several of the bodks of the New Testament has been called in question , none of them have bfeeii impeached on sufficient grounds , except the Epistle to the Hebrews , "which even the ancient church rejected as not having proceeded from the Apostle Paul . On the other hand , systematic Rationalism , that of Rohr and Weg-
scheider , has been adopted indeed , but only by the minority of theologians ; while the opinions of the fourth class have acquired for themselves a permanent footing amongst the majority , and their prevalence , not onl y among the clergy but also the laity , may be regarded as the decided result or the theological investigations of the last eighty years . The class of blind zealots for every thing which the symbolical books contain—doctrines not capable of proof from Scripture ana repugnant to reason—the class in which are found the denunciators of all rational theology , is every day becoming more insignificant , arid must by degrees die out . "—Pp . 45 , et seq .
After this clear and candid statement we trust that no one , who has any regard for his own character , will repeat Mr . Rose ' s accusations of a denial of the divine authority of Christianity against the great body of German theologians . Dr . Bretsehneider , who , from his station and experience , must know the fact better than one who has travelled hastily through the country , conversing of course by preference , where he could find them , with those
blind zealots whose race is becoming extinct , assures us , that the class which comprehends the majority of the present German clergy , admits an agency of God in the revelation of Christianity , different from his ordinary Providence , that is , they are not antisupernaturalists . This information will be very unwelcome to those who would fain persuade men that faith and reason cannot be conciliated . We trust , however , that their love of truth
will get the better in this instance of their hatred of reason , and that they will not persist in reiterating charges , advanced by a writer who could have no means of knowing their accuracy , and denied by one who has had the best opportunity of ascertaining their falsehood . We subjoin Dr . Bretschneider ' s concluding remarks : " We forgive Mr . Rose , as an Englishman , his inconsiderate attacks on so many respectable men , and on a whole order who are justly deserving of estimation . A thorough-bred Englishman easily takes the form for the essence
of things , and considers the essence as in danger ot being destroyed it the form is lost . He would think there was an end of all justice , if judges and barristers did not come into court in the gowns and wigs of elder days , and that the constitution of his country was ruined , if the Lord Chancellor did not sit in parliament on a woolsack . Just so Mr . Rose thinks there is an end of religion , if theology lays aside the stiff garb of the symbolical books , or the liturgy ceases to speak in the language of the sixteenth century , and that the ruin of the church is impending , because the clergy choose rather to take the Apostles for their teachers , than the theologians of the Reformation . The
weakness of mankind has always led them to confound their notion of religion with religion itself , and to prophesy its destruction when any . change took place in the mode of its conception . f Christianity is in danger / was the cry in the time of the Waldenses , of the Hussites , of Wickliff , and of the Reformation ; and yet it was only the system of the Romish church that was in danger , and not religion , which , on the contrary , by means of these
reformers , was invested with a garb more suited to the age , and inspired with new and more widely beneficial activity . Human modes of conception are ever changing ; and had religion been so poor and narrow a thing that it could only exist in some one of these modes , it must long since have perished . It is not given to man to bind the Spirit of God in the letter of a liturgy or a confer
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Review . —State of Religion in Germanjf . ~ & 3 5
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Nov. 2, 1827, page 835, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1802/page/51/
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