the Church-"What makes the Church ?" or, in other words, What are the essential terms of Christian communion and the conditions of natural Christian organization ?"—were the great questions of the time to which the spirit of religious inquiry sought an answer. All other questions were subordinate, even those arising out of the Synod of Dort and the progress of Arminianism. (Rat. Theol., ii. 2.) Their broad and tole rant views were equally separated from Prelacy and from Puritanism. In them Dr. Tulloch sees the founders of our religious liberty, and not in the Puritans, of whom he justly says, "To the Puritans we owe much. They vindicated the dignity of popular rights and the independence due to the religious conscience. Save for the stern stand which they made in the seventeenth century, many of the elements which have grown into our national greatness, and given robustness to our common national life, would not have had free scope. But it argues a singular ignorance of the avowed claims of the Presbyterian party and the notorious principles of the Puritan theology, to attribute to them the origin of the idea of religious liberty. As a party, the Presbyterians expressly repudiated this idea. Their dogmatism was inflexible. The Church, according to them, was absolutely authoritative over religious opinion no less than religious practice. It could tolerate no difference of creed."

The

Strange to say, the Cambridge Platonists were of Puritan origin. Their latitudinarianism was a reaction from Puritan dogmatism. earliest records of the movement are contained in the correspondence between Whichcote and Dr. Tuckney, a Puritan and master of Emmanuel College, in which the latter, who had been Whichcote's tutor, called in question some doctrines preached by hint in a Commencement Sermon in 1651. We can only give the merest outline of the theological views of these religious philosophers. We cannot lay our hands on any passage in Dr. Tulloch's volumes short enough for quotation where he sums up their doctrines, but the essential distinction between them and the rational theologians, so far as we can gather it, seems to be that while the rational theologians argued up to the principle of liberty, the Platonists argued down to it. The former, looking abroad on the strife and schism which were rampant all around, sought to reason out a remedy for a state of matters so sad. The latter, living habitually in the serener air breathed by the broad-browed poet-philosopher of Athens, regarded the strife as something to be wept over, rather than reasoned againstto be remedied rather by raising its unhappy victims to a higher level of spiritual life, than by entering the lists of controversy with them.

Dr. Tulloch gives the following account of the "intellectual and spiritual advance" which had been obtained in this school in the days of John Smith, whose writings he thus criticizes :

"The breadth and freedom of mind which we traced in Whichcote still lies, in some degree, on a polemical and scholastic background. He has worked himself out of technical subtleties, and obtained a firm rational footing; but many of the trappings of the scholastic spirit still clung to him, as his correspondence with Tuckney plainly shows. He made a clean advance upon the theological spirit of his age, having pushed the lines of his religious thought manfully forward, till they touched all the diverse aspects of speculative and moral culture. He thus redeemed religion from the dogmatism and faction which were alike preying upon it, and taught men to see in it something higher

than any mere profession of opinions or attachment to a side. He well conceived and drew its ideal as the spiritual education of all our faculties.

"But this, which may be said to form the summit of Whichcote's thought, attained through meditative struggle and prolonged converse with Platonic speculation, was the starting-point of Smith. He began easily on this level, and never needed to work out for himself the rational conception of religion. Religion was inconceivable to him under any other form than the idealization and crown of our spiritual nature. The Divine represented to him from the first the complement of the human-the perfect orb which rounds and completes all its aspirations and activities. The assimilation of man to God was consequently the one comprehensive function of Christianity; and whatever contributes to this spiritual transformation is more or less of the nature of religion. Wherever there is, as he says, 'beauty, harmony, goodness, love, ingenuity, wisdom, holiness, justice, and the like, there is God.'

"But Smith did more than merely develop this comprehensive ideal of religion. He not only moralized and broadened the conception of the Divine, but he entered directly into its whole meaning, and inquired what it was as a phase of human knowledge as well as of human attainment. That religion

cannot be separated from reason, nor morals from piety, was of the nature of an axiomatic truth to him. His special thought was, how does reason authenticate religion, and the divine idea in its totality rise into a valid element of human knowledge? He was, in short, from the beginning, and by right of mental birth, a Christian philosopher.

"Divinity presented itself to him in the shape of a science. Even if the answers given by him to the questions which he thus raised had been less satisfactory than they are, it was yet a definite advance in the thought of the seventeenth century to ask such questions; to conceive the idea of a philosophy of the Divine. Theology had been hitherto viewed as a product of the schools, or, at the best, as a series of deductions drawn from a supposed infallible oracle. It was tradition, or dogma, resting on a verbal basis."

These quotations will serve to indicate the general spirit of the so-called Cambridge Platonists. We are glad to find Dr. Tulloch protesting against their doctrine being held to be Platonic otherwise than in name.

"It is needless to indicate how different in many respects is the spirit of our theologians from the genuine Platonic spirit; the one clear, bright, poetic, dramatic, scientific, rather than mystical; the other vague, serious, and exclusively theological. The mysticism of Plato is a mysticism half poetic and half philosophic, touched with the brilliant and changing hues of a mythology half real, half ideal. The mysticism of More and Smith is purely spiritual and theosophic-an obscure region bounded by supersensual realities, and the creature not of fancy and imagination, but of a passionate and fertile faith. The vivacity, inquisitiveness, common sense, and dialectical badinage of the Platonic Socrates, have nothing in common with the profound but sombre and unwieldy thoughtfulness of the Cambridge divines. The Platonism which dominated their thoughts and coloured their theology, and impressed more or less all their speculations, was not the Platonism of Plato."

The practical result reached by both the rational and theosophic thinkers reviewed by Dr. Tulloch, so far as it has any bearing on the ecclesiastical questions of the present day, is thus stated by him :

"The truly Catholic Church is not the Church resting in this creed or that, proclaiming this type of doctrine or that, but the universal company of the faithful, who have Christ as their Lord, and believe in his name, with all their diversities of opinion and of gift. The idea of the Church, as based upon opinion, is a mediæval and not a primitive idea. The Church subsists in a communion of spirit, not in coincidence of doctrine. It has a common faith, it may have a common worship; but it is not bound to any definite type of theology, any argumentative or theoretic creed. The statement of fact in the Apostles' Creed is ample doctrinal basis, beyond which it is wrong to go."

'Such,' says Dr. Tulloch, 'was the conclusion to which the idea of toleration worked itself in the minds of our Rational Theologians. It seems the only logical conclusion. If the essence of the Church rests in doctrine rather than in life, in creeds rather than in sympathy, then it follows directly that toleration of religious differences is inconsistent with its true order and function. If salvation depends upon true opinion, then variety of opinion must be inconsistent with it, and of course expelled from the Church, and prevented with all practicable force. It is impossible to get out of this circle. Persecution is the legitimate corollary of the dogmatic idea of the Church. Toleration is only rationally held when differences of dogma are not only acknowledged, but, so to speak, cultivated as the very condition and nurture of spiritual activity. Uniformity of doctrine is not only impracticable, it is not a good thing in itself. It can only exist where thought and science are dead; where the cold shadow of the past lies upon the quick life of the present and imprisons it, to the injury of Christian progress and civilization.'

We have endeavoured to give such an account of Principal Tulloch's works as will enable our readers to understand and estimate his position as a theologian. But no mere extracts can convey a just idea of them. The volumes on Rational Theology are in themselves sufficient to establish his claim to a very high rank among the cultured thinkers of the day. His whole habits of mind are those of the true scholar. He is entire master of the subject he deals with, and he treats it in the broad easy style which none but a master can assume.

The spirit of tolerance which breathes through his theology pervades his writings in every part. He stands aloof from all strife. The controversies which darken the history of theology-we might almost say which form the history of theology-of necessity appear upon his pages. He paints, with the hand of an artist, the principal actors in these controversies, and yet from beginning to end of the book there is not a single indication of partisanship, or a single unjust or even ungenerous remark. His rich, manly sentences, often exuberant with thought, are always free from fictitious adornment. He has rare critical insight, and in the power of painting a character in a few broad strokes he is excelled by no English writer we know.

Besides the works we have already mentioned, Principal Tulloch is the author of a volume of Lectures on Renan's Life of Jesus, published in 1864 by Messrs. Macmillan and Co., under the title of "The Christ of the Gospel and the Christ of Modern Criticism." The lectures were written at Rome, for the use of Dr. Tulloch's theological classes, during the winter of 1863-4 when he was compelled by ill-health to leave the active superintendence of his students in the hands of a substitute. He has also published a small volume entitled " Beginning Life," a book for young men.

Both of these have been republished and largely circulated in America, and we understand that of the latter upwards of thirteen thousand copies have been sold at home. It is about to be issued in a new form, partly re-written.

Principal Tulloch has also been a contributor to the highest class of periodical literature. Among his papers of this class we may mention, in addition to those already referred to, a series of articles in the Edinburgh Review, including papers on Edward Irvine and Professor Ferrier, and also the important articles on Comte's "Positive Philosophy" (April, 1868), and on Dr. Newman's " Grammar of Assent" (October, 1870).

SPANISH RULERS AND WRITERS.

No. II.-THE MONK KING.