248 PROCEEDINGS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY 



the dangers, he had no patience. " Christianity," he said, " stands or 

 falls with the person of Christ as represented in the Gospels." Believ- 

 ing that the Christian religion had begun a new world, he warmly- 

 assailed whatever in the past or present appeared to clog its appointed 

 work. He glorified the memory of the German Reformers, whom he 

 honored as the regenerators of modern society. In this sense at least 

 he was the most Protestant of Protestants. A revelation of God's will 

 and truth he found not less in the providential advance of order and 

 virtue, than in the Bible itself. He sought to unite the two revela- 

 tions, and to express in broad generality the lessons of Scripture under 

 the form of a philosophy of development. He calls the Bible " the 

 mirror of universal history." With destructive rationalism, as such, he 

 had no sympathy. Indeed, reconstruction seems to have been the 

 dream of his life. He saw with sorrow the signs of a waning and 

 setting faith around him. But he thought he also saw a deep and 

 wide-spread yearning for a better light. To open the way to that was 

 his cherished wish. His " Bihelwerk," as he himself explicitly de- 

 clared, was undertaken in that spirit. Under this impulse, also, he 

 strove to pierce through what he deemed the inventions of synods and 

 councils, into the simjjle beliefs of the Apostolic age. And in the same 

 temper he speculated hopefully on the Church of the Future. This 

 may serve for a meagre sketch of his philosophy. It belongs to the 

 theologian to decide on the value of his researches and theories. If 

 some of his expressions are wanting in sharpness of boundary, and 

 seem to play about the mind rather than to enter it, it is but just to 

 their author to add his declaration, that his system forms in his own 

 mind a connected whole. Dr. Arnold once wrote to him in reference 

 to a theological point : " I believe that you have got hold of a truth 

 which is as yet to me dark ; just as I cannot understand music, yet 

 nothing doubt that it is my fault, and not that of music." This is a 

 modest and friendly expression of a real difficulty. 



Bunsen has said that " Restoration, both in a philosophical and an 

 historical sense, is the problem of the present day." His character- 

 istic traits come out in his attempts at restoration. Reconstruction is 

 always a delicate, often a slippery work. It involves a certain ratio 

 of destruction, and it offers a tempting stage for the exhibition of favor- 

 ite theories. To strike the exact proportion between what is to be 

 saved and what thi-ovvn away, and to be duly jealous of one's own 

 idols, is a hard trial to that sanguine cast of intellect which is almost 



