the shipwrecked mariner's strange adventures, and beholding with astonishment his manifest superiority to themselves in all manly exercises.

Now this matchless power of conceiving and representing human nature, in all its various phases, so rare in any poem, so universal in these; this were, of itself, sufficient to demonstrate the absurdity of the hypothesis, which refers the Iliad and Odyssey to a number of different authors. But when we further observe the consistency with which each character is sustained, from the beginning of the Iliad to the end of the Odyssey, we see the most convincing demonstration that both poems must have proceeded from one and the same author. That consistent and complete idea of Ulysses, for instance, could not have been the offspring of more than one mind. As well might Ulysses himself have been the son of more than one father. That portrait of Helen, begun in the Iliad and finished in the Odyssey, is no patchwork of several authors. As well might Guido's Magdalen have been painted by half a dozen different masters. Each one of the characters, of either or both of the poems, is as palpably and necessarily the work of one hand, as the Venus de Medici or the Apollo Belvidere.

ARTICLE II.

FEUERBACH'S ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY.'

By Rev. Charles C. Tiffany, Derby, Ct.

THE English and American public is indebted to the translator of Strauss's "Leben Jesu," for the appearance of Feuerbach's "Wesen des Christenthum's," in an English dress.

1 DAS WESEN DES CHRISTENTHUMS, von Ludwig Feuerbach. Leipzig, 1843. THE ESSENCE OF CHRISTIANITY. By Ludwig Feuerbach. Translated from the second German edition by Marian Evans.

It is an indebtedness we should willingly have foregone; but, as it has been forced upon us, we must fain take some notice of the obligation, if it be merely to protest against it. It is a matter of no little surprise that a woman should have undertaken the task, in both these instances, of introducing to her countrymen and kinsmen works which, if accepted as true, would overturn the only religious system which has accorded to woman her present elevated position. Even were there room to doubt this in regard to Strauss's Life of Christ, there can be none in regard to the work of Feuerbach. In him we have the natural result of the various attempts at an idealistic solution of the Christian Religion, viz. the attempt to overthrow all religion. Nor does he mask his design. He does not retain the shell after he has extracted the kernel. Christianity with its life departed is, to him, no more than any other dead system; fit only to be buried out of the sight of men. He does, indeed, attribute a certain worth to it; but this worth is only its destruction; for the only praise he bestows upon it is, that it most easily, of all religions, leads to Atheism. It might seem to some that such a work was not the one most demanded by the exigencies of our times. How unphilosophical soever all forms of religion may be, they have yet ever proved safeguards to society, preserving its morals and protecting its property; nor are there, to most minds, many signs that such safeguards are not still needed. But with Feuerbach and his translators the case is different. The inclination of men to practical atheism is not sufficient. It must be demonstrated to be the only philosophical belief. A theory must be formed to justify the practice. Hence this book.

The book proceeds upon a philosophical method. It aims to show, from the nature of the mind, that a belief in God is impossible; that all supposed belief in him is an illusion; and that, hence, religion is only a round in the ladder of human progress, and that by no means the highest, to be trodden upon and left behind. Let us examine the theory and trace its results.

A word or two in relation to the author's philosophical

position, may not be out of place as a preliminary to the investigation of his book.

Feuerbach belonged to those followers of Hegel which constitute the so-called Left-wing of the school. They are destructive in their tendency, and stand out in marked contrast with the more conservative Right-wing. The latter do not deny a belief in a personal God, or even in historical Christianity; while the former belong, almost universally, to the Pantheistic schools. Indeed, this would seem to be the more legitimate consequence of a system which seeks to develop the universe and all its contents from the categories included in the human mind. For, as the whole proceeds with the strictest logical connection, admitting no break, each succeeding category being developed from the former by a logical necessity-developed out of it as the flower from the bud, and the fruit from the flower; where can there arise anything which is not strictly human? Even the highest results of this philosophy must be included in the mind which gives it birth; and nothing which it can attain can surpass the instrument of its attainment. For, according to its fundamental principle, the mind investigates itself, and what it discovers is itself. The Absolute, therefore, which it is its boast ultimately to attain, cannot be more than human in quality, nor can it be other than the mind. The term absolute excludes the individual indeed, but not the essence of the individual. It is, in fact, the universal essence, including all the manifestations of essence. The material universe offers no stumbling-block to this theory; for, to the strict Hegelian, it can have no other than a subjective existence.' But even where its objective reality is granted, it is only assumed to be a different manifestation of the same essence. The Absolute is therefore called, in its deepest significance, subject and spirit, though this Absolute spirit comes to consciousness only in the finite spirit.

1 Hegel started, indeed, with the idea of giving the logical development to Schelling's Philosophical View of the Identity of Subject and Object — mind and matter, but he soon found that on his own theory this was inconsequent and went over to Idealism. Not so, however, with all his followers.

Whether, therefore, this Absolute be called God, or what you will, it is, in reality, nothing over and above man and nature. Both these are its manifestations; or, rather, are it; for, without them, it is not. A jeuseits, or a something beyond, is the most fearful heresy in the Hegelian list.

It requires no very strong effort to change this Absolute spirit, which comes to its full reality alone in man, completely into man's essence and consciousness; to transform the process, and assume that man does not arise from the Absolute, but the Absolute from man; that man is not the Absolute, set as something other than the Absolute; but that the Absolute is man set as something other than man. The God, or the Absolute, thus attained, would of course have no worth beyond that of a human conception; would, in fact, be nothing more than man viewing himself as the Absolute, or God.

This, Feuerbach has done; and this is the key to his whole system. This principle is deduced and carried out in the following manner :

His work is divided into an Introduction and two Parts. The Introduction treats of:

The Nature of Man in general.

The Nature of Religion in general.

The First Part contains:

The true or Anthropological Essence of Religion.

The Second Part:

The false or theological Essence of Religion.

It is in the Introduction that we get at the germ from which all the rest proceeds; for, after he has laid down the principles, his results follow as a matter of course.

His doctrine of the nature of man, is as follows: The essential distinction between men and beasts lies in Consciousness. But it is consciousness in its strictest sense; not the consciousness of the individual of himself, but his consciousness of his kind, his genus. Beasts are conscious of themselves, as distinct from other external objects. But only men are conscious of themselves as distinguished from their essence, or genus. A subject, in the true sense, includes an

object; it is nothing without it; only so far as it has an object, is it subject. But the object which is the full complement of the subject, can only be the objectified subject itself. Hence man as a subject can be conscious of nothing which is out of his essence; for, only that which is in his essence, can be himself objectified. Of whatever a man is conscious, therefore, he is conscious only of himself in it.

What, then, is the essence of man, he asks, of which he is conscious? what constitutes his genus-the peculiar humanity in man? He answers: the Reason, the Will, the Heart. These three are not powers which a man has, but are his constitutive Elements, they are the absolute essence of man as such. They are themselves limitless; they rule the individual, and are not ruled by him.

As these, the essence of man, are limitless, so also is the consciousness; since what is in the essence is in the consciousness. The consciousness of man as an individual is limited; but not his consciousness of himself as man; and when we limit the consciousness, it is because we transfer the limitation of the individual to the genus, or essence, which is an error. Indeed, the individual is conscious of himself as limited, only because the object by means of which he becomes conscious of himself as individual subject, is his perfect, illimitable genus. For the essence of a thing must be all-sufficient for the thing; it cannot get beyond it. If the understanding denied what the essence asserted, it would show that it was the understanding not of this, but of some other essence. When therefore I think of the Infinite, I only think the infiniteness of the thinking capability ("Denkvermögens"). So when I feel the Infinite, I only feel the infiniteness of the "power of feeling;" and if feeling is the essential organ of religion, then the essence of God or religion is only the essence of feeling. Thus a being cannot be conscious of itself as limited; for its essence is, for it, unlimited, and it can be conscious only of its essence.

Having determined thus much concerning the nature of man, Feuerbach proceeds to apply this to the nature of Religion, which is peculiar to man.