CHARACTER OF THE WORK.

THE distinctive character of this Review has already been made known through the Prospectus; but it seems both needful for the information of those who may not have seen it, and necessary as an outline of its prominent features, here in the beginning to republish the body of this prospectus in a perma

nent form.

It is to be a Literary and Theological Journal, published in the name and by the authority of the Alumni of Marshall College.

"The objects of the publication will be such as come within the scope of religious Reviews generally, with free room at the same time for the interests of literature under a wider form. Altogether, it is deemed best that it should not be closely bound beforehand to any particular method or plan.

"The Review is expected, however, of course, to bear a distinctive and peculiar character. As the mere echo of what already exists in this way, it would have no right to challenge any regard. Its peculiarity is denoted by its title. It proposes to represent, in philosophy and religion, the system of thinking which has come to be identified extensively, in this country, with the Institutions at Mercersburg, though of far wider and higher force in fact, on both sides of the Atlantic. With the same field of survey that is spread out to other Theological Reviews, the stand point of its observations will be materially different. It is wished, in this respect, to supply, by means of it, a want which all other Reviews at the present time fail to supply. Did the way seem to be fairly open, in any quarter besides, for a full and free representation of the tendency in whose service it is to appear, it would not be commenced.

"In Religion, the publication will be made to rest throughout on the basis of the APOSTLES' CREED, taken in its own proper and original sense. Its motto, here, will be that of the profoundly philosophical Anselm of Canterbury: 'Non quæro intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. The last evidence of all truth will be acknowledged to hold only in the person of Jesus Christ, out of which with irresistible necessity, all other articles of this wonderful symbol flow.

"But Faith, as thus going before understanding, seeks not to exclude it. It is properly in order to science. It will be assumed thus, always, by the Mercersburg Review, that the

mystery of Christianity is objectively in full organic harmony with the constitution of the world as otherwise known, and that it is capable, accordingly, of scientific apprehension under such form. Room will be made, in this way, for the idea of theology as a living process in the life of the Church, and not a tradition simply in its outward keeping. It will be taken for granted, that theology is not yet complete; just as little as the same can be said of the new creation in Christ Jesus, in any other view. "Science, so rooted in the realities of Faith, can accomplish its growth only as it remains perpetually bound, in the midst of all progress, to the authority of the past. Christianity involves necessarily, as in the creed, the idea of one Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church. The proposed Review will be decidedly historical and churchly, then, in its character, and may be expected to lay emphasis on all that truly and properly appertains to religion on this side.

"It will be Protestant, of course, in opposition to the corrup tions of Rome; but Catholic, at the same time, in striving to honor and save the glorious and sublime truths out of which these corruptions for the most part spring. In its controversy with Rome, it will allow no companionship still with the radical and rationalistic spirit of the age, engaged ostensibly in the same

cause.

"It lies in its conception, as now described, that the Mercersburg Review will bear no strictly denominational character."

CONTRIBUTORS.

BUT though this publication must and will possess a distinctive character, yet it will be a catholic rostrum or pulpit, whence any one may speak, provided only, that his subject be of sufficient moment, his style possessed of proper merit, and his manner graced with becoming decorum. This being the case, its columns will, of right, be open first of all to the Alumni, from any and all of whom fit contributions are hereby particularly requested. It is expected, moreover, that the Ministry of the German Reformed Church, who are not included in this number, will also speak; for they, too, have rights hercin involved

and invested, and, therefore, room will be made for them, as cheerfully as for the Alumni. Again: All beyond the circle of these two classes, whose wealth of indifference or bigotry, or of both, has not alienated them from all rights inhering in the objects embraced by this Review, are hereby invited and urged to come forward and claim these rights. In so doing, they will meet with a hearty welcome.

Thus, then, as already intimated, even those who are opposed to each other, whether seemingly or really, in their contention for the Truth, provided they be manifestly led by the Truth, and do not attempt to lead it, will receive an impartial hearing. This is not, indeed, to be a theatre where men are to contend with beasts. Neither are men by any means to be considered as the possessors, revealers, guardians, defenders, and saviours of the Truth. The branches bear not the Root, but the Root the branches; the branches are not the revealers, but the revelation, of the Root. Man, indeed, lives-and yet not he, but the Truth lives in him; and the life that he lives in the flesh, he lives by the faith of the Truth incarnate in the Son of God. Man, therefore, is the servant, not the lord of Truth; he is bound by it, not it by him; if he be true at all, it is only in so far as he is possessed, guarded, defended, saved, and revealed by the Truth. Never, with his logic claws, can he grasp it by the forelock, and drag it into view. It is the Truth that immortalizes man, not man the Truth. It is its own revealer; and yet, in so far as it is human, man is its revelation. But because of the sinful and discordant posture of man, Truth can now reveal itself only by a dialectical conflict with error. The field of this conflict, is the human personality, and the court where Truth is crowned, is the human consciousness. This is the case in the experience of every individual who makes any progress at all in true virtue. In his bosom, truth and error daily grapple in a conflict of life and death. By this means alone is he formed, not forms himself, into the image of God. The same conflict, only in its general form, is going on in the bosom of the Church, both in a theoretical and a practical way; and it is only when precocious bigotry assumes to be already sanctified, and impudent folly affects to be superior to the Truth, and so to guard,

defend, and save it, that this conflict is silenced as the work of Satan. This being the case, whatever professes to be an organ of the theoretical part of this conflict, if it be at all true to its pretensions, will speak, not the tongue or dialect of a single family or tribe, but all the tongues and all the dialects of the whole Church. If any cry out that this will cause a chaos of sounds, let them know that, if they have no chaos, they can have no cosmos. It is because certain ones will have this latter without the former, that they get neither, but only a solitary voice, incestuously wedded to its own echo, and housed between the mountains of ignorance and schism, where it bloats on the stagnant pool of bigotry, and battens on the impudence that creams so richly there. Nullum chaos, nullus cosmos.

ART. II.—THE YEAR 1848.

WONDERFUL, and long to be remembered, has been the year 1848, now thrown into our rear. The outward end of much that is past, and the beginning, outwardly, of a great deal, that is to come. A year of revolution and change; of uncertainty, anxiety, and alarm; answering to the prophetic imagery of "signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars;" the powers of heaven shaken, and the order of the world thrown violently out of course. A year of mystery for the nations; involving a deep burden, which the whole civilized earth is concerned to hear and understand. Who shall pretend to fathom its sense? Who shall tell the mighty secret, that lies hid within its sybil leaves?

It is not for any age or period, fully to understand itself. While events are passing, they cannot, for the most part, be

fairly seen in their true proportions and relations. The part of history, which it is always most difficult to interpret, is that which is in the process of immediate actual evolution. The present throws light upon the past; while its own sense again, so far as it is in any measure original and new, can find its clear and sufficient commentary at last only in the life of the unborn future. We are in a much better position now, to comprehend the age of the Reformation, than were the men who themselves lived and acted in its stirring drama. We are better able than they were, to perceive the general force and bearing of the movement as a whole, to separate the merely accidental and transient from the necessary and constant, to reduce the tumultuating show of seemingly chaotic elements to system and reason. We are not overwhelmed and hurried along, as they were, by the wild tossing torrent of what was taking place at the time; but are permitted rather, as it were from some lofty height of observation afar off, to survey with full leisure, in a calm objective way, the entire tract of revolution, in its connections, both with the period going before and the period which has followed since. There are those, indeed, who do pretend still to exhaust the meaning of such an age, by looking into it under a purely separate view; as though history had no life of its own, extending forward perpetually from generation to generation, as the growth of a divine thought; but were made up of confused parcels only, each carrying its significance mainly in its own facts, and requiring no light besides, for its proper interpretation. But this is to insult philosophy and religion, in one breath. No man can possibly have any true knowledge of the sixteenth century, who sees not in it the product of forces long before at work in the bosom of the Catholic Church; and whose estimate of its meaning, at the same time, is not made to embrace also in one and the same view its historical consequences, as they lie cxposed to observation now in the lapse of subsequent time. The history of Protestantism thus far, is the revelation of what lay hid, originally, in the great fact of the Reformation. So in the case of our own age. It can never be fully understood by itself, but only as it shall be seen hereafter, when its past and future connections are brought into view together, and made to explain