I. THE MYTHICAL THEORY APPLIED TO THE LIFE OF The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined. By David An Address delivered before the Association of the Alumni of the Cambridge Divinity School. By W. B. O. Peabody, D. D. III. ARTISTIC REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TRINITY, 1. Lectures on the Pilgrim's Progress and on the Life and Times of John Bunyan. By Rev. George B. 2. Wanderings of a Pilgrim in the Shadow of Mont Blanc. By George B. Cheever, D. D. VIII.-CHARACTER AND POSITION OF CONGREGATIONALISM, Report on Congregationalism, including a Manual of NOTICES OF RECENT PUBLICATIONS. Page 427 Dewey's Discourses and Reviews upon Questions in Controversial Theology and Practical Religion, Waylen's Ecclesiastical Reminiscences of the United States, Worcester's Universal and Critical Dictionary, 455 Mann's Lectures on Education, 456 ART. I. 460 460 460 Munn's Statement of Reasons,-Allen's Centennial INTELLIGENCE. Miscellaneous Intelligence.-Monumental Inscriptions-Har vard University, 460 463 465 THE remarka self, just in our p of Dr. S some id will app the charg her minis persons h cate. W this point *The Li STRAUSS. London: C VOL. XL greatly mistaken in regard to the authorship of certain sentiments which have of late agitated this community. It is not necessary for us to enlarge upon this preliminary remark, further than to suggest that there is much less alarm, and danger, and risk of infection in views which, originating from most peculiar and complicated foreign influences, have been borrowed here by those who have cast themselves into the midst of those influences, than in views which have been naturally and inartificially attained by one who has studied without bias or eccentric tendencies. Only Germany, and only Germany of the nineteenth century, could have evolved the theory of Dr. Strauss. Whether its promulgation by any one here be an honor or a reproach to him, he must be content to call himself a mere copyist. A few particulars relating to Strauss personally, and to his book, may properly introduce what we now intend to offer. Our purpose will then be, to present his theory with the details by which he would sustain it, with a criticism and a commentary upon it. Not the least remarkable of the phenomena attending this work, is the youth of the author at the period when he gave it to the world. At an age when young men, who by a modern allowance have been permitted to teach their elders, most generally begin to admit modest humility to their true regard, and to realize, by disappointed pride or the vanishing of some delusion, that they know only in part and are just commencing their best education, Strauss published a book which opens with an absolute renunciation of Christianity as a revelation, and closes with instructing those who, like himself, are its ministers, how they may still preach it without believing it. If some venerable Christian divine had written such a book as the summary of a life of hard study, of full experience, and of devoted ministration to the sins and sorrows of humanity, we might read it with no other feeling than that of sympathetic distress. That plan into which angels desired to look, and which prophets and righteous men waited to see unfolded, might well claim from one who intended to reject it the deliberation and the patience of his most mature years. Strauss was born in 1808, and as his book was prepared and announced in private circles some time before he published it in 1835, he must have attained its results at a very early age. They |