abolish (tollere) to preserve (conservare) and to raise to a higher state (elevare). All these senses are wonderfully combined, in the idea with which we are now concerned. We may say with the fullest truth, of man, that in every higher stage of his existence, his previous life is in this threefold view aufgehoben. The child is abolished as a child in the young man, and yet is preserved, at the same time, and raised unto a higher stage of life. The temporary outward form is abolished; the substance, the idea is preserved; not however by continuing to be what it was before, but by nounting upwards to a more exalted mode of outward existence."

"Parallel precisely with the bodily life of man in this view, is the life also of his spirit. For soul and body are by divine constitution most intimately joined together, and what God has thus joined, man has no right to put asunder. Both parts of his being develop themselves, hand in hand together. Man comes not into the world a scholar, an artist, or the possessor of a fully formed moral and religious character. He carries within him, indeed, the capacity for life, in such form; but only in the way of germ, that must yet be developed, by impulse from within, and the influence of proper conditions from without, as the plant grows through the action of air, sunshine, and rain. Here also, we have in full again, what we have just noticed in the case of his animal life. Spiritual growth or development is likewise a process of annihilation, preser vation, and exaltation; in which it comes in the end to a complete explication only, of what was present by implication at the start. This must be affirmed even of the development of the life of religion itself. Its commencement is the new birth; its end the resurrection of the body. This last is only the full consummation of the first, its proper ultimate consequence, by which the new spirit has added to it the new body also, as its needful organ and blessed habitation." ******

"What holds of the individual must hold also of humanity as a whole, since this is simply the organic totality of all single men. So precisely as the single Christian does not become complete at a stroke, but only by degrees, the Church, as the complex of all Christians, must admit, and require too a gradual development. Christ himself, the head of the Church, submitted to the law of a genesis in time, and grew from infancy up to manhood. This geneis was no opposition merely, no dóznous, as many of the Gnostics supposed; but truth and reality. "Jesus increased," it is written, "in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man," (Luke ii. 52). "Though he were a Son, yet learned he obedience, by the things which he suffered," (Heb. v. 8). How then shall the Church, which repeats and continues the earthly human life of

Christ, form an exception to this law of development. The Lord himself teaches the contrary, in the parables he employs to represent the nature of the kingdom of God; comparing it with the small mustard seed that gradually becomes a great tree, (Matt. xiii. 31, 32;) and with leaven, that works and spreads till the whole lump is leavened (v. 33). Paul is full of the idea of a constantly advancing development on the part of the Church. He speaks of the whole building of the saints, as growing to a holy temple in the Lord, (Eph. ii. 21., Comp. 1 Peter ii. 5). He dwells on the edifying of the body of Christ, until we all come in the unity of the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, unto a perfect man, unto the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, (Eph. iv. 12, 13., Comp. v. 15., also iii. 18, 19, and Col. ii. 19).”

"We present, now, the particular characteristics of this development of the kingdom of God, as they disclose themselves in a thorough study of history."

I. "The development of the Church is partly external, and partly internal. The first consists in the progressive diffusion of the gospel among those who are not Christians, by the activity of missions. This must go forward as long as there may be a soul that has not yet heard of Christ crucified. * * As soon as Christianity has gained footing among a people, however a more difficult interior mission begins; having for its object the transfusion of the manners and institutions of such a people with the Christian principle. This forms that inward development, which we have here chiefly in view. * * * Like leaven the Gospel must work itself into the universal mass of life, under all its established forms." Hence the Church exerts a powerful influence upon Government, Art and Science, greatly modifying their outward form, and transfusing them inwardly by her own spirit. Thus too the Church, "transforms the natural social life of the nations, and causes her faith to show itself in a system of virtues and good works, which as Christian all rest on the principle of love to God."

II. "The development is organic. It is no mechanical accumulation of events, and no result simply of foreign influences. Certain outward conditions are indeed required for it as the plant needs air, taoisture, and light, in order to grow. But still the impelling force in the process, is the inmost life of the Church herself. Christianity is a new creation that unfolds itself continually more and more from within, and extends itself by the necessity of its own nature. It takes up, it is true, foreign material also in the process; but changes it at once into its own spirit, and assimilates it to its own nature, as the body converts the food, required for its growth into flesh and blood, marrow and bone. The Church accordingly, in this development, remains true always to her own nature, and reveals only what it contained in embryo, from the start. Through all changes-first Greek, then Roman Catholic, then German Evan

gelical-she never ceases still to be the Church. So the oak also changes, but can never become an apple tree. Just because the Church does unfold itself from within, as now affirmed, obeying its own life-law throughout, the process itself must form a whole, in which the several parts mutually complete each other. It is only the entire history of the Church, from her commencement in the congregation at Jerusalem to her consummation in the general judgment, which can fully represent her conception." ****

III. "The development in question includes the three-fold form of action, which has been already described as expressed by the German word aufheben. Each new stage negates the preceeding one, by raising its inmost being to a more adequate form of existence. Annihilation is thus required. But it is only the outward, the transient, that is thus annihilated. The substance abides." ******

IV. "The development of the Church is carried forward, by means of dialectic opposites and extremes. This is a very weighty point, which is indispensable to a right understanding of Church History. Here the history of mankind shows itself different from the history of the divine Redeemer. His life unfolded itself quietly, like a clear stream flowing with smooth regularity in a straight course. He suffered indeed and died; but this came not properly from the constitution of his own nature morally considered; it grew out of his voluntary assumption of the place of men, in order to redeem them from the power of sin. His own life, as such, remained always calm and serenely clear, in uninterrupted. communion with his heavenly Father. This was because he knew no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth. If Adam had not fallen, his life would have unfolded itself in his posterity, in the same way, without being required either to pass through death, that sharpest and hardest of all contradictions. He fell, however, and the human nature along with him, including of course the whole human race; as partaking of the same life. Hence, in history, all errors, contradictions, conflicts and sufferings, with death at their head. Christ has appeared indeed as the second Adam, and introduced into humanity a new principle of life, that must in the end triumph over all contradictions, all sin and all evil. But this principle can realize itself only in a gradual way. The Church on earth consists not of perfect saints, but of dying sinners, comprehended in a process of sanctification, which will end only with the outward resurrection. Freedom from sin and error may be predicated of Christ and the Church triumphant, but not of the Church militant. So long, accordingly, as the elements of a still unrenewed life continue to work in her constitution, her development must necessarily involve hard struggles and conflicts."** Thus, up to the time of the Reformation, the "history of Christianity had been a development of the principle of objectivity, authority, obe

dience, Jewish Christian legalism. This was carried so far that the power of the Church became at last an insupportable bondage. Then the spirit of personal freedom, trained by such discipline to ripe self-possession rose in revolt. With this begins the evolution of the principle of subjectivity, the Gentile Christian element, evangelical liberty and independence." Evangelical freedom, however, has degenerated into fleshly self-will, and licentiousness. Hence the historical stream of Christianity, is now turning from this pseudo-protestant extreme, towards a higher form of true Church life in the opposite direction. "Not only on this large scale, however, is the law in question illustrated; it repeats itself also, in each single period, within more narrow compass. Every where one extreme begets another."*** Thus, for example, "the formality of the English Episcopal Church causes Puritanism to appear; and when this swings over to the opposite extreme, a reaction follows in the restoration of the Stuarts." ***

V. "The truth, in this whole case lies not in the extremes, but in the middle, or the deep rather, in which they may be said to meet! The very nature of an extreme is, that it pushes one side of a truth into pre-eminence at the cost of another; wronging thus the interest itself which it seeks to uphold, since the organic nature of truth makes it impossible for any part of it to be fairly represented, without due regard at the same time to other parts." "This right middle, is removed heaven-wide from a characterless halting between two opinions, or that loose eclecticism, which throws heterogeneous elements together, and then dignifies the undigested mish-mash with the name of a system. Such a middle must be pronounced rather something worse than the extremes it seeks to avoid; since it lacks courage and energy to attach itself decidedly either to the one, or the other."

VI. "Every stage of development has its own corresponding disease. That the process should pass through diseases, might be presumed even from the analogy of our natural existence; it results with necessity from the elements of sin and error, that still cleave to the Church in her militant state, as well as from her connexion with the unregenerate world whose influence she is made continually to feel. These diseases form the Antichristian power in the Church, which first has also a development of its own. Along with the wheat grow the tares till the last judgment."

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VII. "These diseases, however, attending the development of the Church, prove in the hand of an all-wise God, who in the end rules all for His own glory, the negative conditions, of her progress. With the consciousness of disease, awakes also the desire for improvement. * When the Church is brought to thorough repentance for her sin, and the proper means are employed, her original life returns more fresh, and vigorous than ever before; as

the natural body, after having surmounted the diseases of early life, goes on to unfold itself subsequently with increased strength." VIII. "The starting points of new stages of development, or the epochs that unfold themselves into periods, carry, according to the want of the time, the character prevailingly, either of restoration, or revolution, or reformation; of which three forms of change the last must be considered the highest and most influential. By restoration, we understand the simple re-establishment of a state which has existed before, without any advance. * * * * Revolution is the unsparing violent overthrow of what is at hand. * the midst between restoration and revolution, stands reformation; the improvement and productive advancement of what is at hand; or such an overthrow of the old, as is its fulfilment, by raising its truth to a higher position. A reformation includes in itself both restorational and revolutionary elements, and the organic union of these, through the force of a positive life-principle, is that precisely which constitutes its peculiarity."

In

IX. "Reformatory movements are characterized by having at their head great religious personalities, which have become filled. and ruled, in mind and heart, by the power of a deep religious idea." X. "The main stream of development, though full of turns, moves always forwards. We say purposely the main stream, which was formed first by the Greck-Roman universal church; then by the Romano-Germanic Catholicism; and since the Reformation appears in evangelical Protestantism. Along with this there are sidecurrents that may dry away entirely. Thus we find sects which having fulfilled their historical call, without uniting themselves afterwards with the general life of the Church, are as it were turned into stone. * * Large Churches also, that once formed the main stream of history, may sunder themselves from the historical movement, and then stagnate and waste away in dead formalism. This is the case with the Greek Church since its separation from the West, and with those sections of the Roman Church, since the Reformation, that stand in no connexion whatever with Protestantism. With this restriction we affirm an uninterrupted progress in the history of the Church. As soon as we are set free from the cheerless view, that takes history to be the product of mere human activity, without the living intervention of the almighty love and wisdom of God himself, we must necessarily come to this idea of a progressive movement. * * * God has proposed for his kingdom upon earth, a definite end. **** It would imply either that He is not almighty, or that He deals not seriously with men, to suppose that the Church is not always in fact coming to this end, or that it is never to be reached." *****

"The Rationalists also talk much of klärung of humanity, in their sense." an advance beyond Christ and the Bible.

an ever-advancing "aufBut they mean by this Every such conception