Our objection to the Roman doctrine, as we understand it to be exhibited by Mr. Brownson, is that the law objectively taken is so far sundered from the activity of the obeying subject, as to be in fact set over against this in the character of another nature altogether, and under a wholly outward form. Objective and subjective are made to fall apart dualistically into two distinct worlds. We do not wish to confound them, to mix them together, or to make one absorb and destroy the other; we recognize their difference; but still we object just as strenuously also to this abstract separation. Allow that we may not be able to show in what way precisely the two interests of authority and freedom flow together, this is no reason still why we should give up the claims of either in favor of the other. We may not subordinate authority to the independence of man, so as to make him his own lord and master, with liberty to follow simply his private pleasure; but just as little have we any right to affirm such separate mastery in favor of the law, to the exclusion of man's mind and voice. Authority on the outside of the will, in no union with it, standing over against it simply as a foreign force, though it should be the authority of God himself, can bring with it no strength, no freedom, no life. The case demands an inward mediation; such an entrance of the law into the sphere of the subject's own life, that it shall seem tobe part of his very nature, and to grow forth spontaneously from the activity of his will. It is the "law of the spirit of life in Christ Jesus," the law as the power of self-moving spirit in the soul itself, that makes it free from the law of sin and death. This implies oneness of nature between the power that binds, and the activity which allows itself thus to be bound; and it is only on the ground of such correspondence that the relation requiring them to be so joined can be said to hold from the beginning.

Mr. Brownson charges us with great confusion, as well as fundamental error, for making object and subject dependent on each other in the realization of truth, and for resolving the first separately taken into the general, as distinguished from the particular; which is he tells us, to make the object the product of V the subject, and in the end to overthrow the existence of particular concrete objects altogether. We still say however, that there can be no truth or law in the world of mind under a purely objective form; for the reason that intelligence and will are needed to make room for any such existence, and to bring it actually to pass. Truth exists, as truth, only by being known. Blot out all knowledge, all consciousness, all thought, and you blot out all truth at the same time. Intelligence is the light in which it reveals its presence, the very form in which it becomes

real. Will it be said, that is to make God himself dependent on the thinking and willing of men, and so to resolve his being into mere void, or abstract possibility, seeking to become plenum, full and real in the life of the world? We reply, by no means. God is at once Object and Subject, in the most universal sense. His existence is the absolute union of both. As object merely, without self-knowledge and self-activity he would not be the God of the Bible, but the very abstraction of Buddhism itself, the infinite Nothing from which it is pretended here so anxiously to fly on the other side. To conceive of God as necessarily existent under a purely objective form, without regard to his own intelligence and will; as though these had to do with the first in a secondary way only, finding the object at hand previously for their use; is a thought in its own nature fatal to all sound theology, full as much as the imagination which allows him no independent personality whatever. Dualism in this shape, is only pantheism back upon us again with a new face. The necessity by which God exists, as we have before said, is a free necessity; it has ground, not from beyond his own will, but in the activity of his will itself. He is eternally self-produ ced. His being is not merely an object, but an act, his own act, going forth always from an exercise of thought and will. In this consists his Personality; which at the same time is absolute; carries in itself no reference to any object or thing beyond itself, but affirms itself with illimitable self-sufficiency from within as the Infinite I Am, which is at the same time and must be the everlasting ground of all life and being besides. And so then in the constitution of the univese under God, object and subject can never fall absolutely asunder, but are required to go always together as joint factors in the determination of all proper reality, in the world. Nature itself exists only for mind; and in this view, moreover, the proper truth and sense of it are found not at all in the single particular things belonging to it as these may be perceived by the senses merely, but in the ideas rather they reveal and represent, which come from beyond, which are always general or universal in their nature, and which can have no being or presence in the world whatever, save under the form of thought and by the activity of self-apprehending and selfmoving intelligence. Truth thus, in the moral world under God, considered as objective merely is always something gener

So is law. In such form exclusively, however, they can have no force in the concrete constitution of man's life. For this purpose, they must become subjective, or in other words enter into the sphere of particular thought and will. This is not to

subordinate them in any sense to the power of such thought and will; as though truth and law might be considered the product simply of men themselves. Men make neither truth nor law. These have an absolute necessity beyond their will, and underlie the very order out of which their whole existence springs. But still truth and law actualize themselves in the world, become concrete and thus real for men, only as they are incorporated with their life, and pass over in this way from a purely objective character to a character which is at the same time subjective and individual.

In this realization of reason and law, however, their character as general is not lost. It is not every man's thinking and willing privately taken that can thus make room for them in the world; but only such private thinking and willing as are comprehended in the life of the world as a whole. In this way mind collectively taken is more always than mere single thought and will; not simply as it is the aggregate of individual opinions numerically joined together, but as it brings us nearer also to what may be considered the proper wholeness of truth under its objective form. Reason and law work thus objectively in the constitution of the moral world, as a most real power lodged in the very structure of our collective life; something which is in such view wholly different from all merely private intelligence, as well as independent of it while it is only by means of this at the same time that it can ever bring itself to pass or make itself felt. This objective revelation forms the medium accordingly, the necessary and only medium we may say, through which mind in its individual capacity is brought to communicate with truth in a truly living way. The communication is not separate and direct, but by the intervention rather of a more general rationality, in the bosom of which the single mind is of necessity born and matured and perpetually carried. Purely private reason is an absurdity; and so just as much is private will. The absurdity is not relieved, however, by setting authority over against either, in the form of truth or in the form of law, in a purely abstract and outward view. The abstraction here is full as bad as the negation. The case calls for a concrete mediation of the single and the general. This we have in the actual structure of the human world; where reason and law are found touching men continually, not in an abrupt and isolated way, (what Dr. Bushnell styles the ictic method,) but mediationally always, through the organism of the human life itself collectively taken, and by means of relations that bind the single subject indissolubly at all points to the great living, rational and

moral mass, of which he is a part and without which he can be nothing. God does not bring his will nigh to men in a direct way, but through some living constitution more broad and general than themselves, which they are bound, as well as naturally prompted, to regard and reverence for this very end. His authority utters itself through the family; through right public opinion; through art and science; through the civil state; through the course of history; and above all, though in full conformity with the same general law, in the Church catholic as this has stood from the time of the Apostles down to the present day, and is destined to stand also to the end of the world, the pillar and ground of the truth, against which the gates of hell can never prevail.

In this way, we recognize fully the vanity of mere private judgment, in the great business of religion, and the need of authority to assist us in settling rightly the high and solemn questions with which it is concerned. This authority too, we see plainly enough, must be something more than the letter of the Bible, as each man separately taken may have power to read it for his own use; since this necessarily resolves itself at last, under such view, into that very private judgment and will, from which the problem is to find some sufficient escape. It is in truth the essence of rationalism itself, to make the single mind, in such style, the source and measure of Christianity; and it is only a circumstance in the case, that the Bible may happen to be taken as the ostensible platform of such independent thinking, while another sort of rationalism sets this also aside, and falls back fairly and openly on its own resources in the most naked form. We acknowledge the need of something more here than the Bible, thus made the sport and plaything of private judgment. Christianity is a living fact in the world, which as such carries along with it, to the end of time, its own evidence and its own authority. In this form it constitutes the Church. We own and confess the authority of this body, the one holy catholic Church of the Creed, as both legitimate and necessary for the proper constitution of the Christian faith in all ages and lands. When those who would make the Bible per se the source of Christianity, refer us at the same time to the influence of the Holy Ghost as going along with it and securing its right use, we see clearly enough that all such illumination must be regarded as fanciful and vain, if it fall not in with the general law of our nature just noticed, by which the presence of truth for the individual mind is conditioned and mediated by its relations to mind in a more comprehensive view. We have no right

to conceive of the Spirit, as working in any such abstract way. It is against philosophy, against experience, and against the clear representations of the New Testament itself. As the Spirit of Christ especially, the medium of the new creation which began to be revealed on the day of Pentecost, he is at the same time the Spirit of his Church, the one and the self-same power that is active in all the saints, as they form collectively his mystical body, and are thus the fulness of him that filleth all in all. The authority of the Spirit then is to be expected and sought, like all other manifestations of God's will in the world, not under an abstract character, but under the form of concrete life; that is, in the bosom of the Church, by which and through which only it comes to such revelation. But now when the Romanists, to meet this acknowledged want, refer us to their Church outwardly considered, or to the Pope as its visible head, for an authority which is declared to be infallible at all points, and always at hand, for the solution of all religious questions, we seem to ourselves at least to encounter, under a slight change of aspect only, the very same difficulty we have wished to escape from on the opposite side. The Church or the Pope here is made to stand mechanically in the place of the Bible, as the organ of the Holy Ghost; whose authority is then supposed to reach over to the single believer, through such outward medium, in a purely abstract quasi-magical way, without any regard whatever to the standing order of our life, which demands in every such case, as we have scen, a concrete living revelation, by the force and power of which objectively the individual mind may be brought to assert a corresponding activity in a truly free way. We object not to the idea of authority in the case; but we wish an authority that may show itself truly moral, answerable to the constitution of humanity, compatible with the idea of freedom. No authority, it seems to us, can be of this character that is absolutely abstract, that comes upon the subject as an abrupt and isolated mandamus from a higher sphere. To be really from God, it must legitimate itself by entering the sphere of the life it seeks to rule; it must take concrete form in the world; it must win for itself a living human activity in the social system, which in the case before us becomes the Church, whereby it may have access to individual thought and will in conformity with the general law of our nature. Let it appear that the decisions of the Pope, though taken to be moved by the Holy Ghost, are the product in some way of the general life of Christianity, rationally working out the result through such central organ, according to the law of man's nature as otherwise known; and