State-rights theory, or their claim of the invalidity of certain legislation, in any future political intrigues and affiliations. An obnoxious law, or the grievance of a debt incurred to one's own detriment and harm, becomes a very different thing, when a man has once assented to it as the condition of a great advantage. And, though the South may show a repu diator or a nullifier here and there, we do not believe that the South will ever be able to send a body of men to Congress, prepared to repudiate or nullify what has been once solemnly accepted in the terms of amity and restoration.

With this one condition secured,—and with the ratification of the Constitutional Amendment, not only forbidding slavery, but empowering Congress to pass all needful laws to make liberty secure, we believe that every thing will have been done which can be done to insure the public honor and safety, as a condition precedent to the re-distribution of political power. And we should be glad to see the anxiety and jealousy, so widely manifested as to the two other points, directed upon this. Unless as we feel sure it must be Congress is prepared, with the support of the Administration, and without any advice of ours, to insist on some such vindication of its own dignity and the nation's honor, it is impossible to conjecture what treacheries and cabals it may not deliberately invite, by over-hastily admitting into the counsels of the nation, and into a share of government patronage and power, a class of men who but now boasted of being public enemies. Fortunately, the precise form of the danger is one which is very clear to see, which must be met at the very first step of any negotiation whatever, and which is perfectly within the power of Congress to control.

Our own leanings may dispose us to put too favorable a construction on the past. But we cannot possibly over-estimate the opportunities of the future. President Johnson has had a task assigned him, under Providence, and in the orderly working of our form of government, to which either the wisdom, courage, humanity, or firmness of few men is equal. It was natural that he should regard that task from the point of view of the class of which he is so honorable a representative, -the class of the industrious whites of the South. It would

be natural if he did not share in the more refined and humane sympathies, which have drawn the conscience of great bodies of men at a distance, to feel first and most for the race which has so far been the victim of our social and political arrangements. In the place of official responsibility in which he stands, and amid its infinite embarrassments, it is hardly to be wondered at that his words to the colored troops the other day, while generous and manly, should be words less of laudation and cheer than of grave and honest counsel. It is but three years since Mr. Lincoln's words to a colored delegation were colder still, and spoke of expatriation instead of equal citizenship. Yet they were honestly and kindly meant. And, while he always postponed his philanthropy to his theory of official duty, and declared that, whether it should involve the freedom or slavery, the deliverance or ruin, of the negro race, the Union must be saved at any rate, it is Abraham Lincoln, and not any theorist, or philanthropist, or declaimer of them all, that the reverence of that race has singled out as its Deliverer; nay, even in a high religious sense, its Messiah. Mr. Johnson's words may seem measured and cold, but we will trust him that they are honest. And what words that have been spoken in all the country have a heartier ring and a more manly glow than those of his addressed to the colored people of Nashville, which are reprinted now by his own authority?

"Humble and unworthy as I am, if no other better shall be found, I will indeed be your Moses, and lead you, through the Red Sea of war and bondage, to a fairer future of liberty and peace. I speak now as one who feels the world his country, and all who love equal rights his friends. I speak, too, as a citizen of Tennessee. I am here on my own soil; and here I mean to stay and fight this great battle of truth and justice to a triumphant end. Rebellion and slavery shall, by God's good help, no longer pollute our State. Loyal men, whether white or black, shall alone control her destinies; and, when this strife in which we are all engaged is past, I trust, I know, we shall have a better state of things; and shall rejoice that honest labor reaps the fruit of its own industry, and that every man has a fair chance in the race of life."

VOL. LXXIX.-5тH S. VOL. XVII. NO. III.

36

ART. VII.-REVIEW OF CURRENT LITERATURE.

THEOLOGY.

IN the "Astrology of the Reformation," it is Dr. Friedrich's purpose to show, that Luther wisely availed himself of the popular belief in astrology to promote the Reformation; that he accepted in good faith the prevailing ideas respecting the influence of the stars upon human destiny, and turned them to account in carrying forward his work. Luther's faith in astrology is shown, not only from numerous passages in his correspondence, but also from the preface to his edition (1527) of the "Proquosticon Propheticum" of John Lichtenburg, a renowned German astrologer. This work was filled with predictions of direful events that would occur in the natural world, as well as to the Church, the papacy, and the Empire.

Why should not Luther have believed, what was so wisely accepted, that even scepticism was constrained to support its ridicule? It is a mistake to suppose, that the increase of scientific knowledge has rendered astrology impossible in this age; that the boundaries between the natural and the supernatural are so well determined that the stars no longer minister to superstition. Astrological almanacs are annually published in England. In America, astrologers advertise in the papers. Many a farmer consults the position of the planets before he sows his seed, or kills his animals. Many a man likes to see the new moon over his right shoulder. Nurses inquire of the stars, before weaning an infant. We are informed that, in this very year, the Viceroy of Egypt has postponed his intended visit to Europe because the astrologers pronounced it unlucky. Multitudes of men look upon comets with something more than admiration, although the discovery of their periodical times has put an end to any serious belief in their fatal influence.

Why should we wonder that Luther shared in the universal delusion of his times, when scientific men like Cardan and Kepler confessed their faith in the influence of the planets over human impulses ? when Tycho Brahe drew horoscopes, and was frightened at the appearance of Halley's comet? The German emperors, contemporary with Luther, kept astrologers in their service, and consulted them in important undertakings. Charles the Fifth and Catherine De Medicis patronized astrology, and the Vatican admitted its power. "Paul the Third appointed no important sitting of the consistory, undertook no journey, without observing the constellations, and choosing the day which appeared to him recommended by their aspect."†

* Astrology of the Reformation. By Dr. JOHN FRIEDRICH, Theological Instructor in the University of Munich. Munich. 1864.

† Ranke's History of the Popes, i. p. 157.

This philosophy of the ruling classes was the religion of the common people. They believed that certain conjunctions of the planets' portended misfortunes, storms, floods, epidemic diseases, wars, revolutions. This was Luther's life-long faith. He was an attentive observer of unusual appearances in the natural world. "Within the last four years, how many signs and wonders have we seen in the heavens,- suns, crosses, extraordinary rainbows, and other wonderful things not in the natural course of events; and portending, as reason teaches us, the wrath and judgments of God! If they do not announce the last day, yet tumults and wars that shall change the governments of States, and occasion extreme misery to the people."

In this is nothing censurable. It was the faith of all classes. Our own fathers accepted it. In England the art of astrology was publicly taught and practised more than a century after Luther's death. In 1666 a parliamentary committee consulted a professor of astrology concerning the origin of the great fire in London. There is no evidence that Luther made improper use of the popular superstition, or any use of it different from what any other earnest and intelligent man would have made. Dr. Friedrich's book is written with a strong bias against Luther, but fails to establish his complicity with the authors of the peasants' war, which, it is alleged, originated with the astrologers. That their predictions had a great influence on the popular mind, in connection with the war, is true; and it is also true, that a religious reform was included among the demands of the peasants. But that Luther favored the insurrection is not proved. His tendencies were against it. His sympathies were with the Government, and the higher classes who supported his movement, ment which did not penetrate the lower ranks of German society, as is shown by the extensive re-action that soon took place. His feelings were conservative, and he strenuously opposed the peasants' war, and deplored their excesses. It was not for astrological predictions, or the oppressions of peasants, to originate, or greatly to modify, a religious movement which was already prepared in the history of past ages, and only required a fitting occasion.

- a move

Dr. Friedrich's book is the result of careful research among the curious old literature of Germany, and would be an important contribution to the history of the Reformation, if its allegations against the spirit and method of Luther's work were established.

At this stage of theological science, one hardly opens a book upon dogmas with the expectation of finding novelties. The main doctrines of Christianity, rightly or wrongly deduced from the Gospels and the Epistles, were long ago settled; and the great task of modern criticism has been to prove their falsity, or soften their rigor. In noble opposition to the Old-Testament sternness, and the cold intellectualism of Calvin, Wesley undertook the grateful task of developing the social

*Tract on "The Last Day, and the Signs of its Coming."

and emotional nature of believers, and of forming a community that should be held together by the element of love, an element that played by no means so important a part in the old dispensation as in the new. A Church established upon such a basis was in its origin a pleasing and an edifying spectacle. Its continued growth and prosperity show, that it appealed to a deep-seated want of the human heart, and that it did a great deal to satisfy that want. But it is no less plain, from an examination of the career of Methodism, and from the aspect of the congregations that fill its churches, that it has become a religious sect, with as one-sided a tendency as either Lutheranism or Calvinism. It has ever made too great a demand upon nerve force, to the exclusion of intellectual. The groans and the shouts of the faithful, in conference and revival meetings, will remain a blemish upon the Methodist Church, so long as it indulges in violent appeals to the emotional natures of its communicants, and makes no attempt to supply their exhausted systems with the chalybeate of reason. We believe, that a consciousness of their defects has been impressing itself upon the minds of the thinking men of the denomination, and that the late activity of the leaders, both in America and in Germany, is to be traced to a gradual awakening to a sense of what the age requires.

ren

With this conviction of the merits and defects of Methodism, it has given us great pleasure to greet the really able attempt of Mr. War(formerly a pastor in Boston), to put into the hands of the students under his charge a text-book intended at once to spread abroad juster ideas of the doctrines of his sect, and to educate, as its leaders, a class of ministers who should be more intelligent and better versed in theological science than their predecessors. In a subject so vexed and so uncertain as that of the respective boundaries of ethics and dogmatics, many would find fault with the definition given to systematic theology, and with the sphere assigned to its constituents. "Systematic theology," he says, "is the comprehensive, scientific presentation of the Christian doctrine of God, of man, and of the mutual relation of the two. It embraces: first, Christian dogmatics, which treats of the relation of God to man, and the Christian doctrine of God thence resulting; and, second, Christian ethics, which treats of the relation of man to God, and the Christian doctrine of man thence resulting." A definition commendable for simplicity, rather than capable of rigorous and distinct development, or practical treatment. So the einheitlich, or unitary method, consisting in the union of ethics and dogmatics, is an arrangement better suited to oral and informal lectures from the professor's chair, than to a scientific treatise. The two subjects can hardly be mingled without confusion.

It is a remarkable event, not only in theology but in general literature, that an American should write a work in German, and with the

*Systematische Theologie einheitlich behandelt. Von WILLIAM F. WARREN, Doctor und Professor der Theologie. Erste Lieferung Allgemeine Einlestung. Bremen: Verlag des Tractathauses. Zürich: Zeltweg, Nr. 728. Cincinnati, Ohio: Poe & Hitchcock. 1865. 8vo. pp. 186.