R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of the Intellect

(Westminster Review, January 1851)

THERE ARE many, and those not the least powerful thinkers and efficient workers amongst us, who are prone to underrate critical research into ancient modes of life and forms of thought, alleging that what it behoves us chiefly to ascertain is the truth which comes home to men’s business and bosoms in these our days, and not by-gone speculations and beliefs which we can never fully comprehend, and with which we can only yet more imperfectly sympathize. Holding, with Auguste Comte,¹ that theological and metaphysical speculation have reached their limit, and that the only hope of extending man’s sources of knowledge and happiness is to be found in positive science, and in the universal application of its principles; they urge that the thinkers who are in the van of human progress should devote their energies to the actual rather than to the retrospective.

There is, undeniably, truth in this view. It is better to discover and apply improved methods of draining our own towns, than to be able to quote Aristophanes in proof that the streets of Athens were in a state of unmacadamized muddiness – better to reason justly on some point of immediate concern, than to know the fallacies of the ancient sophists – better to look with ‘awful eye’² at the starry heavens, and, under the teaching of Newton and Herschel, feel the immensity, the order, the sublimity of the universe, and of the forces by which it subsists, than to pore over the grotesque symbols, whereby the Assyrian or Egyptian shadowed forth his own more vague impression of the same great facts. But it would be a very serious mistake to suppose that the study of the past and the labours of criticism have no important practical bearing on the present. Our civilization, and, yet more, our religion, are an anomalous blending of lifeless barbarisms, which have descended to us like so many petrifactions from distant ages, with living ideas, the offspring of a true process of development. We are in bondage to terms and conceptions which, having had their root in conditions of thought no longer existing, have ceased to possess any vitality, and are for us as spells which have lost their virtue. The endeavour to spread enlightened ideas is perpetually counteracted by these idola theatri,³ which have allied themselves, on the one hand with men’s better sentiments, and on the other with institutions in whose defence are arrayed the passions and the interests of dominant classes. Now, though the teaching of positive truth is the grand means of expelling error, the process will be very much quickened if the negative argument serve as its pioneer; if, by a survey of the past, it can be shown how each age and each race has had a faith and a symbolism suited to its need and its stage of development, and that for succeeding ages to dream of retaining the spirit along with the forms of the past, is as futile as the embalming of the dead body in the hope that it may one day be resumed by the living soul.

But apart from this objective utility of critical research, it has certain highly advantageous influences on the mind which pursues it. There is so far justice in the common sarcasms against men of erudition par excellence, that they have rarely been distinguished for warmth of moral sympathy, or for fertility and grandeur of conception; but your eminently practical thinker is often beset by a narrowness of another kind. It may be doubted, whether a mind which has no susceptibility to the pleasure of changing its point of view, of mastering a remote form of thought, of perceiving identity of nature under variety of manifestation – a perception which resembles an expansion of one’s own being, a pre-existence in the past – can possess the flexibility, the ready sympathy, or the tolerance, which characterizes a truly philosophic culture. Now and then, however, we meet with a nature which combines the faculty for amassing minute erudition with the largeness of view necessary to give it a practical bearing; a high appreciation of the genius of antiquity, with a profound belief in the progressive character of human development – in the eternal freshness of the founts of inspiration, a wonderful intuition of the mental conditions of past ages with an ardent participation in the most advanced ideas and most hopeful efforts of the present; a nature like some mighty river, which, in its long windings through unfrequented regions, gathers mineral and earthy treasures only more effectually to enrich and fertilize the cultivated valleys and busy cities which form the habitation of man.

Of such a nature, with valuable qualities thus ‘antithetically mixt’, we have evidence in the work before us. It exhibits an industry in research which reminds us of Cudworth,⁴ and for which, in recent literature, we must seek a parallel in Germany rather than in England, while its philosophy and its aims are at once lofty and practical. Scattered through its more abstruse disquisitions we find passages of pre-eminent beauty – gems into which are absorbed the finest rays of intelligence and feeling. We believe Mr Mackay’s work is unique in its kind. England has been slow to use or to emulate the immense labours of Germany in the departments of mythology and biblical criticism; but when once she does so, the greater solidity and directness of the English mind ensure a superiority of treatment.

The series of subjects which Mr Mackay has chosen as waymarks in tracing the Progress of the Intellect, is – after an introductory chapter on Intellectual Religion – Ancient Cosmogony; the Metaphysical Idea of God; the Moral Notion of God; the Theory of Mediation; the Hebrew Theory of Retribution and Immortality; the Messianic Theory; Christian Forms and Reforms; and Speculative Christianity. In the introductory dissertation on Intellectual Religion, he develops his view concerning the true basis and character of religion and morals, and the relation between ancient and modern ideas on these subjects, and it is perhaps here that he presents himself to the greatest advantage; this preliminary chapter is a sort of lofty, airy vestibule, in which we gather breath and courage to descend with the author into the crypts of citation and conjecture, into which he is about to introduce us. It is Mr Mackay’s faith that divine revelation is not contained exclusively or pre-eminently in the facts and inspirations of any one age or nation, but is co-extensive with the history of human development, and is perpetually unfolding itself to our widened experience and investigation, as firmament upon firmament becomes visible to us in proportion to the power and range of our exploring instruments. The master key to this revelation, is the recognition of the presence of undeviating law in the material and moral world – of that invariability of sequence which is acknowledged to be the basis of physical science, but which is still perversely ignored in our social organization, our ethics and our religion. It is this invariability of sequence which can alone give value to experience and render education in the true sense possible. The divine yea and nay, the seal of prohibition and of sanction, are effectually impressed on human deeds and aspirations, not by means of Greek and Hebrew, but by that inexorable law of consequences, whose evidence is confirmed instead of weakened as the ages advance; and human duty is comprised in the earnest study of this law and patient obedience to its teaching. While this belief sheds a bright beam of promise on the future career of our race, it lights up what once seemed the dreariest region of history with new interest; every past phase of human development is part of that education of the race in which we are sharing; every mistake, every absurdity into which poor human nature has fallen, may be looked on as an experiment of which we may reap the benefit. A correct generalization gives significance to the smallest detail, just as the great inductions of geology demonstrate in every pebble the working of laws by which the earth has become adapted for the habitation of man. In this view, religion and philosophy are not merely conciliated, they are identical; or rather, religion is the crown and consummation of philosophy – the delicate corolla, which can only spread out its petals in all their symmetry and brilliance to the sun, when root and branch exhibit the conditions of a healthy and vigorous life. Mr Mackay’s preliminary chapter has an independent value, and would be read with interest by many who might not care to follow him in his subsequent inquiry. The dilemma of sensuousness and sentimentalism is thus excellently put: –

Religion often appears to be a mere sentiment, because the reason by which it should be disciplined requires long cultivation, and can only gradually assume its proper prominence and dignity. The faculties are seldom combined in its avowed service; and from its consequent misdirection has been inferred the impossibility of finding within the limits of the mind an effectual religious guide. It has even been said that religion has properly nothing to do with the head, but is exclusively an exercise of the heart and feelings; that all the teaching or education which can properly be called ‘religious’, consists ‘in the formation of the temper and behaviour, the infusing of devotional feeling, and the implanting of Christian principles’. In other words, the highest faculty of the mind is not required in the service of him who bestowed it. Through this narrow view the sentiments are over-excited; the judgement becomes proportionately languid and incapable, the connexion between the theory of practice and duty⁵ is unobserved, and dogmas are blindly learned without regard to their origin or meaning. Superficial religion has everywhere the same result; it fluctuates between the extremes of sensibility⁶ and superstition, and exhibits in this respect a curious parallel to the analogous catastrophe of natural⁷ philosophy. The uneducated feeling has only the alternative of unquestioning credulity, or of sacrificing and abrogating itself. This is the universal dilemma of artificial creeds; their votaries divide into formalists and sceptics, Pharisees and Sadducees; Calvinism, in our own days, has swung back to rationalism, and the symbolical forms of ancient religion are pronounced by a competent observer to have generally led to these extremes.^* The passage is easy from one to the other. The devotional feeling of a Catholic of the middle age might have been destroyed, if the doctrines of Copernicus or Galileo had induced him to mistrust the infallibility of the Pope; and in the days of Sir Thomas Browne, it may have been correct to say that a disbelief in witchcraft implied ‘a sort of atheism’. Horace was startled out of his irreligious philosophy by a clap of thunder; but if a heathen who saw an angry Hecate in the eclipsed moon could have understood a modern almanack, he might at once have fallen into the impiety from which Horace was a convert (Sec. 3, p. 9).

Admirable again is the section on Faith, from which we cannot resist giving a long extract: –

Religion and science are inseparable. No object in nature, no subject of contemplation is destitute of a religious tendency and meaning. If religion be made to consist only in traditional and legendary forms, it is of course as distinguishable from science as the Mosaic cosmogony from geology; but if it be the ascensio mentis in Deum per scalas creatarum rerum,⁸ the evolving the grounds of hope, faith, and duty from the known laws of our being and the constitution of the universe; a religion may be said to include science as its minister, and antiquity, which beheld a divinity in all things, erred only in mistaking its intelligible character, and in making it a mere matter of mystic speculation. In a more limited sense, religion may be contrasted with science, as something beyond and above it; as beginning where science ends, and as a guide through the realms of the unknown. But the known and the unknown are intimately connected and correlative. A superstructure of faith can be securely built only on the foundations of the known. Philosophy and religion have one common aim; they are but different forms of answer to the same great question – that of man and his destination… Faith is, to a great extent, involuntary; it is a law or faculty of our nature, operating silently and intuitively to supply the imperfections of our knowledge. The boundary between faith and knowledge is, indeed, hard to distinguish. We are said to know our own impressions; to believe in their reality, or in the existence of an external⁹ cause of them. It follows that the immediate as well as the more remote inferences from phenomena, are the blended fruit of faith and knowledge; and that though faith, properly speaking, is not knowledge, but the admission of certain inferences beyond knowledge, yet it is almost impossible, in tracing back the operations of the mind, to find any, even the most elementary inference, which is not in some degree a compound of both, and which may not ultimately be resolved into a consistent belief in the results of experience. Faith being thus the inseparable companion and offspring of knowledge, is, like it, liable to modification and correction; that which we call our knowledge of the ultimate purpose of existence being, in fact, only a belief or inference from experience, which would lose its rational value if it were supposed to be so complete and infallible as to exempt us from the necessity of further reflection. All human knowledge must partake of the imperfection of the faculties through which it is derived; and the limited and unsatisfactory character of what we know leaves a wide and most important void to be filled up by our belief. But the more imperfect our knowledge, the more necessary it becomes to examine with suspicion the foundations of the faith so closely connected with it. Faith, as opposed to credulity, and to that blind submission to inexplicable power which usurped its name in the ancient East, is an allegiance of the reason; and as the ‘evidence of things unseen’, stands on the verge of mysticism, its value must depend on the discretion with which it is formed and used. Like all the other faculties, the belief requires to be educated; as the feet are taught to walk, the lips and tongue to speak, so the capacity of belief must be taught how to build securely, yet not arrogantly, on the data of experience. Faith is not that belief of Saint Augustine, whose merit increased with the absurdity of the proposition, nor that which attributed to the instigation of God the real or projected murder of an only son. An irrational faith grew out of the opposite extreme of incredulity,¹⁰ when men refused to believe the truth, unless authenticated by sensuous evidence that confounded their understandings. True faith is a belief in things probable; it is the assigning to certain inferences a hypothetical objectivity, and upon the conscious acknowledgement of this hypothetical character alone depends its advantage over fanaticism; its moral value and dignity. Between the opposite risks of credulity and scepticism, it must be guided by those broad principles of reason which all the faculties require for their regulation. Reason alone can in each case determine where credulity begins, and fix the limit beyond which the mind should cease to assign even a qualified objectivity to its own imaginations. In its advanced stages faith is a legitimate result of the calculation of probabilities; it may transcend experience, but can never absolutely contradict it. Faith and knowledge tend mutually to the confirmation and enlargement of each other; faith by verification being often transformed into knowledge, and every increase of knowledge supplying a wider and firmer basis of belief. Faith, as an inference from knowledge, should be consistently inferred from the whole of knowledge; since, when estranged and isolated, it loses its vitality, and the estrangement is as effectual when it is hastily and unfairly inferred as where it is wholly gratuitous. The same experience which is the source of knowledge being, therefore, the only legitimate foundation of faith, a sound faith cannot be derived from the anomalous and exceptional. It is the avidity for the marvellous, and the morbid eagerness for a cheap and easy solution of the mysteries of existence – a solution supposed to be implied in the conception of an arbitrary and unintelligible rule, which has ever retarded philosophy and stultified religion. Faith naturally arises out of the regular and undeviating. The same unerring uniformity, which alone made experience possible, was also the first teacher of the invisible things of God. It is this

Elder Scripture, writ by God’s own hand,

Scripture authentic, uncorrupt by man,¹¹

which is set before every one, without note or comment, and which even Holy Writ points out as the most unquestionable authority by which, both in heaven and earth, the will of God is interpreted to mankind. If man is not permitted to solve the problem of existence, he is at least emboldened to hope, and to infer so much from its actual conditions as to feel confident as to its results. Faith takes up the problem exactly where knowledge leaves it, and, as from confounding the objects of the two have arisen the discords of sects and the puzzles of philosophy, so the discovery of their true relations and limits enables the mind to reconcile and account for the controversies of the past, and in some measure to penetrate the mysteries that occasioned them (Vol. I, p. 35).

Having thus indicated the ground on which he takes his stand, Mr Mackay commences his survey and delineation of religious development, selecting that of the Hebrews and Greeks as the most typical and complete, and tracing it up to the period when the combination of the two modes of thought in the Alexandrian theosophy formed that web of metaphysical and religious dogma, which constitutes speculative Christianity. While the Hebrew and Greek religions are his main subject, he has not neglected the copious illustration to be drawn from the Persian, the Hindoo and the Northern mythologies, by indicating instances of analogy and of possible derivation, and thus the Progress of the Intellect, is, perhaps, the nearest approach in our language to a satisfactory natural history of religion. The third chapter on the ‘Metaphysical Idea of God’ is a rich mine of associated facts and ideas; but while admiring the range of learning which it exhibits, it is here that we begin to perceive the author’s defects, or rather his redundances. Some of his pages read like extracts from his common-place book, which must be, as Southey said of his own, an urn under the arm of a river-god, rather than like a digested result of study, intended to inform the general reader. Only a devotedness of research such as his own, can give interest and significance to the mass of allusions and particulars with which Mr Mackay overlays, rather than illustrates, his more general passages, which are usually at once profound and lucid. The popular lecturer on science comes before his audience with a selection of striking and apt experiments in readiness, and is silent as to the morning’s preparation in the laboratory; and so the scholar, who would produce a work of general utility, must not drag his readers through the whole region of his own researches, but simply present them with an impressive coup d’œil. The occasional absence of this artistic working up of materials diminishes the effectiveness of Mr Mackay’s admirable work.

The introduction of a truly philosophic spirit into the study of mythology – an introduction for which we are chiefly indebted to the Germans – is a great step in advance of the superficial Lucian-like tone of ridicule adopted by many authors of the eighteenth century, or the orthodox prepossessions of writers such as Bryant,’¹² who saw in the Greek legends simply misrepresentations of the authentic history given in the book of Genesis. The enlarged acquaintance with Hindoo literature, and with the monumental records of other ancient nations, which the last half century has brought us, has rendered more possible that wide comparison which is a requisite for all true, scientific generalization. O. Müller¹³ says, obviously enough, that if we possessed no other access to Grecian antiquity than its mythology, a systematic and philosophic explanation of the latter would be impossible; and so while the mythology of one nation is studied apart from that of others, or while what is really mythology in the records of any one nation is not recognized as such, but, though it presents the ordinary mythical elements, is accounted for by a special theory; we shall never arrive at a just and full estimate of this phase of man’s religious tendencies.

Mr Mackay holds, with Creuzer,¹⁴ that the basis of all mythology was a nature-worship; that ‘those interpreters are in the main right, who held that the heathen Pantheon, in its infinite diversity of names and personifications, was but a multitudinous, though in its origin, unconscious allegory, of which physical phenomena, and principally the heavenly bodies, were the fundamental types’. This primitive period of the myth, in which sacerdotal influence was in the ascendant, he thinks may be designated the Orphic or Cabiric, in distinction from the Epic period, which was characterized by a gradual merging of the mystic or religious feeling in the poetic. He says: – ‘Between the life-like Epic and the sombre Orphic style, between the picturesque and eventful romance, in which the gods are the mere machinery of a human drama, and the mystical symbols of theological metaphysics, there must have been many varieties in the treatment of religious legend, tending to reduce its fragmentary materials to the consistent and positive forms in which they are found in Homer.’ In this theory, mythical conception, instead of being a step in advance of fetishism, is a decadence of the religious sentiment from that monotheistic or pantheistic impression to which it leaps by its first impulse; general ideas in the process of transmission, or simply as a necessary result of the laws of expression in the early stages of thought, resolve themselves into the crystalline forms of the legend. We will quote the author’s own presentation of his opinion. Under the head of ‘Relation of Monotheism to Symbolism’, he says: –

It is impossible to assume any period of time at which the vague sense of Deity ceased to be a mere feeling and assumed a specific form, or became an ‘idea’. The notion of external power must have been almost instantaneously associated with some external object; and the diversified reflections of the Divine easily came to be looked on as substantive and distinct divinities. But however infinite the variety of objects which helped to develop the notion of Deity, and eventually usurped its place, the notion itself was essentially a concentrated or monotheistic one. A vague monotheism resided in the earliest exertions of thought, being nearly identical with that impression of unity and connexion in sensible phenomena, which in its simplest form appears to rise independently of any effort of philosophical comparison. The power of generalization, or of seeing the one in the many, that first element both of science and of religion, is so nearly innate or instinctive as to have been termed by Plato a divine or Promethean gift; and the philosophical conception of the oneness of the universe and of its author, usually regarded as the last acquisition of civilization and reflection, appears to have been anticipated by a natural revelation, an indefinite dread of the aggregate of supersensuous nature; which is said to be common even among savages. In this indefinite feeling must be sought, if anywhere, that conceptional monotheism of primitive ages, which like the virtues of the golden age, makes every successive epoch, unless it be the present, appear only as a stage in the progress of degeneracy and aberration. The genius of religion… does not wait for the co-operation of science in order to commence her task, the powers of combination are at work long before the maturity of the reason eventually found necessary to guide them; nay, the origin of religion, like that of civilization, may be said to be free from many of the corruptions attending its onward progress, which arise from the mind’s inability to deal unembarrassed with the multitude of sensuous analogies. Generalization begins before a sufficient basis has been prepared to make it legitimate, and every successive step in the research into particulars seems to be in mysterious contradiction to the first hurried conclusion. Hence the universal blending of monotheism with polytheism, and the impossibility of discovering historically, which of the two is older or more original.

Mr Mackay’s main proposition, that the substratum of religious symbolism was a worship or deification of the elements, is well sustained by the evidence; but he perhaps overstates the degree in which the monotheistic idea was originally co-existent with polytheistic personification. To the uncultured intellect, a plurality of divine agencies, analogous to the human, would seem, by their conflicting wills and influences, a natural explanation of physical and moral vicissitudes. As the impression of unity in nature gained force, these agencies would gradually become subordinate to a higher power, but the impression would at first be hardly more than a shadowy presentiment – one of those

High instincts, before which our mortal nature

Doth shudder like a guilty thing surprised.¹⁵

That allegorical elements exist to a considerable extent, in the divine, if not in the heroic myths of Greece, there is strong evidence, both presumptive and internal; and the allegorical interpretation, on the lowest estimate of its soundness, is far superior to the pragmatical or semi-historical, which, in endeavouring to show a nucleus of fact in the myths, exhibits an utter blindness to the mental state in which they originated, and simply substitutes an unpoetical fable for a poetical one. But owing to the manysidedness of all symbols, there is a peculiarly seductive influence in allegorical interpretation; and we observe that all writers who adopt it, though they set out with the largest admissions as to the spontaneous and unconscious character of mythical allegory, and the manifold modifications which have obscured it, acquire a sort of fanatical faith in their rule of interpretation, and fall into the mistake of supposing that the conscious allegorizing of a modern can be a correct reproduction of what they acknowledge to be unconscious allegorizing in the ancients. We do not see what unconscious allegory can mean, unless it be personification accompanied with belief, and with the spontaneous, vivid conception of a symbol, as opposed to the premeditated use of a poetical figure; and this belief would lead to an elaboration of the myth, in harmony rather with the attributed personality than with the true physical characteristics of the object personified. As a painter, in treating an allegorical subject, is led on by his artistic feeling to add one detail after another, until the specific idea with which he began becomes subordinate to the general effect; so the exuberant religious imagination of the Greek, which set out with a personification of the sun or the ocean, would generate myths having relation rather to the human symbol than to the real phenomena of its cosmical prototype. Hence it appears to us, that any attempt extensively to trace consistent allegory in the myths must fail. Nor need we regret it, since our interest in the subject is of a different nature from that of the ancient philosophical interpreters, who, living at a period when the myths still constituted the popular religion, were under the necessity of bringing them into accordance with their own moral and religious views. It is enough for us if we have sufficient insight into the myths to form an approximate conception of the state of mind which produced them, and to assign them their true rank in the scale of religious development. Mr Mackay has not escaped the influence of the allegorizing mania; he does not despair of finding the true cosmical meaning of the most natural human incidents in the Odyssey, or of the tragic conceptions of the dramatists; but if, like the alchymists, he is sometimes in quest of things not in rerum natura,¹⁶ he, like them, elicits much that is suggestive in his search. To criticize details would carry us beyond our limits, and we shall do a greater service to the reader by referring him to the work itself, which, open it where he may, will offer both food and stimulus to his thought.

While the poets of Greece were giving to its religious thought a more and more sensuous expression, its philosophers were working out an opposite result; and Mr Mackay traces this subtilizing process until it reaches the Aristotelian theosophy, of which he gives a comprehensive and clear account.

It is in his theory concerning the religious development of the Hebrews, and in his treatment of their records, that Mr Mackay departs the most widely from prevalent opinion. The idea that many parts of the Old Testament have a mythical character, an idea which was necessary to conciliate them, as well with the philosophic Hebrewism of Philo, as with the Christian morality of Origen,¹⁷ and which has long been familiar to German critics, is still startling to the English theological mind. No thinker of ordinary intelligence can fail to perceive, not merely difference in degree of completeness, but contrast, between the religious conceptions which represented the Deity as sanctioning or prescribing the cunning trickery of Jacob,¹⁸ or the savage cruelties of Joshua,¹⁹ and those which preside over the sublime remonstrances of the prophets; but the explanation is still sought in the theory of accommodation, that is, the puerile and unworthy religious conceptions invariably accompanying an absence of intellectual culture, which in other nations are referred to the general principles of human development, are, in the case of the Hebrews, supposed to have been benevolent falsities on the part of the true God, whereby he allured a barbarous race to his recognition and worship. On this theory, because Abraham had but limited notions of honour and justice, God plagued Pharaoh and Abimelech²⁰ for being misled by the falsehoods of the father of the faithful, and made those falsehoods redound to the temporal advantage of his chosen servant; because the Israelites were surrounded by examples of idolatrous and sacrificial observance, and had a strong propensity to imitate them, Jehovah, in condescension to their weakness, prescribed for them a ritual analogous in spirit and in symbolism to that of their heathen neighbours: because they were a ferocious race, eager to ‘eat of the prey and drink the blood of the slain’,²¹ a suitable vent for their destructive energies was found in such requirements as the slaughter of 3,000 in their own camp, and the war of extermination against the Canaanites, or in the especial injunction to Joshua to hough the enemy’s horses. The only argument by which the theory of accommodation can be sustained is, that in conjunction with that divine countenance of human vice and weakness which it supposes, there were delivered and preserved certain elements of superhuman truth which attest the specifically divine origin of the religion – its distinctive character as a revelation. Now, while the mythical theory does not exclude that more enlarged idea of providential evolution, which sees in the peculiar religious and political history of the Hebrews, a preparation for ushering into the world a religion which anticipates and fulfils the yearnings of man’s spiritual nature, it delivers the understanding from a heavy burthen of contradiction and absurdity, and the religious sentiment from the admission of painful anomalies. The fact, that the history of all other nations has a mythical period, urges a strong presumption, that the Hebrew records will not present an exception in this respect, and an unprejudiced examination confirms this presumption. We find there not only a generic similarity to the gentile myths, in a degrading conception of the divine attributes, with a corresponding crudeness and obliquity of moral views, in an ignorant interpretation of physical phenomena, a love of prodigy, and a lavish supposition of gratuitous miracle, but also a specific resemblance in symbolism. This is visible on a cursory glance, but a nearer investigation discloses overwhelming proof, that the Hebrew writings, far from meriting an exceptional confidence, require, from the evidence they exhibit that the Hebrew mind was peculiarly deficient in a true historical sense, special canons of caution in their interpretation. On applying the test of a critical analysis, the books of the Pentateuch resolve themselves into a compilation of distinct documents, differing in date and frequently in spirit and purpose, as may be seen from the variations and contradictions in their accounts of the same event; and the more ancient of these documents presents internal evidence, that it was not in existence earlier than the time of Samuel, about 400 years after Moses. The same artificial coherence, the same arbitrariness of classification and of titles, together with palpable inaccuracies and indications of partisanship, characterize large portions, not only of the remaining historical works, but also of the prophetic. Since these conclusions are denied by no competent critic uncommitted to the maintenance of certain tenets, it would be wise in our theological teachers, instead of struggling to retain a footing for themselves and their doctrine on the crumbling structure of dogmatic interpretation, to cherish those more liberal views of biblical criticism, which, admitting of a development of the Christian system corresponding to the wants and the culture of the age, would enable it to strike a firm root in man’s moral nature, and to entwine itself with the growth of those new forms of social life to which we are tending. The spirit which doubts the ultimately beneficial tendency of inquiry, which thinks that morality and religion will not bear the broadest daylight our intellect can throw on them, though it may clothe itself in robes of sanctity and use pious phrases, is the worst form of atheism; while he who believes, whatever else he may deny, that the true and the good are synonymous, bears in his soul the essential element of religion. Viewed in this relation, the Progress of the Intellect is a valuable addition to recent examples of plain speaking – of that παρρησα²² which Paul held to be the proper effect of confidence in the excellence of revelation, whose manifestation was in the spirit, and not in the letter.

Before stating Mr Mackay’s theory concerning the Hebrew history and religion, we must express our regret that the force of his conclusions is weakened by his unduly insisting on details difficult of proof, by a frequently infelicitous citation, and by his not giving due value to a free poetical impulse in the figurative language of the Hebrews, a deficiency which sometimes leads him into an almost trivial literalness of interpretation. But notwithstanding these occasional defects, the chapters which treat principally of the Hebrews will repay a close study, both from their suggestiveness, and the soundness of their general views. Mr Mackay holds that the original God of the Israelites was no other than the Nature-God, El or Ilus, worshipped in Arabia, Palestine, and Phoenicia, with licentious and sanguinary rites, under the double aspect of Baal and Moloch; and that the purer worship of Jehovah, inculcated by the prophets, and established by Josiah, was a religious reformation among the Hebrews, generated by the growth in civilization consequent on an enlarged commercial intercourse with foreign nations, and contemporaneous with a movement of religious reform which took place throughout Asia, about 700 BC, ‘connected in India with the name of Buddha, in Persia (or Media), with that of Zoroaster, and a century later extending itself by Xenophanes and Heraclitus into Greece’. According to this theory, the calf-worship in the wilderness and under the kings, the altars in the high places, and the atrocities of the valley of Hinnom, were not acts of apostasy, but of persistence in early barbarism. In Mr Mackay’s opinion, the account of the Passover, as it now stands, is the veil which the purer conceptions of later Hebrews cast over the ancient custom of sacrificing first-born children to the bloodthirsty El; the massacre of 3,000 Israelites, represented in Exodus as retributive, was probably sacrificial – a huge offering to the same demon, the rather that Aaron, the leader in the calf-worship, was not involved in the same destruction; the command by which God is said to have tempted Abraham, the vow of Jephthah, the slaughter of the seven descendants of Saul, whereby David sought to propitiate his God and avert a famine, are indications that human sacrifices were familiar to the Hebrews; above all, that ‘passing of children through the fire’, recorded of so many kings, and indignantly denounced by the prophets, as a practice habitual to the nation, is most probably to be interpreted as an actual immolation. The somewhat obscure passage, Amos 5:25, 26 – ‘Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel? But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun, your images, the star of your God which ye made to yourselves’ – Mr Mackay thinks important as conveying a denial of the early existence of a pure, Jehovistic religion. A disputed passage is, of course, dubious ground for an inference; but there is ample evidence of a less questionable kind, that the early Hebrew God, whether identical or not with any heathen deity, was of a character widely different from the one proclaimed by Micah, as requiring nothing of man but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with God.

The original presiding Deity of Israel was, in Mr Mackay’s words, ‘emphatically the terrific God’. The Old Testament abounds in pictures of Divine operations that cannot be regarded as true delineations of the real character of Deity; but only distortions of it, analogous to those exhibited in the mythologies of other countries. The judicious reader of the Hebrew Scriptures, however orthodox his faith, cannot fail to perceive that they exhibit a progress from degrading to enlightened views of Divine nature and government. The writings of the prophets are full of protests against the conceptions of popular ignorance, and by continually expanding and purifying the Jewish ideas of Deity, prepared the way for the reception of the teachings of Christ. This view of the progressive character of ‘revelation’ does not depend for its evidence on minute points of criticism; it rests rather upon broad facts which are open to the apprehension of the most unlearned: and the Progress of the Intellect abounds in statements which place them in the most forcible point of view. To a greater or less extent they are now recognized by Christians of all denominations, and it is impossible to take up the writings, or listen to the discourses of the leading men of any church or sect, without perceiving the influence which they have exerted upon their minds.

Mr Mackay’s analysis and history of the theory of Mediation, from its earliest mythical embodiments, those ‘flowers which fancy strewed before the youthful steps of Psyche, when she first set out in pursuit of the immortal object of her love’, to its subtilization in philosophy – his delineation of the origin of Christianity as an expansion of the prophetic spiritualism, yet carrying within it certain elements of Jewish symbolism, which have arrested its true development and perverted its influence – his final sketch of the confluence of Greek Philosophy and Christianized Hebrewism – are admirable, both from their panoramic breadth and their richness in illustrative details. We can only recommend the reader to resort himself to this treasury of mingled thought and learning, and as a further inducement, we will quote the concluding passage from the section on the ‘Mediation of Philosophy’.

The true religious philosophy of an imperfect being is not a system of creed, but, as Socrates thought, an infinite search or approximation. Finality is but another name for bewilderment or defeat, the common affectation of indolence and superstition, a temporary suspension of the mind’s health arising from prejudice, and especially from the old error of clinging too closely to notions found instrumental in assisting it after they have ceased to be serviceable, and striving rather to defend and retain them, than to make them more correct. A remnant of the mythical lurks in the very sanctuary of science. Forms or theories ever fall short of nature, though they are ever tending to reach a position above nature, and may often be found really to include more than the maker of them at the time knew. To a certain extent they are reliable and complete; as a system of knowledge they are but intermediate and preparatory. As matter is the soul’s necessary instrument, so ignorance, more or less mixed up with all its expressions and forms, may be said to be as it were the eyelid through which it gradually opens itself to the truth, admitting no more than it can for the time support, and, as through a veil, learning to support its lustre. The old religionists discovered a universal cause, personified it and prayed to it. The mere notion seemed not only to satisfy the religious feeling, but to solve all problems. Nations unanimously subscribed to the pious formula, which satisfied their imaginations, and pleased their vanity by cheating them into a belief that they were wise; but which, at the same time, supplanted nature by tradition, the sources of truth by artificial disguises, and at last paralysed the sentiment which gave birth to it. Science, unlike the rude expedient which stupefied without nourishing the mind, gratifies the religious feeling without arresting it, and opening out the barren mystery of the one into more explicit and manageable ‘forms’ expressing, not indeed his essence, but his will, feeds an endless enthusiasm by accumulating for ever new objects of pursuit. We have long experienced that knowledge is profitable; we are beginning to find out that it is moral, and shall at last discover it to be religious. Aristotle declared the highest and truest science to be that which is most disinterested; Bacon, treating science as separate from religion, asserted knowledge to be power, and held that truth must be tested by its fruits, that is, its instrumentality in promoting the right and the useful. Both assertions may be justified and reconciled by the fact that, while no real knowledge is powerless or fruitless, the fruits differ in refinement and value, the highest being unquestionably those disinterested gratifications which minister to the highest wants of the highest faculties, and which earned for philosophy the title of a divine love, realizing the mysterious longing of the soul, and promoting the accomplishment of its destiny,

To rise in science as in bliss,

Initiate in the secrets of the skies.²³