and Low, with a decided impression that the combatants are skirmishing on an immense ice-field, which is drifting them all together into other and unknown seas.  What cares any man profoundly conscious of the wants both of the intellect and the heart whether Moses wrote the Pentateuch or not, and if so, whether he was as accomplished a geologist as Professors Buckland and Lyell?  Admit that the whole letter of Scripture comes from God, even to the vowel-points, by what laws and methods shall we expound it so as to put an end to the internecine war between Faith and Reason, between Religion and Philosophy?

We say without reserve, that this book of Mr. James’s, if we except a small and unpretending treatise by the same author, published a few years since, on the “Nature of Evil,” is the first we have met with, in the range of modern religious controversy, which goes to the heart and marrow of the subject.

To see into what straits we had been brought, call to mind the essentials of the Kantian and Scotch philosophies, which have dominated the German and English mind, and partially the French mind, for the last quarter of a century.  Kant resolves all our knowledge into the science of phenomena.  Our faculties give us nothing but the phenomena of consciousness; and the phenomena of consciousness are not noumenal existence, or existence in se.  Nor have we any right to reason from phenomena to noumena, or to say that the former authenticate the latter.  We know only the Ego.  The Non-Ego lies on the other side of a yawning chasm,—­if, indeed, there is anything on the other side, which is doubtful.  The Ego becomes the centre of the Universe, and God, who comes under the Non-Ego, lies somewhere on the circumference, and is only yielded to us as the product of our moral instinct.  Sir William Hamilton, following Reid, asserts a natural Realism, or noumenal existence within the phenomenal; but he utterly denies that either of these authenticates the Infinite and Absolute.  He and his disciple, Dr. Mansel, labor immensely to prove that there can be no such thing as a philosophy of the Infinite, and that to attempt such a philosophy leads us into inextricable confusion and self-contradiction.

In thus degrading Philosophy, unchurching her ignominiously, as fit only to deal with the Finite,—­in other words, making her the lackey of mere Science,—­they fancy they are doing famous service to Revelation.  Very well,—­we are ready to say,—­having scourged Philosophy out of the temple, will you please, Gentlemen, to conduct us yourselves towards its hallowed shrine?  If Philosophy cannot yield us a knowledge of the Infinite, we take it that Revelation, as you apprehend it, can.  We, poor prodigals, have been feeding long enough upon husks that the swine do eat, and crave a little nourishing food.—­The answer we get is, that Revelation does not propose to give us any such fare.  Not any more than Philosophy does Revelation disclose to us the Infinite.