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silver, was as 1 to 46, and in Europe as 1 to 40. The value of equal quantities of gold and silver was in the proportion of 15 or 15 to 1. From 1810 to 1829 the total produce of the South American mines was estimated by M. Jacob at 65,372,6157. The average annual supply of the American and Russian mines during the ten years ending with 1829 is estimated at about 3,146,0007. The total estimated produce of the American, European, and Russo-Asiatic mines in 1834 was about 6,000,0007. Since that period the supplies have greatly increased. Within the last few years, indeed, an unusual quantity of gold has been steadily imported into Great Britain. Among the many reasons assigned for the increased importation is the increased productiveness of the gold mines and washings of Siberia and the Ural Mountains in Russia. Large quantities of gold were imported into England from St. Petersburg in 1846, and the statistical returns of the Russian mines show that their productiveness has increased immensely during the last ten years. In a recent article in the Mining Journal, on the progress of French mining, the value of the gold extracted in five years from the Russian mines is estimated to amount to 12,792,0007. The value of the precious metals applied to mere purposes of ornament and luxury in Europe and America has been estimated by M. Jacob to be about 5,900,0007. annually.

The advantages of trade and commerce in ancient times were not more striking and more enriching than they are at the present day. Nature seems to have taught us that the natives of different portions of the globe ought to exercise a kind of dependence upon each other, and be united by one common interest. In the words of Addison, almost every degree produces something peculiar to itself. The food often grows in one country and the sauce in another. The fruits of Portugal are corrected by the productions of Barbadoes; the infusion of a Chinese plant is sweetened with the juice of an Indian cane. The Philippine Isles give a flavour to our European bowls; while the single dress of a gentlewoman may be the production of an hundred climates. The muff and the fan are brought together from the different ends of the earth; the scarf from the torrid zone, the tippet from beneath the pole. The brocade petticoat rises out of the mines of Peru, and the diamond necklace from the bowels of Hindostan. Our ships are laden with the gold and the harvests of every land; our tables stored with spices, oil, and wine; our rooms filled with pyramids of China, and adorned with the workmanship of Japan. Our morning's draught is brought to us from the remotest corners of the earth; we repair our bodies with the drugs of America, and

U 2

repose

repose under Indian canopies. The vineyards of France are our gardens, the Spice Islands our hotbeds, the Persians our silkweavers, the Chinese our potters. The earth is the Lord's and

the fulness thereof.' P

PAs pertinent to the subject of this article, we add the following passage from an old book which has now become very scarce. The title is, The State of the Greatest King, set forth in the Greatness of Solomon and the Glory of his Reign. By G. Renolds, Professor of the Mathematics, Bristol, 1721. 'To some it may seem incredible that David and a few of his subjects should give such immense sums towards the building of the house of the Lord in Jerusalem, because at this time there is not so much money to be found in all the kingdoms and republics in Europe; for six of the greatest kingdoms in it would reckon themselves greatly oppressed, if, for once only, they were obliged to pay an annual tax, amounting but to as much as only a few of the subjects of king David gave freely and willingly towards the building of the Lord's house in Jerusalem. But to such it will seem to be more creditable (credible) if they consider that from the time of David and Solomon, and for above a thousand years afterwards gold and silver was in much greater plenty in the world than either of them is at present.

'The immense riches which Solomon had in silver and gold; the prodigious quantities of both these which Alexander found in the treasuries of Darius, the vast quantity expended upon Shushan, the chief city of Persia, where Tithonus and his son Memnon, when they built it, caused the stones of the building to be joined together with gold, as Cassidorus writeth, and the vast loads of them which we find often to have been carried in triumph before Roman generals when they returned from conquered provinces, and the excessive sums some of the Roman emperors expended in their luxurious and fantastical enjoyments, and in donations to their armies, and many other, with what private persons had and expended (some of which shall be mentioned afterwards), sufficiently prove this. But at length, the mines which furnished this plenty, especially those of the Southern Arabia (where it is supposed the Ophir of the ancients was) being exhausted; and the burning of cities, and great devastations of countries, which after followed from the eruptions of the Goths, Vandals, Huns, and other barbarous nations in the west, and of the Saracens, Turks, and Tartars in the east, having wasted and destroyed a great part of the gold and silver which the world afore abounded with: this introduced that great scarcity of both which afterwards ensued, and which the mines of Mexico, Peru, and Brazil, have not as yet been able fully to repair.'

THE

THE INFLUENCE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY UPON CHRISTIANITY IN GERMANY."

By the Rev. O. T. DOBBIN, LL.D., of Trinity College, Dublin.

We shall not succeed in giving a full and fair view of the causes which have contributed to the corruption of Christianity in Germany, unless we take into account the influence of the Teutonic philosophies upon religion. We shall scarcely say too much if we affirm that the Germans are a peculiarly thoughtful and reflective people, and that metaphysical disquisition, with the processes of investigation it implies, must have for them an especial charm. Nor again would it be going beyond the warranty of facts to allege that, among a people to whom philosophy was so germane, it would produce a very observable effect upon their theology, and give it a complexion of subtlety and idealism such as it would not exhibit under other circumstances. In fact, the theology of the schools in any country or age will be very much as the philosophy of the place or period may be ; and Christianity from the first has felt and had to deplore the undue but very natural influence that human philosophy has exercised over the doctrines of revealed truth. The facts are patent to the eye of every observer, and do not need the weighty authority of Locke to win them belief. Our English philosopher, however, says :-

'He that shall attentively read the writers after the age of the Apostles will easily find how much the philosophy they were tinctured with influenced them in their understanding of the books of the Old and New Testament. In the ages wherein Platonism prevailed, the converts to Christianity of that school on all occasions interpreted Holy Writ according to the notions they had imbibed from that philosophy. Aristotle's doctrine had the same effect in its turn; and when it degenerated into the peripateticism of the schools, that too brought its notions and distinctions into divinity, and affixed them to the terms of the Sacred Scripture. And we may see still how at this day every one's philosophy regulates every one's interpretation of the Word of God.'

But this will be pre-eminently the case in a region where a speculative philosophy has made her abode, and where the minds of the learned are more than ordinarily subject to her sway. The honour put upon philosophy in the simple fact that one of the most exalted University degrees in Germany takes its designa

a This article must be regarded as supplementary to those on German Rationalism which have appeared in the preceding numbers of The Journal of Sacred Literature.'

tion from that branch of science, and the array of professors devoted to this study in the schools counting by hundreds, are sufficient to show that while with us philosophy is a mere appendage or a very subordinate part of a good education, with our Teutonic neighbours it is a large, essential, and very important portion. A good share of the student's curriculum is devoted to it, and in modern days at least the profession of attachment to some prevailing form of philosophy is almost essential to the reputation of a literary man.

With Leibnitz, the independent disciple of Des Cartes and opponent of Locke, may be said to have commenced the career of modern philosophy in Germany. But this man of most comprehensive genius and all but universal attainments either had not sufficient time or had too little concern to expound his system, and give it that elaboration and expansion which were requisite in one whose qualifications might make him the head of a school of philosophy. He flung his thoughts forth on this subject, as he did upon a multiplicity of others, like a shower of fireworks, all luminous, all desultory, while he seemed regardless of their future fate the mere ebullitions of an ever active mind. His chief work in answer to Locke is posthumous. But what circumstances forbade him to do, allowing him indeed to be a constant creator, but rarely a methodizer and harmonist, his follower, Wolf, did for his philosophy. The disciple, however, while he reduced his master's ingenious and grand thoughts to system, erred upon the other side, of being too systematic; and while by his logical arrangements he did Leibnitz service, and made him intelligible and complete, he did at the same time lay bare the faults that a looser arrangement had partially concealed. His system was geometry applied to the human mind, forgetting that the mind is neither square nor circle, neither marble tablet nor plastic clay. He failed in his attempt to subject spirit to the laws of matter, and Logic retired dispirited from a field where she displayed her weakness as well as her strength. The incongruity is still more observable in its application to sacred science, though Wolf and his enthusiastic followers for half a century thought not so. By means of his philosophy all difficulties of revelation were to be removed, all doctrines expounded, all precepts enforced, all mysteries comprehended, and the hard skeleton of a logico-philosophical methodism was to become the mate of the warm, living, inspired spiritualism of the Bible. To no mistake are the words of the poet more applicable than to that of John Christopher Wolf and his clerical disciples—

'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamed of in our philosophy!'

It may not be superfluous to say that the common sense of the day looked on with amazement and distrust at this invasion by philosophy of a domain hitherto deemed too sacred for the intrusion of metaphysical speculation, while infidelism jeered at this mongrel compound of philosophy and theology. Wolf was a devout man, relied in his dying hour professedly upon the atonement of the Son of God, and in his divinity system never forsook the grand outlines and substantial verities of the Christian faith; but by seeking to prove everything, demonstrate everything, and by failing, as he necessarily must, to do so, he did more damage to the religion of the Saviour indirectly than his direct efforts to accredit it could ever repair.

His system, his learning, his character, had fascination for the leading theologians of that age, and gave shape to their representations of revealed truth. Baumgarten of Halle, Ribov of Göttingen, Carpzov of Weimar-Reusch and Toellner, Reinbeck, Canz and Schubert, addicted themselves to this philosophising of Christianity; and while none perhaps would decline the name of rationalists more pertinaciously than most of these, it cannot be doubted that its morning twilight rays gleam out here and there in their writings. They shift the basis of Christianity altogether, and build upon a sandy foundation. Logic, reason, with all their apparatus of process and nomenclature, are put in the place of divine revelation and human testimony; and when their insufficiency for the work they were employed to do is proved by the results, then, by an unhappy confusion of their pretensions with the object of their labours, the Bible shares in the reproach that follows their ill-success.

But there have been more recent and also more celebrated and influential philosophies in Germany than that of Leibnitz matured by Wolf. The first claiming to be named is that of the distinguished Prussian metaphysician, Immanuel Kant, with its strongly subjective tendencies; next, its modifications by Reinholdt and Fichte, which leaned still more than even their master's toward subjectivity; that of Schelling, with his intellectual intuition and absolute identification of God with the subjective and the objective worlds; and finally that of Hegel, with its absolute idealism, and its resolution of Deity into a dialectic process, a logical formula, a mode of thought. We should not be wide of the mark were we to aver that even the most novel of these theories had its counterpart centuries back, in the schools of the pagan philosophers of Egypt, Greece, and Rome-nor have the speculations of the older Brahmans failed to take some one or other of these directions. We cannot reflect upon the subjects of inquiry among the philosophers of all ages, God, the world, man and his destinies, without

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