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ART. VI.-Hippolytus and his Age; or, the Doctrine and Practice of the Church of Rome under Commodus and Alexander Severus: and Ancient and Modern Christianity and Divinity compared. By CHRISTIAN CHARLES JOSIAS BUNSEN, D.C.L. In Four

Volumes. London: Longman, Brown, Green and Longmans. 1852.

THE work before us is one of the fruits of the Great Exhibition. It was not, indeed, published at the time, but it is plain that it was intended that the letters to Archdeacon Hare and the Apology of Hippolytus should appear at that time. The former were advertised in the Times,' early in July, 1851. The topic of the Exhibition is prominent in the opening of the letters; and Hippolytus is supposed, in the fiction of the Apology, to have visited England at that time. The book and its author, the editor and the printers, being of so many various nations, were to have formed a part in that many-coloured gathering. The writer himself states circumstances which show the wonderfully short time in which so large a work, bearing on so many subjects, and on such difficult points of complicated research,' was composed. The first two volumes, and part of 'the fourth, were written and printed in the last six months of 1851; the last two in the first six months of 1852.' (Vol. iv. Pref. p. i.)

But more than this: in the early part of June, 1851, Dr. Tregelles informed M. Bunsen of the publication of the Philosophumena. In the course of the next week, on the 13th of June, M. Bunsen dates his first letter to Archdeacon Hare; it is 18 pages long. The second needed time for preparation; it is dated June 20, a week after the first, and occupies 104 pages. The third follows in two days; being dated June 23, but is only 16 pages long. In two days more, on June 25, the fourth letter (54 pages) is dated. After another two days, on June 27, the fifth is written; it extends to 128 pages. On the 26th of July, the letters were so far carried through the press that the author was able to submit the printed sheets of the whole to his friend; and it would seem as if the Apology of Hippolytus, occupying 117 pages of the fourth volume, was written within that space of time. This is very wonderful, even if considered only in reference to the physical exertion and manual labour required for its execution-for the mere writing of the letters, besides any previous reading necessary, and the authorities which had to be sought out and referred to-to say nothing

of the wonderful variety and multiplicity of the knowledge which is introduced in connexion with it. It was written in a fortnight, and printed in a month.

But this is not all. Consider when and where these letters were written; not in the calm seclusion of the cloister, or the freshness of green fields and the retirement of the country, but in a house in Carlton Gardens, in the month of June; in the midst of the heat and bustle of a London season, intensified a thousandfold by the Great Exhibition; and that by one whose official duties, we presume, are enough for one man's time, and who then, we should have thought, must have been obliged to devote his whole leisure to the extra duties of courtesies to the foreigners who had resorted to the World's Fair. But M. Bunsen did write these letters in this wonderfully short time, and the volumes he has produced will remain on record as a remarkable fact in literary history; not only, we conceive, as an evidence that a volume of a given size can be written in a given time, and amid a thousand distracting occupations; but also, we must add, as an abiding monument of the egregious folly of attempting to perform such feats.

When we first read the title, and saw that, beside the question of authorship, and the immediate subject of the work, the chief argument of the volumes was the doctrine and practice of the early Church; we entered on the perusal of them with great interest. We undertook to review them with the special object of investigating the one subject of Ante-Nicene Theology. We said, in some surprise, And so it seems that, after all, the 'battles of the Faith must again be fought on the old ground, 'the doctrine and practice of the primitive Church. M. Bunsen, the great prophet of the Church of the Future, has entered 'an appeal to the Church of the Fathers;-for doctrines, for 'liturgies, for the canon of Scripture and the constitution of 'the Church, he would go back to the testimony of antiquity, 6 and with all due allowance for altered circumstances and 'modern improvements, would claim the sanction of saints and 'doctors for the views which he has himself promulgated.' How far he commits himself to this appeal we do not inquire; but he puts forth a picture of the faith and practice of the Ante-Nicene period which professes to be matter of historical fact; and as a question of historical fact we were prepared to go into the subject. There is no need in such cases to mix up matters of personal and party warfare; deep as is our concern in the question, we trust that we could engage in it in a truly historical and critical spirit. We are not afraid of the subject: the divines of the Church of England have ever courted the inquiry, and engaged in it fairly, according to the measure of

knowledge which existed at their time. And those who in these last days have been the means, under God, of lighting up the flame of primitive piety, as well as of recalling us to primitive doctrine, have devoted all their energies, and all their means, to bring home to the knowledge of all the genuine records of the Primitive Church. Insinuations and assertions to the contrary, pervade M. Bunsen's work; he says, we are bent more than ever on stopping and suppressing, or, at least, discrediting, all inquiry;' yet among the earliest efforts of our revival was the setting forth in English the Records of the Church;' and the suggestion made, as the means of meeting the jealousy which the Laity might feel, that in deferring to the voice of antiquity they were transferring the ultimate appeal from the Bible, which they could all read, to writings accessible only to the learned-was that the principal works of the Fathers should be put forth in English translations; and the endeavours of that School have notoriously been devoted, amid discouragement and want of adequate support, to the publishing critical editions of the patristic writings, as well as cheap and accessible reprints of former editions. All that we can desire is that these should be read; read entire, not in extracts, and judged of by the principles of true common sense, and not by preconceived theories.

6

Our intention was, at this time, to have gone fully into the points raised by M. Bunsen, with reference to the doctrines of the early Ante-Nicene Church. The question of the authorship of the treatise, which has given occasion to this publication, we consider to be settled; to be as fairly and as completely settled as any literary question can be. We conceive that it has been proved incontrovertibly, that the so-called Philosophumena of Origen, is a work of S. Hippolytus, Bishop of Portus Romanus,' The Harbour of Rome;' and that a variety of questions respecting the personal history of the writer, his position and influence in the Church, and the authorship of other writings which before was matter of doubt, are now definitely concluded. Those who have written on the subject, both in Germany and England, generally concur in these points. The arguments have been put out vigorously and skilfully by M. Bunsen; and by him, and others who had written on the subject, it has been well nigh exhausted.

But when we came to read the dashing pages of the Age of Hippolytus-when we found the bold and broad assertions which it contained-when we failed to recognise the doctrines which we knew to be held by the primitive Fathers, and saw also with how rude a hand the critical pruning-knife was applied to some writings, and new authors and new authority attributed

to others, the free and uncautious spirit in which we were disposed to read a book written apparently with all the freedom and candour of a genuine lover of truth, and by one who appeared, at first sight, to be familiar with all learning, critically acquainted with the theological language of the Fathers, and at home with their opinions, as if he had lived in their society;the free and hearty surrender of ourselves to our author's statements-was checked: we began to hesitate; we referred to original works; we looked at the Greek of the Philosophumena, and the text of Photius; we recalled the very words of ancient writers; we came across cases of questionable scholarship, and we felt that we could no longer read M. Bunsen's book without the utmost caution. Our next step was to go into an investigation of the correctness of some of his statements; and then, when our suspicions were further excited, into a comparison of his English with the Greek of his citations. The result of our inquiries we shall simply lay before our readers: they shall judge for themselves.

The writer of these words desires to put aside the fictitious tone with which custom invests the writer of a review, and to affirm in the plain and simple language which involves a personal responsibility, that the above statements are strictly true. The feelings with which he commenced reading the Age of Hippolytus were those of great interest in the literary questions involved in it; with a kindly disposition towards the writer personally-with entire confidence in his candour and truthfulness-and without the least suspicion of his want of scholarship or of acquaintance with the subjects on which he was writing.

" saw.

Such probably is the case with very many, with almost all the English readers of these volumes. They remember Bunsen, the friend of Arnold: they remember his testimony-'I could not express my sense of what Bunsen is without seeming to 'be exaggerating. . . . He is a man in whom God's graces and gifts are more united than in any other person whom I ever I have seen men as holy, as amiable, as able; but I ' never knew one who was all these in so extraordinary a degree, and combined with a knowledge of things new and old, sacred and profane, so rich, so accurate, so profound, that I never 'knew it equalled or approached by any man." And again, You met Bunsen, and can now sympathise with the all but idolatry with which I regard him." And indeed the religious and, to all appearance, the candid spirit which appears in some of the early writings of M. Bunsen, which form part of the second volume of this work, and a certain ardent way of speaking

1 Arnold's Life and Correspondence, ii. 137.

2 Ib. i. 327.

of the love of truth, and freedom from prejudice, and a spirit of love, and in general a sort of religious tone, which show at least what the writer once was, go far to explain this admiration.

Many readers, of course, receive implicitly the statements of such a man. For the most part they have no critical acquaintance with the subjects on which he is writing; neither have they the leisure, nor the opportunity, nor the learning requisite for testing their correctness. The insinuations and assertions that the opinions of early Christian writers have been misrepresented by theologians, to serve their own purposes, and that M. Bunsen belongs to a country, the scholars of which have brought a new light to bear on ancient records, and that he gives, as he professes to do, the results of the most recent investigations, all this throws an air of plausibility over his assertions; and the natural consequence is, that the ordinary English reader accepts his representations as correct.

distinguished place which he occupies in all those inquiries which are most interesting in the development of the world's 'mind and civilization,' his having long sat at the feet of the illustrious Niebuhr-the first to sweep away the cobwebs of history, and find out the method of distinguishing the true 'from the false,-and the subject-matter of the volumes having 'for more than a quarter of a century formed the cherished 'occupation of his life and the object of his most serious research and meditations;'-these are the thoughts which press on the reader's mind, and, in consequence, we are not surprised that even educated and intelligent men should, at the first appearance of the work, suppose that M. Bunsen has undertaken his work 'with great sincerity and good faith, and has encountered the 'critical difficulties in the restoration of the "Patristic relic," ' which was the motive of his book, with the power of a profound scholar and an accomplished linguist."

Now we assert, and we are prepared to prove, that the ordinary readers of M. Bunsen's work are misled on subjects of the last importance, by representations boldly and unhesitatingly made, made by one who, whilst he professes to possess the utmost critical sagacity and the most familiar acquaintance with patristic literature, and the most devoted love of truth, not only puts forth vague and sceptical speculations on the nature of Revelation and the truths revealed by the Gospel, but draws an unreal picture of the belief of the Age of Hippolytus, which he supports by mistranslations, conjectural emendations, groundless assertions, and an exhibition of what looks like theological learning, and is not; and that the pictures which he thus draws of the