ever a man combined splendor of imagination with keen intelligence and
saintly character it was he. Raphael incarnate he seems, yet he stands
outside all the creeds, and to his prophetic vision, in the sunlight of
the world's great age begun anew, the--

Faiths and empires gleam
Like wrecks of a dissolving dream.

In his treatment of Buddhism Professor Blackie is candid and impartial,
until he comes to consider its Atheistic character. Then his reason
seems almost entirely to forsake him. After saying that "what Buddha
preached was a gospel of pure human ethics, divorced not only from
Brahma and the Brahminic Trinity, but even from the existence of God;"
and describing Buddha himself as "a rare, exceptional, and altogether
transcendental incarnation of moral perfection;" he first tries to
show that _Nirvana_ is the same as the Christian _eternal life_, and
transmigration of souls a faithful counterpart of the Christian doctrine
of future reward and punishment. Feeling, perhaps, how miserably he
has failed in this attempt, he turns with exasperation on Buddhism,
and affirms that it "can in no wise be looked upon as anything but an
abnormal manifestation of the religious life of man." We believe that
Professor Blackie himself must have already perceived the futility and
absurdity of this.

The last chapter of Professor Blackie's book is entitled "The Atheism
of Reaction." In it he strikes characteristically at the five points
of Calvinism, at Original Guilt, Eternal Punishment, Creation out
of Nothing, and Special Providence; which he charges with largely
contributing to the spread of Atheism. While welcoming these assaults
on superstition, we are constrained to observe that the Christian dogmas
which Professor Blackie impugns and denounces are not specific causes
of Atheism. Again he is on the wrong scent. The revolt against Theism at
the present time is indeed mainly moral, but the preparation for it
has been an intellectual one. Modern Science has demonstrated, for all
practical purposes, the inexorable reign of law. The God of miracles,
answering prayer and intimately related to his children of men, is an
idea exploded and henceforth impossible. The only idea of God at all
possible, is that of a supreme universal intelligence, governing nature
by fixed laws, and apparently quite heedless whether their operation
brings us joy or pain. This idea is intellectually permissible, but it
is beyond all proof, and