ce which the
present age recognises, is that of which the Indian talks, when he says
of certain epochs of the world's history, _Brahma sleeps_! Those who
sleep and are indifferent in spiritual matters find peace; but those who
are alive and awake must beat the wind, and battle, belike, with much
useless loss of strength, before they can arrive even at that first
postulate of all healthy thinking--there is a God. "_Ueber Gott werd ich
nie streiten_," said Herder. "About God I will never dispute." Yet look
at German rationalism, look at Protestant theology--what do you see
there? Reason usurping the mastery in each individual, without control of
the higher faculties of the soul, and of those institutions in life by
which those faculties are represented; and as one man's reason is as good
as another's, thence arises war of each self-asserted despotism against
that which happens to be next it, and of all against all--a spiritual
anarchy, which threatens the entire dissolution of the moral world, and
from which there is no refuge but in recurring to the old traditionary
faith of a revolted humanity, no redemption but in the venerable
repository of those traditions--the one and indivisible holy Catholic
church of Christ, of whom, as the inner and eternal keystone is God, so
the outer and temporal is the Pope.

Such is a general outline of the philosophy of Frederick Schlegel--a
philosophy belonging to the class theological and supernatural, to the
genus Christian, to the species sacerdotal and Popish. Now, without
stopping here to blame its sublime generalities and beautiful confusions,
on the one hand, or to praise its elevated tendency, its catholic and
reconciling tone on the other, we shall merely call attention, in a single
sentence, physiologically, to its main and distinguishing character. It
was, in fact, (in spirit and tendency, though not in outward
accomplishment,) to German literature twenty years ago what Puseyism is
now to the English church--it was a bold and grand attempt to get rid of
those vexing doubts and disputes on the most important subjects that will
ever disquiet minds of a certain constitution, so long as they have
nothing to lean on but their own judgment; and as Protestantism, when
consistently carried out, summarily throws a man back on his individual
opinion, and subjects the vastest and most momentous questions to the
scrutiny of reason and the torture of doubt, therefore Schlegel in
literary Ge