ourselves to trace the steps of the process which led Dr. Laemmer from a many-faced Protestantism to the Catholic Church, it will be useful to make a few preliminary remarks.

In Dr. Laemmer we have a witness who has had rare opportunities of becoming acquainted with the very highest and best forms which Protestantism has been enabled to assume in the country of its birth. He is, above all things, the child of the German Protestant universities. Of the twenty-six universities of which the learned nation is so proud, six or eight are Catholic, 6 four are mixed, 7 and the remaining fourteen are exclusively Protestant. 8

Now, Dr. Laemmer was student successively at Koenigsberg, Leipsic, and Berlin universities, that is to say, at the very universities which at the present time are the chief seats of Protestant thought, both in philosophy and in theology. The leading Protestant schools in Germany are at present three in number, called respectively the neo-Lutheran, the Mediation, and the Tübingen, or historico-critical school; of these 9 the neo-Lutheran, or Lutheran reaction school, has specially existed in Berlin and Leipsic; the so called Mediation theology at Berlin; and the Tübingen school (now almost extinct in its native home, and renewed by Hilgenfeld at Jena) has made its influence felt throughout. Besides, at Koenigsberg, he came, as we shall see, under the influence of one of the ablest defenders of Hegelianism. We should exceed our limits, were we to enter upon a statement of the principles of these schools. Be it enough to say, that the first-named school, by defending the authority and credibility of the Scriptures, aims at re-constructing the historical basis of Christianity, and insists on a return to the Lutheran Confessions of the sixteenth century. Since the political troubles of 1848, an ultra-conservative party, called the Hyper-Lutheran, has arisen within this school, which goes back beyond the Reformation, and insists on the principle of a visible authoritative church, a rigid sacramental theory, and the doctrine of consubstantiation. Stahl, and Leo of Halle, to whom Dr. Laemmer makes an important allusion, to be hereafter quoted, belong to the most advanced of this party. Among the representatives of this school with whom Dr. Laemmer was brought into direct contact, were Hengstenberg and Kahnis. 10

The Mediation school takes its stand between the Lutheran party on the one hand, and the school of criticism on the other, and without going back to the principle of authority, or forward to that of discovery, proposes to unite the use of reason with belief in Scripture, and to understand what it believes. Of the members of this very numerous school Dr. Laemmer had intercourse with Twesten and Nitzch. The Tübingen school had for its leader Christian Baur, and starting from the principle that the only portions of the New Testament undoubtedly genuine are four of St. Paul's Epistles, viz.: to the Romans, to the Galatians, and the two to the Corinthians, it comes to the conclusion that Christianity in its present form is the result of the controversy between the Jewish, or Petrine, and the Pauline Christianity of the apostolic and following ages. All the other books of the New Testament it attributes to some one or other of the contending schools. That this school, extravagant as its conclusions may appear to us, is every day gaining ground in France with a very numerous party, we have been lately assured by competent authority. 11 That it has many advocates in England is well known. 12 A critic in the Home and Foreign Review 13 speaks of "the importance of those inquiries of Dr. Baur and his followers into primitive Christianity, which have in some way modified the views of almost every one who has become acquainted with them."

These are thy gods, O Israel! These are the shapes of Protestantism that wander to and fro in the various universities of Germany. Dr. Laemmer, speaking with full knowledge of the subject, sums up in one word the result of all this unhealthy movement, and that word is—chaos. And what heightens the confusion is, that, although the systems which form this chaos are in absolute and perpetual conflict with each other, yet does each professor claim for himself the exclusive possession of truth, as if he and he alone had been gifted with infallibility.

The special feature of Dr. Laemmer's conversion appears to us to consist in this, under the grace of God, that he approached faith through its historic side. Sound and conscientious historical research has been the means of his deliverance from bondage. His mind from boyhood inclined towards things grave; the details he communicates concerning his choice of authors reveal that sobriety of judgment which is the first quality of a student of history. The bent of his mind in this direction was strengthened by study of the fathers, of the history of the Papacy, and of the Catholic theology of the Reformation period. We invite special attention to the happy result of historical studies in his case, because we see in it a promise of much future good for Catholic truth in Germany. The broad distinction between the German method of the present century and that of the past, lies in this, that the nineteenth century is the age of historical inquiry, whereas the last century was that of critical thought. Even the Tübingen school is an improvement on the destructiveness of Strauss, for it admits and calls attention to the historical value of at least some portion of the Scriptures. In the other schools, above described, this tendency is of course still more marked. The modern spirit tends not so much to examine the ontological value of an opinion, as to investigate how men came to hold that opinion. It was this spirit which suggested the questions of concursus, which, as we shall see, changed the current of Dr. Laemmer's life. Now we hold it very probable that as this spirit becomes more extended, its fruits will be these: men will become familiar with the teachings of Christian antiquity; and although this knowledge may be sought not for the sake of the doctrine itself, but as a preliminary to other studies, still, such is the divine power of truth, that, once revealed to the soul, it creates therein a wondrous craving after itself, which will dispose the soul for the grace of faith. There must be at this moment many thoughtful men in Germany, who, in virtue of this spirit, are engaged in the examination of the fathers and of the theologians of the Catholic Church, and, who, finding themselves,