There is, probably, no philosophical author at the present day in Germany whose works are welcomed by so wide a circle of readers in America as those of Chevalier Bunsen.  Though often more theoretical than exact in scholarship, and allowing his historical instincts to take the place of scientific conclusions, he not unfrequently anticipates thus the laborious efforts of scholars, while his peculiar suggestiveness of thought and his scope of view interest extremely the common student, and lend a charm to his works such as no other writer in the same field possesses.  He has the art of making other men work for him, and, perhaps, has thus been tempted to write too much for his own fame.

The great service for which posterity will thank Chevalier Bunsen is, that, in an age of bigotry and of skepticism, he has especially represented the union of Philosophy and Christianity, and has shown that the freest historical criticism and the most open recognition of the moral principle through all faiths and races are harmonious with the most devout belief in the divine manifestation of Christ.  This book, “God in History,” is written from his most advanced and religious stand-point, and seems to us the best fruit, thus far, of his studies.  It is compact, consistent, and not marred by his usual defect,—­a certain mysticism or indefiniteness of thought,—­but is clear and philosophical to the close.  It is not to be looked upon as a complete philosophical history, but rather as a suggestive and introductory treatise on that grandest of all themes, the Progress of the Instinct of God through Human History.  His own definition of his subject is, that it is a history of the “Consciousness of God in Mankind”; but, as he unfolds his idea, it is evidently not always the consciousness, but the unconscious instinct of God, whose progress he is describing.

The first part of the present volume—­the Third Book—­is occupied with a brief, but exceedingly instructive investigation of the development of this instinct in the Aryans of Persia and of India; and in this inquiry the two prominent historical figures are Zoroaster and Buddha, or, as our author might have named them, the Moses and the Luther of the early Aryan religions,—­the one the Lawgiver and the Founder of a pure monotheism in the place of a slavish belief in elementary powers, and the other the great Reformer of a corrupted faith in behalf of an oppressed people.

The illustrations which Bunsen gives of these two wonderful expressions of the instinct of God in the remote past, the religions of Zoroaster and Buddha, are exceedingly fresh and original.  They are contained mostly in sacrificial and festal hymns and songs which have not hitherto been much known, even to scholars.

As an introduction to and historical preparation for these two great forms of belief, he describes also the instinct of Deity as it had developed itself among the Turanians, the Chinese, and the Egyptians.