show that any attempt to remove God to a distance from the creation, or to explode the idea of Providence, wars with the record of revealed truth. The Scriptures, as we have seen, assert their own inspiration. And their testimony is clear in regard to the necessity of Divine influence to regenerate men. This is a great mystery, who then can believe it? Its mysteriousness is admitted in the very passage that asserts its necessity.1 Strip Christianity of its mysteries, and you strip it of its glory. "A religion without its mysteries," says Robert Hall, "is like a temple without its God."

But you cannot get rid of the mysterious. Naturalism banishes the Creator to a distance from the creation, resolves everything into the unaided operation of established laws, and thinks that the mystery is greatly lessened. But, in truth, it is greatly increased. The stupendous system of worlds on worlds moving in harmony throughout the fields of space, without the ever-present agency of Him who made them, is a mystery more baffling and less sublime than the same system viewed as directly dependent on the presidency and power of God. It is confessedly mysterious how the Divine Spirit works on the human mind, so as in the case of inspiration to allow free intellectual action, and in the case of regeneration not to infringe on moral liberty. But so it is. Scripture attests it, and the subjects of Divine influence in either case have been conscious of it. Naturalism guards the human mind and human concerns from such

1 John, iii., 7, 8.

an interposal, and thinks that it has cleared the moral world of a mystery. But it is not so. The Bible, in its grand disclosures and robe of solitary majesty, is much more inexplicable without inspiration than with it. And how moral evil-that most insoluble of all mysteries-should be counteracted, and men rescued from its power, by the mere play of natural influences, is assuredly more mysterious and unaccountable than that it should be accomplished by the Spirit of God.

In fine, naturalism, viewed in all its bearings, is most unnatural. It has a universe independent of Him who created it. It has a Christ, a Gospel, and a Church, for the existence of which no higher cause is assigned than Jewish conceptions and traditions. It has a world in which moral evil abounds, and depraved human hearts exist, for overcoming and regenerating which, it ignores all but natural influences. In attempting to get rid of mysteries the most sublime and ennobling, it falls into mysteries far more perplexing but less elevating. Were the two systems to be tested by the attribute of mysteriousness, we would prefer supernaturalism with its mysteries to rationalism with its mysteries.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DENIAL OF THE BIBLE REDEMPTION, OR

SPIRITUALISM.

Change in the enemy's tactics-Rationalism confessedly beaten on the field of Biblical criticism-Coleridge's remark-The doctrines of redemption granted, by rationalistic theologians and philosophers, to be in the sacred text-The warfare shifted from the ground of critical interpretation to that of speculative philosophy -Change that has come over Unitarianism: its pretensions philosophical rather than exegetical-The "School of Progress"Parker's "Discourse on Religion "-Newman's "Phases of Faith” Mackay's "Progress of the Intellect "-Tendency of Mr. Morell's speculations-Examination of the moral argument against the evangelical doctrines-The argument stated-Refutation of it: unsupported by analogy-View given by it of the Divine character is one-sided and partial-Scripture doctrine of depravity accords with actual condition of man-Pardon on the ground of an atonement consistent with the paternity of God-Reasonableness of the Scripture doctrine of spiritual regeneration-Sustained by an appeal to three undeniable facts-Charge of gloominess against the doctrines of redemption shown to be unfounded-Quotations from Jonathan Edwards and Cowper.

MORE than half a century ago, the battle raged keenly between the defendants and assailants of the New Testament doctrines on the field of Biblical criticism. Neology and rationalism in Germany brought a large though unhallowed amount of scholarship to the attempt to expel from the sacred volume those doc

trines which have been generally regarded as its distinguishing truths. And the same warfare was prosecuted with much vigor in our own country. The cool daring of the French atheistical philosophy infected men's minds; and individuals who professed to interpret the Divine Book, set about demolishing one text after another that favored the obnoxious articles of atonement and spiritual regeneration, as men set about destroying the underwood of a forest in order to build them houses on the clear ground. Christendom for awhile looked on appalled. But the work of destruction was soon seen not to be the work of interpretation. And, after the alarm and heat of the first onset were past, the attempt to expunge the doctrines of the incarnation, atonement, and regenerating influences of the Spirit, from the sacred record, was pronounced a more complete failure than the attempt in France wholly to explode the idea of God from the heart of society. On the ground of criticism, then, the dispute, as is generally admitted, has been decided in favor of the great doctrines of redemption. It is only such a man as Mr. Foxton, late of Oxford, that ventures now to say that "in the teaching of Christ himself, there is not the slightest allusion to the modern evangelical notion of an atonement."1 It is only such a kindred spirit as Mr. Newman, formerly fellow of Balliol, whose faith, having passed through so many phases, has at last got into the eclipse, that "can testify that the atonement may be dropt out of

1 Foxton's Popular Christianity, p. 67.

1 Such

Pauline religion without affecting its quality." a style of writing as this is only to be rivalled by asserting that Hamlet would still be Hamlet though the part of Hamlet were omitted. Nothing but a system of monstrously forced interpretation-so forced that, if applied to extract a meaning from any human composition, it would raise the shout of dishonesty-could expel these doctrines from Holy Writ, strip the text of all that is peculiar to the Gospel, reduce its theology to a mere theism, and the teaching of Jesus to a morality somewhat elevated above the best of the heathen. The mode of attack, accordingly, has been changed, the ground of warfare has been shifted. But there is the sacred text speaking as loudly and clearly for the atonement and the doctrines inseparably connected with it, as the stars in their courses and the earth with its teeming productions, speak for the existence and providential agency of God. Coleridge spoke strongly, but not more strongly than truly, when he said that "Socinians would lose all character for honesty, if they were to explain their neighbor's will with the same latitude of interpretation, which they do the Scriptures." "I told them," at a time when he was far ahead of them, as he himself informs us—"I told them plainly and openly, that it was clear enough John and Paul were not unitarians."2

'Newman's Phases of Faith, p. 103.

* Mr. Theodore Parker thus speaks of the "Old School" of unitarians, which he has outgrown, though in a very different way from Coleridge: "If the Athanasian Creed, the thirty-nine articles of the English church, and the pope's bull Unigenitus,' could be found