generate and elevate our race, and that, under the agency of the Divine Spirit, it exerts this influence by bringing the mind into contact with God, not as a vague immensity, but as a glorious, awful, benignant Person with whom we have to do. The sinner has been arrested in his wickedness, his spirit has quailed within him, and he has become a new creature, by hearing the living God of Holy Scripture speak to him in solemn warning and melting invitation. The saint has been refreshed and armed anew by the thought that the same Divine Being who clothes the grass of the field, and cares for the fowls of the air, loves, as a father, his own redeemed children, and surrounds them with his favor as with a shield. Yes: the Spirit, by whose inspiration the Word was given, beareth witness with our Spirit to the perfect personality of God. And could this be separated from the Bible, and a pantheistic creed substituted in its stead, it would be as if the sun had been shorn of his beams, and the ocean had lost his voice. "Ye shall know," said Joshua to the Israelites, "that the living God is among you. "It is a fearful thing," says Paul, "to fall into the hands of the living God." And in such winning words as these, of which the sacred volume is full, how near does the Personality of Him whose name and nature are love, come to the heart: "Incline your ear, and come unto me; hear, and your soul shall live." "Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else." The relational conception of the Most High, as our Maker King. Father, Saviour, Judge, guards

No

us as effectually against a pantheistic view on the one hand; as the absolute conception of Him does against an anthropomorphic view on the other. Both conceptions blend with each other in the Bible. book gives us such exalted ideas of the Infinite Intelligence, and none is less in harmony with the system of pantheism. "It is all in the same spirit: burning, powerful words; real above everything in this world; piercing, as living words must needs do, to the dividing of the very hearts and reins. They have the impression, they are stamped with the seal of the living God. The tetragrammaton is on them."1

4. In Christ Jesus we see the absolute and the personal reconciled. Pantheism and anthropomorphism, though traceable to the same source, are two extremes, towards one of which the mind, in the absence of revelation or in the want of faith in it, has ever shown a strong tendency. Men have been apt either to limit the Infinite, and think of Him as being such an one as themselves, or to conceive of Him as an infinite substance of which all things are but the modes and manifestations. How to reconcile the personality with the infinitude of the Divine nature, seems to be one of those sublime mysteries pertaining to the Divine existence which unaided reason cannot solve. Such knowledge is too wonderful for us; it is high, we cannot attain unto it. As principles of abstract theology they may be clearly made out, but really to grasp them in our religious belief as attributes of the Almighty, is a great achievement of faith. The two Professor Garbett's Discourse, p. 45.

are, however, reconciled before our view in Him who is the Word made flesh, at once the Son of God and the Son of Man. The creation of the world was the work of an infinite Being. The everlasting God, the Lord, is the Creator of the ends of the earth. And by Jesus Christ were all things created, that are in heaven and that are in earth. The redemption of the world demanded the interposition of Him who made it. It was Jehovah's prerogative to say, "Behold I create new heavens and a new earth." And in Emmanuel, God in our nature, God with us, we see the Redeemer of man. The judgment of the world is an act of the Absolute. None else is judge but God. And the Son of Man, coming in his glory, occupies the judg ment throne. The Divine Being, without any limita tion of his absolute perfections, is thus revealed in the person of Christ. Great indeed is the mystery of godliness. The incarnation is a stupendous fact that surpasses reason, for whatever pertains to the Divine nature must be incomprehensible by the human mind. But it contains in itself the solution of the mysterious problem how the absolute and the personal agree in One. And with all its mysteriousness, it becomes a resting truth to the minds of men and angels, when attempting to grasp the idea of an infinite and yet a The Lion of the tribe of Juda, the personal God. Root of David, has opened the book and loosed the seals thereof. And happy the mind that returns from its wanderings, that leaves off raving about a vague immensity which it can neither love nor fear, and rests in Jehovah-Jesus, God manifest in the flesh.

CHAPTER III.

THE DENIAL OF THE DIVINE PROVIDENTIAL GOVERNMENT,

OR NATURALISM.

Distinctive characteristic of Naturalism-Denounces every idea of Divine interposition-Not peculiar to any age or country-Broadly manifested in some works on Physical and Moral Science: System of Auguste Comte-"Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation " Humboldt's "Cosmos" Combe's "Constitution of Man"-The Owen School-Naturalism in the department of Bible Theology: Anti-miracle School of Germany-SpinozaPaulus-Strauss-Miracles considered-Hume and Strauss alike guilty of a petitio principii-Denial of Special Inspiration of Scriptures Theodore Parker-Inspiration viewed as a factMr. Morell's Position-General remarks upon Naturalism as a whole-The idea of a self-sustaining universe based upon false analogy-Chargeable with anthropomorphism-Opposed to palpable evidence of Geology-Assigns no adequate cause for Christianity and its effects-Diametrically opposed to the religion of the Bible -Naturalism unnatural.

NATURALISM, or, as it is sometimes called, rationalism, is distinguishable enough from atheism and pantheism. The rationalist is distinguished from the atheist by his theoretical belief of a Supreme Power, and he is distinguished from the pantheist by his denial of an ever-present and all-pervading Divine energy. The pantheist says, God is at hand; the rationalist says,

God is afar off. Pantheism sees the Divine Being in all things, and confounds the Creator with the creation. Whereas naturalism, though distinguishing Him from his works, banishes Him into a distant solitude. It is not essential to this system that the evidences of design in proof of a creative intelligence be denied, however much it may tend in that direction, and though many of its abettors may have gone that length. But its distinctive characteristic, as a form of infidelity, is, that while admitting the world to have been originally created by God, it, as it were, extrudes him from that world, by reducing it to a self-sustained mechanism, and by resolving, what are generally understood by the works of Providence, into a regularly successive series of necessary developments. The seed, having the vegetative power in itself, is cast by the husbandman into the soil, and there, aided merely by natural agencies, it is left to develop itself into the full-grown plant or tree. The watch, complete in its wheels and mainspring, is wound up, and continues to move, though ever so far distant from the maker. The ship-builder, having finished and launched the ship, leaves it entirely to the care of the sailors. Such are specimens of some of the analogies by which men would exclude God from his own world, and make the universe, if not independent of his creative power, altogether independent of his presence and control. The falsity of the analogy is obvious, and will be noticed by us

"Ut faber discedit à navi exstructâ et relinquit eam nautis."— Melancthon.