the Holy Spirit. That is, the law of God requires that these attainments shall be made when the means are provided and enjoyed, and as soon as, in the nature of the case, these attainments are possible. But it requires no more than this.""

3

All this is totally inconsistent with our author's teaching elsewhere, that man, of himself, naturally, with his natural powers, is able or free perfectly to do the entire will of God, and of course without the Holy Spirit. If such freedom or ability in the full sense in which he uses the words, exists, man must find it as easy, at any and every moment, to obey as to disobey: no motive influence must sway his will one way or the other. His own sovereign power over his willmust be of itself sufficient, even in his fallen state, to meet the full requirement of God; and if so, what does he want more? Where is his need of the Holy Spirit?

According to our author, that Spirit does not exert his influence and help, till the sinner has willed to receive him. His obligation afterwards rises and falls, narrows and widens, just as that Spirit, by His revelation varies the amount of light and instruction, and the proffer of needed grace and help. The Scriptures," says he, "abound with assurances of light and instruction and of all needed grace and help, upon condition of a right will or heart, that is, upon condition of our being really willing to obey the light, when and as fast as we receive it."3 A right state of the will being the condition of the Spirit's influence and instruction, light and assistance, how is the will, in the first instance, to be brought into that right state? Not, according to our author, by the Holy Spirit, for His help can only be had on this very condition: the right willing must precede, and until that is done, no help is to be expected or will be vouchsafed from the Spirit. The sinner must, by the energy of his own will, convert himself, and afterward the Spirit will take him up! He must first "cleanse" his sensibility, by the right action of his will, and then the Spirit will develop in him all those higher forms of holiness that result from His indwelling! We know not what our author can mean by cleansing the sensibility, unless it be from physical depravity, for he does not allow moral corruption to be predicated of anything but acts of the will, the sensibility following a law of necessity. To it there can pertain no moral character, except as it is under the direct or indirect control of the will. "It is denied, at least by me, that either reason or divine revelation affirms moral obligation or moral character of any state of mind that lies wholly beyond both the direct and the indirect control of the will.' And yet the mass of mankind will affirm, that the will follows the inclination; that the wishes and desires determine the will; and that only in acting according to their dictates do they recognize and acknowledge themselves to be free, however often mistaken in the fact. We see not but that our author cuts off depraved and 4 III. 32.

' III. 64.

2 III. 67.

3 III. 64.

ruined man forever from the grace and help of the Holy Spirit. We need His influence and aid to make us willing, and to keep us willing; nor do we know of anything in all the teachings of the Word of God, which sanctions the idea that man has ample power, in and of himself, in his present fallen state, by any energy of his own unaided will, to meet the requirements either of the law or of the gospel. The will is naturally opposed to God-the heart is enmity against Him, and the carnal mind is neither subject to the law of God nor can be. Unless the Spirit of God, by His efficacious energy counteract, overcome, and renew our stubborn wills and dispose us to receive His grace and help, we shall not only at first, but continue for ever to rebel and resist the Holy Ghost. Such is the deplorable condition into which we have been brought by the apostasy of our first parents, and such the native depravity of the human heart, that the powerful grace of God is indispensable to change his heart and renew a right spirit within him. In this condition, his case is hopeless and helpless, and left to himself, he must remain to all eternity a damned rebel, justly obnoxious to the same treatment his guilty primogenitor deserved. By no unaided spontaneity of will can he lift himself to God-nature's help is utterly ineffectual.

Our author, however, adapts the law of God to man's fallen nature-brings it down to the level of human weakness and depravity, and denies that it requires him to be what it did his prime progenitor, or that "sinners be just in all respects what they might have been had they never sinned." It is contented with vastly less, and does not require of them "as high and perfect a service as if their powers had never been abused by sin." For God to hold up to us the law given to our first parents, in all the length and breadth that He did to them, our author protests would be absurd and unjust, and that with as much show of reason and as much authority He might require of all sinners, to "undo all their acts of sin and to substitute holy ones in their place." Why may not God as well require one as the other? They are alike impossibilities, originating in the sinner's own act or fault." They are not. There is as wide a difference between them as between the past and future, between a natural impossibility and a moral inability. It is not an absolute physical impossibility but a relative one, like to that we sometimes predicate of vision, where the atmosphere has been rendered dense by fog or impervious by darkness. External means may disperse the fog-light may be diffused through the medium of vision, and then the natural eye can discern what no such change would make perceptible to the man devoid of the power or faculty of vision. So in the sinner's case. He is fallen in darkness, prejudice, ignorance, errors, and hosts of things to which he is exposed by reason of the

apostasy of the parents of the race, interfere with and prevent him from exercising his natural capacities, according to the requirements of the law. The law has not been changed by the fall. It is not a fluctuating gnomon, like the gauge of a steam engine, indicating always the degree of power. It remains forever immutable like its Author. Man's corruption and ruin are incident to his relation to guilty progenitors, descending as he does from them, originally placed under a moral constitution that makes no provision in nature for his help or recovery after it had been vioÎated. Our author's objections and reasonings are founded on the assumption, that there is no federal relation between our first parents and their offspring, and that God does not deal with men morally through a public Head or representative, but that each one born into this world is placed under a similar probation with Adam's before he fell. This we regard as the rotor peudos of his theology. Consistently carried out, it cuts us off from all hope of redemption through Jesus Christ the second Adam, our newly constituted covenant Head and representative, who has obeyed the law and suffered for us, and thus accomplished what our fallen parent failed to do; or perverts the whole gospel scheme from a system of grace extended to those elected of God the Father, brought into union with Christ the Son, and adopted children of His family, into a mere modified moderated system of moral government, which adapts the law's requirements to human weakness and corruption. The gospel is thus rendered a galling yoke of bondage ; and our author's philosophy, while denying native depravity subverts it entirely, and robs us of the grace of God. We cling to the precious Word of God, and rest satisfied and thankful for its revelations, which, finding us ruined and helpless, inheriting corruption, misery and death, from Adam, points us to Christ, and tells us, not of works or legal righteousness, not of a modified and moderated system of moral government, but of salvation, "redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins, according to the riches" of divine grace, of justification freely by faith without the works of the law, which brings the influence and aid of the Spirit of God, to work in us the work of faith with power-to enable us to put that confidence in God for acceptance, which previously was morally impossible, and which, lifting us from deep degradation and damnation, and placing us in the situation, with means and under influences through which we may attain to the higher developments of holiness, leads from strength to strength, until we arrive at the perfect stature of manhood in Christ Jesus.

Our author evidently gains nothing by his philosophy but sacrifices everything of value in the gospel. His rejection of native depravity, so far from relieving from embarrassment and difficulty, only increases them. Nor has he placed himself on such vantage ground as to give him just occasion to ridicule as he does, the

faith of those who with the Westminster divines believe, that the natural inclination, the bias of our nature, is to sin, and who account this part and parcel of our moral corruption. He brings man into the world, the subject of physical depravity, with debilitated powers of mind, and a sensibility that needs cleansing, and so renders it a matter of course that he will sin. We see not but that he is as veritably, if not equally, obnoxious to the charge of teaching a moral depravity transmitted "by ordinary generation, as he holds they do whose Confession of Faith and teachings he condemns. For if by a law of necessity the developments of intellect and sensibility are effected, and the will, without the Spirit's aid, "of course" yields to the strongest "impulses," and if the impulses thence imparted, are undeniably stronger than any natural bias to God and holiness, he plainly teaches the doctrine of sinning by necessity of nature as veritably as those whom he charges with believing and teaching, that the corruption of man's moral nature is propagated and descends by natural generation from Adam.

REGENERATION.

Our author's views of Regeneration also take their shape from his philosophy. Regeneration is variously represented in the Scriptures sometimes as the beginning of a sinner's new life; as his awakening out of the sleep of death; his rising from the death of trespasses and sins; his being translated out of the kingdom of darkness into light, and his entering upon a life of holiness. It is hence tropically called the new birth, a new creation. Again it is described as a change of heart, and by many theologians is spoken of as the proximate cause of conversion, or faith and repentance. By others it is regarded as synonymous with conversion. Our author is of this last class, and denies any distinction between them. He sees no propriety in the distinction made by those who use the phrase regeneration or the new birth, to denote the Spirit's agency in changing the sinner's heart, and that of conversion the sinner's activity in the process or rather act of that change. The facts of importance here to be noticed are, the total depravity of man, rendering a radical change of moral character indispensable to salvation: man's obligation to be and to act holy, to change his heart, to transfer his supreme affection from self to God: the certainty that if left to himself, he will never spontaneously effect that change within himself: the necessity of the Spirit's agency in order to produce it: the voluntary agency of the sinner in yielding to and concurring with His influence: and the consequent developments of holy character. Our author has expressed himself generally on this subject as a point of faith, distinctly and definitely, in accordance with orthodox divines and evangelical Christians. But in applying his philosophy to the subject of regenera

ting influence, and describing the nature of the change produced in the sinner, he gives occasion to fear, that practically he may differ in his views of what constitutes its nature. According to his philosophy, it consists in a change in the attitude of the will, or a change in its ultimate choice, intention or preference, a change from selfishness to benevolence; from choosing self-gratification as the supreme and ultimate end of life, to the supreme and ultimate choice of the highest well-being of God and of the universe; from a state of entire consecration to self-interest, self-indulgence, selfgratification for its own sake or as an end, and as the supreme end of life, to a state of entire consecration to God and to the interests of His kingdom, as the supreme and ultimate end of life."" The sensibilities, according to our author, following a law of necessity, undergo a change as a natural consequence of the change of the will. The will having power to change itself, no causative power can be brought to bear upon it, that shall determine its choice without destroying its liberty. The intellect also follows a law of necessity and can only be indirectly controlled by the will. Of course neither intellectual views of truth, nor sensitive emotions, ac cording to him, can have any determining influence upon the will. It originates its own acts, by the fiat of its own sovereignty. Intellectual views of truth may be a condition of the will's acting; but no more. Whatever emotions or feelings may exist anterior to the change of the will, being selfish, are opposed to God, and can have no causative influence in determining its choices. It follows, therefore, from these positions of our author, that the agency of the Spirit can consist only, in arranging the condition necessary for the mind's willing, that is, in presenting the truth before it. But the presentation of the truth, according to his theory, can exert no causative influence whatever. The will being itself the sole cause of its own actions, and being sovereign and free, it has equal ability, at any moment, to will the opposite. The sinner, therefore, is the prime and sole author of this change of will, whereupon, but not till then, the law of necessity begins to operate, and passions and affections, emotions and actions, correspondent, all follow as a matter of course. He is indeed changed, but he has changed himself, and the Spirit of God had no other agency in the matter than to present truth to the mind, that is, to supply the necessary condition of the will's action. To say that the Spirit, under such circumstances, is the author of regeneration, that the new-born soul is a new creature, created anew in Christ Jesus unto good works, is altogether a misnomer. The Spirit of God, according to our author's philosophy, does but afford the occasion, and is not the cause of the sinner's regeneration. As to His having the regeneration of the sinner as an end, specifically in view, and operating specially with that design-appropriately and

1 II. 496.