blasphemy. So I stand by the shores of the Red sea and look upon its waters rolled back like walls of adamant, and the chosen of God passing through. A man as weak as ourselves had stretched a rod over the waters, and they parted. It was, however, a simple act of divine power. Likewise Christ, who was God manifest, commands his disciples to fill waterpots with water. They obey him. He commands them again to draw therefrom, and they draw wine. He in like manner arrests the passion, changes the current and direction of a human life in the person of Saul, by the exercise of his almightiness.

In any and every creative act of God there is no trace of the use of mediate instrumentalities. These acts are not complicated. A close analysis reveals the fact that at the very foundation of all there must be the simple exercise of almighty power without intervening instruments. This is God's method of working, so far as I can understand it. To insist upon the use of instruments in that simple divine act is to take the divinity of the act away. So far as I am able to understand or conceive of God as working primarily, this is his only modus operandi. Creating within one a clean heart is no exception to the rule. It is an act of God; and from the nature of the case he needs and employs no instrumentality whatever, as Mr. Fuller very truthfully says. Immediately after this primary act of God, the law of growth comes into exercise; and this undoubtedly is complex and mediate.

4. From its incompatibility with the regeneration of any who do do not and cannot from the nature of the case receive impressions from, and actually accept the truth. Dr. Kendrick is regarded as good authority on questions of this character. He says:

The sinner is saved through faith; the sinner is saved through regeneration, being born from above by the implanting of a germ of spiritual life in his soul. Faith and regeneration, both denoting one and the same essential process, are yet logically distinguishable. Regeneration is the divine, faith is the human side of the process. Regeneration is the act of God, faith is the act of man. Regeneration is faith in principle, faith is regeneration in development. Which then is anterior? Chronologically, we may say neither. For faith is regeneration acting itself out. But logically and efficiently one precedes and conditions the other. The act of God antedates and originates the act of man. God precedes, man follows. We are not born because we breathe, but we breathe because we are born. We are not born again because we exercise faith, but we exercise faith because we are born again. It is not "the will of the flesh, nor the will of man," but the will and the act of God that initiates the spiritual life. We are, indeed, commanded to believe on Christ, but we never should believe upon him, and we never do believe upon him, except through the quickening work

of the Spirit in the soul. The sinner, dead in trespasses and sins, never really and spiritually hears the message of salvation so that it becomes vitally sufficient, any more than the unconscious infant. Hence we suppose that a man may be, and that thousands of men are, regenerated without any present act of conscious faith. They may be regenerated in sleep; they may be regenerated amidst the unconscious convulsions of the dying hour; they may be regenerated and sanctified like John the Baptist, from the womb; nay, even before the light has ever dawned upon their earthly being. And at any period the regenerating act may first indicate itself im some other way than in direct perception and reception of Christ. Its one invincible characteristic in all cases is, that on account of the redemption wrought by Christ, the Spirit of God works in the soul a divine change, which will always infallibly draw it to Christ whenever he is revealed to it, and will lead it to rest joyfully in him as the author of its salvation.

On the principle which Dr. Phelps advocates, that God never regenerates a soul without the use of truth as an instrument, all that class of persons who die in infancy must be lost, and the awful saying of a former day will have at least a semblance of truth in it, which affirms that "hell is paved with skulls of infants whose bodies were hardly a span long." They cannot be effected by the word of truth. They cannot receive and accept the message of truth, which is able to make them wise unto salvation. This certainly cannot be previous to the soul's separation from the body. But the celebrated writer above quoted affirms that "God regenerates the infant before it dies. . But the fruit of regeneration is developed only in the separated soul." So far, therefore, as truth is concerned in regeneration, in these instances it is put beyond a peradventure. The child is as unconscious of the existence of a gospel as it is ignorant of the science of astronomy.

I have simply to say that the distinguished writer to whom I have referred, admits that the regeneration of the soul is an act of sovereign power. I understand this act to be simply the changing the heart so that it will receive and be benefited by the truth. The heart is utterly averse to this truth previous to this change. I submit, therefore, that it is utterly repugnant to sound reason that this truth should be the instrument of the change. In the simple primary act of regeneration, changing a soul from hatred of God to the love of God, the Spirit needs and employs no instrument whatever.

Springfield, ILLINOIS.

NEHEMIAH PIERCE,

PASCAL.

IT

An Address before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Brown University.

T was an opinion of antiquity that there were in the history of the world grand cycles of time when the heroes and wars of earlier centuries reappeared, and the scenery of the universe was to slide back into its old grooves, and all that had once been was reproduced under new names. The doctrine is as baseless and chimerical as that of the transmigration of souls. But although events do not thus return in reality, they do in their resemblances and in their memories. It is matter of interest to observe how the questions of former ages are occasionally revived, after having remained long dormant; and how the events and characters of other lands and times receive a new lease of fame in foreign lands, and a fresh instauration at home into the seats of their original glory. The old battles of the Reformation are evidently thus about to be renewed in our day; and the ancient dead of the champions alike of Protestantism and the Papacy are resuscitated from partial or total oblivion. There are some names, indeed, that seem beyond the reach of such changes, because they have not yet been and never can be forgotten. They are like those stars in our hemisphere which never set. Yet, as these same stars may at one hour be trembling on the very margin of the horison, and at another hour they are flaming high on the front of the heavens, so the revolutions of society often call into new eminence even

its great and perennial names. Distinguished writers in the Protestant and Romish Churches are thus before our eyes wheeling to a higher point than they occupied but a few years since. There is interest in watching this resurrection of the past. We are like Dante, when he walked through the rows of sepulchres and the covers of the tombs were lifted, and the entombed talked with him, as they lay on their marble couch. But there is peril also in the changes thus occurring. Statesmen have said that of all human governments a restoration is the worst. It comes back to avenge old and inveterate grudges, with all their long arrears of hate, and to revive and exaggerate obsolete abuses, to trample down the resistance that was before tolerated, and to make dissent treason. It is a resuscitation of tyranny after it has become yet more bloated and corrupt in the cerements that have long enwrapped and concealed it. The history of the Stuarts on the British throne, and of the elder Bourbons on the French, seems to sustain this assertion, that restorations are eminently untrustworthy and disastrous. And what is true of dynasties is true of opinions and communities. If this be so, we cannot observe without interest and alarm the restoration of that mighty institute, the Society of the Sons of Loyola. With all the virtues, the prowess, and the talents of some of its members, its vices were great and its first principles unsafe. But with the revolving cycle that brings it from the grave, where the Pontifical edicts had for the time laid it, there returns also in renewed lustre the memory of its mightiest antagonist, the profound thinker, the mighty controversialist, and the devout believer, who stands, in relation to the earlier fate of the Jesuit order, like the Apollo Belvidere by the side of the Hydra his arm has just transfixed.

"Lord of the unerring bow,

The shaft hath just been shot, the arrow bright
With an immortal's vengeance; in his eye

And nostril beautiful disdain and might

And majesty flash their full lightnings by."

Instead of bringing before you some general topic, let us then be allowed to dwell upon a character, to sketch a constellation reascending from our horizon to its old place nearer the zenith. To scholars we would speak of a scholar; to the young we would recall the inspiring memory of one who achieved in youth immortal fame, and who, though smitten down in middle life, carried into his untimely grave the united wreaths of philosophy, of wit, and of eloquence.

E

He belonged indeed to an age long past, but it was the seventeenth century, the season that, in Cuvier's opinion, was "the great era of science," and that Hallam has pronounced "the most learned period, according to the sense in which the word was then taken, that Europe has ever seen." To an inhabitant of this Union its interest is enhanced, for it was the era that cradled the colonies whence our Republic sprung; and he of whom we would speak first saw the light but some three years after the Mayflower set out upon its wintry voyage to these shores, where unbroken forests as yet clad, and rude savages only held the site of your city and University. It was an era of great events and great men, of Bacon, and Grotius, and Selden, and Leibnitz, and Descartes; of Cromwell, and Gustavus Adolphus; of the Commonwealth, and the Protectorate in England; of the Synod of Dort, and of the Westminster Assembly; of the English Puritan, and the French Jansenist; and during it the Thirty Years' War rained its storm of blood on the continent. In some of its memorable histories, he who is our subject, bore no inconsiderable share, and, in a period of mighty and antagonistic influences, he was able to stamp deeply the impress of his single mind on his age and his nation. That nation, it is true, was not of kin to ours, nor was his the language that we use. But even if the France that gave him birth be to us a foreign land, its share in the early colonization of the Canadas, and the navigation of the Ohio, entwines its history in that century with our own, had it not in still later years given birth to our La Fayette, shelter to our Franklin, and aid and alliance to the War of our Independence.

In that gay and sunny land, the traveller from these western shores visits with eager and strange interest the palace and gardens of Versailles, where the stately and long-drawn piles of architecture, the long and lofty galleries crowded with paintings and statuary, consecrated to all the eminent names of the French people, the massive stair-cases, where a court might unfurl to advantage its gorgeous trail, the formal magnificent park studded with statues, and chequered with parterres and fountains, all recall the splendor, the tyranny, the victories, and the talents of the age of Louis XIV. It is royal magnificence and worldly glory in their most imposing forms. But there are scenes in that immediate vicinity that have, to here and there a pilgrim from the West, a more transcendent interest. Turning his back on the gorgeous pride of the old monarchy, such a wanderer travels some six miles onward from Versailles, until he reaches a secluded valley, scooped like a bowl from amid the tame level of the plain, over which he has been passing. His downward path is fringed with wood, and the dell is consecrated, apparently, to retirement and meditation.