Bible, and I have no right to make the one weaken the other. The one class of truths are as necessary to the fulness of the gospel as the other. I have no right to strike a single quantity from this celestial equation. I must let it stand just as it is. I must leave the compound with all its perplexities and DIVINE CONTRADICTIONS. The different notes are the harmony of the whole tune; and, although this mixture is a delicate one, and even good men may differ in the degree of prominence they give to each of the parts, yet I must do as well as I can. I must see that these opposing powers form the harmony of the whole system; and this is, as I conceive, moderate Calvinism. It tells the whole truth; it reads the whole Bible. It is not afraid of earth-born antagonisms; it aims to be filled with all the fulness of God.

All this may be illustrated by what takes place in the nat ural world. We find that through the whole system of our sun and planets there prevails the law of attraction, by which all things are drawn to one common centre; and you might ask: Why do they not rush to one consolidated union? There is another law, by which they are repelled. And these two laws act in opposition to each other; and that opposition is the harmony of the whole. So in the spiritual world: two pillars support the fabric, of which, if either be removed, the roof falls God and necessity; moral subjects and freedom. Nay, the law of antagonism reigns throughout all nature: "All nature's difference keeps all nature's peace."

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The moderate Calvinist is the more confirmed in his views, inasmuch as he finds his system injured, as either of the parts assume an inordinate proportion. I have no hesitation in saying that the worst error that ever infested the church is a distorted orthodoxy, a caricature of truth, a tree with its branches without its roots; predestination without free agency; a divine will without a divine reason; a physical necessity controlling a moral being; faith without works; action without motive; sin without law, or a gospel that annihilates the law; an Antinomian gospel;1 a God whose only

1 I ought to say, however, that the danger of leaning to this side of the question is greatly mitigated by the utter impossibility of benumbing, or destroy

attribute is irresistible power; a God whose will makes all things right, whose only righteousness is his will. All this is horrible, and the more horrible for its partial resemblance to divine truth. Such a rock I have always aimed to shun. Calvin has one fault: he makes sovereignty too absorbing. He was pressed to it by the reaction of the age. I have endeavored to preach a simpler gospel. I deny nothing in the old forms; I believe all.1 I have only made a different mixture. I have tried to give my hearers an ampler whole : God is sovereign; man is free. He works in us to will and to do; and when we will well, we do his work.

On the question of original or inherited sin, I have always been a moderate Calvinist, seeking to utter no more than the Bible allowed me to know. On this sensitive point, which always must come up in ordaining-councils, and when candidates are examined for the ministry, and on which some good men concentrate all their wisdom, you might see me sitting a patient listener, silent as Ignorance herself should be, with my longest finger over one eye and my thumb folded over the other, waiting the result, which was always similar, and having one consolation, that the process must finally end. It has always seemed to me that Paul, in the 5th of Romans (which is the seat of this doctrine) is very clear as to the effect of Adam's transgression, and says very little as to the mode of the transmission. It seems to me he is arguing, in this chapter, against a favorite tenet of the Jews, that the gospel was for them, not so free for the Gentiles; they were the children of Abraham, and heirs of the promise; and yet they were obliged to confess, from their own authoritative record,

ing those instinctive feelings of liberty and responsibility which are engrained in the nature of man, and ever operate, whatever be his speculative notions. Dr. Twiss, Dr. Gill, and others of that class, did not injure practical piety so much as their creed would seem to threaten; for the same reason that Don Quixote's senses were always correcting his imagination, he was always at last compelled to find an inn where he imagined a castle.

That is, I do not remember a principle, or technic term in the old Calvinist writers, in which one might not detect the reality which they were aiming to express. Whether the expression was the best possible, is another question. They have been accused of suffering their thoughts to evaporate in mere technics. It is not so, or only so to the reader who chooses to continue uninitiated.

Now the apostle

that all men were the children of Adam. adroitly seizes this concession, and proves to them that the gospel was for all, because all needed it; and that men were just as certainly sinners as they were the descendants of Adam. His object is to teach the universality of sin, as the foundation of an universal offer of the benefits of redemption. The mode of connection or transmission he does not stay to discuss. The broad fact is enough for his purpose. I have been very cautious of adding to his words. I have not chosen to make a paradox where he has only left a mystery. I suppose that the connection between my sinful bias and Adam's first transgression is wholly owing to the sovereign appointment of God; if so, it is highly improper to adduce the original endowments of Adam as a solution of the obligations of man, ACCORDING TO OUR NATURAL APPREHENSIONS OF JUSTICE. From the very nature of the case, you cannot make a mystery an explanation of itself. All the formulas about Adam being our federal head, our representative, our sinning in him, and falling with him in his first transgression, of his sin being imputed to us, etc., may be reduced to one, viz., that for certain unrevealed reasons, God willed that man should be born with just such propensities as he is born with. All these forms of expression resolve themselves into sovereignty. We must bow to his sovereign will. It is right, because the Lord hath done it. The fault of the high Calvinist was, he sought an explanation where God intended His speculations always play between a mystery and an exponent. Sin, from its very nature, is the violation of an obligation; and in order to know the nature of sin, we wish to know the nature of those obligations it violates. Now, I cannot see that Paul intends our union with Adam as such an explanation. You cannot make a mystery an explanation. What was given to try our faith, was never intended to satisfy our reason.

none.

If, then, you ask me, my dear Rusticus, how these sentiments appear on review, after the lapse of half a century, to a man who has one foot in the grave, and the eternal world just before him, I sigh and say, Alas! I see much to lament

in my defective spirit, my want of zeal and a want of vitality to the orthodoxy I embraced; when the truth was constantly seen, the impression was too feeble, and my preaching was the stammering of a child. But the creed I threw into the council at twenty-seven years of age, is my creed now that I am beyond threescore and ten. I have been, always, a MODERATE CALVINIST. This is not boasting, for some will say, it is a miserable confession; a man ought to be more progressive. Why should he ride at anchor all his life, when he ought to be sailing? I can only reply, that I am ready to pull up my anchor when I know whither I am going, and am assured of profitable discoveries.

One reason of my cleaving to Calvinism is, that when you have slain the body of it, you cannot exorcise the ghost. It will remain, and will haunt you, and you cannot think its residuum into non-existence. As it is with regard to the substratum of matter, denied or reduced to a minimum by certain metaphysicians, you cannot think of qualities without thinking of a primitive in which they inhere; so it is with the hypostasis of this system: it will not down at your bidding; it will haunt your speculations when you deny it. The strongest opponents of the system have felt its power even when denying it. The invisible chain of necessity was around Erasmus, Episcopus, Whitby, and all the vigorous minds who have striven to break its material form. Priestley himself ran away from Calvinism, and fell into the chains of a stronger necessity.

I must add, however, that in my religious investigations I have never been under the play of polemic antagonisms. I have never been fond of pursuing truth in that way. My battles have been with my own objections. My issues have been, almost all of them, mental. I have been my own opponent and my own convert, and have never, for a moment, dreamed that I was born to stand sentinel over the orthodoxy of the church. I have cheerfully devolved this duty on those of my brethren who selected this mission because they felt themselves born for it. I have always had enough to do to get rid of my own heresies. I have found the path of truth VOL. XVIII. No. 70.

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so dark and difficult, that I have not wondered if some have missed it.

As I draw near to the eternal world, I must confess I feel an increasing, perhaps I should say an alarming, indifference to the niceties of mere speculation. The spirit of the gospel is all a spontaneous, an all-absorbing love, is the best light when we tread the dark passage. O, blessed Redeemer, beam on my dying hour with thy light, and I can adjourn all my speculative difficulties to the world where I shall know even as I am known.

ARTICLE IV.

SPECULATION AND THE BIBLE.

BY REV. JAMES W. M'LANE, D. d., BROOKLYN, N. Y.

THERE is much bold adventure, at present, in some departments of intellectual effort. A draft is frequently made upon the belief of the Christian, which he cannot honor. A possibility is pushed into the place of certainty. A mere perhaps has given to it all the importance of an undoubted fact. In many of our popular lectures, and in much of the current literature of our day, there is a departure from that which should be regarded as the legitimate domain of the scholar; a divergence from the course of a safe and salutary exercise of human reason; a non-observance of that "temperance over appetite," which, as Milton intimates, should be regarded by us in the pursuit of knowledge. There are boundaries in the domain of truth which must be recognized; lines, where certainty to us must, in the nature of the case, cease, and where mystery must begin; limits, we may add, within which man has his safety, his intellectual freedom, and his moral elevation. When he goes beyond these, and draws