We should here notice the argument in a recent article on "Perpetual Sin and Omnipotent Goodness," which expresses, if we mistake not, a very prevalent view, and which is akin to the theodicy we have styled "a law of nature," though it is not strictly the same. After a most able statement of the proximate solution of the origin of evil, as incidental to the discipline of new-created beings, (which, however, is carried almost too far, so as to involve the certainty of sin,) the writer speaks of the perpetuity of sin very briefly, and mainly with reference to the sinning angels. That God should annihilate them, he says, "or abate any measure of the tokens of his displeasure, would be a weakness and a reproach to himself in his own right. He is only doing by the fallen angels now [?] as ever, just what is due to himself. He can do no less in holding them to their misery, and do right."

The governmental argument which the writer prefaces to this statement, has, we think, been answered. The main argument rests, we think, on the assumption that immortal being is of nature, and that God is not bound to interpose for the relief, even in death, of those who sin; rather, he is bound not to interpose. We might reply that if death be the proper penalty of sin, the judgment may be executed by forces pre-ordained, and then there need be no interposition. But if such forces are not provided, then justice is as much bound to interpose, lest punishment exceed its limit, as lest it fall short of its due. This lies in the very idea of justice; and the heavens might as properly fall for its excess as for its dereliction. Indeed, an eternal suffering not justly incurred by the sins of time would be calamity, rather than penalty, and in that view might indicate the "weakness" of a Ruler who should not prevent it.

And aside from reason and Scripture, we may safely appeal to the natural instincts of mankind, to show that death is evil and may be penal. The deaf mute certainly cannot have a higher instinct here than the more favored individuals of the species. Yet such an one, telling his experience, says: "I had

Wetstein, Valpy, De Wette, Bloomfield, Alford, and, we may add, Thompson, Christian Theism, p. 403.

1 L. P. Hickok, Bibliotheca Sacra, Jan. 1856, pp. 48-80,

terrible dreams about death, which stimulated me to take some possible means to save my life from being destroyed, by hiding myself under the ground. .. I had always regarded death with painful terror and superstition; it seemed to me to be an unnatural and ghastly thing, and a sort of punishment inflicted on bad human beings. ... Before I came to be educated, the subject of death affected my thoughts and feelings. I considered it to be the most dangerous of all calamities, and sometimes dreaded it. I generally thought that I should never die, but live for eternity." Such persons, we are told, had no idea of the soul, nor of any spirit whatever; yet these testimonies "might be multiplied indefinitely," and "to most of the uneducated deaf and dumb, death is truly the King of Terrors." But the terror is strictly that of death. Can it be less evil or less penal to the angels, or to men who hear the words of eternal life?

We have seen the difficulties which the old Christian doctrine of man's intermediate nature offers to relieve. To many, who affect explicitness, this doctrine will appear a thing indeterminate; a playing of fast and loose with words that certify nothing; an artful evasion. We wish with them no quarrel of words; let them state, in better terms, by what condition of nature man is a probationary creature. Do they think his moral character may be undetermined, between eternal sainthood and eternal fiendishness? or his moral constitution unsettled, between endless bliss and ceaseless woe? But by what rule can a quality be undetermined, and not a nature? Have they found a dividing wall between substance and attribute? How can man's will waver on the verge of an endless destination, and not his being? Will they say that God can not create a being capable of eternal existence, yet liable, under His power, to perish quite away? Would this savor too much of mutability, in the creation or in the Creator? Then let them be consistent; let them discard all doctrine of probation; let them say that whatever will be, must be; that nothing is intermediate, undetermined, but all is abso

1 Notions of the Deaf and Dumb, Bib. Sacra, July, 1855, pp. 581, 585.

lutely fixed.

Let us accept the Mohammedan fate, resign ourselves to a Destiny that has locked all events in adamant, and say, Whatever is, is right.

Upon the rationalistic, and now fast prevailing theology, rather, may be fixed the charge of playing fast and loose. It can not say whether there has been a failure and a recovery in the history of man. Its Fall and Redemption are a thing of degrees. There has been no crisis, no turning point, nothing to decide the future course of man beyond the capacity of self-salvation. He has, perhaps, not done quite as well as he should have done. But if he has run below his level, he can rise to it again. If he has deteriorated a little, he can improve. Meanwhile his sufferings have not fallen far behind his derelictions, or if they gather in a flood, they can never whelm or destroy him. By a law of his being all punishment is inevitable, and remission of sins impossible. And besides this law of nature there is no judgment. The passage from one life to another is of nature, and yields no critical result. Every evil done or sufferred has brought its discipline of good. Through whatsoever devious paths, Progress is the eternal law of our being.

Such is the Ethical Theology of our day, in its last, we think its consistent results. We admit its truth, or rather half-truth, that so long as life lasts, reward and penalty are natural and not miraculous. Aside from this, its results are manifest, and with the sceptical school they are plainly avowed. There has been no catastrophe in man's history. We are not a fallen race. God did not make man very good, and he at once begin to be very bad. There was no occasion why God should repent and be grieved at heart for the conduct of those whom he had made. And the book that pretends to give account of his dealings with and for man as fallen, is not from him. Be it so! Then the new theology has its sad dilemma. It will not pretend that human history has done honor to human nature. Either man has done much worse than he should have done, or God made him much worse than he should have made him!

The theology is readily allied with a denial of the divine Providence, and exemplifies the law of retribution which it

avers. Professing to be most ethical, it becomes the argument of those who fear no judgment beyond the present,-"scoffers, walking in their own lusts, and saying, Where is the promise of nis coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation."

Those Christians who now deny the intermediate nature not of soul alone but of body, should not be too confident that they can silence the new theology. The Church doctrine of bodily death which they reject, is a lingering, languishing protest of the crisis in man's history. This alone shows the resurrection of Christ to be a crisis of redemption. And hence the argument

of Paul for a crisis yet to come, and a future reign of righteousness: "Because He hath appointed a Day in the which He will judge the world in righteousness, by that man whom he hath ordained; whereof He hath given assurance unto all men, in that He hath raised him from the dead."

§ 4. OF ORIGINAL SIN.

With the current view of immortality the proposition that infants are saved by grace is strictly untenable, and by many is no longer asserted. The old theodicies of the existence and guilt of all in Adam, and of the imputation of his sin to all his posterity, are absolutist and arbitrary, annulling the idea of grace with that of justice. The common notion now is that infants are saved by their innocence, or by the so-called grace of Christ, which justice, however, demands; so that in either case their salvation is of debt. A sinful or criminal nature, which alone can be supposed to deserve eternal suffering, implies a sinful volition; which in the case of infants must logically involve preexistence, either chronological, as Dr. Beecher supposes (and in which view his argument is a consistent deduction from the prevalent doctrine), or timeless and dateless, as deduced by Dı. Müller.

But death is a calamity which may be either penal, or may befall the guiltless. And all may be said to die in Adam, since death, either with or without personal guilt, seems to have en

tered the world and to have extended to all men, through the first man. In this view, we may either suppose the term "sin" to be taken in its primary sense of failure, missing the mark (duapria), or in a forensic way it may be taken in the old sense of the world "guilt," i. e. liability to sentence, and the divine justice is not impeached. Infants are neither strictly deserving of, nor qualified for, eternal life. They are characterless, in that they have done neither good nor evil. Yet their existence, with that of the race, was forfeited in Adam; no more unjustly than the health, the length of life, even the existence of every child is put within the power of the parent. But the single forfeit makes even infant being, much more eternal existence, to be of grace. Does not the passage in Rom. v. 12-21, sustain this view?

We have used the phrase "original sin," as expressing the doctrine of native depravity. That doctrine may well be rejected with the notion of natural exposure to escapeless woe. But in the view that the offspring of a fallen race are unfitted for the original destiny of that race, the doctrine in question may perhaps be well reconsidered. May not the bias to evil be illustrated by the ill temper of brute animals, derivable from the birth as personal guilt can not be? And though holiness can no more than sinfulness be transmitted, may not the fruits of divine grace in the parent so modify the very nature of the child as to render it less fitted to die, and a more proper candidate for eternal life? May we not, indirectly, infer as much from 1 Cor. vii. 14?

$ 5. OF PUNISHMENT.

The reaction from the doctrine of eternal suffering appears most plainly in the notion that all punishment is disciplinary and reformatory. Of course it is not properly penal; i. e. suffering incurred or inflicted because deserved. The only desert is a need, if not a right, to be reformed. The name "punishment" does not agree at all with the theory, and is discarded by many who hold it.

The philosophy which is apparent in the work on "The