may perhaps say many, of the subordinate matters and connexions. And the conclusion would be, that as in the works, so also in the word, of the Divine Author, it was intended there should remain some cloudy spots, some streaks of darkness, some apparent inconsistencies, to demand the humility and submission of human reason,-to demand this upon the competent evidence, accompanying the communication as a whole, that it is a revelation from God. Now, supposing this unexampled student of Revelation to be a preacher, which he ought to be, he would not feel himself bound to maintain that rigorous universal consistency which he could not find in the documents constituting his great authority. Whatever did appear to him to be plainly the meaning of any declaration of the sacred oracles, he would feel himself warranted to say, even though he could not, by an honest unsystematic application of the rules of analogy and harmonization, make out to his own mind its precise consistency with what he would also say on the authority of other dictates of those oracles, interpreted in the same honest manner.

Of course, we cannot be understood to mean that this comprehensive and impartial examiner will ever have found an insuperable discrepancy between essentially important parts of the authoritative documents.

We may very fairly ask, whether such a mode of holding and teaching religious truth, be not more reasonable than that adopted by the maintainers of strict systems of Christian doctrine, let it be what Fuller denominates hyper-Calvinism on the one side, or Arminianism on the other. For is it not quite obvious, that their method is, to fix on certain portions of Divine revelation, taken in the most rigorous and absolute sense, to frame them into a scheme, and then to throw aside, in effect, a very large portion of that same revelation, which presents so plain and direct an appearance of disagreement with that scheme, that they are compelled either to beware of adverting to it at all, or to advert to it always controversially; that is, in the way, and in every way, of torturing, refining, invalidating, in order to avert the strong hostility with which those ungracious parts of Scripture are plainly felt to bear against the consecrated and canonized system, every particle of which is, at all hazards, to be maintained in defiance of them? To all such preachers, unless they are adroit in controversy, and love it, and can persuade themselves of its utility in popular instruction, a large portion of the Bible, instead of being a resource, is actually a grievance and a nuisance; and the tendency of their preaching is to render it such to their hearers also. Accordingly, it is notorious, that in more than a few Christian congregations, an occasional preacher would give serious offence, if he should-not throw out opinions somewhat unaccordant with the idolized system,

but-happen to repeat any of the inspired language, that seems to sound a dissonant note. Would they entertain any proposition for rendering the Bible, in every sense, a more commodious book, by the exception of all such passages? They may, at least, most conscientiously say, that to them all such portions of the volume are worse than useless.

But we have been unwittingly led away from the subject. We were venturing the opinion, that from the prevailing strain of the Bible, considered as one mighty address to collective mankind, and upon the authority, especially, of the example of our Lord, of his commission to the Apostles, of the correspondent example of those Apostles, imitated also in that of the glorious train of the men who, through succeeding ages, down to this day, have resembled them most, in spirit and success, a Calvinistic preacher may well feel himself warranted and required to urge it on unbelieving men, as their duty, to repent and believe in Christ, even though he should not be able to make out the consistency of this proceeding, with his conviction of the total inability of depraved man to do so. At the same time, it were absurd to hold the value of conscious consistency so light, that he should not be gratified to find it possible for the subject to be placed in such a view as to obviate the discrepancy. An effectual expedient for this desirable purpose, Mr. Fuller, his veteran and deeply read biographer, and many other intelligent divines, have deemed to be afforded by the distinction of natural and moral inability. The nature of this distinction has often enough been intelligibly stated; and it has been forcibly illustrated, and applied to the purpose, by our excellent biographer, in several sermons and tracts of recent years. There are a number of sensible remarks on the subject, some from his pen, and some in the language of Fuller, in the present volume. We are inclined to transcribe one paragraph, as quoted from the latter.

It is allowed that it would be inconsistent in the Divine Being, to enjoin that on us which we are naturally unable to perform. By naturally unable, is intended that inability wherein we cannot do a thing though we would ever so fain; or that inability which does not at all consist in the want of a disposition, but of opportunity; or else in a debility of our bodily or mental faculties. If our inability to fulfil the commands of God were of this kind, it is allowed, it would be inconsistent in the Divine Being to hold us still bound to fulfil them. God does not require a blind man to read his word, nor an ideot to understand it. But our inability is not natural, but moral: that is, it lies in the want of a good disposition, and in being under the dominion of a bad one. Our inability is like that of Joseph's brethren, who could not speak peaceably to him: or like that of the Jews, to whom Christ spake, saying, how can ye, being evil, speak good things? or like that of those reproved by Peter, having eyes full of adultery, and that cannot cease from sin. The reason why the mind is not

subject to the law of God, nor can be, is its being a carnal mind, and enmity against God. Now it is so far from being inconsistent in the Divine Being to require of us what we are, in this sense, unable to perform, that it would be inconsistent in him not to require it: as inconsistent as for a worthy prince to drop his claims of allegiance, in proportion as his rebellious subjects become so averse from his government, that they cannot find it in their hearts to yield obedience to him.

In this view of things, however, we are unable to obey God's law; though that inability is our fault. While the heart is entirely averse from God's law, it is impossible any real obedience to it can be yielded. Hence, God has told us, that when the Ethiopian can change his skin, and the leopard his spots, then may those do good works who are accustomed to do evil. And hence, the best of men, who are still the subjects of a great deal of moral inability, that is, of carnality, acknowledge, that the way of man is not in himself; that it is not in man that walketh, to direct his steps.' p. 219.

There is cause to be truly pleased, that so many pious and valuable Christian teachers, are, by means of this distinction, enabled to surmount the difficulty ;-or rather, perhaps, to put it one step further removed. For, pursued to a very short distance, the matter comes inevitably to this: They have to enforce on the depraved being a duty, and to denounce on its non-fulfilment the punishment, in the very same terms they would have had to do so, on the supposition that this being, (that each individual) had itself created that depraved condition of its nature, which constitutes its absolute and total inability to perform that duty; but it did not itself create that condition. In short, the speculation stands in direct and immediate communication with that direful mystery, the Origin of, Evil. And we must confess we should think that the less use is made in religion, the better, of philosophizings which are precipitate towards that black abyss. It really would appear to us, that abstract reasonings on will, and power, and account-ableness, in relation to man, can afford no assistance, none, toward the fundamental removal of theological difficulties; and that the only resource in a matter like that to which we have been adverting, is in a simple submissive acceptance of the dictates, and adherence to the practice, of the inspired teachers, and of their Teacher.

But we are self-rebuked again for having wandered off in this direction, and rendered it necessary to confine within a very brief space whatever else we should have observed upon this interesting volume.

If we were to be thinking more of the man, simply, and how his mind might have been the most advantageously cultivated, than of his practical utility in the Christian Church, we might be disposed to regret that the study of such a subject should

have been destined to form the first great stage of his intellectual discipline. His mind was naturally of extraordinary strength and acuteness; the thing to be desired was, that he might, at this early period, have fallen on subjects adapted in the greatest possible degree to its enlargement; and no tract of speculation, none, at least, which required so much thought, could well have been less fortunate in this respect, than the one in question; especially when we see what sort of writers he had to expend his attention upon; Johnson of Liverpool, and other such worthies! writers whose pamphlets and tomes might have been very honestly vended as specifics for freezing too warm imaginations, and too liberal temperaments. With Fuller's mental constitution, and under the effects of the unfortunate deficiency of the higher means of cultivation during his youth, what he wanted, at the period of coming to manhood, in order to his faculties being extended to the utmost of their natural capability, was, to be drawn into contemplations and inquiries of the widest scope, and into the regions of eloquence and poetry.

It was not till advanced a number of years in his laborious studies, that he became acquainted with the writings of Jonathan Edwards. But neither was that most powerful thinker exactly the proper spirit to become the tutelary genius of his intellectual progress, excepting as associated with other strong spirits of a greatly different cast, who might have combined and mingled with his influence on the pupil, influences of equal strength and excitement, but of a considerably different kind. Fuller's mind already too much resembled that of Edwards, in, the hardness and bareness-may we not say ?-of its operation, and in the destitution of the warmth and expatiating freedom of imagination, to say nothing of what belongs merely to taste. Imagination, though a faculty of quite subordinate rank to intellect, is of infinite value for enlarging the field for the action of intellect. It is a conducting and facilitating medium for intellect to expand itself through, where it may feel itself in a genial vital element instead of a vacuum.

There can, we think, be no doubt that the contracted and contracting nature of the first stage of Fuller's studies, commencing at the time, and taking its direction from the subject of the disputes in the church at Soham, contributed very much

*This enlightened divine pronounced, among many other oracular utterances of similar quality, that there were not thirty real Christians in Lancashire, nor twenty in Yorkshire. We most perfectly recollect, at this moment, the look and tone of submissive and solemn faith with which a devoted adherent of his, a truly pious man nevertheless, though, of course, a very weak one, repeated from him this sentence of charity, and sense.

to what also the defect in the native constitutiou of his mind,-a limitation in the compass and reach of his vigorous thinking, of which we will acknowledge to have often had a perception amidst our strong sense and admiration of the force of his mind. That mind has often suggested to us the idea of a giant with limbs too short.

The earnest application of his strong understanding, during the first period of his ministry, appears to have carried it rapidly to maturity; for, in reading this volume, we have been very much struck in observing the clear distinctive conception, the firm grasp, the completeness of intellectual action, displayed in passages and fragments written at a comparatively early age. A very remarkable exemplification is afforded in his Confession of Faith, prepared against his ordination at Kettering, when he was under thirty. It may well he doubted, whether any similar occasion has ever furnished an instance of so long a series of propositions so strongly and compactly thought, and so precisely and perspicuously expressed; or of so much of what was decidedly the writer's own, exhibited in the mode of professing a system of doctrines in substance common to him with many others. We do not wonder that his able and excellent senior, Mr. Hall, of Arnsby, should have declined, as far as possible, the magisterial formality of what is commonly called giving the charge.'

Equally without precedent, we verily believe, was the train of feelings which preceded his removal from Soham to Kettering, as attending the long protracted deliberation whether it was his duty to remove. To this step he was persuaded by many respected friends, and by some strong personal reasons, among which the danger of absolute poverty to a man with a growing family, was probably the one which had the least power to decide him. He lingered through months, and even years, of distressing perplexity, aggravated sometimes quite to anguish; solicitous not to go contrary to the Divine approbation, and severely suspicious of himself, lest any unworthy motive should beguile him into a mistaken assumption of that approbation. It is impossible to conceive a more genuine exercise of devotional conscience, than that displayed and evinced by the nume rous passages relating to the subject, which are brought together by Dr. Ryland from Fuller's diary and letters. They exhibit the rare spectacle of a man capable of making any sacrifice of selfish interest, to his sense of duty to God and his fellow-mortals. This, we think, must be the irresistible impression on every reader. We much approve the Doctor's having exercised the freedom of his discretion so far as to bring to view the secluded records of this portion of Fuller's life; for besides the example of humility before Vol. IX. N. S.

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