does not the book of Isaiah, show plainly enough that God has always held the lines of His government in His own hands, unhampered by covenants with men, so that He could choose those to be His people who were not His people? The Jewish exclusiveness, therefore, he argued, is riddled every way,-by reason, by the principles of their own traditions, and by the open declarations of the records to which they appeal.

Now, Orthodoxy perverts the argument, and mistakes the sweep of this epistle, on every point. The vivid pictures which Paul paints to show that Jews and Gentiles have broken their covenants with the Almighty, Calvinism interprets as a mathematical projection of the doctrine of total depravity. Paul's idea that they have nothing to claim of God, on terms of bargain, Calvinism stiffens into the dogma that the human race are born under the shadow of infinite wrath. The apostle's poetic conception, in the third chapter of Romans, of Christ as a new ilasterion, or mercy-seat, whence God freely dispenses the richest favors to all men who have the filial spirit, Calvinism deforms into the hideous proposition, that Christ was needed as a sacrifice, to enable God to be propitious to a revolting race. The allusion to Abraham, intended by the apostle to lift the Jewish mind above the idea of covenants, is perverted into the idea that the Christian church is founded on a strict covenant of faith, which forbids any Heavenly mercy to stray beyond the believer in a propitiatory offering. The reference to Adam is dwarfed from its typical breadth and rhetorical magnificence, to the idea of federal headship, or a corrupted nature flowing from that fountain into every breast. And the references to the Old Testament by which the apostle proves that God had never given up the right to turn and broaden the channels of His providence as He pleased, have been frozen into the dogma of personal election and a foreordination that annihilates free-will.

If we stand at the spring of principles from which the book of Romans issued, we see a stream of thought as different from Calvinism, as the waters of life are sweeter than the pool of Marah. Dr. Beecher, by his typical interpretation of one great proof-text of his brethren's theology, has called their attention to the character of the

epistle, and of the genius of its author, which imply the rhetorical structure of the whole argument, in the light of which, when once seen, the whole system of Orthodoxy must change. His chapters therefore on the fifth of Romans, although they do not strengthen his own theory, and do not include the whole truth, are very valuable contributions, from the Orthodox side, towards a worthy conception of the great apostle's thought.

Extended as our article is, we should do wrong to refuse a passing notice to Dr. Beecher's theory and justification of eternal punishment, as unfolded from pages 156-159. It is always interesting to watch the mental gymnastics among verbal artifices, by which noble natures try to evade the horror of eternal misery, as a fact, busying themselves with the adjustment of certain logical relations of the doctrine, as a thought, and so keeping away from its tremendous import, as a reality. This volume offers a new speculative subtlety, which acts as a screen to guard the author's sense of equity and benevolence from scorching before the heats of hell. All sin, he says, grows out of selfishness, and selfishness is essentially cruel. No holy instincts are shocked when cruel purposes are disappointed and thwarted. Now the root of future misery will be the just defeat, and exposure, of the spirit of cruelty, by infinite love, armed with infinite power. So that God will be glorified, and pure minds can rejoice, in the future and unending suffering of the wicked.

This argument, on a close examination, certainly reveals some strange features. Selfishness is cruel, because it is an entire disregard of the interests and welfare of others. The saints, therefore, by becoming regenerate, lose every trace of this disposition, and so of all cruelty. Now is it not rather troublesome to conceive of their satisfaction in the eternal sin, and internal wretchedness of millions of their fellows, just at the time when selfishness is rooted out, their cruelty withered, and their regard for the interests of others most intense? Does not this principle cut two ways? Must it not balance the satisfaction which the holiness of the saints will feel in the defeat of malice, by their keener sensitiveness, as unselfish and sympathetic beings, to the misery and woe of the malicious souls? VOL. IX. 6

And then, as to the methods of this defeat of evil. If the contest is between finite cruelty and resources on one side, and "infinite love, armed with infinite power," on the other, is there no danger that saintly sympathies will be perplexed with some slight sense of the inequality of the combat? Dr. Beecher stakes his argument on this figure of an engagement, and he must be held to it. If infinite power must be brought in at the close of the system of probation, to ensure the victory to infinite love, is not the triumph essentially a physical one, and so unworthy the sympathy of holy minds? And further, if this power must be invoked, at the close of the system of probation, to ensure God's victory, why might it not have been applied, in earlier stages of that system, to prevent the spread of malicious influences, to restrain the agency of Satan, to make the sphere of probation more promising, or to offer a little assistance to souls in the critical perils of temptation? If power is to be wielded to give the supremacy at last to love, one can hardly understand why an unselfish Deity, that is, a being with no element of cruelty, and full of sympathy, should withold that power, to use it in its full sweep against the outward effects of evil at the consummation of his government, instead of bringing it to bear in larger measure upon souls when their inward redemption might have been ensured by it?

We confess to a feeling of disgust in playing with these metaphysical foils, over such a subject as eternal punishment, which involves the whole question of government and order in the universe. But Dr. Beecher's principles are so hostile to the conclusion he brought them to cover, that it is only just to turn them round. Let a man treat the great question of order as a reality, and like Abbot Samson, look steadily into the pit, when he would reason about the justice and beauty of eternal suffering, and his metaphysics become enlightened, his principles insensibly broaden, so that, like John Foster, he will feel that nothing can be so certain, as that such a doctrine is not true. If, however, this question is treated as a speculative problem, an idea which, by some subtlety, must be brought into fellowship with other ideas that seem hostile to it, the mind will come to regard it about like the questions before the schoolmen, of the real presence in the Eucharist,

or the possibility of an angel passing from one point to another, without traversing the intermediate space. Speculative logic can be demeaned to any service; Christianized feeling must swell underneath the brain through all its exercise, making the problem a real one, if we would know what the mind has to say about the harmony of eternal woe with the highest goodness and equity.

We have been struck, in reading his volume, with the easy indifference the author shows to all the difficulties, with which the methods and laws of birth and family life surround his thesis. Are the homes of this world repetitions of the alliances and kindred that existed in the angelic state? Is there a truth deeper than has been imagined in the old saying, that matches were made in heaven? If the family bonds of this world are not coördinate with relationships that existed in our first estate, what a deception is practised upon the young parents, who suppose that they are fondling an infant creature, born of their characters and blood, when really they are caressing an abridgement of an imp, which God has cast into their domestic care to hide its depravity, for a season, in a sunny glee, and to prattle its old pollution through nursery rhymes. We read that in the spiritual world, "they neither marry nor are given in marriage." Is it not rather hard, then, that so many parents should suffer so much from the thought of the probable damnation of their more sinful children, when they might be relieved by knowing that these family ties are delusions; and that the wandering one who bears their name, is of no nearer kindred than any of the yellow editions of fallen spirits in China, or of the black-letter re-publications of Nubia?

What becomes, too, of the children that die? Their infancy is a temporary device; and so, of course, they stretch to their old proportions, so soon as the scarlet fever, or the measles, restores them to eternity. They are not old enough to receive an interest in the atonement on the earth. If they are lost, on that account, has their probation been fair? If provision has been made for them, so that their salvation is secured, is probation equal for all the colonists of this globe? And on any view we can take of it, does Dr. Beecher's theory show us an equal earthly trial for all that are here? Surely not; he

cannot pretend that opportunities and chances are in equilibrium for those brought up in an atmosphere of pollution, and those born into Christian homes; for heathen and Christian people; for those who die at five, ten, twenty, fifty, and seventy years. And so, is not his great scheme of a second probation burdened with the same moral injustice, which he exposes so eloquently in the common Orthodox view that this is our first trial? According to both theories, this is our last opportunity of escape from perdition; and both alike show most startling inequalities, directly established by Providence, in the opportunities for redemption.

A

Surely, this book is a strange phenomenon, even for the domain of theology, where portents are not rare. most singular spectacle it would be, should Dr. Beecher be summoned before a council and probed with questions to settle the charge of heresy. How savory would his answers seem, as returned in detail! "Do you believe the Trinity? "Yes." "Do you hold to universal sinfulness?" "Yes." "Do you accept the doctrine of total depravity?" "Yes; I hold to complete corruption of nature antecedent to all volition." "Do you believe in eternal punishment?" "Yes." "Do you acknowledge this world as a final state of probation?" "Yes.' "Do you hold strictly to the atoning mission and death of Christ ?" "Yes." "Do you believe that faith in the atonement, and a consequent regeneration by the Holy Spirit, open the only avenue of salvation?" "Yes." Do you believe that Dr. Bushnell is a heretic?" "Yes." Surely the accused must be acquitted by acclamation. But let us imagine one question more. "You hold then, firmly to the Orthodox system of theology as organized in the prominent Confessions?" "No; I believe that every one of its theories of forfeiture involves God, and his whole administration, and his eternal kingdom, in the deepest dishonor that the mind of man or angel can conceive, by the violation of the highest and most sacred principles of honor and right, and that on the scale of infinity and eternity. The human mind cannot be held back from abhorring such theories, except by the most unnatural violence to its divinely inspired convictions of honor and right." (pp. 225 and 306.)