Now if such be the nature of free agency, it must involve important consequences, with regard to the mode of the Divine operation in dealing with creatures thus fearfully and wonderfully made. They can be dealt with only according to the nature which the Creator has bestowed upon them. Physical impulse and forcible constraint are here as inapplicable as reasonings with a stone, or expostulations with a lump of clay. So far as we can gather, either from the voice of reason, or the tenor of Scripture, persuasion, command, entreaty, threatening, and promise, are the only legitimate and possible modes of Divine government. A power has been given, for wise and worthy ends, the dignity of which refuses to be dealt with on lower terms; and the Almighty would deny His own workmanship, and contradict His own wisdom, by seeking to deal with such creatures in any other way. The facts which the word of God reveals, with regard to the possible recovery of guilty and rebellious souls by Divine grace, when fairly examined, do not impeach this conclusion of reason, which finds such a mass of consenting testimony in the word of God. They do not prove that even the Almighty can change the will of man without its own consent, but only that, in certain cases, to be considered hereafter more fully, that consent may be secured. Repentance is no piece of celestial mechanism, but a great and stupendous moral change. Moral agencies are always employed in producing it, though it lies deeper than the ordinary sphere of moral suasion. From the first command in Paradise, to the parting invitation, where the Spirit and

the Bride say, Come, and invite the wanderers of earth to slake their thirst with the living waters of salvation, the whole of Scripture confirms the principle here advanced—that moral agents can be ruled only by moral influence, and that mechanism, compulsion, and mere physical constraint, are means incompatible with the essential laws of their nature, which Almighty Power cannot, and Infinite Wisdom refuses to employ; so that the supposition that such remedies can avail when all others have failed, is nothing else than a mischievous delusion.

CHAPTER IV.

ON TEMPTATION IN FREE AGENTS.

Ir has now been endeavoured to show that the creation of Free Agents implies the bestowment of active powers, by which the creature is exempted from physical constraint; so that Omnipotence is self-limited, by its own gift, to deal with it in the way of moral suasion and influence alone. How far this influence may extend, in the case of a Being infinitely wise and powerful-what mighty moral engines may be brought to bear upon the spirit, or whether it may not be persuaded, by its own consent and the consciousness of need, to abdicate its own vicegerency for a season, so as to be re-created morally by a deeper work of Divine power than creation itself-are questions to be solved rather by the light of revelation and experience, than by the force of abstract reasoning. But the fundamental maxim must still be maintained, without which all Providence becomes a sea of darkness; that moral means alone are open, even to Omnipotence itself, whereby to govern a moral creation, and control the thoughts, actions, and desires of reasonable and immortal spirits, created at first in the image of God.

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would remain linked with the great Source of all created being, and abide under the approving smile of the Eternal King.

The temptations to evil, in such a creature, must result from the essential limitations of its own being. It is limited alike in power, wisdom, and goodness. Its will has bounds which it cannot surpass; and whether placed lower or higher among its fellows, it can easily conceive a range of activity, or a degree of authority, larger and fuller than its own. Its intellect knows something of the Maker and His works; but still more remains unknown; and it is able to speculate far and wide among these conceivable possibilities of being. It may strive in its thoughts to reconcile things incompatible, which its ignorance may deem reconcilable, and thus revel amidst the seductive combinations of an ideal universe. Its goodness is limited and dependent. It continues only so long as the will abides in submission to that Divine command of love, which is its chief link of union with its Maker, and with the whole universe of being. In the observance of that law is its only safety. It is the path by which it may rise into higher and higher knowledge of the truth, and more intense activity and joy of will, in the service of the Most High, and maintain dominion over those lower creatures which He may have placed in subjection under it. But all the possibilities of good, which the intellect may conceive to lie in the undiscovered universe of being; and all the energy of the will, when it chafes, like an ocean on its shores, against the primary law of subjection

that limits its independence, constitute temptations to disobedience. There is a shadowy universe of possible felicity in untried, self-chosen pathways, which arrays itself against the experience of present happiness in the service of God, and the authority of a law which commends itself, by its own light, to the deepest consciousness of the spiritual being.

Every moral agent, therefore, by the mere fact of its creation, is placed between two unknown worlds, which solicit its choice in opposite directions. It finds itself, from the first birth of inward self-consciousness, placed under a moral law, which contains its own evidence of binding obligation, but which it clearly has the power to disobey. All its actual experience, whether brief or long, has been one of happiness in obedience. But unknown regions of hope are before it. On either side the prospect is immense, of growing felicity in the tried pathway of obedience, or of conceivable happiness, higher than has yet been enjoyed, in the wider fields of independence and self-will. One road, in its first entrance, appears steep and narrow, though it leads onward and upward to the heights of celestial glory. The other is wide and facile, and seems to offer a vast range of free enjoyment, unvexed by the restraint of law, with heights and depths that appear to rival the happiness and independence of the Creator; though it leads really to a dark abyss of gloom and misery, from which only infinite wisdom and goodness, by amazing depths of condescending grace, can rescue those who have once gone astray.