in the anticipated terrors of the judgment which is before him.

27. On this subject conscience, when once made alive, gets the better of all those representations which are made of God, by the expounders of a poetic or sentimental theism. There is a disposition to merge all the characteristics of the divinity into one and while with many of our most eminent writers, the exuberant goodness, the soft and yielding benignity, the mercy that overlooks and makes liberal allowance for the infirmities of human weakness, have been fondly and most abundantly dwelt upon-there has been what the French would call, if not a studied, at least an actually observed reticence, on the subject of His truth and purity and His hatred of moral evil. There can be no government without a law; and the question is little entertained-how are the violations of that law to be disposed of? Every law has its sanctions -the hopes of proffered reward on the one hand, the fears of threatened vengeance upon the other. Is the vengeance to be threatened only, but never to be executed? Is guilt only to be dealt with by proclamations that go before, but never by punishments that are to follow ? What becomes of the truth or the dignity of heaven's government-if man is to rebel, and God, stripped of every attribute but tenderness, can give no demonstration of His incensed and violated majesty? There is positively no law, if there be not a force and a certainty in its sanctions. Take away from jurisprudence its penalties, or, what were still worse, let the penalties only be denounced but never be exacted; and we

reduce the whole to an unsubstantial mockery. The fabric of moral government falls to pieces; and, instead of a great presiding authority in the universe, we have a subverted throne and a degraded sovereign. If the lawgiver in his treatment of sin is to betray a perpetual vacillation; if at one time sin shall be the object of high-sounding but empty menaces, and at another be connived at or even looked to by an indulgent God with complacency; if there is only to be the parade of a judicial economy, without any of its power or its performance; if the truth is only to be kept in the promises of reward, but as constantly to be receded from in the threats of vengeance; if the judge is thus to be lost in the overweening parent-then there is positively nothing of a moral government over us but the name. We are not the subjects of God's authority; we are but the fondlings of his regard. Under a system like this, the whole universe would drift as it were into a state of anarchy; and, in the uproar of this wild misrule, the King who sitteth on high, would lose his hold on the creation that he had formed.

28. It is impossible to pursue this speculation into its consequences, without being shut up unto the conclusion, that there is indeed a moral government; and, if so, that there is indeed a law with its accompanying sanctions; and, again if so, that guilt and condemnation, that sin and punishment, follow in the train of each other. Now what we

complain of is, that, in the great majority of our writers on Natural Theism, while a moral government is admitted in the general, the doctrine is not

at all carried out to its specific applications. There is nothing done to dispose of the palpable fact which glares so obviously upon us, that the rule of this government has been transgressed by every individual of the human species; and that all, without exception, have become amenable to the high jurisdiction of heaven for their gross and repeated violations of it. Either this government then must resign its authority and honour; or man is in that fearful dilemma, from which it deeply concerns one and all of us to know how it is that we can possibly be extricated. Now this is a

It

question which the advocates of Natural Theism have scarcely ever offered to dispose of. By far the greatest number of them have blinked it altogether, or at least left it wholly unresolved. remains with almost every one of them in the state of an unsettled problem; and though both the character of God and the destinies of man are most essentially involved in it, yet if touched by any, it is with a very delicate and undecided hand. It is no vindication, that it lies not within the limits of their department. It is very true, that it lies not within their limits in the shape of a doctrine. But it lies within their limits in the shape of a desideratum. They know as much both of the "Quid oportet" and the "quid est," as to assure them of the conclusion, that all men have done despite to the authority of heaven-and the yet unresolved difficulty is, how can it consist with the truth and the unchangeableness of this authority, that the High and the Holy One, whose dwelling-place is among the sublimities of an unapproachable sacredness, how

can He again look on His polluted creatures with complacency? How, in a word, is the compromise to be struck between the mercy of God and the majesty of His government; and in what terms shall that deed of amnesty be framed, which both provides an outlet for the divine goodness on a sinful world, and inflicts not an irreparable blow on the other lofty and unchangeable attributes of His nature?

29. It may not be for the expounder of moral science to find a positive reply to this question. He may not be in possession of resources for the solution of it: but there lie within his reach the materials for the enunciation of it; and this enunciation, he ought to have bequeathed or handed over to the professor of the Christian Theology. With the former it lies in the shape of an unreduced formula a formula which he at least is able to construct, though not able to pass through the intermediate steps to the final resolution of it. Now it is the preparation of these formula that appears to us the most important service which moral philosophy can render. It can collect the data for the construction of questions, and then present them for solution to the disciples of another and higher calculus. And how shall that God who hath both the truth of a righteous and the authority of a powerful sovereign-how shall He take sinners into acceptance, is just one of these questions. How, without the disgrace and indeed the overthrow of heaven's jurisdiction, can heaven ever be entered by those who have rebelled against the king who sitteth on its throne_this, it may

not be the part of moral philosophy to pronounce upon as a doctrine; but altogether its part to make it over as a difficulty to those who can resolve it. The error is, not that it has failed to make out the account. But the error is that it has closed the account, and so sends away its disciples with the impression of a sufficiency which it cannot realize. We do not require of it to put forth a physician's hand to a disease which lies beyond the reach of its prescriptions. But we require of it as full and fair an exhibition as it can give of the disease. We charge it with having misled its votaries into a false and ruinous security with having said peace when there was no peace—with the soft and the soothing whispers which it has given forth, when it ought to have sounded the trumpet of alarm-and, in the face of those intimations which even Nature hath uttered of a fearful and unsettled controversy, with having suppressed every warning of the danger; and, by the lullaby of a delusive eloquence, having hushed all its votaries to sleep among the urgencies of an impending storm.

30. And it is further to be observed of this question, that, if left undetermined, it not only casts an ambiguity on the character of God in heaven; but it throws into a state of utter precariousness the cause of human virtue upon earth. The question is if mercy shall be rendered at the expense of justice, at what point in the scale of moral worth or of moral worthlessness, shall the one attribute give way to the other? If all have sinned, but in spite of this the mercy of God advances a certain way over the domain of