glions, as so many foci of instinctive agency, which imperfectly imitate the yet wanting centre. And now the promise and token of a true individuality are disclosed; the spontaneous rises into the voluntary, and finally after various steps and long ascent, the material and animal means and conditions are prepared for the manifestations of a free will, having its law within itself, and its motive in the law-and thus bound to originate its own acts, not only without, but even against, alien stimulants. That in our present state we have only the dawning of this inward sun (the perfect law of liberty) will sufficiently limit and qualify the preceding position, if only it have been allowed to produce its two-fold consequence-the excitement of hope and the repression of vanity" (Moral and Religious Aphorisms, XV). . "And who that hath watched their ways with an understanding heart, the filial and loyal bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and above all the manifold intelligent ant tribes, with their commonwealths and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husband-folk, that fold in their tiny flocks on the honeyed leaf, and the virgin sisters with the holy instincts of maternal love, detached and in selfless purity-and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind, in the kindling morn of creation! Thus all lower natures find their highest good in semblances and seekings of that which is higher and better. All things strive to ascend, and ascend in their striving. And shall man alone stoop ?20 . No! it

20 These almost startlingly penetrative passages anticipate, so far as prophecy can anticipate, the evolutionary thought of a later generation, especially on its ethical side, as expressed, for instance, in the poetry of Browning.

must be a higher good to make you happy. While you labor for any thing below your proper humanity, you seek a happy life in the region of death. Well saith the moral poet

'Unless above himself he can

Erect himself, how mean a thing is man!'"

(Moral and Religious Aphorisms, XXXVI.)

What is peculiar to man, however, and exclusively human is a struggle of jarring impulses within him; a mysterious diversity between the injunctions of the mind. and the elections of the will; an inexplicable sense of moral evil in his nature. The means of redemption from this evil constitutes spiritual religion indeed—something higher than religious morality. This redemption cannot be effected merely by a progressive development toward moral perfection, but requires a special revealing and redeeming agency. "I regard," says Coleridge, "the very phrase, 'Revealed Religion,' as a pleonasm, inasmuch as a religion not revealed is, in my judgment, no religion at all." The historic Christ is the Revealer and Redeemer. "I believe Moses, I believe Paul; but I believe in Christ," succinctly expresses Coleridge's meaning. To show that the distinctive principles of Christianity as a redemptive religion are in full accord with right reason and highest conscience is the purpose of the third part of Aids to Reflection.

"The two great moments of the Christian Religion are, Original Sin and Redemption." Without a distinct.

21 Coleridge considers many other articles of the Creed, such as Election, The Trinity, Baptism, etc., but since these are matters for the Speculative, not the Practical, Reason to consider, they admit of great varieties of opinion without affecting the character of the Christian.

comprehension of the meaning of the term original sin it is impossible to understand aright any one of the doctrines peculiar to Christianity. Original sin, then, is "sin originant, underived from without," that is, it is not a thing in nature, where all is Necessity, cause and effect, antecedent and consequent,-"in nature there can be no origin." Sin therefore is a spiritual, not a natural, evil, but the spiritual in man is the will; in and by the will sin must originate. It is a thing neither inflicted on man, nor implanted in him, nor inherited by him: "For if it be sin, it must be original; and a state or act, that has not its origin in the will, may be calamity, deformity, disease, or mischief; but a sin it can not be." The question, therefore, of the chronology of sin, or the chronicles of the first sinner, or of the supposed connecting links of an adamantine chain from the first sinner down to ourselves, has only a metaphysical and historical interest; and the question as to whether sin is of God or coequal with God becomes a barren controversy. What the individual must primarily concern himself with is, not what inherited tendencies or diseases he is afflicted with, but what moral evil he has originated in his own responsible will; for that alone is sin.

Nevertheless, original sin is confessedly a mystery, one which by the nature of the subject must ever remain such, which is felt to be such by every one who has previously convinced himself that he is a responsible being,-a mystery which admits of no further explanation than the statement of the fact. It is, however, not a fact and a mystery first introduced and imposed by Christianity, but of universal recognition. It is assumed or implied by every religion that retains the least glimmering of the patriarchal faith in God infinite, yet personal. A deep

sense of this fact is in the most ancient books of the Brahmins; in the Atheism of the Buddhists; in the myths of Prometheus, of Io, and of Cupid and Psyche,—“in the assertion of Original Sin the Greek Mythology rose and set." It is as great a perplexity for the philosophic Deist as for the Christian; so that a man may not get rid of the difficulty by ceasing to be a Christian.

It is in the Christian Scriptures alone, however, that original sin is affirmed with the force and frequency proportioned to its consummate importance. And it is the Christ alone of these Scriptures that supplies an adequate redemption from its power. The Redemptive Act is complete and perfect in itself. Christ, sinless, voluntarily took upon himself our humanity; and though his death. was violent, he accepted it with an inward willingness of spirit, which was its real cause. The power of sin was conquered by his Spirit. It is not merely by steadfastness of will, or determination, but by steadfastness in faith, faith in something higher than the will-the redemptive power of Christ's love-that the will can be saved from the consequences of original sin, that is, be regenerated, and that the self can be emptied of evil and filled with grace and truth.

Redemption is in no sense a credit-debit account between two parties (God and man) into which a third party (Christ) enters to pay the debt to satisfy the creditor. But the Redeemer, by taking on human flesh and conquering sin in the flesh, created a condition by which man may be a co-agent with the Spirit of Christ; and through repentance and faith, the two constantly interacting, and through his will, working in conjunction with both repentance and faith, man may attain to salvation. That is, redemption is a spiritual process and a

spiritual mystery. And things spiritual must be apprehended spiritually.

The redemptive experience has a true inwardness and is transcendental. A Christian cannot speak or think as if his redemption were a future contingent event, but must both feel and say, "I have been redeemed, I am justified." Christ did not merely come to show us a way of life, to teach certain opinions and truths, and tell us of a resurrection; but he declared He is the Way, the Truth, the Resurrection, the Life. God manifested in the flesh is eternity in the form of time. The Absolute Reason in Christ became human reason. And the method of redemption furnishes the means for the human reason to become one with the Absolute Reason, the human will with the Absolute Will. Just as the understanding in man utilizes the material furnished by the senses to its own ends, just as the reason utilizes the understanding to its own and higher ends—just as, in other words, there is an antecedent and higher mental initiative in every act of mental and moral growth, so the Redeemer furnishes the antecedent moral and spiritual initiative to the will that it might free itself, not only of its own original sin, but of ultimate corruption and carnal death, and become free indeed. Thus the method of redemption offered in the Scriptures is in absolute harmony with right reason and highest conscience.

Since the redemptive experience is an inward process of purifying the heart and the will and must needs be had by every Christian, it follows that the question of miracles and the question of immortality are relatively of less importance as attesting the truth of religion. As to miracles, it may freely be admitted and even contended that those worked by Christ were to the whole Jewish