ideas, beliefs, hopes, and aspirations has consisted, so far as we can discern, not in shoving them back and gaining from the conquest of their territory more ground for the shallow, muddy pools of positivism, but in bringing them forth more clearly, and establishing them more firmly in the domain of human consciousness. It may not, then, be impossible for some of those very truths of Christianity which now seem to stand most isolated and remote from the necessary, or even the real, knowledge of the race to establish themselves in closer organic connection with the sum-total of its knowledge. The contributions which Christianity has made to our concept of God is one of those interesting collateral subjects of research which are suggested by our general theme.

"The concept of God is the resultant of God's revelation of himself to the human soul." It is a centre upon which converge many lines, not only of argument, but also of intuition, feeling, and purpose. Viewed in the light of these statements, the difficulties of this concept seem to us to lose their weight as objections to the reality of that Personal Absolute whom faith calls our Father and our God. The difficulties make the thinker feel, with a sense of awful mystery, the inadequacy of his attempts perfectly to compass the Eternal with forms of sense and understanding. But they also show that Eternal One as, in his valid but limited revelation of himself, he stands before, and within, the human soul. They make the thinker conscious of his own finiteness, but conscious also of possessing the self-disclosure, according to the form of his finiteness, which the Infinite has made. They permit him to say: I know not the whole of God, and many things, therefore, I dare neither to affirm nor to deny; but what I do know of Him, I find so grounded in my very being, so confirmed by the forms of all external being, so comforting to the heart, so fruitful in the life, that I affirm it beyond the possibility of trustworthy denial.

ARTICLE II.

ATONEMENT.

BY PROF. JOHN MORGAN, d.d., oberlin, OHIO.

INTRODUCTORY.

A Moral World.

THIS is a moral world, under a moral government, because mankind are conscious of moral ideas and of moral law, and know themselves to be moral agents, subjects of free-will, of the power to obey or disobey moral law.

Outside of the sphere of moral agency mankind are as much under the control of necessitative forces as brute animals or insentient matter. But within this sphere necessity can have no compulsive operation, however mighty the influences that act on the soul, whether these influences press from within through the working of the living organism, or from without through the action of other living beings or the action of material external nature. As moral law commands, there must be the power to obey, even if the heart of the moral agent is set in disobedience. In general, sceptical necessitarians admit the incompatibility of universal necessity with obligatory moral law. But many Christian philosophers, strenuously maintaining universal necessity, still hold to the validity of moral obligation. The sceptics appear here to have the logical advantage; but the saintly character of many of the advocates of universal necessity is beyond question.

It would seem not to be easy to perceive how blameworthiness or praiseworthiness can attach to qualities called moral, when the subjects of these qualities no more freely produce them than the rose so produces its fragrance, the rainbow its beauty, or the serpent the poison of its fangs. We like a

beautiful or beneficent thing, and we dislike an ugly or baneful thing, and we praise the one sort and dispraise the other; but this is a totally different operation of our minds from moral approbation or disapprobation.

The moral law commands only one thing-love, benevolence, good-will. This implies that the moral agent knows something of the value of well-being or good. Obedience to the moral law is holiness-the only holiness conceivable or possible. Obedience is in its very conception voluntary. It cannot be the product of creation, in the literal sense of the word. Creation gives existence to being and its natural attributes. But it may be conceived that when man was ushered into being God at once so operated on him in a moral way as to secure in him, as his first character, obedience to the moral law, or holiness. Thus man would be made, or induced to be, upright.

Refusal to love, or disobeying the moral law, is sin or unholiness. This may appear in various forms; but the essence of sin is found in not loving, or in not exercising good-will. No moral agent can be made the subject of holiness or sin without his consent. Neither holiness nor sin can be propagated from father to son, as scrofula may be. Disease, physical depravity in countless forms, may be immediately inherited, and of course without the consent of offspring. But these are not sin or sinful, however harmful. These may be the occasions of sin, but not without the consent of offspring. When sin or vice is said to be inherited, the word ought to be considered as employed in a secondary sense, unless the context forbids this interpretation. A whole family, tribe, nation, or race may thus inherit moral qualities; but the moral quality resides only in each individual moral will, and originates there. In no other possible way can we conceive of moral responsibility as properly attaching to each individual moral agent. However powerful the principle of heredity, we must not give it an interpretation which will sweep away the moral world, or use it to explain the universal prevalence of sin in mankind

in such a way as to annihilate the sin which it is sought to explain.

If an inworking of the Holy Spirit is an essential condition of the holiness of creatures, their holiness is still their own personal holiness, consisting of their own willing and doing. The occasion or condition makes no part of the thing. And when man first sinned, his sin was disobedience to the moral law. The sin was occasioned by temptation applied to the susceptibilities of his nature. These were not sinful nor evil in any sense. They were necessary constituents of his form of being, necessary to its activity. But moral creatures always know propensities are not to be indulged in opposition to moral law, but always governed in accordance with it.

All the susceptibilities or propensities, being essential to the nature which God has given to man, were transmitted to their posterity by the first parents of the race. I do not find that the Scriptures explicitly tell us whether human nature was changed by the fall of Adam and Eve. But observation has determined that propensities may be made morbidly intense, or irregular, or both, by wrong indulgence, and thus changed may be transmitted to offspring. But this change does not constitute the propensities themselves sinful in any sinner. Sin consists in the surrender of the will to their control, in the consent of the man to obey them against the moral law. When offspring inherit them in this disordered state, it is an inheritance of increased temptation. But however strong the temptation may be, the propensities cannot govern without the consent of the tempted party, even if the temptation is aggravated by the wily influence of Satan. We do not yield to absurdity, when we believe that our first father has transmitted to us an inheritance of increased temptation, certain to lead us into sin. But to say that a necessitative force infuses sin into us in connection with our descent, is to contradict the very nature of sin, which can be nothing else than disobedience to moral law, and so the free action of moral beings. The principle of heredity is one of tremendous influence, and recognized in

the Scriptures; and it is seen to mould families, nations, and races in a marvellous manner. But it is never in the Scriptures spoken of as necessitative, or as fating any creature of God to be wicked. The Bible would be a very different book if it represented mankind as inheriting sin as they inherit scrofula, consumption, or leprosy.

Nor has the Bible any responsibility for the doctrine that when a moral creature has once sinned he is bound to sin by chains of necessity. For the moment necessity comes in morality and all moral action cease, and all moral responsibility, except for the past. It may be that a sinner, or every sinner in the world, has so set his heart to do evil that there is no hope of his turning from evil-doing unless a Divine Redeemer undertakes his deliverance; but all his obstinate sin is as free as if he were just beginning his evil course. The distinction between moral certainty and physical necessity must be held fast, or there comes a total collapse of all moral ideas.

The first man, by becoming a sinner, became the natural representative of the race in sin, as from him descends the nature or propensities which, with Satan's influence, successfully tempt mankind to sin. It is not Adam and Eve alone who, in the third chapter of Genesis and in the fifth of Romans, are set forth as sinning, but the whole human race of moral agents. But nowhere in the Bible is the offspring of the first pair said to inherit in a purely passive way their sinful moral character. The first sin of every human being is as free as the first sin of Eve and Adam. The disobedient

attitude toward God and his law is as freely assumed. And no necessity of continuing in sin is caused by any sin of any sinner. All sin is always freely committed, and is the abusive product of free-agency. Guilt is proportioned to the degree of light enjoyed. If sinners have now more light than Adam had, they are, in committing sin or in continuing in it, greater sinners than he could be. The cigar-smoker, who knows better that it is wrong to smoke cigars than Adam knew that it was wrong to eat of the tree of knowledge of good