trial, test, and probation; that the eye of God was upon all, and that his hand recorded all. The operations of Divine influence are, as much as those of any agent in nature, matters of notice and observation; and the conversion of an intelligent being is as much a phenomenon produced by combinations, as any result in experimental philosophy; it follows, therefore, that the doctrines founded on these influences and these phenomena, must be supported by an induction of the facts, and not by abstractions and syllogisms. The circle of metaphysical truths is that which sweeps closest and nearest around the inquiring mind; and, though it may gradually attain a wider comprehension, in proportion to the growth of the mind, it always holds the same central relations. All the circles of truths relating to time and place, cause and effect, means and end, are outside of it and beyond it. The metaphysical area may, indeed, be an area of truths, but there are other areas of other truths, equally important, and equally sublime. The mere metaphysician is a mental miser, abject in his own dark retreats, and never issuing forth to the ever-expanding areas of experimental truths, except on the mad and quixotic errantry, of compressing the widest circles of the universe within the enclosures of his own abstractions. He will not subordinate his ideas to the facts of experimental science, but contract, press, shrivel up truths of the amplest comprehension to the cramped limits of his own stinted range. Many theological principles are metaphysical, but religious phenomena are not metaphysical; and, therefore, the operations and combinations of Divine influences ought not to be treated metaphysically. In metaphysics, as an abstract science, there can be no speculation about cause and effect, or the adaptation of means to an end; for its legitimate subjects are truths necessary in themselves, what must be independently of all will, and of all positive causation. There is nothing to cause two and two to make four, or a part to be less than the whole. Metaphysical inquiries are not conversant with truths depending on time and place; they do not seek for facts, but ideas; for principles and abstract results, and not for causes and their operations. THEOLOGY is the sum of all the methods in which God has worked out, or reduced to probation and experiment, the sublime truths of metaphysics, the pure abstractions of eternity. On the least investigation, it is discovered that God has not worked out these immutable principles according to any human estimate of them,—not even in natural philosophy. If we, in the metaphysics of geometry, conceive of two bodies gravitating towards each other, our minds cannot refuse the conclusion that they will and must meet. Metaphysical and mathematical research could not have discovered the proposition in the abstract that the same body which possessed a gravitating tendency to the sun might also have a tendency to escape from the sun. Contrary to, or beyond, all the anticipations of abstract science, the possibility, the practicableness, and the reality of the harmonious combinations of these two forces, have been shown and demonstrated by the Supreme Architect of physical mechanism in actual FACTS; facts as clear as the sun, as numerous as the stars, as stupendous as the universe. In this position of science, should a mathematician still persist in discussing this intricate and nice adjustment as an abstract idea, he would be justly deemed the sturdy champion of inane conceptions; and would be a specimen of the theologian, who still continues to investigate moral phenomena by the flittering lucubrations of his metaphysics, rather than by the daylight which revelation has thrown around their operations. The combination of opposite forces is, to the metaphysician, a paradox which it is not in the province of his science to explain. In his investigations of physical phenomena, he discovers a body endowed with the clashing tendencies of attractive and repellent energies. If in this case he act the metaphysician, he will not be able, on any principle of necessary truth, or of abstract speculation, to account for the fact which is transpiring under his notice. What will he do? he must either deny the fact, or explain it away. He cannot deny the fact, for it is as stubborn as the fixedness of the universe, and as demonstrable as meridian sunbeams. His alternative is to explain it away. This he may attempt; but while he is making himself the learned dupe of his own prolusions, mighty nature proceeds onward, in undisturbed majesty, demonstrating the beautiful and splendid results of her mysterious and impenetrable relations and adaptations. In the case of a gravitating planet escaping from the sun and yet tending to it, the ingenious mathematician must admit that it had received, at some period, an impulse in a different direction. This impulse must have been given to it by its Maker at its production. By this admission of the change in the direction of the gravitating body, he gives up his metaphysics; for, as its truths are unchangeable, and independent of time and place, they could not alter, nor be otherwise than as they are. He has not admitted the fact by inferences from his own abstractions, but from experience and observation. He has seen that there are other laws than the metaphysical,-laws disposing the relations of cause and effect, regulating the operations of means to an end, all depending on time and place, which, unlike the laws of his province, might have been very different from what they are. Before he resigned his metaphysics, he had his choice of difficulties: he must either deny a fact, or give up an abstraction; he must either believe a mystery, or admit an absurdity. In speculations on revealed phenomena embodied in theological science, the divine must act the same part as the honest mathematician: he must renounce his metaphysical abstractions concerning the First Cause. The divine has conceived and fostered a long train of home-bred ideas of necessary truth,* by which he judges what God must be, and invests him with attributes in the abstract; and, on the supposition that God will ever act these perfections ad extra, his science arranges and settles certain immutable laws, by which he inevitably will, or necessarily must, exercise them. From the lofty heights, or rather, perhaps, the profound depths, of these abstractions, he comes to investigate God's moral acts, just as he finds them recorded in the minutes of the scriptures. He finds himself in a foreign realm, in a new order of things, amid the productions of a strange and new Deity, certainly dissimilar to the God of his abstractions. His first impression is that God has worked out abstract attributes and necessary relations, in a manner and way totally at variance with his metaphysical conclusions. He cannot, for instance, refuse the avowal that, somehow or other, there is evil amid the works of a holy agent-that his plans contrived with wisdom and power, are liable to resistance and failure - that there is in a moral intelligence and human spirit, an agency free, and distinct from the agency of God, yet capable of acting freely while the impulse of another influence is acting upon it. In such a predicament of perplexity and consternation what will metaphysical theologians do? What will they DO? * Πίστις ουκ ἐν γεωμετρικαῖς ἀνάγκαις, αλλ' ἡ του πνεύματος ἐν ἐνεργείαις εγγινομένη.—BASIL, Psalm cxv. What they have done is answered by nearly the entire history of uninspired divinity. They have manufactured terms; they have worked upon words; they have constructed syllogisms; they have measured creeds; they have forged anathemas; and have either explained away, or denied, facts and principles as incontrovertibly found in the Bible, as earthquakes and electricity are found in natural philosophy. Their whole intellectual conduct presents a lamentable and blamable contrast to the noble simplicity, and sublime honesty, of the sacred writers. Inspired theologians, like the philosophers of experience, have given an induction of facts and events, as they found them, without a premature attempt to account for them, or to reconcile them to abstract notions. Their only generalizations were those revealed to them, the agency of God and the obligations of man two principles which account both for the institution and operation of means and for the agency, the depravity, the misery, and the salvation of man. Among the earliest students of Christian philosophy were the disciples of Berea, who " more noble than those of Thessalonica," were the scholars of inspired induction. They searched the Scriptures whether these things were so, whether these things were in the Scripture; and having found them there, they believed them. O! that in this there had been an uninterrupted succession of unsophisticated Christian inquirers; then theology, by this time, would have been the mistress of the sciences and the arbitress of philosophy; she would never have been enslaved by Plato, or starved by Aristotle. Conversion, the fact to be explained by theological science, is a moral phenomenon transpiring in an intelligent spirit, developing itself by a change in the dispositions, and by an improvement in the character. To the investigation of such a fact, the theologian may as well bring the truths of mathematics, as the laws of metaphysics; for both exclude the operations of causes and the relations of means. "To the word," then, he must have recourse. The Bible supplies him with an induction of facts, proving that the phenomenon of a moral change does take place in a sinner, showing that the means which produced the conversion is truth, and testifying that the "vera causa " of the result is the influence of the Holy Spirit. It explains the agents and the order employed in operation, but holds an awful and warning silence on the process; and leaves to the inquirer the alternative of either believing what is said, or asserting what God has left unsaid. If the information of the Scriptures be rejected, as not sufficient to account for the change that has taken place, let us glance at the positions which the metaphysical speculators must consequently take. They see a man proceeding in direct opposition to all moral laws, with headlong libertinism; free, determined, perverse, obstinate. In such a case, all their abstract principles would impel them to the conclusions, that a dependent creature, revolting from his Sustaining Creator, must unavoidably and necessarily perish; and that, if the Creator employ his agency to prevent the voluntary revolt of the free agent, his free agency, by being influenced, must, so far, be destroyed. At another interval, they see, in this man, a great and decided change a change which has brought him into cordial harmony with the will and the character of his Maker. This gives birth to the "quæstio vexata," how came this to take place? and how was it effected? In the solution of this problem, metaphysicians take sides, and their taking sides proves that they do not dispute the fact of the change. The metaphysicians of the PELAGIAN School aver, that as the Divine agency could not interfere with human agency, to change its direction and exercise, without destroying its liberty, it must be that the free agent exercised a self-determining power, independently of Divine influence, to alter its own character. The metaphysicians of the AUGUSTINIAN School prove by a syllogism that this would be an event without cause that a creature having lost its free agency cannot of itself recover it—that an event cannot be the cause of itself, and that therefore the effect has been produced by the energy of the Divine agency mastering and subduing the resistance of man's perverted will. The Pelagian asserts human agency to the exclusion of Divine influence; and the Augustinian triumphs in Divine influence, to the annihilation of the agency of man. The Augustinian gives up the doctrine of activity in man, for the sake of a firmer hold on the doctrine of dependence on God and the Pelagian resigns the doctrine of dependence to give full scope to the doctrine of the activity of man. Both divines, wide as the poles asunder in their doctrinal applications, agree in this, that man cannot act freely while he is acted upon by the operations of Divine influences. The point in which they are both agreed is the knot, which enwraps, in its complica |