settled, whether the decrees are in God essentially, or inhesively ' and accidentally!!' Till this abstruse point is settled, and made intelligible, we may surely be excused for suspending altogether our assent to the undefined doctrine. Truth would lose nothing, and charity would gain much, if this term decree were exploded from the theological vocabulary. It has been the occasion of an unhallowed logomachy.

We have one more objection to adduce against this method of teaching theology; and it is founded upon the wide discrepancy between what the student in divinity is taught, and what he is to teach others. What the divine or minister of religion is appointed to teach others, is Christianity, or the doctrine of Christ and his Apostles: what the theological student is taught is, a school-made divinity compounded of what is called natural religion, metaphysical reasoning, and revealed articles of faith, the latter being broken up into subtile distinctions and interminable controversies. Between the popular theology and the systematic theology, how little is there in common ! Had theological systems been framed with any adaptation to the instruction of the common people, they would never have receded so far from the simplicity and practical character of the Scripture doctrine. The Christian theology was originally the simplest and most popular thing in the world, within grasp of the humblest intellect, and was propounded with the utmost plainness of speech. If veiled by its own light from the wise and prudent, it stood revealed to babes in intellect in all the plainness of a message from heaven. It spoke the language of the common people, and blended with all the elements of common life. Now, alas! a man must be theologically educated to understand the very terms of his religion!

The Scriptural theology is a discovery of facts and a system of motives: the systematic theology is a series of problems. The former addresses man as a sinner; the latter as a philosopher. The one builds upon the authority of God and the moral nature of man as accountable to his Maker. The other lays its foundation in à priori reasonings, and makes the existence of God the subject of inquiry; destroying, by supposition, the moral nature of man, in order to prove the more philosophically that he has a Maker! What divines are pleased to call the natural order requires, that, in teaching theology, we should begin where, in teaching religion, we end,-with the glorious perfections of the Godhead. But how does it exhibit the Divine Nature? Applying its metaphysical prism to the Light Ineffable, it decomposes the rays of its brightness, and presents to us, in the place of the God and Father of Our Lord Jesus Christ, a Pantheon of Divine Attributes! Pursuing the same natural order,' it next teaches the pupil to speculate concerning the Divine decrees

and eternal purposes, before it stoops to the low ground of man's actual condition and duty, and politely discourses of angels before it condescends to speak of human beings. When at length this Theology comes to treat of man, how does it treat of him? Does it address itself to his conscience and heart by considerations adapted to develop the religious principle within him? No, it proceeds to analyse the human nature as it had attempted to do the Divine; and to dissect the moral being, in order to determine how the will is moved, how sin is propagated, and other points of learned curiosity. After running this long course through the region of possibilities and abstractions, the pupil is conducted to the subject of Redemption; but soon he finds himself plunged into the quinquarticular controversy; from which he escapes only to be involved in the still more unmeaning logomachies relating to Church government. Happy and favoured is he, if, on emerging from this academic initiation, he does not leave the best part of his religion behind him. Not unfrequently, the finished divine is but an orthodox sceptic, at once a doubter and a dogmatist, his knowledge improved at the expense of his faith,-well provided with definitions, but with enfeebled convictions.

Let our Academic now apply himself to his professional work as a popular instructor, and, in order to any degree of success, he must begin with forgetting, or endeavouring to forget, more than half of what he has learned. Were he to propose as a topic of inquiry to his flock, after the mode of theologizing he has been taught, the problem of the Divine Existence, the possibility of Revelation, the origin of evil, he would justly incur the scorn, or ridicule, or pity of his hearers. What could be a greater insult to the understanding and feelings of men awake to their real religious condition, and concerned about their immortal interests, than such theological pastimes? Soon he finds that he has learned any thing but the main business of his office, that of explaining the word of God, and persuading men to believe and obey it. Thus it is that so many great divines have been notoriously wretched preachers:-we have heard of an instance of the kind being explained by the shrewd observation, that the learned Professor had been giving out so much divinity to his pupils all his life, as to have none left for himself. There are, of course, exceptions; but they are the rare triumphs of elevated spirituality and piety.

If, instead of the natural order' of theologians, we examine the true order of Scriptural truths, we shall find that the first lesson in the school of Christianity, is the necessity of Divine illumination in order to either an appreciation of sacred truth, or a sincere reception of it. Here all religion begins. And the next lesson relates to the real condition of man as standing in need of redemption and moral restoration; for Christianity is the religion

of sinners, and stakes its truth upon the fact, that man is a fallen being. This, then, is the first step within the portal of Theology. Here the child and the philosopher must alike begin. The first operation of the Divine Teacher is, to convince of sin.' A consciousness of sin is the foundation, deep laid in the moral nature of man, upon which all religions, true or false, will be found to rest ; for in this originate the wants of the conscience, the longing to be saved without knowing the true way how, which is the parent of all superstition, the blind feeling after God,-the yearning of the creature for deliverance. "If we say we have no sin, we impeach the veracity of God (evoTNV TOLOUμEV AUTOV +), and his word can have no place in us."

Is it because this is the repelling point of theology, the essence of all that is offensive in every true system, the great heresy in the world's esteem, that our doctors of theology have chosen to postpone it in their system? Miserable policy! Christ has chosen that his disciples shall stoop on entering the narrow wicket that leads into his school; and these temple-builders have thought it wiser to lead their scholars round by a magnificent portico, that conceals the homely edifice of Truth; and many never go further than the porch. It was reserved for a layman to set a better example. Mr. Douglas places a belief of our fall in Adam at the head of the six articles, in which, according to his more philosophical and scriptural theology, religion consists ‡. We are delighted to find Mr. Conybcare adopting a similar order.

At the very entrance of our inquiry into Christian doctrine, the leading and characteristic attribute of that religion, as a remedial dispensation, presents itself. But the necessity of that remedial dispensation, and its adaptation to meet the exigencies of the case, cannot be appreciated without a previous examination of the moral condition of our nature, to which the remedy is to be applied. The investigation of that condition has, indeed, ever formed the most interesting problem of ethical speculation.' Conybeare, p. 135.

The learned Author proceeds to shew, that the perplexing paradox which man's condition presents, forced itself upon the observation even of the ancient heathen sages, and drew from some of them confessions strikingly accordant with the testimony of Scripture. A passage in Aristotle, cited by Mr. Conybeare, is in the closest harmony with the language of St. Paul.

* Need we except Deism, which is not a religion, but an attempt to annihilate sin without, like Atheism, denying a First Cause?

† 1 John, i. 10.

See Eclectic Review, Vol. V. Third Series, p. 17.

"There appears, besides reason, another principle innate in the human soul, which resists and opposes itself to reason; and just as the limbs of the body when afflicted by the palsy, are torn aside in a direction contrary to that in which we designed to move them, the like also happens with regard to the soul." (Hoix. Nixoμ. A. 17.) Conybeare, p. 139 *.

"I see another principle of action in my members, which wars against the principle of my understanding, and brings me into captivity to the principle of sin which inheres in my members." "For that which I do, I allow not; what I would, that I do not, but do what I hate "..." O wretched man that I am! who shall rescue me from the body of this death?" Rom. vii. 23, 15, 24.

...

Not less striking is the declaration of Plato, in a dialogue of which human nature forms the express subject. Referring to the conscious bondage which the disciple confesses he labours under, he makes Socrates assure him, that he must seek for deliverance, 'not relying on any thing which he, as his philosophical instructor, was able to accomplish, but on the will and power of God alone. After citing these specimens of the general ad missions of mankind, Mr. Conybeare proceeds :

6

The religious views and practices of almost every country strongly express the same humiliating confession; they all plainly indicate a painful feeling, that man had incurred a guilt offensive in the eyes of the Deity, that his mind had contracted pollution from its connexion with his carnal passions,-that a stain existed, which required the most painful inflictions, either in this world or the next, for its purgation. Hence the varied rites of purification;-hence have the votaries of India or Egypt sought to wash away their moral pollution in the sacred streams of the Ganges or the Nile ;-hence the sacrifices of expiation by which those who felt the divine justice to be outraged, vainly imagined it could be appeased; offering thousands of rams; or, with a more perfect superstition, immolating human victims; and, to enhance the value of the sacrifice, by offering the dearest objectgiving their first-born for their transgression-the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul;-hence the varied and often excruciating systems of corporeal penance, undergone from the conviction of guilt, from the natural apprehension that a moral government must imply the retribution of punishment, and the hope that these voluntary indurances might be accepted as satisfactory. The conscious wants which these things indicate were strikingly illustrated, when a poor Indian devotee, writhing under such self-inflictions, on hearing the doctrine

* Bloomfield refers to a similar mode of expression attributed to Socrates by Plato and Xenophon: Aúo exw uxas, &c. Mr. Conybeare cites a remarkable passage from Plutarch, in which depravity of soul is ascribed to the portion of evil mingled in the nature of all

from our birth."

of Him who came to seek and save that which was lost, proclaimed by a Christian missionary, exclaimed, "This, this is what I have so long sought for, but hitherto sought in vain." How beautiful, indeed, to such as he, must appear the feet of those who preach the Gospel of peace-a peace so deeply needed, so anxiously sought! Hence also the views, added to all these temporal expiations, of the necessity of a future penal purgation for the soul: such views we find to have tinctured most of the religious systems of the East, the probable cradle of our race. Thus Zoroaster is said to have taught, that souls after death must be cleansed from the stains of sin, and from all the defilements which they had contracted from their union with matter, and, after a long purgation by fire, be fitted for their re-absorption into the Deity from whom they had emanated. Many of the Stoical and Platonic schools seem to have participated in these notions; for we by no means find them confined to rude periods or uncultivated nations. Thus we find Socrates, in the Phædo, introduced as asserting, that the souls of many had contracted such an earthly tendency from the contagion of the body and its carnal lusts, that they were condemned to flit around the depositories of their corporeal tenements, and, as spectres, to haunt the graves that covered the dust of Death. Cicero, in the close of the Somnium Scipionis, repeats the same doctrine; and we find it strikingly expressed by the most learned of poets, in a passage evidently intended to convey a philosophical view of the psychological opinions of his time. (See Virgil, Æn. vi. 735.)' pp. 142, 3.

Mr. Conybeare next shews, that the testimony of Scripture not only confirms these representations of the moral condition of man, but all its appeals are founded on the assumption of its being exactly what we find it; and to beings so situated, all its 'addresses are directed.' It follows, that "a real conviction and 'candid acknowledgement of the state of the evil must necessarily precede every application for an availing remedy.'

' And what, then, is the experience of our own breasts on this subject? Repugnant as it may be to our pride to admit in express terms truths so humiliating to the imagined dignity of our nature, yet, in our inmost hearts we shall, I believe, very generally discover a secret consciousness of the justice of these representations. He, indeed, who can really imagine that his moral conduct, or, what is much more essential, his moral feelings, really coincide with any standard of his moral duty which his reason can approve, must have a conception of that moral standard so low and inadequate, or so exalted a view of his own character, as falls probably to the lot of few who ever really take the trouble to bestow any serious attention on the question. The grounds, indeed, on which anything like self-complacency can be built, must arise from a very imperfect view of the extent of the general field of our duties, and from considering them as entirely confined to those which arise from our social relations. In these the relations of reciprocal interest so evidently prevail, and they are so obviously regulated by an immediate principle of utility, in which every individual closely participates, that it requires very little expansion of the mere