its weal or woe, are the influences or motives that will operate upon it. To which will be added as its years multiply, the ever intensifying force of habit.

Let me first suppose you to be wholly ignorant of the parentage and other circumstances of that infant boy. Will he become a man of pure or corrupt morals; a blessing to the world or a curse; an heir of glory or of shame and death? You can give no opinion, much less utter a prediction.

But if you are well acquainted with the parents, you can make some slight approximation to a foreknowledge of the future character of the child, because you are not wholly ignorant of its personality, and have considerable knowledge of the kind of influence to which it will be subject. And yet it may be only a ray or two of dubious light that is thus thrown on the problem of its being. That child may be cradled in a home of guilt and misery: the parents may be in rags, passionate, ignorant, dishonest, profane; and the child destined to grow up amidst associations the most noxious. What will its future life be? A reproduction of the beggary and vice of the parents? Probably so, but not certainly. The lad may discover quick parts; at the age of fourteen resolve to escape from the misery of his paternal home: amidst the pressure of difficulties push his way to knowledge and honourable employment: by the age of twentyone be known in the town where he dwells as, in tact and application, a superior man of business: give his whole soul to the promotion of his secular interests: at fifty be mayor of the town in the lowest haunts of which he was born and on his sixtieth birthday hear a voice from heaven saying, "Thou fool, this night thy soul shall be required of thee, then whose shall those things be which thou hast provided?" Or, that infant on whom you gaze as he is carried in swaddling clothes,

may in after years just emerge from the position in which he was born; live in obscurity, though not in penury; become a true, but not an eminent Christian, and dying, be saved as by fire. Or, he may exhibit in early life unquestionable qualifications for superior usefulness; become one of the prophets of the land, or of many lands; and after living in the esteem and admiration of the just, may die in the Lord. Or, becoming a true Christian, he may rise to a yet higher reward. Spending his days on earth in poverty and obscurity, he may be pre-eminently distinguished by child-like humility, trust, and love toward God. Though among the least of the thousands of the town in which he passed his life, he may rise above the richest, the most intelligent, and the most eloquent, in that world where the standard of excellence and the rule of recompense are not intellectual, but moral.

In all the cases cited, the future is to us ambiguous. We have scarcely opinions, and no foreknowledge. But suppose that thirty years after you have gazed on an infant in utter ignorance of its parentage, you meet that human being again in a railway carriage, without knowing that you had ever seen him before. You hear him utter a few significant sentences, only a few, but they reveal his character, and bespeak his fate. You clearly perceive whether he is walking in the narrow way, or the broad road that leadeth to destruction. You know that commonly by the age of thirty, character has received its decided and final bias: and with some approximation to foreknowledge, you judge of the man's destiny.

Let one other case be presented; the case of a man with whom you were well acquainted from infancy. You saw him while yet in his teens a servant of Christ; and for the following twenty, or thirty years, or more,

you have observed that his religious profession has been thoroughly tested, the result being your firm persuasion of his uprightness before God and men. You know him at the age of fifty or sixty. Such has been his manner of life that you have no doubt of his holding fast the beginning of his confidence to the end. Even you, approximate nearly to foreknowledge of that man's future character and fate. It is evident that such prescience—which may be called the foreknowledge of inference, in distinction from the foreknowledge of decree-implies no obstruction to the freedom of the creature. In all ordinary cases, as existing in the divine mind it may amount to certainty; and how nearly to certainty in such a case as the great trial of Abraham, it is not given us to know. If man possesses a sufficient insight into the future to regulate his relations to his fellows; he who knows what is in man, and knows what are the influences operating upon him, must be able to judge beforehand of the conduct of the free creature, with a very near approximation to the perfection of that judgment which is subsequent to the events. Our hypothesis does not imply unlimited contingency; but only so much of contingency as is essential to the liberty, and therefore the accountability of the creature.

And besides such kind of foreknowledge as we possess, existing in the divine mind to the utmost degree of which the liberty of the creature admits, we can conceive of God as knowing not only all things that have been, but also all that might have been; and in like manner all that can be in future times; the divine view comprising in addition to all the actualities of existence, all its possibilities. Man in many cases conceives that his fellow man must act in one of two or more ways; and he resolves what he will do, when the decision of that fellow creature is apparent. If the infinite mind

read all the possibilities of the universe; though all human volitions be contingent, nothing is unprovided for by him who worketh all things after the counsel of his own will; to whom pertains, not the glory of controlling a vast machine, but the far higher glory of ruling as sovereign, with perfect wisdom and success, over all the contingencies of a free and intelligent universe.

To which considerations may be added the probability that the contingency which marks human character, is temporary as well as local. Already has it been suggested that we have no evidence of creatures "halting between two opinions" in heaven, or in hell: and that such ambiguity existing here, is in constant process of diminution from mature age till death; and may therefore wholly vanish when the ages of mortals. are completed. Now, the voice of mercy bids the wicked turn from his wickedness; but hereafter it shall be said "He that is filthy, let him be filthy still; and he that is holy, let him be holy still." Thus, we may venture to think, will all such uncertainty as that with which we gaze on the new-born infant, or the thoughtless youth, be eliminated from the universe; and the entire mental creation be, through its own free action, brought under laws as certain in their direction. and effect as those which guide the mote floating in the sunlight, or the planet sweeping round its orbit.

CHAPTER IX.

ON THE WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT.

"THE earth was without form and void: and darkness was upon the face of the deep." So is it written in the opening page of the Bible. If the words are the voice of the Spirit of God, they are invaluable: if they are merely the words of man, they are utterly worthless. The prophet Malachi declared that Elijah would be sent to the Israelites. Had he spoken in his own name, his prophecy had been vain. His prediction derived all its worth from the fact that he spake as the Spirit gave him utterance. From the same source mainly is derived the worth of the New Testament. Its first four books are a history of our Saviour, and were probably compiled long after his ascension. Beyond question we should have been greatly interested in such details as the evangelists could supply; but it is only as we recognize in the narratives the work of the Holy Spirit, that we discern their highest excellence. "He shall bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you." And if we think of the Apostolic preaching and Epistles, yet more important appears the gift of inspiration. For after Christ had suffered, and risen from the dead, his chosen witnesses understood not the nature of the kingdom he came to establish; but were still looking for a kingdom of this world. Had it been left to them to carry out the purposes of their Master, the result would indisputably have been an