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science is absolutely indispensable to dispel error, a philosophy is simply a necessity of life.

In regard to the second question, or practical duty of the church at this time, we confess our deep feeling and earnest anxiety. There is something unnatural in the attitude of the church in the midst of this spiritual movement. The world is coming up en masse around the camp of Israel, and Israel slumbers. Or, aroused, the army stands at gaze, uncertain what to do. It is, strange to say, a time of the absence of active, practical power and spiritual movement within the church itself.

The truth is, we lie in the trough of the sea, between the theoretical and the practical. Presbyterians cannot be moved without thought and reason. Has that mode of the revival spirit which swept in such mighty power over our churches spent its force? But the Spirit of God lives. The truth lives. The church lives. The ministry are here. The mighty factors are none of them extinguished. If ever there was a time when wise men should bend their energies to a problem, it is to ascertain what God would now have us do, and whether some readjustment of theory and practice, some philosophy of deeper ground, some scrutiny of human nature beyond our previous ken, be not called for.

There are some things we can see to be wrong. One is the withdrawment of ministers, to so great an extent, from their spiritual work. Not only is it true that a large number of ministers are secretaries, agents, editors, professors, teachers -offices which must necessarily be filled by them, but still withdrawing much heart from the great work of the ministry -but there is a vast secularization, arising from the want of conscience touching the support of the ministry. A man cannot see his little ones starve or go naked. If the church do not support him, he must seek bread in other ways, in part at least, and this is just the withdrawal of so much spirituality. Then it is surprising, when we come to reckon it up, how much time is devoted by the ministry to various modes of moral reform, physical improvement, charities, the preparation and delivery of lectures and orations, education, and other things which, however valuable, are not their particular work.

What is their work? We speak the literal truth, in the plainest language, when we say that, as pastors, we have sometimes felt a burden too heavy to be borne. We could not endure the vicarious weight of souls. There is an awful sense in which souls lie in the hands of men put in charge of them by the Almighty. We become used to the most stupendous truths, and fail to realise their meaning. This, of probation and pastoral responsibilities, cannot be an ordinary thing, cannot be

taken coolly. It is either the wildest extravagance, or it is the most solemn and weighty of human thoughts.

Vicariousness is one of the greatest of the conditions of life. It is true that the ultimate issue is the work of man's individual will; the giant personality within him that plunges him headlong into perdition, or makes him more than a conqueror. But we immeasurably help or harm each other. Such a thing as isolation is unknown in this mortal sphere. All disputed theories aside, the facts of great social connections and influences are indisputable. Adam infuses one drop of venom which, to all time, darkens and embitters the ocean of his race; Japheth is the the conqueror-every nation that springs from his loins is a ruler of mankind. We know not what blood tumultuated through this our royal father's veins, that all his race should be kingly; we only know the prophecy and the fact. Heads of nations are vicarious: Russia was in Peter the Great potentially; England in Alfred; America in Washington. Heads of churches: what a despotism gloomed in Hildebrand; what stern glory in Calvin; what executive power in Wesley! Heads of families: Tudor, Stuart, Bourbonregal pride and efficiency; cunning, baseness, ruin; fatuous folly. The story of the Atreidæ is from the life; the father and the mother are vicarious; character runs in families from generation to generation; it is so true that it has passed into proverbs current among all men.

But nowhere is vicariousness so awful as when we approach the confines of redemption. In the Master it so is, that we hardly think of it at all as elsewhere. We cannot understand a man who sees no vicariousness in the atonement; we could follow him as well if he saw no brightness in the sun, or no life in a living man. The most awful hour and scene of this universe is that where, under this pressure, even He seems to falter: "Abba, Father! all things are possible unto thee; take away this cup from me!" Not the martyr speaks, but the sacrifice.

And this fearful but ennobling idea runs through the whole of redemption. God lays the world upon the church to be saved; the parents bring their offspring to the font, to make them Christ's, before they can speak; ten righteous men, and Sodom had continued a well-watered and fertile valley. "Upon me," said David, "be thy vengeance; these sheep, what have they done?"

But it was upon the eleven on Olivet, especially, that He laid the solemn weight of vicariousness. Upon them and their successors. Yes! their successors. In the folly of a material and corporate succession, let us not forget the real and solemn spiritual one. A minister is either the greatest of fools and

the most baseless of braggarts, or he holds a commission, which to hold, and be careless while holding it, furnishes one of the darkest proofs of human depravity. The minister is vicarious; the souls of his flock are upon his soul; he must bear it as God enables him. Human nature is not so poor a thing, but there are pale cheeks and bent forms under this great responsibility. Human nature is not so bad but that it is to them priceless, beyond all words, to gather a lamb safely into the fold, or see a strong man quiver under the smiting of the Holy Ghost.

But do we not need this unction now, a consecrating spirit in the ministry, a yearning over souls, a wrestling with God as in Gethsemane, to know how we shall wring out from this time, and this land, and these strangely agitated people, salvation? Sometimes one thinks that God is sending out the fainter rays of a great light and heat to come,-that the first millennial pulsations of the great and solemn heart of the Holy Spirit are beginning to be felt in this spiritualising of all men and things. According to the theory of Laplace, when the vast central body of nebulous matter had reached its condensing point, immense masses one after another, centres of systems of worlds, moved off with velocity incalculable, yet with harmonious and majestic march, to fill all space with proofs of creative power. On such a scale are the vast impulses of the Spirit of God, in successive ages, in the moral world. How shall the ministry be clear in their great office, if they are least influenced in such an ongoing of the mighty presence of God the Spirit? There ought to be at such a time, a striving and heaving within the entire church; this should be its harvest time; it should meet the dim, anxious questioning of men; it should teach them the true spirituality. The whole creation now groaneth and travaileth together, waiting for the redemption of the sons of God. The ministry now should stand like Paul on Mars'-hill, preaching to the philosophic and the æsthetic who are erecting altars to the unknown God, and, like their Master, have compassion on the multitude, who, like sheep without a shepherd, gather with confused instinct around them. Who will come forth at such a time, with the word of the Lord like a fire in his bones, and so speak to the heart of bewildered humanity as that it may see and know God? We are like those who watch for the morning; our souls break for their longing after God; and while knowing the doom that rests upon those who, though anointed captains, will not lead in the great battle of life, we ponder anxiously and yet hopefully the deep words," HE SHALL BAPTIZE YOU WITH THE HOLY GHOST And with firE."

ART. V.-The Life of Archibald Alexander, D.D., First Professor in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, New Jersey. By JAMES W. ALEXANDER, D.D. New York. 1854.

THIS is a very valuable and interesting work. It is a full memoir of a very remarkable man, who was honoured in his day and generation to be an instrument of extensive good to the Presbyterian Church in the United States, and who is entitled to occupy a high place among those who have contributed to advance the cause of Christ upon earth. The memoir has been prepared by a son of him whose history it records, himself a distinguished and highly esteemed minister of Christ in New York, of the Old School Presbyterian Church. The memoir is singularly free from the defects and drawbacks which often characterise biographies written by near and dear relatives. It is marked throughout by good sense, good taste, and good feeling, and exhibits very superior powers and accomplishments in a literary point of view. The writer of this notice may have perused the memoir of Dr Alexander with a deeper and livelier interest in consequence of having had the happiness, in the good providence of God, of spending a few days at Princeton, and enjoying the privilege of personal intercourse with Dr Alexander and his esteemed colleagues in that important and influential theological seminary. But apart from all personal feelings, he is persuaded that the history of such a man as Dr Alexander ought to be known by the ministers of this country, and that there is much of what is contained in this memoir of him which is fitted to be useful and interesting to the churches of Christ. It would not be very difficult, with the memoir lying before us, to give a summary view of Dr Alexander's life, labours, and character, and to comment upon some of the many interesting topics, religious, theological, and ecclesiastical, which would thus be brought under consideration, but we have thought it better for the present to undertake only the still easier task of letting the memoir speak for itself, and attempting very little more than laying before our readers, who have been often favoured with very valuable materials from the Princeton divines, a series of extracts from its pages.

Archibald Alexander, the subject of this memoir, was born on the 17th of April 1772, near Lexington, in Virginia, in a country at that time very partially settled and very thinly peopled. His grandfather had emigrated from near Londonderry, in Ireland, about forty years before this, and was descended from a Scotch family which had settled in Ulster,-a specimen of that class of cases which has led to the Presbyterian emigrants from Ireland being usually called, in some parts

of the United States, the "Scotch Irish," to distinguish them from the Papists. His parents were of most respectable character, in comfortable circumstances, and gave him the best education which the then condition of the country admitted of, though in early life his opportunities of acquiring knowledge were not very abundant. From a very early period, he manifested that eager love of knowledge and that habit of steady application which characterised him through life, and made him at length a man of great extent and variety of acquirements. He was early brought under religious impressions, of the sincerity and depth of which he gave the most satisfactory evidence by a consistent Christian course of more than sixty years. Having chosen the ministry as his profession, under the influence of the best and highest motives, he was licensed at the age of nineteen, and after itinerating for several years as a missionary preacher in the partially settled districts of Virginia, he was ordained in 1795 to the pastoral charge of a congregation at Briery, and in 1799 he was appointed President of Hampden Sidney College, which is in the immediate neighbourhood. He continued to labour in these spheres with eminent zeal and success till 1806, when he accepted a call to be pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church in the city of Philadelphia, which has always been the head-quarters of Presbyterianism in the United States. Here he laboured till 1812, when, at the age of forty, he was appointed by the General Assembly to be the first Professor of Theology at Princeton, then just instituted, the first theological seminary established by the Presbyterian Church in that country. He spent here the remainder of his life, extending over another period of forty years, enabled to continue to the last in the active and efficient discharge of the duties of his office, filling a situation of much influence and usefulness, enjoying the respect and esteem of all good men, and the affection and confidence of all who were brought into contact with him.

Nearly one half of the memoir is occupied with details connected with the first part of his life which preceded his settlement at Princeton. These are curious, as exhibiting the condition of society in the United States, and especially in Virginia, in the period succeeding the War of Independence, particularly those which describe his labours as a missionary preacher, before he accepted a pastoral charge. But they are perhaps of less general interest than the materials furnished in regard to the more public and influential half of his life as professor at Princeton. There are only two points connected with the earlier half of his life to which we think it needful to advert, his difficulties about infant baptism, and the effects of his early circumstances and habits upon his mode of preaching.

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