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lie, and righteousness must be displayed as opposed to unrighteousness; that through eternal ages the height and depth of truth and right may be seen; we shall begin to know that the mystery of iniquity is a necessary mystery: that a parenthesis of misery must, some time or other, be brought within the Divine rule. If you say,-" But for sin I might be happy as a glorious seraph, enjoy an overflow of blessing, and have deep insight of Divine goodness; and why should this good not be given, instead of having to be wrought out by the misery of millions?" We reply," The highest and best gift, to created beings is freedom; freedom involves choice, responsibility, and the possibility of transgression. Shall no free existences be created? nothing to love God? nothing able by choice to say, 'Lord, we are Thine and Thou art ours!' why, this would be sin's most awful triumph! fatal in the casting down of moral perfection and goodness! perverse in turning liberty, which is guided by motive and reason, into supremacy of blind and inevitable fate!" For God not to create because free beings must necessarily have power to abuse His bounty were folly indeed. "How can we conceive a more awful triumph of evil, than that its dark and hateful spectre, while yet unborn, should tie up the hands of the Almighty from the noblest exercise of His creative wisdom, and imprison His infinite riches of goodness within His own bosom; so that matter should never exist, because it might issue in a soulless and infinite chaos; and no reasonable souls ever spring to life, to love and adore their Creator, lest the dark power of evil should seize upon them, in spite of all His perfection, and drag them down into an abyss of ruin. To deny life to infinite numbers of holy and happy beings, whom His power could create and His wisdom govern, and in whom His goodness might delight itself for ever, through the fear of the victory of evil, in the abuse of His own gifts-what were this but for the Supremely Good to play the coward and the murderer, and thus to deny His own being, and renounce His Godhead, lest the abusers of His free bounty should suffer the just punishment of their crimes?"1

There may be mercy even in the condemnation. Punish1 "Difficulties of Belief," pp. 66, 67: Professor Thomas Rawson Birks.

ment may be Divine medicine, the alone effectual, for sin of the soul. Every stroke of God, as a rectifier, may not only be against hatred and all evil, but much more for the enlargement of love wisdom and joy. We may be sure that the power of God has not gone beyond His wisdom, nor wisdom exceeded goodness.

Allowing that wisdom permits the entrance of evil, and forbids the exercise of physical power in its destructionevil coming out of freedom granted to angels and men, evil is not an arbitrary thing on God's part; nor are we to think that Divine Omnipotence means the power to condense into a single moment the great results of the revealed plan of mercy. Granting that evil is a veiling to some, and a casting down to others, it is an unveiling to many more, and the disciplinary means of receiving power to ascend beyond the former height. Trials, which strand or sink some, are as those tempests on the sea, which purify the land and make mariners skilfully bold. Men are not victims to "the ruffian violence of an impure reprobate ethereal race." The poet may write"Video meliora proboque,

Deteriora sequor,"

and the saint exclaim, "the good that I would, I do not, but the evil which I would not, that I do;" nevertheless, God gives victory to the valiant, and the ruin of those that perish must be ascribed wholly to their own sin; not to the denial, on God's part, of grace. Moreover, who can tell what may happen "when their irremovable sorrow finds beneath it a still lower depth of Divine compassion, and the sinful creature, in its most forlorn estate, and in its utter shame, encounters the amazing vision of tender, condescending, and infinite love?"1

It may be seen from such reflections that sin, in the fact of provision against its existence, and provision for its destruction, drives out chance and fate from the world. The living God has ordered that we shall have the power of life in ourselves, and be free. We are free: not a man lives but knows that his freedom counts for something in the world. Even the physical struggle is not so much pitiless and embittered, as an adjustment of endless variety, and a display of power 1 "Difficulties of Belief," p. 239: Professor Thomas Rawson Birks.

Return of the Banished.

297

exercised with skill. Satan, circumstances, motives, may persuade, not compel. The body loaded with chains so that we move not; a seal on our lips, we speak not; yet, in our conscience, with every moral power, we resent the insultnot as by a new power of freedom, but by the gift that conveyed it of old to the first man. God, who made him free, foreseeing the peril of that freedom, not only made the peril conspicuous by type, by warning, by threat, excluding sin on the one side, and defining it on the other; but did also meet the inexcusable abuse of freedom by giving celestial machinery, spiritual power to work repentance, to effect a moral change, and convert ungodliness into a righteousness that leads up to fulness of peace and joy. Thus, the transgression of the first man, transmitted to us by natural inheritance, is made the ground of advance into higher spiritual life. The son dies not for the father's sin, but being warned and sowing to the spirit, reaps life everlasting. Sin, however, and here no mistake must be made, is always sin, and the wages of sin is death; yet if a man say, "I have erred, but mean to err no more," the door is opened to that God Himself helps, and comforts, and saves. Jesus has greater power for moral good than the great archangel possesses for evil. Salvation does more than run side by side with destruction. The second Adam outruns the old Adam to tell us that the malice of him who assailed our race, and the weakness of him who first betrayed our race, are but the small dark cloud that specks the infinite sky: that even now the tears of nature glow with a beautiful bow of promise of powers unrevealed, of wisdom unfathomed, of love inexhaustible, by whose beneficent influence the Adamite and pre-Adamite fault will be made to display the wisdom of universal Providence, and establish the government of a righteous King.

man.

"Lord, grant me grace to cling to Thee,

In this presumptuous time,

When reason, by distorting, mars

Thy mysteries sublime,

When none will creep along the ground,

But all must soar or climb."

POOR MAN'S QUARTERLY Review.

STUDY XVII.

MAN: ORIGIN, NATURE, LANGUAGE, CIVILISATION.

"I cannot but believe, that, if we would so regard the ills and sufferings of man as to endeavour to assuage them, we must deliver ourselves from notions, however plausible, and from theories no matter how clever, which reduce him to the level of the beasts that perish.”—Address in British Medical Association, Norwich, 1874. F. Russell Reynolds, M.D., F.R.S.

THERE was an old superstition which saw in nature the action of capricious deities; there is a modern superstition which sees nothing but the action of invariable law; both being regardless, or ignorant, that everything done in nature manifests a knowing how to do it.

Ancient seers ascribed even the gentlest, most constant, as also the mightiest works of nature, to the operation of God. "The Lord by wisdom hath founded the earth; by understanding hath He established the heavens. By His knowledge the depths are broken up, and the clouds drop down the dew" (Prov. iii. 19, 20). "God created man in His own image, in the image of God created He him, male and female created He them" (Gen. i. 27). We do not, nor did the wise ancients, think that a likeness was moulded in plastic clay of the spiritual and invisible God. Ancient and modern thought regards the words and act as symbols expressive of some special operation in the creation of man, and of his separateness from all other creatures. We have been curiously fashioned by natural forces into animal life; and by mysterious influence, of external operation and interior assimilation, enabled to bridge the gulf which separated earth-life from consciousness of Divinity.

There is something very tender in the words-"God breathed into man's nostrils the breath of life." They endue the ideal image with vitality, and awake it into consciousness by a kiss of love. They are the poetic simile of a Divine process, a

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loving symbol of Divine action, a contrast of God and man, spirit and flesh, soul and body, the summing up, the head, rékos, of all things. The fact may sustain the superstructure of various thoughts.

Our never being able of ourselves to originate any form of mental activity; no one ever acquiring the creative power of genius, or making himself a great artist, or a great poet, or gaining by practice that peculiar insight which characterises the original discoverer; shows that these are mental instincts or spiritual intuitions.1 What we can do is—call upon our will by "purposive selection," by attention, by direction, to train, utilise, and perfect natural gifts: therefore, spirit is placed within the body, and subjected to the internal mechanism of thought and feeling.

Thus separated psychically from the brutes, we are enabled to pass from the Fiji, who delights in the shrieks of his human victim, to that higher kind of self-pleasing which leads a man to risk his life in rescuing even an enemy from drowning. This action of sympathy and love is not selfish, though sacredly self-pleasing, any more than the workings of Shakespear's genius are reflex actions of that, whatever it be, which forms the ground-work of canine cleverness. Not only so, as human emotion and intellect have their seeds in the past, indeed are partly animal, partly human, running down into the earth out of which we were taken, and soaring toward Heaven whither we hope to ascend; there is reason to think that our powers not beginning with the present conscious existence will not end with it. Every man's consciousness, both for good and evil, not being the product of one body, but an effect wrought by human progress during the past the deduction is that our end, whether as to soul or body, is not by and by. The leaves of our life-book contain writings of past ages, the present issue, or edition, does not complete the series; there will be a quickening again of intelligence, and an extension of memory, by a mysteriously. regulated advance, and higher correspondence with the Eternal Spirit of the universe. Memory will be plenary, no longer

"Mental Physiology," p. 25: Dr. W. B. Carpenter.

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