state of things a great redemption is adjusted, all strictly Scriptural theology agrees; but the details of the adjustment the ordinary Christian would find it difficult to state, and learned theologians have long been accustomed to discuss.

Bishop Butler has suggested the important thought, that the great events of the resurrection and immortality, though stupendously miraculous, may still be also a truly natural train of events. So also, perhaps, a clearer view of the great facts of the fall and ruin of our race may be obtained by contemplating them on their naturalistic and their theodocic or judicial sides. THE NATURALISTIC VIEW. Man, like every other being, must come into existence under the operation of universal laws and secondary causations. It is of no present use to inquire how it was right for the Deity to frame a certain set of regulations around a given being, provided those regulations are fundamental and universal, and as such, necessary to the existence of a rightful general system. It is enough to know that such fundamental laws, inflexible, even though bearing hard upon the individual whose well-being they cross, and even limiting the normal divine action, are necessary to the existence of any rational system, mundane or supermundane. Every species and every individual must come into the system under its laws or be excluded. Of this our earthly living system, a fundamental and universal regulation is the law of descent. Man is but a species of the great living generative genus. By that law the nature of the primogenitor is the nature of all his generations. This law man shares with all the lineages of living nature, animal or vegetable. Each species of beast, bird, fish, serpent, consists of a myriad of individuals who are sharers of one great capital of specific vital force. Of the human race, for instance, each individual of the whole number is a single vessel containing his modicum of the one great ocean of human blood. And not only is the composition of matter circumscribed within certain limits, both of substance and form, but the soul stuff, too, is confined within certain limits of essence and character. As is the parent, such is the child; as is the first progenitor, such is the entire posterity.

The commencement of an order with its laws, however miraculous, may be viewed in a naturalistic aspect. It was natural that if the first man, modeled to the idea of a perfect

humanity, had stood at that high grade, his whole lineage would have been the successive copies of the same model. Even though some descendant had sinned and fell, it is not probable that the level of his offspring, if begotten, would have sunk to a lower grade. The whole anthem of human history would then have been pitched and carried through upon that same exalted, transcendental key. If by his own imprudent act, violating the laws of his higher being, he shut off all communion with higher natures, between whom and terrene nature he was the natural intermediate, it would not be unnatural, even if its singularity made it miraculous, that the same act should depreciate his fresh and plastic nature to an altogether lower model. By the laws of descent, therefore, the fall of the progenitor would be the depravation of the race.

This depravation might be threefold: corporeal, psychological, and psychical.

1. Corporeal. Separated from the higher nourishment, (perhaps the tree of life,) by which the organism was able to resist collision and disintegration, its framework becomes subject to decay, damage, and dissolution. Its particles and parts become displaced, lose their organic properties, and the system breaks and crumbles from around the spiritual being, panting for his own release, yet shuddering in anticipation of an unknown future. This is disease and death. Man by the fall is lineally mortal. "In Adam all die."

2. Psychological. Disastrous must be the effect upon the mind. Be it that no one of the faculties was lost, (though that is more than we can know,) yet how has their first immortal vigor departed, and how deranged their pristine order? Intellect, conscience, moral feeling, all are dim, and the will no longer executes, with steady, unvarying purpose, their high suggestions. Passion, appetite, heated impulse obtain the ascendant. That blessed Spirit whose presence enabled order and right to reign has been closed off. Love to God is no longer felt; and as it cannot be a motive for action, so no action can be right and pleasing to God. The way of truth is now unknown, as the way of right is unloved. Man is still a free agent, but free only amid various alternatives of evil. The way of right and the pleasing to God are excluded equally

from his knowledge, his affections, and his will. To the truly good he is no longer objectively a free agent.

3. Psychical. But his soul is still immortal, and thereby this state of nature must be eternal. Unless arbitrarily terminated, or redemptively restored, the soul must, from the very laws of its nature, suffer an immortality of evil. Collective living men must form a community, of whose evil nature we can form but an indistinct idea. Demoniac passion must transform the earth into a hell. Lust, or the lower forms of love, must serve to perpetuate the race. Enough merely of conscience would remain to make the wretch feel that all was wrong, and enough of intellect to assure him that there was no hope. And the departing spirit, looking out into a spiritual universe, in which there is no proper room provided for its existence, would see that in any place its only prospect is eternal despair. Here, then, we have the three naturalistic aspects of death, temporal, spiritual, eternal, hereditarily resulting from the fall. Be it remarked, that these results accrue from fundamental laws and natural second causes.

In the system as thus described, the exclusion of all free agency for good excludes all responsibility for the absence of good. There can be no obligation to put forth a volition never in the agent's power. There can be no guilt for not obeying a motive which was never in the agent's reach; nor can there be any guilt for the existence of the nature which excludes, throughout the being's whole existence, the power of the volition and the motive, provided always that neither that nature nor its incapacity is self-superinduced. The man no more made himself than he made Satan; and he is no more responsible for his own nature than for Satan's nature. He can no more reverse the law of motives than he can reverse the law of gravitation. Obliged to choose in the midst of evils alone, as a fish is obliged to swim in water, he is no more obliged to will himself into the good than a sunfish is obligated to fly into the air. Hence his evil, though a moral evil, is not a responsible evil. His sin is such only as being opposite to the divine law, not as subjecting him to its just penalty.* One theodicic question will now no longer be suppressed.

* See, in regard to this and other points here discussed, our article on "Automatic Excellence distinguished from Moral Desert," in our last number.

Would it be right for the Deity to continue such a race in temporal and eternal evil and misery? So far as its immortality is concerned, the plea of natural law cannot be adduced in justification of its eternal misery. Man, corporeal and on earth, is not a species under a genus of naturally immortal beings. He stands alone and single. Let us conclude, therefore, that his immortal misery can scarce be just. His temporal misery can only be justified, so far as we can see, under the law of compensation. The suffering of any creature or species may be justified under the proviso that it has such an amount of happiness that its own choice would be for existence rather than for non-existence. Such a being makes a fair virtual agreement with his Creator to suffer the ills for the sake of the happiness of life. Not only Adam, but every primordial progenitor of a race of creatures, is a "federal head." Not with Adam alone, but with every progenitor, was there a divine "covenant ;" and perhaps no more with Adam than with any other progenitor. By the principle of compensation alone, therefore, can we conceive that even the temporal existence of the race can be justified. But when we consider that the main end of the human system is PROBATION, we shall at once see that the very object of the existence of the race, with the cessation of free moral agency and responsibility, is lost. In such case the whole purpose would terminate in Adam himself, and the race would be a failure.

Unless, then, creation shall prove abortive, there must take place a renovation, and such a renovation as shall complete the restoration of the system by a process of probation. Such a restorer must, 1. So suspend the sentence of death upon Adam as to warrant the natural continuity of the existence of the race. 2. He must so restore the Divine Spirit, the means of divine knowledge, and the possibility of holy motive, as that free agency in spiritual things shall reappear. 3. He must open the avenue through which all who rightfully use their agency may attain to a full and eternal restoration of the primitive Adamic state. This grand process will, in its full development, abound in scenes and events of wonderful interest.

THE THEODICIC OR JUDICIAL VIEW. All these processes, while moving under the law of cause and effect, are still regulated by the laws of a just government. The laws of nature are the

laws of God. The laws of our mundane nature are but part and parcel of the laws of a nature coextensive with the government of God. From this high standpoint we behold the moral and the natural law coincide, if not become identified. The fall, as the result of the violation of the divine law, even though it were a process of cause and effect, was also a process of sin and penalty. It was as truly judicial as it was natural. The natural certainty of death, corporeal, moral, and eternal, was coincident with the sentence of the threefold death. That sentence was literally pronounced in the second person singular upon Adam alone. Its literal expression implied an immediate execution, leaving no time for the propagation of a race. Its execution upon him alone would have been its full literal and final fulfillment. But such a failure of any grand result from the creation of Adam was not the wisest course. By the introduction of a Redeemer with a new probation for the race, with a final restoration for all who fulfill the conditions of their probation to a more than Adamic glory, and the exhibition of the nature of sin and justice before the universe in the penalty of the finally perverse, a new, eventful, and stupendous chapter would be added to the Divine history.

If a Redeemer shall appear, qualified by a death infinitely more valuable than the death of Adam and all his race, to limit, to suspend, or to reverse the application of the law in such manner as to secure ultimate restoration under the laws of free agency and probation, he will, we may suppose, follow the outlines previously described in the naturalistic process. 1. God will, in view of his process of restoration, permit the continuity of the race. 2. By the return of the Holy Spirit to every soul of man as soon as born, by the revelation of the system of divine truth to his developed intellect, holy motives become possible, the way of truth becomes clear, and man becomes a free agent in things spiritual and eternal. Yet the intrinsic and essential nature of the fallen race comes into existence unchanged; and the individual is met by the supernatural restorative operation, in the order of nature, subsequent to the moment of his commenced existence. Mankind are held, therefore, as still depraved, and as prospectively certain evil doers. But as this nature is overlaid with a power of spiritual free agency, their evil doings, which were before necessary and