palpable contradiction to its own tendencies. How, then, shall Christ, being perfect in sympathy with all Divine good, be attracted, and not repelled, by what is in inveterate contrariety to such good? He whose mind is one with God's must partake the attitude of God's mind towards the sinner; and this attitude (if Dr. Bushnell's theology, which makes God to be an essentially moral being, be true) can only be one of righteous aversion and displeasure. How then shall Christ be conceived to love the sinner, in any natural, unforced, unsophisticated sense of the word love?

Obviously the question is insoluble, and Dr. Bushnell quietly slurs it over by putting an adroit mystification upon the meaning of Love, which reminds one of nothing so much as those devices of legislation whereby some ticklish financial scheme is incorporated in a bill for repairing highways, to which no one listens, and so it gets fastened upon the country. Vicarious sacrifice, says Dr. Bushnell, is nothing peculiar to Christ, being a function of daily and universal recurrence, incident in fact to all love, human and Divine, inasmuch as love is essentially vicarious, or disposes its subject to self-sacrifice in behalf, not only of worthy, but of most unworthy objects. "It is the nature of love universally to insert itself into the miseries and take upon its feeling the burdens of others. Love does not consider the ill-desert of the subject [object]; he may be even a cruel and relentless enemy." (p. 42.) There is here a mole-hill of interest in the repair of the highways, but a very mountain of zeal for free access to the state treasury; and it is intolerable that so small a mole-hill should be expected to hide so huge a mountain from our sight. What, then, is the exact truth of the case?

Dr. Bushnell wishes to justify his private opinion of Christ's sacrifice as being at the same time vicarious and not substitutionary. To this end he needs to vacate the word vicarious of the idea of substitution invariably associated with it, and fill it out with the idea of identification; for then he may hold to the vicarious sacrifice in the most orthodox manner, and yet put to rout every orthodox idea involved in the word; for no one can deny that Christ at least identified himself with sinners. Let identification then- no longer substitution - be the dominant idea of the word, and we shall be able to make Christ's love as strictly natural and credible as the mother's love for her child, friend's love for friend, patriot's love for his country; since all these loves are equally vicarious, consisting in the subject's identifying himself in every case with the object. So far substitution seems rapidly collapsing under the Doctor's nimble fingers into identification. But Christ's love is of a very difficult sort to naturalize; obstinately re

fuses to fall within the ordinary bosom categories; disowns all community with maternity, or friendship, or patriotism, save in so far as the shadow may claim community with the substance; and yet, unless he can somehow compel it into the traces, his thesis that it is a strictly vicarious love on recognized natural principles will never get justified. What does our resolute disputant do hereupon? Recoil before the insuperable difficulty? Not a bit. He simply enlarges love itself to the dimensions of the exigency, and coolly tells you, as if he were reciting truisms, that love universally has no regard to the worthiness of its object, but embraces the most unworthy, and so forth.

Is what is here alleged of love, then, universally true of it? Is it not indeed universally untrue of it, rather? Does the mother still identify herself with the child who at maturity becomes her cruel enemy? Does the friend any longer love the friend whom events have turned into his relentless foe? Does the patriot continue to identify himself with the country which deliberately rejects his counsels, derides his devotion, condemns his person to infamy? All these truly would be a new thing under the sun! But no, Dr. Bushnell may say, the probabilities I here speak of are inherent in God's love, which alone is true love, and not in man's, which at bottom is self-love. But he did say that these things were true of love universally, and with no attempt to discriminate between Divine and human love. Besides, it is only in highly figurative moods that we permit ourselves to say such things even of the Divine love; and we should always revolt from being construed literally. We say, on occasion, that God forgives his enemies, loves his enemies, does good to them, returns them blessing for cursing, and so on. But surely we use these natural images of the truth, not as positive, but as purely negative expressions of God's spiritual or infinite perfection, which refuses to be conceived of by minds of a gross culture, save under these finite forms. We use them only in accommodation to persons whose spiritual understanding is still dense enough to allow them to conceive of themselves as being so strictly commensurate with God in being and character as to be personally agreeable or personally offensive to him. Surely Dr. Bushnell must aspire to a livelier parish erelong than this! Whose friendship, then, or whose enmity, is felt so acutely by God, that he experiences in one case an emotion of personal complacency, in the other an emotion of personal indignation? And if God's infinite superiority to us exempt his love from the limitations and vicissitudes that characterize ours, we have clearly no shadow of right to argue from the stammering figures of speech by which we attempt to do bare negative justice to his ineffable worth, as if they were real or positive measures of the truth. It

is plainly untrue, then, of all love, Divine as well as human, that the object of it is ever in any sense out of proportion to, or in any sense disunited with, its subject. It is an outrage upon all love, Divine as well as human, to suppose that its subject is ever in normal discord, and not in fulness of accord, with its object; for in its supreme sense love means marriage, and marriage is such a complete union of subject and object as forbids the conception of subsequent divorce as possible. Thus Dr. Bushnell's preliminary statement of fact, upon which his total philosophic edifice is reared, is a palpable falsification of fact, being discountenanced by all traditional and all living experience.

Dr. Bushnell will be prompt hereupon, by himself or attorney, to ask us what we suppose Christ to have meant when he bade us love our enemies. We suppose he meant precisely what the face of his language imports; but we have not the least suspicion that, when he bade us love our enemies, he conceived himself to be laying a literal, and not an exclusively spiritual, injunction upon us. Love will hard

ly be commanded; and Christ at all events was not a man of such thin, pedantic make as to mistake the nature of love's obligations. Surely we are not called upon to remind a respected "master in Israel" that Christ's words, by his own interpretation, are "spirit" and "life"; and that whenever we attempt, accordingly, to fulfil them literally, we bury ourselves only the more deeply in nature and death. In the great final spiritual assize which he himself sketches to our wondering imagination, his literal or servile and interested follower, the man who invokes his name with scrupulous respect, and does every literal thing he has commanded, finds himself to his astonishment arrayed among the goats, or rejected; while his spiritual or disinterested disciple, the man who has never invoked his name at all, nor observed a literal statute he has commanded, finds himself to his equal astonishment among the sheep, or accepted. What is the inference? Not merely the fair, but indeed the necessary inference? It is that Christ's words address something deeper than the intellect in us, or appeal for ratification to the heart alone, contemplating no voluntary or professional obedience, but a purely spontaneous or living one; so that he who thinks to compass a ritual instead of a spiritual conformity to the command in question, or expects to fulfil it by some slavish outward routine in place of a free inward death to selfishness, is caught in the snare of his own cupidity. There can be no more dangerous trifling in this state of things with Christ's words, than to use them as the habitual weapons of our controversial and partisan necessities. Whoever else may go unharmed of them in that case, our own fingers will hardly escape a salutary scarification.

Our readers have now seen that the foundation-stone of Dr. Bushnell's gospel, the statement of fact upon which its entire philosophical justification proceeds, is void of all warrant in fact; and hence they may reasonably conclude that its philosophic justification will be found void also of all warrant in philosophy: for a philosophy which has no sanction in our actual experience is no more a veritable philosophy, than a house without any basis in the earth is a veritable house. Here then we might fairly dismiss the book without further investigation, expressing our deliberate conviction that, on the main question at issue between the author and his theological antagonist as to the true, unforced sense of the term vicarious sacrifice, the latter has a manifest advantage both logically and linguistically. But we wish to push our examination of the book a little further in order to show the reader in vivid outline, not merely the wrong done to practical facts of nature, but the higher wrong done to the interests of speculative thought among us, by these pertinacious, ever-recurring efforts to swathe the immortal form of truth in the grave-clothes of a perishing sectarian dogmatism.

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Dr. Bushnell's philosophy of the Gospel-stated always with a certain haze of obscurity over it, arising from a glib redundancy of verbiage, which really hinders while it seems to promote insight is this in brief. God's "attribute-power" by which Dr. Bushnell means his unqualified excellence- is ample for all his needs so long as his creatures remain in harmony with his perfection; but when once they have lapsed out of sympathy with Him, it grows pale and thin and ineffectual, and so requires to be supplemented by a "moral power" bearing stricter relations to their lapsed intelligence and debased instincts. In Christ, accordingly, God realizes this requisite complement of his ability, and becomes a "moral power" adequate to the effectual handling of his creature and the disciplining him by the alternate methods of law and grace, or fear and hope, out of temporary rebellion into permanent submission. One does willing justice here to the general purpose which Dr. Bushnell has in view, and which is to ventilate his hereditary theology by a faint breath of scientific reason; but he must not be allowed to carry out his laudable purpose, at the risk of gratuitously perverting our honest human thought and speech. For example, it is all-important to understand at this juncture just what Dr. Bushnell means by this "new moral power over men" achieved by God in Christ; and when you ask him the question, you find that he means "the power which a man finally gets, through self-culture, to impress and sway other men." By the moral power which God obtains in Christ, then, is to be understood a power which he had not

previously enjoyed of governing his own absolute creatures with honor to himself and advantage to them. The conception is indeed in a philosophic point of view eminently opprobrious to the Divine name; but what is incumbent upon us just now is to listen attentively to Dr. Bushnell's further exposition of his topic. "Moral power, then," he continues, "is what a man once had not, but now has, having been conquered by the conduct of his life. And this is exactly what we are to understand by the moral power of God in the Gospel of his own Son. It is a new kind of power the greatest and most sovereign we know

which God undertakes to have by obtaining it under human laws and methods. Hence the incarnation. God had a certain kind of power before," namely, "attribute power." But now, from the manifold insufficiency of this sort of power, "He is constrained to institute a new movement on the world, and obtain through Christ, and the facts and processes of Christ's life, a new kind of power, namely, moral power; the same that is obtained by human conduct under human methods. It will be Divine power still, only it will not be attribute-power." This last-named power characterizes the absolute ideal we form of God. But "this new power is to be the power cumulative gained by Him among men as truly as they gain it with each other. Only it will turn out in the end to be the grandest, closest to feeling, most impressive, most soul-renovating and spiritually sublime power that was ever obtained in this or any other world." (pp. 85-88.)

When Mr.

the famous auctioneer, has an undoubted Raphael to dispose of, no man has less to say in commendation of his goods. He is proudly reticent, confining himself to a bare recital of the outward fortunes of his picture, without a word upon the merits. Raphaels speak for themselves, and if Mr. should undertake to help them along, his customers would reasonably suspect the genuineness of the article. So now we can't help feeling a dire suspicion that this very tall talk of Dr. Bushnell disguises some desperate shallows of thought. Let us see.

In the first place, it is no definition of moral power to call it the power "men have to impress and sway other men." No doubt this effect is incidental to moral power, since we each of us, if we please, may to some small extent influence other persons to their advantage or undoing. And if this sort of power were ever practically unknown to the Divine mind while it abounded in us his creatures, surely our instinctive reverence for his perfection would forbid us to regard that circumstance as evincing any real deficiency of executive ability in him, and dispose us rather to see in it the proof of his thoroughly creative relation to us; a relation which keeps him forever free of all those petty personal designs upon