conscientiousness, and natural affection which are every where found among men, are mainly relied upon to disprove it. But such objections are nothing to the purpose; for, as we have seen, our doctrine recognizes those facts, and fully harmonizes with them, and even depends upon many of them for the possibility of its own truth. Doubtless, depravity exerts a malign influence in misapplying or deteriorating those other native qualities or faculties of man, so as to weaken, or, at least, deface them; but their extirpation is by no means indispensable to its own predominance. Its conquests, like those of the African slaver, aim to make captives, rather than corpses.

As to entire native depravity, the question is not, Are there any objections to it? but, Is it a fact? And no objections come to the point unless they are made against the evidence by which that fact is supported. This idea is admirably presented in the sixth chapter of Dr. Woods' Essay. It is indeed absurd to argue against the fact, and yet leave its evidence unconfuted. Yet almost all objections levelled at the position that men are depraved by nature, are statements of other facts supposed to be inconsistent with it. But what will these objections avail, coming as they do from those whose selfish interests and personal feelings impel them to deny the doctrine if they can, while the proofs of the doctrine remain conclusive, and even. undisturbed. As well might the underwriters insist, that the ship which they had insured could not have been cast away, because she was staunch and well built, navigated by competent persons, and had commenced her voyage with favourable breezes; and refuse to attend to the testimony of the half-drowned and dripping survivors of the wreck, and of the corpses and the fragments that bestrew the shore.

In closing, may the writer be permitted to appeal to those who, like himself, are among the younger learners and monitors in the school of Christ? And may he urge the youthful ministry to give the subject of human depravity such an examination as its importance and relations demand? A deep rooted and grounded sense of the ruined state of man, accompanied, as it will be, by meekness and sincerity, is a good preparation for seeking and securing the knowledge of the truth of God. On the other hand, heresy begins in a low estimate of the native depravity of the heart. To this may be traced nearly all the glaring delusions

with which the world is carried away. The man who has persuaded himself that the state of the natural heart is not so desperate, soon forgets the extent and spirituality of the law of God, and loses sight of the danger of eternal judgement; he then feels less and less occasion for an atonement of infinite value, till he acts on the principle, "Nec Deus intersit, nisi dignus vindice nodus," and discharges first the divinity of Christ from his creed, and next he expunges the doctrine of vicarious expiation for sin. As he transfers his reliance from the divinity of Christ to the "divinity within him," he dispenses at his sovereign pleasure with the existence and agency of the Holy Spirit, and then parts with the doctrine of the necessity of a change of heart. His confidence in the vis medicatrix of the soul causes him to reject the offensive sentiment of distinguishing grace. "The longer he studies the shorter his creed becomes," till it is contracted to a stony heap of negatives.

This is the full course" of apostacy: though very many who commence it do not go through. But notwithstanding these exceptions, the doctrine of man's depravity is not an unessential point: besides being of the first magnitude itself, it has a decisive bearing upon every other point. Any system of religious truth in which a vital part is wanting, though it may be cunningly devised, is a body destitute either of heart or brain. What can it effect? No youthful preacher, who shrinks from the awful responsibility of ministering at random to a mind diseased, will fail to obtain first of all clear views of its depravity. If we mistake as to the nature and extent of the disorder, we shall almost necessarily err as to the remedy.

The system of gospel truth is not a rope of sand, chimerically intended to preserve its integrity without any coherence of its particles. It is rather a chain whose intertwisted rings, though each infrangible, are contrived for mutually giving and receiving strength. The doctrine of depravity is an indispensable link. The whole state of the sinner's heart shows his dependance on infinite forbearance and compassion: his total depravity evinces his need of atoning blood: his native depravity makes known his want of regenerating grace. Thus will a clear view of the natural condition of the soul constrain us to glorify the longsuffering love of the Father, to exalt the cross of the Redeemer, and to honour the work of the Holy Spirit.

ART. II. THE TRUE UTILITY.

By Rev. THOMAS T. STONE, East Machias, Me.

Socrates.Καὶ τόνδε δ ̓ αὖ σκόπει, εἰ ἔτι μένει ἡμῖν ἡ οὔ, ὅτι οὐ τὸ ζῆν περὶ πλείστου ποιητέον, ἀλλὰ τὸ εὖ ζῆν. Crito-Aà pével. Socrates.-To dè εὖ καὶ καλῶς καὶ δικαίως ὅτι ταὐτόν ἐστι, μένει, ἢ οὐ μένει ; Crito. Μένει.

PLATO'S CRITO, C. viii.

THE philosopher means, if I understand his words, that real utility, as our modern phrase has it, is that which gives worth to human existence, while on the other hand real utility is no other than rectitude and virtue. Such is the doctrine by which Socrates expressed the ground of his refusal to escape from imprisonment and death. He felt that even life might be purchased at too dear a rate; that life is worthless in fact, if severed from what alone gives it value; and that its whole value consists in serving as the condition, or rather the substraction, of true welfare.

I know not that any will dissent from the doctrine. As bare being, that which belongs to organic or inorganic matter, to the leaf, the flower, the pebble, the dust of the earth, is to itself wholly valueless; as even animal being, existing in the lower orders of creation, the insect, the beast, the bird, is of little worth in the estimation of a creature like man, great as its sensitive pleasures may be; so likewise being as it is developed and modified in man, human life, with all its distinctive attributes and powers, may be considered, while merely being and life, as devoid of what may be called self-inherent and independent excellence. Leighton has said of men's relation to God, "Severed from his concurrence, as cyphers, multiply them as you will, still they signify nothing." So likewise of human labours and services, he remarks that without love they "are as so many cyphers, they amount to just nothing."

This illustration, quaint as it may perhaps seem, appears to me not inaptly to represent human existence as it is, severed from that spiritual love which is the substance and form of virtue, and from that living, inward idea of God which is alike its prototype and its principle. Life indeed, with whatever it involves of subsistence, of capacity, of power, the whole aggregate of human faculties considered VOL. IV.

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simply as phenomena, forms but the cypher in arithmetic. The cypher has no value; multiplied indefinitely by itself, it acquires no value. Prefix the unit, however, and you obtain a value great in proportion to the number of cyphers before which it stands. Again, you may make this value positive or negative, a plus quantity, as the mathematicians say, or a minus; in the former case an actual substantial value, in the latter an utter loss; in both the greater as your nominal sum is enlarged. Life, I repeat, is the cypher; life prolonged is the cypher multiplied by itself; happiness, I may add, (the equivalent of utility,) be this happiness real or delusive, is the unit; virtue we may call the determination of its positive character; vice, the determination of its negative character,-the first constituting the happiness real, the second making it delusive, false, fictitious: the former indicating acquisition, the latter loss; this, a bankruptcy; that, wealth, in whatever constitutes the good of existence.

This representation, however quaint, as I have said, and fanciful withal it may seem, contains, I humbly conceive, what is true in the doctrine of Utility ;-a doctrine which in one shape or another comes before us almost every day, and which, men, who have chosen to distinguish and tacitly eulogize themselves as practical, seem to claim for their own monopoly. As it is often understood, or at the least applied in action, I am willing to say,-Let who will have the credit of it, I ask no share. But as it may be presented, and as, to the shame of some even Christian moralists, it has been presented by the wiser heathen writers, I would be its humble advocate. Here let me observe in passing, that we might presume beforehand that there is some element of truth in a doctrine so generally held; a doctrine identified with ethical systems so contrary as those of which the one contracts all virtue into self-love, and the other expands it into universal charity; a doctrine which Christians, unbelievers, and heathen men, the worshippers of God and atheists, statesmen, scholars, labourers, the learned, halflearned, and ignorant have vindicated, agreeing though disputing, exhibiting one outline amidst utmost discordancy in detail. What this element of truth is, what, in other words, the sense is in which the doctrine of utility has truth in it, I have endeavoured in general terms to set forth. In proceeding to a more minute examination of it, I may lay

down the following as an unquestionable maxim; Whatever constitutes the actual well-being of man, that alone is truly useful.

Well-being, then, Plato's rò su (v, is the test of an alleged, as it is the essence of the true Utility;-being that is well for man as man, well for the whole of man, not for parts and fragments of man. Let me explain myself by illustrating the errours to which this statement is opposed. Horace, in his epistle to the Pisos, has given, as every scholar remembers, a ludicrous description of a supposed painting, in which a horse's neck is joined to a human head, different sorts of feathers spread over limbs gathered from every quarter, and female beauty terminated in the shape of a fish. Let the fantastic picture pass into vital being; and withal let this new form of being have as many kinds of life infused into it as there are animals out of which it is wrought, the man, and horse, the vulture, turtle, wren, or any other bird, the woman and fish connected without union, no entireness, no oneness, nothing a whole, every part a broken fragment. Who sees not the disorder, the confusion, the unfitness of piece to piece, the unfitness of all the members singly and in conjunction to any one end? This discordant man, this monstrous assemblage of deformities, may stand as the type of what the originally god-like nature of man is sometimes made by theories of pretended utility. First it is deprived of manhood; next even the degraded substitute is broken into fragments of every sort. Not the spiritual essence, but the physical nature, is contemplated; whatever there is of the material in the human constitution is recognized, and haply withal the understanding, though too often, alas! as merely animal without either reason or conscience. Thus bowed down from his upright form, the human animal is regarded, not as one being, but as a chaos of heterogeneous elements, without either symmetry, or structure, or unity of end. Thus the theory distorts nature, then undertakes to search out and evolve the good, the true welfare, of this intelligent piece of matter.

I shall not be understood, of course, to mean that any system has gone the whole length of such absurdity; my sole object is to expose what I deem the general complexion and tendency of prevalent notions concerning utility; and these, let it be repeated, are the two great errours which they involve. First; they do not contemplate utility such