this fashionable Calvinism, he might have astonished his auditors with his sesquipedalian nomenclature, and earned a shining name for his polished orthodoxy." p. 426.

a paragraph which shows that the art of caricature is not confined to Brooklyn Heights.

The earlier Emmonites defended a theory of Natural Ability that not only asserted man's constitutional capacity to be all that his Maker requires, (which is true,) but also his actual power to meet, unassisted, every claim of God upon him. "He taught that God never requires of men, what they have not the natural power to do:" of course, all the power requisite, if this heading of the section signifies anything to the purpose. He taught that "men have natural power to regenerate themselves" (p. 374); "that men are active and not passive in regeneration" (p. 428) - the word used is not conversion, of which this would be true. แ "They need no other principle, power, or ability to do all that God requires, than they naturally possess are as able to do right as to do wrong

• are

as able to obey any command of God as to disobey it . . . are able to obey every command of God." (p. 375.) Framed, however, as these strong expressions were into the stringent counterparts of God's sovereign decrees of electing grace, his direct agency in determining human choices, and a regenerating impulse on his part which, in fact, amounted almost to a Divine compulsion of irresistible conquest these daring statements were much hampered in doing the injury of which they were capable. Here, again, time has wrought adversely. From hundreds of our pulpits the hawsers have been cut which moored them up to these firm fastenings of God's throne and grace. These doctrines in which those fathers delighted, which, in their view, so exalted Jehovah and abased the sinner, are not set forth in distinctness sufficient to hold men back from a false, presumptuous self-reliance, while still they are told that they are able entirely to do all that God demands of them. Very well; they will do it, at their own convenience. If they have the affair so completely in their own hands, almost any vacant hour will suffice to adjust it. Not very much is said now about the Holy Spirit's official work in salvation, as absolutely necessary to this end. How should this be so indispensable, if man has

all the natural ability wanted in the premises? Consequently, men do not fear, at present, as they used to, about grieving away forever that Spirit by these self-confident procrastinations. Hence, a reckless impenitency which will do its own work when it pleases; and because it knows that it cannot do much in the way of holiness, it naturally enough infers that there is nothing very radical or thorough which needs to be done in order to enter the kingdom of heaven; that "a change of heart" is only resolving to be a Christian, that is passing an inward resolution that you are one already. So orthodoxy glides again down this easy slope into something with "which no liberal Christian will be much disposed to disagree." [Vid. Boston Review, Volume I. p. 520.

ance.

Our biographer has largely set in order, in parallel columns, the apparent contradictions in positions maintained by Emmons: we think that he has shown more perspicacity here than success in his endeavors to prove that the contradiction is only in appearSo, we presume he would interpose a note at this point -to the effect that Emmons held a very emphatic sentiment of the moral impotency of the sinner. It is worth asking, how much of native power you have left (which deserves the name of power) after you have subtracted the moral impotency from the natural ability. “What's in a name?" Constitutional capacity for religion is one thing. We all have it. Real power to make ourselves "sons of God" is a fiction of the schools. But the schools carry it as a metaphysical distinction; and the pulpits follow, as affecting a knowing, philosophic air; and the pews are flattered into a persuasion of their decided self-sufficiency; and humanity becomes its own Saviour.

Will the reader follow us carefully here? When Emmons so stoutly defended this "exercise" scheme of his, locating all sin in man's sinful acts of will, and denying that we are "by nature children of wrath" he had no idea what a harvest of proud, self-reliant fancies would ripen from this seed. But here is the fact. He is quoted and lauded by our recent theologues for these strongly argued points which the most liberal divinity among us welcomes; but the other side of his theology is left stranded along-shore as behind the age of course, we speak comparatively. No connection with the first sin, save in

cidentalno disposition therefrom arising to go astray-no real responsibility for anything save one's own volitions - all evil and good in these alone, so far as our character and destiny are concerned hold on to these dicta, and lay the main stress of the pulpit upon them; and instead of making men realize their guilt and peril, you do precisely the reverse. What Emmons. did in converting men, he did not do by this arm of his battle, alone or mainly. He preached the whole of the doctrine contained in the evangelic text, with an equal stress laid on the supernatural work declared in it,-"But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God, even to them that believe on his name: which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God." We are amplifying this topic somewhat to a repetitious length. But it needs to be understood how the human element in our creed is prevailing over the Divine; whence the start and what the method of this process. We are not arguing a theory, but setting down history. Dr. Channing's descent from the Newport to the Federal-Street platform may be profitably studied in this connection.

These pages renew the argument which ascribes our salvation through Christ" directly and immediately to a more winning perfection than justice; to the free, untrammelled, unnecessitated Grace of the Monarch." (p. 389.) This is the Andoverian claim, in the premises. We object to this putting of the case, implying, as it does, that the received Calvinism of our creeds and confessions attributes the sinner's redemption to anything higher or more ultimate than just this very grace. The biographer of course knows this; and we decline being put by his words into the issue of justice versus grace. His cross-questioning is more artful than truthful.

"Did Christ bear the legal penalty which was due to us? 'Yes," many Calvinists reply. 'No,' was the reply of Emmons; for after our penalty has been borne once, distributive justice forbids that it be borne the second time, and therefore, on this theory, our freedom from punishment results immediately from strict justice; not from sovereign grace." p. 389.

We challenge the "therefore." It is not one of Paul's rivets.
It is not held that Christ so literally, and in every way, bore the

penalty of sin as therefore to suspend the action of God's love and mercy, "free, untrammelled, unnecessitated" in redemption. So far from this, the whole procedure begun in sovereign grace alone. That originated this counsel of eternity which had its fulfilment at Calvary. But the gospel does put Christ's atonement in such a relation to God's just claims upon the individual transgressor—his "distributive justice"— that salvation comes through Christ's satisfying these demands of law, in precept and penalty, upon his condemned soul. God's grace is magnified, not in ignoring the righteous grasp of justice upon the offender, and saving him through some impulse of general benevolence, or "public justice," as the phrase now is, but in devising a plan of justification which shall meet the sinner in his individual default and ruin, and reconcile, in his salvation, the claims of law and the securing of life everlasting. If Grace provides for Justice a satisfactory substitute for its adjudged victim, and superintends with sleepless love the entire details of our actual rescue from the second death, how is this being saved by Law and not by Grace? That Jesus took our law-place as he did, was simply "because God so loved the world." We claim for our doctrine a peculiar property in the familiar stanza: "Grace first contrived a way

To save rebellious man;

And all the steps that grace display,

Which drew the wondrous plan."

"Are our sins literally imputed to Christ?

6

...

Yes,' many Calvinists answer. 'No,' was the answer of Emmons. . . . Has Christ rescued us from the guilt of sin? Yes,' respond many Calvinists. 'No,' responds Emmons. . . . Is the meritorious obedience of Christ literally imputed to us? Yes,' many Calvinists affirm. No,' is the word of Emmons." p. 389.

We do not care to fill in the reasons which the biographical theologian ingeniously puts in the lips of the older, in this still "shorter catechism." It must suffice to say that the "Yes" of "many Calvinists" to these interrogatories is not affirmed in the sense here forced upon them, so as to make them teach that our salvation is one of justice instead of Divine, almighty grace. Our former reply covers the whole ground. We hold no such commercial imputation of sin or righteousness as to authorize

the inference that, through this imputation of the former to Christ, we must be freed from its burden, mediately or "immediately by exact justice, and not by sovereign grace;" or, so as that through Christ's obedience, "we must receive its positive recompense from retributive justice, not from sovereign grace." We hold, with Paul to the Romans, such a doctrine here as teaches that as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might GRACE reign through righteousness unto eternal life, by Jesus Christ our Lord." (5: 21.) Of course, says Stuart, (in loco,) Sukawoσúvηs here means "righteousness in the sense of justification, i. e., God's righteousness-that which he gives or bestows ... grace which superabounds has exercised its sway in procuring a remission of the sentence of condemnation and bestowing that justification which is connected with eternal life." These are transactions in law and justice, as well as in grace; and in those because in this. Our author essays to work a logical pestle, in this section, to the apparent pulverizing of our old English divines and their unworthy successors, which will not cause us to depart from our foolishness so long as we have the goodly fellowship of the Pauline epistles. Logic is good. But we had as lief worship a dry stick as this idol of some of our schoolmen. Its forms are not the absolute compass and circuit of all spiritual truth. Christ's revelation refuses a servile submission to its cramps and screws. If demonstration be demanded of its unreliableness as a final arbiter, enough of it is at hand in the extreme inferences which Emmons accepted from his own premises of "disinterested benevolence." Living men have heard this deduction from his logic stoutly maintained that if God had told Satan before his apostasy that it was on the whole for the Divine honor that he should rebel and be a lost spirit forever, Satan should have therefore preferred rebellion and crime forever to the holiness in which thus far he had rejoiced; which, reduced to its logical expression, is a holy willingness to be unholy"—a scientific residuum, but an insult

to common sense.

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We shall not complain, but we distinctly affirm that the impression evidently sought to be conveyed to the prejudice of the orthodoxy of our Protestant standards, in this memoir, is historically without foundation. If theological discussion is to go on