but

has been done, and has been done only by Christianity. It has placed its proofs, not in a sphere beyond the reach of the will, in a sphere which is not that wherein the will reigns. It has not become philosophy; for philosophy is man himself, man moral translated by man intellectual, the formulated sentiment by theory. The foundation of Christianity, considered as history, is not subjective, but objective, outside of the I, as in all history. Our passions may pervert the look we cast on facts, but we cannot mix our substance with these facts, identify them with ourselves, transmute them into ourselves. Objective by their nature, they remain what they are. We shall meet them again; but it is better still to say they will meet us again. The monuments subsist and are indestructible; the rules of criticism subsist and are immutable. There the will can do nothing directly. What is false is false; what is true is true. We may refuse to attend to a proof, to look at a fact; we cannot refuse our consent to evidence, and what is false cannot eventually and universally be held as true. The Christian religion, in this respect, has taken the most loyal and generous form, and, I re-assert it, it is of all religions the only one which has submitted to this proof, the only one which has challenged it. But it was not all to have held, as far as the thing was naturally possible, the will at a distance from the discussion. Here the heroism of truth appears. As truth it aspires to be believed. That is its necessary tendency, its desire. But what a means of being believed, to run from the first step right in the face of the will! The will braving the will! What an outset! And yet it was necessary. It was necessary that it should be really verified, quite evident that the human will, under the deceptive appearance of homage to God, was not going to anticipate itself. It was necessary it should have the feeling, the consciousness, that it was indeed the will of another which it was adopting; and that it might feel thus, it was necessary it should feel itself opposed on all sides, and in its greatest depths. At this price only it was certain not to worship itself under the name of God.

Here we have the most imposing testimony in favour of Christianity, that of mankind. Just as the piercing cry of sorrow informs the surgeon of the moment in which the steel, operating for the extirpation of an inveterate evil, has penetrated beyond the dead flesh, and plunges into the living and sensitive tissue, even so a terrible cry from human nature has served as an answer to the sword of the Word as it ploughed into its depths. The wound, until then probed in every direction, but without even awaking the invalid, now probed to the bottom for the first time, irritates the living fibre, and awakes the patient with a start. Other religions could recoil by a feeling of nationality or by individual interests, but here a howl of indignation has gone forth from all and every

man.* The new religion makes its way like an enemy, and its advent into the world has the character of an invasion. The cross, in which is summed up all that is characteristic of this religion in its dogmatic, moral, and social bearings, the cross is "unto the Jews a stumbling-block, and unto the Greeks foolishness," that is to say an offence in all times to the legal man who thinks he has done, or is able to make, his reckoning with God; folly at all times to the worldly wise, who laughs at the double idea of man reckoning with God, and of God reckoning with man. The human will, by which we must understand " the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eye, and the pride of life," the human will is nailed to the cross. This cross expresses everything: that man, irrevocably lost, ought to renounce all confidence in himself, that his works have no proper value of their own which may be reckoned to him, that he is dead, and that he has to be re-quickened, that the very foundation of his inclinations must be renewed, that he belongs not to himself, and that he must divest himself of his own will, placing himself in the hands of God, to receive a new one from him, conformed and subordinate to the Divine will.

The cross, the new sun of the moral universe, concentrates in its focus all these rays of truth. It is the sublime abridgment of everything more explicitly spoken by the Gospel. The morality of the Gospel is not the partial and successive restoration of man. It does not add virtue to virtue until the framework is filled up, but it casts into the heart of man a new principle of life and action, the love of God; and as this word, so easily articulated, is the name of a moral fact till then deemed impossible, and which was so in effect, it gives for a principle to this principle, for a basis to this basis, a fact of incommensurable import, and at once of a mysterious nature, and profoundly sympathetic with our moral necessities; a fact which alone completes life, governs the world, organizes chaos, pacifies the soul. It sets before us God himself becoming man for the salvation of men, the only lever which could be brought down low enough into the soul to shake, move, and displace its life; shall I say a physicological discovery which belongs only to God, and the application of which restores to him our will in the subjugation of our hearts.

Strong in this immense fact, the Gospel raises against us immense pretensions. I know not what they dream of who would consent to receive Gospel morality on the sole condition that we don't ask their acceptance of its doctrines. What is this but first of all to desire to transplant a tree without its roots? And then,

* We subjoin this sentence in the original that the reader who wishes may test the sufficien-y of our translation: "D'autres religions avaient pu être repoussées par un sentiment de nationalité ou par des intérêts individuels, mais ici le tolle! est parti de tout l'homme et de tout homme."

where does doctrine end and morality begin? I despair of any one making me see it. In the Gospel doctrine is already morality, and morality doctrine, and their respective character maintains that intimate and organic union which makes them to be the continuation of each other. If you rend the living bond which unites them, if you tear morality from the heart of religion like a leaf from the midst of a book, you then have a morality such as others, which you will in vain call beautiful, sublime, and which will not bind you more than any other to perfection. But seen in its place, and in the whole with which it is co-ordinate, Gospel morality raises, we repeat, immense pretensions. The Gospel exacts of the soul an entire surrender, without reserve, of all it loves, of all it desires, of all it is. The indispensable condition of true morality; for the least shelter, the most modest retreat suffices the will. The smallest nook of the soul is to it a world wherein it makes room for itself and stretches itself out. An indivisible point would be enough for it. There is none so contracted in which it is not found entire, in which it does not triumph to the full. It is not space that is important to it, it is being. The I occupies no space, it asks only life. Not to be absolutely nothing is all it demands, for then it is everything. Now it is this last asylum, this mathematical point, which evangelical ethics refuse to the will. Also all those who have honoured the evangelical system with the most superficial glance, have said, if not with more truth at least with more feeling, this morality is beautiful, but it is inapplicable, it is impracticable. A contradictory and rash assertion. Contradictory because the just and the impracticable are self-excluded, because duty in morals implies power, because these two ideas are confounded at their source-which is God, and because to put them in contradiction to each other is to make him a liar. A rash assertion because it is to judge at a glance what we wish to have thoroughly examined, and to consider from a natural point of view an order of things necessarily supernatural, to deny that God would or could finish his work, to deny that he has been faithful to himself, and consequently to deny the means at his disposal, and by the use of which he can as easily renew our moral force as our moral ideas. If Christian morality is impracticable we could not call it beautiful, for nothing is beautiful but the true; if it is true it is practical, in the sense that no one of its precepts is absolutely above the capacity of man armed with God's weapons; in this sense especially that the spirit of this law becomes without reserve and without restriction the spirit of the spirit of the believer, on whom it is not only by God imposed, but to whom it is assimilated, and with whom it is incorporated by the efficacy of love.

We might ask whether it be not necessary to establish undeniably the entire submission of the will, to impose upon it some law

purely arbitrary, that is to say, some law which is not its own recommendation, but one which is recommended by its origin and the name of its author. I shall be very guarded in saying whether the imposition of laws of this kind are unworthy of the Divine legislator; but I would reply that the Gospel does not impose any such like, and prescribes in general only what nature recommends to the conscience; and I would add that in general the will is not less subdued by the necessity of obeying natural laws than it would be by arbitrary ordinances. In itself it is already but too difficult fully and spiritually to obey the first, without gratuitously seeking out another exercise. I am not even far from believing that natural laws are generally more difficult of observation. Pride is easily flattered, and obedience assumes a material form in the observance of arbitrary commands; the others offer more occasions of humility and more spiritual aliment. And experience proves beyond all question that there is no necessity to carry to another soil than that of the conscience, an obedience the direction of whose spirit is determined by the evangelical law. I add that when man has desired to remove the will from under the sublime severity of Christian law, he has created a multitude of arbitrary prescriptions which are not added to, but substituted for, the natural laws, of which the Gospel is a new and more perfect publication.

It may now be asked whether with this same object of establishing the loyal submission of the will it be not indispensable that the idea of happiness be waived, whether we must at all cost escape the dangerous contact of two elements of which the one tends naturally to absorb the other. The submission of the human will to the Divine will is virtue, virtue is truth, truth in action. Now happiness is necessarily included in truth. Nothing in the world nor out of the world can prevent a being whose will is united to that of God from being happy thereby. It would be so in the abode of the damned. Nothing can prevent such a being from the commencement of its efforts to unite its will to the Divine will, from tasting in some measure that true happiness which has its principle in the peace of the heart. It is useless then to think of separating from each other two elements thus inseparable. They would re-unite, notwithstanding all obstacles, or perish each one apart from the other.

If the Christian religion is so far from excluding or waiving the idea of happiness, that on the contrary it begins with offering it, if this is its first act, its first word, the reason is that no more than any other religion can it begin otherwise. And if anything distinguishes it, in this respect, from other religions, it is its being more gratuitously liberal, it is its giving all to whom nothing was given, it is its assuring all to whom nothing was promised. But its gifts are spiritual, invisible, assigned for eternity, and its demands

are near, immediate, inexorable, unbounded. It does more than show that happiness is the consequence of submission; it places it in submission itself. Obedience is more than the means of happiness. It is happiness. This religion, all prodigal as it is in its gifts, draws them from our own heart. It enriches us with our own substance, it makes us the artificers of our own lot. We are free so far as we obey, rich so far as we despoil ourselves. The surrender of our own will is the whole of religion, is life eternal. We are clearly warned of what our instinct has whispered to us ever since the world began, and that is, that we shall have attained the end of our being and the limits of our desires only when we shall have sincerely, loyally, and in good faith, yielded ourselves into the hands of God. But although this truth stands upon the threshold of every conscience, what a task notwithstanding, and what subject more appalting? What object more horrible to a natural man than such an abdication? And even as to those who have suffered themselves to be caught in the snare of heavenly promises as by divine honey, what more overwhelming discovery than that of a task they have never even caught a glimpse of through these sweet words of pardon, of grace, of salvation? Why, notwithstanding the conviction even of their reality, notwithstanding the beauty of these promises, notwithstanding the inevitable acceptance of a morality whose righteousness we acknowledge, why, finding in the Gospel itself nothing but reasons to respect and love them, why the rigourous adoption of these principles, why has a real, consequent Christianity deeply rooted in the life been at all times? Why yet a rare thing? Why content with a Christianity of bark to which we could not cordially yield ourselves, evince generally aversion, and decide only after long struggles for the free Gospel, which, considered under one of its principal aspects is, to take it rightly, but the proclamation of the sovereignty of God? It is precisely because of that. The attribute which recommends it with authority is the same which repels it with power. The sovereignty of God excludes the sovereignty of man. Need we be astonished that St. John should say "that no one can believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God without the Holy Spirit?"

IN

ART. II.-THE WITNESS OF THE SPIRIT.

NTIMATELY and inseparably connected with justification by faith, is the inestimable blessing of adoption into the family of God. Our sonship lost in the first Adam is regained by every believer in Christ, the second Adam. That we might be restored