but little, if at all, more satisfactory than the common opinions of the people. These philosophers taught that matter is eternal, and that evil in the world is owing to the want of its perfect adaptability to good. Nature, they taught, always tends in its operations towards good, but owing to the imperfection of matter, which refuses to adjust itself to the form, it does not always, in its formations, attain to good. The soul, they taught, is the end and the essence of the body in all animals. In the souls of the inferior animals, the end of nature is not perfectly accomplished; neither is it in the souls of children. The human animal, and that the male, is the end and the centre of all earthly natures. All else beneath the moon is, as it were, an unsuccessful attempt to produce the male man.

Aristotle looked upon the reason of man as an element emigrated, from another sphere, into this sublunary portion of the universe. The moral life of man, therefore, he considered as an interpolation in nature-something distinct from the rest of the world. The end of his ethics is, to determine what is good for man politically, socially, and individually, in this life. Morality, in his system, is a relative mean between the opposite vices of excess and deficiency; and the rule of right is to be determined by the majority of instances. Virtue is a disposition towards good acquired by habit. Men who live rationally are, he thought, especially dear to the gods, and the peculiar objects of their providence; but that external and corporeal advantages are rather things of fortune, which, as they do not always fall to the share of the good and deserving, it is hard to say whether they are dispensed by the gods or not. Socrates maintained, and so did Plato, but not so exclusively, that virtue follows from knowledge, and that man only transgresses involuntarily.

The Greek mind, representing, as it did, the highest pagan or heathen enlightenment, was wholly unable to reconcile the moral phenomena of the course of natural providence with the judgments of their moral sense. The adversity of the good, the prosperity of the wicked, the crimes of the guilty involving the misery of the innocent, and even the existence of evil at all, whether physical or moral, perplexed their reason with insoluble paradoxes. The Greeks, amongst other opinions

in regard to the moral administration of the world, believed that Jupiter kept his lightnings to punish perjury; for physical punishment, because of moral delinquency, was a cardinal notion of the Greeks in regard to the course of nature. Aristophanes, in the comedy of "The Clouds," exposes the paradox which the belief involves; and thereby illustrates the moral perplexities which environed Greek opinion of the providential course of nature. Aristophanes is ridiculing the doctrine of second causes, as taking the administration of the world out of the hands of the gods, and presents Socrates as teaching the doctrine to Strepsiades, who held on to the popular opinion of the agency of the gods.

And tell me of the lightning, whose quick flash
Burns us to cinders; that, at least, great Jove
Keeps in reserve to launch at perjury?

Soer. Dunce, dotard! were you born before the flood,
To talk of perjury, whilst Simon breathes,
Theorus and Cleonymus; whilst they,

Thrice-perjured villains, brave the lightning's stroke,
And gaze the heav'ns unscorcht? Would these escape?
Why, man, Jove's random fires strike his own fane,
Strike Sunium's guiltless top, strike the dumb oak,
Who never yet broke faith, or falsely swore."

The perennial fact, in human judgment, that God's moral administration of this world has always seemed, to human reason, less perfect in justice than the moral standard which man sets up, in each age, as the criterion of moral conduct, seems conclusive, that the finite moral conceptions of man furnish no adequate type of the rule of God's conduct, whose ways are not as our ways, in his eternal administration over the life of man. And as man cannot obtain a conception of the infinite character of God, the Greeks and other pagans anthropomorphised the gods, and ascribed to them human passions, and a corresponding morality; and made fate, and not free will, the supreme condition of moral existence, whether of gods or men. The attempt to explain the moral providence manifested in the course of nature and human life, resulted, by the natural recoil from the failure to solve the problem, with the Greeks, in bringing down the goodness of the gods to the human standard.

The moral order and administration of the world seemed, to the Greeks, to rest rather on fate than on justice, on power than on right. And while the speculative reason of the pagan world, at best, but oscilated between fate and free will, its religious faith never rose above the enlightenment which rested its last hope for pardon of its shortcomings in this life, on the sacrifice of a cock to Esculapius. A supreme God, as a moral governor of the world, was, at best, but an obscure sentiment in the back-ground of the opinions of philosophers; and an individual immortality of the human soul, little else than a craving of their minds. They felt that, with their intellectual and moral instincts, they would not perish in the grave, but would live beyond it, in intellectual contemplation, as an assembly of philosophers. The grand moral fact, in the life of the pagan world, was, that the reason of man required of him more than he felt able to perform.

Though European civilization was born of Asiatic, it had advanced so far beyond it in enlightenment, that Asiatic civilization seemed to have run its course in history, and to be only lingering in time to fulfil the condition of decay. The course of history, as if turning backwards, had carried European civilization into Asia, and the language of Greece had become in Asia a spoken tongue. European opinions had mingled with Asiatic, more in confusion than in conflict, creating rather doubt than enlightenment. At this crisis in human history, a person appeared at Jerusalem, who was born, in the humblest condition of life, in an obscure village of Judea, and proclaimed himself the light of the world, to show to man that way of life for which, under the sense of duty which is ineradicable from his nature, man had been seeking in vain by the light of his reason. He professed to have come into the world in a supernatural way, being born of a virgin, to fulfil prophecies that had for centuries been made by men of his particular race and nation, who claimed to have the foreknowledge of God given to them for the special instruction of the Jews. Moses, the chief of these prophets, had written, as he claimed, under the eye of God, a history of the creation of the world, just in the order of formation in which it was made; and had narrated how only one man and one woman had been made by God in

his own image, to live in the world and to have dominion over it, and to people it with their children. He had stated, too, how this man and this woman had, of their free will, transgressed the commands of God, and thereby introduced sin and death into the world; and that it was one of God's ordinances that the sins of the parents were to be visited upon their children; and that thus it was that sin and death became the common heritage of the human family, all men having descended from the man and the woman who broke God's command. God had, according to this history, done the work of creation in six days, and rested on the seventh; and made it an example to man to labour six days, and to rest on the seventh for moral and religious improvement. So that, according to this history, the moral and religious government of the world rested on the two grand facts of creation, the work of six days and rest on the seventh, and the making one man and one woman the parents of the human family, and their transgression the cause of moral evil in the world.

Jesus Christ, as this man of Judea was called, at once recognised this account of creation and the fall of man into sin, as true, and declared that he had come into the world to fulfil the promise made by God, as told by the prophets, to deliver men from the woe that had been brought upon them by their first parents. He thus connected his work with the prime facts of the world. He so connected it with the origin of the physical universe and with the origin of man, in a moral filiation, as to be able to assume that it was part of the great scheme of administration which God had in his mind when he laid the foundations of the universe. The Mosaic history, which introduces the narrow Jewish polity, is thus made an introduction to universal history, with Christianity as the grand source of its moral life.

Moses, in his history of creation, gives, contrary to the universal doctrine of the pagan world, the only condition on which God can be thought to be omnipotent—that matter is not eternal, but contingent; and, therefore, it did not hamper God in his work of creation, as Plato and Aristotle taught, and thereby necessitate evil or imperfection. Neither did Moses, after the manner of philosophers, give any theoretical genesis of crea

tion by formative forces of nature, but he merely narrated how the work was performed, in the order of its fabrication, by a personal God. And though Moses tells of God speaking to him face to face, as a man speaketh unto a friend; yet he also tells that God said to him, when he asked God to show him his glory, Thou canst not see my face; for there shall no man see me and live. This corresponds with the doctrine of God, which, as we have shown, speculative reason teaches. God can be manifested to man in finite relations, but not in his transcendent majesty.

Christ recognised as true the Mosaic representation of God, and offered no speculative solution of the great first cause. Neither did he, after the manner of philosophers, propound any theodicy or metaphysical theory of sin, but pointed to the Mosaic history, as giving the true account of the fall of man; and offered, not a speculative, but a practical solution of the dreadful mystery. That justice, which made even the pagan world, in its conscience, feel that punishment must follow sin, is recognised by him as inexorable, and sinless as he claimed to be, he offered up himself to its behests, as a vicarious sacrifice in the stead of sinning men. He told men that God, of his free grace and love, as a compassionate father, had sent him, his only begotten Son, who is sinless, to suffer for their sins, and thus to leave them as free from guilt as if they had not sinned, if they would only accept the gift of grace, and become as little children.

The theism of nature, as well as the theophanies of the Jewish dispensation, are consummated in Christ. While, in the genesis of the notion of God, the manifestations of nature are, as we have shown, of deep import, leaving atheism without excuse, still, of God as the moral governor of the world, our best notions are derived from Christianity; for the moral character of God is too much obscured in the paradoxes of good and evil presented in nature and human life, ever to have been adequately discerned by human reason, as pagan philosophy shows. Neither could the peculiar theophany of Father, Son, and Spirit, consummated by the teachings of Christ, be inferred from nature. This conception of the Godhead gives vitality to the mediatorial scheme of Christianity, and solves, in a prac