science does not accuse me of anything, yet am I not hereby justified; but he that judgeth me is the Lord."* (1 Cor. iv. 4.)

We believe that if there be one thing against which more than another we should be watchful in the present day, it is this negative theology, in which the great doctrines of the gospel are either omitted, or placed in so subordinate a position as to lose the dignity and weight given to them in the word of God. The atonement, the union of Christ with the believer, and the indwelling power and presence of the Holy Spirit,-these are fundamental truths on which we must take our stand, and around which we must rally as they are exposed, from time to time, to the assaults of the pride of intellect, ranging from specious argument and plausible insinuation, to the fiercer but really less dangerous attacks of open infidelity.

II. This negative theology which distinguishes Dr. Temple's essay, necessarily leads on to positive errors, which we will now endeavour to classify and explain.

1. The church of God is systematically deprived of its privileges, and placed on a level with the world. This is one of the masterthoughts which runs through and predominates in the entire essay. From a perusal of it no one could form any other idea than that all nations, Jewish, Christian, and Heathen, have had, as nearly as possible, the same treatment, privileges, and training at the hands of God, and stand in the same position before Him, without regard to revelations, covenants, or creeds. The beginning of this state of things is graphically described by an illustration taken from Dr. Temple's daily life. Speaking of the period when the human family divided itself into distinct races and nations, he says: "The world as it were went to school, and was broken up into classes." If, to follow out this figure, we could have entered this school on different occasions, we should have seen the Babylonians learning the worship of Baal; the Phoenicians and Syrians that of Ashtaroth and Thummim; the Hindoos studying their Vedas; the Persians, the books of Zoroaster; the Chinese and other Asiatics, those of Buddha; the Hebrews, those of Moses; the Egyptians receiving instruction in the system of animal worship; the Greeks and Romans in the dignity and mysteries of the Olympian gods and goddesses. We almost shrink from stating that, according to the same view of this subject, the teacher who placed these subjects in the hands of the respective classes, and directed their studies, was God. We believe that we have not overstated what is contained in Dr. Temple's own words, although he may not have realized the conclusions to which his premises necessarily lead. He writes:

*For although I know not that I am guilty of unfaithfulness, yet my own sentence will not suffice to justify me, but I must be tried by the judgment of my Lord." (Cony beare and Howson, vol. ii. p. 32.)

"Such was the training of the Hebrews; other nations, meanwhile, had a training parallel to and contemporaneous with theirs. The national religions were all in reality systems of law given by God, though not given by revelation, but by the working of nature, and consequently so distorted and adulterated that in lapse of time the divine element in them had almost perished. The poetical gods of Greece, the legendary gods of Rome, the animal-worship of Egypt, the sun-worship of the East, all accompanied by systems of law and civil government springing from the same sources as themselves, namely, the temper and character of the several nations, were the means of educating these people to similar purposes in the economy of Providence, to that for which the Hebrews were destined."* (p. 15.)

Again,

"The whole lesson of humanity was too much to be learned by all at once. Different parts of it fell to the different parts of the human race; and for a long time, though the education of the world flowed in parallel channels, it did not form a single stream. The Jewish nation, selected among all as the depository of what may be termed, in a pre-eminent sense, religious truth, received, after a short time, the Mosaic system." (p. 8.)

From such views as these there necessarily follow two results: the one, that the Jewish, and subsequently the Christian, church, is placed below its proper standing-place as the church of God; the other, that the heathen nations are elevated from their proper position as sunk in idolatry and sin, to a sort of dignity, as carrying on, jointly with and parallel to the church, the education of the world. As specimens of the first of these results, we select the following:

:

"In the Mosaic system there is very little directly spiritual." (p. 8.) "It is clear that the Pharisaic teaching contained elements of a more spiritual religion than the original Mosaic system." (p. 10.)

"The careful study of the law (as introduced into the synagogue service after the return from captivity,) was yet in itself a more intellectual service than the earlier records exhibit." (p. 10.)

"The Hebrews are described as a people whose extraordinary toughness of nature enabled them to outlive the Egyptian Pharaohs, Assyrian kings, Roman Cæsars, and Mussulman caliphs.'" (p. 14.)

"By the same extraordinary toughness of nature they were well matched against a power of evil,' (sensuality and the animal passions), 'which has battled with the human spirit ever since the creation.'" (p. 14.)

"Asia was the instrument selected to teach the Hebrews the immor

* It will be at once seen that this passage is exceedingly confused, and even contradictory; in the former part of it we are told that the natural religions were systems of law, and that they were given by God. Afterwards we read that they were accompanied by such systems of law, and that both the natural reli

gions and the systems of law sprang from the temper and character of the several nations; we need scarcely add, that no two sources can be conceived more entirely opposed to each other than God on the one hand, and the temper and character of heathendom on the other.

tality of the soul; for whatever may be said of the early nations on this subject, it is unquestionable that in Babylon the Jews first attained the clearness and certainty in regard to it, which we find in the teaching of the Pharisees." (p. 19.)

The following passages illustrate the second result-the undue elevation of the heathen :

"Although it is likely enough that" (under the Christian dispensation) "the unconverted people may have a real part to play, that part must be plainly quite subordinate, subordinate in a sense in which neither Rome, nor Greece, nor perhaps even Asia, was subordinate to Judæa.” (p. 15.)

"Rome learned her lesson as the Hebrews had learned theirs, by an enforced obedience to their own system." (p. 16.)

"It is in the history of Rome, rather than in the Bible, that we find our models and precepts of political duty, and especially of the duty of patriotism... except through general appeals to natural feeling, it would be difficult to prove from the New Testament that cowardice was not only disgraceful but sinful, and that love of our country was an exalted duty of humanity. That lesson our consciences have learnt from the teaching of ancient Rome." (p. 17.)

"The Hebrews may be said to have disciplined the human conscience, Rome the human will, Greece the reason and taste, Asia the spiritual imagination." (p. 19.)

"Saints had gone before" (the time of Christ's appearance as the great Example)" and saints have been given since; great men and good men had lived among the heathen; there were never, at any time, examples wanting to teach either the chosen people or any other." (p. 24.)

"The common workman of the days of Greece breathed the atmosphere of the gods; ... in the great monuments of their literature we can taste this pure inspiration most largely." (p. 27.)

We cannot follow into detail all that is expressed or involved in the passages here collected, but we will attempt a short outline of what we conceive to be scriptural truth upon this subject, and direct attention to some of the greater deviations from it in Dr. Temple's essay. The Bible gives us this view of God's dealings with the world:-The fall of man was followed by the universal corruption of man's nature; when the deluge had swept away one generation, their successors inherited the same fallen nature; and notwithstanding the precepts given to Noah and his family, and some traditions of divine truth which probably long continued amongst the nations of the earth, idolatry prevailed universally : then it was that God called a single individual, Abram, himself the member of an idolatrous family (Josh. xxiv. 2,) to be the confessor of a pure and holy faith, and in himself and his descendants to form God's church in the midst of a world sunk in error and sin. The very characteristic of the Jewish church and people, descended from Abraham, was isolation and separation from the other nations of the earth. "I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people . . . and ye shall be holy unto

me; for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people that ye should be mine." (Lev. xx. 24-26.) The object of minute ceremonial prescriptions sanctioned by Divine command, which Dr. Temple regards as "utterly irreconcileable with our present feelings," was to maintain this separation, and to test the principles of unquestioning submission and obedience to the command of God, which, it may be remarked, are as essential points in the Christian character as those in the Jewish; to lead up the mind, by a visible and material process, to some conceptions of the Divine holiness and perfections, and in different ways and degrees to prepare the way for the more spiritual dispensation of the gospel. In the meanwhile, as regards the heathen, "God suffered all nations to walk in their own ways" (Acts xiv. 16); whither those ways led them, their own writers sufficiently testify, and besides the inspired description of Rom. i., all is summed up in the brief but fearful expression of Ephes. ii. 12, "without God in the world." In the face of Rom. i. 22-25, and many similar statements, to affirm that the religions of nature, including the impure and lying legends of Greece and Rome, the animal worship of Egypt, and the sun-worship of the East, are "given by God" and parts of the "economy of Providence," is simply for the purpose of a baseless theory to controvert the plainest declarations of God's own word.

We maintain, in opposition to Dr. Temple, that God's Jewish church was, during that dispensation, the exclusive depository of religious truth, and not only of what might, "in a pre-eminent sense," be termed so ;-that the Mosaic system contained much which was directly spiritual, as appealing to the affections, and demanding the service of the heart (e. g. Deut. iv. 9, 39; vi. 5; viii. 2, 3; x. 12; xxx. 6; and passim);-that it was of a far more spiritual character than the Pharisaic teaching during our Lord's ministry, as He himself demonstrates (Matt. xxiii. 1—29), in the course of which long and severe denunciation, the only ground of approval in respect to the Pharisees was that derived from their sitting in Moses' seat;-that the careful and spiritual study of the law was enjoined distinctly and fully in the books of Moses;—that the immortality of the soul was learned by revelation from God, and not from the heathen sages or Chaldean astrologers of Babylon; although as affliction throws us back upon meditation and communion with God, and so enables the soul to realise eternal things, as it fails to do under any other circumstances, we can easily conceive that many a Jew of the Babylonish captivity then most fully appreciated the value of his eternal inheritance, and under exile and hardship solaced himself with the anticipation of its rest and blessedness;-that, as by the waters of Babylon he sat down and wept, his mind would remember the heavenly as well as the earthly Zion; and the Jew might derive from his own scriptures in Babylon blessed hopes which he could not learn from Babylon. But above and beyond

all other extravagances of this essay, we are most amazed at the blindness or wilfulness which, in the face of the revealed purposes and prophecies of God, can attribute the preservation to this day of the Jewish people, amidst the wreck and amalgamation of other nations, to an "extraordinary toughness of nature." When was this "extraordinary toughness of nature" acquired? It certainly is not to be found in the earlier days of the wilderness state, when every adult disappeared in forty years. Why will not Dr. Temple acknowledge "the hand of the Lord" to be now as manifestly evidenced in the preservation of this people as it then was in their destruction? (Deut. ii. 14, 15; and xxviii. 58-65.)

On those passages which unduly elevate the heathen, we will merely remark, that moral excellence, however great, is not to be confounded with acts of religious duty, animated by God's Spirit and directed to God's glory. We do not question the intellectual greatness of Greece, or the valour and patriotism of Rome; nor do we venture to pass beyond what is revealed, and curiously inquire how God will deal with such men as Socrates and Plato, and the like; but whatever our admiration of intellectual or moral excellence, wherever manifested, we cannot confound these with the graces of the Holy Spirit, as displayed in the saints of the Bible. We believe that the truth of God's word upon this head is clearly and correctly expressed in our 18th Article, on Works before Justification, which must have had Dr. Temple's consideration as a clergyman of the English church; and we can only say, that if he still thinks that the maker of gods and goddesses, or any other heathen artificer, writer, or worshipper, when "breathing the atmosphere of the gods of Greece and Rome," imbibed thereby a pure inspiration," he differs very widely from the wisest of the heathen themselves; who clearly saw through the vanity of their system, and even appreciated the immoral influence of their mythology. The philosophers dwelt much upon this point, and even Ovid justifies his own licentious poems upon the ground of the demoralizing character of the gods of Rome:

Quis locus est templis augustior; hæc quoque vitet,

In culpam si qua est ingeniosa suam.

Dum steterit Jovis æde, Jovis succurret in æde,

Quam multas matres fecerit ille Deus.

Proxima adoranti Junonia templa subibit

Pellicibus multis hanc doluisse Deam, &c."-Trist. ii. 287.

2. The Bible, like the church, is depreciated, and regarded, and dealt with as an ordinary book. Thus we are told:

"There is little in them" (the four gospels) "to be technically called doctrine." (p. 26.)

"The early church stands as the example which has most influenced our religious life, as Greece and Rome have most in