intrude some intervention between our race and the broken and clamorous law of Heaven, and also to dispense, by a mediatorial office, the Holy Spirit in the world as a cleansing and renewing influence upon corrupted hearts and the universal impotence of will. No other conception of divine agency is of any worth to him, because that alone is related to his conception of the needs of human nature; that alone supplies the complement for our moral insufficiency. The Catholic interfuses a vast sacredotal and sacramental scheme with his conception of grace and the providential portion of the word salvation. If you strike out the guardianship of a hierarchical church and the miraculous replenishment of spiritual power by the sacred ordinances, the idea of divine agency and redemption is shrivelled to insignificance, in his view; for it is no longer pertinent to his theory of what the race lost by Adam, and of our need of deliverance through a corporate and transmissive energy of grace in society. So the Arminian, so the Quaker, so the Unitarian estimates the amount, the kind, and the methods of heavenly assistance through the Bible, Christ, and the Holy Spirit, in the light of their conceptions of human nature-of what it is made for, of what it needs in order that it may fulfil its destiny, and of what God can give it, consistently with the laws of his providence and his design in the creation of free souls. It is absolutely essential, therefore, to an interpretation of our view of grace and its agency in salvation, that we keep it always in relation with our idea of man and his needs; for what God does in our behalf is precisely that which we cannot do for ourselves, and which is needed to help us attain the spiritual condition which He contemplates for us.

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But we may be told that we are to derive our idea of salvation and of God's agency in it, from the Scriptures. Certainly; but we must be careful, in our search for the testimony of the Christian records, that we conduct our examination in accordance with the laws of success. great many of the words and phrases which the Scriptures use in regard to this subject, are very general and comprehensive. The effort of every mind that is really reverent towards revelation, will be to interpret them so that they will stand in harmony with all the other

plain, or assumed principles of divine government which the New Testament recognizes. This is no easy task. Look at these phrases, for instance: "Thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins;" "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world;""Jesus Christ came into the world to save sinners ;" "God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself;" "I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me;" "No man can come unto me, except the Father who hath sent me draw him." How luminous these statements are, and yet, how indefinite as to methods! Sometimes they are quoted to prove that man has little or no agency in his own salvation, but is under the complete control of a system of means, in which God and Christ alone are active. Yet there is room for numberless theories of the ways in which Christ saves men, and draws them, and of the processes by which God, through Jesus, shall reconcile the world to himself. Every thing depends on the contents we ascribe to the words "save," "take away," "draw," and "reconcile." We do not necessarily get at the contents, by quoting the phrases. Many a man has shut himself out from the deep inward significance of Christian principles and declarations, by substituting the process of putting phrases together, according to verbal associations, and reasoning from words, for the process of breaking open words to find the exact thought they imprison, and then bending his intellect to a proper correlation of Christian ideas.

God does not suffer us to gain spiritual wisdom by mere tesselation of texts. It should seem that He had warned us from that method of dealing with the Bible, by ordaining that its various books should be cast in the most diverse literary forms, and composed in the most richly diversified states of mind,-under the pressure of the most various inward impulses and social necessities. As if he would compel us to take into account, the peculiar light cast upon inspired utterances from the temperament of the teacher; whether he were prophet, psalmist, philosopher, or apostle; whether he wrote in imagery, parable, or abstract phrase; whether he was endeavoring to reach darkened and hostile minds, by the skilful arrangements

and combinations of rhetoric, or was developing spiritual truth, without reference to human opposition, or any practical emergency, in the untinged language of universal thought. It often happens, that by the mechanical way in which so many people quote Scripture, without regard to the style of the books and the object of the writer, passages are brought together, having no more inward affinity than a lily and a crystal, and a principle from an Epistle used as an argument against some burning sentence of a Prophet, with as much propriety as the cold gripe of mathematics might be invoked to choke a fervid statement in an ode.

It is plain, also, that the law which we have spoken of as determining the significance of the word salvation, among sects, holds equally with regard to the Scripture. That is, the divine agency implied in the Bible, will be related to the Biblical ideas of the state in which man is, to the estimate of his powers, and the conception of the doom that is over him. It will refer to the difficulties that block his spiritual path, to the view assumed of what man was made for, and the deepest desire of God with regard to him. In order to be sure, therefore, of the amount and character of the divine agency which the Scriptural usage of the terms salvation and redemption involves, we must not only collect and collate the passages in which those terms occur, but we must set them in relation with the steady assumptions concerning human nature, which characterize the New Testament; we must reflect light upon them from the conceptions of human ability and need that lie on the face of the gospel. What God has decreed and will do in the work of salvation, answers to, and completes, what man cannot do, and helps the work which He desires to see accomplished in the human soul. Plainly, it is a much more difficult thing to gather out of the whole range of the New Testament, two conceptions: of divine and of human agency, properly related to each other, and fairly expressing the assumptions of the gospel, with regard to man, and its revelations with regard to God, than it is to isolate the passages that describe either the human, or the divine agency, separately, and hitch them together as a mechanical creed.

One of the safest and surest tests, therefore, of the Evan

gelical authority of any interpretation of divine agency in salvation, is to try how it will fit the general flow of exhortation and appeal to the human conscience, affections, and will, that distinguish the Bible. If it is out of symmetry with these, no matter how many texts we may cull and conjoin to set it forth, it is as certain that we are wrong, as it is that there is harmony of sense in the New Testament; and we may be sure that, instead of arriving at a Biblical principle, we have only manufactured a mosaic work of words.

What more forcible refutation is needed of the Calvinistic, or, in fact, of any sacrificial theory of divine grace in salvation, than to confront it with the general tenor of the Saviour's ministry among the inhabitants of Palestine? Can any collocation of Scriptural phrases establish that theory as an evangelical doctrine, if the Saviour's personal and practical dealings with human hearts, did not assume it, involve it, imply and enforce it? Would it not be the key-note, the central and ever recurring theme, wherever Jesus went, and whomsoever he talked with ' I have come to save you from the doom of nature and the everlasting grasp of God's angry law? Would not every one of his discourses, and his personal interviews, be intoned with a cry to this effect,—' believe in me and the sacrifice I am to offer on the cross, as your only avenue of escape from ceaseless retribution-your only hope of happiness hereafter!' The The passages from the four Gospels which are brought to defend this theory, are of the most general character: "Behold the Lamb of God which taketh away the sin of the world;""Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many," &c. To one whose religious ideas of sacrifice and ransom are permeated with a Calvinistic color, these texts, when isolated and placed in the proper setting, read very friendly to his creed.

But what will he say when he finds that the Saviour did not teach or hint the doctrine of total corruption and inability in his practical dealings with sinful men and women? and yet without that doctrine there is no call for a sacrificial grace. What will he say when he finds the Sermon on the Mount, silent concerning the need of an

atoning death, and appealing to men to recognize a higher sanctity and charity by their natural conscience, than the law had claimed? What will he say when he sees that Jesus spoke to Nicodemus of the Holy Spirit-not as a constituent personality of the God-head, not as a sanctifying influence purchased for believers by his own. death, but as an invisible and secret agency, omnipresent as the air, and catholic as the breeze? How will he account for the fact that the Young Lawyer, asking for the method of eternal life, was not instructed in any imputed righteousness, or directed to any spiritual abasement before the bloody cross soon to rise on Calvary, but was probed by a question that tested the vigor of his consecration and the sweep of his charity? How will he explain the parable of the Prodigal, which intrudes no mediator between the filial sorrow, and the parental pardon; or the Lord's prayer, that asks directly for forgiveness without reference to a dying God; or the picture of the king in judgement, showing us souls accepted by their unconscious merits, and not by their evangelical faith? How will he interpret the fact that Jesus mingled with the marriage party at Cana, and conversed with the Samaritan woman, and sat at Simon's table, and came in contact with scribes, Pharisees, and Publicans, whom, probably, he was never to meet after that one interview, and whose only hope of salvation, according to the sacrificial theory of grace, lay in a reliance upon his redemptive death, and yet never mentioned it, but talked and preached in a manner that would provoke against any modern preacher of religion, the charge of hiding the distinctive features of the gospel, and tampering with the everlasting welfare of souls? Is it not plain that the Calvinistic idea of sacrificial mediation does not fit the Saviour's conception of the position, needs, and perils of the soul? It is disproved by Christ's dealings with human. nature. The practical side of the gospel, forces us to a different interpretation of those passages that might verbally seem to support it, and repels the intellect to a search for a theory of grace, that will be in harmony with its appeals and demands.

Suppose now, that, instead of the Calvinistic scheme of divine agency in salvation, another interpretation is of