he criticises the faithfulness of his creatures, and permits no nearer access than an awe-struck worship. Our system of thought, to be Christian, must recognize a God of whose spirit the sun is a type, who is ever giving himself to his children, present in every part of his universe, keeping a positive interest at every moment in the spiritual welfare of every soul, and never dropping the twisted rein of law and love that binds it to his throne. Only the idea of a personal Ruler, Educator, Father, whose unbending laws are the steady pulses of immediate interest and discipline, can answer to the picture of the Hebrew Father who hastened to the wanderer, and to the symbolic revelation in Jesus, who came "to seek and to save that which was lost."

It does not follow, however, that a love which thus holds every spirit, in time and eternity, by its direct grasp, must manifest itself always, or at the beginning of the next life any more than here,-in a flood of mercy, which amounts to miraculous help in the purification of the heart. The laws of character are part of that grace. All the obstacles, difficulties, and roughness that condition the strength of virtue here, belong to the ground-plan of its wisdom. And it may belong to the very essence of parental wisdom and clemency to keep the connections of the soul to its government, sometimes by the thread of retribution,-if such an element is required for the vigor of virtue, or if such a thread is necessary to keep the organic connections of the soul with its earthly life; and to change the ties, or in other words, the manifestations of interest, according to the needs of that spirit that is trained. Nothing can be more unphilosophical than to imagine that all souls, varying as they do in temperament, constitution, experience, worthiness and guilt, will require precisely the same expression of government and mercy towards them, on their entrance to the future. If personal character, consistent with the methods of training, in this life be the supreme object, as we believe, of Providence, the aspects and demonstrations of love at the commencement of the next life must differ. To be Christian, we must hold to the fact that grace must pervade all the spaces, and reach through all the ranks of spirits, in the invisible world; but let us not refuse or fear to contem

plate it as essentially the same grace that is manifest in this life ;-including many moral rays, some soft and some stern, in the white light of its love; as evident, at times, in patient punishment, as in blessings that surprise; and combining the most various methods of discipline with the laws of a perfect and ever unfolding order.

We need, also, to hold a doctrine of positive and personal grace in order to feel sure that all inequalities of birth, opportunity and privilege, in this life, form part of one system, and are comprehended in a plan that foresees the exact compensations of circumstance in the opportunities of the future. Those who believe in this life as a final state of probation, have never been able to make these inequalities fit into their scheme; and it is equally hard to make them handsome and symmetrical portions of the porch to eternity, on the theory that swallows up all training in the next life, by making character there a necessary and immediate inheritance.

There is scarcely any necessity-since we write in a Universalist Review, to say that we must hold to a grace which foresees the victory of goodness, and that the gift of existence to every soul will prove an everlasting blessing to it. Against every theory that darkens the character of God by any imputed decree of eternal punishment, or any philosophy that makes the atmosphere of eternity seem dusky and cold by the permeating presence of moral laws alone, we should affirm such a doctrine of grace as vital. And yet we must so hold it, that entire respect shall be paid to God's plain system of training free and strong agents to serve and love him. We must so hold it, that the seriousness of life in struggle and discipline, and the great meaning of the words conversion, consecration and sanctification, shall not be abated a jot. We must so hold it, that the practical character of the Gospels, and the infrequency of Christ's allusions to that triumph, shall look harmonious with the position we give it in our scheme of religious thought. We must so relate it to other conceptions of God's government, that we can read the most vivid descriptions by the Saviour of the evil of sin, and of its corrupting strength when it becomes a habit, without any reluctance to accept its imagery. We must so hold it, that no soul, having the advantages of conscience and

Christian influence, shall have a right to feel from our presentation of it, that it will ever be any easier for him to conquer evil habit and realize the aspirations which he slights, than it is for him now; but that the appeals of Christ, conscience, Christian preaching and heavenly love, have a seriousness which the next world also endorses and upholds. In short, we must so hold it, that the victory of love shall seem the result of a free yielding of hearts to a discipline intended to invigorate character,-a result in harmony with every portion of the system of training here.

We have now to ask, if there are any obvious facts, principles, or implications of the New Testament, which oppose the view we have unfolded. And we are remind-· ed, in the first place that the conversion of St. Paul is often urged as an objection to the philosophy on which our system is based. He, it is said, was instantly converted by miracle, without any agency of his own, from a wicked persecutor into an apostle of the gospel. And it is urged that, if the grace of God could override what are called the laws of character and training in his case, by miraculous change of circumstances, it may do so for all men, at their entrance upon the future life. But, allowing all that is claimed for this conversion, it is improper to reason from the exceptions in God's government to the general principles of it. We do not deny that there is a miraculous thread running through the religious history of the world. Some men are raised to be teachers. They are supernaturally selected, divinely commissioned, immediately illuminated, endowed often with powers of miracle. Plainly, we cannot conclude, from the gifts and experience of these men, what is the steady flow of divine providence for the vast majority of men. We do not give up the study of medicine under the Christian dispensation, because the first preachers of it possessed the gift of healing. We do not even expect that all our race shall have faculties like those of Shakspeare and Milton given to them at death, because God saw fit to kindle such intellects at birth in their mortal frames. One of the first necessities of accurate reasoning, is, to separate facts properly into classes, so as not to apply logic impertinently; and if the case of Paul should contravene our theory, we

could say that it belongs to the class of exceptional, providential facts,—just where his inspiration and miraculous endowments belong; and we are no more to reason from the first to the general laws of experience, than from the last.

But we are not so sure that the case of Paul does contravene our theory. By the light that smote him near Damascus, he was convicted of error, he was turned in a new direction. He himself recognized some personal agency in the assumption of the new career that was suggested, for he said to Agrippa, "I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision." And what were the succeeding stages of that experience? He went up blind to Damascus. The prayers and counsel of Ananias were necessary before he had any light upon his future path. If we could look into the chaotic turmoil of Saul's nature just after his mad career of persecution was arrested, and see how slowly, with what help of human agencies, and in what strict accordance with the general laws of growth, his mind was filled with light, and his soul filled with strength and peace, we should not be ready to ascribe the whole process to miracle, or to build a great induction upon it against the permanence of the divine system of education. According to Paul's account in Galatians, he was three-years engaged in meditation, inquiry and communion, before he had a conference with Peter and other apostles in Jerusalem; and by all the chronologers, it was six years from his conversion to the date of his first missionary tour.

Especially, we are not to suppose that the miracle which flashed over the field of truth, bewildering his brain by the mighty surprise it wrought, created his Christian character for him. We must not confound character with a single new direction or attitude of the will, a mistake, into which no one will deliberately fall. The intellect, the affections, the conscience, the tastes, come by slow fidelity under the control of a central consecration, before Christian character is reached. Acts reflow into capacity; volitions generate an organic fibre of habit; will tends to become impulse; successions of resistance gradually deposit a better love as a reward, so that the principle a man begins by serving, gains upon him as a force, transfuses its

power into the inner veins of emotion, transfigures him gradually with its light, and brings his intellect and affections and executive nature more easily into play, as the organs and agents of its mastery. Character is from the Greek word "charatto," to grave upon, or furrow into; and it is only when a succession of acts is bound together by a stream of moral purpose, which flows deeply in the silent realm of our nature, channelling it, as the tides furrow the beach, that strong moral character can be predicated of us. Now, in this sense, Paul's character obeyed the common spiritual law. It was in great part his own creation. He had struggles with appetite. He had to fight against the old passions, and the intolerant zeal that made him so fierce a persecutor. He was not swept along a strong, smooth current of emotion in the work of apostleship, but stemmed and breasted many eddies of passion and difficulty. Doubtless he sinned and was inwardly punished; doubtless he was sometimes perplexed and gained light through supplication, in despondency, too, and felt returning peace by obeying the conditions of it. He might have been less faithful than he was, and therefore he had a power of property in that Christian character which had been nourished to its strength through fortitude and prayer. He himself says, "I therefore so run, not as uncertainly; so fight I, not as one that beateth the air: but I keep under my body, and bring it into subjection: lest that by any means, when I have preached to others, I myself should be a castaway." How could he be a 66 castaway," what sense is there in these words, if his acceptance and reward were to be of a wholly unconditioned grace,—if there was no rewardable action of his personality in the labors of his apostleship? So to the Philippians he writes that he "presses forward" to an unattained prize. And surely his language to Timothy, "I have fought the good fight," &c., implies a deserving discharge of duty, for which he anticipated a future reward. Thus, the experience of the apostle lends itself to our position, that character is not a gift, but a selfwrought possession out of materials of grace, and that even miraculous conversions do not lift a soul above a possible sin, out of the necessity of difficult labor, or away from the duty of earning blessings according to the grade and richness of fidelity.