not in being without law, but in having good laws, which they hold sacred and inviolable. And if, as in this country, and among the Congregational churches, we make our own laws, we ought to hold them all the more sacred. If they were imposed upon us by external arbitrary power, we might have some reason for evading or disregarding them; but as it is, we have no excuse. It is for this reason that we have so often adverted to the necessity of adhering to the laws and usages of the churches. In this way, alone, can unity of faith, and worship, and effort be secured. And if these pages may be instrumental, in any degree, in contributing to this result, we shall feel that we are amply repaid.

ARTICLE II.

THE SIN AGAINST THE HOLY GHOST.

BY THE REV. HORATIO N. BURTON, NEWBURY, VT.

A Sermon preached at Plymouth church April 3, 1864. By Rev. HENRY WARD BEECHER.

"Verily, I say unto you, All sins shall be forgiven unto the sons of men, and blasphemies wherewith soever they shall blaspheme: But he that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgiveness, but is in danger of eternal damnation: Because they said, He hath an unclean spirit."-Mark iii. 28-30.

In order to any just estimate of this sermon, we need a clear statement of the nature of this sin as plainly made known to us in the word of God.

I. And first, according to the Bible, this sin is of a particular and specific character, distinguished by its very nature and form from all other sins. From all the possible forms of sin our Saviour singles out this alone and sets a special mark upon it. "All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men, but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men." This language certainly discriminates. It shows us that the sin against the Holy Ghost is a specific sin, differing in certain essential particulars from all other sins, and consequently in no way to be confounded or put into the same category with them.

II. A second characteristic of this sin is that it is specifically against the Holy Ghost, not simply against the Godhead, but against the Third Person in the Trinity. Blasphemy and indeed all sin against the Father and against the Son, can be forgiven, but not this against the Spirit. By reason of the object against which it is aimed, it is unpardonable. But as all sins are against the Triune God and so may be said to be against the Holy Ghost, our Lord marks out this sin by a third unmistakeable characteristic.

III. It is a sin of blasphemy, a sin of the tongue, of word rather than of deed. "Whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him." Or as Mark has it: "He that shall blaspheme against the Holy Ghost hath never forgivness, but is in danger of eternal damnation; because they said, 'He hath an unclean spirit."" It was what they said that at once furnished an occasion for our Saviour's warning and constituted the sin against which he warned them. It was blasphemous language, an open and verbal attributing of the work and power of the Holy Spirit to Satanic agency. Hence:

IV. It is a public, not a secret sin. Blasphemy from its very nature can not be secret. Dr. Emmons has well said on this point: "When the Scribes and Pharisees committed this sin, they spoke against the Holy Ghost before a multitude of people, with a malicious design of sinking his character and miraculous operations in the view of the world. And no man at this day, can be guilty of the unpardonable sin without blaspheming the Holy Ghost in public, or speaking against his peculiar operations in the hearing of others."

It is this reviling the Spirit in public that distinguishes the unpardonable sin from other sins against the Spirit. Men may resist, provoke, grieve and quench the Spirit, and yet not be guilty of the unpardonable sin. The one element in which all these forms of sin against the Spirit come short of the unpardonable sin, is an open, malicious, verbal ascription of the operations of the Holy Ghost to Satanic or other infernal agency. This would imply a depravity from which there is no possible recovery, a guilt not expiated even by the blood of Jesus Christ.

V. A final characteristic, therefore, of this sin is that it is unpardonable. He who commits it stands without the pale of the divine forgiveness. No change of time, place or circumstance can bring him within the sphere of God's mercy. "He hath never forgiveness, neither in this world, neither in the -world to come."

Having these plain and undeniable data of the Scriptures before us, as our criterion of judgment, we pass to a statement of the views advocated in the sermon under consideration.

And at the outset Mr. Beecher informs us that this sin against the Holy Ghost is not a specific sin, but a generic state or condition of the soul. This is his language:

"It is not an action; it is a condition of disposition or heart from which certain kinds of action are developed. It is generic; and like all generic states, it may to-day manifest itself in one way and tomorrow in another way. It is not an acute disease; it is It is the sin of condition, of the whole

At first

a chronic state. moral condition, and not the sin of a specific act. sight the language of the text seems to indicate that there is such a thing as a single sin, a single act that is so criminal, so heinous, that God will never forgive it. It is certainly true that the command reads as if the unpardonable sin consisted in a single and specific act. This has been the general opinion, and it is yet the popular impression; ... teachers and commentators have united in teaching that there was some specific action of wickedness which might properly be called the unpardonable sin."

Thus much in the way of mere assertion, our reverend sermonizer gives us in his introduction. He makes no attempt to draw his doctrine from his text by expounding its simple language, but admits that this is obviously against him, as is the almost universal exposition of it by teachers and commentators.

Let us pass, then, to the main body of the sermon. And here he entertains us with sundry rectorical flourishes respecting the fearful depths of depravity to which men may reduce themselves and to which the Scribes and Pharisees had actually reduced themselves, stigmatizing them, beyond what they deserve perhaps, as the progressives and radicals of their day, though in this he flatly contradicts his own language a few months ago when he said they, with Herod and the devil, were the conservatives of their day. This state of intensified de

pravity and rocky insensibility it is that he again affirms, without any proof, to be the unpardonable sin. "We sec," he remarks, "and recognize in common life that state of mind which Christ denounced in the Pharisees as unpardonable. There are men that everybody gives up. There are men whose families even regard them as incurables." The only scriptural proof he addresses to show that the unpardonable sin is an incurable moral state, is Paul's description of the condition of the Gentile world as recorded in Rom. chap. 1st and Eph. chap. 4th but with great impropriety as we shall yet see.

We now have his theory and all the proof of it he adduces, clearly before us; upon which we remark:

First, that it directly contradicts the distinguishing characteristics of the unpardonable sin as plainly given us in the Scrip

tures.

These make it an act of sin, a specific kind of sin, separate and distinct from all other sins. He says it is not an act at all, but a state; not specific, but generic; not a single sin, but a result of all other sins.

The Scriptures say it is a sin aimed specially at the Holy Ghost, and from this fact alone has peculiar guilt attaching to it. But with any construction you may put upon Mr. Beecher's theory, this sin is no more against the Holy Ghost than it is against the Father or the Son. It is a result of all sin, a state or condition of the soul; but how can such a result, state, or condition, induced by all sins, be any more against one person of the Trinity than another? This he does not deign to tell us. Indeed he argues that the unpardonable sin is not specifically against the Holy Ghost. Hear him: "If it be said that this unpardonable sin is sufficiently defined as being blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, we ask, 'What is blasphemy against the Holy Ghost? Is that a specific, or is it the carriage of a man's life and disposition? In point of fact, anything that is supposed to constitute blasphemy against the Holy Ghost has apparently been committed and recovered from by men." Accordingly he never speaks of the unpardonable sin as against the Holy Ghost, but rather as against conscience, our manhood, our sensibilities, and the like.

Again, the unpardonable sin, according to the Bible, is a sin

of the tongue; it is speaking against the Holy Ghost, blaspheming the Spirit. Now speaking, blaspheming is undeniably an act of man, not a condition or state of his soul. Undeniably, therefore, our sermonizer is wide of the truth. Doubtless what a man speaks springs out of a state of his heart. But our Saviour nowhere says that this immanent state of the heart is unpardonable, but the overt act which proceeds from it.

Hence again, while the word of God represents this sin as open, avowed and public, Mr. Beecher represents it as personal and private. According to the Bible it is an act of speech addressed to the public ear; according to Mr. Beecher it is a state of the heart concealed in the individual's own breast.

Again, Christ says it is an unpardonable sin; Mr. Beecher, that it is an incurable state. The former says it shall never be forgiven, neither in this world, neither in the world to come; the latter, that it is "a state in which a man's conscience becomes so dead that there is no resurrection from it in this life." Would he by this limiting adjunct keep the way open for forgiveness in some future age? It is the convenient escape of a certain class of errorists. And if you tell them the Saviour says "neither in the world to come," they reply that this means the age to come, implying that in some after age there will be forgiveness even for this sin.

Our second general criticism of Mr. Beecher's theory is that it ignores certain essential distinctions everywhere recognized in the word of God. Here as elsewhere in his theological utterances, he utterly confounds guilt or criminality with depravity, and punishment with chastisement. Sin is never with him a crime against God to be expiated, but a disease of man's soul to be cured. It is a thing not so much to be punished as corrected. It is an infirmity or weakness, not so properly subject to the arbitraments of justice as to the dictates of compassion, a sort of negative condition out of which man needs to be brought by discipline and culture, and not a positive offence against God. And in keeping with this view of sin, is his view of the atonement. It is only a grand catholicon, a universal panacea, simply an expedient, or display to educate and impress men rather than a satisfaction to divine justice to expiate their guilt.