Bushnell, with his views of the will, say: "The functions of the soul are all intractable to its sovereignty; it were easier for a man's will to gather all the birds of the sky into martial order, and march them as a squadron through the tempests of the air, than to turn back the current of penal disaster under which he has sunk." But while we do not see how, with such a philosophy, he comes to such a saying, we can easily adopt it as our own, and be glad that Christian experience sometimes leads men to feel the weight of that pollution, which a corrupt philosophy is so ready to deny. We cannot understand how a man is to make himself holy by an independent act of choice. He may have a natural ability to be holy, as well as to be sinful; in other words, may be a rational man, whose powers of thought and feeling are applicable to holy objects, as well as sinful. But this natural ability, which means nothing else than that he has all the capacities of a moral agent, is not a positively efficient ability in originating holiness. The question is upon turning the inclination upward, when it is going downward. The whole soul is bent upon sin, swallowed up in it. The propelling power to what is holy is all departed, and the living energies of the man are pressing him towards deeper and deeper vileness. How is this inward bent to sin to turn against itself? When was this Satan casting out Satan, ever made a part of human history? When has the obstinate energy of hatred turned itself to the tender and vehement force of love? If the carnal mind, which is enmity against God, is the mind of the sinner, if it is his character, his controlling influence, what inability can be more entire than his to take upon himself, by a single choice, the spiritual mind, which is life and peace? The objects presented before him in the invitations and warnings of the Gospel may be good. They are the outward part of the motive, through which he is to be saved; but they succeed or fail of success, according to the state of the mind. The crop depends upon both seed and soil. The motive, which determines the will, arises from both object and disposition united. All hearts are in God's hand, to form them as he pleases. When he has formed them into his own holy image, when he has given us

the new birth, then all the graces of the Spirit will readily follow in the train of those glorious truths presented in the word, and the individual acts of will help us as certainly toward heaven, as they now carry us toward hell. Apart from this prerogative of God to change the mind, the exclamation must be over all our labors, Paul plants and Apollos watereth in vain.

The question, also, seems settled, that there may be such a thing as a morally necessary holiness. God's holiness is necessary. The Scriptures may rightly say, that God "cannot lie," that it is "impossible for God to lie," that he "cannot deny himself." There is an impossibility of his doing it, because he is God. This necessary holiness of God even Armininians acknowledge. Dr. Clark says: "The Supreme Being must do always what is best upon the whole. An infinitely wise being can no more choose to act in contradiction to wisdom and goodness, than a necessary agent can act contrary to the necessity by which it is acted." Thus says Clark, and so say we, that the perfection of the Deity is this, that his unalterable nature makes his will unalterably holy. So the more a man is beyond the effect of these individual and transient choices, the more he is under what is sometimes called the "immanent choice," the more he is necessarily holy; the more like God, and the more perfect he will be. And if there can be such a thing as an uncreated necessary holiness in God, which is to be the moving spring of the will, and not its offspring, then it is easy to pass to the idea, that there may be such a thing as holiness made necessary by divine power in man, which is to be the moving spring of their will, and not the offspring of it. One of the strange phenomena of theological speculation is the notion, that no character can be created, or exist, without the will's specific action to bring it into being. God is said to have no character till he has chosen it by volition, for to take upon one's self a character voluntarily is to take it by volition. Adam is said to have had no character, till by choice he produced one. Now it seems to us no less absurd to suppose that a person creates himself, than that he creates the faculties and dispositions, which make up himself. The person is created with dispositions, and these dispositions must have a character

determined by the character of the objects to which they prompt us. Jesus Christ, when born of Mary, was the " holy thing," and did not wait to become holy by acts of choice. The benevolence of heart which Adam showed, when fresh from the hand of his Maker, was no more the effect of an act of choice on his part, than his own existence.

The question, also, seems settled, that the fore-knowledge of the Deity is consistent with the action of the will of men. They would not be consistent, were there any independent action of the will, any such thing as individual choice, going forth to make a character, and going forth as easily to alter it again. But when the will has its settled laws, when it acts only from motives, and its action is always the same when the motives are the same, then God, who knows all outward objects, and all secret intentions, may tell just how men will act in the several stages of their being. He does not depend for his knowledge upon what possibly may be, but upon what certainly will be, while the laws of the universe continue as constituted at first.

Bishop Horsley says, in reviewing the controversy upon predestination: "So far as these necessarians maintain the certain influence of moral motives, as the natural and sufficient means whereby human actions, and even human thoughts, are brought into that continued chain of causes and effects, which, taking its beginning in the operations of the Infinite Mind, cannot but be fully understood by him, so far they do service to the cause of truth; placing the great and glorious doctrines of fore-knowledge and providence-absolute fore-knowledge, universal providence, upon a firm and philosophical foundation." We cannot but feel, that the Bishop is right in supposing that all firm and philosophical foundation for the foreknowledge of God is lost, when human actions are separated from the chain of causes and effects, and nothing is left but an unregulated self-moving will, whose only definite feature is, that its movements are independent, not to be inferred from any thing prior to themselves, or safely calculated until they

are seen.

It is easy to see the origin of those views respecting the

human will, which differ from the ones here expressed. They were meant to be a way of escape, with some from any thing like native depravity, redemption, sovereignty of grace, supernatural conversion, and with others, from the difficulties which attend a bias to sin, when it is declared not to be truly and properly sinful. "But the bed is shorter than that a man can stretch himself on it; and the covering narrower than that he can wrap himself in it." Sin and regeneration both become comparatively shallow. God is no more justified than before by such an explanation of the difficulties that attend his government, nor does man feel more deeply the obligations to obedience. The world is not thus made any more ready or sure to learn the lesson, that "the wisdom of men is foolishness with God."

ART. V. THE PEARL OF GREAT PRICE: THE PLA-
TONIC AND THE EVANGELICAL IDEA.

BY TAYLER LEWIS, LL.D., SCHENECTADY, N. Y.

NOTHING Seems more secular than the language of the exchange or the mart, and yet it is this language and this imagery which the Scripture employs to express one of its most holy and heavenly ideas. "The kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchantman seeking goodly pearls, who when he hath found one pearl of great price, goeth straightway and selleth all that he hath and buyeth it." As in the parable of the unjust steward, the most worldly conceptions are made the medium of the highest truth. Buying and selling, barter, profit, yea, something like what we would call the spirit of speculation, or haste to secure the advantage by obtaining the best and earliest bargain, are the prominent thoughts that are thus sanctified, as it were, and converted to a sacred use.

And this is in accordance with what would seem to be a favorite kind of imagery, whenever the same idea is presented in other parts of the Bible. It is as though there was nothing

which men would so readily understand in its outward form, or which would, therefore, take a deeper hold when once its spiritual import had truly penetrated the soul.

"The pearl of great price :" the expression has become proverbial as a name for one of the most precious portions of our Lord's teaching. So perfectly plain is it, however, that the only outward interpretation needed is to put it in parallelism with the same or kindred images in other portions of the Bible, and exhibit its place in the Scriptural analogy, that is, its harmony with the Biblical spirit and the controlling Biblical ideas. It calls to mind the priceless wisdom of Job 28: 16: "The pure gold (the segur or gold of the treasury) shall not be given for it; the choicest silver shall not be weighed as its price. It cannot be valued with the stamped gold of Ophir, with the precious onyx or the sapphire. There shall be no mention of pearls or of agates in comparison with it; it shall not be priced by the topaz of Ethiopia; for the possession of wisdom is above that of rubies." Compare also Proverbs 3:15:"Blessed is the man that findeth wisdom; for her merchandise is better than the merchandise of silver, and her exchange than the choice gold; she is of higher price than pearls, and all that thou canst desire is not to be compared to her."

In all these rich figures, and especially in the language of our Saviour, there would seem to be something more than the thought merely of comparative value. There is a deeper mercantile idea known to the ancient, and still more familiar to the modern mind. This costly possession not only excells all other things in exchangeable worth, but is itself the ground of all other value. It is the voμopa (numisma, nummus) in the highest sense, the pure, and genuine, and undepreciable money -itself the regulative standard of exchange. The price of every thing else is to be determined by it. Without it all other wealth is baseless, all other credit but bankruptcy and spiritual ruin. This idea also comes out in the Hebrew of Proverbs 47. "Wisdom is the principal thing," the summa capitalis; for such would seem to be the meaning of

here. Wisdom is the principium-the beginning, as well as