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brought into the account; and he expected the judgments of heaven to fall upon the country. If on other topics he was slow to utter an opinion, on this subject, through good report and evil report, on all fit occasions, and from the beginning, his sentiments were warmly declared. Professor GIBBS evinced his Christian faith by a consistent Christian life. We believe that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, he had his conversation in the world. He took low views of himself, and, as we might expect, was not free from serious misgivings in regard to his preparation for heaven. With his sensitive conscience, as he looked back upon life, he charged himself with faults, which those who knew him best would never have imputed to him. He felt, also, that his mind had been unduly taken up with the intellectual relations of religious truth. He fell back, in his last illness, upon the simplest verities of the Gospel. He was content to abide in these without striving to penetrate farther. He had dropped, he said, all thought upon the natural attributes of God, and mused on the moral attributes of his Heavenly Father,—leaving God, as he expressed it, "to manage His own worlds." "I know that God intends good for me;" "I must be saved through Jesus Christ alone;"-this was the sum of his faith. His last days were chiefly marked by a tender humility. It was instructive to see this teacher-after a life of three-score years and ten, spent in searching the Scriptures-resorting for consolation to the simple truth which a child comprehends. He died of old age,―calmly as an infant falls to sleep. The grief of his children will be softened by the recollection of his blameless life and peaceful death. His numerous pupils, the most of whom are actively engaged in preaching the Gospel, will revert to their association with him, with kind and grateful thoughts. And the sterling worth of this gentle, retiring, unassuming scholar, will remain in the memory of his friends and neighbors. We who have long been more or less conversant with him, who for years have seen him in his daily walks-wrapped in thought, withdrawn from the world around him, his head drooping upon his attenuated form-shall often be reminded of his absence. His accession

to the College at that particular juncture when the theological department was founded; the state of clerical education being as I have described it, and when the new German learning was to be introduced and applied to the exposition of the sacred volume; his colleagues, too, being what they were,able men and devoted to theology in its philosophical relations, was a happy event. It is clear to me that he has done a great and useful work.

Our old men are passing away. Since my own ministry began, three who were then in the vigorous performance of duty, have died; and now the fourth is added to their number. All but one of the original faculty of the Seminary, are gone. When we see the honored men on whom the burden of government and instruction in this ancient seat of learning formerly rested, and who carried its reputation and usefulness to the remotest corners of the land and across the ocean, disappear, one by one, we cry with the king of Israel, mourning for Elisha, "O my father, my father, the chariot of Israel, and the horsemen thereof!" Honor and love to those who survive! And when their time shall come, may they depart in peace and enter into the joy of their Lord!

It is solemn to think that the book of a human life is closed. Nothing more to be written there! Nothing more to be done on earth! Every day a new page is filled, a new leaf is turned. At length we reach the end. Then the awful question comes, what has been our purpose; what have we done? Happy are they who live not to themselves, who fill up their days with doing good, and whose hopes are on high!

ARTICLE III. THEOLOGY OF WESLEY.-REPLY TO THE METHODIST QUARTERLY REVIEW.*

OUR readers will perhaps remember that we had occasion, in a previous number, to vindicate against the Methodist Quarterly Review our representation of Wesley's view of "the advantages of the fall:" and that we presented an array of numerous passages from his writings which bore a very decisive character. We had hoped that this presentation would be sufficient, if not to convince our critic of the correctness of our position, at least to shield us from the charge of misrepresentation. In this hope, however, we were mistaken; and the only effect of our effort has been to draw forth from the editor of that Quarterly a vehement and angry repetition of his accusation against us, together with an elaborate effort to sustain it. He repeats in very positive forms his charge of misrepresentation, without one candid admission that there is anything in Wesley's writings to lend plausibility to our statement; and deliberately aims throughout his reply to stigmatize us as grossly ignorant and unjust. Such charges, of course, must have a reply; and we turn with much reluctance, and in much haste, from more pressing, and more congenial occupations, to furnish a brief, but, we trust, conclusive defense of our statements. Those statements, we have been led by this asault upon them, to review with some care; and we are happy to say that we find none of them in need of any modification.

On the whole, there is something not at all unsatisfactory in our critic's sensitiveness. There was a time when monstrous dogmas about the exalted benefits accruing to God's moral kingdom through the occurrence of sin could be promulgated without offending the moral sense of mankind; but that time seems now to have gone by. All parties seem not only

This Article was prepared for the April number of the New Englander, but at the last moment our crowded pages compelled us to defer its publication. 40

VOL. XIX

anxious to bury those dogmas out of the sight of men, but disposed, when the fossil remains of some such gigantic monster are disinterred, absolutely to deny that it ever had life. Whoever draws forth the fragments from their obscurity, and puts them together, bone to its bone, is straightway stigmatized as an impostor, who has himself constructed the grisly skeleton which he pretends to have found. Those who are familiar with the controversies of recent years in New England, will remember that Dr. Taylor was himself charged, by the defenders of the school of Edwards and West, with having invented the phraseology in which he combated those views. This charge continued to be current until our own distinct references afforded conclusive proof to the contrary; and now from quite a different quarter the same effort is made to deny, in the face of the ample evidence which we presented, that Wesley had any sympathy with such views. We shall endeavor to show the fallacy of the several evasions by which the editor of the Methodist Review seeks to escape the conclusions which we announced.

He bestows, in the beginning of his Article, a paragraph upon the Reviewer personally, in which he unfolds our "object" in this "misrepresentation;" language which evidently implies, not that our statements were an honest misconception, but that we had a purpose in misrepresenting Wesley. Without quoting anything from us to show what our object really was, he simply declares that we were aiming "to exalt Dr. Taylor at the expense of Mr. Wesley;" and that concerning this, "there can be no dispute." The thing is settled, not by our language, which one would think must contain the proper proof of our object, but by the allegation of the critic himself, and he seems to imagine that some additional evidence of our criminal intent is furnished by his confident declaration that the thing is "beyond dispute!" Now, so far from this being our aim, we never compared Mr. Wesley with Dr. Taylor at all; but with Edwards; and surely it can be no depreciation to any one to be put upon a level with this greatest of our New England theologians.

For the object of our brief allusion to Wesley, of which the critic disposes in a way so summary, and so satisfactory, to

himself, we have only to say, that his idea of it is altogether erroneous. We had no such aim as he attributes to us. That object lies on the face of our Article itself, too conspicuous for candor to mistake it.

We had censured the New England Theology. The drift of a great part of our Article was to impugn leading writers, not of other denominations, but of our own. We criticized the views, not of Methodist divines, but of Congregational, through many pages of our review. Edwards, West, and Hopkins, we quoted largely by name; and pointed out the defects in their reasoning, with an unsparing hand. After having shown the general obscurity of such writers as Leibnitz and Edwards, on the topic in hand, we were not weak enough to imagine that the superiority to them which we claimed for Dr. Taylor's view, would be enhanced by a comparison with Wesley. We alluded to him for a wholly different reason. That we might mitigate in some degree the severity of our strictures, and avoid unnecessary offense to those who might feel pained by them-and that we might not seem to hold up those writers to a peculiar and an unmerited odium-we observed that these errors of the New England theologians were not peculiar to themselves, but were common in writers of various theological schools of the time, and we named Wesley as one who maintained a similar view.

So obvious was this aim on our part, and so groundless is the suggestion of any other, that the critic does not quote a line or a word of ours in support of his gratuitous imputation.

I. But let us examine the theory itself, by which the editor of the Methodist Quarterly would exempt Wesley from the charge of holding the view that we attributed to him.

Our readers will remember that we quoted from Wesley a number of passages in which he gives expression, in language of the largest scope, to his conviction of the infinite blessedness which has resulted from God's counteraction of the fall. It is quite worthy of note that our critic does not impeach the accuracy of these quotations, nor deny that Wesley did employ all the extravagant language which we imputed to him. To most readers it will be a matter of surprise that, admitting

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