When the lawyer, "willing to justify himself, said unto Jesus: And who is my neighbor?" no one can suppose that he was "willing to sanctify himself." But the Greek is: 0 ôè v δικαιοῦν ἑαυτὸν, Lk. x. 29.

When the cup was found in Benjamin's sack, Judah said to Joseph: "What shall we say unto my lord? What shall we speak? Or how shall we clear ourselves?" Sept. Ti dixaiw9@per; Gen. xliv. 16. This is the language of the court-room, and of the accused.

The Apocrypha has this question: "Who will justify [Sept. Tis dexatáset] him that sinneth against his own soul?" Ecclus. x. 29. It is not a question who will reform and make righteous that sinner, but who will defend or clear him. We add but one more illustrative passage, in which the forensic use of this word is more clearly manifest.

1 Kings viii. 32. "Hear thou in heaven, and do, and judge thy servants, condemning the wicked, to bring his way upon his head; and justifying the righteous, to give him according to his righteousness." "Justifying," etc. Sept. Too dizaiõσai dízatov δοῦναι αὐτῷ κατὰ τὴν δικαιοσύνην αὐτοῦ. Here the dedicatory prayer of Solomon brings the wicked and the righteous before God for discriminating retribution; and condemning and justifying are set over the one against the other. Penal visitations are invoked on the wicked, and the rewards of righteousness for the upright. The whole scope of thought in the verse is eminently judicial, and retributive. "Condemning the wicked" may as well mean to make them morally wicked, as "justifying the righteous" may mean to make them morally righteous. The prayer of the king is for the exercise of judicial and not moral

power.

After what philological examination, then, or with what sense of responsibility for the many who may never go back of Dr. Bushnell's English assertion, does he make such bold declarations? The adjective, díxatos, translated righteous and just, he says is never once used in a judicial sense. The verb, δικαιόω, to justify, "has a moral force only." So he speaks of dizatorón, justification, "used, as far as I have been able to discover, in an exclusively moral sense." In all which he is preparing the Greek Scriptures for his favorite conclusion, the germ of this volume,

that "in Christian justification there is no reference of thought whatever to the satisfaction of God's retributive justice, or to any acquittal passed on guilty men, because the score of their account with God's justice has been made even by the sufferings of Christ." pp. 411-15.

But usage is clear and abundant, as we have seen, to warrant an assertion directly opposite. It ought not to be doubted that these words do have a forensic and judicial import, and as connected with the sinner and Christ's atoning work, may properly mean to clear him from penalty for Christ's sake and through his substituted sufferings. In justification a judicial act is performed, and not a moral one; and he justified is cleared from the penalty of the law on account of what Christ has done for him. The making morally righteous follows this governmental and judicial act, and is properly called sanctification. In an octavo effort to eject all vicarious sacrifice from the work of redemption, it was both natural and necessary that a bold blow should be struck at these Greek words, for in them there is the joint, the articulus, of the evangelical system. Failing here, his whole effort fails; succeeding here, the whole evangelical system fails. For if the penitent, believing sinner is not judicially acquitted on account of Him, who, through suffering, became "the end of the law" for that sinner, then must we abandon the unfounded scheme of grace, and go back to works. But fully believing that "by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life," we confront the assertions of the author, that these words are used only in a moral and never a forensic sense, with the examples above cited. Are they not as the cup found in Benjamin's sack? And ought not the first reply of the defendant to be the confessing question of Judah? Τί δίκαιωθῶμεν ;

It is instructing as well as sad to see how not only the great doctrines, but the great men of the evangelical church, need reconstructing under this new adjustment of theology. Dr. Bushnell finds Luther exultant and strong and reforming, on his wond of justification by faith. He at once drops all his justification by works, his vigils and fastings, his alms and penance. Even on the steps of the Sancta

Scala he throws away all, and rises to freedom and a regenerate manhood in the imputed righteousness of Christ. Such a man and theology and experience stand in the way of the theory of this volume. How is the difficulty met? "Luther is two and not one, viz., a Christian and a theologian." His heart is right, but" that theologic contriving of his head" is wrong. He does not understand himself.

"The very great wonder is, that a man so intelligent should imagine, for a moment, that he was fired with a passion so mighty, and a joy so transcendent, by the fact that an innocent being had taken his sins and evened the account of justice by suffering their punishment! This he thought he believed; but we are not obliged to believe he did." p. 437.

When Luther comes to define the doctrine, out of which he has so rich an experience, he "makes a plunge so bewildering into bathos and general unreason. I confess that calling it justification by faith-articulus stantis, vel cadentis ecclesia— I could more easily see the church fall than believe it." pp. 438-9. A great wonder it will appear, that the Protestant church for more than three centuries has been mistaken in supposing that Luther understood himself. It would be a marvel to discover at this late day that the pivotal power in his great work was not what he thought it was. Can it be that the Reformation was carried and Protestantism founded in a self-deception of the leader? Did he blunder this work through, and with an impetus that has carried it three hundred years farther, to be stopped only at Hartford in New England? So wide-reaching and presumptuous are the forces needed to give to the church of God a new theory of vicarious sacrifice. We still incline to the opinion that Martin Luther understood and believed what he said, and that the church understands him, and that both have understood the doctrine of Justification by Faith.

Dr. Bushnell feels, evidently, that he has weakened the power of the divine government in human estimation, and lessened the sense of sin, by a sacrifice not penal, and by a system of redemption that ignores penalty. He therefore labors his argument through forty pages against this conclusion, by showing that Christ sustains the majesty of government, and makes deep

impression of the demerit of sin, by teaching the doctrines of final judgment and future punishment. We fail to see the force of this argument, since neither doctrine is new with Christ. And though both sanction law in their place, it is where atonement can not apply, and therefore they are proof not relevant. Moreover, the doctrine of future punishment loses much of its force under the theory of our author, that it is only natural retribution, "the penal sanctions of nature." Sinful communities have punishment in "the storms, fires, earthquakes, pestilences, famines, wrecks, orphanages of the world." The individual has his punishments in his aches and pains, sicknesses, fears and

remorse.

But how does Christ's announcement of such a doctrine become a new sanction to the law, since all these casualties are as old as the human race? In this notion of punishment he finds the guilty man in the world to come, "suffering at any given moment for being just what he is at that moment, that, and nothing more. God has, in fact, put nothing of his pain upon him; he only takes it on himself, and there is really no more reason to be troubled about the severity of his lot than there is here, in the retributions of this life." p. 345. Connect closely the steps of this logic. Christ, to sustain the majesty of the divine government without a penal satisfaction, preaches the doctrine of punishment. But the penal visitations are natural, and therefore nothing new; they are proportional daily to the trangressor's conduct in the world to come, and no more severe or to be dreaded there than here. So is the "certain fearful looking for of judgment" quieted, and perdition made easy. Such contrasts do poor human inventions furnish when taking the place of God's "propitiation" and "eternal judgment.' Punishment only natural? Then as well have a vicarious sacrifice for wounded soldiers as for sinners.

But this is not all. The future punishment of this system is to be constantly decreasing, by a process that dwarfs the soul, and destroys its susceptibilities for punitive retributions, till "the suffering that is left is that of a nature tapering down to a diminished grade of feeling, or abject continuity of consciousness, that is only the more desolate that it can not utterly die." We would naturally fear annihilation through exhaustion, by

this depreciating and dying out of the immortal. But the author assures us that "the progressive diminution is never to end in cessation, but may well be figured by the asymptote of the curve," which is always approaching, but never touches a right line.

The effect of such a view must be greatly to lessen a sinner's anxiety about "the terrors of the Lord," even as opiates on a man about to be executed. Indeed what is this whole invention of a merely natural, and constantly decreasing and a rather comfortable perdition, but a kind of moral chloroform?

And yet perhaps this low grade of penal inflictions is fully up to the level of the desert of transgressors, as indicated elsewhere in this treatise. An apostasy without " demerit," as the author teaches, suggests a lightness of sin, that should be followed by easy penalties. We can not but mark in this connection, the coincidence between these views of Dr. Bushnell and those of the Rev. Charles Beecher, as brought out in his defence before the Georgetown Council. Mr. Beecher said that future punishment "would be softened, because man would not be able, in his degraded condition, to appreciate it." "The power of the soul becomes so weakened by sin, that the sinner in hell can not suffer much." "To the lost man it is slight, from his debilitated mind, and from his ability to enjoy where a saint would suffer." Thus low and beggarly becomes the administration of the divine government, when the character of God is robbed of an attribute, the atonement of a proper satisfaction for sin, and eternal justice reduced to a temporal polity, a mere measure for carrying a point. This reconstructing of our orthodox theology is exceedingly expensive.

An allusion here to Dr. Bushnell's theory of the Devil will be pertinent. It is one of the simple, startling negations of the volume, that there is no personal devil. Our author shows great ability in negativing; in young writers it would be called contradicting. These declarations would have honorable place and force, if they were preceded by broad premises, and the logical array of facts. In the case in hand he powerfully writes and publishes the arch enemy out of theology and the world, by just two pages octavo. p. 539-41.