babblings of strange tongues. This is the religion for which the man in Coleridge instituted the most appropriate ceremonial. But the light within is not the scintillation of our own faculties, but the truth streaming in upon us from above, and claiming to be recognized and acknowledged. God did not create the human machinery and leave it to work out its own results. He CREATES us always in the present time. He works within us to will and to do of his good pleasure, on the single condition of selfsurrender. This apprehension of man's relation to the Highest is calculated to beget in him that sweet sense of hourly dependence by which alone he is truly exalted, that self-abasement which comes of self-revelation, that state of hourly prayer whence rises to God the soul's unceasing hymn. The contrast which we present, therefore, is the contrast between self-exaltation and self-abandonment; between the arrogancy of pride and the grace of humility; between the attitude of self-sufficiency and the attitude of continual prayer; between a worldliness decked out in religious forms and decencies, and a piety that warms in the divine effulgence; between a worship that centres around self, and a worship that brings us lowly before God; between a soul that stands in the cold shimmer of its own vanities, and a soul clothed in the Divine Beauty as with rainbows. 10 CHAPTER VII. TOTAL DEPRAVITY. "How, it is inquired, are infants regenerated who have no knowledge either of good or evil? We reply, that the work of God is not yet without existence because it is not yet observed or understood by us."— CALVIN. We are not at all anxious to keep terms with the old theologies, much less to gloss over any real differences between falsehood and truth. But the terminologies of religion become so vague and so emptied of their primitive meaning, long before they fall into desuetude, that it is necessary to subject them to a clear analysis to see for what ideas they stand, or whether they stand for any. It is a fact very familiar to the historian of opinions, that an old system of theology may pass clean away, and a very different one take its place, without the least change in the old creeds and nomenclatures, just as the Roman republic passed into the empire, and liberty changed into despotism, without the least change in the forms of government. Nay, when men become secretly conscious that the ancient faith is leaking out of its symbols, it is quite observable how they cling to the symbols with a fiercer dogmatism, in order to elude the charge of innovation and heresy. In this extreme anxiety to preserve the husks of dead men's thoughts, it may come to pass that those whose creeds are hostile may agree substantially both in opinion and sentiment. As it is not the husks, but their contents, that we care for, we wish to compare our doctrine with that which may be supposed to be current under the term "total depravity." We classify the internal forces of human nature under a threefold division. Under the first division we place those which are evil in themselves, and only evil; those which do not admit of being changed into any thing good, but which require to be expunged altogether. Among these are those corrupt acquired instincts which have become the inheritance of fallen man, hatred, malice, revenge, deceit, cruelty, acquired lusts, and selfishness in its myriad forms. These, we have seen, when once acquired, are transmissive from one generation to another. They are not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be, because in their essential character they are the very opposites of the Divine nature. They are that "body of death” which all along through the centuries has formed and stratified upon our burdened humanity, and which can in no wise be incorporated with it, but which must be rolled off, as the burden of the pilgrim rolled away when he came to the cross. Under the second division we place the natural appetites, affections, and powers; and these are good or evil according to their ultimate ends, according to the service in which they are used. Under the con trol of the Divine law they are good, under the control of the selfish nature they are evil. The appetites are good when they serve the higher nature; when their end is self-indulgence, they degenerate into brutal sensuality. Family affections are good and pure when their end is mutual improvement and aid; bad when their end is mutual indulgence and the exhibition of family pomp and pride. Nothing can be so disinterested as a mother's love. Nothing, again, can be so intensely and intolerably selfish. Family affections bring us into a more tender and loving fellowship with all the families of men, or else they are the forms of a noxious selflove, and they differ from those of a gross personal selfishness only because they reflect its hateful fires in a circle removed one degree further from us. Men will even commit greater wrongs to aggrandize their families than they would to aggrandize themselves. Intellect, when enlisted in the service of God and humanity, pouring light upon man's path to guide him to happiness and to heaven and lead on the groping nations to their millennial era, is a sublime and benef-▾ icent power. When enlisted in the service of wrong, having private honor and advantage for its end, and leading astray by cunning arts and glozing sophistries, it is the very attribute of archangel ruined. These natural powers, therefore, whether intellectual or affectional, are good or bad according to the motive force by which they are impelled and guided. Between God on the one hand, and self on the other, they hang and tremble; but it is the tendency of hereditary corruption to make them sway in the wrong direction with cumulative weight; to make the balance come down on the side of evil. But under the third division we place those sacred capacities which are the crowning glory of human nature, the capacity already described, of receiving the Divine Light and Life and making God operative in man. This capacity does not "tend to all evil," but to all good, since it is the ground of the regeneration of the individual and the progress of the race. It implies too the power of choice; choice between the agencies which we will suffer to shape our characters; choice between the influence that comes down to draw us into the heavens by its sweet persuasions, and the influence that comes up from below and seeks to draw us downward by its infernal sorceries, that power of choice in which consists the moral agency of man. - Now if by the term human nature we mean to include the forces belonging to the first two divisions here named, and exclude the last, doubtless it is inclined to all evil, and averse to all good. Man shut in to himself would be abandoned to all depravity. There is hereditary corruption that sways him from behind, and then his natural powers and affections have lost that equipoise which they had in primitive man, and are deflected towards the service of the selfish nature. Appetite, natural affection, and the natural reason would all go over to the service of the evil powers, and toil in the bondage of sin. On their swift and downward course they |