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long before we had Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Chicago, which are the second growth when the wave flowed over the Alleghanies. Again the wave is flowing from the valleys of the St. Lawrence, the Ohio, and the Mississippi, into the great central basin of the lakes, which, lying in the very center of the North American continent, are the last to receive, as they will ultimately concentrate, the great moving mass of humanity and civilization. The circles are growing narrower, and Mackinaw, which was the center of Indian and of missionary romance, will finally become one of the great centers of commercial growth and social progress, presenting the contrast between the solitudes of nature and the wild life of the Indian on one hand, with the busy activity of modern society, its multitude of people, and the wonderful arts.

The steady uninterrupted growth of our country, which no other nation can now interrupt, affords at once the moral evidence that what we have seen of growth and development in the past, will be exhibited in a progressive line through the future till ages have passed away. We have seen from the little settlements at Plymouth and Jamestown their gradual growth inward till cities arose along our coasts which rival the largest of ancient nations. We have seen them again extending along the Ohio and the Mississippi till great towns, filled with commerce and with arts, rose upon their banks. We have seen them enter the basin of the lakes, till Buffalo spreads itself along the rapids of Niagara, till Chicago looms up in a day, and St. Paul looks down from the far Northwest. Why should not this movement continue? What should interrupt it? We may imagine the beautiful shores of Huron and Superior alive with the chariots of commerce, and gleaming with the spires of beautiful towns. Here, where we have stood on the site of "Old Mackinaw," beholding its world of waters, we seem to see, shining in the morning sun, some metropolis of the lakes, some Byzantium, presiding over the seas which lave its shores. Here, perhaps, in those bright days of triumphant civilization, some pilgrim student may inquire for the grave of Marquette, may read the story of Pontiac, and lament the woes of that wild nation who once frequented the shores of Huron, and sung their last songs round the "Pequod-e-nonge" of the Indian, the Mackinaw of the whites.

ART. V.-THE PAULINE USE OF THE WORD ZAPE AS IT APPLIES TO THE DOCTRINE OF DEPRAVITY.

IN studying general theology as a science, it is proper to begin with the direct doctrine of God, his being and attributes. But not so with the special system of "Christian doctrine," or positive Christian theology. Here the doctrine of God is supposed to be understood. Christianity is a remedial scheme, and its whole force and fitness depend on the pre-supposition of the ruined state of man. As the value of medicine depends on the antecedent existence of disease, so the total worth of the Christian scheme must be estimated by the actual condition and necessities of human nature, making such a scheme necessary. From our views of man, his natural condition and capabilities, must arise our peculiar doctrines concerning Christ, his mediation, his atonement, the Church, human accountability, and the means by which human nature is to achieve its exalted destiny. We say, therefore, it is from the avopros rather than the Ocóc that our inquiries relating to the Christian scheme are to take their rise.

The condition of man by nature, taking the word nature in the sense of generation, birth, is commonly denoted by the term depravity, a word which it is not easy to define with metaphysical accuracy. There is no one word in Scripture: which technically answers to the idea of depravity, unless perhaps it is poopá, which is commonly translated corruption. In Rom. viii, 21, it stands in contrast to the state of salvation by Christ, and represents simply our natural or fallen state: "For the creature itself shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God." The corresponding word in the Old Testament is, shahath, generally translated pit, but sometimes grave, four times corruption, (Job xvii, 14; Psa. xvi, 10; xlix, 9; Jonah ii, 6,) and twice destruction, (Psa. lv, 23; ciii, 4.) The prevailing idea of the Hebrew word is destruction, loss, ruin, not corruption in the sense of putrescence. In the New Testament the idea of corrup tion in the sense of impurity is prominent; but the radical idea, namely, that of ruin, destruction, is preserved throughout. When applied to man it sometimes denotes the special derange

ment and abuse of his faculties, as 2 Pet. i, 4; ii, 12-19; and at others simply the general frailty, mortality, and lapsed state of his nature, without taking in the idea of special or actual abuses of that nature, as Rom. viii, 21; 1 Cor. xv, 42, 50. But in every case it stands contrasted with the state of personal salvation in Christ, and the complete fruition of his redeeming grace.

Various theories of human depravity have been set forth. The lowest we shall mention is that which resolves the cause of sin into a simple negation, the imperfection of man metaphysically, or constitutionally considered, the "limited receptivity" of mind. According to this, error is made to mingle with our perceptions of truth, pain with our emotions of pleasure, evil with our attainments of good, simply from the defectiveness, privation, or limitation of our faculties, which we have, as finite creatures, placed under such physical conditions of development as naturally depress, excite, limit, and perplex our mental operations. But if this privation operates to necessitate sin, then God is the cause of it, and man is to be pitied for his misfortune; if it only makes sin possible, then the cause of universal defection is still left unexplained.

A much more plausible theory is that which makes depravity consist primarily in the wrong condition of the body, or organic nature of man, its appetites and desires. This theory supposes the wrong action of the soul to be due to its connection with and dependence on the body, and through it on the external world, assuming that the mind apart from the body and per se is not depraved. Much of human experience and of Scripture seems to lodge the seeds of sin in the physical nature Our bodily infirmities, appetites, and desires, and our susceptibility of impressions from the external world, are, indeed, the chief occasions of sin, and the besetting snares of the soul; but are not sufficient to account for the universal prevalence of the lower laws of our being over the higher, for the "evil that is in the world," the wrong condition of human society, or for the explicit statements of revelation.

This theory naturally identifies itself with sensationalism, or that system which, adopting a more metaphysical groundwork, resolves the origin of sin into the susceptibility of the mind of being determined by impressions received through the senses. With the metaphysical school of sensational philosophers, as

such, we have nothing to do, and it will suffice here to state that, so long as the senses and bodily desires are entirely subservient to the reason and higher nature of man, furnishing him, as Müller expresses it, with "a basis of his earthly existence, and the means of his self-activity and sensibility in relation to the world," just so long our physical nature and organism innocently and usefully subserve the purposes of the Creator. But when our external nature assumes an independency, and usurps dominion over the spirit, subjecting the will to the passions, the whole current of our moral being is perverted. Now, the sensational theory of depravity supposes this ascendency of the outward over the inner man; this triumph of sense over the intelligence, the will, and the moral feelings, to be the true rationale of sin. The sensational side of our being, it says, develops first, and seeks only the agreeable, the self-pleasing; and the child has already acquired considerable facility and strength of habit in seeking the sensationally agreeable before the period of reason and reflection arrives to enable it to choose and pursue the morally good, so that the preponderance is on the side of the earthly, the perishable, the selfish, and hence arises sin. The metaphysical basis of this theory plausibly identifies itself with the doctrine that the mind is dependent for its ideas on objective existence, and the senses are the necessary medium of those ideas.

All heathenism, wherever it has attained any philosophical development, is underlaid with the doctrine of dualism, of the two eternal antagonistic elements of mind and matter. In the Chaldean and Hindoo philosophy in the East, and in that of Plato in the West, which reappeared in the Jewish Church in the form of Essenism, and in the Christian Church under the forms of Gnosticism and Manicheism, this notion of matter and spirit, struggling against each other for the mastery in irreconcilable conflict, reached its highest manifestation. In this theory spirit is essentially pure, matter essentially corrupt; and the existence of sin is caused by the connection of the two, wherein the latter obtains the mastery over the former. It is easy to see how, according to this materialistic notion of the origin of evil, the whole system of asceticism arose in the Church, making self-mortification, or physical attrition in the Brahminical sense, the condition of the

highest attainments of holiness. These theories of paganistic dualism and modern ethical sensationalism naturally affiliate, and ground themselves upon the common admission that depravity does not inhere in the spirit, but in matter and our physical condition, and affects the spirit only through its connection with matter. In theological dogma they would slightly differ, but in ethics they are the same.

It is against these views that the Bible teaches that sin, in the sense of hereditary depravity, is positive, as opposed to a simple negation, affecting our entire being, the soul as well as the body; that is, however it may be philosophically defined, it is the wrong condition of the entire being as compared with the holy law of God, possessing, aside from grace, a determinate potentiality to evil.

The sensational theory has sheltered itself under a misapprehension of the scriptural, and especially the Pauline use of the term caps, flesh, more than all other exegetical defenses. It is necessary, therefore, to push our inquiries into the ethical use of this word. The corresponding Hebrew to oaps, is, basar, and is used to denote flesh as a constituent part of the body; also the entire body, the human race, the flesh of animals, all animate beings, blood relations, etc. Then, also, it is used to signify man, as frail, mortal, perishable. Beyond this, the Old Testament, philologically, will rarely carry us. The ethical sense of flesh, as a nature at enmity with God, the very point of the Pauline use of oaps, appears only by implication, and must be made out of such texts as the following: Gen. vi, 3, "For that he also is flesh;" 2 Chron. xxxii, 8, "For with him is an arm of flesh;" Psa. lvi, 4, "I will not fear what flesh can do;" Psa. lxxviii, 39, "He remembered that they were but flesh;" Jer. xvii, 5, "Cursed is he that maketh flesh his arm." The practiced reader will at once perceive how slender must be the reliance on such passages for proof that the Old Testament usage of the word in question carries with it the marked figurative and moral sense of oaps in the New. Yet the germ of the New Testament usage is found in the Old, for in such passages as the above there is an implied idea of corruption and alienation from God, as well as the prominent foreground of meaning of frailty and infirmity.

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