from clerical pens, are published from the pulpit before they reach the press. But if the pulpit be the legitimate throne of eloquent speech, it should not fail in clear, simple, self-consistent statement and reasoning.

The author divides his work into two sections: Theistic Religion, and Rational Christianity. His introduction consists of two discourses. The first affirms, that the knowledge of religious truth comes not through the understanding, but through the moral faculties as a subject of faith. "To the mere understanding, the world is as intelligible and as satisfactory without a God as with one." p. 13. The province of this faculty is only to examine the facts which lie around it, and to demonstrate their conditions. It can never get beyond the limits of a "positive philosophy." A distinction is here assumed between the understanding or speculative reason, and the practical reason or moral sense. pp. 14, 15. The second discourse asserts, that the popular faith is Manichean, based on Augustine's false rendering of the "natural man," in the Pauline epistles. Dr. Hedge would translate it, "the animal man." The animal man can not be a Christian; that is, man can not be this while living as a mere animal an axiomatic statement which, one would think, the apostle might have despatched in much fewer words than he has given to its vindication. Our author's improved version does not fit the logical connection of the apostle's reasoning. There is no room, moreover, to dissect between the "animal" and the "natural" man in this way. Neither a true exegesis or anthropology allows it. Calvin's explanation can not be set aside; that the ixò av0pwñoz "is not merely the man of gross passions, but whoever is taught only by his own faculties." These are only varieties of the same class, differenced by degrees of the animal or natural life, in distinction from the spiritual. Dr. Hedge's distinction here made is therefore without a difference of radical qualities. But it governs his entire inquiry. He goes on to say, that the "natural man" has in him the germ of godliness. The carnal part of the natural man is conceded to be at variance with God; but this is only a partial state. The processes of divine. grace in human nature are all strictly natural. Every thing in

God's government of matter and mind is natural in opposition to unnatural, which we have never heard questioned.

But Calvinism, says our author, demands to "denaturalize" man, to make him "inhuman before he can become religious. The doctrine taught by Augustine, and revived by Calvin, is that human nature, as such, is adverse to religion is incapable of holiness: nature must be supplanted by grace. . . . and after that change has taken place, the righteousness that follows is no product of human nature, but grace excluding human nature, and acting in its stead." p. 28.

This is a misconception. We no where affirm that human nature, that is, the human soul, is constitutionally incapable of holiness, but always and directly the reverse. This we maintain, that by its actual unholiness it is incapable of cleansing itself into purity. Human nature is not "supplanted,” but is regenerated, by grace. Its righteousness is personally its own; but it is inwrought and perpetuated through the grace of God. Dr. Hedge interprets into a physical disorganization and reorganization, what we defend as a spiritual, and not " unnatural" but supernatural restoration of human nature to holiness.

Its

Coming to the discussion of "Religion within the bounds of Theism," our author is positive that science does not find God; rather, it loses him as it advances. Science can not discover the being of God, and necessarily ignores his providence. business is "to find natural, known, appreciable causes for every fact and event: . . . . where religion says 'creation', science says, development."" p. 40. But faith demands both God and his government. Science refuses mystery: religion needs it. This is evidently designed sharply to distinguish the methods rather than the essential spirit of scientific explorations, for farther on, the author is eloquent in setting forth this very unsympathetic, "geometrizing" agent as geometrizing" agent as "an evangelist whose mission it is to show us the Father,' and regenerate the world the prophet whom nature vouches, the fellow-laborer who also cometh in the name of the Lord."

God, thus missed by science but demanded by faith, must be self-revealing. It lies in the very nature of Deity to disclose himself. How? In the human soul, by the quickening of the mental faculties into a state of exaltation. This is inspiration,

revelation, "the divine Spirit coöperating with and reënforcing the action of the mind." p. 58. The marks of this inspiration are that its utterances be practical, sensuous, popular, in distinction from abstract and philosophical; that it also carry the authority of personal character in the revealer of truth. The miraculous element is possible, but is not necessary, or primarily authoritative. Further on, the writer repeats that there is no real objection, whether philosophical or scientific, to a miracle; only it is contrary to the nature of the human mind to be convinced of religious truth by such kind of evidence.

Here Dr. Hedge has managed, as often elsewhere, to satisfy nobody. Least of all does he meet the Gospel declaration (John iii. 2) that men should know God's presence with his Son through the miracles which he wrought before them. If the author were a believer in the authority of the Bible, even so far as the contents of the four Gospels, we would ask him to explain this, among many similar statements in those records, of a simple matter of fact: "Then many of the Jews which came to Mary, and had seen the things which Jesus did, believed on him." John xi. 45. The kind of testimony to a divine commission here given at the grave of Lazarus, would seem to have been adapted to the wants of those intelligent Jews; and if to them, then why not to others?

The Regent God," according to this system, governs the universe, it is somewhat difficult to ascertain precisely in what manner. The self-governing theory of fixed laws is stoutly repelled. The catholic doctrine of Providence is essentially misconceived, as if God sometimes were busy with our affairs, but not always. The plan of this author labors to unite a personal God and ruler with an idealistic pantheism; and escapes an outright pantheism only, if at all, by poetic license.

God is accessible as the object of prayer. He hears our prayers for specific things. Man always has direct, unpropitiated access to his Maker. Neither here or elsewhere do we find any place for Christ's mediation, or recognition of its need.

"The Old Enigma" is the question of moral evil. Its solution is the necessary imperfection of the finite. This, however, is to confound the natural limitations of created souls with their moral defects; as if the latter were as unavoidable as the

former-which is not true if God has any angels. Dr. Hedge rejects the original purity and subsequent fall of man. He gives us" Optimism" as the key to the mystery of evil :

"All partial evil, universal good."

That evil produces good is one thing; so it may be "the bitter, biting oil which makes the flavor of the orange and the peach." That evil actually is good is simply false. Evil may be a part of the process of which good is the end." So Judas was a part of the process of which redemption was the end. But no true Christian faith teaches that either Judas or any moral "evil is good undeveloped." This is putting "darkness for light;" the Satanic sophistry too transparent even for self-deception

"Evil be thou my good:"

a fit philosophy only for one who is compelled, like Milton's fallen seraph, to make the despairing confession:

We would not do Dr. Hedge the injustice to charge him with a downright affirming of this naked absurdity. "It is all for the best," has a true Christian meaning which does not deny the reality of actual and everlasting wrong. But this can not be his interpretation of the "homely phrase" to which he subscribes. He is extremely obscure at this point, confronting a terrible fact for which he finds no satisfactory cause or explanation.

Sin is defined as a "wronged consciousness. . . . defection from the inner, holy self." "If a man could suddenly believe in sincerity that he was moral, he would be so": thus Novalis, as quoted approvingly. Therefore "sin ceases when the consciousness thereof ceases. . . . Devils (if such exist) are sinless." p. 129. 129. Our author can see nothing in sin but a negation of good; we hardly understand how he can see so much, on his optimist theory. He calls it a negative state of the soul, as death is of the body-"a stoppage of breath." Yet, "the pang of conscious guilt is no illusion." But, if the guilt lie all in the consciousness, the quickest way to sanctification would seem to be through such a hardening of the soul in evil as to bring it to the sinless state of devils! Some appear to be fast

reaching that nadir of the spiritual sphere. Are we here also, on the borders of modern Perfectionism?

How all this squares with the "enmity against God" of the epistles, which looks much like a positive hostility to his holiness, we pause not to determine. Tantamount to this philosophy of sin is his doctrine of regeneration: "rally your faith in all the ideals rally the good in the depths of thyself." p. 139. Our readers may be violently reminded of an ingenious device for a man's lifting himself over a stone wall.

The chapter on Death takes an entirely unscriptural view of that topic. It maks this a thoroughly normal thing, expressive of no displeasure in God at man or his sinfulness. It is no more an object of dread to him than to a brute or a withering leaf. "Religion" has made the natural man a coward about what is only the sunsetting of the present life. But how of tomorrow?

Dr. Hedge allows that Immortality is the subject of general human hope. Yet, the analogies in nature prove nothing: nor does the wish of the soul. But the sense of moral obligation in the soul, contradicting at so many points its instincts, involves "a problem which requires immortality for its solution. The law of duty is not calculated for earthly limitations. The obedience it requires supposes an immortal nature." As for the notion of the resurrection of the body, it only survives in the creeds of Christendom, not in its thought.

Thus closes the department of "Religion within the bounds of Theism." If it be painfully barren of ennobling, invigorating truths, we should bear in mind that this writer everywhere flouts the idea of a theology taught by nature, affirming that the delusion so expressed should be exploded, that all religion is necessarily that which is revealed. We turn then with sharpened appetite to the chapters on "Rational Christianity."

Concerning a written revelation from God, the ground is assumed that "our evidence that any particular writing is from God can never be stronger than the evidence of reason for or against the matter contained in it." p. 202. This momentous principle the very kernel of Protestantism," thus asserts the supremacy of reason not only over matters which are on a level with its powers, but also over facts which lie beyond