Philosophy, who assail him with their subtle dialectics, that his is a far higher and bolder aim than they would tie him down to to wit, that he may commend himself to every man's conscience in the sight of God. And again, with reference to his own responsibility in his work, and his satisfaction therein, he makes conscience even as it were God, and its approval God's voice, when he says to the Corinthians, "For our rejoicing is this, the testimony of our conscience, that in simplicity and godly sincerity, not with fleshly wisdom, but by the grace of God, we have had our conversation in the world, and more abundantly to you-ward." (2 Cor. i. 12.)

At the risk of being thought old-fashioned or behind the times, we are content to abide with the immortal Bishop Butler, in preference to Sir James Mackintosh and the moderns, as regards the nature of conscience, believing that, in so doing, we abide with Paul. "You cannot," he asserts, "form a notion of this faculty, conscience, without taking in judgment, direction, superintendency. . . . Had it strength, as it had right—had it power, as it had manifest authority—it would absolutely govern the world." (Human Nature, Sermon II.) John Howe calls it "a certain dijudicative power." Cicero hits the same point when he describes it as "recta ratio," right reason; and in relation to its legal authority, it was called by the ancients "vera lex," the true law. "The laws of well-doing are the dictates of right reason," saith the great Richard Hooker. (Eccles. Polity, Book I., section 7.) We conclude, therefore, with M'Cosh, that the human conscience is at once a law, a faculty, and an emotion. "Subject only to God, it reviews all the actions of the responsible agent, and is itself reviewed by none. It is the highest judicatory in the human mind, judging all, and being judged of none; admitting of appeal from all, and admitting of no appeal from itself to any other human tribunal." (Method of the Divine Government, p. 305.)

Not that, in any supposable or possible case, the natural action of conscience is sufficient to bring a man to God. Moffatt found in South Africa savages who had never heard of God, yet suffered exquisite tortures of conscience, for the many murders they had committed, although the murders were sanctioned by the established usages of the tribe. That natural

conscience was God's witness in the savage breast, answering loudly when God's law was proclaimed, and God's Gospel preached. Yet law and Gospel, thundering and flashing in that tumultuous conscience, ten thousand times ten thousand years, could bring nothing but a denser spiritual darkness, a more utter and hopeless spiritual death, until the Holy Spirit of God wrought effectually there by his supernatural and newcreating power. All that we are concerned to say is, that it would be precisely there that the Spirit of God would work ; and that precisely there is the point at which all the arrows of the Almighty are ultimately aimed. So Jesus said, "He will convince the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment;" a process all in the conscience. Nor is it to be conceived as possible in the nature of things, that God should ever convert a man in any other way but through the conscience; since the very first, and always indispensable step is to have a conscience of sin. If any affirm that this is derogatory to the sovereign omnipotence of Jehovah, we ask, is it one whit more so than to allege that God will never make a man hear with the eyes?

It will at least be conceded that conscience is the attribute which has mainly to do with our duty toward God. His approval or his disapproval; his blessing or his curse; reward or punishment; life or death; heaven or hell:-all these stand related, directly and alone, to the question of right and wrong - of moral character and conduct. What is it then but a grand impertinence for any other faculty to put in its claim to adjudicate or decide in these high concernments? Or how can any such claim be, for a single moment, admitted, without diverting the mind from the great business in hand, so blunting the power of conscience, and weakening the power of every appeal. This argument lies with its utmost force against appealing to the speculative understanding, or suffering its interference, except incidentally and subordinately, in matters pertaining to our relations with God. It is a logical faculty, not in any sense moral. Its province includes that which has an indirect and purely incidental relation to our moral obligations; as the genuineness of a Greek manuscript, the harmony of the Evangelists, or fate and free-will; but no necessary relation to

our sense of right and wrong, or to its proper grounds and proofs. "But every fool will be meddling," Solomon says, and the speculative understanding pretends that the investigation of these incidental and ultimate matters is involved in the question of our personal relations with God and his law.

We join issue. Does not conscience apprehend at once the grand truths of God and the creation; man and his obligation to God; sin and its curse; the redemption by Christ and its highest of all obligations upon sinful man, to repent and believe, and the fearful guilt and inevitable consequences of refusing? Shall the answer to the conscience then be, to challenge the authorship of the Pentateuch, or the inspiration of the Canticles, or the Book of Job? Shall we go back to Adam, and question the Bible doctrine of our relations with him, and all with a view to impair the evidence of our guilt? Or, far anterior to Adam and all created existence, shall we seek to penetrate the secret counsel of God, and claim the right to know his relation to the fact of sin, in order to measure the amount and turpitude of our guilt? Shall the proud and arrogant reason, blind and halt, in its beggarly garments, set up its own standard of moral obligation, and assume that, just as far as, by whatever means, the plenary power of man to keep God's perfect law is impaired, so far the obligation of plenary obedience is abated; thus cutting loose altogether, either from the doctrine of man's special and necessary dependence on the Spirit of God, or of his absolute and eternal obligation to keep the law, in its utmost length and breadth? All this the speculative understanding does, and much more, if more is possible, in the same direction. It objects to God's decree, that it is at war with man's freedom, or else pleads for a freedom which is subversive of the decree. It affects to adjust the different parts of God's revealed truth, or claims the right to reject what cannot be so adjusted. Need it be said that the boasted adjustment will usually be found to be nothing more nor less than the virtual rejection of the Scripture doctrine of Divine Sovereignty? It will not have a plenary atonement because that, it asserts, would impair the Divine mercy; an argument, than which it is not easy to conceive anything more superficial and frivolous, since the mercy and the atonement are alike from God.

And so justification is not justification, and substitution is not substitution, and Christ did not bear our sins, and the Divine justice is not satisfied, and all men are born neither sinful nor holy, but with adequate power to be holy, and go to an everlasting heaven without any help from God, or Jesus Christ, or the Holy Ghost.

The point we are now considering is, how such questionings and cavillings of the speculative understanding are to be met. This is by no means answered when it is asserted that what the speculative understanding can question, the speculative understanding can resolve. The assertion is not true. The busy thoughts of a little child will start many an inquiry whose solution is a thousand times farther off than the farthest fixed star from the grasp of all the philosophers. The attempts which have been made to reconcile the existence of sin and the benevolence of God, do not even relieve the difficulty. We hold all attempts to explain the origin of sin, whether by old school men or new, to be mere childishness. We know exactly nothing at that point, and the things we do know, at other points of this great subject, no grasp of human thought can bring together. The Bible declares the very end and purpose for which the world was created to be, the manifestation of the glory of Jesus Christ in human redemption. That could not be without sin. Does God then choose sin, or did he decree it? The answer is, God hates sin, and that alone; forbids it by the most terrific penalties, and will punish it, in the least instance, with everlasting destruction in hell. Can man or archangel put the two together? They who make the attempt seem to us as little birds that seek entrance to a castle by flying, with their tiny momentum, against its iron gates or granite sides. You stand before an adamantine wall as high as heaven. You grope and flounder in blackest midnight. The angry lightning flashes from the frowning face of God's thundercloud, and you are wrapped again in a darkness which is felt, and seems as if it would extinguish your very eyeballs.

Do we then exclude the discussion of the deep things of God? Nay, we enforce it, since they are the things which promote enlargement and strength. In the same proportion they minister to humility, for humility is enlargement and strength;

and they are the very things which appeal with most of commanding force to the conscience. Philosophy may construct a compact and beautiful argument for eternal decrees, proving, to a demonstration, that God could not govern the world without them. But a man accepts the doctrine, not because it approves itself to the speculative understanding, but because, far beyond and above the speculative understanding, it commands the conscience, and, through the conscience, the will and the affections, by the mighty power of the Holy Ghost. And this is precisely the amount of the pretended agreement between Platonism and Calvinism, the pagan philosophy and the teachings of the Bible.

No man, inspired or uninspired, ever exceeded Paul in dialectic skill, in the love of its exercise, or in the power to crush his subtle adversaries by their own weapons. Yet see how habitually he drives his argument right through all such artillery, and home to the conscience, as knowing that the spiking of every gun, and the destruction of every battery amounts to little so long as that stronghold is unassailed. What a clarion ring of celestial warfare is there in his grand response to the Greek philosophers: "Not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God." (2 Cor. iv. 2.) So in the presence of the Roman governor he "reasoned of righteousness, temperance, and judgment to come." Every word was a bolt aimed directly at the conscience of Felix; hence he stood pale and trembling. At Thessalonica, too, when he would convict the Jews of the guilt of Christ's death, for three successive Sabbath days he "discoursed to them (dieλéyero) out of the Scriptures," - their own,"opening and alleging that Jesus," the man whom they had killed, "was the Christ," the anointed of God, the promised to their fathers, and hope of their nation. But most striking of all, when he has declared, as a matter of pure revelation, God's absolute sovereignty in the future and eternal destiny of men, even to the hardening of whom he will; and the speculative understanding, as counsel for the proud heart, starts up with its cavil of God's injustice and man's irresponsibility, he dashes all to the ground by one tremendous thunder-peal to