Him who lay in the bosom of the Father, preaffirmed, as we have seen it, by those who spake as they were moved by his own Spirit; and so appositely and pointedly re-affirmed by that one of his chosen witnesses who had lain in his own bosom: "Other foundation"— of acceptable obedience, or of the obligation which binds us to its exercises-" can no man lay, than that which is laid in Jesus Christ," -considered as the offspring of that infinite goodness which conferred so inestimable a benefit on our fallen race.

As not only lapsed, but dissevered from any interest in that goodness, utterly and finally,-the obligation originating in and depending on it would expire. Of punitive obligation we speak not, further than that, succeeding the preceptive, as it must from the fact that their joint effect on the same subject is impossible, it constitutes the only sense in which the law, in its application to those who bear its penalty, can be considered eternal.*

As this point, aside from its intrinsic interest, is too material to the main purpose of this paper to be dismissed without a more extended notice than could consistently be given it in the text, the attention of the reader is solicited to this marginal attempt to set it in its proper light. The point is, whether the preceptive obligation of the divine law rests alike on those whom it abandons and execrates, as on those whom it protects and blesses; or, in other words, whether the penalty and precept of the law are jointly and eternally enforced with regard to the same subject. To this we reply, that the happiness of the subject having been the original and direct aim of the law, and to be accomplished by means of his submission to its preceptive requirement, it were a gross absurdity to suppose him a subject of its punitive, while he is also a subject of its preceptive action. The precept requires him to love God, and looks through that, as a medium, to his happiness as an end. The penalty supposes him to have forfeited the happiness, and with it, of course, the means of happiness, which is neither less nor more than loving God. If we suppose, then, that God requires the subject of punishment to love him, we must further suppose it to be his will that he should love him, or that it is not. If he requires him to love him, while at the same time it is not his will that he should do so, then it follows that his requirement and his will are at mutual odds; in other words, that not loving him is as much in accordance with his will, on the one hand, as it is a violation of his command on the other-which is absurd. But if-to take the other horn of the dilemma-it be supposed that, while God requires the subject to love him, it is equally his will that he should love him-it follows that, as loving is the means of, and necessarily leads to happiness, it is his will that the subject of obligation to the means should, by virtue of that means, be connected with the happiness to which it stands related, as an end; or, which is the same thing, that he requires and wills both his holiness and his happiness-which is also absurd. On the whole, then, we are forced to the conclusion, that since God, in the punishment of the sinner, does not require him to love him, either with or without willing that he should do so, inasmuch as either supposition involves a gross absurdity-he does not require him to love him at all. Indeed, it equally results-unless the punishment were disciplinary and benignant, which it is

But to resume the interrupted thought. With our moral constitution utterly and hopelessly wrecked,-with our eterna interests lost sight of by our Maker,-we could, by no possibility, feel obliged to that love of him without which he could acknowledge no obedience. Nor would the love itself be less impossible than the feeling of obligation to exercise it; as there would remain no possibility of adaptation in the object to those constitutional conditions of our nature on which the exercise of love depends,-no principle in the intellectual or moral constitution of the subject upon which the requisite power could rally,-no fulcrum upon which its action could fix.

Happily for us that utter wreck was never permitted; that disregard for our interests was never indulged. To obviate so huge a calamity there did, it is true, arise, under the divine administration, a necessity of the great sacrifice; but, anticipating that necessity, it was provided for in the "Lamb slain from the foundation of the world." Emanating from Infinite Goodness, himself the action of that goodness, sinlessly embodied in the sinning nature, he holds that nature in such vital conjunction with his own, that it is made to partake of his quickening Spirit, and to share his availing and everactive sympathies. In this way, while lapsed man, as the subject of law, is ever supplied with virtue to fulfil it, he is ever presented with the all-embracing cause, ground, or reason for his obligation to not that the delinquent cannot be bound to do anything, but only to suffer,— to suffer that punishment, a part of which, at least, results from the loss, as well of the power and privilege of loving God as of the happiness of which the exercise of that power and privilege is the divinely-constituted means.

To the venerable allegation, "That the loss of power to obey does not impair the divine right to command," we answer,

1. The divine right in question, having for its ultimate aim the well-being of the subject, as has been variously demonstrated, would-that aim surrenderedbe surrendered along with it; or, which is an absurdity, it would be maintained with reference to no ultimate aim whatever.

2. The right of commanding supreme love, after his own punitive and positive action had rendered it absolutely impossible-after he had absolutely willed its impossibility-is a right, the vindication of which can be prompted by no enlightened regard for the honour of the divine equity.

The unmixed and unmitigable pains of eternal death are not less incompatible with the obligation of loving God, than with the felicity of loving him. When, therefore, he gives up, or ceases to will the happiness of the delinquent, he ceases to will the holiness which would lead him to it; and when he ceases to will his holiness, he ceases to require or command it; and when he ceases to will, require, or command holiness, he ceases to oblige or bind the delinquent to its exercise. The obligation to suffer still remains; and that, as remarked in the text, is the only sense in which the obligation of the law, in the premises, can be considered eternal.

do so; a reason which, if we mistake not, has been shown to be rooted in the inherent value of well-being to the subject, considered as a final end,—an end of sufficient moment to justify the institution and maintenance of the existing scheme of moral government, as a means divinely adapted to that end.

With the following condensed view of the argument, we have done :

1. God wills our happiness; for it is a contradiction to suppose that Infinite Goodness could will otherwise.

2. Holiness, by a divine constitution, is the means of that happiness; for, willing the end, it would contradict God's wisdom and goodness to suppose that he does not equally will the means, or that he wills other means than that of holiness.

3. Holiness being willed as the means of happiness, is willed with reference to that end, and no other; that is, it is willed on the sole ground of its aforesaid relation to happiness; and that is equivalent to our original affirmation, that moral obligation is imposed out of ultimate regard to that consideration. That consideration is sufficient; no other can be. It is, therefore, the sufficient and only ground of man's obligation to obey his Maker.

ART. III-ON THE SECOND EPISTLE OF ST. PAUL TO

TIMOTHY.

SOME writings derive importance from their date, as well as their intrinsic character; and to understand them accurately, and duly to appreciate their worth, it is necessary to be acquainted with the facts of contemporaneous history. Those facts, especially, which attest the general state of the world, and more particularly those which come into immediate contact with the subject matter of the document under consideration, the character of the principal personages that appeared upon the stage of action, as well as the particular exigencies of the times, must be accurately understood in order to elucidate the peculiar phrases of the writer, and to explain the facts and incidents detailed.

That Timothy lived in a very eventful era of the world is manifest. The Roman empire had, under the reign of Augustus Cæsar, about sixty-five years before the time of writing this epistle, achieved the conquest of the world, and was now under the government of a prince who exceeded all his more immediate predecessors in wickedness, Tiberius, Caligula, and Claudius, whose licentious

ness and many acts of cruelty had filled Rome with mutilated limbs, and corpses, and all kinds of miseries, in the midst of enervating luxuries and debasing debaucheries;-Rome, we say, at this time, was under the government of a prince who plunged deeper into the muddy pool of depravity than any of his predecessors, however debased they may have been-a prince whose dissolute character has handed his name down to posterity with the blackest infamy. Nero, a name associated with every vice which can degrade human nature, was now at the head of the Roman empire, and he rendered himself notorious by a precocity of profligacy which ripened into maturity at an early period of his inglorious reign.

He who could sport himself with inflicting barbarous tortures upon mankind, not caring to discriminate between the innocent and guilty, merely to gratify a capricious humour-who could indulge in the profane mirth of dancing around the mangled corpse of his own mother, after having had her ripped open that he might feast his voluptuous eyes upon the place of his conception-who could order the city of Rome to be set on fire that he might have a plausible pretext for crushing and punishing the Christians for burning the city-he that could deliberately do such things may well be supposed fully equal to any act of barbarous cruelty, however atrocious and malicious. Yet Nero is said to have done all this, together with a thousand other acts of inhumanity, at the bare recital of which we instinctively recoil with horror. It was under such a monster in human shape that Timothy lived. Is it not a wonder that he lived at all?

In the mean time, during those reigns of blood and carnage, the Christian religion had been silently advancing in the world. For about sixty-five years from the birth of its Founder, and thirtytwo from his death and resurrection, it had been steadily making its way amidst opposition of the most formidable character, its disciples inhumanly punished as bleeding victims upon those very altars their own hands had erected for the sacrifice of prayer and thanksgiving, as a penalty for their testimony to its truth. This religion, thus propagated, opposed, and persecuted, had excited great attention, and enlisted the interests, the prejudices, and the passions of mankind, very generally, both for and against it. Among its early converts there were some who had been its most virulent opposers and persecutors, one of whom was the author of the epistle before us. Zealous for all the peculiarities of the Mosaic economy, learned in the laws of human jurisprudence, an active partisan for the Jewish Sanhedrim, a devout Pharisee by birth and education,

and a violent persecutor of the followers of Jesus Christ, he was selected by the high-priests of the Jews to execute their malicious decree to extirpate the Christians from the face of the earth. While on his way to Damascus, with his bloody commission in his pocket, and his heart palpitating with hatred to the Christians, determined to bring all that called on the name of the Lord Jesus, whether men, women, or children, bound to Jerusalem, this zealous partisan was suddenly arrested in his mad career by a voice from heaven sounding in his ears, "Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me?" Ignorant of the person whose voice he heard, and yet surprised by such an unexpected recognition of his name, though prostrate upon the earth from the overpowering brilliancy of that light from heaven which shone around him, he answered from the fulness of his heart, "Who art thou, Lord?" What an unexpected answer was given to this question, "I am Jesus, whom thou persecutest!" "Jesus whom I persecute! I thought thou wast dead and buried. Thou certainly wast crucified at Jerusalem, and thy body committed to the tomb; and I was told that thy disciples came by night and stole thy body, and conveyed it to a secret burying-place. I know, indeed, that thou hast a few straggling followers upon the earth, but I was on my way to destroy even them, in the hope that thou and thy name would soon be forgotten. But dost thou live?" "Yes, I live; I have the keys of death and hell, and I have you as my prisoner. Submit, therefore, to my authority, or suffer the vengeance due to thy sins." "I submit. What wouldst thou have me to do?" "Arise, and go to Damascus, and it shall be told thee." Away he goes, being led by those who accompanied him; for the brightness of the light which shone upon him had blinded his eyes.

Of his subsequent conversion, his call to the ministry of reconciliation, his success and sufferings, we cannot speak particularly. Among others converted to the faith of the gospel, one of the most eminent was Timothy, to whom the epistle before us is directed. It seems necessary, however, to remark that for his fidelity in his calling, his success in winning souls to Christ, the bold manner in which he confronted the Jews and supplanted the Gentile worship, he provoked the ire of the Jews and stirred up the wrath of the Gentiles. For these things he was brought before the civil magistrates, condemned, and cast into prison, and was now, when he wrote the epistle before us, a second time a prisoner in Rome under the blood-thirsty tyrant Nero, the persecutor of the Christians. Having no hope of an exemption from death, he sends to his son Timothy this farewell discourse.

Timothy, as before remarked, had been converted by the