THE GROUND AND SUBSTANCE OF JUSTIFICATION : 
 
 DISCOURSE 
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 OF THE 
 
 HHiy^lTV qp !U!V 
 
 TO THE' 
 
 STUDENTS OF DARTMOUTH COLLEGE, 
 
 NOV, 1853. 
 
 BY NATHAN LORD, 
 
 PRESIDENT. 
 
 DARTMOUTH PRESS, HANOVER. 
 
 1854. 
 
 TUTTLE 
 
UNIVERSITY OF 
 ILLINOIS LIBRARY 
 AT URBANACHAMPAIGN 
 STACKS 
 
DISCOURSE. 
 
 Job ix. 2. — How should man be just with God ? 
 
 This is the inquiry of all minds ; the problem of all 
 the ages. It has produced a conflict of the ages, ac- 
 cordingly as men, instead of accepting, with simplicity, 
 have sensualized, or spiritualized, or denied the word of 
 God. 
 
 The inquiry is pertinent to every particular man ; for 
 every particular man is included under the general de- 
 nominator of the text. Every particular man is likely 
 to make the inquiry, and, sometimes, with profound 
 anxiety ; for it involves his salvation. 
 
 It is pertinent to men collectively ; to every society, 
 state, nation, the world. It concerns the conservation of 
 men, socially and politically, as well as morally ; for jus- 
 tification, a state of righteousness before God, is univer- 
 sally prerequisite to a true and permanent prosperity. 
 Without righteousness every thing eventually crumbles. 
 All institutions which men represent and administer are 
 made dependent on virtue. All subordinate material 
 natures are so subordinated by God, as to be affected by 
 the character of men. The earth itself, by God’s origi- 
 nal appointment, is blessed or cursed for man’s sake. 
 Wherefore, the problem of justification has a reach and 
 comprehension as wide as our present terrestrial system. 
 And, as our terrestrial system is doubtless related to all 
 other parts of God’s universal system, the problem has 
 an universal interest, extending, at least as to moral im- 
 
4 
 
 pression, to the principalities and powers in the heaven- 
 ly places, and to the lowest depths of hell. It involves 
 the integrity and dignity of God’s universal government, 
 in the view of intelligent beings. Nothing could be 
 more shortsighted than to imagine that this question of 
 justification is merely appropriate to a few bad men, in 
 respect to specific, overt offences ; or that it is limited to 
 a nation, as the Jewish, or any other nation • or that it 
 has a merely local and temporary concernment accidental 
 to any peculiar conditions of individuals or of society. 
 For it is moral and essential. Its scope is infinite ; 
 and its consequences are everlasting. 
 
 I propose to discuss this problem. I do it under a 
 •deep sense of its importance, especially to students and 
 all other persons who are likely to lead and mould the 
 opinions of society. For, if I mistake not, society, - and 
 I mean our Protestant society, - is now, to a great extent, 
 and in a remarkable manner, in consequence of new and 
 subtle methods of philosophy, making up new issues be- 
 tween itself and God, in respect to righteousness. It is 
 changing the evangelical meaning of the term, in accom- 
 modation to the new, confused and variable meanings 
 which it puts upon the thing signified by it. A great 
 temptation is spread before us, and with great, though, 
 too generally, unperceived effect, to accept, under this 
 name, ideas foreign to those which are intended in the 
 Gospel, or were , intended in the primitive churches, 
 and in the early Protestant formulas ; — ideas which deep- 
 ly affect the moral character and relations of men, and 
 are likely to result in proportionately injurious conse- 
 quences to the world. I would endeavor to propound 
 the meaning which the Scripture, our only true guide, 
 attaches to this term; and to solve, out of Scripture, the 
 problem which humanity, or, rather, its philosophical 
 
0 
 
 S3*kl 
 
 representatives, are uncertainly and vainly trying to solve 
 on their own account. 
 
 I say out of the Scripture ; — for the opinions of any 
 man, or party, or school, are of no consequence but only 
 as they are in accordance with the Revelations. We 
 want not, on such a subject, theory, upon human reason- 
 ing, but fact, on Divine authority. For man’s opinions, 
 which are notional, variable, inconstant, cannot alter prin- 
 ciples and laws which are immutable and eternal. Learn- 
 ed and good men often unconsciously or inconsiderately 
 traverse, for their powers are limited, and their virtue is 
 impel feet. Learned and bad men traverse voluntarily 
 and with bad design. The Bible never traverses. Jus- 
 tification is above opinion, hypothesis, speculation, in the 
 Divine wisdom. It is a problem of the supernatural, the 
 infinite. It belongs only to God. Whether God will 
 justify a sinner, or how, or on what conditions ; and 
 whether he will, at any time, or when, or how, bring in- 
 to a state of justification the whole fallen world, and in- 
 troduce a millenium ; or what the millenium will be, is 
 as much beyond the grasp of Gabriel as of an infant. 
 Our mere notions about it are contemptible. We are 
 shut up to the Revelations. The question is suggested 
 in the text, not for us to answer it, but to show us most 
 emphatically, according to an idiom of Scripture, that 
 we cannot answer it, because self-justification is impos- 
 sible ; and to awaken our more profound concern about 
 it ; and to direct us to the answer which God alone gives 
 us out of heaven. 
 
 The term justification signifies, simply, the making or 
 constituting of a man righteous ; but, by necessary im- 
 plication, the making of an unjust man righteous. The 
 doctrine of justification, which is my theme, concerns that 
 way or method of clearing men from imputed guilt, and 
 
6 
 
 constituting sinners righteous and acceptable to God, as 
 their moral governor, which is revealed in the Bible. It 
 presupposes the fall of man from original righteousness, 
 his consequent universally and entirely sinful character, 
 and his equally universal state of guilt and condemna- 
 tion. It could have no significance whatever hut upon 
 the previously revealed fact of human degenerateness and 
 wickedness. Its degree of significance to any mind will, 
 of course, depend upon the degree to which that mind is 
 previously convinced of its personal sinfulness, and the 
 general apostasy and guilt of the world. No man can 
 believe in justification who does not believe in the Scrip- 
 ture doctrine of sin ; and whatever any man believes 
 about sin will be the measure of his belief in justification. 
 The two subjects are correlative, and necessarily qualify 
 each other. If we accept the. one only nominally and 
 partially, we can have only a nominal and partial belief in 
 the other, which nominal and partial belief may become, 
 practically, and is likely to become, according to the 
 natural law of error, one of the most injurious forms of un- 
 belief, and to result in the greatest dishonor to Christ, — 
 as the history of unbelief has shown. Luther went for the 
 doctrine of justification, really and entirely ; the reform- 
 ers, in general, and the pilgrim fathers of New England 
 went for it, in the same measure and degree, as “ artic- 
 ulus stantis vel cadentis ecclesia,” because they went for 
 the previous doctrines of original and actual sin. They 
 would not have taken a pen to write for it, and much 
 less would they have given their bodies to burn for it, if 
 they had not regarded it as an account of God’s estab- 
 lished method of taking away sin. They believed, ac- 
 cording to the literal Scripture, that all men are by nature 
 children of wrath, that the principle of evil is born with 
 them, pertaining, mysteriously, to every man’s moral be- 
 
7 
 
 ing; and hereditarily, by reason of parentage, as really as 
 the principle of reason to the mind, or of sensibility to the 
 nerves; and constituting a sinful character, in its order, 
 as truly as those constitute intellectual or animal charac- 
 ter, in their respective orders ; the one quite as level to 
 human comprehension as the others ; that is, all equally 
 above it. They believed that by Adam’s disobedience all 
 were made sinners, and consequently in Adam all die 
 under the penalty of law ; and they did not feel them- 
 selves called upon to vindicate the character of God in es- 
 tablishing such a constitution; or to qualify or refine away 
 the express and unequivocal declarations of his word, in 
 accommodation to the prurient intellects, or uneasy sen- 
 sibilities of a hostile world. This was their stand -point; 
 and from it they looked away to Christ, the second Adam, 
 the Lord from heaven, -to his obedience unto death, and 
 his resurrection unto life, in and by whom alone God sees 
 fit to clear, and magnify, and exalt himself both to the 
 good and bad of all the worlds, — as he does now, in meas- 
 ure, and will effectually do in the issue of this wonderful 
 manifestation. They put the one over against the other, 
 — unrighteousness by the first man, righteousness by the 
 second ; death by Adam , resurrection by Christ. These 
 remarkable antitheses constituted, in their minds, the 
 central truths of Christianity, primitive and reform ed 5 
 without which Christianity must run down, on the one 
 hand, into the crude naturalism of popery, as it had done 
 in their time, or evaporate, on the other, in the more 
 subtle and destructive naturalism of neology, as it has 
 been doing ever since. We ask for the primitive and re- 
 formed faith, for the doctrine of the Bible and the cate- 
 chism, and not for the theories of the sophists ; - the sen- 
 suous sophists of the middle ages, who, by a necessity of 
 their class, held to one false idea ; or the more imagiaa* 
 
8 
 
 tive and etherial sophists of the modern age, who, by an 
 equal necessity, are as variable as the winds. We trust 
 there will still be Christian students, and ministers, and 
 people, who will continue to ask, and to hold fast to the 
 words of Scripture, equally captivated not at all by the 
 old lights of popery, which were once new, amd the new 
 lights more brilliant and flashy of a more speculative, 
 and romantic, and less reverential period. For the true 
 Christ is ever and only in the Scripture, — a supernat- 
 ural Christ, — and to be truly seen there only, not with 
 the eye of sense, or the eye of reason, but of faith, — 
 “ The gift of God.” 
 
 I will now discourse of the ground , and the substance 
 of justification. 
 
 I. The ground of justification is Christ’s work of re- 
 demption, by his sacrificial death. 
 
 The Scripture saith, 4 We are redeemed unto God by 
 his blood — 4 Christ has suffered for us, the just for 
 the unjust, that he might bring us unto God, being put 
 to death : ’ - 4 Who bare our sins in his own body on the 
 tree :’- 4 Redeemed by the precious blcod of Christ 4 Ye 
 are bought with a price 4 The redemption of the pur- 
 chased possession.’ These and scores of similar passages 
 teach us literal redemption only, in distinction from all 
 other ideas, -the languagcbeinginterprctedto mean what 
 similar language means in all other cases, which it must 
 mean, agreeably to the natural laws of language, or it 
 does not mean anything certainly, and we need a new 
 Revelation in order to ascertain the meaning of the old ; 
 though a new Revelation, or any number of Revelations 
 would be equally uncertain, if they might, in like man- 
 ner, be subject to the fancy or caprice of theorizing and 
 interested interpreters. We are compelled by respect to 
 
9 
 
 true knowledge in general, which would otherwise be im- 
 possible, to reject all such speculative interpretations, 
 and, equally, all speculative methods and systems that 
 produce them, or are built upon them. We want not any 
 human theory of atonement, but Divine facts. 
 
 The facts declared in Scripture are — that God made 
 man, the generic representative Adam, upright, in his own 
 image, and the woman Eve, in the same likeness ; that 
 these constituted heads of the race, through instigation 
 of the Devil, fell, and lost the Divine life, by sin ; that 
 in their fall the race is mysteriously implicated, and, 
 consequently, sin and death, naturally, that is, accord- 
 ing to the law of fallen and disordered natures, reign 
 over this world. All individuals, families, states and 
 nations are declared to be apostate and wicked. The 
 curse of sin rests, naturally, that is, according to the 
 settled and immutable principles of moral government, 
 upon them all, and upon all subordinate animate and in- 
 animate natures, so that “ The whole creation groaneth 
 and travaileth in pain together.” To repair this loss of 
 good, consistently with those eternal principles by which 
 God governs all the worlds, and by which only a person- 
 al and perfect God could be supposed to govern, Jesus 
 Christ, in the fulness of time, was manifested from heaven. 
 He was born, miraculously, of the virgin Mary, of the 
 seed of David, according to lineage, but also declared to 
 be the Son of God, with power, by the resurrection from 
 the dead. Because of this Divine paternity he inherited 
 not the sinful nature of man, and was capacitated for the 
 work of his heavenly mission. The attention of the world 
 was directed to this remarkable personage, as claiming 
 to be the incarnation and manifestation of the Godhead ,- 
 a Divine teacher, a fulfiller of prophecy, and a worker 
 
 of miracles. All the forces of material nature were sub- 
 
 2 
 
10 
 
 ject to him, and, equally, all the higher and lower intelli- 
 gencies that, with them, constituted the creation of God. 
 The powers of heaven, earth, and hell bowed before 
 him, and performed his bidding. He was creator of the 
 worlds, Lord of angels, conqueror of the Devil and his 
 revolted hosts. This God-Man, wholly God and wholly 
 man, two natures in one person, was taken, according to 
 the determinate counsel and foreknowledge of God, and 
 by wicked hands was slain, voluntarily submitting to in- 
 conceivable indignities and sufferings, the just for the 
 unjust, offering himself, though infinitely excellent, a 
 propitiatory sacrifice for the guilty, — a ransom for our 
 sins. These events were connected with a long antece- 
 dent promise of salvation, by sacrifice, to our fallen pro- 
 genitors, to the patriarchs of subsequent history, to Abra- 
 ham the representative father of the elect, and to the 
 Jewish Church. They were also in correspondence with 
 emblematical sacrificial institutions of the Jewish econo- 
 my, and more obscure traditionary sacrificial observan- 
 ces of all the pagan nations from the beginning of the 
 world. Redemption was the theme, the antitype, the 
 object and end of them all. It was the fulfilment and 
 winding up of them all. They had all their significan- 
 cy and power of impression from their completing and 
 perfecting issue in the offering of the Cross which bought 
 our pardon. They would have beenunmeaning, absurd 
 and frivolous, or cruel and revolting, but for the end 
 which they prefigured. This gave them consequence, 
 Propriety and dignity, and made them, accordingly, im- 
 pressive upon the nations. When Jesus died they were 
 finished, for redemption was then effected ; and all na- 
 ture signalized the event. The sun withheld his shin- 
 ing, the earth was convulsed, rocks were shattered, the 
 vail of the temple was rent, the Shekinah was revealed, 
 
11 
 
 the graves were opened, and reanimated dead men walk- 
 ed about the streets of Jerusalem. It was a miraculous, 
 solemn, authoritative declaration of Almighty God. 
 
 These facts are history, supernaturally authenticated, 
 and having a natural evidence, internal and collateral, 
 incapable of refutation. If the things thus related in 
 Scripture are not facts, there are no facts ; the world is 
 not a reality, but a phantasmagoria ; we are spectres ; 
 and spectres are nothing. Nihilism reigns. 
 
 The design, significancy and end of this history is re- 
 demption. Its centre is the cross ; and all other subjects 
 of the Revelations are merely incidental and auxiliary. 
 All the direct and literal language which describes it 
 declares redemption. The analogies which explain and 
 enforce it signify redemption. The figures which illus- 
 trate it picture redemption. But redemption itself, 
 equally according to etymology, analogy and figure, im- 
 ports the deliverance of the criminal from penalty by lit- 
 eral satisfaction to the broken law. If any choose, on 
 that account, to call it mercenary, let them take the re- 
 sponsibility of applying that epithet, invidiously, to a 
 transaction which God exalts as the highest instance of 
 the integrity of his government, and which, in a liberal 
 and comprehensive view, admits only of that construc- 
 tion. But upon no scientific principles of interpretation 
 can they deny that redemption, in the literal and actual 
 sense above expressed, is the doctrine of the Bible. That 
 is the only natural and proper meaning of the term, ac- 
 cording to those laws of language by which only we obtain 
 knowledge and assurance upon any other subject. It im- 
 plies a subject buying, an object bought, and a price 
 paid ; — the subject, Christ ; — the object, man ; — the 
 price, blood. “ Ye are bought with a price/ ’ “ Ye 
 
 are not redeemed with corruptible things, as silver and 
 
gold, but with the precious blood of Christ.” “ Feed 
 the church of God, which he hath purchased with his 
 own blood.” The price is paid to the sovereign ruler, 
 in view of his violated law, otherwise enforcing the con- 
 demnation of the sinful soul, but now made honorable in 
 its release ; — to offended and dishonored moral govern- 
 ment, which could not stand if the claims of justice were 
 not fully satisfied, to the view of moral beings, but is 
 now rendered more glorious by the demonstration of the 
 Cross. The race owed obedience. It fell. The law de- 
 manded death. Christ paid the forfeiture ; and their ac- 
 ceptance of his ransom, through abounding grace, ab- 
 solves them from their guilt. The broken law cannot 
 exact upon any who are found in Christ ; for their lia- 
 bility to punishment is discharged ; justice w T as satisfied on 
 the Cross. “ God so loved the world that he gave his only 
 begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not 
 perish, but have everlasting life.” “ Christ, our passo- 
 ver, is sacrificed for us.” The destroying angel, seeing 
 his precious blood upon the door-posts of God’s people, 
 passes them by. Such are the simple statements of the 
 Scripture concerning the mysterious* fact of our redemp- 
 
 * I make frequent use of the epithets mystery and mysterious, that I may 
 impress students with the distinction, which it is unsafe in any degree to 
 lose sight of, between natural and supernatural truths; and that they may 
 more wisely criticise that rationalizing fashion of discourse now so common, 
 which would reduce all things in heaven, and earth, and under the earth, 
 to the measure of our natural conceptions and judgments. The Gospel, 
 over and above its testimony to natural religion, is beyond nature. It was 
 given to supply our absolute deficiency of natural knowledge, in respect to 
 redemption and its related truths, and is incomprehensible in the exercise 
 x n our merely natural powers. It is revealed to faith ; and is to be simply 
 accepted as incomprehensible, and though incomprehensible, because it 
 proceeds forth miraculously and authoritatively from God. To affect a 
 knowledge of it as of those natural phenomena which God has left more 
 open to the exercise of our faculties, is at the expense of faith. To accept 
 it only as it can be levelled to our natural ideas ; that is, the ideas possible 
 
13 
 
 tion ; and we ask for any to show cause, not out of their 
 metaphysics, hut out of Scripture, why they should put 
 upon these statements a speculative and fanciful inter- 
 pretation, and turn this sublime reality, the hope of a 
 ruined world, into an allegory, a symbol, or a myth. 
 
 to us in the use of our imperfect and disordered powers, resolving its diffi- 
 cult problems either by the sensuous, or speculative reason, — like the 
 Catholic, on the one hand, or the neologist, on the other, - is a virtual re- 
 nunciation of faith. And it seems to have been so put to us, in the wisdom 
 of God, as a test of character, with the assurance that if we receive not the 
 kingdom of God as little children, we shall in no wise enter therein. 
 
 It . has been commonly received among wise and good men, that some 
 things are settled; that, especially in ethics and theology, there ar e prin- 
 cipia, the foundations of all belief, the starting points of all inquiry, the lim- 
 its and the rule of reasoning, and the guide of life ; that to these principles 
 we must travel back from all our circuits, making them the ultimate test of 
 knowledge and virtue. But that is made questionable by our modern 
 sophists. The old foundations are breaking up. For example ; — the first 
 and foremost of these principles is the personality and absolute perfection 
 of the Godhead. But I mistake if there are now many persons, out of an 
 
 old fashioned and continually narrowing circle, who would feel obliged to 
 accept a proposition merely because God affirms it, or a fact because God 
 ordains it, or a principle because he makes it his rule of conduct. Bather, 
 the principle, the fact, the doctrine must have the previous sanction of the 
 reason, — by which can be meant only the reason of every man who chooses 
 to exercise his ingenuity upon the subject. God himself, the Alpha and 
 Omega, must be subjected to that criticism; and our ideas of right and 
 wrong, of fitness and unfitness, of honor and dishonor, must be, virtually, the 
 standards of judgment in respect to his word and government. Be it so, if 
 the reason of every particular man, and every particular great man, is but 
 the developement of a supposed universal reason , and Pantheism is the true 
 theology. But these critics of the reason, who affect to sit in judgment on 
 the Godhead, ought to be frank, manly and consistent. They should make 
 an open profession of their pantheistic faith, and prove it by something 
 better than mesmeric finesse, before they call upon the Christian world to 
 go back of principles which it has been used to regard as ultimate and de- 
 cisive, and to accept dogmas and hypotheses upon the credit of a merely 
 pretending oracle. New revealers should avow their Divine authority, and 
 should work new miracles to sustain it. Else very good men and minis- 
 ters of the Gospel, imposed upon by this specious sophistry, or unconscious- 
 ly misled by its influence upon their own aspiring imaginations, may be- 
 come the worst subverters of the old foundations, and confound the ele- 
 
J4 
 
 In what the merits of Christ's obedience, sufferings 
 and death consist, how they are adequate to the demands 
 of law, how equivalent to the punishment of transgress- 
 ors, or in what philosophical sense they become availa- 
 ble ; — these, and other speculative questions raised in 
 the schools, concern ns not. They belong to the super- 
 natural government of God, which cannot be reduced by 
 our philosophy, and is likely to be dishonored by our 
 ambitious and vain attempts. It would be amusing, if, 
 on such a subject, any thing but serious melancholy could 
 be justified, to observe the inconsistent and nugatory 
 strifes of the sophists in aspiring to this circumvention of 
 the infinite, and their mad sporting above the clouds. 
 They do but dash each other’s theories in pieces, and 
 are severally dashed themselves against the plain and 
 unsophisticated language of the Scripture, which gives 
 us no solution of what is beyond our faculties, and calls 
 upon us only to believe the facts upon the authority of 
 God. Because of this presumptuous spirit , our protestant 
 schools, the world over, are now divided and at variance, 
 to the general confusion and indifference of the bewilder- 
 ed people, and the dishonoring and withdrawing of the 
 Holy Spirit. But the facts of the Bible are not less facts 
 because they are mysterious, and mysterious facts are 
 not less credible or important because they are incom- 
 ments of all knowledge. And another worse consequence will then ensue ; for 
 the infatuated people, upon the natural propagation of the illusion, will, ere 
 long, be left without cither a pole-star to guide them in the darkness, or an 
 anchor to hold them in the storm. They will merely float upon the wild 
 sea, driven, about by the gusty winds of doctrine that already threaten to 
 convulse entirely the social state of Christendom, and to hasten a general 
 catastrophe of the nations. Is there nothing like this now ? Shall men’s 
 eyes be holden that they will not see it ? Shall the vaunt of “ progress 
 and improvement” cheat us to the end ? Shall we, by a vain public opin- 
 ion, sustain one another in such an error till it is too late to retrace our 
 steps ? 
 
prehensible in the imperfections of a probationary state. 
 They rather constitute the trial and discipline of such a 
 state, for which, indeed, God appoints it, giving us 
 precisely this opportunity of subduing that presump- 
 tous spirit of intermeddling with forbidden knowledge 
 which occasioned the original loss of virtue in the race, 
 and the perpetuated sacrifice of primeval good. They 
 are not less satisfying and saving to the humbled and 
 believing soul when it stands in its probation, and re- 
 ceives the kingdom of God as a little child. If I would 
 be cured of a mortal disease, it is of no consequence to 
 me that I do not comprehend the art of the physician, or 
 the nature of the remedies by which he saves me. I 
 should die if I declined the remedies till those specula- 
 tive questions were settled, which I could not settle with- 
 out being myself a physician ; and not then ; for I reck- 
 on that our best physicians are but experimentalists after 
 all ; and whoever pretends to be more than that, and to 
 have resolved, by any eclectic process, the arcana of the 
 profession, and to have found the Catholicon, is not a 
 true physician, but an empiric and pretender. Let no man 
 trust him. And so it is enough that Christ has satis- 
 fied the demands of justice, and that God is w T ell pleased 
 with the economy of redemption, which himself estab- 
 lishes and reveals. The intimate nature of this redemp- 
 tion we may be content to let alone : for we are bound by 
 the law of our finite and disordered faculties to let it 
 alone, till we are raised to a higher sphere, lest we be 
 turned away, by scholastic artifice, from the fact of re- 
 demption which alone concerns us, to metaphysical fic- 
 tions which prove nothing, but confuse all things, and 
 produce the greatest unconcern of what most touches our 
 salvation. What have we to do to catch at shadows, and 
 let go the substance, though men vainly call those shad- 
 
16 
 
 ows learning and philosophy ? What, but as Paul, to 
 know it for what it is, to criticise it by a higher standard, 
 and expose its egotism, shallowness and falsehood ? 
 
 The fact of redemption by Christ’s blood on which 
 simple-hearted Christians have always rested, is so sim- 
 ple, that they who would be learned rather than wise, 
 choose not to present it in its simplicity, lest they should 
 not attain to the proper dignity of a learned calling. 
 That vice belongs to scholasticism in general, which, in 
 all the ages, has, wittingly or unwittingly, covered up 
 God’s simplicities by its vain affectations. But it is 
 well for students, liable as they are to that temptation, 
 to know that things are always most essential, vital and 
 consequential in their simplicities, and are then corner- 
 stones of the greatest buildings, and key-stones of the 
 most magnificent arches ; and that these simplicities, as 
 well in natural as in supernatural science, are things 
 which we learn not by reason, and cannot explain by 
 reason, but take for granted by a simple faith. So it is 
 that this simple fact of Christ having bought us by his 
 blood, paying that infinite, though infinitely mysterious 
 price for our redemption, which fact we know by faith 
 alone, is the basis and compacting element of Christian- 
 ity, without which Christianity falls, or becomes only an 
 illuminated edition of natural religion ; — yet not nat- 
 ural religion, in its simplicity, but as it is expounded 
 by such as would improve upon the original traditions. 
 Our justification before God stands upon it, which could 
 not stand, as we shall see by and by, if a perfect satis- 
 faction were not made to moral government for our sins. 
 Admit the sin, and we must admit also the expiation, 
 according to the Scripture, as the only adequate founda- 
 tion for the sinner’s hope. Expiation for sin could not, 
 indeed, be reasoned out by us, a priori , notwithstanding 
 
17 
 
 those sophists who would be thought evangelical, but 
 would have the Gospel true, not because God reveals it, 
 but because it is indicated by their a priori reason. Yet, 
 who ever reasoned out redemption independently of Rev- 
 elation ? Who ever heard of a crucified Christ except 
 from the Bible ? It is easy for any man, now that an 
 atonement is made and declared, to say, ambitiously, 
 that it was evident beforehand ; and it is easy for some 
 men to frame an ingenious argument upon that pretence. 
 But who ever actually prophesied of redemption, except 
 the men whom God miraculously inspired ? Christ was 
 no otherwise “ The Desire of all nations,’ ’ than as the 
 seed of the woman had been foretold in the holy Scrip- 
 tures, and the scattered rays of that heavenly light had 
 penetrated to the chambers of pagan imagery. The Per- 
 sian Magi would not have found the actual Christ but for 
 the miraculous star that led them. We have no evidence 
 that unassisted reason could ever have gained that su- 
 pernatural height ; though, when the light of redemp- 
 tion shines into the otherwise benighted soul, its very 
 expulsion of the previous darkness shows its fitness to 
 the sinner’s forlorn and miserable condition. The ex- 
 perimental reason, then, expressly enlightened from 
 above, admires what the mere speculative reason could 
 never otherwise have imagined. It accredits truth, so 
 inwrought by a Divine power, and the renewed heart 
 gratefully entertains it, while to mere speculation it is 
 still as romance and fable ; — just so as always the poor, 
 the ignorant, the suffering and despairing know, experi- 
 mentally, the fitness and sufficiency of Christ’s salvation, 
 when moved by the Holy Ghost, while the vainly wise 
 ignore it, and it becomes to them a stumbling block and 
 foolishness. The light of redemption shines into the open 
 casements of their unsophisticated minds, as it never 
 
 9 
 
 O 
 
18 
 
 could shine through the stained, variegated, parti-color- 
 ed windows of the more fanciful and artistic, who 
 like a painted and substituted rather than the living 
 Christ, an idea, an image, rather than the reality. So 
 “ God hath chosen the poor of this world, rich in faith, 
 and heirs of the kingdom which he hath promised to them 
 that love him” : — truly a severe but merited reproach 
 upon the learned subtlety of this world ! 
 
 There is great meaning in that interior, experimental 
 evidence which convinces the believer, so profoundly, 
 of the doctrines of the Gospel. It is so, particularly, in 
 regard to the reality of our redemption by the blood of 
 Christ ; for though this is declared to us in inspired lan- 
 guage which has a logical power above all other language, 
 yet all language fails, from its very nature, to produce 
 that profound and vital sense of the fact which the be- 
 liever entertains in his experienced soul. He doubts not 
 the propositions which are embodied in the words of 
 Scripture ; and they are full of light, and hope and peace 
 to his otherwise darkened and despairing mind. They 
 establish, strengthen and settle him ; but only as the 
 body in which he finds the life of truth. When he reads, 
 for instance, such unequivocal declarations as the fol- 
 lowing : — 16 Whom God has set forth a propitiation, 
 through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness 
 for the remission of sins that are past, through the for- 
 bearance of God • to declare, at this time, his righteous- 
 ness, that he might be just, and the justifier of him that 
 believeth in Jesus ; ” — “ Who hast redeemed us unto 
 God by thy blood, and made us kings and priests unto 
 God “ He was wounded for our transgressions, he 
 was bruised for our iniquities ; the chastisement of our 
 peace was upon him, and by his stripes we are healed ; 
 these and similar declarations are assuring and satisfy- 
 
19 
 
 mg in respect to fact. But the fact itself of his debt 
 paid by Christ, his ransom effected by atoning blood, his 
 exaltation out of Christ’s humiliation, his joy out of 
 Christ’s sorrow, his glory out of Christ’s shame, his life 
 out of Christ’s death, his ascent from Hades out of Christ’s 
 descent into it, his rising up from a state of ignominy 
 and wrath to become an infinitely honorable habitation 
 of God through the Spirit, while the eternal ages roll on 
 the anthem of redeeming love ; — all this is connected, 
 by a new consciousness, with thoughts, emotions and af- 
 fections which are indescribable and unutterable. He 
 could not tell them to another believing mind, and much 
 less to one who had no similar experience. And he 
 could not define them to himself. But he can tell to all 
 men that, in view of the fact of redemption which he re- 
 ceives, literally, on the authority of God, he has corres- 
 ponding exercises of the soul, produced by God’s Spirit, 
 which cannot be adequately told in any language of the 
 earth ; and that those interior and vital evidences of the 
 fact are even more conclusive to his mind than the his- 
 torical or dogmatic evidence which he accepted on other 
 grounds. He stands on this double foundation : that is, 
 the literal historical doctrine, and the corresponding 
 heart-felt experience ; and, according to that great Chris- 
 tian paradox which no one but the Christian himself can 
 understand or appreciate, he is the more convinced in- 
 asmuch as it is impossible for him to comprehend or ex- 
 plain the process. He believes, not with the stupid 
 faith of the Catholic, because the fact is impossible, but 
 with the recovered blind man of the Gospel, because it 
 is impossible to describe the mysterious nature and in- 
 comprehensible influence of the certain fact, as that cer- 
 tain fact is made vital and effectual by the promised Spir- 
 it. He believes because of the sensible evidence of the 
 
20 
 
 clay, the spittle, and the audible command ; but he be- 
 lieves, rather, because of the blessed light which is equal- 
 ly indescribable in its simplicity and its glory. Thus it 
 is that the mysterious Cross and Regeneration go togeth- 
 er in respect to God’s elect. Thus it is, also, that the 
 simple-hearted believer is kept in covenant, saved equal- 
 ly in respect to the letter and the spirit of the Scripture ; 
 saved from the sophistry which substitutes dogma and 
 form for the spiritual life ; from the sophistry that virtu- 
 ally rejects dogma and form, — the only appointed means 
 of sustaining the spiritual life, and for the true Spirit 
 substitutes a natural spiritualism, a false though baptiz- 
 ed sentimentalism, which has no moral virtue ;-andthat 
 other more heartless sophistry which subjects both doc- 
 trine and experience, the letter and the Spirit, to a mere 
 idea , a conception and image of the speculative reason 
 that puffeth up with a conceit of wisdom and virtue, but 
 leaves the soul barren and unprofitable.* 
 
 *1 must ask of students that they would studiously enter into the mean- 
 ing of these distinctions, and follow them out, critically, in their application 
 to the systems of error that are coming in so destructively, but, to the gen- 
 erality even of good men, imperceptibly, in our times, and are wrest- 
 ing, according to their respective varieties, the interpretation of Scripture. 
 They will then understand the infinite difference between the Christ of 
 the Bible, and the Christ of nature ; — the school that has one master, and 
 the schools that have many. They will be able to lay open to their sources 
 the fallacies of Romanism, Puseyism, Pelagianism, and the different types 
 of neological philosophy. They will mark the natural influence of these 
 several distinct subtleties in the opposing superstitions and fanaticisms of 
 the age. They will learn the devices of the Prince of the power of the 
 air, in arraying now these hostile forces, exciting them to a new and terri- 
 ble activity, and, under color, on the one hand, of preserving, and, on the 
 other, of reforming and improving society, heaping up the elements of gen- 
 eral explosion and revolution. They will consequently attain to a knowl- 
 edge, and, by the blessing of God upon such important studies, to a char- 
 acter eminently fitted for those hastening scenes of prophetic history, — 
 scenes unexampled in the past ages, — in which all these erring parties 
 will experience ruinous reverses, though now they regard the warnings of 
 Scripture with stolid indifference, or an irritable unbelief. 
 
21 
 
 
 We rest then our justification before God on the ground 
 of this literal and experimental doctrine of Christ’s re- 
 demption. We owe it wholly to the Scripture which 
 proposes it to us as God’s only and sovereign provision 
 for our deliverance from the curse of sin. In the con- 
 sciousness of guilt we accept it as the only known or con- 
 ceivable method of absolution. We are shut up to it ; 
 and can only evade it by a denial or misconstruction of 
 our lost and sinful state. But we know ourselves too 
 well to make that denial, even if the Scripture had given 
 us no account, beforehand, of the fall of Adam, and had 
 not concluded us all under sin. We could, but God for- 
 bid that we should misinterpret the Scripture in respect 
 to the apostasy and depravity of the race. We could, 
 then, diminish our sense of personal unworthiness, and 
 of the necessity and reality of Christ’s atonement ; we 
 could abandon ourselves to a merely ideal theology, and 
 reduce the doctrine of sin and redemption to philosophical 
 formulas squared to our fictitious conceptions of the na- 
 ture of God, of his end in creation and providence, of 
 virtue, of government, of retribution ; we could substi- 
 tute these artificial standards for the teachings of Scrip- 
 ture and experience, and sustain ourselves by the vote 
 of the majority. But when Sinai thunders its anathe- 
 mas in our guilty conscience, and the awakened soul be- 
 comes alive to the ruined state of the world, and its own 
 personal depravity and insufficiency, then all these cob- 
 webs of speculation are swept away, and we learn that 
 there is nothing to know or to make known as a ground 
 of hope save Jesus Christ and him crucified. So the 
 blood-bought Church, elect in the Redeemer, has always 
 judged ; and a crucified Christ has been all the glory and 
 the joy of every penitent disciple. When the Church 
 visible has lost the spirit of its invisible relations, and 
 
22 
 
 has turned to fables, then Christ has withdrawn from it, 
 and it has shed disastrous light upon the nations, equal- 
 ly disastrous whether it has been Roman or German, the 
 false fira of the Vatican, or the Areopagus. Guilt and 
 sacrifice stand or fall together. Deny the Scripture doc- 
 trine of original and actual sin, in that interior and vital 
 sense in which Romanists deny it, and you set up a rit- 
 ual justification, and substitute an outward washing for 
 the cleansing of the soul. Deny it in the same sense as 
 the neologist, after his order, denies it, and you set up 
 a sentimental justification, and substitute girlish emo- 
 tions and sympathies, mere refined humanities for the 
 heavenly love. You become a creature of forms, on the 
 one hand, or of sensibilities, on the other ; a sensualist 
 or idealist in philosophy ; stoical or epicurean, ascetic or 
 philanthropic in morals ; superstitious or fanatical in re- 
 ligion ; despotic or revolutionary in politics ; socially, a 
 cold and leaden bigot in your attachment to antiquated 
 errors and abuses, or a gaseous and steaming fomenter 
 of reforms, discords and destructions ; on both hands, 
 equally lost to yourself, to society, and to God ; for man 
 finds God, and becomes like God, and acceptable to God 
 only at the Cross : “ I am the way, and the truth, and 
 the life ; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.”* 
 
 *It is worthy of the student’s most attentive observation, that the Roman- 
 ist and the neologist come out, though by different methods of reasoning 
 and interpretation, in nearly similar conclusions concerning the doctrine of 
 sin ; and that, consequently, they will be likely, in the course of providence, 
 to come together also in respect to their social and political relations. Be- 
 cause their different respective methods arc both equally natural and philo- 
 sophical, and not of faith, they equally fail, of necessity, to apprehend that 
 death of the soul, its loss of the Divine life of love, by the fall of Adam, 
 which is set forth in Scripture. These differences, therefore, being not es- 
 sential, but merely Speculative and formal, oppose no serious obstacles to a 
 practical and political agreement when exigencies require. The neologist, 
 for example, now alleges upon the Romanist the .absurd belief of a mere 
 
II. The substance of justification. 
 
 Justification presupposes guilt. Whoever is justified 
 was previously guilty, he he the old man of an hundred 
 years, or the infant of an hour. And justification must 
 have substance as really as guilt, or it cannot be substi- 
 
 physical depravity, in consequence of the fall of Adam, — a derived distem- 
 per in the supposed organism of the soul, to which baptismal regeneration, 
 penance, almsgiving, priestly absolution, and the like, are in natural cor- 
 respondence ; making him a mere ritualist in religion. The Romanist, 
 on the other hand, charges upon his adversary the greater absurdity of sup- 
 posing a pure spirit, a developcment of the supposed universal reason, or, 
 more orthodoxly, a new creation of God, incarcerated in a distempered or- 
 ganism of flesh and blood, subject to disturbance and irregularity from the 
 diseased sensibilities and deranged appetites of a mortal body, for all which 
 a natural remedy is found in the arts of hygiene, and a vigorous cultivation 
 of the active and moral powers; that is, a refined education in general ; — 
 making him a mere spiritualist, or sentimentalist in religion. Thus 
 they stand only at opposite poles of the same natural system. And 
 they do not virtually misrepresent each other ; for their respective theories, 
 so far as any theory on such a subject can be reduced to formulas, centre in 
 a merely physical idea of sin, and runout practically to a merely physical 
 deliverance from it. According to them both, and equally, the loss pro- 
 duced to the soul by sin, being only accidental and not essential and vital, 
 is a loss to be repaired, consequently, on the one part, by an outward wash- 
 ing, and, on the other part, by a galvanic stimulus. Both these remedies 
 are equally natural, except as both parties, in affected compliment to the 
 Scripture, admit an assisting influence of a Divine Spirit. But in both the- 
 ories, as the stress is laid upon the physical evil, so, of necessity, it is laid 
 also upon the physical remedy, and not the supernatural afflatus, which is 
 but as a favoring breeze upon the steamer that can do without it, or against 
 it ; for God himself, according to both philosophies cannot help saving the 
 absolved or the resolved professor of their respective creeds. In both, tha 
 Redemption, and the Regeneration, and the Justification,, as they are not 
 formal, but vital and essential, not natural but supernatural, are but nomi- 
 nally and not really admitted, and the supernatural Gospel which reveals 
 them is essentially dishonored. They would both save, not by the true 
 Christ, but by semblances and fictions; the one by consecrated water, the 
 other, by rhetoric and philosophy ; the one by a visible ordinance, the other 
 by auimal magnetism ; the one by physical constraint, the other by moral 
 suasion ; the one by the fear of misery, the other by the love of happiness ; 
 the one by display of regal and pontifical magnificence, the other by an in- 
 dependent press and spirited discussion ; the one by bulls and anathemas; 
 the other by speeches and resolutions. And whosoever chooses not to be 
 
24 
 
 tuted for it, and guilt cannot be taken away. The two 
 ideas must be consubstantial ; that is, not merely related 
 ideas, but reduced to facts and verities. Being a sub- 
 stantial verity, it admits of definition. It has a mean- 
 
 saved by either, but is indifferent alike to threat and flattery, is denounc- 
 ed by both for new-fangled heresy, or old-fashioned pertinacity ; left to 
 ireaeh heaven at last, if at all, only according to uneovenanted mercy, or 
 universal salvation. 
 
 Yet the Romanist has clearly this great advantage over the neologist, - 
 that his method, more sensuous though it be, makes at least a more tangible 
 recognition of the word of God. He honors, though out of all proportion, 
 and extravagantly, the formal dogmas and the rites of Scripture, and, so 
 far, holds to something that is, in an important sense, connected with salva- 
 tion ; whereas the other transcends the Scripture altogether, and passes in- 
 to a region of mere abstractions. He relies on what the Scripture in no 
 ’wise recommends, but, contrarily, denounces, and calls upon the Christians 
 to beware of, lest they be spoiled through its vain deceits, — as the excel- 
 lent Paul has it : — “ For I determined not to know any thing among you 
 save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And my speech and my preaching 
 was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the 
 Spirit and of power ; that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of 
 men, but in the power of God.” 
 
 Wherefore I doubt not that these two fallacies, opposites in form, but of 
 the same essence, will come together, when a common occasion, in the course 
 of providence, shall occur ; and, particularly, that Romanism, having a more 
 settled character, and positive efficiency, and withal a more plausible pre- 
 tence of Divine authority, will swallow up neology. Neology, ideal and 
 unsubstantial as it is, when its insufficiency to save men from the death of 
 sin, and its corresponding powerlessness, as an instrument of state, to save 
 them from social and political disorganization, shall become practically evi- 
 dent throughout the Christian world, as it already is in the most learned 
 and civilized parts of it, will retire from the conflict. Jt will be obliged, at 
 least, to affect Romanism, to conceal itself under its name, and to fight un- 
 der its banners, making that false system more adulterous and anti-christian ; 
 for the mere security of its temporalities. It will, by and by, manifest less 
 concern for its own visionary and useless speculations than for life and 
 property. It will learn that an imaginative theology and corresponding 
 empty declamation are no match for Satanic agency ; and that without some 
 formal show of Divine authority, some sensible hold on the natural con- 
 science, this fallen and God-hating world will naturally fall off into anar- 
 chy and dissolution. It will find that when it has abolished institutions, 
 civil or religious, benevolent or penal, ordained in the wisdom of God ; or 
 when it has reformed and shaped them, only according to its vain ideas, 
 
25 
 
 mg like any other reality of Scripture, or of nature, and 
 that meaning, sufficiently for all practical purposes, is 
 distinctive and intelligible. We may ascertain in what 
 justification consists. 
 
 It, of course, excludes the idea of any antecedent 
 righteousness ; for it consists in making unjust persons 
 
 and equally in rejection of their Divine right, then it has taken itself out of 
 the Divine protection, and that the setting up of its romantic idolatry is 
 but a signal for the execution of God’s judicial vengeance. 
 
 Already the winding up of the whole scene of cosmopolitan reform, philan- 
 thropy and chicane, is at hand. The day hastens when the revolutionism grow- 
 ing out of the contest of the rival forces of Romanism and neology for the so- 
 cial and political dominion of the earth, and producing the present convul- 
 ions of our apostatizing Christendom, will cause a general reaction in favor of 
 the strongest arm. The neio light dream of universal liberty and equality, 
 and universal salvation, will vanish like the painted clouds of evening, and 
 the subjects of that grand modern hallucination will call upon some advanc- 
 ing dark power of despotism to save them from the ruinous political conse- 
 quences of their delusion. Then experience will teach men, but too late, 
 what they would not learn by faith from doctrinal and prophetic Scripture, 
 how inefficient is any Gospel which is not Christ’s, but another’s, to estab- 
 lish liberty, and vindicate the boasted “ rights of man;” — when the abom- 
 ination of desolation” shall stand again “ in the holy place” ; when another 
 assimilated Greek and Roman power, more wickedly idolatrous than that 
 of old, shall seek once more to possess the City and the Land which God 
 forever holds in keeping for the people of his covenant. Nor can a more 
 ultimate consequence be doubtful, according to that everlasting covenant, 
 that this mighty despotism, more arrogant and insulting by reason of its 
 world-wide triumphs, shall make the last resistance of this aion to the Prince 
 of heaven ; and lie, the true and literal Christ, shall consume the man of 
 sin, — “That Wicked,” — by the breath of his mouth, and destroy him by the 
 brightness of his coming ; shall finish his six days’ work, not of creation, but 
 redemption, and usher in a Millcnial Sabbath. For that let the afflicted 
 militant Church of God wait, with patience and hope ; and “ Fight the good 
 fight of faith ; and keep the commandment, without spot, unrebukeable, un- 
 til the appearing of our Lord Jesus Christ, which in his times he shall 
 show, who is the blessed and only Potentate, the “ King of kings and Lord 
 of lords ” 
 
 While I say these things of Romanism and neology, I intend systems, — 
 if neology may be said to have a system, — and not men ; or, rather, not all 
 the men denominated by them. I remember the few great and good, ex- 
 ceptions to their respective schools, and much more the many humble poor, 
 
 4 
 
righteous. It implies a character superinduced upon 
 those who previously possessed it not, and were under 
 condemnation for the want of it. Besides, a justifying 
 righteousness is not a righteousness of works, hut of 
 faith. 
 
 But it consists not in faith. Faith is not righteous- 
 ness ; for righteousness is by faith. It is a consequent 
 of faith ; and to confound antecedent and consequent is 
 a solecism. Righteousness is true virtue, holiness, and 
 
 unconsciously misled, who have fallen, unhappily, but not fatally, into these 
 communions, yet have loved the true Christ behind the idols which a pur- 
 blind reason had interposed, and worn his robe of righteousness, though 
 ignorant, on the same account, that it was not a texture of their own. 
 There are many grades of Romanism and neology, from high to low, and 
 some possibly of God’s elect in all, who, despite the accidents of birth and 
 discipline, have lived so near the dividing line of faith, to the true Christ, 
 that the heavenly influence has passed over, and saved them from the sin- 
 fulness, if not all the darkness and prejudice of the natural mind. God 
 also, in his inscrutable wisdom, may use such servants of his whom he leaves 
 still in partial bondage, not only to restrain bad men from excess of wicked- 
 ness, but to reprove good men, of a purer doctrine, though less sanctified 
 in heart, that no man should glory but in his grace. Wherefore, God for- 
 bid that any should not love and honor such chosen servants, for Christ’s 
 sake, though called to condemn and denounce the false systems in which 
 they are brought up, even though these systems become more destructive 
 from the sanction of their venerated names. These paradoxes and myste- 
 ries of Divine providence are ordained for our probation. They humble 
 and confuse us now, but they will be cleared up by and by. Meanwhile it 
 becomes us to profit by them, according to their design, not, indeed, to sur- 
 render a heart-felt conviction, to suppress an urgent conscience, to with- 
 hold a deserved rebuke, to forbear a solemn testimony ; but for the clear- 
 ing of our mental vision, the establishing of our faith, the correcting of our 
 judgments, the increasing of our candor, the enlarging of our sympathies, 
 and the refining of our charity. Then we shall not dishonor Christ though 
 we call things by their right names, and expose sophistry, or scout hypoc- 
 risy, or laugh at folly. We shall need not fear to brand an infidel, to scotch 
 a deceiver, to rebuke a friend, or withstand a brother. Christian students 
 will be hurt by none of these ; but by time-serving, sycophancy and double- 
 dealing ; by childish evasions, unlawful concessions, deceitful subterfuges 
 and hollow-hearted coalitions; by shuffling for private advantage, maneuv- 
 ering for a clique, catering for a party, or shouting with a majority. 
 
27 
 
 is meritorious, for it implies virtuous and holy action, and 
 consists in it. But faith is not meritorious ; for the saving 
 faith of the Gospel is not strictly an act, but a principle ; — 
 the cause or antecedent of action, of all virtuous willing 
 and doing, and therefore not an actual righteousness it- 
 self. Besides, it is a principle not of man’s production, but 
 of God’s. “ It is the gift of God and, being God’s pro- 
 duct, it constitutes no merit of the believing mind ; just 
 as the more generic fact of regeneration is not man’s 
 righteousness, nor the effect of man’s righteousness, but 
 of God’s sovereign mercy, and a stated antecedent of 
 righteousness which cannot be confounded with righteous- 
 ness itself.* 
 
 *1 am not unmindful, here, that the Scripture literally calls upon men 
 to repent, believe and love, specifically; and also, generally, to renew their 
 hearts; that is, it requires of them holiness, and all the evangelical fruits of 
 holiness, just as if these now fell within the limits of their natural ability. 
 Nor am I unmindful with what confidence and zeal these commands of 
 Scripture are frequently adduced in evidence of man’s natural ability to 
 obey them : and that this alleged natural ability consequently makes a great 
 figure in our modern speculative theology. But I think it not adventurous 
 to say, on the other hand, that these very commands of Scripture, in all their 
 literality, prove, in their proper connections, the very contrary of this al- 
 leged natural abilly. They help to constitute, according to the idiom of 
 Scripture, that remarkable paradox by which God purposely makes the sin- 
 ner’s inability most evident to his own awakened mind, and convinces him 
 of his absolute dependence on the grace and power of his Almighty Kedeem- 
 er. He would thus most effectually subdue and humble men, and magnify, 
 in their view, that work of his Spirit which alone reproduces the principle 
 of holiness in the fallen soul. 
 
 For these rciparkable commands stand not alone in Scripture. They be- 
 long to an economy which can be perfectly understood only when its sever, 
 al parts are taken in their natural relations to each other and the whole. 
 Any partial and disintegrating process of interpretation is deceptive. It is 
 disingenuous, onesided, and leaves out of view those very facts which are 
 most important to a comprehensive understanding of the subject. It is dan- 
 gerous; for in connection with other similar interpretations of related doc- 
 trines of the Scripture, its effect is to falsify the whole economy, and to pre- 
 vent or impair that state of intellectual conviction which, though it be not 
 «ssentially prerequisite to the conversion of the soul, God has been pleased 
 
28 
 
 Faith is sometimes described to us as if it were meri- 
 torious ; and many preachers of the Gospel apparently 
 make that mistake. But with how little reason this is 
 said will appear, even if faith be considered a natural act 
 of the self-determined mind, as justifying faith is not, 
 
 to make the ordinary and stated antecedent of it. But a brief explanation 
 must now suffice. 
 
 Thus : — God said “ Let there be light ; and there was light.” He com- 
 manded nothing to produce something, and it did. Christ said to the dead 
 Lazarus, “ Come forth and he did ; to the impotent man, “ Stretch forth 
 thine hand and he did ; to Saul of Tarsus, “ I am Jesus whom thou perse- 
 cutest;” and Saul believed, and preached the faith he had destroyed. lie 
 says, in like manner, to others dead in sins, “Live and the new life of 
 faith and love glows in their recovered souls. These analogous commands 
 all equally illustrate natural inability, and supernatural power in overcoming 
 it, alike in respect to related material, mental and moral natures. The su- 
 pernatural power goes out with the command to prevail over the natural 
 impotency, which it speaks into activity, over the death which it wakens in- 
 to life. The nothingness and the death ; the creation, the redemption and 
 the new creation, are all made manifest; and Father, Son and Iloly Ghost 
 are glorified together. Christ does not command without giving evidence 
 sufficient of his power to make the command effectual ; and he commands 
 that he may illustrate his all-sufficiency. While he says, “No man can come 
 to me except the Father, who hath sent me, draw him,” he requires the com- 
 ing, and when he pleases, exerts the drawing, and the impossible to man 
 is made possible by God. We ‘ work out our salvation with fear and tremb- 
 ling, for God worketh in us to will and to do of his good pleasure.’ Christ 
 thus practically harmonizes all his doctrines, and they are vindicated in 
 their comprehensive unity and sublime efficacy to the world. 
 
 But when these facts of Scripture are separated, and placed out of the re- 
 lations in which God reveals them, they are rendered unmeaning and con- 
 tradictory, and they cannot be logically interpreted together. One or both 
 must yield to some absurd violence of rationalistic exposition. If the Cross 
 and the Regeneration are not viewed in strict connexion with the fall of 
 man and his spiritual death, which they presuppose and make more fully ev- 
 ident, then one or all of these related facts become not facts, but mere top- 
 ics for the exercise of a metaphysical ingenuity, and Scripture is a nose of 
 wax. Beautiful they are as they stand together, in their simplicity, in the 
 word of God ; but monstrous, as they are put in opposition in the systems of 
 the philosophers. Firebrands they are to wise men when the command to 
 love meets the equally literal declaration “je cannot,” on the arena of phi- 
 losophical contention ; but life giving they are to children when the heaven- 
 ly music meets their ear in its touching and melting symphony, “ Thypeo- 
 
29 
 
 and not a supernatural principle produced by God, as it 
 is ; for though there be a faith which is man’s act, it is 
 a mere assent to propositions, on proof, a mechanical op- 
 eration, and after processes of reasoning which are me- 
 chanical, and not moral, and therefore not meritorious. 
 
 pie shall be willing in the day of thy power.” Who shall say that these chil- 
 dren are not greatest after all, great in God’s greatness, while they delight 
 to be nothing, and less than nothing, that God may be all in all? 
 
 I can imagine that such children, in their simplicity, should greatly per- 
 plex a philosopher, not merely in respect to his contradictory interpreta- 
 tions of Scripture, but his very theory of natural ability ; and that too with- 
 out having any theory of their own. For it is obvious to ask what this al- 
 leged natural ability, except as a philosophical abstraction, and without re- 
 gard to Scripture, is ? What was the natural ability of light to shine, or any 
 other matter to produce itself before it was ? Or of Lazarus to live again 
 when he was dead ? Or of the withered hand to restore the nervous energy 
 which had been destroyed ? And, by equal reason, of the soul to love while 
 it hates ? of a sinful current of affection to turn itself back to the fountain, 
 and change the poisoned springs into living water? What are these invis- 
 ible principles of light and love, that reveal themselves in corresponding mo- 
 tions, affinities, attractions, repulsions ? What and where is the secret 
 place where these principles originate, and whence they flow out for good 
 or evil? Is that secret place in nature ? What is that nature of a dead 
 man, or of a hating soul, which has ability to live, or love ? What is the nat- 
 ural stimulus that awakens it ? What natural power destroys, not the or- 
 ganism in which life or love are manifested, but the principles themselves ? 
 or reproduces them ? or sustains them under the difficulties of resisting na- 
 ture ? To what natural retreat fled the love of Satan and his hosts when 
 they rebelled and were thrust out ofheaven ? or what natural motives would 
 set it again in flame ? Or Judas’s, or yours, or mine, if we be dead in sin ? 
 I would that any wise man would instruct me better concerning this natural 
 ability of death to live; or enough, at least to set me on a hopeful search. 
 I would be wise. My poor faculties reach not to this. I would that some 
 would teach me who have explored this profound of wisdom ; if, indeed, it 
 be in nature , and not altogether supernatural in God. 
 
 I must humbly profess that I cannot understand this alleged natural abil- 
 ity of the hating soul to love, or in what department of the complex fallen 
 man to seek it. Yet, supposing it not absurd, as I believe it, but merely ob- 
 scure and incomprehensible to my natural faculties, I would believe it, not- 
 withstanding, if it were revealed. Or, if the Scripture were supposed silent on 
 the subject, I would yet believe it, had there ever been experiences enough 
 of good and true men to constitute a fair induction. I would even believe it, 
 — though one swallow does not make a summer, — for any single well 
 
 au- 
 
30 
 
 Or, if supposed moral, it must partake of that imperfec- 
 tion which, definitely or indefinitely, is admitted by all 
 men ; and imperfection is not righteousness, or the cause 
 of righteousness, but is that very evil which makes a su- 
 perinduced justification necessary to the salvation of the 
 
 thcnticated case. If I could know, for certainty, of any man, or child, iri 
 this fallen world, that lie had, out of any natural ability , loved God supreme- 
 ly, and his neighbor as himself, I would accept the philosophy which I now 
 reject, and henceforth make it my interpreter of Scripture. But I must 
 have the testimony of one who honestly believes that man is fallen and with- 
 out good ; that salvation is only by the sacrifice of Christ, and the regener- 
 ating work of the Holy Spirit ; and that these blessings, in provision and ap- 
 plication, are according to God’s good pleasure and grace; for on these 
 points I would not be guilty of supposing the Scripture silent ; and this ques- 
 tion of natural ability is practically of little moment, except among those 
 who would think themselves greatly injured by any disputing of their ortho- 
 doxy in these respects. Others ignore it, or leap over it altogether ; and 
 doubtless, with their modicum, whether of Scriptural or metaphysical theol- 
 ogy, they are wise. But is there in this world such an orthodox man ? or 
 any man, but such an one as some critics would have God describe Lis ser- 
 vant Job — by nature perfect and upright, — who will say that he rose up, of 
 his natural ability, out of the death of sin ? If such a man cannot be 
 produced, — and I never heard of one, — and if, practically, there is 
 no such thing as death naturally producing life, and sinful love naturally 
 producing holy love, what boots it for men who would be wise, to contend, 
 against the literal Scripture and experience, for a metaphysical fiction and 
 abstraction which is nothing? What does it profit, or rather what does it 
 not pervert and destroy, to deny, for the sake of that chimera, the literal 
 words of Christ, “ No man can come unto me except the Father who hath 
 sent me draw him;” to turn the Scripture against itself by contradictory in- 
 terpretations ; to rend society, as Protestant Christendom is now rent, into 
 innumerable factions; and turn the world upside down ? Is this improve- 
 ment ? By this way of progress shall we come out at last in the millcnium ? 
 
 “ Shall the sinner then be blamed if God produce not in his dead soul this 
 life of love ?” God forbid ! W e blame him not for that, It were mock- 
 ery to require of him what constitutes the exclusive and sovereign prerog- 
 ative of God, just as it were to declare his natural ability to do what belongs 
 only to supernatural power. We blame him not for that, but for the unlov- 
 ing heart which makes the sovereign act of God necessary to his salvation ; 
 and because his unloving, unbelieving heart, self-moved, appreciates not, 
 and refuses the supernatural power that in Christ Jesus causes the dead to 
 live. These, and not that, constitute and aggravate his guilt. And when 
 
31 
 
 soul ; — a justification which is no where represented in 
 Scripture to consist in a balancing of the good and bad 
 actions of men, and a making up of the arithmetical de- 
 ficiency, but as provided for those in whom dwelleth no 
 good thing, In point of fact, experimentally, the true 
 
 the Spirit moves him, that aggravated guilt of unbelief, in respect to the 
 proffered all-sufficiency of Christ, will be the greatest burden of his awak- 
 ened mind. Under that effectual discipline of the Spirit it will put him to 
 his deepest thoughts, his most distressing fears, his most agonizing prayers, 
 perceiving then, as he must, that the more God has offered him a supernat- 
 ural salvation, the stouter has been his natural refusal of it ; and that now> 
 the more earnestly he struggles, in the ability of nature, to set himself at 
 liberty, the closer does he draw his chains about him. That terrible agony 
 is the sinner’s last effort of natural ability ; and that last work of the convinc- 
 ing Spirit is attended, when God pleases, with that other work of the same 
 Spirit which forms Christ Jesus in the soul the hope of glory. So reads the 
 Scripture ; and such is the experience which is according to the Word. Such 
 is the testimony of good men in all the ages whose experience has taught 
 them according to the Scripture rather than the substituted metaphysics cf 
 the schools. To this day even every true physician gives that prescription 
 to awakened minds. He expects the conversion of the soul then only when 
 it is convinced effectually of its absolute dependence on Almighty power. 
 There are those who recommend a different specific, — a calculation of in- 
 terests, a reckoning of the greatest amount of happiness, and a correspond- 
 ing violent effort of natural ability to possess it. I do not call them true 
 physicians. They put the sinner's agency out of its stated relation and pro- 
 portion to the Divine efficiency, and dishonor Scripture. They abase not 
 man, and exalt not God;. and they cannot be true. 
 
 “ But the Scripture must not be taken literally in its doctrine of faith 
 and grace; for the alleged absolute dependance of man on God for regen- 
 erating mercy makes him a mere machine.” 
 
 All things are what God made them; and they cannot be otherwise. If 
 God made man a machine he is a machine ; and wc cannot help it. If 
 not, he is a moral agent, and can be neither less nor more. But God did 
 not make him a machine. Consequently, he could not convert him into a 
 machine without destroying the properties which constitute humanity. Man 
 has undoubtedly mechanical faculties and powers, both of mind and body ; 
 that is, his mind and body act , exhibiting their proper phenomena, accord- 
 ing to their respective laws. But God also gave him l/fe, which a machine 
 possesses not ; and man’s action, different from a machine’s, is from that in- 
 visible and incomprehensible principle within. Yet life produces not mor- 
 al action, which God refers to a higher and more subtle principle, distin- 
 guishing him alike from mechanical and brute natures, — the life of love. 
 
32 
 
 believer does in no wise imagine the assent of his under- 
 standing to the truths of the Gospel to be meritorious, 
 but only a physical belief, speculative, mechanical, and 
 not vital ; and it is his constant prayer to be forgiven for 
 the imperfections of his faith : that is, because that be- 
 
 Man loves. That, and nothing else, makes him a moral being ; and having 
 that he cannot but be a moral being. That mysterious principle of spirit- 
 ual affinity draws him, in his normal state, to God ; just as*all material na- 
 tures, in wonderful analogy, are drawn by an equally mysterious principle 
 of physical affinity to the central orb. If man fell in Adam, according to 
 the Scripture, and lost this life of love, and, in that respect, became dis- 
 honored like the brutes that perish; that is, if his love to God was turned 
 to hate ; — for love, if it be not love, is hate; — surely then the recovery of 
 any man in Christ, if God pleases to give any man the Christian faith, no 
 more makes him a machine than did God’s original creative act. That new 
 creation touches not the mechanism of the complex man. That mechanism 
 fell not, but its central spring — the love. The restored love affects it not, 
 except that henceforth it is moved and regulated as in its normal state. 
 The restitution is not of active powers and faculties, but their original holy 
 principle — affection ; and that restored affection argues God’s particular 
 attribute of mercy, as the original creation was an instance of his general 
 goodness. Regeneration makes a new man, but only in respect to that 
 which constitutes him a moral being — love. And because God pleases, in 
 his mercy, to give him, through Jesus Christ, a holy instead ofa sinful love, 
 to restore the lost and broken up affinity of the loving soul to himself, does 
 he, therefore, make him a machine ? Docs he even reduce him to a brute ? 
 The objection is absurd. 
 
 Great is the mystery of this new creation. But it is not greater than 
 thatof the original creation, nor more incredible ;• for neither of them isab- 
 surd, and both are literal facts of Scripture. They stand in history and ex- 
 perience ; whereas the hypothesis of natural alilily, on which the objector 
 argues, is a mere fiction, equally opposed to both. It exceeds belief; and 
 its effect is onty to blind or confuse belief, and thus evade the force of lit- 
 eral Scripture. The mind cannot entertain the idea as practical, that the 
 sinful love should turn itself into holy love, that moral affection should 
 counteract its natural law without a supernatural cause, — whatever that 
 cause may be. I can believe in the supernatural cause producing not an 
 excitement of an imaginary natural ability to love, but love itself, though I 
 cannot comprehend it. But a philosopher only would accept a fiction which 
 is absurd before a fact which is incomprehensible. 
 
 It is not to be supposed, after all, that our objector, who assumes that 
 speculative fiction, and reasons from it against the doctrines of grace, In - 
 lieves it; for belief has a substantive character; it requires a foundation, 
 
lief which is his own natural act, is without any good 
 moral effect upon him, except as God gives it life and 
 virtue by his Spirit. He feels, with the venerable Hook- 
 er, that if for any single act of his own coming from him 
 without sin, he might be saved, yet would his salvation 
 
 and condescends notto rest on a mere conception. He has no belief what- 
 ever, but is an unbeliever, so long, and so far, as he stands only on that airy 
 basis. He believes nothing about a sinful soul, except as that machinery 
 which he calls the soul, works well or ill, in obedience to the sensibilities per- 
 taining to that other machinery the body, subject to the infirmities of flesh 
 and blood. It is our philosophical objector who is the materialist, despite 
 his contrary pretensions. He objects to our doctrine of a fallen spirit be- 
 cause his philosophy reaches not to essence, which is out of sight, but to an 
 action, which can be measured by the sense. Love , — the principle , — 
 figures not in his reckoning of moral character ; but action, its effect. 
 He confounds the antecedent and the consequent, the tree and its fruit, and 
 reduces them both to one aesthetical admeasurement, - utility, the greatest 
 number of agreeable sensations. He makes his first definition of a moral 
 being when that being becomes an agent ; and the definition virtually ex- 
 cludes the primordial element of a moral nature, without which moral agen- 
 cy is impossible. His moral agent is a machine indeed, a mere automaton. 
 The spring that moves it is not an interior spiritual life, but homil- 
 
 etics. His homiletics move not to love, but action, to the counting of beads, 
 or the giving of money ; and moral character is measured by the extent of 
 the mummery, or the magnitude of the subscription. Yet such sophistry 
 has had the power of misleading, to a great extent, the churches of the ref- 
 ormation, on a road which, as I have already shown, must take them back 
 ultimately, though they perceive it not, to Romanism. Hoodwinked they 
 are, and will be, till the deceiver, under the pretence of greater liberty, 
 leads them back to a more iron slavery; - and then too late for another 
 reformation. 
 
 I shall here take it upon me to say, though at the risk of seeming unkind- 
 ness towards some dead and living whom 1 most honor ; and to say it be- 
 cause the times demand that we should honor Scripture more than any 
 man or school, that, in my judgment, many great and good men, the lights 
 of New England, as their fathers were up to the time of Edwards, have 
 committed a great and perhaps incurable mistake, in respect to the theolo- 
 gy of New England, by making, as some of the fathers, from the time of 
 Edwards, sometimes seemed to make, an unwarrantable concession to the 
 philosophers concerning natural ability, and other related subjects deeply 
 affecting the integrity of the Gospel. They have admitted, or seemed to 
 admit, this speculative fiction into their books and their discourse, and 
 
34 
 
 be impossible, because that highest virtue which is his 
 own, independently of God’s grace, is merely formal, and 
 seeming, and infinitely inadequate. No man ever heard 
 an enlightened Christian preferring any plea for salvation 
 on account of the meritoriousness of his faith, or any oth- 
 
 have consequently obliged themselves to put this, and other related falla- 
 cies, in virtual opposition to their foimulas of doctrine. 
 
 The orthodox theology of New England, as it is , in distinction from that 
 of our pilgrim fathers, and the standards of the primitive and reformed 
 faith, is conformed extensively to this fashion of idolatry. It has capti- 
 vated both ministers and people. Some who are most attached to the prim- 
 itive and reformed standards still profess the error though it saps the 
 foundation of the doctrines for which they would shed their blood. 
 It puts them, unwittingly, against themselves. It ties their hands,, 
 when they most need to use them; It betrays them to inconsistent 
 theories and interpretations, when occasions call for the most unequiv- 
 ocal and uncompromising defence of the simple truths of Scripture. 
 It takes them, on some of the gravest questions, away from the sympathy of 
 their best friends, or shuts their mouths in despairing silence, and leaves 
 them to the tender mercies of the cruel. The worst is, that they do not 
 comprehend the secret of their mistake ; or they dread to relinquish a no- 
 tion which has become inveterate and is popular, lest they should be oblig- 
 ed to adopt a contrary truth which has yet only an evil name, and no pat- 
 ronage. For example admitting the fiction of natural ability, of course, 
 they are betrayed, often inadvertently, into a corresponding interpretation 
 of Scripture which implies a progression of the race in virtue ; its natural 
 developement towards a perfect state'; the sufficiency of an artificial propa- 
 gandism ; a marriage of civilization to Christianity; and a mixed millenium 
 of the secular and the heavenly, of grace and nature ; thus essentially dis- 
 honoring the doctrines of their creeds. They admit an exegetical element, 
 on the one hand, which they deny on the other, and which, if consistently 
 applied, would upset all the orthodox formulas of Christendom. They ac- 
 cept a past which is history, and a future which is a myth ; an actual Christ 
 in dying and rising from the dead for his covenanted and purchased king- 
 dom, and a figurative Christ in returning from the “ far country” to set up 
 that kingdom in glory and majesty on the earth. They accept a Jerusalem 
 which stood on solid mountains, and a New Jerusalem in the clouds, and not 
 ‘coming down from God out of heaven ;’ a people driven out of the promised 
 land by fire and sword, and restored to it only in idea ; and the earth and 
 the heavens literally drowned with water, and burned with fire, and new 
 heavens and a new earth in the imagination of the philosophers. Their ar- 
 chaeology ahd eschatology are at war; and some, with equal unconcern, sub- 
 
35 
 
 Br act of his mind or life. The men who do it arrogant- 
 ly and presumptuously in their philosophy, or inconsider- 
 ately in their discourse, would not dare to do it in their 
 prayers. The conscience, unless greatly sophisticated 
 and depraved, would stop them. Such a prayer was nev- 
 
 ject both, indifferently, to the interpretations of a loose speculative science. 
 Because of these inconsistencies the philosophers put them at fault, and they 
 consider not the occasion of their adversities, nor, as yet, greatly heed to 
 know it. They see, all over Christendom, the sad reverses of what they be- 
 lieve to be the true and living Gospel; and, all over the pagan world, phan- 
 toms starting up to lure away the nations into a deeper darkness, faster than 
 they can be overtaken by the heralds of the Cross ; — they see, where 
 Christ is named, innumerable false Christs turning away the people from 
 the faith once delivered to the saints, and converting not prophecy alone, 
 but doctrine, and all the Scripture, into fable ; they see their ancient formu- 
 las forsaken, or reformed and desecrated to suit the spirit of a more libera- 
 ted age, despite all their apologies, protests and lamentations ; — they see 
 faith almost ceasing from the earth, and the earth itself consequently shak- 
 en and convulsed by God’s judgments ; — yet, though their hearts are brok- 
 en, and they have almost lost the power of song, they are compelled, in 
 their captivity, to lift up their voice in acclamation over the alleged progress 
 of sound learning and true virtue, and the hastening conversion of the 
 
 world, to God and Liberty ; liberty, and Happiness. They 
 
 will not believe though a man declare it unto them ; albeit their persons are 
 dishonored, their books are laid upon the shelf, their presses are circum- 
 vented and restrained, their discourse is turned back upon them, and they 
 are reduced to ‘ eat ashes like bread, and mingle their drink with weeping.’ 
 
 What will startle these men of God from their bewildering dream ? Our 
 hearts bleed for them. But their deliverance will not come till they turn 
 back, consistently and entirely, to the simple Gospel ; to the Divine cove- 
 nants; to fathers whom God purified in the fires of persecution, whose mon- 
 uments were sacred till a wild and revolutionary philosophy struck its roots 
 into the reformed soils of Christendom, We look, with a fond desire, that 
 they will yet go back ; for, otherwise, they will be hunted down, and the 
 sharpest doubling cannot save them. They must believe only in God and 
 in his Christ. God has but one economy of moral government, and that 
 has but one consistent interpretation. Whoever will depart from that, as 
 some of our New England sects have already done, and substitute their ro- 
 mantic naturalism for the literal Gospel, though popular gales may waft 
 them proudly for a time, will at length encounter shipwreck, and the loss 
 of all things. Whoever will play fast and loose, as these abler and better 
 men have done, between faith and reason , may, indeed, save their life, but 
 not their property. They will be left dependent on the charities of friends 
 
36 
 
 er heard out of the synagogue of the Pharisee, or the con- 
 venticle of the fanatic. 
 
 And if faith, though considered an act, and not a prin- 
 ciple of the mind, he not synonymous with justification, 
 or equivalent to it, I know not what other act of the mind, 
 
 too poor to help them, or the humanities, such as they are, of a cold and in- 
 constant world. 
 
 Oh, Origen ! Origen ! and ye Alexandrians, Cmsareans, and academic- 
 ians, all ! How can ye atone for the mischief ye have done to the sons of the 
 pilgrims, to our loved New England ? Ye have spoiled the home of the per- 
 secuted saints. The}' began to build, and ye twisted their foundations. They 
 would have reared, notwithstanding, the best superstructure of this earth, 
 but ye secretly interposed the wood, hay and stubble, which the fire must 
 destroy. Ye have turned to disappointment the last natural hope of a dis- 
 tracted world; and Christ will make here his last and greatest demonstra- 
 tion of the insufficiency of man to carry on and carry out his principles of 
 moral government, his doctrine of Church and State, till “ The times of 
 Restitution.” Schoolmen ! - I say it though a schoolman, and because a 
 schoolman only might presume to say it, — ye have played falsely ; — false- 
 ly, but not always fatally, for ye have often been unconsciously played up- 
 on : — ye have made not, as ye ought, The Scripture, but, as ye ought not, 
 “ Philosophy The Guide of Life.” Your secret is, indeed, betrayed, 
 and that can harm no more. But from that cast off, yet prolific seed, oth- 
 er varieties of illuminated sophistry, and angelic falsehood, have sprung up, 
 and filled the schools. They have taken forms and bodies, without num- 
 ber, in a new, fresher and wilder generation, that will bring forth other and 
 more poisonous fruits of selfish fallacies, chicaneries, intrigues, discords and 
 revolutions, till the strong arm, and He who breaks it, shall be revealed. 
 
 But those excellent men, the lights of New England, and its glory, of 
 whom I have taken this great liberty to speak, are blessed after all. God 
 forbid that I should detract from their real worth, on account of what was 
 mostly an accident of their times and their position ; or refuse their guid- 
 ance, in respect to essential truths of Scripture, or accredited formulas of 
 faith which they still literally acknowledge, on account of philosophical er- 
 rors which have captivated their imaginations, but which their hearts de- 
 nounce. God chastens, but he will save them. They have assented to 
 some fictions; but they have not, on that account, let go all realities. They 
 have confessed to the depravity of a fallen world, to a redeeming and justi- 
 fying Christ, and to a regenerating Spirit, as set forth in the words of Scrip- 
 ture, and embodied in their forms of faith ; and they will stand on those 
 foundations. Christ is their rock, their chief corner-stone, and that cannot 
 be removed forever, nor they who build upon it. But had they not some- 
 
37 
 
 or series of acts, could be thought to constitute a right- 
 eousness. Certainly, righteousness, in Scripture, is con- 
 nected only with faith. Nothing could he more express 
 than that we are justified by faith alone without the deeds 
 of the law ; and if faith does not constitute righteousness, 
 but is only its stated and conditional antecedent, there is 
 no supposable act of ours for which wc could hope to be 
 accepted at the bar of God. If any such act be imagin- 
 ed, it must be either of the nature of faith, or independ- 
 ent of faith. But if faith be not righteousness, and mer- 
 itorious, then, by necessity, whatever is of the nature of 
 faith cannot be righteousness, and meritorious. If the 
 
 times bowed themselves, too reverently, in the house of Bimmon,they would 
 have led God’s people through, and not have been deprived of seeing, ex- 
 cept from Pisgah’s top, the promised land. 
 
 Yet, even these errors of great and good men God may make sub- 
 servient to his higher glory. We shall see it, if, and so far as, a better ad- 
 vised generation of Christian students shall learn, from their mistakes, to 
 call no man master. Emmons, Hopkins, Spring, Bellamy, Backus, Ed- 
 wards, Calvin, Luther, — and all such ! Let students give them honor, so 
 far as they followed Scripture. But let them glory only in Christ! 
 
 This note is prolonged beyond my intention ; perhaps beyond propriety ; 
 and the reader may be in danger of forgetting the thread of the discourse. 
 But truth in the margin may be sometimes of as much importance as truth 
 in the text. I deem the things said to be of no little consequence in these 
 distracted times, and therefore have said them, at some expense and hazard. 
 I should not have chosen to say them, for others could do this better, with 
 more authority, and to better purpose. But such persons might be even 
 more reluctant. Perhaps they could not so well afford to do it as one who 
 is likely to die sooner, and to have his judgment, not of men, but of God. 
 Wherefore, let what is written take such course as God pleases. I am in- 
 different, provided truth is served ; though I would not serve truth at the ex- 
 pense of charity, if that were possible, on the whole. If any who may chance 
 to read these pages judge that I have committed that offence, yet let them 
 not altogether withhold their love, so far as I have not exceeded truth, and 
 they shall have love for love, ‘good measure, pressed down, shaken togeth- 
 er, and running over,’ though they administer, with equal reason, a more 
 severe reproof. “ Let the righteous smite me ; it shall be a kindness : and 
 let him reprove me ; it shall be an excellent oil that shall not break my 
 head: for yet my prayer also shall be in their calamities.” 
 
imagined act be independent of faith, the question is set- 
 tled on another ground ; for, “ Without faith it is impos- 
 sible to please God/’ 
 
 Yet, we have seen, on the ground of Christ’s redemp- 
 tion, the believer is justified and made righteous. What 
 then is his righteousness, that great boon which he re- 
 ceives by faith, and which avails to everlasting life ? 
 What can it be ? What does the Scripture affirm it to 
 be, but the righteousness of Christ, “ The righteousness 
 which is of God by faith ?” This is his name, “ The 
 Lord our righteousness.” “ Who of God is made unto us 
 . . . righteousness.” “Now the righteousness of God with- 
 out the law is manifested.” “As by the disobedience 
 of one many were made sinners, so by the obedience of 
 one shall many be made righteous.” “ Christ is the end 
 of the law for righteousness to every one that belie veth.” 
 So saith the Scripture. So said those justified men, of 
 old, who constructed their formulas of faith on the basis 
 of Scripture, and a synopsis of it. They received Scrip- 
 ture as it is written. They interpreted Scripture by Scrip- 
 ture, and by the principles of natural religion as data rec- 
 ognized by Scripture, and exemplified in God’s methods 
 of providence, and in his plan of moral government, and in 
 the experience of Christian men, as set forth in Scrip- 
 ture. They knew what they were about ; and they who 
 sneer at them take a responsibility that I would not bear 
 for worlds. Let us observe their method, as we inquire 
 particularly concerning the substance of justification : 
 
 1. In the formal sense : 
 
 2. In the vital sense : 
 
 3. In these senses combined. 
 
 1. Formally. I observe here that there are certain 
 proper formal notions of government which are origina 
 and fundamental \-principia the basis of all moral reas- 
 
oning and true virtue, from which if we depart we soon 
 find it impossible to make our reckoning, and are lost in 
 the endless mazes of speculation and hypothesis. These 
 principles are settled in natural religion ; though it has 
 been the tendency of all ages to depart from them, and 
 the world, in successive periods, has been, consequently, 
 confounded, and nation after nation has been wrecked, 
 making successive miraculous interpositions of God and 
 formal revelations necessary, to revive the remembrance of 
 them, in order to any reformation of society, or the hold- 
 ing of the fallen world together. The revelations have 
 more authoritatively explained and enforced these natu- 
 ral and fundamental principles, though, by reason of the 
 same perversities of mankind, their clearer light has been 
 obscured ; they have been misinterpreted by false philos- 
 ophies • deceitful lights have more disastrously misled the 
 alienated world ; and other revolutions and Divine inter- 
 positions have succeeded, and are ordained, on the same 
 account, to succeed, until “The times of restitution of 
 all things which God hath spoken by the mouth of all his 
 holy prophets since the world began.” 
 
 Among these original and fundamental principles of 
 natural and revealed religion from which society is now 
 misled, as I have already observed, by Romanism and 
 neology, more than in any antecedent period of history > 
 is the proper personality of God, and his independent, 
 sovereign and exclusive right to govern his own world, 
 according to his own infinite and incomprehensible per- 
 fections. All ethics and theology, so far as not corrupt- 
 ed by the sensuous or rationalistic systems of the schools, 
 in all ages, have stood on this basis, affirming God’s ab- 
 solute perfection, his supreme and universal government, 
 and denying the right of government, or interference, to 
 any other being. For a creature, from the necessity of 
 
40 
 
 the ease, cannot be supposed to have any independent ex- 
 istence, power, authority, right, or dominion. Creatures 
 can have no rights in respect to the Creator, or to fellow 
 creatures, but such as are delegated by God ; and these 
 are not strictly rights , — for the right of a dependent 
 creature is preposterous, and the right of sinful and re- 
 bellious creatures is more absurd, — but privileges and 
 immunities mercifully conferred on them during their state 
 of reprieve, probation and discipline, as declared by 
 Scripture, until Christ, the manifested God, for whose 
 sake this state of probation is ordained, shall finish his 
 present work of intercession, cast down all his enemies, 
 restore the fallen world to its allegiance, and, in the issue, 
 deliver up his purchased, sanctified and glorified king- 
 dom to the Father. All this is of Christ, the God-man, 
 who made the worlds, not for the sake of creatures, but 
 for his own sake, ‘ that unto principalities and powers 
 he might make known, by the church, the manifold wis- 
 dom of God, according to his eternal purpose in Christ Je- 
 sus our Lord.’ The idea, now so common, that God made 
 the worlds for man, or the happiness of man, or any oth- 
 er creature, or that the creature’s happiness is an end of 
 the Divine government over the worlds, is so merely imag- 
 inative and hypothetical that the reason can have noth- 
 ing to do with it, upon any solid admission of a personal 
 God. Humanity, and especially, our fallen humanity, 
 be it representative in the Pope, or the Protestant philos- 
 opher, or diffused and popular, is not the Godhead, nor 
 an equivalent to it, by immeasurable degrees ; and hu- 
 man happiness has, consequently, no right to be consid- 
 ered as God’s end, but only as a stated consequence of 
 obedience to God’s will ; — of obedience rendered, spon- 
 taneously and conscientiously, wfith reference to the only 
 worthy and the exclusive end of being, — the glory of 
 
41 
 
 the Creator. Otherwise we are virtually Pantheists, re- 
 solving the Godhead into creature-hood, or raising the 
 creature into a developement of the Godhead, annulling 
 every natural notion, or supernatural revelation of a su- 
 preme Divinity. 
 
 It results from this, agreeably to natural and revealed 
 religion, that all treason, rebellion and sin, wherever or 
 by whomever committed, are committed against God 
 alone. An angel does not sin against a fellow angel, and 
 man does not sin against a fellow man. Whatever inju- 
 ry they inflict, respectively, upon each other, or upon oth- 
 er orders of beings, is a wrong done to God’s creatures, 
 in violation of the natures, relations and conditions which 
 he has constituted and ordained. Of this wrong sub- 
 ordinate governments, as his agents and representatives, 
 may take formal cognizance, so far as social interests are 
 involved, in subjection to his promulgated principles and 
 laws ; but the sin is against God; and the interior and ul- 
 timate punishment of it is reserved by him, as the infinite 
 ruler and disposer of all. When we speak of rights, ‘ ‘ the 
 rights of man,” — and many persons now seem to speak 
 or think of nothing else, — we speak as natural and re- 
 vealed religion never speaks, but as it is interpreted by its 
 interested expositors. We use a mere technical or spec- 
 ulative fiction, which, when it passes out of conven- 
 tional discourse, and usurps, in speculative systems, 
 the place of a substantial verity, works incalculable mis- 
 chief; for it derogates from the only substantial authori- 
 ty which is Divine, and practically subverts the princi- 
 ples of moral government. Moral government exists, of 
 necessity, in God alone ; and all sin and transgression re- 
 late to his universal, supreme and absolute authority. 
 Upon any other idea sin resolves itself, agreeably to the 
 
 old pagan notions, and the modern infidel perversions, 
 
 6 
 
42 
 
 into mere injuriousness, disturbance, disorganization, 
 which are not moral, but mechanical ; man’s present in- 
 terests are put above the Divine honor ; and God is vir- 
 tually ruled out of his own world. So David thought 
 not, when God brought home to his mind the true na- 
 ture of his adulterous and murderous acts; but confessed, 
 in the spirit of the only genuine repentance, “ Against 
 thee, thee only have I sinned, and done this evil in thy 
 sight, that thou mightest be justified when thou speak- 
 est, and clear when thou judgest.” So Paul thought 
 not, when he exclaimed in the bitterness of an awakened 
 conscience, <c Oh wretched man that I am, who shall de- 
 liver me from the body of this death ?” 
 
 It is also another consequence, verified by natural and 
 revealed religion, that all sin and transgression, being 
 committed against God alone, are essentially and moral- 
 ly dishonorable and derogatory to his character and gov- 
 ernment, and practically subversive of his righteous au- 
 thority, so that they could not subsist together. The sin- 
 ner must be restrained and punished, or universal anar- 
 chy and destruction would ensue. But God cannot cease 
 to exercise a moral government, and therefore the penal- 
 ty of the law must be enforced. This is a principle of 
 all governments, whether God’s supreme and universal 
 government, or the subordinate governments which he 
 has delegated to his creatures, in the family, the state, 
 the church. It is the principle of every unrequired vol- 
 untary society ; and, without it, any social state would 
 clearly be impossible. The mind cannot entertain a dif- 
 ferent idea, except in that state of somnolency and mad- 
 ness which the Scripture describes as the present ab- 
 normal state of this world, so far as deprived of the in- 
 cidental and collateral influence of the Revelations ; — a 
 state from which it is only partially delivered during this 
 
43 
 
 mixed and disciplinary scene, and will be effectually and 
 absolutely delivered only when the curse of sin shall be 
 taken off, and Christ shall make all things new. 
 
 It is also another and more pointed consequence, 
 that all sin and transgression, being utterly con- 
 trary to the law of God and subversive of it, could 
 not be consistently forgiven without reparation made 
 to the violated law ; and the sinner and transgress- 
 or, though forgiven, could not hold a place in the 
 favor of God, without a superinduced righteousness in all 
 respects equal to the law’s demands. For, if God should 
 merely pass over the wrong done to his government; or, 
 if he should accept the wrongdoer in his contracted 
 state of imperfection, that would virtually nullify his 
 absolute authority, and detract from the essential perfect- 
 ness of his moral system. The sinner can make no res- 
 titution for his past delinquencies. His repentance, or 
 his future obedience, if they were possible without a su- 
 pernatural provision of God, though they might not be 
 useless, could restore nothing. They could not put him 
 back to the integrity of a sinless state. Yet, if, notwith- 
 standing, he should have a place with beings who have 
 never sinned, that would constitute a declaration from 
 God that moral distinctions are mutable and of no prac- 
 tical importance. Upon merely humanitarian grounds 
 he might repair his wrong by the payment of money, or 
 by other good offices to the injured party ; or, if he did 
 not, it would be of little consequence, except for tempo- 
 rary convenience or utility. But admit the Godhead, 
 and there is no evidence, but the contrary, that sin could 
 be pardoned without satisfaction, or that a being of con- 
 tracted imperfection and guilt could be treated as if he 
 had never fallen. For guilt pertains not to a mere ac- 
 tion, but the informing spirit. It is vital and essential ; 
 
44 
 
 and the loss of essential virtue is a loss that God only 
 can repair. Whether he will do it, in any case, or how, 
 constitutes the great problem of justification which the 
 Scripture only can resolve. And these principles I un- 
 derstand to be in accordance with the judgment of learn- 
 ed civilians and legislators of all periods. They have 
 proceeded upon them, in their commentaries and enact- 
 ments, as necessary to the social state, although they 
 have not unfrequently ignored them, inconsistently, in 
 their theological speculations, and in matters of political 
 expediency. 
 
 Christ resolves this problem. He meets the difficult 
 conditions of moral government. He stands mysterious- 
 ly in our stead, a sufferer for our sins. He is made sin 
 for us. He bears our iniquities : and his perfect right- 
 eousness is imputed to us, and reckoned to our account ; 
 — our sins to him, his righteousness to us. His death 
 is our plea for pardon ; his merits for our justification. 
 The one absolves from guilt, the other constitutes virtue. 
 The ideas of mediation, substitution, satisfaction, which 
 have their correspondencies and analogies throughout the 
 constitution and course of nature, agreeably to which the 
 whole system of nature is carried on, though as matters 
 of religious verity, and a ground of religious hope, they 
 are unknown to natural religion, and undiscoverable by 
 it, have a practical realization in the Scripture. They 
 constitute the distinctive peculiarities of the Christian 
 system. Without them Christianity has no peculiar glo- 
 ry, and is of no more value than any system of pagan 
 ethics, except as Christ and his Apostles had a more ex- 
 cited genius, a greater comprehension and a purer moral- 
 ity than the philosophers whom they denounced. It 
 would be impossible to represent or express these ideas, 
 by language, or to describe, in terms, facts in accordance 
 
45 
 
 with them, if this is not done in the language of Scrip- 
 ture. We might as well have no Revelation by lan- 
 guage, — and without language a Revelation would be 
 impossible, — if it be allowable to put upon the wolds of 
 Scripture a fanciful and speculative interpretation which 
 makes them descriptive of something else, and virtually 
 annuls their literal meaning. If a ransom, a sacrifice, a 
 propitiation, a price, a purchase, a redemption, be a mere 
 symbol of the Divine compassion; if Christ, our righteous- 
 ness, be merely Christ, our teacher, our revealer, our 
 example of benevolence, self-denial, suffering and pa- 
 tience, then language is not a true representative and 
 vehicle of thought, and the church that is built upon it 
 becomes, as our modern Protestantism has become, by 
 reason of such uncertain expositions, a Babel of confu- 
 sions. We reject them all. We would sooner say with 
 Bolingbroke, — “ the Bible declares the doctrines of 
 grace, but I do not believe the Bible,” than with the ne- 
 ologist, “ I accept the Bible, but do not believe the doc- 
 trines.” An honest enemy is better than a treacherous 
 friend. A rough wind that threatens to drive us on the 
 rocks, is better than a false beacon-light that would mis- 
 guide us. We should stand a better chance with the 
 wind. If Apollyon had been wise when he withstood 
 Christian in the valley, he would have put on an angel's 
 dress, and offered him safe conduct. He has grown wiser 
 by his past mistakes. 
 
 Wherefore we conclude that the formal substance of 
 our justification is Christ’s perfect righteousness. We 
 stand before God, if we stand at all, not in our own right, 
 for we have no original, independent right, but a privil- 
 ege conferred by God, and that privilege we have for- 
 feited and lost by sin. We cannot stand in a neighbor’s 
 right, for he is equally dependent, and under a similar 
 
46 
 
 condemnation. “ No man can by any means redeem his 
 brother, nor give to God a ransom for him.” We can- 
 not stand in the right of faith ; for it is by faith that we 
 have access to the grace wherein we stand ; — grace, and 
 not personal merit; — and faith, not a meritorious cause, 
 but a Divinely appointed means. There is no conceiv- 
 able right in which we can stand, but that which is set 
 forth in Scripture, for the knowledge of which we are in- 
 debted to that alone, — the right of Christ. The corres- 
 ponding discourse of Christians, whether doctrinal or 
 emotional, in all the ages, is simply equivalent to the lit- 
 eral Scripture. It points to the law broken by the fallen 
 race ; the broken law fulfilled by Christ, magnified and 
 made honorable by his expiatory death ; and to his mer- 
 its which are actual and infinite, accepted instead of 
 ours which are impossible. The whole is a provision of 
 God, not as a mercenary master, but a righteous gover- 
 nor, reconciling, harmonizing and displaying all his mor- 
 al attributes. It is not discoverable, or imaginable by 
 us, beforehand; but, when revealed, then, evidently, 
 though incomprehensibly, adapted to the necessities of a 
 fallen race, correspondent to various analogies in the 
 course of God’s natural providence, and infinitely bene- 
 ficial, in respect to moral impression, upon the worlds. 
 
 Against this revealed economy no objections, but such 
 as are merely speculative and fanciful, can be suggested. 
 If I am destitute of true virtue , by nature and in princi- 
 ple ; if I am an actual transgressor ; if I lie under the 
 penalty of guilt ; if God, who declares these facts of my 
 condition, also reveals his Son from heaven, a ransom 
 and a surety ; if he gives me assurance that through 
 faith in Jesus Christ, he will impute and reckon to me 
 Christ’s perfect righteousness ; and that for Christ’s sake 
 I may be treated as though I had never sinned, and at- 
 
47 
 
 tain even to a higher glory, inasmuch as Christ’s merits 
 are infinitely greater than mine could have been ; — why 
 does any man yet find fault ? Does he say that this is 
 an unphilosophical way of governing the world ? 13ut it 
 is according to God’s simple Revelations ; it is confirm- 
 ed by experience, analogy and history ; and it meets the 
 conscious wants of man. What better philosophy would 
 he have than that ? Does he affirm that he cannot rec- 
 oncile it with his ideas, that an innocent person should 
 suffer for the guilty ; that the merits of Christ, or any 
 other being, should be supererogatory and imputable to 
 sinners ; or that a sinful being should be accepted for the 
 righteousness of another ? Yet, if God affirms it, and if 
 it actually inspires myriads of penitent souls with the 
 hope of eternal life ; what are his ideas and notions worth 
 in comparison with this ? Surely, if any man cannot 
 reconcile the government of God, as declared in God’s 
 own word, to his ideas, it becomes him to reconcile his 
 ideas to the government of God. Surely, this whole 
 question is not a question of philosophical fitness and 
 propriety, according to our poor comprehension of things, 
 but a question of fact on Divine authority. A reasona- 
 ble man might well be content to leave all such questions 
 of philosophical fitness and propriety to God himself, who 
 alone is able to judge of such high matters that concern 
 his own integrity and glory, and not assume to measure 
 the Divine wisdom by his own. Who, in his right mind, 
 could refuse, even in idea, the proffered righteousness of 
 Christ, and put himself upon the only possible alterna- 
 tive of pleading his own righteousness at the bar of God ? 
 Who of us would choose to go before “ The great white 
 throne,” in such “ filthy rags” ? 
 
 And, as we thus reasonably conclude, so would we 
 heartily accept the righteousness of Christ as the formal 
 
48 
 
 substance of our justification. We would heartily ac- 
 cept this Scripture doctrine, though indebted solely to 
 the Scripture for it • and accordingly delight in Scrip- 
 ture as making known what, otherwise, the reason nev- 
 er could have discovered, and, though revealed, refuses, 
 in its natural blindness, to admit. We would hold to it, 
 against all the artifices of the perverted reason, standing, 
 as it does, on the most literal, direct, unambiguous lan- 
 guage of the Scripture ; harmonizing, as it does, with all 
 the known and settled principles and traditions of natu- 
 ral religion ; sustained, as it is, by instinctive, experi- 
 mental, and analogical science ; coresponding, as it does, 
 with the known methods of Divine providence, and the 
 conscious exercises of pious men in all the ages. There 
 is no knowledge with which it agrees not, but specula- 
 tive knowledge, — the boasted philosophy of Paul's time 
 and ours. How much that is worth, in the comparison, 
 it becomes us to consider well, lest we exchange those 
 old lights which have led so many pilgrims to glory, for 
 those flashing meteors that so many others, captivated by 
 their fictitious brilliancy, have followed to perdition. 
 One may reasonably admire such coruscations, for a mo- 
 ment, as he would, occasionally, sit up, for a night, to 
 observe a meteoric shower, or to seek a comet. But let 
 not our observatories, sacred to a higher science, be en- 
 gaged only by such curiosities as these, and darkened to 
 the sun, and moon, and stars which God has fixed and 
 settled in the heavens to guide us. 
 
 2. The vital sense of justification. 
 
 I am afraid to speak here. The theme is too wonder- 
 ful. None but deeply convicted, and deeply distressed, 
 and deeply comforted persons, effectually taught and dis- 
 ciplined by the Holy Ghost, can, with any near approach 
 to the meaning of Scripture, appreciate, or describe, the 
 
49 
 
 believer’s vital union to Christ. It belongs not to these 
 days to do it, when vision is ceasing, and all we can do 
 is to desire to know. It belongs, least of all, to me. I 
 would rather choose to go back, and sit by the poor wo- 
 man who washed the feet of Jesus with her tears, and 
 wiped them with the hairs of her head ; and learn of her. 
 I would go back to those despised and persecuted saints, 
 of a more primitive and uncorrupt period, the confessors 
 and martyrs ‘who wandered about in sheep -skins and 
 goat-skins, destitute, afflicted, tormented, of whom the 
 world was not worthy ; ’ — and learn of them. We can- 
 not think, nor reason, nor know, nor feel, nor discourse 
 like them. How could we, in an age of all-pervading 
 secularity, an age of intellectualized, idealized religion, 
 an age of imagery, of sesthetical refinement, of political 
 finesse, of steaming curiosity, of profane and self-ag- 
 grandizing independence ; an age when Christianity 
 stands not so much upon the text as the commentary ; 
 not in the teaching of the Spirit, as the pictorial illustra- 
 tion ; not the prayerful quiet of the closet, as the bustle 
 and shouting of the anniversary ; not in the conscience 
 and the heart, as in formal display and mechanical op- 
 eration ; not by the gentle dews of grace, as by educa- 
 tional stimulus, the thrift of trade, and the march of sci- 
 ence ; great in the greatness of a self-magnifying world ; 
 rich in its deceitful riches ; honorable in its spectral hon- 
 ors ; learned in its fictitious learning ; refined in its mer- 
 etricious finery ; and mighty in its material power ; — 
 how could we, in such an age of worldly activity, advance- 
 ment, ambition, splendor, glorying, when Christiani- 
 ty reckons upon its worldly strength, the patronage of 
 the worldly great, and counts upon their sanction and 
 certificate ; when it is charmed with their applause, and 
 
 is hopeful of appropriating their stores of wisdom, the 
 7 
 
50 
 
 influence of their position, and their hoards of money ; 
 when it calls upon philosophy to instruct it, upon art for 
 its adornment, and even upon fashion for its address ; 
 how could we, under the overwhelming pressure of world- 
 ly cares, the confusions of worldly intercourse, the be- 
 wildering influence of worldly sophistry, the inflations of 
 worldly conceits, the seductions of worldly glory, the 
 comforts of worldly independence, the contentment of 
 worldly security, and the vaunted certainty of worldly 
 progress ; — under disadvantages like these, how could 
 we know, or feel, or speak, like the men whom the w T orld 
 hated and drove out of it, for Christ’s sake ; or, while 
 it suffered them to live in it, hunted to the dens and cav- 
 erns of the mountains ? I can hut faintly echo their 
 voice ; and should refrain from that, but that the topic 
 before me is indispensable to my subject, and I must 
 treat it as I best may. 
 
 Yet, if I could speak like them, it would be only to 
 utter, with a juster emphasis than I can now command, 
 and in more fit relations, and with the outflowing of a 
 more experienced and loving heart, the words of Scrip- 
 ture. Deeply as the vital truth entered into their souls, 
 and their sublimated faith trusted to it, they knew it only 
 as it is written. They did not undertake to explain the 
 mystery of the God-man, how the Divine descended to 
 the human, or the human was raised to the Divine, and 
 the incarnate Son became two natures and one person 
 forever. Equally they did not undertake to explain the 
 corresponding mystery of regenerate natures, brought 
 by the incomprehensible power of the Holy Ghost, into 
 indivisible and perpetual union with the Divine Redeem- 
 er. They had no more natural ability to understand or 
 expound these supernatural verities than to love the au- 
 thor of them, without a corresponding supernatural gift, 
 
51 
 
 — a gift which they had not received of comprehension, 
 hut only of love without it ; — a gift of receiving and 
 loving an incomprehensible benefactor. They under- 
 stood not what was not intended to be unfolded in the 
 present state of discipline and trial ; and it was their ex- 
 cellence that what the reason could not search out, their 
 childlike faith accepted on the authority of God. They 
 knew that Christ did not speak vainly, in that memora- 
 ble prayer for his disciples, “ That they all may be one, 
 even as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, thatthey 
 also may be one in us.” 4£ And the glory which thou 
 gavest me I have given them, that they may be one as 
 we are one ; I in them, and thou in me, that they may 
 be made perfect in one ; and that the world may know 
 that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them as thou hast 
 loved me.” They had already, by the new conscious- 
 ness of faith, an earnest of those prophetic assurances of 
 Christ, — “ Because I live ye shall live also. At that 
 day ye shall know that I am in my Father, and you in 
 me, and I in you.” It was no cunningly devised fable 
 which they accepted, in the declaration of the inspired 
 Apostles, — “ The anointing which ye have received of 
 him abideth in you ; and as the same anointing teacheth 
 you all things, and is no lie, and, even as it hath taught 
 you, ye shall abide in him.” ££ We know that the Son 
 of God is come, and hath given us an understanding that 
 we may know him that is true ; and we are him that is 
 true, even in his Son Jesus Christ. This is the true God 
 and eternal life.” This was their confession, and it is 
 ours, 4 not of the wisdom of this world, but of the hid- 
 den wisdom before ordained to our glory, 5 - that fallen 
 human natures, by faith, are taken up, mysteriously, in 
 the person of the sinless Christ, to an alliance with the 
 Godhead, and, therefore, and thenceforward, through 
 
52 
 
 Christ's redemption, and by the power of the Holy Ghost, 
 the sinful humanity is made a partaker of the Divine na- 
 ture, and consequently an heir of glory, honor and im- 
 mortality. We receive that mystery, hid for ages and 
 generations, now not explained, but manifested to the 
 saints, £ to whom God would make known what is the 
 riches of the glory of this mystery, which is Christ in 
 you the hope of glory.’ That is it, — the statement of 
 a vital fact, and not the dogma of a speculative creed ; 
 words that are spirit and life, and not the utterance of 
 sentimental passion, nor the intense expression of an 
 overwrought imagination ; for, on such a theme, a liter- 
 al language, or any figures naturally significant of the 
 facts described, could not be intense, nor begin to reach 
 the intensity of the Divine reality. 
 
 I cannot doubt, from the representations of the Scrip- 
 ture, that this mystery involves a vital and essential 
 union between every new-born soul and Christ, a union 
 as real, in its order, as that which took place between 
 the man and the Godhead, in the person of our glorious 
 Lord. I say union, and not identity, whereby the vital 
 and essential excellence of the one becomes personally 
 and morally attributable to the other, and is actually im- 
 puted and reckoned to the other, independently and ir- 
 respectively of his own proper character which is im- 
 perfect, and sinful, and wholly unacceptable to God. 
 God looks not on the Christian, but the Christ that 
 dwelleth in him ; and his virtue is not his own, but 
 Christ’s. It is the character, the impress and image of 
 the sinless Divine put upon the sinful human ; and be- 
 cause it is not mechanical, but moral and essential, there- 
 fore transfusing and transforming 3 so that on account of 
 this transfused and transforming life of Christ alone it 
 is, that the believing soul has a proper substantive jus- 
 
tifieation before God, its pardon having been beforehand 
 purchased and sealed by atoning blood. God justifies the 
 believer, and accepts him, henceforth, not for the merit 
 of his own works, for they are evil and abominable ; nor 
 for the merit of his faith, for that is God’s gift, and not 
 the believer’s own natural act, which is merely a mechan- 
 ical and formal exercise of the understanding, and there- 
 fore not moral and meritorious ; or, if absurdly supposed 
 moral, yet infinitely imperfect, and therefore not a right- 
 eousness, nor a cause of righteousness ; — but God justi- 
 fies and accepts him for the sake alone of the Christ who 
 dwelleth in him as in a temple, sanctifying the place of 
 his gratuitous habitation, and preparing it, by the whole- 
 some influence of his grace, for a resurrection-state of 
 glory. Christ, the indwelling, informing, transforming 
 Christ is all. Every good thought, sentiment, judgment, 
 affection, desire, volition, purpose, action, are not the 
 fruit and product of the believer’s soul, according to its 
 own natural working, but of the Spirit proceeding forth 
 from the Father and the Son, and referable to him alone. 
 All the work of sanctification, from the beginning to the 
 end, is Christ’s. Whatever holy activity the believer 
 himself puts forth, in all the discipline of the Christian 
 life, is from the ulterior activity of the indwelling Christ, 
 according to God’s everlasting covenant. Whenever God, 
 for any of his ends of discipline, withholds that grace, 
 and leaves the Christian to the proper working of his 
 own fallen nature, he falls away. He is likely to be- 
 come a greater sinner than before, because of his great- 
 er contempt of sanctifying blood, and his despite to the 
 Spirit of grace. He would become an adulterer and 
 murderer with David, an idolater with Solomon, a Christ- 
 denying blasphemer with Peter. He would be lost ab- 
 solutely, after all his heavenly experience, and sink from 
 
his height of privilege into the lowest hell, if Christ 
 could ever give up his purchased possession, or efface his 
 own image, or relinquish to the adversary the prey that 
 he had rescued, or cease to pray for the poor, harassed 
 and tempted soul, that its faith might not absolutely fail. 
 But that is impossible. “ This is the Father’s will who 
 hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should 
 lose nothing, but raise it up again at the last day.” 
 
 It is the thought of this transforming image of Christ 
 impressed upon the believer, and of the Divine nature 
 indwelling, that so poignantly touches his sensibilities, 
 when this vital and all- sufficient righteousness is de- 
 nied, and a natural righteousness is substituted for 
 it, either through the indifferent wantonness of un- 
 godliness, or the ambitious and pretending, but jejune 
 and heartless speculations of a false philosophy. It is 
 this which sometimes makes him cry out with the pas- 
 sionate grief of the Magdalene, tc They have taken away 
 the Lord, and we know not where they have laid him 
 or to reiterate the kind, but sturdy rebuke of Paul to the 
 men of his day, ‘ Who, being ignorant of God’s right- 
 eousness, and going about to establish their own right- 
 eousness, have not submitted themselves to the right- 
 eousness of God.’ It is the believer’s experience of this 
 vital truth, that does most 4 establish, strengthen, set- 
 tle him.’ It is this which awakens his profound grief 
 at all departures from it among the professed friends of 
 Christ, even those incipient departures which are not 
 perceived, or not cared for, by men of a less practised 
 and anxious discrimination, but soon, unchecked, start 
 off the unsuspecting churches from the true foundation. 
 It is this experience, according to the literal Scripture ; 
 and it is that great body of experiences, constituting the 
 common sense of the faithful, in distinction from the 
 
55 
 
 common sense of mankind, in general, who have no sim- 
 ilar experience ; — it is this experience, constituting al- 
 so a real knowledge, in distinction from the vague teach- 
 ings of speculative and conjectural expositors ; — it is 
 this vital experience constituting, moreover, an intuit- 
 ional and spiritual apprehension of the Gospel, in dis- 
 tinction from the false spiritualism and mock inspiration 
 of excited genius ; — it is this which assures him with 
 more than the force of moral certainty, — for it is anoth- 
 er, a superinduced consciousness of the new-horn soul, — 
 and brings him into loving sympathy and fellowship with 
 all “the sacramental host of God’s elect.” He loves 
 them, not for their own sakes, but for the Christ who 
 dwelleth in them; and because their otherwise discordant 
 and jarring elements are fused in the common love of 
 Christ, not theirs, but his, which is shed abroad in their 
 hearts by the Holy Ghost. It is with him and them, 
 as, once, in a better age, “ Parthians, and Medes, and 
 Elamites, and Mesopotamians, and Cappadocians, Phryg- 
 ians and Pamphylians, Cretes and Arabians,” forswore 
 the antipathies of color, caste, nation, race, government, 
 philosophy, religion, through the centralizing and assim- 
 ilating power of the common indwelling Christ. It is 
 sometimes, as you may have seen, in the earlier awak- 
 enings of our own times, a particular Church of Christ, 
 moved by his Spirit, forgetting, for the occasion, sex 
 and age, rank and place ; the high and the low, the rich 
 and the poor, the learned and ignorant together, not now 
 mutually repelled by disagreeable tempers, uncouth ad- 
 dress, personal or domestic feuds, political animosities, 
 the rivalries of study, the competitions of trade, or oth- 
 er similar causes of alienation, jealousy, or hate, but 
 weeping or rejoicing, confessing or praising, in the so- 
 cial meeting, or at the sacramental board, as the single 
 
vital influence, the life of love and faith has proceeded 
 forth upon them from heaven. It was the common Christ 
 revisiting his temple, and rekindling the fire upon the 
 altar of their hearts. It was the common indwelling 
 Christ who shone through their eyes, and suffused their 
 cheeks, and vibrated on their tongues, as they repeated 
 the glory in the highest to him, 4 who redeemed them by 
 his blood, and made them Kings and Priests unto God.’* 
 
 * I have made allusion, in the paragraph above, to that experience which 
 is according to literal Scripture, in distinction from that which is shaped 
 variously, to the fashions of philosophy, because it is in respect to vital and 
 experimental piety that neology, in all its characteristic typesand manifes- 
 tations, and especially in its newest and most refined, does most dishonor 
 Christ. It dishonors him by substituting notions and theories, which are 
 merely eonceptional and lifeless, for substantive doctrines of Scripture, 
 which are true representations of Divine realities, and the only stated in- 
 strument by which the Spirit of God sanctifies the soul. It exalts an emo- 
 tional excitement, a working of sensibilities which are consequent upon 
 merely natural notions and ideas, above that penitence, faith and love 
 which the Spirit produces only by the supernatural truth. It captivates the 
 unthinking and undiscerning who distinguish not between the nominal and 
 real in religion ; or, if they did, would follow rather semblances and ap- 
 pearances, which disturb not the conscience, and awaken no apprehensions 
 of danger, or sense of dependence on the regenerating grace of God. It 
 claims for itself from others, on account of this seeming virtue, and control- 
 ling influence, a charity of fellowship which is due only to true religion. It 
 reproaches those who withhold that fellowship out of fidelity to Christ. It 
 puts them under the ban of an invidious public sentiment which be- 
 comes more exasperated and noisy till it issues in overt jarrings, persecu- 
 tions and revolutions. Such is the history of all departures from the Word 
 of God, of all sects and denominations, composed mainly even of Christian 
 men, when their vital union to Christ has been impaired by exalting their 
 chimeras and puzzles above the doctrines of the Cross. Such is the state 
 of Protestant Christendom, of New England, at this day. The fact, and 
 the true account of it, though “ new themes,” deserve very serious consid- 
 eration from all the friends of Christ. The men of sacred history should 
 see to it. 
 
 He must be an indifferent student, and a loose observer, who has failed 
 to perceive, in general, the remarkable developements and changed aspects 
 of philosophy, since the beginning of the present century ; or who has not 
 measured, to some extent, its increased influence upon theology, ethics, pol- 
 itics, legislation, and all the related interests of life. It has set loose and 
 
57 
 
 3. The substance of justification in the formal and 
 vital senses combined. 
 
 The Church is the body of Christ ; and every Chris- 
 tian is a member in particular. Yet is the Church not 
 a dead body, but a living. Accordingly, the figure rep- 
 
 wcll nigh crazed the mind of the civilized world, previously inflamed, as it 
 had been, by the illuminism which began even in the times of Luther ; just 
 as the other face of the man of sin had been unveiled in the days of the 
 Apostles. It has put society to its utmost stretch of speculative activity, 
 seeking for the good which it would not accept from the true Christ, among 
 the phantoms of civil and religious liberty, an imaginary perfect church and 
 state, without him. Nothing has been able to restrain it, or hardly to reg- 
 ulate its delirious movement. Usage, precedent, Scripture, the Divine or- 
 dinances, and even policy and expediency, or the sad experience of past 
 ages, have been equally disregarded in its rash efforts to gain an Utopian 
 paradise, and drive back the cherubim and the flaming sword from the tree 
 of life. The wonderful material excitement and progress of the age are a 
 proper sign and evidence of the increase of motive power in its philosophi- 
 cal ideas. They are the natural measure of each other. 
 
 This is equally true of all the philosophies; for the reaction to sensual- 
 ism has been as violent as the overaction of idealism. Rome has become 
 more vitalized even by its political reverses, and has controverted, with 
 an ability unknown for centuries, the adverse rationalistic tendencies of the 
 times. It has found not its least able champion in our own New England, 
 in one who was scared back too far from the abyss of unbelief into which 
 he had well nigh slipped, and went over to the other extreme of the natu- 
 ral mind, to believe a lie.* It transcends its old limits, through the fervor 
 of its awakened spirit. It begins to speculate on its own account. As if 
 
 * Mr. Brownson is a very zealous worshipper of his sensuous idol, and as 
 sincere as any devotee can be, in mistaking his image for the living God ; 
 as if the greatest opposite to a falsehood were the greatest truth, and there 
 were no via media, a strait and narrow way, between them. Put Christ is 
 just as dark to him as to the contrary philosophers whom he so well chas- 
 tises. Few men better understand than he the fallacies of these inflated 
 and vapid reasoners, or defend, with greater ability, the objective of Chris- 
 tianity which is something, against their fictions and abstractions which are 
 nothing. But his objective Christ is all in all, a mere image, and no better 
 because it has a body, and is dressed in scarlet. The warfare between him 
 and the ncologists is philosophical, on his part, as well as theirs, and of no 
 more account ; for there is little to choose between a crvrifx and an idea, 
 a picture on the wall, and a picture in the brain. lie gains nothing ex- 
 cept that his iron sinews make him a better wrestler than the exquisites on 
 the other side ; or would, if they dared the grapple. Their vaporing senti- 
 ments arc no match for his hai d-faced dialectics. But neither party pains 
 the sanctuary. The one is too volatile, and flies over it ; the other is prone, 
 and stumbles on the threshold. 
 
 8 
 
58 
 
 resents the company of truly regenerate and Christian 
 persons, redeemed by the blood of Christ, and united to 
 him by a living faith ; — the general company of all 
 ages, countries and climes ; and the particular persons, 
 of all denominational communions who sympathise in the 
 
 concerned lest water should not wash, nor ghostly power absolve it, it 
 dreams, confusedly, of succors and enlargement from “ humanity,” which 
 it has so long insulted and betrayedi It makes stiff compliments to the 
 people. It affects democracy, enthusiasm, reform. It drinks intoxicating 
 
 Mr. Brownson deserves great credit for his persevering industry, his 
 knowledge, and his outspoken independence. These are worthy of a bet- 
 ter cause. Few men have so large a comprehension of fundamental natu- 
 ral truths. In this respect he puts most of our modern Protestants to shame, 
 and their cause to infinite disadvantage. Few so well appreciate ethics and 
 theology, so far as they stand in natural religion ; or so far as, standing in nat- 
 ural religion, they are made authoritative by a supernatural revelation ;orso 
 far as established by the miraculous evidences of the Gospel, they consti- 
 tute the proper natural basis of the Christian church. In these respectshc 
 is, sometimes, a host. But into the supernatural revelation, when he has 
 faithfully planted and defended it, he penetrates not, except, by wax can- 
 dles. He accepts not the guidance of the Holy Spirit, except as that Spir- 
 it is supposed to utter its contradictory responses through an earthly oracle. 
 A father is more to him than an Apostle ; and a council of fathers than the 
 college of the twelve ; and the Pope than the Paraclete. Of the Divine 
 life of t'aith,or of Christian liberty, he has no appreciation, but of the ecclesi- 
 astical life of credulity and submission: and the church that he would build 
 up, is, consequently, a natural church only, with a Christian name ; 
 born of water, but not of the Spirit. It is lifeless and rotten lumber, piled 
 confusedly upon a rock, indeed, but a dead Peter instead of the living 
 Christ. In his reaction from speculative infidelity had he stopped midway 
 at the true Christ, instead of going as far over upon the other side, a living 
 faith would have kept him equi-distant from the merely objective Christ 
 which he now extravagantly exalts, and the merely subjective Christ which 
 he properly denies. It would have harmonized in his mind the Christ of 
 the new heart and the Christ of the primitive ordinances; and then the 
 spiritual, which is of grace, would have had its legitimate supremacy, and 
 the ritual, which is of the letter, would have been reduced to its constitu- 
 tional simplicity. He would have learned at the cross, that the true church 
 of the Gospel is not, during this auov of Christianity, the Holy Catholic , but; 
 the Holt, / Elect ; an eKnXr/aia, called out from a dead world, and not com- 
 prehensive of it ; a church chosen, and therefore sanctified and baptized ; 
 not baptized, and therefore sanctified and chosen ; and that over this house 
 of God there is but one High Priest who is consecrated forevermore. He 
 would have learned that all llabbinism is of the earth, and not of Christ ; 
 and is equally forbidden and denounced by Christ, whether it be on the 
 right hand, or the left; that, practically, there is little to choose, in point 
 of dignity or safety, between speculative flights beyond the planets, and 
 burrowing in heaps of mediaeval rubbish ; that his type of philosophy tends 
 to no advantage, personal, social, or political, over that which he has re- 
 nounced, except as a Gregory or a devotee, at Rome, are better than a 
 Robespierre or a son*~ f 'ulnttp>, at Paris : and that Jfrusatfv. the only 
 
59 
 
 common experience of regenerate and believing minds. 
 They are not the Church in the sense of any formal and 
 visible catholic embodiment ; or that the formal ordinan- 
 ces of a visible catholic church, could, in the nature of 
 the case, or do, by supernatural appointment, produce, 
 
 gas, as if to be nerved, unconsciously, for its coming sharp, successful, but 
 but ultimately fatal struggle for the kingdoms of this world. 
 
 The ultimate question between these competitors of the sense and reason, 
 is a question of spiritual supremacy. Their aim, respectively, is conversion 
 or extermination. Their strife will not be moral, but of violence, to deter- 
 mine which shall set up its peculiar type of naturalism above the supernat- 
 ural Gospel ; whether this or that shall be the authoritative interpreter of 
 the Scripture, and thereby acquire the government of the world. For this 
 the nations of Christendom are now putting on the harness. Mohammed 
 merely gives occasion ; and is likely to be crushed, politically, between them; 
 though his ultimate destruction be deferred till the time of their catastro- 
 phe. The great impending warfare is religious. And the true issue will 
 be not so much between the cross and the crescent, as the rival forces of 
 false Christianity, - superstition and fanaticism. It will be political only, in- 
 asmuch as despotism and liberty are the most convenient watchwords, and 
 can muster the largest material forces. Both equally refuse Christ. They 
 constitute together the Antichrist, the many Antichrists of Scripture, the 
 beast and the false prophet, that all hasten to their judgment. We shall see 
 what will be, when the stronger punishes the weaker ; when the greatest 
 falsehood yields to the most flagrant impiety ; when the bear exacts tribute 
 of the other beasts of the field ; when emasculated, bankrupt, and volcanic 
 nations arc bestridden by a rude and ruthless Colossus ; when his iron 
 power grows bold, insolent, vindictive, persecuting ; and He, whose 
 
 mother of the elect, whether Jews or Gentiles, though trodden down for a 
 season by impious feet, is the only ordained seat of universal government. 
 Then, too, he would have understood the prophesying which holds not of 
 any unconsecrated naturalism, whether its seat be in Borne or Athens, the 
 Vatican or the Areopagus, nor of any merely conccptional or allegorical 
 supernatural church, or supernatural heaven, but the literal Zion and Je- 
 rusalem, the sacred place of the incarnation and the resurrection, when the 
 feet of the Deliverer shall stand again on the mount of Olives ; and her days 
 of oppression, and mourning, and sackcloth, shall be ended ; and “ The 
 righteousness thereof shall go forth as brightness, and the salvation thereof 
 as a lamp that burneth ; and she shall also be a crown of glory in the hand 
 of the Lord, and a royal diadem in the hand of her God.” Is it too late 
 for his great mistake to be corrected ? Or the greater mistake of the op- 
 posite rationalizing schools ? Will they not cast their respectivo ‘idols to 
 the moles and the bats V Shall an offended Saviour have occasion to weep 
 over them, as over the men of his time, who would not be gathered, before 
 their house was left unto them desolate ? 
 
60 
 
 confer, or imply true Christian virtue ; which is the lie 
 of Romanism. For, equally according to nature, expe- 
 rience and Scripture, life and organization are perfectly 
 distinct realities; and to treat them, practically, as iden- 
 tical or equivalent, is to run into ruinous confusion. 
 
 
 
 name is called “ Tiie Word of God,” shall then gird his sword upon his 
 thigh, and dip his vesture in the blood of the slain. Terrible ! terrible ! 
 will be “ The Supper of the Great God,” in the valley of Armageddon i 
 
 On which side our own New England, meanwhile, will fall, cannot be 
 doubtful. New England could not now be Romish. Iler time is not yet. 
 She has not yet entirely wasted the inheritance of her Pilgrim Fathers. 
 She must be German, from blood, sympathy and historical connexions; and 
 hold her way till the modernized German wisdom has more effectually 
 eclipsed the wisdom of the Reformation, and its folly shall be demonstrated 
 in its political and social imbecility. Her present institutions grew out of 
 the imaginative philosophy of the last century, and must have their course 
 accordingly. New England, as it is, struck, not like the Pilgrim Fathers, 
 for God, but happiness ; not for liberty to worship Christ, but to drink tea, 
 and speak in parliament. It sinned in its revolution ; or rather it sinned, 
 and was revolutionized ; though the revolution was not sinful, but its prin- 
 ciple. It struck for self, not for Christ ; and its success was held to give 
 sanction to its selfish motive. God has dealt with us accordingly. He has 
 left us to find such happiness as we could in the pursuit of our philosophi- 
 cal ideas. “ He gave them their requests ; he sent leanness into their 
 souls.” 
 
 New England has consequently held to the skirts of all the suceesive phi- 
 losophies of the old world ; and would outstrip them if it could. It drinks 
 at their fountains. It affects their genius and spirit, their principles, their 
 methods, and their magniloquence. There is no respectable variety of 
 French or German metaphysics that has net its students and votaries, its 
 cliques and coteries, in New England. There are but few' adult, or even 
 young persons among us, whom the pulpit, the commentary, the magazine, 
 the newspaper, the school, the college, the seminary, the institute, the lyce- 
 um, the convention, the caucus, the anniversary, the club, the pic-nic, the 
 social party, have not awakened to a new intellectual activity ; few whom 
 they have not shaped to some new pattern of philosophy, or placed in un- 
 conscious sympathy with its ideas ; and few, consequently, who do not 
 carry out their judgments, or their sympathies, in a corresponding habit of 
 religious, political, or social life. New England is, therefore, rent and 
 broken into factions, or patched up by compromises and coalitions, without 
 number, which make its successive rents and fractures w’orsc. Its many 
 Chiists lead as many schools. Every school has many Christs ; and every 
 Christ has his own proper band. They sport their respective brooches 
 
61 
 
 “ He is not a Jew which is one outwardly ; neither is 
 that circumcision which is outward in the flesh ; hut he 
 is a Jew which is one inwardly ; and circumcision is 
 that of the heart, in the spirit, and not in the letter ; 
 whose praise is not of men, but of God.” The church 
 
 and badges, repeat their shibboleths, and shout their paeans, in fearful dis- 
 cord, it is true,, as any Christian man would reasonably presume, but to the 
 same divinities of the unscriptural imagination, - “ liberty, and the rights of 
 man as if these were the gods who led their fathers out of their house of 
 bondage ; or as if true liberty were possible, and licentiousness would not 
 ultimately react to despotism, without the Christ of the Reformation, the 
 Christ whom they renounce. 
 
 These facts I take to be unquestionable, because they are not question- 
 ed, but admitted. All parties make them the theme of their dis- 
 course ; the few more thoughtful men, to mourn over them as evidences of 
 apostasy and decline ; the many, to boast of them as proofs of an unexam- 
 pled march of mind, and an opening era of universal light, liberty and hap- 
 piness. If an old man speak of them in his sorrow, with forebodings, he is, 
 by most persons, judged to be splenetic, and is thrust aside ; but the facts 
 are not denied, If a young man repeat them, hopefully, though with ex- 
 aggeration, he is commended as haviug d ruble of the spirit of his age, and 
 attained the first qualification of a leader of the people. He is thought to 
 appreciate the facts. The same facts are a common basis of reasoning to 
 opposite conclusions, accordingly as the respective parties interpret by 
 faith or fancy. Wherefore, the facts are certain. No man can now reas- 
 onably pretend that New England is what it was. We are going forward, 
 rapidly, on this speculative road ; and we cannot go back. Revolutions 
 never go back. The streams return not to their sources. 
 
 Our present types of naturalistic speculation are the most refined. We 
 seem, in this respect, to be near our limit, just as in regard to material pro- 
 gress ; for itis not supposable that any material agent should drive ourper- 
 sons faster than steam, or our thoughts than lightning. To these material 
 forces the Eclecticism and Mysticism of the present day, the highest styles 
 of the modern philosophy, have a natural correspondence. They are claim- 
 ed to constitute, in their full developement, the perfection of humanity ; the 
 one like to the compounding of all the powers that overcome the frictions of 
 rude or organic matter ; the other darting invisibly through ihe air. Ofthese 
 now popularized systems Eclecticism is the most formal and conspicuous; 
 the most learned, grave and dignified ; the severest student, the deepest 
 thinker, the sharpest critic, the most cunning interpreter, the most author- 
 itative judge, the most effective manager of affairs. It is, withal, the most 
 presumptuous, arrogant and impious. Cousin, its Coryphcus, with ineffable 
 coolness, calls himself, federally and representatively, — for philosophy must 
 
62 
 
 of God, which is the true church, is not true by virtue 
 of any pattern of ordinances, even supposing that pat- 
 tern to be divine ; but only by virtue of its living prin- 
 
 have its federal heads, -the scientific organ and expositor of Scripture, and 
 critic of the Holy Ghost. lie seems to pride himself in that unpardonable sin. 
 But mysticism is more imaginative, subtle, lively and energetic. It trans- 
 cends idealism and speculation. Its more sublimated instinct needs them 
 not. It feels . What want we more? But it equally dishonors Scripture, 
 and contemns the Spirit. For its cardinal fiction is that of “the inner 
 light,” a light not of faith, not of reasoning, not of experience, but of intu- 
 ition ; not a mechanical judgment, or an ordinary flight of fancy, but a spir- 
 itual inspiration ; a sufficient light, though susceptible of culture by the 
 great man, from the introversion of his candle. It is, comparatively, harm- 
 less, like other fire, when restrained and tempered by a previous Chris- 
 tian discipline, or the overruling influence of a Christian neighborhood. A 
 Madam Guyon, an Elizabeth Frye, a Clarkson, a Wesley, a Hopper, might 
 be endured, for an hour, even by a Haldane; for an interpenetrating in- 
 fluence of the Gospel, or a chastened spirit of humanity, saves them from 
 delirium. But when the inner light outshines the light of Christ, as it does, 
 at length, if not in the fathers, yet in the children, then the innocent 
 dreamer, the benevolent enthusiast, the bustling philanthropist, the confi- 
 dent reformer, becomes a conceited and headlong agitator, an incendiary, 
 or a maniac. He is a leader of insane perfectionists, a revolutionizing de- 
 bater, the fiery spouter of a popular assembly, or the oracle of a madhouse, 
 where he finishes his architecture of a New Jerusalem in the moon. 
 
 It would be a great science, and of great value to religion, to compre- 
 hend these streams of philosophical naturalism flowing in their respective 
 channels; or intermingling, now and then; or commingling with the educa- 
 tional Christianity of New England ; and to describe, with desirable ex- 
 actness, their respective, or their combined influence in giving character 
 and tone to the public mind. It is an impossible science now, in the con- 
 fusions of our present state of learning. It requires a revolution, - new 
 principles, new methods, and a new nomenclature. We cannot have it 
 now. Or, if we had, it could not be commended to a demented and com- 
 mitted people. They will travel their own road ; they will even outrun 
 their guides, and, as they plunge, will laugh, incontinently, at the alarmed 
 outcry of their respective leaders. But it is not, perhaps, too high a sci- 
 ence to be attempted, if one had a tolerable aptness for so difficult a task ; 
 and even a proximate accomplishment would be of great service to Chris- 
 tian students. It might arrest the centrifugal movement of the churches. 
 There are, already, phenomena enough to constitute a basis. The materi- 
 als are abundant, and at hand. Christian educators, at least, have a right 
 to know them. They have observed, in the same minds, and in the same 
 schools, the personal God of the Bible, and the conceptional God of the in- 
 
63 
 
 ciple of faith, and the living Christ consequently indwell- 
 ing. Yet is the true church, which, in respect to its 
 living principle, is invisible, in another sense, also visi- 
 ble ; for it rejects not ordinances, though it may inadver- 
 tently depart from the simple pattern of the Scripture ; 
 
 tellect ; the Christ of the Gospel, anil the many Christs of the speculative 
 or intuitional reason ; the Spirit of truth, anil the spirit of fiction, through a 
 course of years, contending for the mastery. They have seen the better 
 Spirit gradually offended and grieved away, till the individual, and, in due 
 time, the public mind, has been left, mainly or absolutely, to its natural bad 
 activity, and has run down, indefinitely, on the scale of worldliness 
 and unbelief. They have seen Melancthon and Kant, Luther and 
 Jacobi, Calvin and Cousin, Edwards and Hegel, in the same men- 
 tal crucible, neutralizing each other, and precipitating a salt which 
 had lost its saltness, or eliminating a gas which now has sputtered and flash- 
 ed, and then exploded ; the one, a worthless product cast out to be trodden 
 under foot of men, fit only to strew' the courts and avenues of the temple ; 
 and the other, lighting up the temple, the city and the country round, in a 
 general conflagration. The eclecticist, as the literal Bible has given way, 
 in his mind, to fable, has become an intellectual innovator, a vehement po- 
 lemic, a towering beresiarch, or an insidious demagogue ; and the mysticist, 
 as the inner light of nature has expelled the supernatural light of Scrip- 
 ture, has figured as a steaming visionary, a frantic declaimer, a reckless 
 coalitionist, a mad conspirator, leagued with kindred spirits of every sect 
 and party, burning out, at length, like the ignis fatuus , over his own slough. 
 Or these together, as they have combined their forces to possess the Church 
 and State, have set talent and learning, logic and rhetoric, in flame ; have 
 stirred up the confused and fretful people to deeds of lawlessness, violence 
 and blood ; and marched on, in a wild crusade, of modern fashion, but an 
 old principle, to deliver without restoring, to recover without renewing, to 
 reform without converting, to conquer without subduing, to animate with- 
 out breath, to beautify without living tissues, and vainly seek possession of 
 the Holy City while yet the people of the covenant, for whom alone it is 
 reserved, are dispersed among the nations. Truly, it will be a great lesson 
 which some will learn, by-and by, when till this unbelieving naturalism 
 shall have had its full developement, and reached its crisis, and received its 
 judgment ; and when God’s holy prophecy, which a deluded world would 
 not understand, nor even read, but to misinterpret, according to its vain 
 ideas, shall become the history of its doom 1 Those students who compre- 
 hend the history wisely, beforehand, will be the benefactors of the world. 
 For their sakes, mainly, I thus speak. Older men are likely to be commit- 
 ted, hopelessly, to their inveterate false ideas. The young are not yet too 
 much prejudiced, to study : or too wise, to learn. 
 
64 
 
 and it walks in ordinances, as appointed signs, and evi- 
 dences, and helps of the antecedent and invisible princi- 
 ple within. The visible churches, of various patterns, 
 do, for the most part, contain it. It is their conserva- 
 tive element, while they decline, as they are ever likely 
 to decline into superstitious or fanatical idolatry. They 
 are kept from formal judgment and extinction, so long 
 as they do not absolutely drive out of them the men of 
 faith who confound not the vital and the ritual of relig- 
 ion. But the men of faith, though introduced not, as 
 yet, into any visible church ; or, though expelled ; or, 
 of their own will, seceding ; or, though scattered and 
 afflicted, so that they could not observe the ordinances 
 in which they were brought up, are yet visible mem- 
 bers of the true church, and distinguishable from the 
 rest of mankind by the manifestation of this indwelling 
 life of God in works of piety and charity, or the more 
 precious fruits of patience and submission. 
 
 In this sense of manifesting Christ in ordinances, when 
 they may, and, always, as they can, in the overt active 
 and passive virtues of the Christian calling, believers 
 are set forth, objectively and visibly, in Scripture, as the 
 church of God. They are the body of Christ ; not an 
 etherial, or a merely notional entity, but a people, elect, 
 saved out of the merely objective and formal societies, ec- 
 clesiastical, civil or domestic, j)f the fallen world ; whom 
 Christ vitalizes by the new life of love ; whom he de- 
 fends by his power, comforts by his Spirit, and presents 
 at length to the Father, as the fruit of his labor and tra- 
 vail, before all the worlds. They are Christ’s body, be- 
 cause composed of members with their proper moral of- 
 fices ; a body spiritual, but not less real ; a body mys- 
 tical, but only in relation to our imperfect faculties ; a 
 body taken into union with the glorious Christ, preserv- 
 
66 
 
 ed by his mysterious indwelling, and destined, in its res- 
 urrection-state, to shine forth as the sun in the kingdom 
 of the Father ; - the symbolic New Jerusalem coming 
 down from God out of heaven. What it is now, in the 
 manifested reality of its Divine life, and what it will be 
 hereafter, in its state of manifested glory, the most sig- 
 nificant figures of the Scripture do but imperfectly shad- 
 ow forth to us, in the darkness of our probationary state. 
 But we know that this holy society is Christ’s, though 
 now marred and disfigured by the clay, the flesh and 
 blood of an earthly tabernacle ; and that he will still 
 dwell in it, till he shall come to raise it in a state of glo- 
 ry, and “This corruptible shall put on incorruption, 
 and this mortal shall put on immortality.” 
 
 This figure of body and soul, organization and life, 
 constituting one complex person, our proper humanity, 
 and representing all spiritual persons, the elect church, 
 having Christ for their spiritual life, will assist us to 
 conceive of the combined formal and vital substance of 
 our justification. For the redeemed people of God are 
 real beings, objective persons, constituting together a 
 proper entity, a society, having properly described rela- 
 tions to God and each other. They are severally and 
 collectively, by nature, according to Scripture, under the 
 wrath and curse of God, alienated from him, and liable 
 to everlasting death. They are dead in trespasses and 
 sins, having no fitness for the heavenly state. But, ac- 
 cording to the same Scripture, they are, individually and 
 personally, subjects of God’s everlasting mercy, given to 
 Christ, in covenant, before the foundation of the world, 
 and intended for the more perfect manifestation of the 
 Divine perfections in the everlasting ages ; - 4 That unto 
 principalities and powers, in the heavenly places, might 
 
 be known, by the church, the manifold wisdom of God, ac- 
 9 
 
66 
 
 cording to his eternal purpose in Christ Jesus our Lord." 
 In pursuance of this everlasting covenant, the incarnate 
 Son of God offers himself, visibly and objectively, before all 
 the worlds, a sacrifice for their sins. They are thereby re- 
 deemed, bought off, formally and visibly, from the sentence 
 of the violated law. They are 4 a purchased possession, 
 that they might be to the praise of his glory.’ They 
 stand c foreknown and predestinated to be conformed to 
 the image of Christ.’ Their debt is paid. They are ab- 
 solved from guilt, delivered from the power of death and 
 hell, and, in respect to moral government and law, ap- 
 pear before the worlds in that state of formal, objective 
 righteousness. The law cannot exact upon them, for 
 c Christ has borne their sins in his own body on the tree.’ 
 They are rescued from the curse. But can they live to 
 righteousness ? Can they be qualified for an everlast- 
 ing life in a resurrection-state of glory ? Can the whole 
 humanity be purified from the defilement of sin, assimi- 
 lated to God, raised incorruptible to inherit his kingdom, 
 and thenceforward enter upon a career of glory, honor 
 and immortality ? That is a distinct problem, and the 
 Son of God, who took not on him the nature of angels, 
 but the seed of Abraham, for this very purpose, solves it 
 in the Regeneration. For the mysterious God -man rais- 
 es our fallen nature, by virtue of his redemption, to a 
 union with the Divine. The living Christ possesses the 
 recovered soul ; restores and preserves, by the Holy- 
 Ghost, the Divine life of love ; prevails over the resis- 
 tances of a fallen nature and seducing spirits ; and the 
 blood-bought and sanctified company become, all and 
 severally, a habitation of God, anointed, sealed, appro- 
 priated, defended, and kept by a divine power, through 
 faith, unto salvation. They are appointed to remain 
 here, definitely and indefinitely, in a probationary state, 
 
67 
 
 for trial and discipline, for the enlightenment and con- 
 servation of the fallen world, as a depositary of truth, 
 and a propagator of the faith, till the ends of the pres- 
 ent economy are fulfilled in the complete in-gathering 
 of the elect, and the perfect vindication of moral gov- 
 ernment ; and then are brought with Christ, in the first 
 resurrection, to be priests of God and of Christ, and to 
 reign with him a thousand years. Then, and thencefor- 
 forward, the whole revealed process of salvation is accom- 
 plished in the saints, - foreknown, predestinated, called, 
 justified, glorified. The form and the life of their 
 salvation are combined and perfected in the Christ 
 of their present faith. They are justified by his blood, 
 justified in his righteousness. In this wonderful com- 
 plexity of righteousness they live, and die, and live 
 again, and live forever, and live together, in a social 
 state ; — the City of God, having the glory of God. 
 <£ And there shall be no more curse : but the throne 
 of God and of the Lamb shall be in it ; and his servants 
 shall serve him ; and they shall see his face ; and his 
 name shall be in their foreheads : And there shall be no 
 night there ; and they need no candle, neither light of 
 the sun ; for the Lord God grveth them light : and they 
 shall reign forever and ever.” “ Such honor have all 
 the saints.” 
 
 But I am aware that all language, whether literal, fig- 
 urative, or symbolic, can give us, here, no adequate 
 conception of matters so far above us. God has made 
 every thing in this world proportioned to every other 
 thing. He has given us limited mental faculties, which 
 are more straitened and confused by our contracted sin- 
 fulness ; and an imperfect language to correspond. We 
 could know but little ; and, accordingly, we have in- 
 struments for learning but little. And the influence of 
 
68 
 
 language and of our faculties is reciprocal. Our minds 
 are kept down by the poverty of language ; and our lan- 
 guage is made less significant by the poverty of our fac- 
 ulties ; so that we have a small compass at best. In 
 respect to things natural we are obliged to go, more 
 than we are willing to admit, by faith ; and, in things 
 supernatural, without faith we cannot go at all. What 
 God has taught us, particularly, concerning the subject 
 of our justification by the blood and righteousness of 
 Christ, we can measurably apprehend ; that is, we know 
 the literal meaning of the terms in which the doctrine of 
 the Scripture is declared ; and that this literal doctrine 
 represents a cardinal fact of the Divine economy which 
 involves our deliverance from sin, and its curse ; and our 
 attainment of eternal life in a spiritual state of glory. 
 We can illustrate this literal representation by reference 
 to original principles of the Divine government, settled 
 and handed down to us, from the beginning, in natural 
 religion. We can assist our impressions, and strengthen 
 our convictions, by reference to other synonymous terms, 
 and to figures and analogies which convey the same lit- 
 eral fact by means of significant resemblances, or similar 
 facts by corresponding representations. All these make 
 the declared fact more evident. The experience of good 
 men, of all periods, confirms it. Our own experience, 
 the product of the promised Spirit of grace, gives us con- 
 fidence, assurance, hope, peace, joy, victory over the 
 world, triumph in death. ‘ He that believeth hath the 
 witness in himself/ Being spiritual, through the in- 
 dwelling Christ, he judgeth all things, yet is himself 
 judged of no man. But that is all. Neither natural nor 
 revealed religion, nor any influence of the Holy Spirit, 
 helps us, in the least degree, to any philosophical account 
 of the mysterious fact of our redemption ; and to stretch 
 
69 
 
 ourselves in this respect, though in the least degree, be- 
 yond the limits which God has assigned to knowledge, 
 during our probationary state, is presumption and impi- 
 ety. It inflates us with vain and foolish conceits, and 
 reacts to unbelief, licentiousness, and a worse destruc- 
 tion. That higher attainment belongs only to a higher 
 sphere, a more perfect dispensation, in which the meek, 
 the believing, the obedient, the patient waiters for the 
 coming of their Lord, will awake, in his likeness, to lar- 
 ger faculties, a purer region of thought, and a heavenly 
 language. “ Beloved, now are we the sons of God ; and 
 it doth not yet appear what we shall be ; but we know 
 that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him ; for we 
 shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this 
 hope in him, purifieth himself, even as he is pure. 
 And he that keepcth his commandment dwelleth in him, 
 and he in him. And hereby we know that he abideth in 
 us, by the Spirit which he hath given us. ,, That is our 
 word and rule ; and he who keeps it will be saved. 
 
 I shall close with one remark ; namely, that if justi- 
 fication, a state of righteousness before God, is alone by 
 Christ, formally and vitally, and in these senses combin- 
 ed; then Christianity, formally and vitally, dogmatically 
 and experimentally, its positive institutions and their ener- 
 gizing principle, its body and soul, alone can save this fall- 
 en world. Without the dying and living Christ, believed 
 on with the heart, confessed with the mouth, and kept 
 in remembrance by the ordinances of the Church, as God 
 gives opportunity, we die not to sin, and live not to 
 righteousness ; and all the semblances and affectations 
 of virtue are nugatory and destructive. In righteousness 
 only can we stand, and our only righteousness is in the 
 right of Christ. All else is fiction and pretence, the 
 righteousness of our mere humanity which is corrupted, 
 
70 
 
 imbecile, condemned. Without Christ our manners, our 
 reason, and our speech; our learning and our laws ; our 
 agriculture, trade and commerce ; our families, schools, 
 colleges, churches, and the comprehending State, must 
 fall. For no house can stand without a foundation ; and 
 “No other foundation can any man lay than that is laid, 
 which is Christ Jesus.” Without Christ we may build, 
 and demolish, and remodel, and reconstruct, and re- 
 adorn ; but our labor will be lost. The very greatness 
 of our unchristian or antichristian civilizations, will be 
 the measure of their doom and shame. Where are the 
 states and nations of the old pagan world ? Where is 
 Jerusalem ? Where will soon be the antichristian states 
 and nations of modern Europe, when the pent-up volca- 
 noes of human passion shall break forth, and the mad- 
 ness of despotism and the madness of revolutionism shall 
 dash against each other ? Without Christ we may seem 
 to live ; but the principle of decay will soon bring us to 
 the dust ; and our resurrection will not be to a better 
 life, but a greater condemnation. Without Christ, our 
 stately Babylons, our gorgeous palaces, our sumptuous 
 feasts, our gods of silver and gold, will not defer our 
 reckoning, nor avert our judgment ; but in the exube- 
 rance of our plenty, the splendor of our magnificence, 
 the exhilaration of our pleasures, and the extravagance 
 of our boasting, the handwriting will appear upon the 
 wall. Without Christ, our manifold expedients to im- 
 prove, to correct, to reform, to advance, to regulate so- 
 ciety, by our natural wisdom, our laws, our institutions 
 of learning and religion, or even by the checks and bal- 
 ances, the antagonisms and strifes of party, may not be 
 useless ; for they limit the selfishness of man, and re- 
 strain his wrath ; they afford occasional shelter, protec- 
 tion and security to the people of God, till the day of 
 
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 their redemption cometh ; but they cannot save. They 
 are the husk, the shell, the burr, defending the precious 
 fruit till the harvest of the age, graceful, rough, prickly, 
 as the case may be, but having no further office ; for 
 life, resurrection, salvation, are only in the kernel. 
 
 Wherefore, for Christ’s sake, we preach and testify 
 these things, and warn every man, and exhort, and so 
 much the more as we see the day approaching; “For, 
 behold, the day cometh that shall burn as an oven ; and 
 all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be 
 stubble ; and the day that cometh shall bum them up, 
 saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither 
 root nor branch.”