and ordinary language of divinity. So far as it is just and in harmony with the Scriptures, I earnestly contend for its retention. Great advantages accrue from having terms appropriated, so far as good usage will warrant, to the expression of sacred truths. They serve, as terms of art do in human sciences, to assist recollection and to abbreviate language; and they have a solemnity and tenderness of association which aids religious feeling. But the most serious mischiefs will ensue, if we carry this practice so far as to establish a technical phraseology of religion, and seek to maintain its rigid observance. A facility is thus afforded to ignorance, arrogance, and hypocrisy. Persons acquire volubility in dealing out words, while they have a miserable poverty of ideas; they fancy themselves able divines, because they have learned a few systematic vocables; they cover error, often of the most noxious kind, with the assumed guise of truth; they nurse spiritual pride in themselves and their imitators; and they repulse, perhaps finally and fatally, men of sense who are unhappily prejudiced against evangelical religion. Whatever use we make of the language of the theological schools, we should never go beyond our ability to translate it into the plain speech of common life. If a learner of geometry cannot demonstrate with transposed letters, or without any letters at all, he will never become a mathematician. A person may have expertly learned the Greek nomenclature of Linnæus; but if, when turned without his books into the woods and hedges, he is ignorant and helpless, he is no botanist.

It is, therefore, I conceive, a great duty, from the pulpit, from the press; and in ordinary intercourse, to express the truths of our divine philosophy' in terms occasionally varied, adopted from the ordinary life of men, and selected with care to avoid both affectation and vulgarism. The understanding of all classes may thus be consulted, and the most probable means secured, under the blessing of heavenly grace, for winning a way to the heart.

This is what Mr. Abbott has done, in the plan and the execution of the following work. Its design is to show that the edifice of salvation must rest upon CHRIST as its CORNER-STONE;' and, with that view, the order of proceeding is to bring forward the leading principles of religious truth, as they are naturally connected with the various points of the history of Jesus Christ.' The chief of those principles may, as it appears to me, be enumerated thus:- the spirituality of God, and his consequent universality of relation to space and time; - the perfections of the Divine nature, both the natural and the moral;-the government and legislation of God;—the proper Deity of the Savior and of the Holy Spirit;—the impropriety of attempting to subject the

doctrine of the Trinity to human ideas or forms of human description; -the proper humanity of Jesus, his perfect holiness, his admirable conduct on all occasions, his teachings, his example, and the original and unrivaled manner in which he pursued and accomplished the purposes of his mission in our nature;-the atonement for sin, and reconciliation of sinners, effected by his sufferings and death; — the value and efficacy of his obedience as an active righteousness, for the complete acceptance of all who are united to him, before the tribunal of divine justice;-the way in which our guilty race has treated the offers of grace and mercy in Christ;-the inexcusable and dreadful consequences of sin;-the nature, the subtile forms, the guilt, and the awful punishment of unbelief;-the diffusion of redemption through the world; the character of true Christians, and the modes of influence in which that character should be directed for the universal benefit of mankind; the causes of dangerous error in religion, both primary and subsidiary;-the means of obviating those causes; the usual fruitlessness of speculative and verbal controversy;—the moral power of simple truth; the influence of the Holy Spirit;—the harmony of that influence, with the intellectual and voluntary faculties of the human mind; its admirable diversity of operation on the various temperaments, ages, and circumstances of persons; -in parental discipline, schools and colleges, the public ministry; -the happiness, the peculiar temptations, and the duties of genuine converts;—the dreadful condition of those who become only half Christians, or who altogether reject religion.

The unfolding of these divine truths is effected in a natural and easy order, acquiring new light in the steps of progress, but very different from the dry method of scholastic systems. Yet this is not a religious story-book; a sort of writings of which we have, I fear, too many. The anecdotal illustrations are numerous, but they are all narratives of real facts: except that in one or two, the personality is ideal, but the action is not; and the distinction is scrupulously intimated. Notwithstanding this attractive clothing, the honor of Christian DOCTRINES is not infringed; their just conception, their accurate delineation, their mutual connection; in short, each element of theological propriety is kept in view.

However, I can easily conceive, I am even compelled to anticipate, that objections and even censures may arise in the minds of some excellent persons. But I cannot apprehend this consequence, except when the volume has been too hastily and inattentively read, or where the mind is preoccupied with the trammels of human artificial systems. This is a subject of serious importance. It becomes me, therefore, to be specific.

Mr.

The sublime representation of the spirituality and omnipresence of the divine Being, which occurs near the beginning of the book, I can imagine, might be considered as identical with the irreverent assertion of Descartes, which was indeed only an offensive and paradoxical position, and which he explained so as to coincide with the truth; or it might be suspected of looking favorably on the intellectual Pantheism of Spinosa, or the more horrid material Pantheism of Schelling, or the thrice-changed hypothesis of Fichte, which he at last refined into the notion of a supreme, self-existent Author of life. But such a suspicion could never arise in a mind, which had taken the pains to understand those abstruse and worthless theories; nor should I have thought myself justified in hinting at this vague possibility of misconstruction, did I not know the vigilant and perverse ingenuity with which the spirit of error and falsehood works in these times, times in which the mighty strife between good and evil is constantly advancing to closer combat. Abbott has taught only the doctrine of inspiration, “IN HIM WE LIVE AND MOVE AND HAVE OUR BEING;" and which is expressed in the first Article of the Church of England, and more strongly still in the Westminister Confession, 'There is but one living and true God, everlasting, without body, parts, or passions.' Indeed the author has subjoined a sufficient monition to prevent ignorant or unjust construction, at the very close of the important passage: see page 22. But I must go farther, and urge upon the reader a deep attention to this part of the work, as a matter of great practical importance. It is the very ground of the awakening considerations in Psalm cxxxix, and which we need ever to impress upon our minds, for counteracting that deepseated and powerful tendency, which all feel, to form ideal conceptions of the Deity, and to imagine that, when we have risen from the direct acts of devotion, or have paid our periodical visits to the public sanetuary, we may go with a sort of relieving liberty into the world's atmosphere, and that there, amidst labor, business, or pleasure, the presence of God has become less intense, or is less obligatory upon our habitual regard.

Again: our author has repeatedly, and evidently with the most deliberate and emphatic purpose, declared that the Lord Jesus Christ is 'the Personification of the Divinity for us,-a Manifestation of Divinity, an Image of the invisible God, which comes as it were down to us,' which meets our feeble faculties with a personification exactly adapted to their wants.' For the ample protection of this representation, I need not load this page with an appeal to the best of the Christian fathers, and the wisest and most thoughtful divines since the

*1

Reformation. I only entreat the upright reader to examine the passages in their full connection, (pages 48, 183, 189 to 191,) and I have no further anxiety. But a human writer's consistency, and the proof of his maintaining the proper Deity of our Lord's pre-existent nature, are comparatively small matters: our inquiry should be, What saith God the Lord? “We beheld his glory, the glory as of the Only Begotten of the Father.—No man hath seen God at any time: the Only Begotton Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him. He that hath seen me, hath seen the Father.-Christ, the image of God. The light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.. -The brightness of his glory, and the express image of his person." All that Mr. Abbott has advanced appears to me to be in harmony with these Scripture declarations, and with the holy application of these sublime truths: while he cautions us against the intrusions of human speculation, as presumptuous and vain, in disputing upon the precise metaphysical relation of the Son to the Father.'

-

But, perhaps greater offence may be taken at the manner in which the author supports the position that, by the sacrifice of the Son of God, the door of salvation upon repentance is opened to every human being on the globe.' p. 82. If a few sentences or paragraphs were detached from their connection, and rigorously refused to be judged of by the explanations which the author, with evident carefulness, presses upon his readers, a color might be found for the charge of an implied subversion of the grace of God, and of opening a door to the merits or the independent efficiency of human doings. The places alluded to are pages 55, 78, 79, 87, 88, 90, 91, 107, 108, 109, and probably in other scattered passages. In reference to these, I think it not sufficient to say, that many other parts of the work might be appealed to, for the arrest of such an unfavorable judgment; nor even to take the still higher ground of the frame and broadly displayed tenor of the entire book, as a satisfactory defence against such an imputation. I ask only a fair perusal of the passages themselves, and an attentive regard to their connection; not the hasty running over insulated clauses, but the serious pondering of the paragraphs which continue the subject to its close. To me it appears impossible, by any just construction of those passages, to elicit from them the smallest countenance to the notion, that the propitiation and righteousness of our divine Savior are not absolutely necessary, as the ground of pardon and acceptance for the sinner before God; or that repentance and faith ever did, or ever will, take place in one sinner's heart, without the gracious and almighty influence of the Holy Spirit. But the sentiments which, to my under

66

standing, the author wishes to inculcate, are these:-that a sense of moral obligation rightly entertained, that is, sincerely believed and practically obeyed, in the affections, the heart, or whatever else we may call the active powers of the human mind, though attaching to any single object in the law of God, or comprehending never so small a range, in the earliest immediate, is yet of a holy essence and character; it is a germ of heavenly life; it wants but opportunity and the presentation of the proper objects, to be called forth universally to the same abhorring of that which is evil, and cleaving to that which is good:"that the element of conviction of sin, and turning to God with unfeigned hatred of sin, though resting upon the smallest imaginable degree of intellectual attainment, is genuine and saving; and that it contains, in the minute but living germ, such fiducial reliance upon God, as would expand into a vital union of the soul to the Savior, were it even destitute of the outward doctrinal manifestation of that Savior: -that the proofs of wisdom, goodness, power exercised upon discoverable moral principles, and all-pervading scrutiny, which show themselves in the works of God, are, objectively and in the reason of the case, sufficient to lead the soul of man to those sentiments and feelings:-that, for this end, nothing is wanting, but such a state of mind as ought to be, and for the absence of which any rational being is criminal and without excuse: that, in a word, the transgression and the ruin of the sinner arise from his own wilful rejection of holy good, and preference of sin:-that God has not left himself without witness to the human race, in even its lowest stages of degeneracy:—that men in every age and country are without excuse, who glorify him not as God:-and that, while salvation is of grace, the grace which is thus divinely effectual operates in perfect harmony with the judgment and the voluntary powers of man.

On what Mr. Abbott calls the ceremonial aspects of Christianity,' I must profess myself to differ from him, and not to have been convinced by his reasonings. He holds the opinion that no particular form, for the constitution and outward administration of the Christian church, was directed by Jesus or by his inspired servants; and that, as the outward political circumstances of all ages and nations differ from each other, and so their genius, habits, and character, are different, it follows that the external form in which Christianity is embodied, may and ought to be varied, yet with moderation and careful judgment. This is not a new opinion. Besides some distinguished foreigners, eminent divines of the Church of England, and illustrious statesmen and lawyers, have been its defenders. It is enough to mention Cranmer, Whitgift, Stillingfleet, Burnet, Leighton, Lightfoot, Selden, and