simply, but, as Thou, Father, art in Me, and I in Thee, that they be all one.

may

(2.) This unconscious recognition of the impersonality of God may be further illustrated by the doctrine of the atonement, and the different views which theologians take of what it is. The popular, and we may say, orthodox, teaching on this subject, is that man having sinned of his own free will, God devised a scheme of redemption, a plan of salvation. There was a great emergency and God provided for it. He was angry against sin, for He is a righteous God. Yet, being full of pity, He had compassion on the sinner, and sent His Son into the world to be a propitiation for our sins. Justice being satisfied, God may now be just and yet the justifier of them who believe. This is the ordinary and popular form of the theology of the atonement. There are some variations which have at least a verbal sanction in the Holy Scripture. Such is that view which makes God the angry Father and Christ the loving Son. The Father is full of terror, suspending the sword of justice over the head of the sinner; but the Son intercedes and pleads that the evil done may be pardoned or the sinner have time for repentance. The Son dies on the cross to reconcile God to us, and so we have redemption, through

The streaming drops of Jesus' blood,

Which calmed the Father's frowning face.'

The reality of our sonship was a strong point with the Alexandrian Fathers. The definition of sonship was of the same substance with the Father.' This could be said only of the eternal Son-the Word of God. But as 'being of the same substance is that which constitutes sonship, and as they were eager to maintain the real sonship of believers, it was not easy to express their meaning without saying either that believers were of the same nature with God or that we are only called sons of God by a figure of speech, as the Arians said. S. Basil says that we are sons 'properly' and 'primarily' in opposition to figuratively. S. Cyril says that we are sons' naturally,' as well as 'by grace.' 'Truly and naturally the Son of God' is generally reserved by S. Athanasius for Christ alone, as we are sons not as He was by nature and grace." "S. Basil and S. Gregory Nyssen" says John Henry Newman," consider son to be a term of relationship according to nature.' The actual presence of the Holy Spirit in the regenerate in substance, constitutes this relationship of nature, and hence S. Cyril says that 'we are sons naturally because we are in Him, and in Him alone.' And hence Nyssen lays down, as a received truth, that 'to none does the term properly apply but to one in whom the name responds in truth to the nature" And he also implies the intimate association of our sonship with Christ's, when He connects together regeneration with our Lord's eternal generation, neither being of the will of the flesh." S. Augustine says 'He called men gods as being deified of His grace, not as born of His substance.' It is remarkable that the eighteenth century divines, who were mostly disciples of Locke, and like him, Arian in their tendencies, generally denied the reality of the sonship, except as applied to Christ. Earnest religion came back with the re-assertion of a real and true sonship. Those who deny this reality may be

Some Calvinists add to this, that only a chosen number of the human race, are elected to be saved, and, only for them did Jesus pay the price of redemption, and the price having been paid, it would be unjust in the Father not to save them. The last view as it relates to the extent of redemption, can only be advocated on the ground of a certain view of the nature of the atonement. Taking the words 'price,' 'propitiation,' 'redemption' literally, it is a contradiction to speak of Christ having died for all men unless it is allowed that all men will be saved. The advocates of a universal atonement, do not seem to have known that they differed from their opponents, on the question of the character of the atonement. They were agreed to take the words literally, and to say that a real satisfaction had been made to the Father by the Son. And they were amply justified by the whole tenor as well as by the words of the Apostolic writings. There is wrath in God. The arrows of His justice are terrible. He is a consuming fire, and to fall into His hands is a fearful thing. But in Jesus Christ, He is reconciled. Yet there are many texts which show that the Divine love to man was in the Father, as well as in the Son, for God is love. He did

Trinitarians in name, but they are either Arians or the Trinity is with them some fearful contradiction like transubstantiation in the Church of Rome.

No believer in the universality of the atonement can consistently believe in the death of Christ as a literal substitution in the sense of price or compensation. The Calvinist objection is valid, that it would be unjust in the Divine Being to suffer anyone to be lost after the price had been paid. Mr. Rigg, a Wesleyan minister, has written a book on Modern Anglican Theology, in which there is some severe criticism on Mr. Maurice, and especially on his doctrine of the atonement. A great deal of this would have been spared had Mr. Rigg been better acquainted with the character and tendency of Wesley's Theology, which in many points is more allied to Mr. Maurice's than is generally supposed. Wesley's Theology was essentially Alexandrian. Witness the place where he calls Socrates' demon, a ministering angel,' and includes him with Marcus Antoninus, and some other good Heathens, among those who were inspired. Southey quotes Wesley as endorsing the words that what the Heathens called Reason; Solomon, Wisdom; S. Paul, Grace; S. John, Love; Luther, Faith; Fenelon, Virtue was all one and the same thing. The light of Christ shining in different degrees under different dispensations.' Southey again quotes Weɛley, describing a mystical faith as 'the internal evidence of Christianity, a perpetual revelation equally strong, equally new, through all centuries, which have elapsed since the Incarnation, and passing now even as it has done from the beginning directly from God into the believing soul.' "The historical evidence of revelation,' Wesley goes on to say, 'strong and decisive as it is, is cognisable by men of learning only, but this is plain, simple, and level to the lowest capacity. The sum is, one thing I know, whereas I was blind now I see, an argument of which a peasant, a woman, a child may feel all the force.' The position which Mr. Maurice has taken up as to reason and revelation is the very ground on which Wesley stood in his controversies with the Calvinists.-(See page 354.)

PROVIDENCE, GENERAL AND SPECIAL.

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not love men merely because Christ died for them, but He so loved the world that He gave his Son. It is evident that both views are true. The apparent contradiction lies only in a too literal application to God of the idea of personality, a forgetting that God is impersonal as well as personal. The second of our 'Articles,' distinctly says that Jesus Christ truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried, to reconcile His Father to us, and yet the first Article says that God is 'without body, parts, or passions.' If God is without passions, how could He be capable of anger-what need for reconciling a God of whom we cannot predicate either hatred or love? Is not the answer to be found in this that God transcends personality as we understand it— that the atonement, too, is in some way transcendental, that it is a process in God, and that the true reconciliation is in the 'Lamb slain from the foundation of the world?'

(3.) This two-fold conception of God again appears in the opposing views of Divine providence. Does God preserve the world by general or by special laws? One of the most certain things in the world appears to be our dependence on an absolute inviolable order in which the universe exists. We see this order reigning everywhere. It subjects us to conditions. It requires us to keep its commandments. If we break them, we suffer as certainly as if the law Maker Himself put them into immediate execution. Nor is there any apparent discrimination as to moral worth. The good man does not live longer than the vicious man, except so far as he has kept physical laws. Due retribution so manifestly follows the breaking of physical laws in the natural world, that it has been justly inferred that in the long run evil doing may as certainly entail its own punishment as if there were no living personal Judge to inflict it. The impersonal Deity is plainly the Ruler of the world. But would it be worthy of an omnipotent God, or would it be like an everywhere present and all-knowing God so to govern the universe as to exclude His own special working. Man might work in this way, but it is incredible that God would. His general and His special working are both true as to us, but general and special lose their meaning when applied to Him. That inexorable law which governs the world is never suspended—

'When the loose mountain trembles from on high,

Shall gravitation cease if you go by?

Or some old temple, nodding to its fall,

For Chartres' head reserve the hanging wall?'

Yet the very hairs of our head are all numbered. His hand feeds the ravens when they cry. His Spirit gives breath to every

living thing. Whatsoever is done in the earth He doeth it Himself. If science teaches us of the general law, religion teaches us of the ever-present God; and, however men may dispute about the mode of the Divine government in the world, some abiding by the general, and others acknowledging only the special laws, all truly religious minds practically admit both.

(4.) The same question returns when we enquire into the nature of prayer. If there is no special providence, it seems useless to pray. Shelley said of the Spirit of Nature' that, 'unlike the God of human error, it required no prayers nor praises.' If all is inviolably fixed, it is idle to pray. If God has put within our own reach all which He intended that we should have, why ask Him for more? Can our petitions change His order? Will He be moved by our importunity? Reason tells us that He cannot. Yet we pray. Religion teaches men to pray. Those who try to explain it say that it is God's will that we should pray-His will to give us things on condition that we ask them, as a father gives his children gifts, yet requires of his children that they ask them from him. Thus prayer becomes a religious exercise, profitable to ourselves by raising and cherishing in us good dispositions. And so rational men fall back on the worship of God in His impersonality. Prayer becomes lost in praise. Awful feelings of reverence overpower the soul. Prayer becomes a life, a love, a longing, a feeling of the Divine within us. • The best of all prayers' said Fenelon, is to act with a pure intention, and with a continual reference to the will of God. It is not by a miracle, but by a movement of the heart that we are benefitted, by a submissive spirit.' Hence petitions to God are not like petitions to men. We repeat the same words in liturgies. Men repeat them for centuries. They are never old. They never change God. They are not meant to change God, but they produce good dispositions in the sincere worshipper. And thus we sometimes sing our prayers as well as our praises, for rational prayer cannot be other than praise. Is not this the reconciliation of Wordsworth's Pantheism with his High Churchism? The cathedral is not the dwelling place of God, but it helps us to realize the presence of the Ever-Near. The very stones are made to sing psalms to God. We project the Divine within us, and that externally realized, speaks to the Divine in others. Even in our prayers we worship God personal and impersonal.

(5.) The question of general and special laws is nearly the

same as the question of miracles. A miracle supposes a personal Deity. The impossibility of miracles exists only on the supposition of the Divine impersonality. Those to whom Deity appears simply as an individual distinct from themselves, only greater than themselves, have no difficulty in believing miracles. Yea, they expect miracles. As knowledge advances, men become conscious of a universal order, and they see more of God in this order than in its violation. Miracles, then, become doubtful, for why, as Leibnitz said, should the Creator have made His work so imperfect as to require His continual interference. If the Deity is all-powerful and all-wise, why should He violate the laws which were made in infinite wisdom. Through these considerations scientific men conclude the improbability, if not the impossibility of any violation of the order of nature.

The idea of miracle as a violation of law is generally renounced by enlightened men. This definition, or this view of a miracle, gave to Hume's argument against the miracles of the gospel, the only strength which it had. It is more likely that the testimony concerning miracles is false than that miracles should have occurred. It is more likely that men were deceived as to what they saw, than that God should violate His own order. There can be no changeableness in God. The supposition that He capriciously violates His own laws exists only by our ascribing to Him the limitations of human personality. The moment we have seen that God must transcend such personality all objections to the possibility of miracles cease. We have been confounding our view of the order of nature with that order in itself. We have been interpreting the works of God as if they were human works. In the transcendent impersonality of God the natural and the supernatural become one. Nature exists in Him. What is miraculous to us is no miracle to God, for His being constitutes what we call the order of nature. It is all miraculous, and if He hastened the operation of His laws or did something in our view different from them, it would still be order. A miracle' says Bishop Butler, 'is something different from the course of nature as known.' It may be in harmony with that course as unknown to us. The difference' says Mr. Rogers between the natural and the supernatural is relative, not absolute-it is not essential. These miracles, so we on earth must call them, and which we are accustomed to speak of as inroads upon the course of nature, are, if truly considered, so many fragmentary instances of the eternal order of an upper world,' Thomas Carlyle, with a deeper view of the

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