ance with his truest interests, and with God's commaudments.

Though faith then, as the spiritual eye of man, is, in a certain sense, the passive recipient of impressions, as the natural eye is of impressions from the objects which surround us, yet in the saving sense of the word, it is something more than this. We We may close our spiritual as well as bodily eyes to the impressions which they would otherwise receive. This we may do if we will it. Faith, regarded as a virtue, cannot then consist in any state of mind merely passive. It is represented in the Bible as an active and most efficient state of mind. It works, and works by love. It produces the obedience of faith. It is the will's closing in with the truths of the Gospel in such sort, that to him, who so accepts them, they become realities are acted on as such. Faith implies then, necessarily, an intellectual perception of the things believed. For without such intellectual perception she can no more be an active principle, than our eye could guide us without light. But it implies also the appropriation of the truths of the Gospel to ourselves. It implies a life in accordance with the belief of the truth of the doctrines so appropriated: repentance toward God, a renunciation of all self-righteousness, fellowship and sympathy with Christ in the great end for which he came into the world (1 John i. 3), a hope of eternal life in Him, zeal in his cause, a yielding up of the whole being to the will of God. A holy or obedient life results from faith by a law natural and necessary.

It follows of course, that when the heart receives or obeys the truth, the outward life must be conformed to it.

Next, we have to treat of the alleged discrepancy between the views of the Synoptical Evangelists and those of St John, with regard to Christ's proper Deity, and of the omission, in all four, of sufficiently direct testimony to the doctrine of Christ's Atonement, to enable us to suppose that in their minds that doctrine assumed the prominent place which it did in those of the writers of the Epistles.

We shall take these two points of the proper Deity of our Lord and of his Atonement together, and that for a very obvious reason. The two are so coupled one with the other, that those who deny the one are naturally and necessarily, we may say, led to deny the other. And, secondly, to those who receive the one, the other as it were follows as a matter of course.

I take the course of argument which Mr Greg adopts, in the observations already quoted as to these points, to be fairly represented by viewing it as an endeavour to prove that in the minds of the writers of the Gospels the doctrine of the Atonement was not so prominent as in those of the authors of the Apostolical Epistles. For though, from the way in which he words his statement, his meaning would appear to be this, that, in Christ's mind, the view that His death was to be an Atonement for the world's sins, was one only slightly, if at all, entertained, yet we are to remember that, according to Mr Greg's view, each Gospel

represents to us not the actual sayings of Christ, so much as the individual idiosyncrasy of the writer himself. According to this view of the question then, the known historical connexion between the writers of two of the Gospels with the apostolic authors of the Epistles, and the identity (fully acknowledged by Mr Greg) of the author of the fourth Gospel and of the Epistles which pass under the name of St John, will not be without importance. We acknowledge, for instance, that St Luke was the disciple and companion of St Paul. We can then hardly suppose that, if the doctrine of Christ's Atonement be only briefly and incidentally alluded to in the former, while it is so fully taught in the Epistles of the latter, this difference can be due to any thing else than that the one made it his business rather to give the facts of our Lord's life, and the other the doctrines of the Christian system. It were, it seems to me, supposing this historical connexion between the author of the third Gospel and the writer of the Pauline Epistles to be ascertained, as absurd to question the objective facts connected with our Lord's life, on the ground that they are only incidentally alluded to in the Epistles, as to doubt the prominence in St Luke's mind of the doctrines which we find inculcated in the Pauline Epistles, because those doctrines are not dwelt on at length in his Gospel. Mr Greg must either take the view that St Luke's Gospel is a faithful transcript of Christ's teaching, or that it is not. If it be, there is enough in it to prove that our Saviour did look on his

passion as an Atonement for the sins of mankind. Mr Greg has forgotten a passage, (Luke xxii. 46 and 47,) which is as clear on the point as Matt. xxvi. 28, on the omission of the after clause of which (eis apeow quaρтiv) in the parallel passages of Mark and Luke. (Mark xiv. 24; Luke xxii. 23) he comments. If, on the other hand, the third Gospel be supposed to be in great part due to St Luke's own invention, it is absurd to insist on the want of fulness with which the doctrine is there set forth as contrasted with the Pauline Epistles. For if Luke formed his Gospel according to the pattern of St Paul's teaching, not of Christ's life, such a difference in the mode of stating their opinions can be, of itself, no ground for our supposing any real diversity between the two-to say nothing of the fact that, even if such a diversity existed, it could have no bearing on the conclusion which Mr Greg endeavours to deduce from this discrepancy between the Gospels and Epistles, namely, that the doctrine in question is due not to our Lord himself, but to his followers.

With regard to the proper Deity of Christ, the question, according to Mr Greg, is somewhat different. This doctrine, it is said, is clearly negatived by the whole tenor of the Synoptical Gospels, and even by some passages in the fourth Gospel: but yet can appeal to several isolated portions and texts as suggesting and confirming, if not asserting it*. A little further on, we are told what isolated parts are here * Greg. p. 157.

particularly alluded to. They are "the narratives of the Incarnation, or the miraculous conception, as given by Matthew and Luke," which may "almost with certainty be pronounced to be fabulous, or mythical." But it is added*, "when we come to the fourth Gospel, especially to those portions of it whose peculiar style betrays that they came from John and not from Jesus, the case is different. very We find here many passages evidently intended to convey the impression that Jesus was endowed with a superhuman nature, but nearly all expressed in language savouring less of Christian simplicity than of Alexandrian philosophy."

The argument, then, against the proper Deity of Christ may, according to Mr Greg, be fairly stated thus. Matthew, Mark, and Luke, know nothing of this doctrine: all the portions of the first and third Gospels, which seem to favour it, being of mythical origin. St John does state it, but states it in terms which shew that the passages which contain it are due not to what Christ said, but what John thought. Now, as regards the mythical origin of the earlier chapters in Matthew and Luke, in which the account of the miraculous conception of our Lord is given, I need only refer to the work of a far abler hand than my own, in which that question is fully discussed t. But did it never strike the acute author of the objections just quoted, that if the authors of the Synop

+ Dr Mill, Christian Advocate's Publication, for the years 1841, 1842, and 1844.