serving the living God," and the escaped bird escapes into no boundless contiguity of shade, but Home! Home, sweet Home! Home into the service of the living God, crying, "What shall I render unto the Lord for all his benefits towards me?" Nor, seen in the light of Calvary, is this the least, this right to serve. To see it in the light of the word and Spirit of Christ is to desire it. To see it thus is to see that it resembles God's law, "holy and just and good and spiritual.” And, oh joy of joys! To feel that I am no longer criminal nor carnal, "sold under sin," but redeemed! Oh! "how love I thy law!" The law thus magnified is my legal security for ever! "I am thy servant; truly I am thy servant;" and "being delivered out of the hands of thine enemies and ours, we will serve thee without fear, with holiness and righteousness before thee all the days of our lives" (Luke i. 51). "The love of Christ constraineth us, because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then all died in him, that when they live, they should not henceforth live unto themselves, but unto him who died for them and rose again" (2 Cor. v. 15).

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Yes it is living service to a living God that is gained by a dying Redeemer. Returning from death and the grave, he says, I am he that liveth and was dead, and behold! I am alive for evermore." By one offering I have for ever perfected them that are sanctified; death cannot come again. The God whom I reveal—the Father whom you see when you see him that died for you and rose again-(for he that hath seen me hath seen the Father),-is the God of life and death in every possible sense-the living God, triumphing over death, never so much seen to be the living God as in putting away death for ever; giving you in me everlasting life, a life in which death's finger, death's interest, death's shadow shall never come again unto eternity!' Oh! this is the living God, and you see him as such, and are become fit companions, in a sense, for him as such; citizens of the city of the living God. The Eternal Spirit, through the blood of Jesus, hath given you a longing for the service-a view of it that fills your heart with a sense of its dignity, its joy, its infinite worth to spend and be spent upon. For to spend my strength on this service is to conserve, increase, and renew it. "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength." Here you get by giving. "Give

unto the Lord glory and strength," if you would be mighty and "sons of the mighty." "Make a joyful noise unto the Lord, O ye lands. Serve the Lord with gladness; come before his presence with singing." The blood of the Lamb gives you the right and the desire. It purges your conscience to serve the living God.

III. If you would thoroughly equip the living and intelligent soul for this service, you must supply not only the Right, and the Desire, but the Power. Grant that: show a free full fountain of that: and nothing more is wanting. But the blood of Christ supplies that too. It supplies the Divine Spirit without measure to those for whom the atoning blood was shed. "He hath redeemed us from the curse of the law, being made a curse for us: that the blessing of Abraham might come upon us, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith" (Gal. iii. 13, 14). But this is one of those commonplaces of the Christian life of which we need not say more, than that while the old views of the sacrifice show it as providing us at once with the Right, and the Motive, and the Power to serve the living God, we shall have no hesitation in saying,—" No man, when he hath drunk old wine, straightway desireth new, for he saith, The old is better."

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ART. IV.-Chalmers and Schleiermacher.

THEOLOGY is able in this century to produce from her ranks, along with a host of men of great talent, two of pre-eminent genius, whose names may stand alongside of any of their race-Schleiermacher and Chalmers. The latter requires no eulogy in the land where he flourished. Of Schleiermacher we need only record that the Danish students, upon occasion of his visiting Copenhagen, designated him, and not unworthily as far as mind is concerned, as the Calvin of the nineteenth century; and that Kahnis describes the whole subsequent theology of the century, even of the orthodox, as a mere working up in various proportions and colouring of the theses of Schleiermacher-a sentence in which Luthardt indirectly concurs.

Everything about these two men provokes to a comparison. They were the fittest representatives that could be desired of the two opposite careers, set forth with such appalling reality in Lessing's famous word;1 Chalmers embracing out and out the truth presented in the right hand of the Almighty, and Schleiermacher choosing with equal decision and consistency the gift in God's left hand, viz., the chase after indefinite truth in the resources of the mind itself, declining to be biassed by any authority of a wisdom from above. Both adorned the earlier half of this century, and lived to such old age as to give full proof of their powers (Schleiermacher born 1768, died 1834; Chalmers born 1780, died 1847). Both were theologians con amore in the two most theological countries of the world. We see both for a time in the seclusion of country parishes, and soon after set in the eye of the public in the respective capitals; both discharging the duties of professorships (in both instances first of moral philosophy and then of theology) and of public lecturers; both taking a leading part in the public questions and interests of the land; both in arms against ecclesiastical abuses, and in opposition to Government in defence of the inherent privileges and the right constitution of the Church. Each was greeted as facile princeps in his own country, and was pushed to the front when a controversy arose on any grand and vital matter. Both were zealous adherents of the Reformed creed as opposed to all that is Romanising or Puseyite. Both were essentially philosophers and literary, and displayed the same singular ability in the conduct of any cause that fell to their care. Yet how different the results in the two cases, and how different their behaviour when the crisis summoned to go forward and suffer, or yield and give back !2

The latter part of the eighteenth century and the first

1 This refers to the famous saying of Lessing: "If God were to hold out all truth shut up in his right hand, and doubt, the impulse to seek truth, in his left, even at the risk of wandering for ever and ever, and gave him the choice between the two, he would grasp his left hand, and ask to be left to doubt, saying, 'Father, give me this; pure truth belongs to thee only""-a sentence which Dr. Duncan, Professor of Hebrew, capped with the racy saying, that it is the "essence of devilry.'

2 Yet our parallel does not so much concern the two individuals, but is rather the concrete exhibition of the course of the two rival principles as they come to view and manifest themselves in the higher stages of life, to aid the judgment in the questions that most affect humanity and eternity.

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decennium of the present show the rankest luxuriance of the infidel principle throughout Europe, and Scotland was by no means exempted from the general pest. Indeed, no one could have determined from appearances whether Scotland or Germany would suffer most from the all-pervading calamity. We hesitate not to say that there was at that time a far more virulent distaste and hostility to the gospel in Scotland than in Germany. When we pass in review the names of Principal Robertson, Hume, Lord Kames, Playfair, Adam Smith, Dr. Thomas Brown, all leagued in heart at least against evangelical truth, and take in the Edinburgh Review at its first start, we see as formidable a phalanx on the side of irreligion as the world has yet produced. We find, accordingly, that Chalmers in early life was imbued with a more vehement dislike to evangelical sentiments than Schleiermacher himself.

from Scottish sources, the works of Hume and others surreptitiously procured, that Schleiermacher was inoculated with that scepticism which ruled his life. It might have been supposed that the latter, situated in the bosom of the chief Moravian seminary, with all around soliciting him to the one article of their creed, love to Him who died for us on the cross, was in more favourable circumstances than the other for coming to decision for Christ. There was, however, one point of distinction in favour of the Scottish youth,-even when cast forth from the paternal roof on the cold charities of the then University life, he carried with him, what most then got with them from home, an unbroken reverence for the law and word of God in the Scriptures. If the pupil of the Moravians could not go wholly and fully with the system, if he failed to attain to that life of grace and of intimate fellowship with Christ which some have and all must profess, he had nothing to go back upon. Schleiermacher tried hard to please his parents and teachers, and for a time employed all the phraseology of a converted person, but it was merely taken on, and proved at last a constraint too irksome to be borne, so, breaking loose from the Moravians, he found himself afloat in life with nothing but certain vague maxims of piety and morality to guide him. That in Scotland the rising tide of religious scepticism was turned, while in Germany it was suffered to overspread the land, we attribute in the first instance to Divine

grace, but we remark that this grace was manifested to a people that still as a whole, even when a large class had strayed, occupied the pristine ground of the Divine testimony. It is an invaluable blessing to have had a good beginning: "I planted thee wholly a right seed." And the blessing was to be anew conveyed simply by charging a chosen vessel with a fuller acquaintance with the sense and power of these testimonies, and making him the agent for opening the floodgates to send the fertilising stream of truth abroad over the length and breadth of the land.

The fundamental divergency between these two men in their life's work, as well as the secret of the so different results, is to be found in the different relation in which they stood to revealed truth. Chalmers was never wearied in strengthening the outworks of Christianity, thereby showing his high appreciation of its inward economy. His conviction of the verbal inspiration of Scripture was given in one of those axiomatic sayings that the memory never loses, that "either the words of the writers were suggested by the Spirit, and therefore they were the best, or God permitted their own words, because they were the best." The German theologian made no further account of the record than of any other composition, reminds us that Christianity was a power in the world before the New Testament existed, says upon occasion that he could afford to want more than one book of the canon, and actually admits that it would be no heart-grief to him though all the books that ever were written perished, with exception, perhaps, of Homer and Plato. His conception of Christianity was as of the highest stage of civilisation to which human nature has been raised; and that too, simply by the life and doctrine of Christ, which we may know without any such inspiration as the Church has supposed. The word of the penmen of the Bible is only inspired in the same manner as the mass of Christian authorship that commends the Christian life.

It is plain that these two theories go as far apart as the east from the west. It cannot be too well weighed that the distinction between those who hold to a real inspiration and those who only receive certain grand facts is eventually the distinction between real life and a romance. It cannot be too emphatically set forth that as it is possible for the romancer