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admit; that mutual concessions have removed a part of the casus belli; that even the party of philosophical scepticism or nihilism is no longer content simply to "deny everything and call for proof," but takes pains to undermine the citadel before attacking it, to prove that cause is only sequence, before attempting to prove that it is not a category of the understanding. These things, we believe, constitute a genuine step of progress in psychology.

There are many in these days of materialism who deride all philosophy and ask, with a sneer, of what use any of these inquiries or controversies can be. Various replies may be made. We may say, in the words of Sir W. Hamilton, "It is as the best gymnastic of the mind that I would vindicate to these speculations the necessity which has too frequently been denied them. By no other intellectual application is the mind thus reflected on itself, and its faculties aroused to such independent, vigorous, unwonted, and continued energy; by none, therefore, are its best capacities so variously and intensely evolved." We may say, in the words of Professor Bowen, "Why seek to estimate the loss or gain from an undertaking which at any rate is inevitable? Men have been engaged in the pursuit of speculative truth ever since they began to think, though voices have never been wanting to admonish them that the end was unattainable. But the warning was unheeded, for it is self-contradictory. Aristotle long ago remarked that we are compelled to philosophise in order to prove that philosophy itself is illusory and vain." Every thinking man has some system of philosophy; it is a duty then for any honest thinker to seek the best attainable philosophy, to have a system well founded and well reasoned-not caught up at haphazard, nor heaped together incongruously.

Or, finally, we may reply that error of every kind is usually entrenched in metaphysics, and we must conquer it there if at all. In theology, and in every science, all speculative questions have their origin or end in philosophy. "Even our physicists," says Professor Bowen, "find themselves studying and teaching metaphysics unawares." So far as the views of our modern speculative scientific men are false and dangerous, they can only be exposed and refuted by men well trained in philosophy, accustomed to detect and handle philosophical error.

When we become convinced, after careful study, that the extreme form of modern Evolutionism is only Pantheism “writ large," we have gone far toward freeing ourselves from its fascination. And when we have satisfied ourselves that the empirical philosophy as taught by its ablest advocates, is equally with the other founded on metaphysical assumptions; and that, to say the least, it finds certain problems as insoluble as does the intuitional philosophy,—we have certainly reached a result of vast practical importance for our moral and intellectual life.

E. JANES.

ART. VIII.-Man's Sympathy with Man, and the Means of Grace.1

ALL the ordinances of God referred to by the general expres

sion, "the means of grace," are as well suited to the end of winning men to embrace heavenly wisdom as if they were designed to be the efficient causes in the great work of gospel persuasion. Suppose an educated gentleman, say twenty-one years old, has never before seen a Bible, and that the sacred volume is now before his eyes, and he is perusing its divine pages for the first time. He knows that the Church receives the book as the very Word of God, and he cannot help forming some general idea of its style and structure and contents. How signally must most of such a reader's expectations be disappointed! The historical form, the progressive, time-consuming development, the minute, human, often revolting details of the inspired production; the local, definite, narrow direction of many of its composing units; the Jewishness of its psalms and prophecies, and of much of its narratives and laws, would broadly contradict his pre-formed impressions. Not only so; he would find the whole mode of the Bible to be the opposite of what he has looked for in a Divine revelation. He would wonder to find it a book of principles rather than of statutes; a book which relies on reason more than on authority; a book not addressed to church officers, with the exception of one or two small parts, but to individuals in their private 1 From the Southern Presbyterian Review.

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capacity; a book constantly requiring the exercise of judgment and discrimination on our part, in order to be useful to us; a book not only encouraging but demanding investigation, and the full and free exercise of all the powers of the soul in reference to its claims, its doctrines, its duties, and its application; a book which on the side of its authorship is thoroughly human, while it claims to be absolutely divine. Yet however perplexed our supposed student may at first be by these strange discoveries, he may soon come to see in them all only a most beautiful, humbling, and worship-inspiring display of divine prudence and wisdom.

So,

Among all the contradictions of an a priori judgment in reference to the character of a revelation from God, not the least striking is the prominence of the human element on the side of its authorship. The Psalms of David are far more truly the utterances of the sweet singer of Israel than are Moore's melodies the utterances of Erin's most musical bard. The songs of the poet may or may not vent his own convictions and sentiments. Not so the hymns of the prophet. He really saw the visions he records; he had the convictions and the feelings he inculcates; he experienced the sorrows he recounts, and basked in the hopes he communicates. In David's Psalms we have David's unique personality brought to bear upon our spirits as truly as we have the word of God. too, the Epistles of Paul have more of the Apostle of the Gentiles in them than the Letters to His Son of Philip Dormer Stanhope have of their titled author. In them Paul himself, in his own marked individuality, lives, and breathes, and thinks, and feels, and worships, and persuades. They are Paul's spirit, and temper, and faith, and hope, and love, and zeal, placed before us alive and palpitating and mightily working. In nearly all the sacred books their human writers appear not merely as the accredited penmen of the Spirit, but as veritable authors. With perfect freedom and boldness they come before us in their own personality, and reason and reprove and exhort with all freedom of mind and emotion. And what is further very remarkable is, that the most pious student of the Holy Scriptures is, other things being equal, the most likely to excel in his admiration of the lofty, poetic genius, the fervid overpowering energy, intellectual and logical, the

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deep and mighty pathos of the men chosen by God, not only to write, but also to be, his revelation; and who, because thus chosen, give, so far as they give any, a true indication of their experience and characters. How different, for instance, the relation of the Night Thoughts, and the scorn of worldly ambition they profess, to the real life of the servile courtier who penned them, predominated as it was by an appetite for earthly preferment too greedy to be nice in reference to the way of its gratification! How different this relation from that of the Book of Ecclesiastes to the life and biography of its royal scribe! How little does the one let us into the experience of its author; how greatly the other! How different the relation of the writings of Lord Bacon to Macaulay's view of this philosopher's real character, from that of the writings of Paul to Luke's presentation of the apostle's experience and real predominating aspiration! Indeed, it is not too much to say, if only it be said reverently, that so far as the infinite disparity between the two personalities, that of Jesus Christ and that of Paul, will allow, the latter is as largely revealed in the Scriptures as the former. But let us imagine that our supposed novice reads the first verse of the twelfth chapter of Romans, "I beseech you therefore, brethren," etc. Would he not be apt to say, Why, this is the word of Paul himself! The amanuensis has the audacity to obtrude himself, and to use his own influence. Not content to be the mere instrument by which the Holy Ghost reveals the bearing of the mercies of God on human duty, this apostle in his own person beseeches me. Is this a manner befitting even the private secretary of a human monarch, and how much less one expected to write under the dictation of Almighty God, and who is the instrument of revealing the will of the King of kings, the Sovereign of the universe?

The explanation of this wonderful paradox is the law underlying all saving ordinances, that God uses the sinner's sympathy with the human as a means of lifting the sinner up into sympathy with the divine. By the fall the life of holiness was expelled from man's heart, and enmity to God introduced into its place. But man was not by the fall thus alienated from his fellow-man. Social morality, and what we distinctively call the natural affections, survived the dire catastrophe of Eden. The

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fallen man is not dead to the convictions of a soul formed like his own, considered merely as the convictions of his fellowmortal, or dead to the sufferings or pathos of a being having a body and soul like his. He still believes in humanity and friendship and patriotism and philanthropy. The parental, the filial, the social, the humane elements of his life remain, and retain great liveliness and susceptibility. Hence, in God's first approach to the sinner, he uses as his agent, not simply a man, but humanity—the mind and heart of a man in full exercise and demonstration and display. By this agency he appeals to the sinner's sympathy with the human, and thus moves him towards sympathy with the divine. "Ye became," says Paul, "followers of us and of the Lord." First of us, and then, by means of us, of the Lord. First sympathy with us, your fellow-creatures, in our intellectual and emotional experience, and in our painful desire for your welfare, and then from this you moved onward under the gentle, unfelt, and, save by after reflection, unnoticed impulse of the Spirit, to full, direct sympathy with God. This is an explanation of the human element in the Scriptures on the side of their authorship, so far as the work of conversion is concerned. As to the regenerate, it may be remarked that they, alas! often become torpid on the divine side, practically dead to the direct appeals of God, and even worse, under the power of an evil conscience, averse to hearing the divine voice; and that when they are in such a condition they need the love and zeal and painful pleadings of humanity, as what they can best be aroused and attracted by, to the exercise of holy consideration and faith. Hence the Lord sent Nathan unto David, instead of arresting the prayerless, guilty, torpid-souled king by a direct voice from the throne of heaven. But the progress, and even the perfection, of Christian character do not annul the law which regulates the influence of spirit upon spirit. On the contrary, in what the Scriptures reveal to us of the worship of heaven, we have reason to believe that the law of sympathy has in the world of perfect holiness its largest influence. One who has taste to appreciate external beauty standing alone gazing upon a lovely landscape, and drinking in its loveliness, is delighted. But let him go again to admire some equally lovely scene, but not alone; let him have with him one whose taste he knows to be of the most