8. The moral responsibility of man is a doctrine not to be weakened or set aside by any views of his nature or, any relations he may sustain to others. We may perplex ourselves with difficulties about the origin of the soul, the transmission of moral character, accountability for inherited depravity, and freedom under the dominion of sin, yet, in spite of all, man continues to be a free responsible agent. As a being with a spiritual nature he is and must be free. His will is essentially free, and upon its acts, as free and accountable, conscience pronounces its decisions. The freedom of will is necessary to the very idea of intelligent, voluntary agency, and moral accountability, and is witnessed to by every man's own consciousness. Whatever difficulties may attend this subject, in our attempt to explain and comprehend it, in all its relations, every rational and sound mind is, and must be, conscious of its own freedom of choice, and accountability for its exercise. "This truth is revealed to us by immediate consciousness, and is not to be set aside by any other truth whatever. It is a first truth equal to the highest, to no one of which will it ever yield. It can not be set side by any other truth, nor never, by any other first truth, and certainly by no derived truth. Whatever other proposition is true, this is true also, that man's will is free." (McCosh, Intuitions of the Mind, 266). And this is a truth abundantly confirmed by the word of God, where it is treated entirely as a practical, but most solemn question, involving the destiny of man as an immortal being. The calling on man to choose between good and evil, life and death, Deent. xxx, 15-19, Josh. xxxiv, 15, 1 Kings xviii, 21; making voluntary acceptance of Christ the condition of his salvation, John i, 11, 12, v, 43, Is. liii, 3, Rev. iii, 20; and holding him accountable to God and his own conscience for the choice he makes, Prov. i, 24— 31, Luke xiv, 24, Is. lxv, 12, lxvi, 4, Luke xix, 44, xiii, 28, all bear witness to this great fundamental truth in human nature.

This must not, however, be held in conflict with that other truth, that man is "carual, sold under sin." Rom. vii, 14. Both are true, and these truths must be self-consistent, and con

sistent with one another. This subjection to sin is entirely voluntary on the part of man. There is no compulsion from without, nor any law of necessity, that he shall remain under the bondage of sin. The evil is entirely in man, in his own voluntary choice of sin, and he remains in sin because he loves its ways, and will not choose the way of holiness and life. When he commits sin, it is perfectly voluntary, and he feels it to be so. He is the "servant of sin," because he takes pleasure in that service, and does not desire to be delivered from its power. His evil dispositions and desires prompt him to sin, but when he yields and obeys, it is with his own free will. With this freedom of choice, and accountability for its exercise, man, as a fallen and depraved being, continually makes a wrong choice, refusing God, and choosing that which can never satisfy the soul.

True spiritual freedom, in its highest and most legitimate sense, is only experienced by those who are delivered from the condemnation and power of sin, and who serve God in "newness of life." Rom. vi, 4. They are no longer the servants of sin that they "should obey it in the lusts thereof." Rom. vi, 12. The law of the Spirit of life, in Christ Jesus, hath made them free from the law of sin and death." Rom. viii, 2. The service of God becomes the highest freedom, such as is enjoyed by angels, and the spirits of the just made perfect, Fallen, enslaved man, can only know this freedom, by accepting Christ, and receiving power to become a child of God. Jesus says: "If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." John viii, 36.

Humanity, fallen in Adam, can rise only in Christ, and through Him there is opened up for redeemed man a pathway to "glory, and honor and immortality." Rom. ii, 7.

ART. IX-ASSYRIA AND HER MONUMENTS.

[From the British and For ign Evangelical Review for Oct., 1868.] "THE site of the second, or great Assyrian monarchy," says Professor Rawlinson, "was the upper portion of the Mesopotamian Valley. The cities which successively formed its capitals lay, all of them, on the middle Tigris; and the heart of the country was a district on either side that river, enclosed within the thirty-fifth and thirty-seventh parallels. By degrees these limits were enlarged; and the term, Assyria, came to be used, in a loose and vague way, of a vast and illdefined tract extending on all sides from this central region. Herodotus considered the whole of Babylonia to be a mere district of Assyria. Pliny reckoned to it all Mesopotamia. Strabo gave it, besides these regions, a great portion of Mount Zagros, the modern Kurdistan, and all Syria as far as Cilicia, Judea, and Phoenicia." This region has recently started up, as if disentombed from the long years of forgotten centuries. With deep interest has the Christian world marked the discovery and development of the remains of Nineveh; and, notwithstanding the incredulity of such able and conscientious men as the late Lord Macaulay and Sir George Cornewall Lewis, and the still lingering doubts of some British savans, we can not but regard, in general terms, the decipherment and interpretation of those strange records to be as marvellous and as real as, after the lapse of so many ages, their very appearance and exposure to the light of day. They have a precision and a purpose, an accuracy and a finish, an entire elevation in art and design, indicating the ruin of a great empire, far in advance of those rude sculptures, that for seven miles along the eastern side of the gulf of Suez have singled out the Wadi Mokatteb as one of the grandest picture galleries of Arabia. And, whilst various sources have been, and may be, assigned to the inscriptions of the "Written Valley," there can be little doubt that the great mass of them are of a pre-christian age, and whether we refer them to a Jewish or a Nabathean origin (for Jethro and his family were in closest intimacy with Moses, and even the Edomites under the Maccabees became Jews), the tablets

The Five Great Monarchies of the Ancient Eastern World. By George Rawlinson, M. A., Camden Professor of Ancient History in the University of Oxford, etc. Vol. i., pp. 225, 226.

of the Arabian desert must be allowed to stand out as a timehonored testimony to the antiquity and truth of the Mosaic record. But the Assyrian monuments fill a wider range, and speak with a louder voice; they tell of a mighty and dominant civilization, and, transferred to the museums of the most civilized nations of Europe, give a clearer and more decided attestation to the events of Biblical history. Altogether, we live in marvellous times, whether we advert to the decipherment of the hieroglyphics of Egypt; or the hoary records of Phoenicia, dug up from the tombs and sarcophagi of Tyre and Sidon; or the ausam, the tokens of the Bedaween Arabs, scribbled amidst the ruins of Rabbath-Ammon, the metropolis of the old kingdom of Bashan, the graphic symbols that puzzled De Sauley, as well as most others of our curious antiquarians in the East; or the arrow-headed characters that appear upon the rocks, and the ruins, and the subterranean remains of Nineveh, and Babylon, and Persepolis.

There is unquestionably a feeling of deep emotion and strange wonderment, to be carried back to a period between two and three thousand years, and to see with our own eyes the names of the "Tyrians," and the "Sidonians," and the "men of Accho," and to place our finger on the very words, as in the tenth line of the forty-third plate of the British Museum; or, to do the same to the very names first of "Sennacherib" at the beginning, and then of "Merodach-Baladan" a little way farther on, in plate sixty-third, that of Bellino's cylinder; or, to muse in silence, as we gaze at the slab from the North-West Palace of Nimrod, and mark, in the eighth line of plate thirty-third, the distinct mention of "Judea, whose place is afar off." A voice speaks to us from the tomb in the old language of Assyria, almost in the words of the Hebrew prophet, "The grass withereth, the flower fadeth; but the word of our God shall stand for ever" (Isa. xl. 8).

The peculiarities of the arrow-headed characters, however, are many. Some of those characters are determinative, denoting a person or a people, etc.; some are alphabetic, consisting of one letter only; some are syllabic, consisting of two or more letters; some are ideographic, representing a deity, or part of the name of a person or place, and having a separate enunciation of their own. Sir Henry Rawlinson gives an indiscriminate list of Babylonian and Assyrian characters,

Inscriptions in the Cuneiform Character from Assyrian Mor unents. Discovered by A. H. Layard, D. C. L. London. 1851.

amounting to two hundred and forty-six, and he premises that "the list does not pretend to be complete ;" whilst the "inscriptions" in the cuneiform character from Assyrian monuments, published by the British Museum in 1861, are prefixed by no less than ten folio pages of variants, or different modes of writing the same thing; and Sir Henry himself has told us, that "the more he has studied the inscriptions of Assyria and Babylonia, and sought to verify previous conclusions, by testing their general applicability, the more reasou had he found to mistrust that which before seemed plain." "Yet," he adds, a little way on in the same Memoir, "I do not despair but that ultimately a severe and extensive comparison of all available materials, combined with the fertility of invention, which is an essential element in the art of the decipherer, will render the Assyrian legends at least as intelligible as the Egyptian." This anticipation occurs in his Memoir published in the "Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society," so far back as the year 1851; and Sir Henry has since done much to redeem his promise. Still it would appear that our march through the Assyrian territory is

Have we any just ground, therefore, to rely on the translations from the arrow-headed inscriptions? Decidedly we have, in the general outline of the decipherment and the interpreta-. tion. For the following reasons: If, by some strange fatality, the language of England should have ceased to be spoken, and not only dead, should be scarcely, if at all, understood, and the celebrated New Zealander, predicted by Henry Kirk White and Thomas Babington Macaulay, should be found standing on London Bridge, wondering at the ruins of St. Paul's and Westminster Abbey; and, then, to enlighten the traveller from the antipodes, a stranger from Denmark, and another from Prussia, and a third or more than one from France, should select the unknown tongue from amidst the epitaphs in Latin, and Greek, and Hebrew, that adorn those venerable temples, and should all unite, with very few exceptions, in giving the same meaning, as independent translators and restorers of the lost numbers of Chaucer and Milton, to the crumbling monuments that told of England's worthies, kings, and politicians, and philosophers, and poets, and

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society. Vol. xiv., part 1.

Memoir on the Babylonian and Assyrian Inscriptions. Chap. i. Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, vol. xiv., p. 1.