book store, I casually took up a volume, whose author and whose subject I have quite forgotten, but this sentence from it comes to my memory: "The two extremes of unconditional salvation, Calvinism and Universalism." Now the decrees of God are unconditional as being the self-originated, independent purposes of the divine mind, but the salvation which is decreed is a salvation whose conditions are faith, repentance, and love. Of course I do not impute such random writing as the above quotation to the men to whom I speak,* but still it may not be amiss to say that in all the world there are none who endeavor more fully to proclaim the conditions of salvation than we do; and in no pulpits is a Gospel preached whose terms are more free, whose grace is more available, and whose

words:

"Arminianism received from the hand of Edwards its death-blow, of which it lingered more than half a century in New England, and died."

*Dr. Aikman here seems to be unaware of some of the positions of the elder Calvinism itself. One of its branches held that all decreed by the unconditional decree was itself unconditional. Faith and repentauce were but a part of the salvation so decreed, and therefore were no conditions of it.

Three of Mr. Wes

ley's publications were aimed against this truly logical view. Vol. VI, þp. 68–81, and 96-99. We can name an American Calvinist who declared that "there is not such a thing as a condition of salvation in the Bible." The writer here reprehended by Dr. Aikman well knew the Calvinism we once had to encounter. Calvinism has grown Arminian since, and adopted in words conditional salvation, universal atonement, free-will, infant salvation, and even "self-determining power." The Calvinism of sixty years ago largely repudiated them all.

Yet, on a former page, (page 313,) Dr. Aikman himself repudiates "conditional salvation"! He quotes two propositions from Dr. N. W. Taylor, in which that theologian denies that God does "save on condition of repentance and faith" either "as unknown and uncertain events," or "as foreseen." That is, there are no "conditional salvation," and no "conditions of salvation." Dr. Aikman earnestly applauds the enunciation of these propositions; he "would be happy to have it pervade all the pulpits of the Methodist Episcopal Church." And yet Dr. Aikman exultingly claims before this paragraph closes, "there are none who endeavor more fully to proclaim the conditions of salvation than we!"

Want of space prevents our demonstrating that Dr. Hodge's theology, so eulogized by Dr. Aikman, excludes "conditional salvation." Briefly we may indicate that Dr. Hodge enounces that the great distinctive between Calvinism and Arminianism is that the former makes Gad the author of our salvation, the latter man. Now Arminianism makes man the author of his own salvation only as performer of "conditions" by God prescribed. This Dr. Hodge clearly excludes. It may, therefore, be shown, with an adamantive logic, that the issue between us and Dr. Hodge is the conditionality of salvation. And here crops out the grand schism between the Calvinistic pulpits and the Calvinistic chairs; between the popular sermons and the standard tomes. But the real deeper issue is between the people and the theology; between the nineteenth century and Calvinism.

faith will more certainly secure salvation, than in the Calvinistic pulpits of America.*

Albert Barnes has somewhere said that some men are born Arminians and some men Calvinists. There is a great deal of

* And so, we doubt not, Dr. Aikman preaches, heartily, sincerely, and eloquently. But we deny his logical right as a Calvinist to do so. He has no right to exhort men to do otherwise than God has willed, decreed, and foreordained they shall do. He has no right to hold men guilty for fulfilling God's decree and will. He has no right to offer salvation to those whom God has eternally and unchangeably excluded from salvation. He has no right to exhort men to repent, who by volitional necessity cannot repent. He has no right to say "they can if they will,” when he knows that, by the laws of psychological causation, they cannot will. It is sophistical for him to say "they can will if they please," when he knows they cannot please." It is inhumane for him to tell "impenitent sinners" that it is just for them to be damned for their impenitence, when he knows that they are impenitent because God wills them to be impenitent. If God has decreed men's sins, what an awful sinner is Dr. Aikman, who stands up in the pulpit to oppose and defeat God's decrees! Surely, if God has decreed a thing, the thing is right! If the sinner is damned for fulfilling God's decrees, ought not the imaginary god to be damned, à fortiori, who makes such decrees? Is not the god a cruel hypocrite who would eternally by decree exclude a vast mass of mankind from salvation, and then mock them with the offer of salvation? And what a treacherous hypocrite is that god who, while proclaiming a public will that men should be holy and be saved, still maintains under cover a secret will" that they should be wicked and damned! And how doubly a treacherous hypocrite must he be when, with regard to a large part of mankind, he takes care that his saving public will shall be defeated, and his damning "secret will" accomplished! How "is grace available to the man who is decreed by God never to accept "that grace," and whose will is volitionally necessitated to reject that grace?" What if "faith will secure salvation,” if the power of faith does not exist and is withheld by God at his own good pleasure? We Arminians, on the contrary, preach a salvation free from all these clamps and fetters. We say to the sinner, "God now puts salvation at the decision of your own will; no decree forged in a back eternity determines how you shall choose; no dark reprobation has sealed your doom; no limitation fences up the atonement from any one of you; no volitional necessity determines your choice for sin." Now none of these broad and glorious announcements of a free salvation can the Calvinistic pulpit make without contradicting its creed. And it is doubtless the seeming freeness of the Calvinistic offers of salvation that makes the people say, "Calvinism is not preached

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now."

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Let us suppose, what is no impossible case, that Dr. Aikman is called to preach somewhere to a congregation which, in secret fact, is composed entirely of Reprobates. First, God's foreordination fixing their every volition from the womb to the grave, and determining them to sin and death, has made them victims of hell and eternity before they were born, with no possibility of reversal; so that they are to be irrevocably damned for what they cannot help. Second, Born from Adam, for his sin they are also given over to irreversible spiritual impotency to repent; and so are again irrevocably damued for what they cannot help. Third, By God's will they are so placed under the influences of motives that they must

truth in the remark. Men are constitutionally disposed to certain beliefs as well as to certain forms. There were Calvinists before Calvin, and there were Arminians before Arminius. Augustine himself held the main position of the latter in his earlier days, although he afterward retracted it, and wrote with all his great power against it. We repeat, that neither will eliminate the other: "the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be." So let us be tolerant, and wisely

sin without any power of contrary choice;" so that they are thrice irrevocably damned for what they cannot help. Now can any one stand up and offer a free salvation to that poor company of Reprobates without a most flagrant falsehood? Is it not the very archfiend's mock to speak, as Dr. Aikman does above, of "terms free," "grace" available," "faith securing salvation," for this mass of pre-damned creatures? "Grace" for pre-doomed Reprobates for whom God's treacherous "secret will" never meant any "grace;" whom his foreordination has forever excluded from "grace;" whose depraved impotence by nature renders them incapable of accepting "grace," and whose wills are bound by causative necessity to reject "grace!" Were we one of these Reprobates (and we confess our moral feelings are entirely on their side) we should certainly beg Dr. Aikman, or any other preacher of "grace," to spare us such grim demoniac irony. It is bad enough to be damned, but it is worse to have the damnation aggravated by such tantalizing and insulting gospel. We should think, if one of the lot, that the last finishing drop in the cup of unjust damnation was a Calvinist's preaching to us a free salvation.

Yet we cheerfully trust that Dr. Aikman will not cease to obey the expansiveness of his own heart, and continue, unlimited by his narrow creed, to preach a broad and free salvation. It is by this, compelled by the example of Methodism, that the Calvinistic pulpit itself is "eliminating " Calvinism and rendering it "effete," and making the people say that no Calvinism is preached. Place before their eyes the Calvinistic creed, lying back of the pulpit, in the books and the schools, and they at once boastfully answer, Our minister does not hold such doctrine's; he preaches a free salvation just like the Methodists." And it is this very fact, of the preaching a free salvation, so freely confessed by Dr. Aikman, that bases and largely justifies the statement of the Methodist. This same fact also both explains the polemic peace we specified above, and furnishes the reason why Calvinism is not now so deleterious in this country as Methodism first found it to be. And this fact, too, is prophetic of the time when Calvinism shall be as fully eliminated from Christian theology as it was for the first three centuries of the Church. Methodism has demonstrated the utter non-necessity of Calvinism for either a deep Christian piety, or a sweeping Christian success. That understood, the preaching a free salvation will melt away the limitations of dogma, and fatalism will be relegated to the domains of philosophy. Predestination in theology is a surplusage and a superfluity. Banish that to the domains of metaphysics, and in theology and homiletics we are at one. And it is through this route we descry the future doctrinal oueness of the evangelic Church. The so-called Calvinistic pulpits are preaching away the Calvinistic creed. We Methodists stopped debate when we saw that they were so fully doing our work for us.

*

endeavor to understand each other. It ought not to seem reasonable that thousands of ordained ministers of Christ should profess a doctrine which they do not hold; or, with puny irresolution, should secretly hold a doctrine which the general religious consciousness of the country recognizes as effete. No; let these two great phases of theologic thought live side by side, as they have done for ages, and let them live peacefully. In the wise consideration of each other's views we may both learn more than either now knows. We both have need to vail our faces before the greatness of God's ways. Perhaps our humility may be profitably directed earthward far enough to prevent either of us from towering so high in our denominational consciousness as to imagine that the other is submerged out of the sight of the world.

ART. VII.-SYNOPSIS OF THE QUARTERLIES AND OTHERS OF THE HIGHER PERIODICALS.

American Quarterly Reviews.

BAPTIST QUARTERLY, January, 1873. (Philadelphia.)-1. Position of the Baptists in the History of American Culture. 2. The Second Century: A Chapter in Church History. 3. Skepticism and Scholarship. 4. The Prayer Test. 5. Darwinism. 6. Paradise. 7. Death-Bed Repentance. 8. Baptism, a Positive Law. BIBLIOTHECA SACRA, January, 1873. (Andover.)-1. Christian Ernest Luthardt's Refutation of False Views as to the Design of St. John's Gospel. 2. The Diaconate. 3. The Chinese Language. 4. The Scriptural Doctrine of the Triumph of Christ's Kingdom distinguished from Millenarianism. 5. The Natural Basis of our Spiritual Language. 6. Paul's Panegyric of Love.-A New Critical Text, Translation, and Digest. 7. Unconscious Greek Prophecy. 8. The Purifying Messiah.-Interpretation of Isaiah lii, 15. 9. Contributions to History. CHRISTIAN QUARTERLY, January, 1873. (Cincinnati.)-1. Excommunication. 2. The Downfall of the Secular Papacy. 3. Popular Amusements as Seen Through the Law of Christ. 4. Church Organization versus Church Government. 5. Sunday Schools, and their Importance in Missionary Work. 6. The Representative Character of Christ.

MERCERSBURG REVIEW, January, 1873. (Philadelphia.)—1. Infidelity-Its Prin ciples. 2. The Crisis in the Conflict between the Crescent and the Cross. 3. The Naturalness of Christianity. 4. The Mission of Philosophy. 5. Woman's Culture. 6. The Sunday-School Movement in its Relation to the Cause of Educational Religion. 7. Conscience and the Vatican. 8. Regeneration and Conversion. 9. The Forgiveness of Sin.

*Yet as an objective fact, repeating that we impugn not the men, we maintain that this stupendous contradiction does exist. It is because of its existence that we are an Arminian. An uneasy sense of that contradiction pervades the minds of our Calvinistic brethren, but is evaded under the plea of mystery, etc. On the other hand, we rest in the harmony of our creed, and desire for them the same happy position.

NEW ENGLANDER, AND CONGREGATIONAL REVIEW, January, 1873. (New Haven.)— 1. Herbert Spencer's Laws of the Knowable. 2. In Memoriam. 3. August Comte and Positivism. 4. Prison Discipline as a Science. 5. Bushnell's Sermons on Living Subjects. 6. Casuistry. 7. Name-Words in the Vernacular. 8. American Landscape Painters. 9. The Treaty of Washington in 1871. NEW ENGLAND HISTORICAL AND GENEALOGICAL REGISTER AND ANTIQUARIAN JOURNAL. January, 1873. (Boston.)-1. Memoir of the Hon. William Willis, LL.D. 2. Births, Marriages, and Deaths in Portsmouth, N. H. 3. Letters and Journal of Col. John May, of Boston. 4. Passages in the Life of Priscilla (Thomas) Hobart. 5. Rear-Admiral Nehemiah Bourne. 6. Family Record of John Appleton, born 1652. 7. Richard Cranch and his Family. 8. Samuel Johnson, D.D., of Connecticut. 9. Freeholders of Rowley, (Mass.,) 1677. 10. Graduates of Middlebury College who married in Middlebury, Vt. 11. Sable Island. 12. Witchcraft Papers. 13. Captain John Haskins' Company of Militia, 1773. 14. Petition of the Connecticut Soldiers in the Revolutionary Army to Governor Trumbull. 15. Inscriptions from Grave-stones in Seabrook, N. H. 16. Hampton Falls and the Rev. Paine Wingate. 17. Early Settlers of Stratford, Conn. 18. Letter-Missive from the Town of Canterbury, N. H., to the Fourth Church in Hampton, N. H. 19. Seals of the City of Richmond, Va., with Facsimiles of the same. 20. The Lippitt Family of Rhode Island. 21. The Plymouth Shermans. 22. The Crane Family. 23. The Hayes Family of Connecticut and New Jersey. 24. The Hutchinson and Sandford Families. NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, January, 1873. (Boston.)-1. The Rise of Napoleonism. 2. Henry Flood, and the Condition of Ireland from Swift to O'Connell. 3. Capital and Labor. 4. Causes of the Commune. 5. Björnstjerne Björnson as a Dramatist. 6. The Rationale of the Opposition to Capital Punishment. 6. Mixed Populations of North Carolina.

PRESBYTERIAN QUARTERLY AND PRINCETON REVIEW, January, 1873. (New York.)-1. Berkeley's Philosophy. 2. "The Dispensation of the Fullness of Times." 3. Woman's Place in Assemblies for Public Worship. 4. Dr. Dorner's System of Theology. 5. Catholic and Protestant Treatment of the Evidences. 6. Why Are Not More Persons Converted Under our Ministry? 7. Beneficiary Education for the Ministry. 8. Who was the Sister of our Lord's Mother? 9. The Presbytery of Wandsworth, erected in 1572. 10. Dr. Forbes on Romans vs. Dr. Hodge.

QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THE EVANGELICAL LUTHERAN CHURCH, January, 1873. (Gettysburg.)-1. Feeling as Related to Faith. 2. The Millennial Era of the Christian Church. 3. The Church. 4. Professor Tyndall's Test of Prayer. 5. The Ministerium. 6. The Position in the Church of Baptized Non-Confirmed Members. 7. Popular Theaters Two Thousand Years Ago. THEOLOGICAL MEDIUM, A CUMBERLAND PRESBYTERIAN QUARTERLY, January, 1873. (Nashville.)-1. The Importance of our Colleges to the Church. 2. The Moral Law. 3. The Transfiguration of Christ. 4. The Doctrine of Reprobation Defined and Explained. 5. The Age of the Patriarch Job-The Learning of his Times-His Typical Character. 6. Education our Country's Safety. 7. Japan. 8. Sunday-Schools, and their Importance in Missionary Work. SOUTHERN REVIEW, January, 1873. (Baltimore.)—1. The Present Crisis. 2. Solar Spots, Prominences, etc. 3. Paris and its People. 4. Smith's Blanchet's Legendre. 5. Armageddon. 6. Jesus of the Evangelists. 7. Oceanic Circulation. 8. Peggy O'Neal; or, The Doom of the Republic. 9. Poem. With the exception of Brownson's Romanistic Quarterly Review, we know no Quarterly in the country but the SOUTHERN which can properly be called a Politico-Ecclesiastical Quarterly Review. Other professedly religious Quarterlies present, exceptionally, political articles; but none but the Southern has a regular staple department of trenchant, par