But most important of all; a belief resting upon external authority is a totally different thing from a belief resting upon moral perception. If the Bible happened to be infallible, that would be no reason for enthroning it, otherwise than so far as God's voice speaks to us through it. But the treasure is in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God-that when the groundless claims of the Church and of the Bible are cleared away, we may more plainly see Christ, and apprehend His absolute authority over us. His is no strange authority. It is known perfection, manifest Godhead, that in Him speaks to the conscience of each man. The moral world, for us men, is the kingdom of Christ; 'the head of every man is Christ.' Thus, whoever follows the authority of conscience is on the way to Christ. It is a real possibility -it is a real certainty-that he shall find the light of life, and shall grow into the possession of Christian faith and hope, if he will but give the gospel of God a chance. And his certainty will be the certainty of moral perception and moral experience.

No authoritative opinions bring a man nearer Christ. They may separate him from Christ, if they are allowed to usurp an authority which belongs to the only Lord of the conscience.

Christianity is really a plain thing, meant to tell upon our conduct. By faith we believe in God-His perfect righteousness, love, and Fatherly providence-and in Christ's revelation and His redemption from sin that He has left us commandment and example how we ought to live, and promised us His Spirit to enable us to follow Him. We believe that justice and judgment are the foundation of God's throne—that mercy and truth go before His face; that the moral issues of this life stretch on into the eternal. Such are the simple elements of the message with which God intrusts us. All besides is secondary. And, if we make the Word of God of none effect by our tradition, we know what the Master will say to us when He sets His seat for judgment.

IV.

THE CALVINISTIC CONCEPTION OF GRACE.

I.

THE Christian life rests upon the consciousness of redemption from sin into a state of blessedness and holiness through Jesus Christ. All the theologies of all the Churches are attempts to explain the principles, or to lay bare the machinery, by which God's causation in grace operates for the communication of the Christian salvation. We are concerned here with a criticism of one of these theologies. But let us not deceive ourselves. In criticising the principles upon which Calvinism rests, we are setting ourselves in antagonism to the orthodox doctrinal tradition of the Christian world. Only, the majority of Churches leave the doctrinal highway, and get into a bye-path by their superstitious doctrine of the sacraments. Theology, we have said, seeks to explain the Christian revelation. If, then, you plant something radically unintelligible in men's way, explanations come to an end. Now this is very convenient for the high churchman. You cannot see awkward sights if it is pitch dark; and the sacramentarian, with his doctrine of grace all in a tangle, looks down with much contempt on the merciless clearness and thoroughgoingness of the Calvinist. On the other hand, all the upcrops of evangelical Arminianism are so many inconsequences. These systems have laid down Calvinistic principles; but, in horror-very just and righteous horror -at Calvinistic conclusions, they have stopped half-way, and made a common-sense but illogical version of the intolerable system. Yet it is obvious that such compromises bring no salvation with them. All the great Christian bodies have set

out on the same track, though none but the Calvinists have persevered to the end, or have dared to look 'Medusa's head '1 fair in the eyes. Therefore we make up our minds to break with Catholic doctrinal tradition, in order that we may make a clean and final escape from the Gorgon.

Theology being an account of God's causation in grace, it is not unnatural that all schools of doctrine should treat grace as if it were exactly analogous to any second cause or finite cause. We cannot but conceive of the less familiar in terms of the more familiar. Our imaginative and emotional language is fully entitled, for its own purposes, to describe Divine agency as if it were a particular and individual cause in that mêlée of causes, physical and moral, amid which we live and strive, sin and conquer. But, when science lays hold of such imaginative or emotional descriptions, and reads them as literal revelations of supernatural realities, then it is time to protest. Then it is time to point out that God is not one of the all, but that He is above all, and through all, and in the all. Yet, to the untrained mind of the average man, our protest may seem to be an atheistic denial of God. Still more repugnant will it be to the perverted mind of the scholastic dogmatist. It is no wonder then, if all the Churches have set off upon that misleading road which seems to afford them views of God's grace as a definite finite cause.

But this is not all. Christian theology is not a speculative Theism; it is a doctrine of redemption. In other words, it does not furnish a theory of the Divine causation as such, but of Divine grace, or of those processes by which God works out the redemption of guilty man. There are two reasons therefore why the theology of the Churches regards grace as an omnipotent special Divine operation-first, there is the religious sense of man's absolute dependence upon God; and, secondly, there is the moral sense of man's utter guilt on account of sin, It may be that, under certain circumstances, the first of these reasons would of itself generate a sort of Calvinism. It very

1 Julius Miller in The Christian Doctrine of Sin, Eng. tr., vol. ii. p. 239.

likely is the case, that orthodox theology has drawn great part of its strength from a reverent sense of dependence upon God, -from a reverent attribution of all that takes place in the moral world to God as its author. But such a doctrine is not a true doctrine of grace. And such support to Calvinistic theology is illegitimately obtained. Calvinism does not begin till both the above reasons for belief in a 'Divine monergism' are taken together. Its theory is that man is absolutely dependent on God, because man is utterly dead in sin. The obvious implication is, that, if man were not utterly dead in sin, man would not be absolutely dependent on God. And this implication is boldly worked out in the doctrine of the covenant of works made with Adam.

I shall ask the reader to believe that this concatenation of ideas is wholly perverse. It is true that man is absolutely dependent on God; it is true that sin is absolutely and immeasurably evil. But it is not true that the evil of sin is the only reason why man lies helpless at God's feet. It is not true that, under any circumstances, it is either desirable or possible for man to be justified or to attain blessedness by his own works, apart from the indwelling of God. Out of this fundamental error may be deduced all that is bad in Calvinism, and all that is implicitly and potentially bad, with the badness of the Calvinistic taint, in sacramentarian or Arminian theologies.

II.

We thus begin our controversy quite in the correct fashion with a discussion of the state of man unfallen. By this, however, we do not, for our part, understand a discussion of the original state of two human beings, from whom the whole human race is descended. There may have been such a primitive pair, or there may not. If there was, they may have lived for a time in exceptional innocence, or they may not. Theology will do wisely not to embarrass itself with dogmatic assertions upon these points. Such assertions are unverifiable,

and they are really unnecessary. What are we discussing then? We are discussing the religious relation of man to God in its abstraction, apart from the influence of sin, and therefore apart from an influence which, however it may have arisen— and its origin is confessedly mysterious-is imputable to man's own guilt, and tends to mar or to destroy his spiritual relationship with God. Now we have real knowledge of man's religious relation to God. We do not know it, indeed, in our own experience, except as troubled by sin. We know it, not under the order of innocence, but under the redemptive order. But, being reconciled to God-yielding ourselves, in faith, to the influences of His Spirit-setting ourselves to do His will—we know God and the Divine life, however imperfectly. We need not go into the heights or depths to seek for the things of God. They are near us. We have a real experience of the essential constituents of fellowship with God. And this experience teaches us that we are not complete in ourselves, but in God; that essentially, as His reasonable creatures, we find our complement and our chief end in Him; that, as His servants, we gain our freedom in doing His will; that man's personality is not sealed against God, or God's Spirit strange to man, but that 'He dwelleth in us and we in Him.' Man's operation and God's operation do not exclude each other. Man's freedom and God's agency presuppose each other. 'In Him we live, and move, and have our being.'

All this will be admitted and asserted by Calvinism; but in whose case? In that of the elect, who are embraced under the decree of redemption, and who live under a dispensation of grace which is not merely supernatural but unnatural. In the case of our first parent Adam-i.e. in the case of the normal human being-Calvinism explicitly denies that there was any such relationship with God. Adam was free, inasmuch as he was left to the freedom of his own will'; he was placed under probation, and enjoyed a conditional promise, by the 'covenant of life.' Very good. Normal man is indeed under probation; he has indeed a promise of ampler reward to