capacity for growth and for self-realisation? Müller only uses his position to make a crisis of conversion psychologically possible. But what entitles him to take for granted the universal necessity of such a crisis? What justifies him in assuming that the root of goodness in fallen man only springs up in response to a definite augment of grace from without?

IX.

The motive, which induces Müller to make that assumption, is plain enough. He wishes to combine with his doctrine of human freedom and responsibility a doctrine of Divine grace. Hence he gives half to man, half to God. But in doing so he only makes man half free, and God half gracious. If God is in every moral faculty, in every moral truth, of which we are possessed, why need we be jealous of admitting the existence of goodness in fallen man?

The process by which God redeems sinners may be expected to contain mysteries if any process may. Yet some things can surely be asserted as plain and clear. It is clear, on moral grounds, that man as a responsible being has ability to shape his course. It is clear, on religious grounds, that man can have no strength except from God. And it is clear from experience that every man has something of God's image. Hence we regard man as partly depraved and partly righteous; as responsible, because he is not wholly depraved; as righteous, because he still partakes, little as he knows it, in God's moral light and God's moral strength. And thus we regard man's life as a real probation,—a real, though not an equal or easy choice, though not a choice carried on under uniform conditions-between what is good and what is bad. If it is by God's justice that the individual enjoys his own probation, yet it is by God's mercy that man is invited to so great a salvation in Jesus Christ. And, as the offer of salvation is God's, and all the power is God's, so, too, all the glory belongs to God; not because any man who is saved was wholly wicked,

but because whatever good he had he held of God, and because his salvation largely consists in his learning to acknowledge and confess his dependence on grace. The texts which are abused to found the doctrine of a magical regeneration, in reality only express man's absolute dependence upon God the Father in Christ. And the texts which are abused to describe mankind, before salvation reaches them, as being very devils, in reality only give strong expression to the Christian's sense of the evil of sin as sin, and to his sense of the misery and wickedness of the social state of heathenism,—a society with no aspiration, with no keen remorse, without God in the world, and contented to be so.

In exhibiting how the work of Christ is related to this process of personal salvation, we have to study it from a psychological standpoint. We have abandoned legalism. We have given up the fiction of an absolute severance between God and His sinful children; and therefore we cannot explain the necessity of Christ's work as due to His abolishing that fictitious separation. Doubtless our Lord's work was constituted with a view to our deep guilt and need as sinners; doubtless He has suffered for us, that God the Father might have regard to Christ's work when salvation should be extended to us. But we have to begin our study of Christ's work where it lies within our own experience—not in a region beyond. We are reasonable souls, made in God's image; and Christ saves us as reasonable creatures. We are ignorant; He shows us the Father. We are struck with a chill sense of guilt; He announces forgiveness to us. We misunderstand God's providence; He shows us that our life and peace consist in submission. We know not how to make our way through the snares of the world; He gives us new commandments, sets us a supreme example how they should be kept, and promises to be with us in the keeping of them, through His Spirit. Such are the leading aspects of Christ's influence upon us; and they embody themselves not only in individual lives but in a church and kingdom of God. The life of the individual Christian

presupposes the Christian community, while the Christian community is nothing apart from personal religion in its members.

Now that we have stated this truth, we must next, in a certain sense, cancel it again. Not all the historical and psychological influences that we have named, or that could be named, amount to a doctrine of grace. We must needs begin the study of religion on the lines which moral philosophy has laid down for us. There are not two kinds of truths; and we cannot simply ignore what we have learned in our preliminary studies. Everything in nature works according to laws; only the rational being has the capacity of acting according to the idea of the laws, i.e. according to principles." This truth we

have learned, and must still respect. But, when we have explained how Jesus Christ gives us truths, impulses, nay even assurances of forgiveness, do we not feel that there is a world unsaid? These are the things with which the apologist is constantly working. Yet they are only the prolegomena of the spiritual life. That life itself implies a deeper relation of man to Christ,—a personal relation; not probability, but moral conviction; not argument, but revelation. "This is the record, that God hath given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son,'-there is Christian belief; and how much further it goes than the apologist can follow it! Christ is as absolute in the Christian religion as God is; God is in Christ, and beside Him there is no God.

What then is the mysterious way into this deeper relation? Faith-simply faith. Christ reveals Himself as the only way to the Father, the eternal source of righteousness and grace. God reveals Christ as the world's only hope; God has respect to Christ in every gift He bestows on any man. And we believe in Christ as the way, the truth, and the life. We believe that His historical impulses and psychological influences are only fragments of something deeper and more spiritual,-only a witness to the life that is in Him. And

1 Kant (I borrow the quotation from 'a Brother of the Natural Man ').

thus believing we have not only historical influence, but life, through His name.

The sacraments are the chief witness to this mystic inscrutable bond between each Christian soul and Jesus Christ. That every one must die to sin, and rise to forgiveness and holiness with Christ—that every one must eat the flesh of the Son of God, and share the benefit of His shed blood-there is here what no historical or psychological influence can explain. But there is here what the Church of Jesus Christ cannot live without, what makes the Gospel a gospel,-what makes Christianity a religion and not a school of opinions or manners. Accordingly, the grace of God in Christ works for our redemption through the conscious and trustful submission of our will to Him who loved us, and gave Himself for us. We know that all good is God's gift; and we believe and bear witness that the Father sent the Son to be the Saviour of the world. The sacraments are a witness to God's grace-a channel for God's grace-everything the high churchman can call them, except a substitute for God's grace, or a shackle upon God's free Spirit. And the Church, to which we have already referred, is not only a continuum of Christian opinion but of Christian faith. It never could have spanned the ages had not each true link in it more or less clearly known himself to be in direct personal contact with God the Father of his spirit, and with Jesus his Redeemer.

This spirit of faith being in us—this recognised mystery lying at the heart of our lives-we return to the various moral influences of Christ Jesus, and use them with new reverence and hope. We can never pass beyond them. They would not give us a Christian religion apart from the mystery at their heart; nor would a religion of mere mysteries, without moral auxiliaries, do anything for us. In particular, the recognition of God's grace does not supersede our knowledge of Him as an absolute master whose laws we must obey. There is nothing legal, there is nothing harsh or inharmonious in this principle of Christ's kingdom. Beauty implies the rigour of concealed

J

law; and the spiritual beauty of a Christian character is the flowering of a life of faithfulness. What Arnold said of poetry may be said of moral obedience :—

'Such poets is your bride, the Muse! young, gay,
Radiant, adorned outside; a hidden ground

Of thought and of austerity within.'

Any beauty of character, or any religious joy, which does not grow out of the conscientious performance of duty, is hectic and poisonous. There never was a genuine spiritual gift, or a worthy spiritual influence over other men, that was not earned as wages by Christ's servant. But let no one say that this principle of our Master's is inconsistent with His grace!

It would seem that, on such a theory as our own, there is no danger of underrating the grace of God. Devout Calvinists generally fear that, if you call man other than passive in relation to his Saviour, you will lead man to infer that if he can do so much with grace, he can surely do something-perhaps everything-without grace. But the life of the redeemed is a Divine-human thing, which cannot possibly lack either of its elements. As well be afraid lest men should drink oxygen instead of water. If salvation is the vision of God, how is man to attain that apart from God? If the strength of Christian service lies in faith, how can it possibly occur to any Christian that he could serve as well without God? The faith by which we live is faith in redemption—all essential and all sufficient. True, we find it necessary to affirm that, in man as a free being, though sinful, the abstract psychological conditions exist under which it is ideally possible that man should be won for God without historically knowing the gospel. But the ordinary channel of God's grace is the knowledge of Christ crucified. And, in His revelation, God declares that all blessing comes to us in virtue of Christ; the crowning faith to which He calls us-that faith which is life and joy-is an absolute belief in the necessity, as in the sufficiency, of Jesus Christ as our own and the world's Saviour. Is there anything here that should lead a candid antagonist to charge us with undervaluing