because they embrace a multitude of circumstances, as well as of individuals. His grace, is his love to the unworthy. And bis mercy is the crowning display of his benevolence-his love to the criminal and the wrath-deserving. He not only is, but he delights to be, good, and complacent, and compassionate, and gracious, and merciful. Yea, more; he is love. It is his moral being. That one brief aphorism exhausts the definition of his character. Nothing can be better, higher, nobler, more perfect, more glorious, than benevolence that is the same yesterday, to-day, and for ever,' always disinterested, impartial, and active, like the sun, unresting in its noble mission, and gentle as the breath of spring; and nothing in the universe more worthy of the ceaseless study of intelligent beings.

II. THE MEDIUM OF CONTEMPLATION. The power, and majesty, and wisdom of God are mirrored in the ocean, the glacier, the forest, the prairie, the snow-crowned mountain, and the gorgeous brow of the starry heavens, whose stars seem to us like far-off lighthouses on the great sea of infinite space. From all these, indeed, there flow rays of goodness; in animate nature the radiance deepens; and flows still more intensely from the microcosm, man. Beneficence is seen in the arrangement of his corporeal structure, and the adaptation of his mental powers. Divine complacency is reflected in the good man's conscience, and will shine out in full blaze in the 'Well done, good and faithful servant, enter thou into the joy of thy Lord.' His compassion appears in all the arrangements he has made for drying up the fountains of tears, and smoothing the calamities of life. His grace is shown from day to day in sunshine, and in shower, in health, and home, and daily bread for thousands and millions that neither regard nor thank him. His mercy shines out in all his treatment of men in their probationary career. 'He hath not dealt with us after our sins, nor rewarded us according to our iniquities.' But Paul speaks of 'a glass,' in which this most illustrious phase of love is mirrored. That glass is not nature, nor providence, nor even revelation in general. The Bible is rather the frame-work and appendages, than the mirror itself. The mirror is set in the Bible. It is not the law, which reflects the hideousness of man's moral character and fills him with terror, but the gospel which radiates forth mercy to the lost-to the very vilest and guiltiest of the lost-to the last and to the uttermost. Jesus shows the Father's mercy. The only begotten Son,' hath revealed the eternal heart. Christ is the living Gospel: the brightness of the Father's glory and the exact image of his essence: heaven's mirror for man. The dimmest eye can now see God and live. None can look unto Jesus, the Saviour, the Friend, the Refuge, the self-sacrificing Redeemer, and mistake the character of God. It is in that mirror that we see that divine love has become mercy to man. 'Herein is love; not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.'

III. THE MANNER OF CONTEMPLATION. Man has been made for thought and for study. The subject that most frequently engrosses our minds produces the deepest impression. By an inevitable law, we become assimilated to the character of the object which has the largest place in our thoughts and affections. This law Christianity makes use of, for our moral elevation. It places before us an object of surpassing moral loveliness, and seeks so to rivet our thoughts upon it, that it may stamp its seal upon our

hearts and it teaches that we place ourselves most in connection with God, when we give it our undivided attention.

1. There must be a steadfast gaze: a 'beholding,' not a glimpse, a glance, a momentary view; but an abiding remembrance, a continuous realization. He who makes religion a mere Sabbath-day affair, is little likely to become eminently godlike. There are too many professors like the natural man of whom James speaks, seeing his face in a glass, then going away and straightway forgetting what manner of person he was. The truth as it is in Jesus must be remembered from day to day. "By which also ye are saved,' says Paul, if ye keep in memory what I delivered unto you unless ye have believed in vain.'

The veil of

2. The Truth must be contemplated with unveiled face.' unbelief must be removed. Prejudice must be destroyed. There must be no jaundiced and distorting medium between the mind and the mirror. All who look at the gospel through the medium of a human creed or church, of sentimentalism, and excitement, do not give it fair play.

IV. THE RESULT OF CONTEMPLATION:- " - changed into the same image from glory to glory.' Peace, purity, righteousness, truth, magnanimity, selfdenial, earnest action, and unwearying love, are all comprehended in that word. Man becomes more and more beautiful; his life more and more 'manly. His path is like the morning light shining more and more unto the perfect day. His ion with God becomes daily sweeter; his aspirations after the nobled the true are daily stronger. Love he comes the mainspring and the charm of his being. All his desires and his feelings are under the control of one great principle: and body, soul, and spirit are all presented on the altar of love.

Reader, if you have not this image there can be no heaven to you. Resist not that Divine agent who is seeking to form you anew after the mind of God; neglect not that glorious truth which is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believeth.'

R.

ON THE FREEDOM OF THE WILL.

The following admirable train of reasoning on the freedom of the human will appears in the second successful Burnett Prize Essay, by Principal Tulloch, of St. Mary's College, St. Andrew's. It is one of the clearest and most powerful passages in his masterly treatise :

"What constitutes motive? What is the spring of the order which is universally admitted to obtain among the facts of man's spiritual being, no less than among other facts? Is that spring in nature, and bound to its immutable sequences? or is it deep in the central being of the man himself, and essentially separated from nature? The materialistic necessitarian holds as his cardinal principle the former of these views. He knows nothing beyond the mere series of phenomena which collectively he may call Mind. Any spirital unit or soul beneath the multiplicity, and therein expressing itself, while yet essentially dis tinguished from it, has no place in his system: and quite consistently so. The theological necessitarian of course shrinks from this conclusion, but his language has not unfrequently been such as to bear it out. Carrying up with an iron hand the phenomenal law of cause and effect into a region of spiritual life, he

THE BIBLE DEFENDER.

16

may have seemed to gain a temporary triumph over an adversary; but he has done so too often at the risk of total peril to his faith, and to the very ground and condition of all religion.

The true advocate of liberty, on the other hand, simply maintains that in the last resource the mind or soul is unconditioned by any natural cause. The selfconscious reason, or ego, is incompressible by the law of phenomena. It only is, and lives in opposition to that law. The spring of the soul's activity is ever within the soul. It displays its elf, no doubt, serially, in regular obedience to the strongest motive; but the strength of the motive comes from within, from the soul's own preference: otherwise it would be truly no motive, but would for ever remain a mere inducement or solicitation presenting itself to the mind. It is always the mind's own act changes a mere inducement into a motive, and leads to action. According to the well-known pithy saying of Coleridge, ‘ ít is not the motive makes the man, but the man the motive.'

The liberty thus defined, it may deserve to be remarked, is entirely different from the old imagination of a liberty of indifference. This latter represented the mind, as it were, in equilibrio, till it put forth the power of choice among the motives bearing upon it. It placed the soul, as it were, on one side, and motives on the other, and pretended to give an explanation of the mode of action between the two. The true theory of liberty makes no such pretensions; it knows nothing of the soul save as active. An abstract potentiality, which of its own sovereignty keeps itself apart from motives, or yields to them at pleasure, is in no respect recognised by it. It simply contends, that in every case of actual human conduct the motive power is from within the soul itself, and not in any respect physically conditioned. It simply says that man is free to act, but it does not pretend for a moment to explain the mode of his freedom. This it so intle does, that it acknowledges the fact of human freedom to be in its very character inexplicable.

This character of mystery-of irresolvability, under the great inductive law of cause and effect-comprises, in truth, all that can be argumentatively said against the doctrine of liberty. The fact will not come within the conditions of our logical faculty, and must therefore be repelled. But this is a thoroughly vicious mode of argument; for, by the very supposition, the fact transcends these conditions: and to reject it on this account is simply to beg the whole question. If this fact be at all, it is primary and constitutive, and therefore not to be reasoned to, but from. It stands at the head of our rational nature as its source. And as such a source-as the inherent activity whence all our mental modes are born-the fountain whence they flow-the me, of which they are the varied manifestations-it defies the application of that inductive law under which they arise, and for the very reason that it is what it is not any one of those modes, but the root of them all-not any of the manifold sides of consciousness, but the unity in which all its sides centre. In this view it is not only not wonderful that we cannot understand freedom, but the fact is such in its very idea that it is impossible we can ever understand it, transcending as it necessarily does that logical power of which it is the condition. Thus apprehended in its primitive distinction, it leaves us no alternative but to abide by it in its necessary incomprehensibility. It is there-we are bound to recognise it. But we have no claim to comprehend it, for (as logicians) we do not contain itit contains us. Whatever we are in our mental and practical character is just the expression of this mysterious personality, to which all our activity leads back, and from which it all flows.

ance.

It is as the irresistible testimony of consciousness that this fact forces acceptIt attests its reality within us, and we cannot get quit of it under whatever ingenuity of explanation. On this ground the advocate of liberty has an advantage which is wholly indisputable; for that we feel ourselves to be free, none can truly deny. This feeling our deepest and most ineradicable con

ciousness-the doctrine of necessity cannot accept as a fact: or if it does, we have no dispute with it; only we do not see how it can consistently maintain itself if it does. For the feeling cannot represent a reality, and yet man's spiritual, no less than his material being, be held as naturally determined. In such a case the feeling can only be an illusion, and man a bond-man, wholly a creature of nature, howsoever he may seem every moment to create a circle of activity around him. But if consciousness be thus held false, man is cast adrift on an ocean of utter uncertainty. Truth becomes for him a mere dream, if the voice within him be held incompetent to give it valid utterance.

The deliverance of consciousness is on the contrary, held by the advocate of freedom to be at once decisive and ultimate on the point. It is not, in his view, any mere dim experience, which disappears under analysis, but a truth which makes itself good under whatever logical assaults. The alternative is simply one of fact. The human consciousness either tells the truth absolutely, unheeding how it may clash with some other truth in the dim-lighted chamber of the logical understanding, or it must be admitted to be false. No saving clauses of ingenious explanation will avail. Man is either free really, or he is not free. There is in him a centre of action wholly peculiar, a naturally undetermined source of activity, otherwise his deepest experience belies itself, and his moral nature is a devout imagination. There is nothing but the recognition of such a free agency in man, however mysterious and unaccountable, that can preserve to him faith in himself, or the perilons dignity of responsibility among the creatures of earth. If he has not in a true sense such a power of action springing from within his own spiritual being, his consciousness deceives him, and he is and can be nochia than a mere irresponsible link in the chain of pheno

mena. (Pp. 258-262.)

"

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We are assured that we have many well-wishers. Our Journal is intended to fill up a gap in the increasing periodical literature of our country. Of an altogether unsectarian and even undenominational character, we expect to have the sympathy and support of the large-hearted and the catholic of all evangelical churches, who are concerned for the defence of the bulwarks of our holy religion. While there may be a similarity of view among the principal contributors, each writer is alone responsible for his own articles. Our pages shall be open to honest enquirers in search of truth, and to the accredited leaders of the infidel party. But if those who favour us with their attention will only think for themselves, and think deliberately, we have no fear of the result. We speak unto wise men; judge ye what we say. If our readers wish to help us

1.-Let them put copies of our first and second numbers into the hands of their friends, and solicit subscribers.

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3.-Let them send us books for review; short, pithy, pungent articles on interesting subjects; narratives of real conversions; and periodicals and newspapers with useful informaton. 4.-Let them secure notices and insert advertisements in newspapers and other periodicals; and whatever is done, let it be done expeditiously, energetically, thoroughly.

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LONDON: WARD & Co., and HOULSTON & STONEMAN, Paternoster Row. HUNTER & Co., 50, GRAINGER STREET, NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE:

AND ALL BOOKSELLERS.

THE

BIBLE DEFENDER:

A PENNY WEEKLY ORGAN

OF RELIGIOUS, SOCIAL, AND POLITICAL INFORMATION,

No. 2.

AND DISCUSSION ON POINTS OF DIFFICULTY AND INTEREST.

'Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.'-BIBLE.

SATURDAY, JANUARY 12, 1856.

CONTENTS.

PRICE 1d.

And few

years

It is wisdom for nations, as well as for individuals, to regard the facts of the past as lessons for their guidance in the future have been more prolific in such lessons than the year which has just gone. It has to be seen, whether England will profit from her experience. No one

doubt that the war in which we are engaged is highly popular with the great mass of the British nation. The voice of our artizans, mechanics, miners, and operatives, has been as decidedly for war as that of the middle and higher classes. The press, in its demand that the war should be carried on with vigour, has but represented the people. There are some to whom war is a harvest-season, but to the great majority it brings grievous burdens, and to many the utmost desolation and sorrow. Why, then, is the war so popular? Is it because we have a natural hatred of Russians; is it merely because we sympathise with Turkey, when asaailed by her powerful and grasping neighbour; is it that war is loved for its own sake, simply for the excitement which it brings; is it because we expect to reap great national glory from the struggle; is it from a love of meddling with other people's affairs; is it from the hope of extended commerce and increased prosperity as a distant result? We do not say that none of these reasons has any influence over any Englishman; but we do not believe that one of them has the slightest influence upon nine hundred and ninety-nine We are much mistaken of every thousand of those whose voice is for war.

if it is not the idea that the war against Russia is being waged in behalf of liberty and civilization that it is so popular with the masses. They look upon Russia as the representative and embodiment of despotism, and consequently look upon the present struggle as a war for freedom. They have hope that the oppressed nationalities of Europe, pining under the dark shadow of the system which her armies have for centuries supported, will No. 2, Vol. I.