unlearned, and that, practically, in every Protestant Church, the rule of faith is some Confession, Creed, or Symbol, which is made a Pope of, in the ordinary working of the churchmachinery? These are grave questions, surely, yet it seems to us they have never been sufficiently considered. Perhaps the present agitation of the public mind will bring out clearly before the Protestant world the fact, that they have shrunk from the application of their own principle; and the result may be that the work left unfinished in the sixteenth century may be completed. It has been a problem with many, why the progress of the Reformation was so suddenly arrested, within half a century from its commencement; nay, why the tide, which rose so rapidly, and threatened to flow over all Europe, was so rudely turned back and so effectually dammed within certain narrow limits that it has never been able to surmount them. Perhaps this problem may find its solution --or one element, at least, of its solution,-in the fact, that, while the Reformation freed human thought in one direction, it bound it in another; that, while it dethroned the Pope, it crowned other high names; that, while it shivered the sceptre of the Pope's infallibility, it only substituted many tyrants for one. If Rome says "you must not think for yourselves, but take our creed," do others say any thing else than "you must think for yourselves, but take our creed?" It may be granted to the historian that this substitution of the authority of a symbol for the authority of the Pope was necessary in the sixteenth century, to afford a fixed centre toward which men's minds might gravitate, in that time of strife, when old bonds and attractions were so suddenly broken; but is such a substitution to be made a permanent element in the Christian Church for that reason? The principal argument for the use of authoritative creeds is, that they tend to insure uniformity of opinion within the limits of the same sect; an argument, we venture to affirm, utterly unsupported by the history of the Protestant Churches, and which, even if it were so supported, would only go to show that activity of thought had been suppressed, and words substituted for things. As for

absolute unity of opinion, even if it be desirable, (which is doubtful), it is unattainable. In no two ages has the faith of the Church been in all points alike; nay, no two men, even of the same age, have held precisely the same shades of opinion on all points. It may be the case that men adopt the same symbols and utter the same words, but as for actual identity of opinion, it is impossible. It is with the eyes of the mind as with those of the body: no two men see objects precisely alike. In total darkness they may agree perfectly, but it is because neither sees at all. Yet, for the practical purposes of life, men's vision is sufficiently accurate; and so, for all the real wants of the moral nature, men obtain the same view of the instructions of the Bible. There is a remarkable uniformity of religious faith among all sects in regard to those points which are essential to salvation.

Let our motto be here, as well as in our national politics, "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable." We believe that true unity must be the offspring of Freedom.. Severity necessarily produces a reaction of unbelief. And how noble, how worthy of Christianity, would be such a free unity of minds unconstrained, a union devoid of all shams, hypocrisies, and cant, in comparison with that unity so much vaunted now, of minds bound to swear in the words of a creed or a master-a unity apparent, not real; in words only, not in heart! When the day of such Union and Liberty shall come for the Protestant Church, then, and not sooner, will she present to the world the full power of her great principles of independence on man and faith in God; then, and not till then, will she act out her fundamental theory, that "the Bible, and the Bible alone, is the religion of Protestants."

ARTICLE III.

AN INQUIRY CONCERNING "THE FIRST EMOTION OF ENMITY TO GOD."

By Rev. PHARCELLUS CHURCH, Rochester, New-York.

In an article of the Biblical Repository for October, 1844, beginning on page 410, entitled "Divine agency and government, together with human agency and freedom," from Leonard Woods, D. D., of Andover, Mass., we find the following paragraph: "Conscience sees that the first emotion of love or enmity" to God, "is of the same nature with any subsequent emotion. It would never occur to plain common sense that, while love to God is the grand virtue of a Christian, his first act of love is no virtue at all; or that, while the first act of love to God is destitute of goodness, following acts of love to the same object are morally good. The repetition of an affection may increase its strength, but cannot change its nature. If there is no sin in the first emotion of enmity, what law of God or of conscience forbids us to indulge it? Does not our instinctive conviction and feeling, that we ought not to repeat and cherish enmity to God, imply that any emotion of enmity is sinful? Indeed, is not the fact that the emotion of love or hatred to God rises spontaneously in the heart of a man, as soon as the object is presented, a clearer evidence. of the goodness or badness of a character, than the same emotion when elicited by his voluntary effort? If a rational being is completely holy, he has no occasion for any effort of will to excite his love to God. The affection is kindled as soon as he sees the object. And the same is true of enmity, in a moral agent, who is the subject of entire and unconstrained depravity. The emotion of enmity rises instantly, whether he wills it or hot, as soon as the real character of God comes before his mind. That the goodness or badness of a man's character is specially manifested by the spontaneous exercise of his affections in view of their appro

priate objects, is, I think, clear and certain to an unbiassed conscience."-Bib. Rep., Oct., 1844, pp. 423-424.

Dr. Woods here brings into comparison, if I understand him, the emotion of love or enmity to God before and after the will has acted with reference to it, or it has acquired a voluntary character. "A spontaneous emotion,” and “an emotion repeated and cherished" by the will, "a first emotion of love or enmity to God," and "subsequent emotions," are forms of expression by which the Doctor designs to set before his readers the passion of love or enmity, while it yet exists as an involuntary or spontaneous sensation, as contrasted with the same passion after it comes to be determined or in any way affected by the action of the will. Precisely how much meaning the Doctor includes in the terms, "repeating and cherishing," he has not told us. Whether he confines them to those cases wherein the will directly exerts itself to call up an emotion, or to repeat a thought or an action, or whether he goes further, and includes in the terms the whole causality of the will, might perhaps be a question. A sensation may depend upon previous acts of the will as its cause, although its first appearance in the mind may not be connected with any direct endeavor toward its production on the part of that faculty. The first emotion or impulse to rob or murder may arise in the mind without any effort in the will to call it up; and yet it probably never comes into being, except as the result of a long course of previous indulgence in crime, and therefore as really depends upon the causality of the will, as any other exercise whatever.

And if the will is in any sense the cause of an emotion, I submit whether it can be "spontaneous," in the Doctor's sense of the term. He uses the term spontaneous with reference to the "first" emotion of enmity, or with reference to an emotion of enmity to God which existed in the mind apart from all causation in the will, direct or indirect. His object is to show that an emotion arising in this manner, without any agency in the will, is a stronger indication of the vicious. character of the mind, if the emotion be vicious, than an

emotion which is caused by the will.. This he does to disprove the "Pelagian Theory," that "an emotion or affection must be voluntarily repeated and cherished before it is morally good or bad." We do not call in question the correctness of the Doctor's conclusions on this point, though we must certainly demur at the soundness of his premises. For, if one of the things brought into comparison in these premises, is an entity, the other must be a nonentity. If it be true that enmity to God is ever a voluntary exercise, it is not true that it ever existed without being to some extent dependent on the previous action of the will. A first emotion of enmity, as existing independently of all previous action in the will tending toward its production, we will venture to say, is an impossibility in the psychology of man. If I mistake in this remark, or in any other I may make, no man is more competent to show it than Dr. Woods, and certainly no one could be more grateful to have it shown than myself. Having in my mind no theory to subserve, beyond that of feeling my way to nature and fact, I could not consider myself otherwise than benefited in having my errors in conducting this inquiry pointed out.

That the drift of my remarks may not be misjudged at the outset, I will here say, that I am not of that class who deny the depravity of our involuntary sensations. Whatever modification, or strength, or influence in any form, the emotions may receive from the previous action of the will, it is clear to my mind, that there are depraved tendencies in human nature that exist prior to all such action. The substantial facts in this case, it seems to me, must be alike clear to all, however they may differ in their terms or modes of speaking of them. One may affirm, and another deny, that those depraved tendencies which are born with us are sin, just as their favorite schemes of thinking bias their judgments. systems or schemes apart, who can deny that an aptitude to vice, a liability to wrong-doing, descends from father to son in the ordinary way of generation? Who can deny that the habits of parents influence the tastes and inclinations of their

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