for us to live, arises from an apprehension of the glory of his person, and of our relation to him as the purchase of his blood, it is not a Christian purpose. It may be philanthropic or benevolent, but it is neither religious nor Christian.

But, 2. The Scriptures, our own consciousness, and the universal judgment of men, recognise those affections which terminate on moral objects as having a moral character, and therefore any theory which denies this must be false. The love of God is essentially the love of the divine perfections, complacency and delight in him as the infinitely good, which leads to adoration and obedience. It can hardly be denied that this is the constant representation of the Bible, and especially of its devotional parts. The psalmist speaks of himself as longing after God, as a hart pants for the cooling waters. "Whom have I in heaven," he exclaims, "but thee? and there is none on earth I desire besides thee." All this Mr Finney pronounces delusion or selfishness. "When a moral agent," he says, "is intensely contemplating moral excellence, and his intellectual approbation is emphatically pronounced, the natural and often the necessary result is, a corresponding feeling of complacency and delight in the sensibility. But this, being altogether an involuntary state of the mind, has no moral character.”—(P. 224.) "Indeed, it is perhaps the general usage now to call this phenomenon of the sensibility love, and, for want of just discrimi nation, to speak of it as constituting religion. Many seem to suppose that this feeling of delight in and fondness for God is the love required by the moral law."-(P. 224.) "It is remarkable to what extent religion is regarded as a phenomenon of the sensibility and as consisting in feeling.”—(P. 225.) "Nothing is of greater importance than for ever to understand that religion is a phenomenon, of the will."-(P. 227.) The legitimate and sufficient answer to all this is that it contradicts the common consciousness of men. They know it cannot be true. If Mr Finney says it is a first truth of reason that it is right to will the highest good, which we admit, we say it is a first truth of reason that compassion, benevolence, love of God, conscientiousness, gratitude, devotion, reverence, humility, repentance, as states of feeling, have a moral character. He is forced to admit that this is the common judgment, and recognised in what he calls "the popular language of the Bible." A philosophy which leads to a denial of this plain fact of consciousness, this first truth of reason, is a false philosophy.

It is obvious that a theory which reduces all virtue and religion to a simple act of the will must lead to the same view as to the nature of sin. If virtue has no place in the affections, neither can sin have. If all religion is centred in one intention, all sin must be confined to another. If all virtue is

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benevolence, all sin is selfishness. But as benevolence is not an affection, but a purpose, so selfishness must be an intention. It cannot consist, the author tells us, in malevolence; “it cannot consist in any state of the intelligence or sensibility, for these, as we have seen, are involuntary, and depend on acts of the will."-(P. 286.) "It must consist in the choice of selfgratification as an end." Or, " sin consists in being governed by the sensibility, instead of being governed by the law of God as it lies revealed in the reason." -(P. 287.) This is a frequently recurring definition. Benevolence is yielding the up unreservedly to the demands of the intelligence."(P. 275.) "As the will must either follow the law of reason, or the impulses of the sensibility, it follows that moral agents are shut up to the necessity of being selfish or benevolent."(P. 290.) "Men naturally desire their own happiness and the happiness of others. This is constitutional. This is constitutional. But when, in obedience to these desires, they will their own or others' happiness, they seek to gratify their sensibility or desires. This is selfishness."-(P. 290.) Of course, it makes no manner of difference what the nature of the feeling is that determines the will. The sin does not lie in the nature of the feeling, but in the will's being determined by any feeling. "It matters not what kind of desire it is; if it is desire that governs the will, this is selfishness."-(P. 301.)* It may be a desire of our own salvation, the desire of holiness, of the salvation of others, of the good of the world, of the glory of God, of the triumphs of the Lord Jesus. It matters not. It is just as selfish and as wicked to have the will determined by such desires, as by avarice, envy, or malice. "The choice of any thing because it is desired is selfishness and sin."-(P. 305.) "Some writers have fallen into the strange mistake of making virtue to consist in the gratification of certain desires, because, as they say, those desires are virtuous. They make some of the desires selfish and some benevolent. To yield the will to the control of the selfish propensities is sin. To yield the will to the control of the benevolent desires, such as the desire of my neighbour's happiness and the public happiness, is virtue, because these are good desires, while the selfish desires are evil. Now, this has been a very common view of virtue and vice. But it is fundamentally erroneous. None of the constitutional desires are good or evil in themselves. They are all alike involuntary, and terminate on their correlated objects. To yield the will to the control of any one of them, no matter which, is sin." (P. 503.) Mr Finney is beautifully consistent in all this, and in the consequences which of necessity flow from his

The sinner may "feel deeply malicious and revengeful feelings towards God; but sin does not consist in these feelings or necessarily imply them."-(P. 296.)

doctrine. He admits that if a man pays his debts from a sense of justice or feeling of conscientiousness, he is therein and therefore just as wicked as if he stole a horse; * or if a man preaches the gospel from a desire to glorify God and benefit his fellow-men, he is just as wicked for so doing as a pirate.† We may safely challenge Hurtado de Mendoza, Sanchez, or Molina to beat that.

It passes our comprehension to discover why the will being determined by the desire to honour God is selfishness and sin, while its being determined by the desire of the highest good is virtue. It is as much determined by desire in the one case as in the other. Mr Finney says, indeed, that in the one case it is determined by the intelligence, and in the other by the sensibility. But reason as much dictates that we should honour God, as that we should seek the happiness of the universe; and the will is as much decided by the intelligence in the one case as in the other. The only way in which the intelligence can determine the will is, that the truth which the intelligence contemplates, whether it be the value of the well-being of the universe or the excellence of God, awakens the corresponding desire or feeling of right, fitness, or obligation, and that determines the will. If the will is not determined by a desire to secure the happiness of the universe, what benevolence is there in such a determination?

Mr Finney's principles lead him to assert that there is no difference in their feelings between the renewed and the unrenewed, the sinner and the saint. "The sensibility of the sinner," he says, "is susceptible of every kind and degree of feeling that is possible to saints."-(P. 521.) He accordingly goes on to show that sinners may desire sanctification, delight in the truth, abhor sin, have complacency in good men, entertain feelings of love and gratitude to God, and, in short, be, as to feeling and conduct, exactly what saints are. The only essential difference is in the will, in their ultimate purpose or intention. The sinner's ultimate intention may be to promote the glory of God from a sense of duty, or from appreciation of the loveliness of moral excellence, and he be no better than a pirate. If his ultimate end is to promote happiness because happiness is intrinsically valuable, he is a saint.‡

"He may be prevented (committing commercial injustice) by a constitutional or phrenological conscientiousness, or sense of justice. But this is only a feeling of the sensibility; and if restrained only by this, he is just as absolutely selfish as if he had stolen a horse in obedience to acquisitiveness."- (P. 317.)

"If the selfish man were to preach the gospel, it would be only because upon the whole it was most pleasing or gratifying to himself, and not at all for the sake of the good of being as an end. If he should become a pirate, it would be for exactly the Whichever cause he takes, he takes it for precisely the same reason; and with the same degree of light, it must involve the same degree of guilt."— (P. 355.)

same reason.

.....

"Whether he [the unrenewed man] preach and pray, or rob and plunder upon

A FOURTH doctrine flowing from Mr Finney's fundamental principles is, that every man must, at any given moment, be either totally depraved, i. e. as wicked as it is possible for him with his knowledge to be, or perfectly holy. This is a conclusion which it would appear he finds some difficulty in persuading his friends to adopt. They receive the premises, they admit the validity of many other sequences from them, but this is rather more than they are prepared for. Mr Finney is right, and he knows it. He has them in his power, and he commands them to follow wherever he and the "intelligence' lead. If the intelligence deceives us here, we can never know truth from error. If obligation is limited by ability; if ability extends only to acts of the will; if the acts of the will are confined to the choice of ends and means; and if the choice of means has no moral character but from the nature of the end chosen, it follows that all morality is confined to the choice of an end. If the right end is chosen, the agent discharges his whole duty; he fulfils the single command of law and reason. If he chooses the wrong end, he commits all the sin of which he is capable. The only respect in which one moral agent can be either better or worse than another is as one has more ability than another. A child has not the knowledge or strength of a man, nor a man of an angel. It is not required, therefore, of the child to have so high an estimate of the value of "the good of being," as a man should have, nor of a man that he should have the comprehensive and consequent strength of intention of an angel. If ability limits obligation, all that can be required is, that a moral agent should will the highest good with an intensity proportioned to his honest conviction. of its value; that is, "with conscious honesty of intention." This is all an angel can do, and it is perfection in him. It is all a converted pirate can do, and it is perfection in him.

Again, if happiness or enjoyment is the only real good, to intend the highest enjoyment of sentient beings is the whole of virtue, to intend our own gratification is the whole of sin. It is impossible that these intentions should co-exist in the mind. If a man intends the one, he does not intend the other. If all morality centres in this ultimate intention, he must, therefore, at any given moment, be perfectly sinful or perfectly holy. This is a severe dose of logic, but Mr Finney will not tolerate even a wry face in swallowing it.

the high seas, he does it only for one end, that is, for precisely the same reason, [viz., to gratify some feeling;] and of course his sinfulness is complete in the sense that it can only be varied by varying light. This I know is contrary to the common opinion, but it is the truth, and must be known; and it is of the highest importance that these fundamental truths of morality and of immorality should be held up to the minds of all." (P. 355.) On the same page we are taught, that if a man abstains from any thing because it is wicked," it is selfish, because the will is determined by "phrenological conscientiousness."

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NO. VI.

2Q

"The new or regenerate heart cannot sin. It is benevolence, love to God and man. This cannot sin. These are both ultimate choices or intentions; they are from their own nature efficient, each excluding the other, and each securing, for the time being, the exclusive use of means to promote its end. To deny this is the same absurdity as to maintain either that the will can at the same time choose two opposite ends, or that it can choose one end only, but at the same time choose the means to accomplish another end not yet chosen. Now, either alternative is absurd. Then, holiness and sin can never co-exist in the same mind. Each, as has been said, for the time being, necessarily excludes the other. Selfishness and benevolence co-exist in the same mind! A greater absurdity and a more gross contradiction was never conceived or expressed.”—(P. 310.) This is sound logic, and therefore we must either admit that every man is either perfectly holy or entirely sinful, at any given time, or we must deny that moral obligation is confined to intention; and if we deny that, we must of course admit that feelings or states of the sensibility may have a moral character; and if we concede that point, we must concede that obligation is not limited by ability; and then the great Diana of the Ephesians has fallen.

This doctrine of the simplicity or unity of moral character is very prominently presented in this work. In Lecture xi. the main proposition contended for is: "Moral character is wholly right or wholly wrong, and never partly right and partly wrong at the same time."-(P. 156.) In Lecture xxviii., he says: "This conducts us to the conclusion or truth to be demonstrated,-namely, that moral agents are at all times either as holy or sinful as with their knowledge they can be."-(P. 354.)

We have little space to devote to remarks on this subject, and surely little need be said. 1. The doctrine, of course, rests on a false apprehension of the nature of sin and holiness, and of the grounds and extent of our obligations. Our own conscience and the Bible teach us that we are bound to be completely conformed to the law or image of God; that in whatever respect or degree we fall short of that standard of excellence is sin; and that the law of God exhibits what rational beings ought to be, not what they can be, not what they have plenary power at any moment to make themselves, but what they would be, and would at all times have power to be, were it not for their sinfulness. No man, according to the standard of conscience and the Bible, is perfect, who is not perfectly like Christ, or has not attained to "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ;" who has not the same love, reverence, humility, patience, long-suffering, mercy, that were in him. It