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ituality-the only right philosophy. Spirituality is the doc-trine of reason, truth, experience, conscience, wisdom, and scripture. Now I begin to understand how so wise a philosopher can get along in life, without any annoyance from the idea of sin, any need of mercy, or pardon, or atonement, or salvation; and how sin appears to him a demonstrated nihility, nay, a certain impossibility, for such a point of space and time as man to perpetrate against the infinite circumference of universal being! Oh! Mr. Adams.

2. I supposed you would not relish my argument.

1. What logic is that, sir, that refutes God? that renders his sayings obsolete, as so many antiquated nullities? that makes faith substantially at one with infidelity? As for your argument, my dear sir, I am very glad you have produced it ; I know now what it is!

2. You like not my kind of humility, either?

1. Certainly not. I know it to be pride only, under cover of a pseudo-philosophy and the solar system. Think you that conscience means nothing? or is it a fibrous organ, or a muscular machine, or a disease, like the toothache, within us? Murder consists not in killing, but in hating. This the ancient heathen even, especially Cicero, knew and affirmed. Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer; and ye know that no murderer hath eternal life abiding in him. So says the Holy Ghost, by his beloved Apostle John. This is spirituality; it is not materialism.

2. What, then, would you make of us?

1. Exactly what we all are, by nature and by practice, till grace makes us somewhat as we ought to be; exactly, dear sir, what the Holy Scriptures fully and truly assert that we all are.

2. You do not agree with me, then?

1. No, indeed. You see what a sin was the first in Eden. Its consequences are all about us, and in us, and over us, forever. But, according to materialism, it was all nothing.

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HUMAN NATURE, SELF'S VIEW.

Was the apple--if that it were-evil? No. The tree? No. The admiration of it as fair and beautiful? No. The eating of it, simply considered? Not at all. Where, then, was the sin? Answer-In putting God at defiance; in making nothing of his order; in practically annihilating God himself; in crediting the doctrine of the father of Universalists in contradiction of God; and in setting an example, to follow which would ruin heaven and confound the universe. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which they violated, is so called, demonstrably and simply, because it was ordained of God as the criterion, the test, the signal of their fidelity or of their sin. If they ate not of it, it stood the lovely monument of their innocence; if they ate of it, its wound condemned them, it bled their accusation, it wept their death!

On the other system, it was all trivial and innoxious, as the autumnal flight of the gossamer. If Adam and Eve had torn up all the trees in the garden, had burned them, and turned the floods of water in desolation over Paradise, that might have been an atom of an atom of something; but as it was, it was all the play of children, and original sin is all and only the day-dream of Calvinists.

2. You are coming hard on poor human nature again.

1. Better it were, Mr. Adams, to see how hard God comes on it. His truth is infallible and eternal, and it is revealed for our instruction.

2. I never could consent to such a manifesto as you give. 1. Human nature, dear sir, is often good or bad in our eyes, inversely, as we are bad or good in the eyes of God. This is what I mean by our estimate of human nature being a criterion of our character, as regenerated or yet in the state of nature; thus, an unregenerate man, latently, if not confessedly, thinks morally well of himself, is proud and selfrighteous, and all his tendencies in this relation are blindly to self-justification, to apologies for his peccancies, and to show, in substance, that, if only justice were done him, in

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stead of oppression and injury, he should do well and prosper, both here and hereafter. He thinks well of human nature in the abstract, because it means himself in the concrete. On the other hand, for a similar reason, the Christian thinks ill of human nature, especially because he receives the testimony of God concerning it with humiliation and personal application. Hence he is humble, grateful, teachable. He trusts God with gladness, in sight, out of sight, in darkness, in light, in trial and distress, at all times, and for all things. His confidence in God, through the medium of his truth, is at once enlightened and joyous. It makes him happy, holy, safe; in life, in death, and forever; through the power and constancy of the covenant-keeping God, by the aid of his Spirit and the eternal mediation of his Son. And in this temper his heart dilates in pure philanthropy, unfeigned, toward others. His sense of the truth impels him to seek your happiness, to love your soul, and to desire intensely that you may participate the blessedness of God in Christ Jesus. No other man is happy-no other can be happy. When pleased and joyous, without religion, it is only the harbinger of the wrath to come!

2. What mean you by wrath?

1. The expression is not mine, dear sir. It is μɛλλovoɑ opyn, future wrath; and as Whitfield says, it is future now, but it will be both present and future forever to them that die in their sins.

2. Do you really believe that?

1. Indeed I do. God says it, and I believe it. Its application, as a doctrine, to individuals, to final aggregates and comparative numbers, is another thing, which will be well adjusted by unerring wisdom and immutable truth. God is the arbiter of all hope, the dispenser of final destiny. Do not believe it, Mr. Adams?

you

2. What, in eternal punishment?

1. Yes.

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THE SCRIPTURE VERY PLAIN.

2. Not I, indeed.

1. But you are afraid, now and then, that it may be true? 2. I can never believe that.

1. Yes you can, my dear sir; and what is more, you will believe it forever.

2. Never.

1. Do you then deny revelation, or are you willing to contradict God to his face?

2. Oh! I interpret those expressions in a different way.

1. Interpretation, sir, you know, is a science. It has its definitions, its functions, its rules, and its tests. Without these, what is the science of law? How, in Westminster Hall, do judges, erudite and honored, interpret the statutes of the realm? or in our own American judiciary at Washington, Boston, Albany, Philadelphia, New York, or elsewhere? The object of the science is in a reasonable way to ascertain, and evoke, and vindicate the native sense of the document-no matter what. The laws of interpretation, as laid down by Blackstone, are substantively all we want in the science of theology. Let us concede that the scriptures every where mean something; let us go to the inspired originals; let us be grammatical and hermeneutical in our analysis of the passage, the last part of the twenty-fifth of Matthew, for example; see there the millions of the whole completed species standing promiscuously before the Son of Man-see him separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats-see him place them in two classes, one at his right, the other at his left hand, then read the final award, first to the one, then to the other; observe the principle of contrast, of antithesis, of contrariety, in the character of the one class compared with that of the other in their sentence, in their final state; and remember that principle of contrast pervades the whole Bible, and all the sayings and doings of God to man from the beginning, when he declared to our apostate first parents the war of

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two parties, their reciprocal enmity, and the final prevalence of the seed of the woman bruising the head of the serpent. Christ shall eternally conquer.

2. I think God is too good to punish men forever.

1. I think him infinitely too good to lie. Did he reveal the future wrath simply to scare us, not believing it himself? There is nothing else in creation so strong as the word of God. It made creation; it upholds it; and heaven and earth shall vanish, but not a particle of his truth, Mr. Adams.

2. Still I do not believe your version of it.

1. What is your version, my dear sir?

2. Any thing but yours.

1. How to get away from the plain sense of scripture on this awful article of our faith, not here only, but throughout the whole volume of revelation, I confess cordially that I do not know at all. I have read the most plausible and ingenious works of Universalists, Restorationists, and purgatorymongers and their theories, only with the edified conviction that selfishness, and deceit, and impiety, or presumptuous ignorance, made them all. From the times and the reveries of Origen, in the third century, to the impudent day-dreamers of our own times, I have never seen any thing of the sort that could bear investigation, or live in the light of revelation. They are all lies, sir.

2. Nothing could ever make me believe in your version of it.

1. Possibly you may believe it yet. You are not wholly your own keeper.

2. No; impossible.

1. A learned minister of the "liberal" school, but a polished and courteous gentleman, factus ad unguem, once told me that he never would believe it; that he would believe rather that there was no God.

2. And what said you in reply?