"Let there be light," before there was light, or the material of light, But having uttered the oracle, "light was," or began to be. Now his oracle, "let there be light," antedates light, being the instrumental cause of it. This is our true stand-point on the subject of means, as respects the drama of creation. There is order in eternity as well as in time.

God himself tenanted the heavens by commanding the tenantry of all spheres into being, or by willing them to be. Now that will was, in all cases, the original cause, while the expression of it was the instrumental cause. So teaches the Bible. "God commanded the light to shine out of darkness, and it shone forth." The oracle of God antedates every creature.

James, the Apostle, confirms our position, and sustains our whole premises in one splendid oracle-"Of his own will God begat us, through the word of truth." This is the sum of our metaphysics. Divine oracles are the Alpha and the Omega of all our metaphysics. By these we have hitherto triumphed. If at any time our opponents aim to decoy us into that region, we meet them with Divine metaphysics.

My friend of the Chronicle, is more learned than I am. He says, "the doings of Christ in his manhood-his sufferings, death, and resurrection, are quite another subject from his doings before the world And he adds, that he is "surprised that A. C. should use the one as an illustration of the other." And A. C. is quite as much surprised, that his friend P. C. should use the one as a negative of the other.

was.

Concerning the doings of Christ before the world was, my Bible is wholly silent. Indeed, a Christ, before the world was, is not found in my Bible. I read of "THE WORD as MADE flesh" and dwelling on earth, in the days of Augustus Cesar, and who was Christed after, and not before, his baptism, when of mature age and reason. His being called Jesus the Christ in the title-page of the New Testament, is no more incongruous than that Bonaparte should now be called, in his memoirs, the Emperor, or that Abram should now be called Abraham.

Antecedent to creation he

Both Jesus and Christ are official names. was called "the Word of God." Becoming flesh, he became a “Son of man" by his mother, and was called the "Son of God" by his Father. He is now Jesus the Christ, in virtue of a Divine commission and of a Divine unction. We do not write the history of any personage prospectively, but retrospectively; and, methinks, we should speak and write in harmony with these canons of reason and propriety. But so long as we can comprehend the sense or design of

our estimable cotemporary Editor, we shall not assume, nor presume, any thing incompatible with the occasion or the theme before us.

"Of his own will he begat us, through the word of truth." Hence we are said to be "born again, not of corruptible, but of incorruptible seed, by the word of God, which forever lives," and which forever abides in us and with us.

"But," says our learned and estimable Editor, "as an Eternal Son of an Eternal Father, existing prior to the production of any created thing, it is quite different." Here the Editor of the Chronicle has got into a region of metaphysics into which we cannot enter. We can affirm nothing of an "Eternal Son." Of such a personage, the whole Bible is as silent as the grave. As in all nature, a father antedates a son, we cannot conceive of a Son and a Father as co-eternal. Hence, no inspired man has ever said one word of an "Eternal Son." The Bible, in its whole style and imagery, never violates the immutable proprieties of things or of persons. Hence, within the archives of Revelation we have not once found the idea, the title, much less the being called an Eternal Son of an Eternal Father. Against all this scholastic phraseology, we have long since entered our most solemn protest. Such a nomenclature has thrown a dark cloud over the Oracles of God.

Of the nativity of Jesus of Nazareth, it was said by a heavenly messenger sent to the holy Virgin, “The Holy Spirit shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore, also, that holy offspring which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God." It was the HOLY SPIRIT, officially, that created the body and the sonl, or the humanity of Jesus the Christ, out of the person of an espoused Virgin. He, therefore, became our kinsman-bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh, and spirit of our spirithaving a human spirit as well as a Divine Spirit. He had, in the Greek tongue, a owμɑ, a ¿ʊxŋ, and a meμ-a human body, soul and spirit, and all the falness of the Godhead dwelling substantially in him. Then was the oracle fulfilled, which saith, "a Virgin shall conceive and bear a Son;" and then was another oracle consummated, "Unto us," rather for us, “a child is born, for us a Son is given, and the government shall be on his shoulder, and his name shall be called Wonderful, Counsellor, the Mighty God, the Everlasting Father, the Prince of peace. Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end; upon the throne of David and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice, from henceforth even for ever. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will perform this."*

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MEANS OF REGENERATION.

It has been and is being accomplished. But in all this there is no title of an "Eternal Son." We must, therefore, repudiate the term as unscriptural, not only in form, but in spirit, and wholly unnatural.

As to the evangelical use of the word regeneration, in the apostolic diction, as propounded in the essay under review, our reviewer offers no argument against it. He might, perhaps, have conceded, with

still more candor, the unassailable facts stated in our review of the unscriptural use of this word. Without intending it, he seems to place himself under the shield of Nicodemus and his argumentum ad ignorantiam—his appeal to his ignorance in vindication of the hackneyed and much travestied word regeneration. "Though," says he, "our correspondent were to get the better of the argument," about the use of this word regenerate, "no change would be effected in the theological views of the Christian world." Perhaps in this he may yet be mistaken. But I confess that he has not, in my judgment, done quite as much honor to his candor as I had expected from him. I regret it more on his own account than on my own. It is, or "it would be, merely the settling of the scriptural use of a word." Pedobaptists, indeed, will tell him that the whole Bible Union movement is but for the settling of the meaning of a word; not so important, indeed, as the settlement of this much abused term. And what does such rhetoric prove? for logic it is not.

There is, along with this, another form of argument which I do not think either profoundly discreet or convincing. It is in the following sage remark, "The theological point gained would hardly be worth a thirty years' controversy"!! So reason the Pedobaptists. Have not the Baptists been contending with the whole Protestant world, for hundreds of years, for their "mode and subject of baptism," regardless of its design?! $4 "Suppose, now," say the Pedobaptists, "you have gained immersion for sprinkling or pouring, is this all you have gained by a two or three hundred years' controversy, and that, too, finally by the aid of a new version?" Whatever answer our ingenious friend may give to this, he will please place to our credit. We ask no more, be it much or little.

We have been contending, during the same term, for a Christian sanctification of the Lord's day, for the Lord's supper, for the restoration of the ancient order of things in every item commanded or commended in the Christian Scriptures, and, much of that time, for a new version of the Living Oracles, and for sundry other items, of quite as much value to the spiritual growth of Christ's mystical body, the church; for a more spiritual and evangelical practice of the precepts of Christ, and for the union of all true Christians on a catholic basis. But with him we fully agree" that the Holy Spirit would not

MEANS OF REGENERATION.

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select words expressive of so wonderful an idea without something more wonderful in the subject than such an outward act, under circumstances in which it might take place." Therefore, we agree just as much for an inward quickening of the good Spirit of our God; for a renewal of the heart through the spirit of grace and truth; for "the sanctification of the spirit" and "the belief of the truth," without which, seven immersions in the Jordan would profit neither infant nor adult. Whether the subject has the love of God in his heart and has been renewed in the spirit of his mind, or created by Christ to good works, are, indeed, paramount concerns. But while I concede, most cheerfully, all these preparations or accompaniments, I cannot say, with my friend, that I hope the day is distant when the Baptists "will cease to require a Christian experience as a prerequisite to that ordinance." Such an experience, before we are in Christ by faith, repentance, and baptism, is not to my mind conceivable, nor is it promised in the Christian Scriptures! Like the Ethiopian officer, any one and every one, with the same faith, and obedience of faith, may, and can, and will go on his way rejoicing. But what Christian experience could he, or the Philippian jailor, have had before they were believ. ingly immersed into Christ? And were they not proper subjects of baptism?!

No unnaturalized alien can have the experience of an American citizen, whatever may be his faith in our doctrine of civil liberty; no unmarried man can have the experience of a husband, nor unmarried woman the experience of a wife; and no anbaptized man can have the experience of one who has believingly and sincerely been immersed into Christ.

Did Philip the Evangelist demand a Christian experience from the Treasurer of Queen Candace's realm? Did Peter demand a Christian experience from the convicted betrayers and murderers of Jesus Christ? Did Ananias demand a Christian experience from Saul of Tarsus, in order to his baptism? Did any New Testament preacher or teacher demand a Christian experience from any one demanding baptism?—! Not one! "If thou believest with all thy heart" that Jesus is the Christ, the anointed Saviour, and art determined to honor and obey him, "thou mayest be immersed." Is not this apostolic teaching? And if so, why substitute John Bunyan's allegory, or John Gill's metaphysics, or any human nostrum, for the apostolic examples and teachings!! To have dethroned the patrons of such human expedients and enthroned the apostles of Christ in the hearts of hundreds of thousands of our contemporaries, is, methinks, worth all the risks and dangers, all the losses and expences, of a twice thirty years' war. What think you, my dear sir?

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We are charged with heterodoxy, by men, too, of whom we would have expected, and from whom we did expect better things. I have just learned the other day that Dr. Alexander, of Princeton, has, in a recent volume, published me as an Unitarian! With just as much truth and show of reason, he might have published me an Atheist. There lives not the man that has a higher or more exalted conception of the Divine and eternal grandeur of the INCARNATE WORD than myself; nor of his infinite worth, and of the sublime and magnificent grandeur of his sacrificial death. "What shall be done unto thee, thou false tongue, that slanderest thy brother;" that either createst or takest up a false report against any one that worships and adores the reigning Monarch of the heavens and of the earth, and of all their tenantries! This gentleman cannot produce one paragraph, one period in all I ever wrote, in its contextual import, that can, by all the tortures of the severest criticism, be made to justify or sustain so malicious a slander. Retract it he must, or prove it he must, before any honorable Christian man can regard him in any other light than that of a public defamer.*

We fear no comparison with any man, however orthodox, in all that we have ever written or spoken of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit of the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of the Incarnate Logos-of the Divine Spirit with which he was Christed, or anointed, above all his fellows, whether prophets, priests, or kings.

It is against the human traditions and the latitudinarian licenses taken by such men to change the ordinances, to annul the everlasting covenant, and to substitute their own nostrums and traditions for Divine oracles, thereby nullifying, as far as they can, the solemn and benignant precepts and institutions of the Divine Lawgiver and King of Zion-the Author and the only Founder of the Christian church or kingdom;-I say it is against their carnalizing, secularizing, and humanizing the institutions of Christ, and making void the oracles of God by their false philosophies and their oral traditions, that we war. It is against their hypocritical prayers for union, while building up their sectarian walls and fortifications against it. So it stands out in legible characters to our eyes, and we should be recreant and false to our own most conscientious convictions, if we did not avow it, and give to them an opportunity, if they desire it, of setting themselves right before our contemporaries.

Others assail our position before our contemporaries, on some alleged departure from the faith, on the personality, mission, and office

*Will the Editor of the Chronicle please send Dr. Alexander, of Princeton, the paper that contains this article, and so well marked as to call his attention to it? And oblige, A. C..