method, fully admitted, has honeycombed many a superstitious notion, and toppled not a few of the time-honored dogmas.

Further, there has in recent years been an extraordinary quickening and extending of the philosophical spirit; and this not less than the scientific method has proved a revolutionary leaven in the contiguous but by no means identical theological territory. And the progress has been most potent in the separating the postulates of philosophy which have been determined and fixed, from those which are variable and uncertain. The superficial have been long wont to decry philosophical study as merely speculative, having in it nothing stable and authoritative. Those competent to form a judg ment on the subject have replied: Much of it is merely speculative and uncertain; but some of it is as clearly put to rest as the axioms of mathematics; some of it is in current and unquestioning use by theologians even, and by scientists, not less than by philosophers themselves; some of it is more solid than the rocks, and enters as final authority over Scripture itself, even the conservative divines being judges. These well understood and practically u: questioned axioms in philosophy were not matured with any dominant purpose to serve theology. With many thinkers they have been verified without any thought or care for any possible effect upon religious belief. But none the less they have passed into the theological department. and have therein wrought startling yet relentless modifications.

In touching upon the scientific realm we have given great preeminence to Sir Charles Lyell. In the philosophical realm we cannot err if we trace the leavening process mainly to Sir William Hamilton, and to his student-on whom the mantle of Hamilton fell-Henry Longueville Mansel. And what in regard to Mansel is notable and remarkable, possibly we should say, providential, is the fact that he took up the philosophical axioms with the intent, the avowed intent, of keeping them out of the theological world! The elaborate purpose of his "Limits of Religious Thought" was to show that theology

has nothing in common with philosophy, and that its dogmas resting upon the Word may be affirmed in spite of, directly in opposition to, the axioms! This inane avowal has without doubt done more than any other specific thing to open the theological gate and let the philosophical tide rush in.

A long and instructive chapter could be easily written recounting the details of this folly of a philosopher turned to good account. We have room but for a single example. Dr. Mansel's aim was that of shielding Calvinism from the application of his own postulates. To this end he averred that justice, mercy, righteousness, goodness, may, for aught we can know, be different things with God from what they are with men. If the Word represents them as different and Dr. Mansel held that it does we are authorised to accept its statements in spite of the facts! This preposterous position, equivalent to the saying that circles on earth may be squares in heaven, and circles in heaven be squares on earth, naturally went down in the light of common sense. The stalwart logic of John Stuart Mill, shivering it to atoms and leaving it to the derision of thinking people, was hardly needed; it was bound to die a natural death. But it accomplished a providential purpose; in an inevitable rebound from it, theologians saw themselves forced to make logical use of the principles which Dr. Mansel had told them they might waive. And while we remember that the Hamiltonian school had a prestige vastly exceeding that of its modern predecessors; and that after the death of his master Mansel was its most erudite and authoritative apostle, the conclusion is reasonable that the theological disintegration it has wrought has been very great. In the light of its virtual postulate that things which cannot be construed to thought cannot be held in real beliefs, the Calvinistic Trinity went to pieces. The truth that justice and goodness are unchangeable qualities, despite the attempt of Mansel to limit the fact to the human realm took the foundation from under the doctrine of endless punishment as a penal infliction. And when these two doginas were shaken the Calvinistic atonement was seen to be a needless absurdity,

and the moral atonement notably in the person of Bushnell-crowded out the expiatory. And so on.

Again, and for this connection finally, and without any attempt to trace the sources or the authorities, great importance is to be attached to the dominance now conceded to the facts of Ethics. The freedom of the human will as indestructible as its own immortality; sin and virtue having no existence save as they are freely elected-save as the faculty and the opportunity remain to cast them off or to retain them; the essence of culpability disappearing as the ability to repent disappears supposing this to be possible; reward and retribution having no natural existence save as they in herein, and become the fruitage of, good or ill intent: these are essentials of Ethical truth; they are impregnable; they are with the authorities no more matter of dispute than are the fundamentals of physics. Ethics and theology are not identicalthey are the hemispheres of the same sphere- they are related each supports the other; but they are different. It is correct to say that the particulars of the Ethical philosophy which we have enumerated have been wrought out, matured, and verified in a realm external to theology. As influences modifying theology they are exterior. It is at least supposable that the thinkers who have demonstrated them, had no thought of, or care for, any possible effect upon theology.

None the less the outcome in greatly changed religious beliefs is vast, radical, and resistless. With the conceded truth that the will may, that to be will it must, elect its moral status, what becomes of the dogma of probation limited to earth in fact, what becomes of probation anywhere in the customary definition of the word? what becomes of the notion of souls "fixed in eternal doom"? With the conceded truth that penalty is a natural result and not an arbitrary inflic tion, what becomes of the dogma of punishment forever for sins committed in time? And with the truth of sin as selfpunishing what office is left to the personal Satan? These questions answer themselves. The New Orthodoxy in its growing revolt from the Old is the trophy of Ethical advance working from without.

We should take no pride, but on the contrary feel something of humiliation, if with all this agitation and progress on its border, the Universalist movement had not, in any regard, felt the leavening spirit. In its distinguishing tenet Universalism of course remains exactly as it has ever been, for change in this particular would be dissolution. But in its correlated principles, particularly in its methods of defence, and in the ethical processes which it presumes, Universalism in common with all the other Protestant creeds, has been changed and improved by the entrance of the scientific method, and particularly by the substituting of a moral in the place of a mechanical theory of redemption.

When the Universalist idea began to assert itself a hundred years ago, and when half a century later it began to manifest more of the organizing temper, it would be preposterous to put in a claim for its leaders that they were in all things wiser than their generation. Half a century ago the prevailing Protestant impression was that souls are saved by the arbitrary fiat of the Almighty; that when the body died the soul went, literally went, to some specific place-heaven or hell; that God saved by putting it in the one place, and doomed by putting it into the other; that redemption and perdition were wrought not in the soul but for it. In a word the "plan of salvation" the very phrase is suggestivewas mechanical; in hardly any very conscious sense was it ethical. The whole of theology has at this date been in good degree taken out of this coarse conception has been relieved of its unthinkable accompaniments. It is to be hoped that ere long the basis of theology in all the denominations will be purely ethical that every shred of its unnatural wrappings and supports and argumentations, will be sloughed away. We are rapidly becoming appreciative of the thought, as we have long been familiar with the phrase, heaven and hell as states not as places, wrought in the soul and not superimposed upon it, or built up around it walling it in as the old New England pound held the captured stray cattle.

It may not in particular instances, and with abrupt distine

tion, be possible, as we have explained, to separate the processes which are Exterior from those which are Interior, for they are mutually reciprocal and each overflows, and often by conscious pushing, goes into, the other. Yet we think it has been made clear and conclusive that the particular intellectual movements which have been briefly delineated, have for most part been quite independent of any theological status, and have been operated without regard to the possible effect upon modes of religious thinking and belief. The fact is palpable we rejoice in it for it is great progress that, even without the intent of the leaders of these mental activities, and in some instances directly against their intentions, they have been a mighty leaven flowing in from the Exterior. By their assimilative power, they have, in great essentials, leavened and changed the entire mass of theological opinion, in every ecclesiastical community where thinking is permissi ble, or where in spite of edicts it has forced its way.

Rev. G. H. Emerson, D.D.

ARTICLE II.

Paradise Found.1

I.

THIS book the record of the latest Arctic Expedition in quest of the North Pole is a strange medley. It is made up of solid geological facts and loose unwarranted inferences. The author is evidently well read in geological literature but as evidently is not a geologist. On well established scientific facts he has built up a fantastical theory which stands as a house of cards on a foundation of granite. The book must be classed with the many that have appeared during the last half century, but which are now fortunately becoming few, in which the authors have undertaken to prove the agreement of

1 Paradise Found. By W. F. Warren. ST.D. LL.D. President of the Boston University.