giving force and power to the seduction. Mr. Irving admits, that the soul of Christ never" originated an evil thought;" therefore, all its temptations must have been external; and if his will was holy and "concentric" with the will of God, these temptations must have been uniformly powerless-if not so, Christ must have been a sinner, on every principle that places sin not merely in the overt-act, but in the will and conception. Sin is not merely in the word or act, it is in the thought too; one unholy feeling, one rebellious wish, one single spiritual bias towards evil, is rebellion against God; and if it be true, that “ as a man thinketh, so is he," then it will be difficult to prove Christ not to have been a sinner, if any part of his temptation arose from within-if the temptation presented externally, awakened any other feeling but devotedness to God"if every variety of human wickedness which was ever realized or is possible to be realized, was inherent in his humanity." We have great pleasure in copying some of Mr. Haldane's observations. on this subject:

“There are two kinds of temptation mentioned in Scripture. The one is simply putting a person to the proof, and in this sense God himself is not untemptible.' "In the same sense God tempts or tries his people as silver is tried in the furnace, Psal. xvi. 10.

"In this sense our Lord, in the days of his flesh, was exposed to every temptation to which we are liable; and this was a part of his humiliation-an inevitable consequence of his assuming our nature. Immediately after his baptism, he was led by the Spirit into the wilderness for the very purpose of confronting the tempter, the great adversary of man.... Having ended all his temptations, the devil departed from him for a season; but, through the whole course of his life, the Lord was surrounded with all the allurements of this evil world.

"The Psalmist tells us that God overcometh when he is judged; it only discovers the glory of his character, and so did the temptations with which our Lord was assailed. They proved that the prince of this world had nothing in Christ. There was nothing in his holy mind on which temptation could make the slightest impression.

"In addition to the allurements of the world, Christ endured the contradiction of sinners against himself. The circumstances in which he was placed, gave the adversary every possible advantage, and he improved his opportunities to the uttermost. At the close of our Lord's ministry, Satan collected all bis strength. This is your hour and the power of darkness.' Mr. Irving presumes to maintain, that when Christ prayed in the garden, If it be possible, let this cup pass from me,' he was in his sinful flesh,' rebelling against God. He might as well affirm, that when God says, 'O that my people had hearkened unto me, and Israel had walked in my ways!' he used the language of impotence and disappointment. If the Son of God assumed human nature at all, he must have shrunk from suffering, for this is an essential property of human nature; but over this, and every other feeling, Christ's desire to promote his Father's glory, and his love to his people, rose triumphant, and instead of there being any thing akin to rebellion in his prayer, lf it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt,' it was such a display of the beauty of holiness, that no parallel to it can be found in the annals of created intelligence."—Haldane, pp. 11, 12, 13, 14.

It is manifest, then, that when the Apostle speaks of Christ "being tempted in all points like as we are," he must be understood with those limitations that are consequent upon the nature of the case. A large portion of our temptations arise from within-from our irregular desires, our unbridled lusts, our unbalanced feelings; from these, and this species of temptation, Christ must, on every hypothesis, have been free. But, besides, external temptation is assisted by the traitor within the soul, and the flesh (meaning thereby, not the mere material flesh, as Mr. Irving would suggest, but the desires of gratifying the flesh, which are inherent in the soul,) joins the world and the devil in bringing us into bondage to sin. From this, too, the Redeemer must have been completely free, if Mr. Irving hesitates to say that Christ was a sinner, or if, indeed, the Apostle was justified in adding "yet without sin."

The word of God is not written in the guarded formal style of an act of parliament, the framers of which endeavour to cut off every evasion by the multiplication and explanation of terms.

"The Scriptures are equally intended for all mankind, learned and unlearned; and therefore they are written in the common style of human speech.....This peculiarity of the style of Scripture, should lead all who, like Mr. Irving, take controversial weapons,' to beware of straining particular expressions; for we often meet with general assertions which must be understood in a limited sense. For instance, the apostle says, 'then (when the Lord comes) shall every man have praise of God,' 1 Cor. iv. 5. Again, the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal,' 1 Cor. xii, 7. In both cases, every man must be understood in a qualified sense; for neither shall every man be approved in the day of judg ment, nor was the manifestation of the Spirit bestowed on every man. So when it is said 'Christ was in all points tempted as we are, it must of necessity be understood with this limitation, that while he was exposed to every external temptation, he was not 'drawn away of his own lust, or enticed.”—Haldane, pp. 16, 17, 18.

We shall submit one other consideration, which we own has great weight with us, though it will probably be derided by Mr. Irving. When we consider the person of the Redeemer, and reinember that it is an union of God and man; the most holy, and pure, and perfect God- excellence that cannot admit unholiness into its presence-purity that "calleth the stars unclean, and charges his angels with folly," we confess that we shrink from the idea of an union of such a being, a person so ineffably pure and spotless, with the corruption and sinfulness of our fallen nature-an union, not of knowledge, not of power, or of mere presence, but so complete and perfect, as to form one person for ever so as that this human nature has no subsistence but as one with God, so close and indivisible, that the attributes, and offices, and character of the Logos are ascribed to the Son of Man; and thus investing, as it were, the spotless Son of God with a nature, in which are inherent, unchanged, all the evil propensities, all the corrupt imaginings, all the inventions devised by fallen humanity. This seems to us not very far removed from blasphemy. But no, says Mr. Irving, "How small a matter doth that seem upon which so much stress is laid by the

ignorant, who will allow Christ readily enough to descend to the unfallen, but not to the fallen state of the creature.... It betrayeth a degree of ignorance unpardonable in the Christian, to make a hesitation, after consenting to his becoming man, that he should become man in the fallen state....It is an exceedingly small addition, I may say nothing at all, to Him, that, after taking the infinite descent of being a creature, he should step a hair's-breadth further, and take up the creature in its fallen state. Sermons, p. (328) lix.

Here, too, we are at issue with Mr. Irving.-There can, indeed, be no relative difference to omnipotence in condescending to one physical state of action rather than to another to a worm or to an archangel; but we conceive, with Mr. Haldane, that this is beyond the question-the contrariety is not of a physical, but of a moral kind-not of power, but of purity, To have communion and unite himself with weakness, was indispensable, if the Son of God would unite himself with any created existence; but the question is, whether the whole tenor of our own conceptions, as well as the uniform testimony of Scripture, be not opposed to the notion of an union being formed between a thing absolutely sinful, corrupt, and foul, and the being who "cannot lie," who "is of purer eyes than to behold iniquity," who calleth sin "the abominable thing that he hateth," and yet who was "well pleased" in Jesus Christ, though in Mr. Irving's view possessed of the very nature which had inherent in it all sin and all iniquity. We are inclined to take the affirmative of this position, and to believe with the powerful writer we have so often quoted, that Mr. Irving, by his hypothesis, "blends holiness and sin, which are so opposed, they cannot coalesce," and in his reasoning loses sight of "the distinction between God's natural greatness and moral purity, one of which was veiled in the humanity of Christ, but the other did not, and could not, suffer the least abatement." In fine, we deem Mr. Irving's hypothesis opposed to our plainest conceptions, involving in it inconsistencies and contradictions, degrading the sanctity of God, necessarily involving the actual sinfulness of the Holy One, and drawing after it consequences destructive alike of confidence in the righteousness of the Redeemer, and the efficacy of his atonement for sinners. Explain it as he may, these defects inhere in his system; he may involve it in abstract reasoning and metaphysical disquisitions, but he never can show that a nature which requires the preventing power of the Holy Ghost is otherwise than sinful; that a sinful nature can exist without its possessor being a sinner; that a sinner* can by any possibility, consistent with the revealed attributes of God, have access to him, but through an atonement, or that Christ, having a sinful nature, could become an atonement for the sins of others. This seems to us to be the plain common-sense of the question, from which Mr. Irving's eloquence and reasoning cannot protect him, and would seem to involve us in more awful consequences than even the heresy

* This reasoning, we conceive, can be confuted upon no grounds that would not deny children to be sinners, and that they require an atonement, even before the will consents to the commission of actual sin.

of Priestley, who never presumed to call Christ a sinner, though he made him fallible; it overturns the very foundation of the atonement, for the lamb that is slain must be "without spot and blemish," holy and perfect in his nature; and it interferes with the trust and confidence in the merits of our great high priest, through whom " we have boldness to approach the throne" of divine grace. Though Christ is no sinner in fact, though his enemies could not convict him of sin, yet the mere circumstance of his "liability to sin" must diminish, and therefore destroy, the fullness of the believer's trust. "True," would the Socinian infidelity of man exclaim, “true, Jesus Christ may have exhibited a perfectly holy life and conversation -his friends and his enemies may have joined in declaring him to be free from any violation of the law, and to the temptations presented to him, he was superior; but from some temptations being presented and overcome, we cannot infer a complete immunity from sin-we cannot conclude that, if other and greater were presented, he might not have fallen-and, therefore, as it is only in degree, not in kind, that his holiness differs from mine, why should I relinquish the one as a ground of hope, to lean upon another, only more fortunate, not more substantial ?" Nor do we see what can be replied on Mr. Irving's theory. It is only upon the absolute holiness of Christ's nature we can really depend on that which did not sin, because Satan had "nothing in him," that the believer can repose his confidence of acceptance with God, in full assurance that God will receive it.

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We will now proceed to the consideration of what ought, perhaps, to have first engaged us, but that Mr. Irving's strange metaphysics drew us aside--we mean the testimony borne on this subject by the word of God. It is from that word alone that information can be drawn, and they but "darken counsel by words without knowledge," who substitute human reasonings for the details of God's word, and, instead of asking information from his Spirit, seek to obtain it by "the high a priori road." And what is the testimony of Scripture? We have already alluded to the remarkable interpretation in the New Testament of a prophecy in the Old, which is distinctly referred by St. Paul to this very subject, a body hast thou prepared me," intimating most plainly that the material tabernacle, with which the Son of God had condescended to unite himself, was a new creation-that it was a new thing in the earth"-that though in Adam all die, because all else are Adam's descendants, born under the original command, Christ's human nature was not included in that command, and therefore must have been free from the curse entailed by Adam's guilt on his posterity. "The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Most High shall overshadow thee," is the declaration under which Christ's human nature had its origin, while" encrease and multiply" is the sanction under which every other human being is born into the world. In the dispensations of God, it has been beautifully and justly remarked, there is an economy of miracle, almighty power never interfering to check or change the laws of nature, until moral

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motives and causes have had their full development; but if Mr. Irving's hypothesis be true, revelation here discloses a miracle, single, as to its magnitude, in the annals of man, that has attracted the notice and excited the astonishment of so many prophets, and yet, so far as we can perceive, this miracle without object and without aim. Original sin consists, according to the strictest of the Geneva school, not merely in the imputation of Adam's sin, but in the consequent corruption and mortality of nature, and if Christ were cursed in the loins of Adam," he must have been subject to the degrading influence of that fall, have been entirely corrupt and alien from God, and no after change, imperfect as it is allowed to have been, could, without atonement, render him, as one of a seed of evil-doers, acceptable to his heavenly Father. But Christ was not under this curse, he was a new creation, though he took the nature of the substance of the Virgin; and not being, as Mr. Irving allows, under original sin, could not have been under its consequences, and therefore

*

*To this effect speak Pearson, Usher, and Horsely:

"Whereas we draw something of corruption and contamination by our seminal traduction from the first Adam, our Saviour bath received the same nature without any culpable inclination, because born of a virgin without any seminal traduction. Our High Priest is separate from sinners, not only in the actions of his life, but in the production of his nature. We, being in the loins of Adam, may be all said to sin in him; yet Christ, who descended from the same Adam according to the flesh, was not partaker of that sin, but an expiation for it.

"Whatsoever our original corruption is, howsoever displeasing unto God, we may be assured there was none in him, in whom alone God declared himself well pleased. This original and total sanctification of the human nature was first necessary to fit it for the personal union with the Word, who, out of his infinite love, humbled himself to become flesh; and at the same time, out of his infinite purity, could not defile himself by becoming sinful flesh.

"The Father made him to be sin for us who knew no sin, that we might be made the righteousness of God in him; which we could not have been made in him, but that he did no sin, and knew no sin: for whosoever is sinful wanteth a Redeemer; and He could have redeemed none who stood in need of his own redemption."— Pearson's Expos. pp. 179, 167.

"Why was be born of a virgin? That he might be holy and without sin, the natural course of original corruption being prevented, because he came not by natural propagation. As we must be saved, so likewise must we be sanctified by one of our own nature; that as in the first Adam there was a spring of human nature corrupted, derived unto us by natural generation: so in the second Adam there might be a fountain of the same nature restored, which might be derived unto us by spiritual regeneration."-Usher's Body of Divinity, pp. 163, 164.

"In the virgin's womb be clothes bimsell with flesh; and, together with that mortal clothing, he assumes man's perfect nature,―a nature subject to our wants and to our pains, not insensible to our enjoyments; susceptible, as appeared in many actions of his life, of our social attachments; and, though pure from the stain of sin, not exempt from the feeling of temptation..... It was necessary to the scheme of redemption, by the Redeemer offering of himself as an expiatory sacrifice, that the manner of his conception should be such that he should in no degree partake of the natural pollution of the fallen race, whose guilt he came to atone, nor be included in the general condemnation of Adam's progeny..... In brief, the /condemnation and the iniquity of Adam's progeny were universal: to reverse the universal sentence, and to purge the universal corruption, a Redeemer was to be found pure of every stain of inbred and contracted guilt: and since every person produced in the natural way could not but be of the contaminated race, the purity requisite to the efficacy of the Redeemer's atonement made it necessary that the manner of his conception should be supernatural."-Horsley, Serm. pp. 241, 425.