might overlook the elect here on the earth. They have anxiously explored the richest veins of literature in search of "latent infidelity."

Are not all these apprehensions quite gratuitous ? Shall any friend of Christianity confess, or imply, that his religion prospers best with ignorance? Shall we fear that the discovery of God's footsteps in the material universe, may destroy the love or suspend the worship we owe him in the moral universe? Shall we cramp the feet of our youthful intellect into the shoes of authority, or train our gifted nature, like a Brahmin idolater, to wait before the gate of heaven upon one leg? Let us away with all such puerile perversions of the sense and faith with which divine goodness has armed us. The mind of man was made to grow; to feed upon the intellectual fruitage of the universe. If we have any notions that must perish by the legitimate progress of man, let them die without appeal, while we are nourished with what remains. Truth will not die, for it is immortal. In how many dungeons has it been fettered, on how many scaffolds has it bled; and, behold! along the van of the race, on the boundary line of epochs, it strides immutable and victorious!

An old writer gives us much instruction in the story of a clown, who killed his ass because he fancied he had drank up the moon! The clown meant well, but the event proved that he had acted on a serious misapprehension of facts. The poor beast had not drank the moon, after all; but only the reflection of that gentle luminary in a bucket of water. It is best not to imitate this clown in our treatment of the human mind; for, though it may drink up some poor and transitory reflection of a truth, the celestial luminary itself is infinitely above its reach, and there is really no hostility between them.

Men receive truth according to their circumstances or capacities. Some men are so gross that they must have the truth diluted with a mixture of superstition-one grain of sense to forty grains of nonsense. Hence some receive, with some of the primal truths of religion, a vast amount of mere hearsay-the garbage of human thought. They believe in a verbal inspiration,-that God dictated the

3 Cited by Carlisle. Art. Voltaire.

words, letters, marks of punctuation, and divisions into chapter and verse, as well as the principles and spirit of the Bible. They believe that the almighty Father is susceptible of passion; that he loves, hates, vacillates, and storms like a police justice, who has more wickedness to punish than he knows what to do with. They believe in a literal, vulgar hell, wherein God will delight to torment his rebel children, as Henry the Eighth tormented those subjects who would not subscribe to his spiritual supremacy. But as men grow more intelligent and refined, they become ashamed of these crudities and vulgarities. They find the eternal spirit of Scripture under its mutable forms. They drop out of their minds the elements of superstition; retaining the pure treasury of truth, and adding to that store from year to year. So men are continually renovating their minds, and sublimating the elements of their religion. Thus, as they grow in grace and rise in the scale of experience, they smile at the bugbear that appalled their infancy, while they lay hold of the principles and anticipate the dignity of eternal life.

Men of large intelligence and mature reflection require the unmixed and crystal truth. They have no room in their precious brains for rubbish. All the space is appropriated by the trophies of wisdom. Their " encyclopædiac heads dine on the science of mankind, and still wander for want of meat." These men are the intellectual marshals of the race; who, in their lonely valor, storm the fortresses of error, and open wide, through calumny and suffering, the gates of freedom to all mankind.

With a large toleration of the growth, and a wise recognition of the liberty, of the human mind, may we plant high the standard of denominational culture. Our ministry needs it; for it must engage well organized battalions-not only bearing the plumes of fashion, and the banner of the League-but clad in the solid mail of scholarship. That man preaches Universalism most effectively, through whose mind it shines as light through a prism-having its rays separated into the minutest lines, and distributed to every taste and capacity. There is no doubt that a faith worthy to comprise "the fulness of the

blessing of the gospel of Christ," is susceptible of this manifold exhibition, having rays of truth so diversified in their hues and expressions that every soul must ultimately derive from it an awakening beam.

But in order that the gospel faith may be thus presented, we must command the resources of the best learning, and broadest culture, which the age affords. These are the ladders by which we must climb the mountain of the Lord, discover the hidden treasures of wisdom that vein the celestial road, and behold how all the anomalous windings of Providence unfold in one tranquil sea. With these we may grasp all the evidences and lessons of Universalism, which nature, Providence, and Revelation unite to reflect; and enter upon influential relations with the ripest scholarship and wisest thought of the age.

In taking leave of the topic, we think we express the prevailing sentiment of the denomination, when we suggest that the retreats of learning evoked into existence by Universalism should be no respecter of sex. That woman should enter here, side by side with man, participating in all his advantages, emulating his ambition, and becoming his queen-consort in the mental sovereignty of the world. That her graceful and pliant nature,-adorning the ever shifting scenery of life, and drawing from man his noblest qualities, should be allowed to unfold to all the opportunities of Christian civilization, and to grace the noon-tide glory of the truth, whose early morning she watched by the sepulchre of Christ.

E. W. R.

ART. XXIV.

The Doctrine of Necessity.

WE think it will facilitate any examination that we may undertake of the Necessitarian theory in general, if we begin by distinguishing its two principal schemes, as they

are held by different classes of its advocates. By keeping such a distinction in view, there will be less danger of confounding what belongs to the one scheme with what belongs to the other; and by comparing the two, by seeing how each carries out its respective elements, we shall have a better chance to test them, and to understand the merits of the whole.

We shall first take that scheme which is the least complicated, and in which, we think, the Necessitarian element is developed the more fully, and in the more straightforward manner. Afterwards, we shall consider what may be called the Modified scheme; which is the one. now chiefly held and known under the name of the Doctrine of Necessity. When we come to this latter, we shall mark how far it goes along with the former, where it branches off from it, and for what reasons it separates.

I. The simplest scheme of the general theory, and we think the most consistent with itself, is the one commonly known under the name of Fatalism.' This, again, may be stated in two forms, namely, the philosophical, and the theological; though these two are capable of being blended together, and indeed are often identical in meaning, as we shall see.

The philosophical form of Fatalism stands on this position: That the human mind is subject to a universal Law of Cause and Effect, in such a way that it can, in no case, be otherwise disposed than as it is necessitated to be disposed, by that law; nor, in any case, act otherwise than as it is necessitated to act, by the same law. Accordingly, every feeling of ours, good or bad, every dis

1 We use this term here, because it is commonly used to designate this scheme as distinguished from that other scheme of Necessity which we have called the Modified one. There is some popular odium resting on the term, Fatalism; and therefore it would be desirable to change it, were it not that the scheme itself will always be subject to as much odium, whatever name it be called by. It is but just, however, to observe, that the Fate of the Ancients was not identical with the Fate of the Moderns. Indeed, it is rarely that any speculative notion of the Ancients is identical with the corresponding notion of the Moderns. On the present subject, the former were far less thorough, in their theory, far less Fatalistic indeed, than the latter. They confined their Fate chiefly to the outward event; they never carried it down through all the internal processes of our mind and being. The Modern theory requires a stronger term, if such could be found.

position of our heart, every principle or motive we act from, every intention, every thought, that we have, is wrought out within us by a congeries of causes, over which we have no power. Or, if it may be said, in an improper sense, that we have some power in the case, still it is a power that is itself determined with equal absoluteness by remoter causes, and consequently has nothing to do with the point now at issue. We indeed seem to ourselves to have a personal agency; but, in reality, we have none. All our mental energies and activities are first produced, and then wholly governed, either by the constitutional laws of our being, which we had no hand in making, and which we cannot control; or else, by exciting causes from without, which work with those laws, and, with their co-operation, produce the entire result for us, whatever it is. We cannot begin a wish, or an effort, or any mood of mind, till we are thus necessitated to do so; nor, after it is begun for us, can we arrest it, or modify it, or do any thing whatsoever about it, otherwise than as mere instruments managed by those combined forces. Thus, the whole mind, with all its affections, and with all its faculties, is tightly locked up in an indeflectible gearing of Cause and Effect, so that it cannot stir a hair's breadth, except as it is stirred by some movement in the forces that hold and sway it. The mind can do nothing but what it is thus made to do. It is as incapable of an act properly its own, as a machine is; and is as passive under the impulses by which it is put in action, and kept in action. Both the mind and the machine must be moved by something else, in order to move at all; and when they do move, they can but move just as they are thus moved.

If it be felt that this language is too strong, or if there be an impression that we represent the element of necessity as more pervading, and more despotic, in the case, than the doctrine really demands, a second thought will discover that we do not exaggerate, and indeed that it is impossible to exaggerate, in these respects. For it is essential to Fatalism, that necessity be absolute and universal; that it go down to the bottom of our being, and leave not the very subtilest movement of our nature, nor the remotest tendency to move, loose from its clasp.