forms; the daily uses of life and the living idea to whose perfect measures this daily life must refer for its rule and law, are all bound up in the same bundle of solemn and impassioned utterance; solving the problem and clearing the doubt for the thinker in his study, and affording to the humblest Christian, to cheer and strengthen him at his toil, his daily bread and wine. These Divine patterns should be the preacher's models. In proportion as he enters into the genius and spirit of the sacred writers themselves, will his discourses be filled with freshness, vitality and power, and be suited to the variety of minds which he is called upon to address; simple enough for the weakest, and deep enough for the profoundest mind. The word of Christ must dwell in him richly in all wisdom. The word of Christ in its indwelling and quickening power is the source of all his true knowledge and wisdom as a minister of the Gospel. Beginning here at the centre and germ, the life and the doctrine advance together hand in hand; the latter cannot outgo the former, but it is only its product and rational form. Hence the inexhaustible foun. tain from which the preacher may draw. It is no cistern that may be pumped dry; but a perennial spring, affluent as that which the grace of Christ opens in the heart, springing up into everlasting life. For the nearer he lives to Christ, the more he meditates upon his Divine work in the heart, the broader, the deeper, the clearer his experience becomes; the more he draws upon it, the more full it is, the more exuberant and gushing; throwing light over the dark things of God's Providence, and drawing aside the veil from one after another of the mysteries of Scripture; dispelling doubts, reconciling contradictions, and, in place of the fears and perplexities which disturb the mind, after human reason and human virtue have done their utmost, introduces the clear light of conscious experience and the full assurance of faith. With good reason did the Psalmist exclaim; "The entrance of thy words giveth light." Psalm 119: 130, 33* ARTICLE VII. DR. ALEXANDER'S MORAL SCIENCE.1 The first is the THERE are two modes of treating ethical science. Biblical method. It consists in deriving the knowledge of our duties from the revealed Word of God; proving them by citations from the Bible; enforcing them by the promises and threatenings of the sacred volume. This has been the favorite method with recent evangelical moralists in Germany. It has preeminent advantages peculiar to itself. The second mode is the philosophical, and is by some miscalled the rationalistic. It consists in deriving the knowledge of our duties from the constitution and relations of man; proving them by the dictates of human reason and conscience; enforcing them by the rewards and punishments preintimated in the necessary operations of the human mind. This is the method adopted by various English moralists, and in the main by Dr. Alexander in the present volume. We were not prepared to expect that this author would avow in any sense his belief in the following propositions, which have been denominated neological by some of his brethren: "Objections to self-evident principles, however plausible, should not be regarded; for, in the nature of things, no reasonings can overthrow plain intuitive truths, as no reasonings can be founded on principles more certain." "It may be thought that this account of virtue makes the moral faculty the only standard of moral excellence. In one sense this is true. It is impossible for us to judge any action to be virtuous, which does not approve itself when fairly contemplated by our moral sense.' "When the mind is in a sound state, and any moral action is presented to it, with all the circumstances which belong to it, the judgment of this faculty is always correct and uniform in all men."4 "In regard to sin and duty, the ultimate appeal must be to conscience." The philosophical method, if properly pur 998 1 Outlines of Moral Science, by Archibald Alexander, D. D., late Professor in the Theological Seminary at Princeton, N. J. New York: Charles Scribner. 185. pp. 272. 12mo. Alexander's Moral Science, p. 125. Here, and throughout this Article, we have taken the liberty to italicize for ourselves the more important words in the quotations which we make. ४ Ib. p. 136. 4 lb. lb. p. 188. See also pp. 60, 62, 63. sued, is by no means hostile to the Biblical. Nothing but an error in the philosophy can make it differ from the inspired Word. It furnishes a basis on which a large part of the Scriptural morality would rest, even if misguided men should be unwilling to credit the inspired Volume. In some degree, the science of morals precedes even theism itself. 66 'Although the belief of the existence of God is not necessary to the operations of conscience," says Dr. Alexander, "yet from the existence of this faculty the existence of God may be inferred." Even an atheist remains under moral obligation. The truths of moral science furnish a proof of the Divine existence. It is useful for every theologian to examine the principles of duty both as they are unfolded in the Bible, and also as they are exhibited in the reason and conscience of man. His theological notions are sometimes inconsistent with the volume of inspiration, and he may often discover this inconsistency by comparing them with that other volume which God has written within the human soul. When the eyes of a divine are turned away from the necessities of a theological. party, he expresses his habitual and unbiassed opinion. He does not think, for the moment, of the influence which that opinion would exert upon the favorite creed of his party. That creed may contravene the laws of human thought, as these laws are revealed in language. It may be a creed which he holds as an excrescence to his habitual belief. In examining the principles of duty by the light of human reason, he is often impelled to use such language as the laws of thought demand, and thus to contradict his unscriptural theories. There is, for example, a dispute among theologians whether all sin and holiness be in their own nature active, or whether some holiness and some sin be entirely passive. The lamented author of the volume now under review has been, we presume justly, ranked among those who believe in the passivity of some, and even of our radical holiness and sin. It is, therefore, instructive to see that nearly his entire volume is devoted to the moral qualities of actions, and comparatively few paragraphs have even an allusion to this moral character which precedes all agency. Why is it so? The passive state is thought to be holiness or sin par eminence. It is said to be the source of all other kinds of holiness and sin. All other kinds are imagined to derive their character from this. Accordingly, this should be the prominent object of consideration in an ethical treatise. The main effort of the writer should be to encour 1 Moral Science, pp. 87, 88, 55. age passive virtue, inactive morality. A volume of moral science which confines itself in great measure to the mere exercises which are called virtuous or vicious, should be deemed a superficial work. If it be other than superficial, the sole reason of its being so must be, that the theory of a moral character antecedent to all inward exercises, is a mistake. The structure of all languages demonstrates it to be a mistake. It is an edifying fact that the habitual style in which Dr. Alexander speaks of virtue and vice, is the same which had been previously adopted by the Hopkinsian divines of New England. Our limits will not allow us to quote many of the sentences in which he asserts, as decidedly as our New England theologians have done, that virtue is that "quality in certain actions which is perceived by a rational mind to be good; and vice or sin is that which a well-constituted and well-informed mind sees to be evil." He cites an objection which may be made against his own theory, and this objection is, that "to define virtue to be only such actions as the moral faculty in man approves, is to make it a very uncertain and fluctuating thing, depending on the variable and discrepant moral feelings of men." He explicitly declares that "no judgment can be formed on moral subjects but by the moral faculty;" and that "nothing can be considered as partaking of the nature of virtue which does not meet with the approbation of the moral faculty;" and in the very first sentence of his book he defines this moral faculty to be "the power of discovering a difference between actions as to their moral quality." He often repeats this definition of conscience as the "faculty by which we can perceive at once the moral character of an act," and as the "judgment of the quality of moral acts." We cannot recall a single instance in which he has unequivocally spoken of conscience as a power of determining the moral character of a passive state. The laws of philosophical language forbid such a definition. There is no moral faculty, then, which can take cognizance of this morality which precedes all moral agency. The whole texture of Dr. Alexander's treatise is pervaded by such remarks as these: "The more clearly we see anything to be moral, the more sensibly we feel ourselves under a moral obligation to perform it."" But do we ever perform a "passive state?" "If there is anything clear in the view of a rational mind, it is this, that virtue should be practised, that what is right should be done." Did our author, in Ib. pp. 190, 191. 7 Ib. p. 52; see also pp. 60, 73–77, penning that sentence, imagine that we are to "practise" and to "do" an inactive nature? He unequivocally declares that "actions of moral agents are the proper and only objects of moral approbation and disapprobation." Samuel Hopkins never propounded the "Exercise scheme" with more decision than this. We repeat our saying, that Dr. Alexander is classed with the divines who adopt the theory of passive holiness and sin. We presume that he did, in his theological speculations, sanction that error. We only affirm, that he could not found a system of ethics upon it. He must forget it for an interval at least. We perceive that he has, in a few paragraphs of this treatise, resorted to the dogma of a moral state preceding moral acts; but the method of his alluding to it proves that he could not, as an ethical writer, consistently adhere to it. Here is one of his brief allusions to the dogma: "When it is said that the actions of moral agents are the only proper objects of moral approbation or disapprobation, two qualifications of the assertion must be taken into view. The first is, that the omission to act when duty calls, is as much an object of disapprobation as a wicked action." Certainly, we add, for it is a wicked action; an act of choice to omit duty. "The second qualification of the statement is, that when we disapprove an external act, we always refer the blame to the motive or intention. But if we have evidence that the agent possesses a nature or disposition which will lead him often or uniformly to perpetrate the same act when the occasion shall occur, we not only censure the motive, but extend our moral disapprobation to the disposition or evil nature lying behind." We by no means deny that, at the moment of penning these sentences, their venerable author intended to assert that holiness and sin are predicable of the soul's passive nature; that they inhere in an inactive state of which we are unconscious, for he elsewhere affirms that "we are not conscious of the existence of what is called disposition, temper, principle." But it is very obvious that he does not, because he cannot, remain faithful to this theory during more than than two or three consecutive paragraphs. It is in general a dormant, passive, undeveloped theory, in some degree similar to passive virtue. Let us glance at the very passages where, if any where, he ought to be true to his own metaphysical dogma. In his twenty-second chapter, he attempts to prove that "morality belongs to principles as well as acts" and prosecuting his argument he asserts that "voluntary wick 1 Moral Science, p. 89. 2 lb. pp. 93, 94. 3 Ib. p. 148. |