But if you want intellectually to embrace them, you must not object to this style of thought; for you might as well try to comprehend a proposition of Euclid without mathematical thought, as thus to embrace the Bible doctrine of grace without metaphysical; involving, as this doctrine does, the ideas of the Divine Power and man's free-will, and their relation to each other. So far as metaphysics are a simple entering into, and obliging the mind to dwell upon, and lay hold of, certain great and fundamental ideas of your religion, so far they are simply the natural exercise of your reason upon religious truth, for the legitimate and modest object of a rational comprehension of it. Do not, then, summarily reject such metaphysics as these.

I have spoken of Bible theology; I will speak now of Patristic. If one father has, in the theological movement of the last twenty years, been quoted and appealed to more than another, it is St. Augustine. Yet I must be pardoned if I say that this constant appeal to his authority has not involved much apparent acquaintance with his system of doctrine. By his system of doctrine I mean that great system of which he was the first expounder in the Church, and which will always be connected with his name. St. Augustine's typical interpretations of Scripture, his devotional writings, and other portions of his works not connected with his characteristic teaching, have been read and quoted; but that great doctrine which constitutes his peculiarity as a teacher and crowned his theological career, which fixed him alike in the chair of medieval and Protestant theology, and to the inculcation of which the principal energies of his life, as a thinker and writer, were devoted, has hardly been looked into. With the exception of a faint allusion to it here and there, Augustinianism has been left untouched, and persons have been content with the vaguest ideas of

what Augustine said or did not say, on what was to him the most important and absorbing question of his whole theological life. With a general impression that he taught predestination, nobody appears to have examined at all the particulars of his doctrine, to have compared his statements, elicited his grounds, or made out his system and rationale. This was not, of course, to know St. Augustine, for persons cannot be correctly said to know an author if they have not made themselves acquainted with his distinctive and characteristic teaching. But want of acquaintance with St. Augustine was not of itself, perhaps, a matter of so much consequence. What made it of consequence was, that he was often quoted as a witness to a particular doctrine to which his doctrine of predestination bore an important relation—a relation intimately affecting the mode and sense in which he held the former doctrine;-I refer to the doctrine of Baptismal Regeneration. It ought to have been ascertained what his doctrine of predestination was, before he was brought forward so confidently as a witness to a doctrine of baptismal regeneration.

In this state of the case, I endeavoured, however imperfectly, to fill up the gap which had been left, and to explain the distinctive portion of St. Augustine's theology. But St. Augustine, it is no incorrectness to say, was a metaphysician, and it was impossible to explain a metaphysician without some metaphysics.

year.

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So much for the treatise I published last sent treatise enters into the other position which was to be examined; that, namely, of baptismal regeneration. But before I launch the reader into particulars, it may not be amiss to give him a general outline of the argument of the treatise, leaving him, if he feels inclined to pursue the subject, to fill up the sketch out of the body of the work.

The question of baptismal regeneration belongs to the general question of literal interpretation, and must be settled by those rules by which the question of literal interpretation in other cases is settled. All baptized Christians are asserted in Scripture to be regenerate. I say this with the full knowledge that my statement requires explanation; but the explanation is not difficult. First, then, under the phrase "asserted to be" regenerate, I mean to include all those places in which Christian communities are addressed as such; in which, that is, the fact is implied, or taken for granted, rather than stated. And this may fairly be done, for a reference to a fact is equivalent to asserting it, and it is all one whether you say something of a person, or address him as being it. Again, under the term regenerate, I include a class of expressions synonymous with it, and obviously signifying or implying a new or second birth. Thus, Christians are addressed by St. Paul as "dead to sin"; but a death implies that a former life is over, and that the life which the Christian is living now is a new or second life, which, of course, involves a new or second birth. They are addressed again as "dead with Christ,' "dead with Christ," "buried with Christ;' and of these expressions the same may be said that was said of the preceding one. Again, they are addressed as "risen with Christ," and a resurrection is the commencement of a second life, or a new birth. They are addressed again as quickened," as " alive from the dead," "alive unto God,"expressions which are obviously synonymous with regenerate or born again. The members, then, of the Christian societies to which St. Paul writes are all, without distinction, addressed as regenerate or born again; and therefore it may correctly, and with perfect truth, be said, that Scripture asserts all baptized Christians to be regenerate.

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Now, how is this assertion to be interpreted? It may be

said that we must go to the Fathers for this purpose; but the Fathers throw no new light on this language, for they simply repeat it. They use substantially the same language which Scripture uses, only somewhat expanded and enriched; and therefore, instead of interpreting Scripture, the Fathers have themselves to be interpreted as much as Scripture has to be. It may be said again that our own baptismal office at any rate interprets this language; but our baptismal office again simply repeats it. For the interpretation of this assertion of Scripture, then, we are thrown back upon Scripture itself, that is to say, upon the ordinary and received rules or principles of interpretation which we apply to Scripture.

Now the received rule for the interpretation of Scripture is, that where a text can be taken literally, consistently with sound reason and facts, the literal interpretation has the precedence; but that where this cannot be done, the literal interpretation must give way for another.

Let us take, for example, the maxim in Scripture, "Resist not evil." The Quakers interpret this text literally, and so condemn all war and the use of arms, as contrary to Scripture. But to this it is replied, that society could not be maintained and human interests protected without the liberty of appeal to force; and therefore, that, in the case of this text, the literal meaning cannot be the true one. Again: the Roman Catholics interpret the text, "This is my Body,' literally; but to this it is replied, that on any principle of literal interpretation, our Lord's body was His visible natural body, then present at the Last Supper, while the bread was the material bread on the table; that, this being the case, it is contrary to possibility that one thing can be another; and that here again, therefore, the literal interpretation cannot be the true one. And in the case of many other texts of Scripture, we reject without much scruple the literal mean

ing, where we see that such meaning is contrary to sound reason, or to other texts of the same Scripture.

Indeed, however natural and proper a general bias in favour of literal interpretation must be admitted to be, the rule of literal interpretation must be seen, when we calmly examine it, to need many checks, and to be only as a limited and qualified rule a useful and true one. If we adopt it exclusively, or abandon ourselves to it, it becomes instantly as foolish, wild, and extravagant a principle of interpretation as any that could be named,—the fruitful source of all kinds of mistakes and excesses, and even the greatest follies and absurdities in religion. This has evidently been the result very often in fact; but it will be useful, perhaps, to enter a little into the reasons of it.

Persons, then, who demand a literal interpretation of statements and texts of Scripture, on the mere ground that it is the literal one, forget to begin with one very important and fundamental consideration, and that is, the nature of human language. To judge from their law of interpretation, one would suppose that language had nothing else to do but to express simple matters of fact in the simplest way. Such may have been the original stock of human language; but, if it was, there has been a very large aftergrowth upon it. Human language is a growth, a structure, an accumulation of a wonderful and complex kind; it contains the most apt and versatile machinery for the expression of all the relations in which the human mind stands to persons and things around it; not only the perception of matters of fact, but all the postures and attitudes of thought. It invents as it advances new modes of statement, and accumulates means and expedients for giving force to expression; it seeks not only to inform nakedly and correctly, but to strike, attract, and impress. All this is an advance upon the original mode