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far as the influence of instruction from the pulpit can affect it-a natural and inevitable result.

To dwell perpetually on one portion of truth to the exclusion of others, is likewise to withhold the requisite means of excitement to the different branches of obedience, and render the affections as well as the views, distorted and imperfect. Especially to dwell continually on the truths which relate to human ability, even if for the purpose of counteracting pernicious error, is fitted to lead to injurious results, by investing them with too high an importance, and shrouding and depreciating the truths with which they should ever be intimately associated, that respect the necessity of the Spirit's influences. Misapprehensions like those which relate to our mental constitution, which consciousness and experience contradict, are far less likely to prove seriously prejudicial, than such as meet with no direct counteraction from the mind's intuitive perceptions, or necessary convictions, such as those that respect the character of God, the import of his law, the nature and necessity of renovation by the Spirit, and the method of gratuitous justification. In place, therefore, of authorizing the slight or denunciation of which some have been guilty, of the doctrines of special grace, of sovereignty, and of God's universal purposes, providence and power over his creatures, the increased attention that is at present given to the subject of human ability, renders it preeminently necessary that those doctrines likewise should be treated with additional frequency, and their import and relations more fully expounded. Human ability no more supersedes the necessity of the influence of the Holy Spirit, than that influence supersedes the necessity of human ability. It does not prevent men from continuing to sin, any more than from commencing it. The certainty,

notwithstanding that ability, of their continuing to sin if left without the Spirit's special influence, is as absolute, as the previous certainty was that they would commence their moral agency as sinners. It is this awful fact, indeed, that renders his interposition necessary, and a just conception of it is accordingly indispensable to a proper sense of our hopeless condition without the intervention of sovereign grace.

Carried thus, as they must be by these views, to the conviction that that preaching will prove the most useful, which is fraught with the justest and largest exhibitions of revealed truth, which raises the mind the nearest to God, and gives him and the great facts of his government to be most intimately associated with its habitual views; which conveys the clearest conviction of duty to reason, makes the deepest impression on conscience, imparts the strongest impulse to the voluntary affections, and thereby addresses to all the various elements of our nature, the highest excitements to obedience—those who adopt them, if they allow them their proper influence, will naturally be led by them to an impartial and zealous exhibition of the whole counsel of God, and sole reliance on it, through the divine blessing, for success.

THEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSY.

ONE of the most extraordinary spectacles exhibited by the church, is the controversies of its teachers respecting the doctrines of Christianity. A perpetual succession of disputations has agitated it ;—commencing in the days of the apostles, who devoted a large share of their writings to the correction of Jewish and Grecian misapprehensions and misrepresentations; extended soon after to almost every branch of faith and duty by allegorical interpretations, and attempts to accommodate the doctrines of the gospel to the prevalent philosophy; subsequently directed at one time to the nature of the Supreme Being; at another to man's attributes and agency; now treating the epoch of the resurrection, or the prerogatives of a bishop, as subjects of fundamental importance; now expending an ardent zeal on the subtleties of scholastic theology; at the Reformation, returning again to the great essentials of revelation, and employed from that day to this in questions respecting the import of its principal doctrines. It has thus been a scene of almost uninterrupted distractions, of contests in which truth has often been the victim, and error the van

quisher; sophistry a more successful weapon than upright argument, and passion than reason; and in which the friends of God have frequently by ignorance, credulity, or unskilfulness, betrayed the cause it was their aim to sustain ; while his enemies have employed the name and sanctions of his revelation to discountenance its truths, and exterminate its friends. Of those successive disputations, the number is small that can merit, if impartially surveyed, a full approval. But few of the representations of Christianity given even by its friends, can be sanctioned as in all essential respects correct, and none perhaps of the long train of combatants can be believed on emerging from this scene of being, not to have experienced some important modifications of the views they had labored to sustain; while in the systems of multitudes of the greatest the wisest and the best, whose apprehensions were distinguished in many respects by accuracy, and their agency by beneficial influences, essential revolutions must undoubtedly have been wrought by the light of a better world, and the disclosure of the limitedness and imperfection of their attainments, filled them with surprise. The spirits of Zwingle, Luther and Melancthon, of Calvin, Knox and Beza, of Leighton and Owen, Baxter, Edwards and Dwight, when transported by the volition of the Almighty, from the dark shadows of this world, doubtless caught in the first rays of the cloudless day in which they now dwell, views widely differing from any they had before obtained of many of the great themes which had here been conspicuous objects of their attention, as well as brighter and ampler apprehensions of the truths they had correctly understood; and extricated instantaneously from the theories in which their theology had been shrouded, left them behind them, never again to be the medium of their vision

of divine objects. Were they to return and mingle again in these sublunary scenes, far different would be the aspects in which they would present many of the great subjects in respect to which they attempted to sway the opinions of mankind, and widely dissimilar in many instances, the spirit they would exhibit, and the methods on which they would rely to correct the errors and guide the faith of God's people.

The contests of truth with error are far from having terminated; or those who are conducting the warfare from having escaped the imperfections of their predecessors. Similar weaknesses, passions and temptations continue to give rise to similar defects and errors. What then are the proper remedies for these evils? or what are the principles on which such discussions are to be conducted in order to correct them, and the methods in which the legitimate objects of theological controversy are to be sought and gained? These are inquiries of high interest at the present period, and merit the impartial consideration of those who are mingling in the contentions that are agitating the Church.

The aim of theological controversy, like all discussions on religious subjects, should obviously be, solely to determine what is truth, and to place it in so just and clear a light, as to lead those who hold it, to continue its adherents, and persuade those who reject it, to become its disciples and obey its dictates. The discussion itself, therefore, should be an upright, faithful, and fearless exhibition, and defence of truth, and exposure and rebuke of error, unwarped by personal or party considerations, and unawed by the wishes and unbiassed by the opinions of men.

I. To conduct a controversy with such an aim, and in such

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