other periodical publications, every one of which has a sphere of greater or less extent. What an amount of aid might be given to the conducting of these periodicals, and what a powerful influence might be exerted through their pages for the instruction of the people and the good of the nation, if the well-educated men,ministers, lawyers, and others-who reside in their neighborhood, would, by contributing to their columns, impart that aid and influence! It is a matter of great regret that so little real interest is felt in this subject, so little tact and facility manifested in the

matter.

We have spoken only of that influence which should be exerted in our own country. For although this country is greatly in advance of all others, as regards the twofold struggle which has been referred to, yet, if we would preserve and perfect what we possess, we have a great work to do. Our population is increasing, by natural processes, at a fearful rate, and Europe is sending to our shores vast crowds of emigrants every year. If therefore, we would avoid retrograding, we must make great exertions. But to advance, not to keep our ground, must be our object. Besides we have a high mission to fulfil, in exhibiting to the world the happy influence, as well as the stability, of our institutions, political and religious. But that influence need not, must not be confined to our own country, important as it is as a field of exertion. There is a WORLD to be blest, to be regenerated, to be saved. Can we not aid in the most effectual manner the struggle which is now going on in the old world, against the double despotism of the prince and the priest? A despotism which, wherever it exists in perfection, makes of the masses the veriest slaves, leaving them nothing to do but on the one hand to obey what they are commanded, and on the other to believe what they are taught. A despotism which deprives them of that happiness which is their right in this world, and cheats them out of that which Heaven in its mercy offers them for the next!

We can do much for the down-trodden millions, in the Old World and the new, by sending them the Bible, and employing suitable men, natives of the several countries, to carry it to those who do not possess it, to read it to those who cannot read, and to explain its sacred contents to all. We can do much to impart the blessed gospel, the best friend of the people, to the nations that are now struggling for popular liberty, but who, alas, are at present so incapable to comprehend, to acquire, or to maintain it. The gospel is, though they do not know it, the very thing they need; for it is the only hope of free institutions.

Let us leave to the politician and the man of the world, the task so easily executed, of gazing, speculating, and wondering at the movements in the Old World which are now attracting all eyes. Let ours be no barren sympathy, but a prompt an effective one

not exhibited in the noisy declamations of popular meetings, but in the overflowings of a heart full of love to our fellow-men, and prompting to earnest prayer and efficient effort in their behalf.

ARTICLE V.

REVIEW OF FINNEY'S THEOLOGY.

By REV. GEORGE Duffield, D.D., Detroit, Michigan.

Lectures on Systematic Theology, embracing Lectures on Moral Government, Atonement, Moral and Physical Depravity, Regeneration, Philosophical Theories and Evidences of Regeneration. By REV. C. G. FINNEY, Professor of Theology, in the Oberlin Collegiate Institute.

(Concluded from p. 746, last volume.)

MORAL AND PHYSICAL DEPRAVITY.

THE main issue to be met on this point is very simple. Is there any tendency, bias, inclination, or disposition, call it what you please, whether simple or complex, negative or positive, which operates, with determining influence, as a cause or reason why men, uniformly and invariably, in all the appropriate circumstances of their nature, choose to do evil? Does the existence of such a causative influence determining to sin, imply a physical necessity and impair the freedom of the will appropriate to man as a moral agent? Our author, virtually, if not explicitly, denies the former and affirms the latter. Some, in affirming the former, may have erred in their illustrations, calling it taste or instinct, and comparing it with that which renders the serpent venomous, the tiger ferocious, the canine and feline tribe carnivorous, and the like; and they may have prosaically or poetically expressed themselves so as to be obnoxious to the charge of believing or teaching, that there flows a poisonous lues, from parent to child, or there exists a fever in the blood, or some physical entity, which is sinful per se. But to avoid an error in this extreme, must we run so far to the other as to deny all causative influence determining to sin, and insist that freedom of will consists alone in absolute sovereignty and independence? Our author says explicitly, "Moral depravity is sin itself, and not the cause of sin;". nor, of course, a cause of sin; which is in effect to resolve all moral depravity into acts of will, and rebuke the common sense notions of mankind, who distinguish between a state of the affections and passions affecting the will, and the acts of the will, and predicate moral depravity of both in given cases. Dr. Dwight will not

give a name to that specific particular state of the affections, &c., which determines the will to sin-which, in other words, renders it pleasant and agreeable to sin, which finds enjoyment in this and the other thing God forbids, and is pained and affected with aversion by that which He requires. But that such a state exists, and is culpable, men almost universally assume; and they generally estimate the degree of a man's moral depravity, by the degree of satisfaction experienced in doing wrong, and of aversion to doing what is right. In estimating moral depravity, we must not confine our attention to the volition, choice, purpose, or ultimate intention merely; but embrace also the feeling of pleasure or satisfaction had in doing wrong, and of pain or aversion to do what is right. We think, speak, and judge of it as the working of a mind, will, and heart, or affections and passions averse from God, and unaffected by His love, or regard for Him-which finds its satisfaction in opposing His will, and not in doing it. So the Scriptures describe it, and call it "enmity against God," which from the very first is morally certain to manifest itself in all the

race.

Our author may say that this is but what he means by selfishness, or that it means nothing more. We are willing, for the sake of argument, to admit it. But in analyzing that selfishness, in resolving it into its constituent elements, we differ widely from him, and believe, that to describe it as consisting wholly in generic purpose, ultimate intention and choice, operating in successive executive volitions, will not tell all the truth, nor will it help the matter to make self-gratification the end on which choice terminates. For the question comes back, and must be met and satisfactorily answered by our author, before he is done with his analysis of moral depravity, why do men, universally and invariably, from the very first, find their pleasure in gratifying self, and not in doing the will of God, in pleasing self rather than in pleasing God? What is it, in other words, that uniformly from the first, makes man choose self-gratification as the ultimate end, instead of "the good of God and the universe?" We answer, that such is the condition in which we are born into this world, such the derangement of our moral powers, and the original moral constitution of the race produced by the sin and apostasy of our first parents, that selfishness is natural to man. It ensues by virtue of our connection with, and descent from, a guilty progenitor, that under whatever circumstances we may be born, in all the appropriate conditions of our being, sin will be preferred to holiness-man will find it more natural and agreeable to serve himself than to serve God. And of man thus related, affected, and conditioned, we predicate moral depravity.

Our author ascribes the uniformity and universality of sinful choice, "to the influence of temptation, or to a physically-depraved THIRD SERIES, VOL. V., No. 1.

7

constitution, surrounded by the circumstances in which mankind first form their moral character, or put forth their first moral choices." Whatever he may say to the contrary, he thus, in reality, admits that some causes operate to determine the will to sinful choice, and that they are permanent, uniform, and efficient to secure the total depravity of the race. For he says, "We can also predict that with a constitution physically depraved, and surrounded with objects to awaken appetite, and with all the circumstances in which human beings first form their moral character, they will seek to gratify themselves universally unless prevented by the Holy Spirit." His predictions rest on fixed operative causes, according to this showing. Of course, therefore, his freewill, after all, is not absolutely sovereign and independent; but is influenced, affected, and determined by antecedent thoughts or feelings. Some causative influence is operative; and whether it be physical depravity, temptation, circumstances, or what not, or all together, we care not. His philosophy fails him, and he gains nothing, nor approximates one step nearer than we do to a solution of the fact of the universal depravity of the human race, which, we frankly confess, is like many other phenomena in the moral government of God, totally inexplicable by human reason. Why have these things operated so uniformly for near six thousand years, so that there is not a solitary exception in the developments of Adam's race, except the babe of Bethlehem, miraculously conceived, but "they have all together become corrupt, there is none that doeth good, not one." If the will possesses that sort of self-originating, self-determining power, that, of its own simple unaided sovereignty, it acts, and this is the freedom he claims for it, then why are there not some found who from the first are wholly uncontaminated by sin? Let him answer this consistently with his philosophy. If physical depravity, together with temptation and outward circumstances, operate uniformly to render men sinners, then may he be truly charged, equally with those he condemns, with teaching that man sins by a law of physical necessity. "His "philosophy of free will," in contradistinction to that of a necessitated will, relieves him not. We will not suffer him to escape in the fog of his metaphysics, but demand of him that he tell us, in terms which cannot be misunderstood, what he means by the freedom of the will. The exceeding obscurity and defectiveness of his definition, we pointed out in our first article, when examining simply the claims of what he calls a superior philosophy. The freedom of the will has long been a subject of theological as well as a metaphysical discussion, and our author has produced nothing new, but rather revived the old Armenian philosophy, which Edwards and Owen before him so effectually exposed. He must be much more explicit and tell us precisely in what it consists, and not play fast

1II. 460.

and loose between the Calvinistic and Armenian schemes, if he would have us respect the consistency and honesty of his teachings. To claim to be a Calvinist and appear in Arminian dress, to profess to hold substantially to the doctrines of the Westminster Confession of Faith, as he has very recently done, and yet ridicule and abuse it and its framers, does not well agree with our ideas of consistency or morality. But we judge him not. If the freedom of the will, in his judgment, be the absolute unqualified power of its self-determination-unaffected, uninfluenced, uncaused by anything whatever antecedent in the mind-the liberty of indifference -let him speak it out openly and manly, that we may place him with the school to which he seems to belong, and cease to discourse to us about motive or end, or any other reason for willing than the will's own sovereign independent determination or choice. Universal consciousness will oppose effectual barriers against such a philosophy. The veriest child will rebuke our philosopher. By self-determination, therefore, he must mean something different from absolute independent self-originated acts of will-the liberty of indifference, or of contingency. Honesty requires that on this point he define his position.

"If the freedom of the will," says Dr. Dwight, "is the freedom of contingency, then plainly its volitions are all accidents, and certainly the chances, arithmetically considered, are as numerous in favor of virtuous volitions as of sinful ones. There ought, therefore, on this plan, to be, and ever to have been, as many absolutely virtuous persons in the world as sinful. Plainly all ought not to be sinful. If the freedom of the will is the freedom of indifference, the same consequence ought to follow: for if there be no bias in the mind towards either virtue or sin, at the time immediately preceding each of its volitions, and the freedom of each volition arises out of this fact, then, certainly, there being no bias either way, the number of virtuous, and of sinful volitions, must naturally be equal, and no cause can be assigned why every man, independently of his renovation by the Spirit of God, should be sinful only. If the liberty of the will consist in self-determination, and the mind, without the influence of any motive, first wills that it will form a second volition, and this volition depends for its freedom on the existence of such a preceding one; then it is plain, that from these preceding volitions as many virtuous as sinful ones ought to be derived; because the preceding or self-determining volitions, are, by the supposition, under no influence or bias from any cause whatever. Thus it is evident, that, according to all these suppositions, there could be no preponderancy, much less an universality, of sin in the world."

This learned and sober theologian has well observed, in addition to the above, that the liberty of the will and consequently the moral 'Dwight's Theology, I. 485.

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