the accumulated experience of ages, illustrated by the discoveries of revelation, mankind are gradually placed in circumstances more and more favourable to present happiness and improvement, better fitted for training spirits for admission to a heavenly state. If Mr. Thom is right, all this is a gross and pernicious delusion; and in cherishing this pleasing speculation, so well adapted, as it seems to be, to raise our idea of man, the work of God, and fill us with love and gratitude to the All-wise Disposer, we are only betraying our rooted enmity to him. According to him, it would appear that the condition of man in the present state is altogether hopeless, and that the main, if not the only, purpose of the measures of Divine Providence with regard to the human race, is more clearly to demonstrate this melancholy and deplorable fact. Human nature, as he repeats over and over again, is decidedly and radically in a state of enmity to its Maker,-an enmity whose utter depravity, intensity and inveteracy, is beyond description, and which the progress of civilization, the gradual development of the human mind, and even the increasing study and more accurate knowledge of the divine word, only serve to display in darker colours, and to unfold in all its "devilish malignity."

In conformity with these views of the nature which God has given him, the dispensations of Providence respecting religion, as they may be traced in Scripture and in the subsequent history of the human race, present, according to our author, the progress and results of three "experiments," which constitute what he denominates in the title of his book, the "three grand exhibitions of man's enmity to God." The first experiment, as may be anticipated, was that made on Adam in Paradise. Here it will be observed that our author does not fall into the inconsistency of the common orthodox creeds, which represent Adam as originally created" in righteousness, purity and holiness," as a specimen of human nature in its highest state of perfection, when its Maker blessed and called it good, notwithstanding that he was at the same time so weak as to give way at the first access of a temptation to which, in these degenerate, "fallen" days, a child would be ashamed to have yielded. No; Adam was essentially neither better nor worse, in these respects, than his descendants after him. "Human nature is in all the same. What it was in Adam, it is in every one of his descendants. What it was six thousand years ago, it has all along been, is now, and will continue to the end of time. appropriate motto. It is in all, enmity to God. less."-Preface, p. xv.

، Sans changer, is its Nothing more, nothing

This is at least intelligible and consistent. But the question cannot fail to present itself, Whence came this human nature? Who made man; and from whom do the successive generations of men derive their existence, with a nature fundamentally and essentially hostile to God? The answer to this question cannot fail, we should think, to confound and perplex the thoughtful inquirer, who is conscious in himself of no such rooted enmity to his Maker, but is desirous, on the

See Dr. Priestley's admirable Essay on the Analogy of the Divine Dispensations, a performance in which, if the author of this work could be prevailed upon to study it, he would find, if we mistake not, some ideas at once new and not undeserving of his attention.

contrary, to cherish gratitude and love to him for many mercies and opportunities of improvement, though not feeling authorized to claim for himself any peculiar and special dispensation of Divine grace. Such a one would be disposed to ask himself the question, Which of the two is to be rejected-the dictates of my own consciousness and observation, or those principles of interpretation which profess to deduce from detached and scattered texts of Scripture a conclusion like this? And he will repel indignantly the reply of our author, that such doubts and objections are only the suggestions of the "mind of flesh," the produce of "carnal reason." What other reason (he will say) can I exercise, than that which my Maker has given me? By what other means, than by the principles which it supplies and suggests, can I judge of your interpretations of Scripture, or even of the authority of the documents themselves, which claim to contain the word of God?

The "experiment" made upon Adam completely failed; or rather, as our author would say, answered its true purpose, of demonstrating, as far as a single individual and a single instance could do it, the enmity of man to God, and his repugnance to obey a law, though imposed by Divine authority. But it might be said, the proof is too limited; the conclusion from one example to the entire race, is inadmissible. Instead of an individual, then, a nation was selected as the subject of the next experiment, and a longer period of actual trial given, extending from the call of Abraham to the final destruction of Jerusalem. The earlier, and by much the larger portion of this period, which preceded the advent of the Messiah, was however, in our author's view, merely preparatory, "paving the way for that second grand experiment, the opportunity for making which was to arise from. the death and resurrection of Christ, and the preaching of the gospel by the apostles." During the first of these periods, the law imposed is said to have been chiefly of a prohibitory character.

"Before Christ appeared and died, thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not commit adultery, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not bear false witness, and in general, thou shalt not refuse to hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God, and if thou transgressest these or any of these prohibitions, thou shalt in one form or another incur the punishment of forfeiture or loss, (Deut. xxviii. 15-68), is the language, and is expressive of the spirit, of the laws addressed by God to his chosen people. All, all was prohibitory; and all, in the event of transgression taking place, breathed threatenings of the forfeiture of temporal blessings already enjoyed. Enmity to God was thus, throughout the whole period in question, displayed on the part of man, in the form of violating divine prohibition. Rom. v. 20, vii. 7."-Þ. 88.

From the stress which is laid in various places on this distinction between prohibition and positive command, we suppose it is a point of some importance to our author's view of this whole subject; but how it is made out, we do not see. It is true that some of the moral precepts are expressed in a negative form, as is the case with those cited in this passage; but they are not on that account less positive in their character; and whatever may be thought of the letter, the spirit of the commandment is by no means fully carried out by merely refraining from certain specific acts; it implies the actual performance of many services tending to maintain the social relations to which they refer,— to say nothing of the dispositions of mind from which these services

66

naturally spring, and which are comprised in the gospel exposition and extension of several of these precepts.* The maxim, "Thou shalt not forswear thyself, but shalt perform unto the Lord thine oaths," gives the same precept, first negatively, and then repeated in a positive form. The ceremonial law consists in a great measure, not of prohibitions, but of positive ordinances. Thou shalt not refuse to hearken to the voice of the Lord thy God," is equivalent to the positive command, Thou shalt hearken, &c. This, however, seems to us a mere verbal nicety on which we should lay no stress, though our author evidently does. But what can we understand by the assertion, p. 80, that, "properly speaking, all these prohibitions were addressed, not to the people of Israel, but to the Messiah himself, emphatically the Israelite or Jew, in whom that people was summed up, and in the hands of whom as Mediator the whole law was ordained, Gal. iii. 19”?

"The Old-Testament Scriptures," he tells us in another place (p. 104), "may be fitly represented as the mould into which it behoved the whole mind and procedure, every thought and every action, of the second or heavenly man" (meaning the Messiah), "as the rule or standard to which in every part of his life and conversation he should conform himself. They were the Messiah's law; a law stringent and severe; requiring the most minute and exact obedience, and permitting not the slightest deviation from either the letter or the spirit of its enactments. This law, so different from the mild, may I not rather say, the intentionally trifling form in which divine law had been issued to the first man, it was absolutely necessary that Jesus, the second man, should without the least flaw or mistake fulfil."

All this, and much more in the same strain, he asks, "who that knows the truth as it is in Jesus will dispute?" If this is to be the criterion, we fear the parties whom our author will recognize as worthy of so honourable a designation will form but a little flock. For ourselves, we are of course disqualified on many other grounds for admission into the sacred enclosure; and therefore, having nothing to lose, we run no risk in avowing our utter dissent from this view, either of the purpose of the Jewish law, or of the character of the Messiah, to whom, we are told, it was especially, and in a certain sense exclusively, addressed. The objection most frequently urged against our Lord by the Pharisees and others, was his apparent disregard of minute outward observances; and though it may be true that many of these derived their only authority from human tradition, yet this was by no means universally the case; and, till now, we should have thought and said with confidence, that no one could read the narratives of the life of Christ upon earth with ordinary attention, and imagine that its distinguishing feature was a strict, rigid and undeviating adherence to the ritual law of Moses.

We are apt, however, to suspect, on further consideration, that we have been mistaken in our view of this matter. It would seem to be, not the ritual merely, but the moral precepts of the old law, which our author means to represent as designed, not for the Jews collectively, still less for mankind at large, but for the Messiah and for him alone. Certainly, in his sweeping assertions on this subject, no distinction is hinted at between these two branches of the law, and the examples

* Matt. v. 21, 27.

"Psalm cxix., which is a detail of the experience of the Messiah, while in the flesh, frequently alludes to this. Read carefully from verse 89 to verse 118."

which he cites are derived fully as much from the one as from the other. The law, considered in this peculiar point of view, is represented expressly (p. 106) as being summed up in these words, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind; and, thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyelf." Such, says our author, was the law given by God to Jesus Christ.

"When this is apprehended by us, we are at no loss to appreciate the real state and condition of Abraham's descendants according to the flesh, during the period which elapsed previous to the appearance and death of the Messiah. They were a people in every respect subsidiary and subservient to that glorious personage. True, they might commit sin and incur punishment; because, in a certain though subordinate sense, the law of Moses was obligatory on them. But in reality, during the whole interval between the giving of the law and the coming of the Messiah, they were under the Messiah's protection, Psalm lxxxiv. 9, as the person to whom the law was properly speaking addressed, and by whom in due time it was to be fulfilled. Their breaches of the law were his; for though personally sinless, he was wounded for their transgressions, and bruised for their iniquities. His righteousness was theirs; for as the true Abraham, and thereby one with them, his fulfilment of the law was equivalent to their fulfilment of it. Acts iii. 26, xiii. 38, 39; 2 Cor v. 21; 1 Peter ii. 24. Every stroke of justice aimed at them, thus passed through them to him, the true victim of divine vengeance [so the almighty avenger, it would seem, missed his aim!]; and every blessing promised to obedience redounded back from him, the fulfiller of the law, to them as one with him, and as having thereby an interest in his fulfilment of it; conditionally, to be sure; that is, the Jews were to realize the blessedness flowing from the Messiah's obedience only if they believed on him."-P. 107.

"Christ's fulfilment of the law was equivalent to their fulfilment of it." (As authority for this, we are referred to Acts iii. 26.) "God, having raised up his Son, sent him unto you first, to bless you in turning away every one of you from his iniquities"!

However strange and extravagant all this may sound to our ears, it is in perfect conformity with the representation which the author afterwards gives of the gospel dispensation as in no sense a covenant of works, involving no practical precept or command whatsoever, but simply this, that we believe in and accept the absolutely unconditional gift of God of eternal life. As the enmity of the Jews, in the second experiment or "grand exhibition," was displayed, not in their neglect at all times of those weightier matters of the law, justice, mercy and fidelity, but simply in their refusal, after the death and resurrection of Jesus, to believe in him as the promised Messiah in obedience to the preaching of the apostles,-so, in later times, the concentrated essence of malignity is exemplified by the obstinate perseverance of mankind in the persuasion that their salvation is to a certain extent dependent on their own good works.

Mr. Thom is profuse in his citations of, or rather references to Scripture; in fact, his whole system is built on that sort of textual criticism which is still too much a favourite with almost all parties; proceeding in a great measure upon that notion of plenary verbal inspiration which sees in every sentence and clause of every book and chapter, both of the Old and the New Testament, the immediate dictation of the Holy Spirit. It is needless for us to say that we regard this notion as altogether gratuitous and inconsistent with phenomena which must force themselves, we should think, on the attention of

every careful student of Scripture. There is no doctrine, however absurd and extravagant, which may not be supported with abundance of apparent scriptural authority by such a mode of dealing with the sacred writings as we see practised in this volume on an extensive scale. We do not pretend to have examined, or even turned to, all his references; but of the large number which we have examined, the greater part appear to us to have no connection whatever with his argument, and when compared with the context, and illustrated by the information we obtain from other quarters respecting the intentions and views of the writers, they will be found to relate to an entirely different subject. A very large portion of them, as may be anticipated, are derived from St. Paul's Epistles, and refer to circumstances and questions connected with the controversies and parties of those times, which are now altogether out of date. Their chief interest to us arises from the light they afford us in tracing the history of the early propagation of the gospel, and the character and views of its first preachers.

It will be seen that the fundamental principle of our author's theological system is the diametrical opposition of man to God, not only in the actual commission of sin, but in his very nature itself, and consequently in all his feelings, tendencies, desires and pursuits. To prove this he cites such texts as the following: Romans viii. 7, "The carnal mind is enmity against God;" Gal. v. 17, "The flesh hath desires contrary to the spirit, and the spirit contrary to the flesh;" Matt. xvi. 23, "Get thee behind me, Satan, for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but the things that be of men. Now we should say that any one who looks at these texts in their connection, and with a single grain of common sense, will at once perceive that they have nothing to do with the subject. The "carnal mind" of which the apostle speaks, is not the original, but an acquired character; not the attribute of humanity in general, but of the particular individuals or classes of whom he was then speaking; the result of rooted prejudices, of confirmed habits of vice, and the indulgence of sensual appetites and worldly desires. "The flesh hath desires contrary to the spirit;" that is, the prevailing dispositions and pursuits of heathens, and of worldly-minded, unbelieving Jews, are contrary to the spirit of Christianity; and the apostle exhorts them to walk after the spirit, to govern their lives no longer according to the habits and practices of unbelievers, but by the spirit and precepts of the gospel. Mr. Thom proceeds (p. 501) to point out marks of this enmity in the violation, not merely of the express laws of God, but of the law of conscience. But is not conscience (considered, as it must be in this connection, independently of the Divine law) a part of our nature, or at least the result of natural reason, tracing out practical rules from a careful consideration of the consequences of our conduct, or, as is more commonly the case, influenced by the prevailing opinions and sentiments of mankind? This law of conscience, therefore, in conformity to our author's dictum, ought to be opposite and contrary to the law of God. Elsewhere, we find the principle and the law of conscience characterized more consistently, in such terms as these:

"It is not God who is imposing laws, but men themselves, who, under the influence of their fleshly minds, are turning the Scriptures, which are spiritual, into mere codes of morals, intended for the regulation and restraint of the