weigh with scrupulous conscientiousness every syllable on so vital a theme; but your argument must not be against a phantom of your own creation, which I renounce as much as you; it must be founded on no supposition of the divine reluctance to save-for it was God's love which provided the sacrifice; nor on presumed injustice in the infliction-for Christ Himself approved it; nor on the fancy that we hold some base huckstering theory of precisely so many ounces of suffering for so many ounces. -parsimoniously weighed out-of mercy! This is absurd per se, for how can transient suffering be exactly equal to pangs of eternal duration?it is derogatory to the divine mercy, for if justice exact a precise quid pro quo, where is the scope for mercy at all? -and it is utterly unnecessary, for the homage to law consists in the principle of the Atonement, not in the amount of suffering.

You must avoid, therefore, all such abjured views, or you will not touch me; while your own theory must fairly answer those objections to the divine equity, goodness, and love, which, as I have endeavoured to show, may be justly retorted on it. And remember that if you insist on the injustice of God's inflicting suffering on Christ for the sins of others, you cannot escape similar difficulty, and greater in degree, on your own system; for can it be less unjust to inflict such sufferings on Christ for no sins at all? If it be unjust to accept Him as a sacrifice for the guilty, how much more unjust must it be to insist on the sacrifice for nothing, and when the victim thrice implored in agony that, “if it were POSSIBLE," the " cup might pass from Him ?”

You are bound to demonstrate the "impossibility." How you should do so on your hypothesis is to me utterly inconceivable ; for you say that God can, with utmost ease, pardon guilt without any compensation to His justice: if so, where could be the difficulty of sparing innocence?—rather, how was it possible to do otherwise? Till you answer these things fairly and fully, I shall continue to believe the doctrine of the Atonement not only more consonant to Scripture, but a more rational account of Christ's Death, than your own. R. E. H. G.

Ever yours,

-

Friday, May 11, 1849.

If it be the climax of virtue to have practised it till duty is transformed into pleasure, as I am inclined to believe it is,I am far enough at present from having attained that point. On the contrary, I find-confess, now, that it is the same with you that things pleasant enough in themselves, at least not painful, become, the moment they assume the shape of duties, irksome. They put on, as it were, a stiff, starched dress, and lose all their alluring, seductive looks.

I will give you a whimsical illustration of this. In my recent anonymous brochure, which met with more approbation from the public than perhaps it deserved, — certainly more than I expected, I felt, with my accustomed fastidiousness, when it came out, that a thousand things might be altered for the better. As I impatiently glanced over it, I felt, mingled with mortification, a positive pleasure in mentally making improvements, adding something here, expunging something there, giving a phrase a new turn,-illustrating a bare thought by an image or metaphor. The task, thus voluntarily prosecuted, was a positive delight. When, a few days ago, it was intimated that a new edition was called for, and I was requested to furnish the printer with any alterations I might be meditating by a fixed day, it is inexpressible with what reluctance I turned to the task; and the thought that it must be done by a certain time has turned a pleasant amusement into insupportable drudgery. But what perverseness ! The task is the same: and why should the thought that it ought to be done make it less pleasant? I have therefore set to work with a will, and am reaping my reward by finding that the task is becoming less a task as I pursue it, though duty has unquestionably marred the pleasure.

In the same way I have often found that if it be necessary to read a given book on a given day, there is not a book, out of the five thousand I have around me, that I would not rather take up than that!

I have somewhere read-and so have you I doubt not- of a petty German despot who, having heard that an old woman of seventy had never been beyond the precincts of her native city, thought he should like to "have it to say" (what is too costly or cruel for a despot if he "would like to have something to say!") that one who had lived to be a very old woman had never been beyond the limits of the city, and therefore decreed that she should never be permitted to do so. It is said that the poor old lady so laid to heart the loss of that liberty which she had voluntarily lived without, all her life, that she took to her bed and died in a few days! Surely human nature is the very image of that old woman.

We might at least learn, one would think, to submit without grumbling to any necessity, which, so long as it was no necessity, was not only submitted to without complaint, but was embraced as a pleasure! It was a smart saying of Locke, "Let your will go whither necessity would drive, and you will always preserve your liberty." Very true-very sagacious, but rather difficult to practise. Similarly we may say, make duty your pleasure, and it will be just the same thing as pleasure; but, like the other, it is more easily said than done. The culmination of virtue— and no doubt, by "perseverance in well doing," we may approximate to it, though in heaven alone we shall fully attain it—is to find pleasure in duty, as such; to find not only that duty does not-as in my absurd condition, so frankly confessed, it often does, make pleasure itself irksome, but that, when not absolutely painful (and in heaven I suppose there will be no painful duties), it is in itself a distinct source of pleasure. I believe even now, and in our imperfect condition, that the having done our duty is a source of greater pleasure than anything else; but then it is the having done it, I fear. We enjoy it by a reflex act, and possibly often linger so long in complacent retrospect, that we

forget the next duty in admiring ourselves! If we could but feel pleasure in duty while it was a-doing, how happy should we be, for we should then be happy all the day long! And it will be so if we persevere. "At first we cannot serve God," says Jeremy Taylor, "but by doing violence to all our wilder inclinations. The second days of virtue are pleasant and easy in the midst of all the appendant labours. But when the Christian's last pit is digged, when he is descended to his grave and hath finished his state of sorrows and suffering, then God opens the river of abundance, the river of life and never ceasing felicities." But so different from this is the condition of men in general, that I almost think one of the best ways of teaching some duties would be to enjoin the due and regular abstinence from them. Tell a lazy man that he is never to get out of bed till ten in the day, and, my life for it, he will fall in love with early rising. Tell an irreligious man that he shall never enter a church, and there you will straightway find him. Certainly, in the present amiable condition of man, the very presence of a law is a great provocative to neglect or violate it- —a fact to which the Apostle seems to allude in the seventh of Romans; a passage, by the way, which ought not to have caused all the pother it has among the

commentators.

I was amused by your defending yourself against the charge of negligence in writing, before you were accused. I am sure I said nothing, and, what is more, meant nothing, by my silence. It is a self-betrayal second only to that of the good Athenian in Hierocles. He told his Spartan friend, who had commissioned him to purchase some books, that he had "never received the letter about the books." "Let me tell you," said a West Indian proprietor to his assembled slaves, after some theft of which he wished to detect the perpetrator, "Let me tell you that it is in vain for you to attempt concealment; for he who has committed the deed will find a tumour sprouting out of the tip of his nose, which will effectually betray him." Up went the finger of the luckless criminal to see whether the threatened pimple was a-comingand so he was detected. My remarks on negligent correspon

dents were quite general; but you have put your finger to your nose, and stand self-confessed.

I casually met the day before yesterday, on board a Clyde steamer, with one of those rare youths at whom we have so often laughed, who have seduced themselves into the belief that they have obtained a profound knowledge of philosophy, by muddling their brains with dark translations of German metaphysicians, and the writings of those geniuses for obscurity who have so successfully imitated them in this country. Certainly there are minds which, like certain surfaces, absorb all the colours of light, and reflect you back only an aspect of perfect blackness: and they deserve to be called the Hottentots of Philosophy. What share vanity may have in affecting to know what others cannot pretend to understand, I cannot say; but these folks will go on using phrases, and terms of art, of marvellous vagueness, and exchanging formula of prodigious generality, just as if they had a meaning. Yet let me tell you, from my recent experience, that you can get on with them remarkably well. "By stopping them," you will say, "and requesting a rigid definition of their dark terms of art." Why, in that case, you would not get on at all. Your philosopher would be arrested at once. "How, then?" you will say. If you have a pretty good memory, and a little invention, nothing more easy; be as profound as himself; assent to what he says, though you do not understand, and reply to it with something which you understand as little, and which