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simply a disease to be cured by comfort and education. At most sin is a misfortune, demanding pity rather than chastisement. Much less does it deserve retribution as a transgression of law. Now there is a vast deal of this humanitarian sentimentalism abroad that not only sets itself to soften down penalty for crime against the State, and to clamor for pardons before sentences expire, but takes defiant issue with Scripture in respect to future punishment, branding it as inexpressibly cruel. And it is easy to see that wherever this rose-water humanitarianism holds sway, it lightens moral obligation, palliates sin, and seeks to undermine a retributive government.

6. In this connection, and upon the same plane, another cause is working in a like direction, we mean the Effeminacy of the Age. It is an ease-loving age, an age of luxury, of ex. travagant expenditures to please the fancy and gratify the appetites. Even our literature is infected with it. The taste of the people at large finds little relish in philosophy and the ology, in those logical wrestlings which were the pastime of our fathers. Great themes are not tolerated in the pulpit; no great questions of metaphysics or morals draw popular or paying audiences; few books, comparatively, are drawn from our public libraries except such as may be classed under light reading, chiefly novels and works merely gossipy or sentimen tal. "Sweetness and light" have usurped the place of strength and profundity.

There is no mighty struggle over fundamental principles taxing the public mind as during the Reformation in Germany, the Puritan movement in England, or in our own Slaveholder's Rebellion. The minds of men have become supine, and crave ease. They are clamorous for small work and large pay. They are fain to accept easy and agreeable solutions of the difficult questions that pertain to our moral relations and deserts. It was remarked during the late war, that never until then had the imprecatory Psalms seemed to have place in the Word of God. When, however, during that struggle we read (e. g.) the thirty-fifth Psalm, we could see that at such times we needed just such a medium of devotion. "Plead my cause, 0 Lord, with them that strive with me; fight against them that fight against me. Take hold of shield and buckler, and stand

up for my help. Draw out the spear, and stop the way against them that persecute me; say unto my soul, I am thy salvation. Let them be confounded and put to shame that seek after my soul; let them be turned back and brought to confusion that devise my heart. Let them be as chaff before the wind; and let the angel of the Lord chase them. Let their way be dark and slippery; and let the angel of the Lord persecute them." Surfeiting, worldly comfort, and the wish to be relieved of profound thought and hard labor, evidently cause a loss of moral stamina; moral distinctions are bereft of their significance, and the idea of penal retribution causes a revulsion, and eventually drops out of faith. No doubt many have fallen into the snares of unbelief through this cause. "Their eyes stand out with fatness: they have more than heart could wish. They set their mouth against the heavens and their tongue walketh through the earth."

But at its next move labor against capital. demands as its right a

7. Socialistic principles have done much, especially among the lower classes, to cause this decay of faith in punishment. This is so obvious that we hardly need to dwell upon it. Socialism begins by a protest of the toiling classes against their employers. It seeks for justice and kindness as between man and man. Thus far it is right and safe. it sets the poor against the rich, and Having gained power by association, it share of the wealth, and if the demand is not granted it is ready to tear down the lawful safeguards of property, and to trample upon all authority. Thus it becomes a formidable foe to civil order and religion. It knows no law but impulse. It recognizes no penalties except its own visitations upon those who oppose its methods of redress. The civil magistrate, the minister of religion, the incumbents of the learned professions, the rich, the cultured, the religious classes generallyeven God himself-present no claim to consideration. It is a reign of ignorance, of recklessness, of irreligion. And wherever it sets up its control, not only the doctrine of endless punishment is swept away, but all divine authority. And so far as the denial of this doctrine has gained prevalence among professedly Christian people belonging to the laboring classes, it is, in our view, largely owing to the inroads of Socialism, which,

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under a religious guise, threatens to undermine all healthful regard to the divine authority. To this extent Socialism is clamor against righteous law and its instituted sanctions.

8. So far as this denial exists among considerate and devout Christians, in large measure it is a reaction and a protest against certain obnoxious teachings of the Church upon this subject. A full and intelligent presentation of this point would require as much space as is covered by this entire Article, and therefore we shall only indicate our views.

The Scriptures, we hold, teach that all men are to live eternally, and that the incorrigibly wicked are to be forever excluded from the kingdom of God, and to be subjected to all the suffering involved in such exclusion, whatever that may be. Generally, in the Bible, the suffering is put in the negative form of privation of the good they would have enjoyed had they proved loyal to God and truth. Whenever the suffering is put in the positive form, as in many cases it is, we think fair argu ment will show that it is suffering endured as the natural consequence of sin. It is not evil inflicted directly by the hand of a tormentor. It is not a doom under which a soul is compulsorily shut down. The man is damned, but he is damning himself by placing himself under the action of retributive laws. And the damnation lasts of course as long as his evil disposition lasts. Should he repent and turn from sin to God, his damnation would doubtless end. That such a change will ever occur, the Scriptures give no encouragement. But the principle is no less true, and no less honorable to the character aud government of God than if it were certain that such a change takes place.

Contrast this statement of the doctrine with the dogma of a hell of literal fire and brimstone; of excruciating torture directly inflicted by the hand of God, which has been orthodox doctrine in the Catholic church, and through it in the churches of the Reformation. Think of the exaggerations in the teachings of many Protestant divines, both European and American, and of not a few revival preachers of recent times? Think of this repulsive view in connection with the doctrines of absolute natural inability, of unconditional reprobation, of limited atonement and irresistible grace as taught in some of the old Confessions? Think of the inevitable sequences of

infant damnation, the perdition of the unevangelized, the necessary doom of men who, prior to their personal choice, came into the world depraved, utterly averse to good, and disabled from doing right-men who never were elected, for whom Christ has made no atonement, and in behalf of whom the Holy Spirit puts forth no renewing power. Nothing has made Universalists, or has turned men over to the delusions of conditional immortality and annihilation, so rapidly and in such numbers, as citations from the old creeds and the deliverances of orthodox teachers. These errorists could boast of only a fractional success in spreading heresy, if the medieval theol. ogy had not furnished them with such materials. Addressed to minds unused to investigation, such materials furnish appeals, ad invidiam, which no logic can meet.

It is painful to utter these criticisms upon the orthodox symbols, to which, in great part, the writer adheres. But in studying this subject and watching the arguments and appeals of the advocates of Universalism and Annihilation, we are convinced that their success in spreading heterodoxy is due more to the prejudice they create against these repulsive exaggerations, than to the force of their arguments. And what is now needed is, for us to see the errors into which our predecessors have fallen and frankly to acknowledge them, and so present the scriptural argument as to sustain the doctrine of punishment as germane and even necessary to the Gospel system.

Without extending these specifications further, such causes seem fully to account for the recent decline of faith in this orthodox doctrine. And these causes all lie outside of the fundamental principles on which that doctrine rests. Their operation may be nullified by a return to a stronger faith in Divine Revelation, by more honest and reverent methods of interpretation, by a sounder mental philosophy, and a more rational social science; and especially by removing from the doctrine itself the unsightly incrustations which have brought it into dishonor.

ARTICLE IV. -PHILLIPS BROOKS AS A PREACHER, BOTH IN THEORY AND IN PRACTICE.

Ir is rare good fortune to students in a difficult art to have as teacher an acknowledged master of it, both in theory and in practice. And the more difficult the art, the greater the need of such an instructor. But what art is more difficult than that of persuading men to be reconciled to God, warning and teaching every man in all wisdom that he may be presented perfect in Christ Jesus?

Among those who stand in the very front rank of the many thousand preachers in our country, the "Rector of Trinity Church, Boston," is eminent. When, therefore, the press put into the hands of these thousands of ministers his "Lectures on Preaching delivered before the Divinity School of Yale College," and soon after a volume of his "Sermons," they were eagerly read by this army of preachers, that by scanning both his theory and his practice, they might learn the secret of the great preacher's success. It may not be uninstructive to look somewhat carefully into these volumes with this same end in view-to note the homiletic principles which the author lays down as the basis of all good preaching, and then to see how he embodies them in his discourses. It may be well to look at these Lectures on Preaching in the order in which they stand in the volume. But it should be remarked that it was farthest from the author's intention to give in them a full course of lectures on homiletics, but simply, as he modestly says-in accordance with the design of the lectureship-to tell of his own life in the ministry-of the principles by which he had only half consciously been living and working for many years.

Since it seems impossible properly to notice these Lectures without going somewhat fully into details, the indulgence of the reader is asked in this respect.

In the first of the eight lectures comprising the course, in which the author treats of "The Two Elements in Preaching," truth and personality, it would seem that the definition of

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