KρLσéws. He who sinneth against the Holy Ghost is in danger of "eternal sin."

Theodore Parker used to say that the profoundest expressions in the New Testament are those which are most likely to have been correctly reported. What phrase on this theme is profounder than "eternal sin"? Dean Alford well says that "it is to the critical treatment of the sacred text that we owe the restoration of such important and deep-reaching expressions as this." Lange calls it "a strong and pregnant expression."

It is not the best way in which to teach the truth of future punishment to say that a man is punished for ever and for ever for the sins of that hand's-breadth of duration we call time. If the soul does not repent of these with contrition, and not merely with attrition, the nature of things forbids its peace. But the biblical and the natural truth is that prolonged dissimilarity of feeling with God may end in eternal sin. If there is eternal sin, there will be eternal punishment. Final permanence of character under the laws of judicial blindness and the self-propagating power of sin, is the truth emphasized by both God's word and His works.

6. Under irreversible natural law there can be no blessedness without holiness.

Here I leave you, face to face with the nature of things, the authority which dazzled Socrates. God's omnipotence cannot force blessedness on a soul that has lost the predominate desire to be holy. Omniscience cannot make happy a man who loves what God hates, and hates what God loves. If you fall into predominant dissimilarity of feeling with God, it is out of his power to give you blessedness. Undoubtedly we are, of all men, most miserable unless with our deliverance from the guilt of sin there comes to us also deliverance from the love of it. Without holiness there can be no blessedness; but there can be no holiness without a predominant love of what God loves, and hate of what God hates. We grow wrong; we allow ourselves to crystallize in habits that imply a loss of a desire to be holy; and, at last, having made up our minds not to love predominantly what God loves, and hate what he hates, we are amazed that we have not blessedness. But the universe is not amazed. The nature of things is but another name for the Divine Nature. God would not be God if there could be blessedness without holiness.

THEODORE PARKER ON THE PERFECTION OF THE

DIVINE HERALD.

BY THE REV. JOSEPH COOK.

In the Singalese books of Gotama Buddha, written under the shadow of the Himalayas, we find the statement that " as surely as the pebble cast heavenward abides not there, but returns to the earth, so, proportionate to thy deed, good or ill, will the desire of thy heart be meted out to thee, in whatever form or world thou shalt enter." It was the opinion of Socrates, recorded with favour by Plato, that "the wicked would be too well off if their evil deeds came to an end.* disloyalty to the still, small voice which declares what ought to be is followed by pain. What if it were not? Is God God, if, with unscientific liberalism, we in our philosophy put the throne of the universe upon rockers, and make of it an easy chair from which lullabys are sung, both to the evil and to the good?

All

"Whatever we do, God is on our side." So say many who would not dare to affirm that, whatever we do, the nature of things is on our side. But the nature of things is only the total outcome of the requirements, the perfections of the Divine Nature. God is behind the nature of things, and you and I cannot trifle with him any more than with it. He was; he is; he is to come. It was; it is; it is to come. It is he.

Great literature always recognises the law of moral gravitation. Seeking the deepest modern words, I open, for instance, Thomas Carlyle, and read:

"Penalties: Quarrel not with the old phraseology, good reader: attend rather to the thing it means. The word was heard of old, with a right solemn meaning attached to it, from theological pulpits and such places; and may still be heard there with a half-meaning, or with no meaning, though it has rather become obsolete to modern ears. But the thing should not have fallen obsolete. The thing is a grand and solemn truth, expressive of a silent law of Heaven which continues for ever valid. The most untheological of men may still assert the thing, and invite all men to notice it as a silent monition and prophecy in this universe; to take it, with more of awe than they are wont, as a correct reading of the will of the Eternal in respect of such matters, and in their modern sphere to bear the same well in mind.

"The want of loyalty to the Maker of this universe-he who wants that, what else has he or can he have? If you do not, you man or nation, love the Truth enough, but try to make a chapman-bargain with Truth, instead of giving yourself wholly, soul and body and life, to her, Truth will not live with you, Truth will

* Jowett's Plato, Introduction to Phædo.

depart from you, and only Logic, 'Wit'—for example, ' London Wit '—Sophistry, Virtue, the Esthetic Arts, and perhaps (for a short while) Book-keeping by Double Entry, will abide with you. You will follow falsity and think it truth, you unfortunate man or nation! You will, right surely, you for one, stumble to the Devil; and are every day and hour, little as you imagine it, making progress thither."

This majestic key-note of scientific, ethical truth is the deep tone that leads the anthem of all great thought since the world began. Open now Theodore Parker, and how harshly his words clash with Carlyle's!

"The infinite perfection of God is the corner-stone of all my theological and religious teaching-the foundation, perhaps, of all that is peculiar in my system. It is not known to the Old Testament or the New; it has never been accepted by any sect in the Christian world. The idea of God's imperfection has been carried out with dreadful logic in the Christian scheme. In the ecclesiastical conception of the Deity there is a fourth person in the Godhead - namely, the Devil: an outlying member, unacknowledged, indeed, the complex of all evil, but as much a part of Deity as either Son or Holy Ghost, and far more powerful than all the rest, who seem but jackals to provide for this roaring lion."+

What is in the lines here in Parker is not so painful as what is between the lines. "God is a perfect Creator," writes Parker, "making all from a perfect motive, for a perfect purpose. The motive must be love; the purpose welfare. The perfect Creator is a perfect providence; love becoming a universe of perfect welfare." Optimism is the religion of science." Every fall is a fall upward."§

One feels, in reading Theodore Parker, that, whatever we do, God is on our side. Carlyle is of a very different opinion, and is moved by no faith deeper than that the distinction between duty and its opposite is "quite infinite." Place side by side this free-thinker, Carlyle, and that free-thinker, Parker, and ask which is the truer of the two to the deep intuitions of the soul? Contrast the seriousness of Buddha and the tone of this man of Massachusett's Bay. Compare Socrates and Plato, under the shade of the Acropolis, with this modern man, under the shade of what? Of a stunted mental philosophy; rooted well, indeed, in our soil at his time, but only a very imperfect growth as yet, and hardly risen above the ground when the attempt was made here to deny the existence of sin, and of its natural wages in the universe, in the name of an intuitive philosophy which asserts precisely the opposite in both cases.

*Carlyle, "Frederick the Great," vol. i. pp. 270, 271.

+ Weiss, "Life of Parker," vol. ii. p. 470.

Ibid, p. 471.

Of course you expect me not to skip the topic of the origin of evil, for, after all, the question which touches that theme, quite as often as any other, drives men into intellectual unrest, throwing some into atheism, some into a denial of the authority of Scripture, some into various forms of a false, loose, unscholarly liberalism.

What are the more important points which the use of the scientific method can make clear on this multiplex, fathomless theme of the origin of evil?

1. There cannot be thought without a thinker.

2. There is thought in the universe.

3. Therefore there is a Thinker in the universe.

4. But a thinker is a person.

5. Therefore there is a Personal Thinker in the universe.

You will grant me, at least, what Descartes made the basis of his philospohy: "Cogito; ergo sum"-"I think; therefore I am." I know that I think; and, therefore, I know that I am, and that I am a person." Agassiz says, in his "Essay on Classification," that the universe "exhibits thought," and that is not a very heterodox opinion! You know with what magnificent logical, rhetorical, and moral power the massive Agassiz, in that best of his books, gathers up range after range of the operations of the natural laws, and closes every paragraph with this language: "These facts exhibit thought; "" these facts exhibit mind;" and so on and on through a mass of intellectual scenery gigantic as his own Alps, and as little likely to be pulverized! When that man, in presence of the scientific world, bowed his head in silent prayer in the face of the audience at Penikese, he did it before a Person! What cared he for the lonely few sciolists who assume that there is no reason for holding their heads otherwise than erect in this universe? As I contrast his mood and theirs, I think always of the old apologue of the heavy heads of wheat and light heads the heavy heads always bend.

:

You say that you are sure you are a thinker, because you know there is thought in you. I know there is a 1 hinker in the universe, because there is Thought in it, and there cannot be thought without a thinker. There cannot be a here without a there. There cannot be a before without an after. Just so, in the nature of things, there cannot be a thought without a thinker. If we know there is thought in the universe, let us quit all doubt about a Divine Thinker.

What! falling into anthropomorphism, are you? That is a long word, but it means making God too much like man. Stern Ethan Allen, who made a speech once near Lake George, in a fort, the ruins of which were part of my playground in earliest years, said in a book

written to attack Christianity: "There must be some resemblance between the divine nature and the human nature. I do know some things, and God knows all things; and, therefore, in a few particulars there is resemblance between man and God."* Anthropomorphism, or the likening of God to man, is not quite as bad as likening God to mere blind physical force—is it? Most of those who are shyest of what is called anthropomorphism are advocates of a theory which likens God to what? To the highest we know? Not at all. To the next to the highest? No. They liken him to one of the lowest things we know—to mere physical force, which has in itself no thought or will. Force, the unknown God, forsooth? No doubt He whom we dare not name is behind all force. But to take one of the lower manifestations of his power as that according to which we will describe his whole nature is far more scandalous than to take the loftiest we know, and to say that God, at least, is equal to that; and how much better, neither man nor angel knows, or ever will. Descartes wrote, in a passage closely following his famous aphorism, and which ought to be as famous as that: "I must have been brought into existence by a Being at least as perfect as myself." The Maker must be better than his work. "He must transcend in excellence my highest imagination of perfection."

Is it anthropomorphism to say that there cannot be thought without a thinker, and that there is Thought, and that, therefore, there must be a Thinker in the universe? That is a necessary conclusion from self-evident, intuitive, axiomatic truth. It is an inference as tremorless as the necessary conclusion that if there is a here there is a there. So are we made that we cannot deny that if there is Thought in the universe there must be a Thinker. Let us rejoice with a gladness fathomless as this noon above our heads. Let us occupy our privileges. Let our souls go out to Him who holds the infinities and eternities in his palm as the small dust of the balance. Let our thoughts, if possible, not faint as they pass from the planet which He governs by his will, called gravitation, down to the winking of our eyelids, which the Asiatic proverb says are numbered, and who makes no mistake. This Thinker, with omnipotence and omniscience revealed by his works, ought to be holy. His unfathomable greatness raises the presumption of his holiness.

But we are not left in doubt upon this theme, for special light is given in the universe wherever doubt would be the most dangerous. 6. Every law is the method of action of some will.

Having presented to you the proof of that proposition which

* "Oracles of Reason."