In view, then, of the progressive nature of Christianity, it comes to be an important question whether we are sufficiently alive to this feature of its character-whether we sufficiently distinguish between such parts of it as are permanent, true for all time, and such as are adapted only for particular times and circumstances. As a thing of progress,

there must be certain of its forms and features that it must outgrow, and not a few that will not be of the same importance now as they once were.1 It is of consequence, therefore, to ascertain what particular features of its character belong properly only to particular times; and whether we be not at present receiving and retaining portions that properly belong to an earlier and less advanced stage of its progress.

It would be out of place here to pursue this subject further, but we have considered it necessary to touch upon it, as we believe that to this may be traced certain erroneous views that exert a most pernicious effect upon education. In particular, we would refer to that view of conversion which looks for, in each individual, a conscious and manifest turning to God-an act of the judgment after arriving at years of discretion. It entirely loses sight of what we find

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chimerical, in the amount of positive knowledge, of the most varied kind, which he (Comte) believes may, by good methods of teaching, be made the common inheritance of all persons with ordinary faculties who are born into the world.”—(J. S. MILL.)

1 "I keep in my mind a clear distinction between Christianity itself, as a thing of divine origin and nature, and the administration of it by a system of merely human powers and means."-(JOHN FOSTER.) "It is said a truth can never die. No; but the mode of expressing that truth must vary with every age, and be conformable to the growth of a people's power of comprehension." (J. A. LANGFORD.) "A spiritual truth," says Origen, "often exists, embodied in a corporal falsehood." The external form of the Bible "may be changed; the mere historical methods by which its teachings were communicated to men may be modified; but, in so far as it is a vehicle of real truths, it will endure."-(H. W. BEECHER.) "It is conceivable that even a positive statute of revelation may lose its appli cability by reason of a radical change in the circumstances it was designed to cover." (HORACE BUSHNELL.)

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2 "We seem to fancy that there is some definite moment when a child becomes a moral agent, passing out of a condition where he is a moral nullity, and where no moral agency touches his being. Whereas, he is rather to be regarded at the first as lying within the moral agency of the parent, and passing out by degrees through a course of mixed agency to a proper independency and self-possession."—(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

"The

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so frequently alluded to in Scripture-that God deals with families as well as with individuals; and it allows no place for any unconscious operations of the Spirit upon the mind of a child.2 We are too much given to regard God as dealing only with individuals, and not also with families and nations, and generations.3 Neither in His promises nor in His threatenings does God so regard man; for He is said to falsity of this conceit is evident in this: that whereas it makes the great business of eternity to lie in an instantaneous act, the transaction, perhaps, of a day, or an hour, or a sermon, the holy Scripture quite contrariwise represents it as the business of a man's whole life, and requires that men not only set out well, but that they make a daily and gradual progression towards heaven."-(Introduction to a Holy Life.) "Conversion is no instantaneous operation which finishes the whole business of religion at once, but is the serious commencement of a work which it requires the vigorous exertions of the whole life to complete."--(OVERTON.) "The consequence must naturally be a carelessness about growing in grace, and a neglect of the outward regular means; and this carelessness and neglect are augmented by their being ostentatiously reminded of those who are said to have been recovered from the most settled despair and the most excruciating horror by a kind of supernatural interposition, after having in vain habitually practised all the means of grace."-(Bishop MANT.)

1"Much of the religion of the present day," says Dr. Bushnell, "makes nothing of the family and the Church, and the organic powers God has constituted as vehicles of grace. It takes every man as if he had existed alone; presumes that he is unreconciled to God until he has undergone some sudden and explosive experience in adult years, or after the age of reason; demands that experience, and only when it is reached allows the subject to be an heir of life."-(Christian Nurture.) "The children's relation to their parents is often enough compared to that of the streams to their fountain-source, and of the branches to the tree out of which they grow; but the streams are pure if the fountain be pure, and the branches are healthy and vigorous if the tree be sound and strong, whilst the child is not, in virtue of a like sequence from a fixed relation, expected to be virtuous and godly because he has descended from, and been duly trained up under the instruction and guidance of, virtuous and godly parents."-(Rev. D. THOMAS.)

2 But whilst he may hope they will not need to be converted from sinful ways, this does not imply that they do not need the action of the Divine Spirit in the renewal and sanctification of their nature. That action of the Spirit preventive of their departure into those ways is presupposed in the hope, when it is well founded, that they will not need to be converted from them. The necessity for the change, which we designate conversion, in the moral principles and habits of the life of the man can only be obviated by the experience of the regenerating change in the nature of the child."- (Rev. D. THOMAS.) "If the parents live in the Spirit as they ought, they will have the Spirit for the child as truly as for themselves, and the child will be grown, so to speak, in the moulds of the Spirit, even from its infancy.”—(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

"It is a poor and shallow notion of God, that He is the God only of individuals, and not also the God of families, and the God of nations, and the God of generations and of ages."-(EDWARD IRVING.)

visit the transgressions of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, and to be unto the third and fourth generation with those that love him and keep his commandments.1 "I have never seen," says the Psalmist, "the righteous man forsaken, or his seed begging for bread." 2

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Neither in providence nor in grace is there any reason to believe that God is a "respecter of persons," at least, in the sense that many persons hold. They lose sight of the fact that, while each minutest act or thought of every individual is known to and taken account of by God, yet, on the other hand, such is the extent of His works and the greatness of His powers that even the globe itself is but an atom before Him, and the entire human race, from its creation to its consummation, but a very little thing. In His sight the

1"It is every day exhibited in actual historical proof that the wickedness of parents propagates itself in the character and condition of their children, and that it ordinarily requires three or four generations to ripen the sad harvest of misery and debasement."—(Dr. BUSHNELL.)

2" It is many times seen that the posterity of holy and good men... have, by a strange and secret disposition of Divine Providence, been unexpectedly cared and provided for... And, on the contrary, the posterity of the wicked do many times inherit the fruit of their father's sins and vices; and that not only by a just judgment of God, but from the natural course and consequence of things."-(TILLOTSON.)

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3 "I am increasingly persuaded that the dispensation of the Gospel .. is not a system of excitements, and surprises, and mysterious preferences, and selections of some who are taken from others who are left; but that, as a system, as a rational and spiritual system, of truth and influence, it is the meet instrument of Him who is no respecter of persons, who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth."-(Dr. RALEIGH: Christianity and Modern Progress.) They take a most unworthy view of the divine character who conclude that his attention is exclusively directed to a few favourite objects, in which they themselves possibly feel a special interest.”—(Dr. M'COSH.) "The diseases, the elements, fortune, gravity, lightning respect no persons... At Lisbon an earthquake kills men like flies. At Naples, three years ago, ten thousand persons were crushed in a few minutes. The scurvy at sea; the sword of the climate in the west of Africa, at Cayenne, at Panama, at New Orleans, cut off men like a massacre."(EMERSON: Conduct of Life.)

4" If, in his general dispensations, treating peoples and humanity itself as a single man, God seems to take small account of individuals, to force them into one solidity, and, without caring for exact assessment, to demand merely a certain total of misery below which his justice cannot descend, still everything, down to the least sigh, is secretly noted in his Divine memory; the tears of each one are, as Scripture says, put into separate bottles: no individual suffering exists without a reason, or trans

entire race is but a unit; the different peoples and nations that arise, and the different changes that take place amongst them, are but as incidents in the life of a single individual.1

Indeed, in the philosophy as well as the theology of the present day there is too manifest a leaning towards individualism. Man is viewed only as an individual-an

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cends its appointed purpose; and of all these sorrows, not one is lost or forgotten."(VINET.) The general providence of God, properly understood, reaches to the most particular and minute objects and events; and the particular providence of God becomes general by its embracing every particular-(Dr. M'Cosн.)

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"In the calm, ever-present eye of God, the whole race is a unit."— (Dr. WILSON.) "The entire succession of men," says Pascal, "through the whole course of ages, must be regarded as one man always living and incessantly learning." "All the civilized world has been one intellectual nation-and it is this that has made it so great and so prosperous a nation-all the countries of lettered Europe have been one body, because the same nutriment, the literature of the ancient world, was conveyed to all by the organization of their institutions of education."-(WHEWELL: University Education.) "The human race, looked at from its origin, appears, in the eyes of the philosopher, one immense whole, which, just as in the case of each individual, has its infancy and its growth."-(CONDORCET.) "Is the past annihilated, then, or only past ? is the future nonexistent, or only future? . . The curtains of yesterday drop down; the curtains of to-morrow roll up; but yesterday and to-morrow both are." (CARLYLE: Sartor Resartus.)

2 Professor Bain, for instance, in his system of philosophy, attempts to show that each individual's knowledge is the result of his individual experience, and allows no place to the hereditary transmission of qualities. The knowledge displayed by the calf or lamb a few hours after birth is, according to him, the result, not of instinct, but of a series of tentative efforts, which are at length crowned with success. He does indeed, in a note to be found in the appendix to the second edition of his Emotions and Will, admit that "the rapidity of the proceeding is beyond what we are entitled to assume from the powers of the animal generally. The case is more fully met by supposing a hereditary inclination to certain acts, the result of their incessant performance by many successive generations." "The knowledge of the optical changes that are the signs of approaching to or receding from a visible object may be, to a certain extent, a transmitted experience, although quickened into full effect by a brief course of trial and error.' This, however, in our opinion, comes very far short of the truth. "The tendency of all our modern speculations is to an extreme individualism, and we carry our doctrines of free will so far as to make little or nothing of organic laws; not observing that character may be, to a great extent, only the free development of exercises previously wrought in us when other wills had us within their sphere." (Dr. BUSHNELL.) "Kant is of too individualizing a tendency in morals."(Dr. DUNCAN: Colloquia Peripatetica.) "Whosoever would arrive at a just conception of man must not consider him exclusively as an individual being." 'As an individual being, he cannot be fully understood." "We must direct our attention to the history of a people, and from that to the whole history of civilization.”—(WAITZ: Anthropology.)

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isolated unit, having no connection with any person or thing going before, coming after, or surrounding him. He is regarded merely as he is in himself, without respect to the times in which he lives, the influences that are around him, or the qualities which he has inherited. But man is no such isolated being. He receives from his parents, and from many

"Surely it is time for individualism to cease in its spirit as in its principle. Let but the great truth go forth that the individual mind is incomplete, that the intuitions upon which all human progress depends are the property, not of a class, but of humanity as a whole, let it be seen that there is a living consciousness running through all the branches of the vast social system, that upon this must depend the real happiness of each individual man in society as well as the peace and repose of the world; and then at length may discord and disorder abate, the sense of true brotherhood grow strong, and the great organ of the human soul, rightly attuned in all its parts, send forth divine harmonies which shall blend in eternal concord with the diviner harmonies of heaven."-(J. D. MORELL: Philosophical Tendencies of the Age.)

"I will ask, and I will leave it to observation and conscience to whisper a reply, Does man, from the cradle to the grave, ever stand morally alone, or act alone?"-(The Parents' High Commission.) "Not by limiting our observation to the life of the individual who is but a link in the chain of organic beings connecting the past with the future, shall we come at the full truth; the present individual, is the inevitable consequence of his antecedents in the past, and through the examination of these alone do we arrive at the adequate explanation of him."-(Dr. HENRY MAUDSLEY.) "There is a truth which seems to be the discovery of our age, and which rightly understood is, we are told, to throw new light on all the problems of philosophy, history, and social order. This is what is called the solidarity of man. By this term is meant that mankind forms one body, not in a figure of speech merely, but as an actual fact; that in his physical, intellectual, and moral nature, man is linked to his fellows by bonds, close, intimate, and strong, which need to be clearly recognized. Science affirms that a child who throws a pebble into the ocean produces a vibration, which passing from molecule to molecule, extends to the very ends of the world; and it asserts, on good grounds, that the same law of transmission pervades the domain of intelligence and will. Humanity is not an agglomeration of individual atoms, each possessing an independent life; it is not a mosaic which can be taken to pieces at will; it is not an aggregation of individuals, each of whom may, if he please, isolate himself from the rest and say, 'I stand for myself alone.' It is a huge tree, and we are all the branches, along which flows the common sap; it is a living body, of which we are all truly the members. In the history of mankind the strange secret of my destiny is wrapped up; and as I am involved in its fall, I can be fully raised again only in its restoration."-(E. BERSIER: The Oneness of the Race.) "Your Christianity, be it ever so individual (and according to me it can never be sufficiently so), is extracted, expressed, so to speak, from the Christianity of sixty generations."-(VINET.) "Label men how you please,” says Herbert Spencer, "with titles of 'upper' and 'middle' and 'lower,' you cannot prevent them from being units of the same society, acted upon by the same spirit of the age, moulded after the same type of character.