are already accepted by him, while his disciple St. Paul undertakes on a larger scale the formation of this new people, in whose bosom the Hebrew nationality is to be mingled into one, with all other nations. It is no longer, then, the prophet, who was to change the world whom the old astrology had predicted, nor the Jewish king, whom the Jewish seers had promised, that stands before you. It is a being, more elevated, more divine, inspired with the sentiment of the Infinite, penetrated with the true divine and human nature, and consequently man and God together, speaking in the name of God, and announcing to men, that a new man must be born in them if they would live and not die. The regeneration, which Jesus represents in this form, is then a spiritual renovation of man, a psychological resurrection. Return into unity, into charity, into brotherly love, and you shall live. Understand the profound sense of the doctrine of Moses, and you shall live. Love God with all your heart, and your neighbor as yourself, and you shall live. To all who ask Jesus how they shall attain to eternal life, he answers, "Enter into life." Life, in the divine sense in which he understands it, is identical with eternal life.

Thus it is according to the point of view where the mind places itself in the contemplation of this remarkable book which we call the Gospel, that Messiacal regeneration, or the kingdom of God, assumes three different forms which, so to speak, entwine one another, and although very distinct, if one separates them analytically, mingle synthetically together.

W. C. R.

DOCTRINE OF LIFE.

LETTER FROM A BAPTIST.

(Continued from page 180, No. V.)

BUT the republication of no past individual experience may cure the disease of an age. A new scientific statement of Eternal Truth is ever necessary, as a point of departure for the thinkers who are to embody the spirit of the next age. Without making great pretension, such, I think, is the little volume called the "Doctrine of Life;" in the short compass of whose 72 pages is dealt a blow at each of the Mother Errors that have led our time astray. And this is done with a calm consciousness of reserved power in the author, that promises something hereafter.

The first chapter, if I understand it aright, makes the word Life convertible with Freedom; for it declares Life to exist in man by his intelligence. Divine Life implies that there is absolute Being, self-intelligent; wherefore it is Power-absolutely free. Human Life is not absolutely free, because human intelligence is not absolute, but progressive, according as God freely manifests himself. Human Life is limited, in as much as it is dependent for its form and degree upon what is perceived; and free only so far as it is intelligent of God. The soul is by necessity influenced, but it exists to be influenced. In other words, Man exists, but exists in relations. If he is not omnipotent, yet under God he has a freedom not measurable by himself. In so far as he is free, he acts in Eternity, and this action in Eternity is no less Human Life, than his action in time and space.

Life in this definition is distinguished from Being. It is the manifesta

tion of Being. And the much vexed question of the freedom of the human will is put to rest by being precluded. Freedom is to be predicated not of the will of man, but of MAN. Man's will is determined by motives, his own activity of nature being one motive, which prevails over all others just so far as he is intelligent of God. For, to act according to God's Wisdom is to act without possibility of obstruction, which unobstructed action is FREEDOM. Thus is vindicated the philosophical accuracy of the exclamation of the Apostle, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is Liberty." (See note at the end of the article.)

In this chapter, on the tenth page, is the following sentence: "If we confine our attention exclusively to the actor, neglecting the object of the action, and proceed to build a system upon this partial view, we find no means of going from the man to his manifestations, and the very term actor becomes absurd." Here is touched the vital error of Mysticism, and its inevitable result of Quietism. Mysticism begins with making God the only Being, and annihilating human life. It seems to itself to destroy the human will, for it persists in refusing to look at man in any relation but the immediate relation to God. It ends, inevitably, in calling by the awful name of God, the principle of human activity, which survives as a-life-indeath, when it is not life-in-life; and the eyes being turned inward upon it, spiritual suicide takes place. In losing infinite object, there is soon no motive; and Quietism is the result, till at last there is no gleam of intel ligence left!

It is curious to see the development of Quietism, by this process, in dif ferent quarters. The first mystic is seldom practically a quietist, because there is generally in him a great individual nature, which has absorbed all the life of humanity hitherto developed. Thus Goethe, the great mystic of art, was the most industrious and laborious of men, to the latest day of his long life. Endowed with the finest senses, alive by his constitution to every department of nature, his mystical theory served just to strike the balance, and keep him incessantly busy, without allowing him to exhaust himself in any direction. But the moral indifference on which he plumed himself, as if he would be greater than the God whom we worship as the Moral Governor, was the only form of Quietism to which he attained, or rather sank. Into this sublime indifferency to good and evil, his infatuated followers easily enter, but without bringing to pass the surprising amount of work, which gave respectability to the earthly existence of their master, who, living in an age of Revolutions, despised the path of heroism! Who can say what Germany had been at this moment among the nations, had Goethe looked, for one moment, into the Transcendental objective, and made himself its servant? But the Lord maketh the inertia as well as the wrath of man to praise him. He who would not serve in Heaven is made manifest Ruler in Hell; and becomes the diagram by which the servants of God, of much humbler intellectual gift, may illustrate the problems of his age. He is a complete exemplification of the specific godlessness of his time; yet, in what he is, he shows how far the race, as a race, is redeemed above the brute. Had not Jesus of Nazareth lived, and by his life made God manifest to Europe for 1800 years,-Goethe, with his subjective method and theoretical Quietism, had never been what he was. Unconsciously he preached not a little of Christianity, though he was himself a cast away, if we may judge by St. Paul's standard.

Neither was the father of the Transcendental Philosophy, himself a Quietist. When Kant had destroyed the "means of going from the actor to his manifestations," by his critique of the Pure Reason, he was fain to vindicate the Life of man, by his "Moral Imperative," and the like. His followers were more strictly consecutive; and Fichte, with his absolute Idealism, Jacobi, with his morality of sentiment, and later disciples, and new masters, with their werdende God, casting away this anomalous "moral imperative," leave individual man aghast in absolute Quietism, which is surely his wisest position in the premises; for until his God is fairly alive, it is a great impudence for him to be!

Religious mystics, also, that have developed Quietism as their theory of morals, have been hindered from practising it, by means of the perse. cutions to which they have been subjected, in a world only half right in its judgment of them. It is no inconsiderable action, to bear persecution with dignity and success; and it greatly interrupts the process of introversion. In fact, it gives occasion for just that struggle, in which, according to our author, LIFE consists. But the disciples and children of the mystics, who are freed from persecution by their numbers, or by the praise the martyrdoms of their leaders have gained for them, generally manifest the legitimate result of the mistake in principle. Every mysti. cal sect that has been left free to unfold itself from itself, has ended in manifest corruption, or spiritual death, from the first monachism to shakerism. Man is only free from the bondage of his passions by his In. telligence, which, in its highest sense, always implies that he lives in somewhat higher than he is. More and more spiritual by inheritance, he must still look ever into the transcending objective, which he can hence. forth only do through Christ, who calls him to act with him, as soon as he is personally reconciled, by having entered into his death. The reward of the faithful steward of the ten talents is service, (for government is service,) by ten cities. True life is more and more action, and Quietism is only another name for death.

This view of the nature of life, prepares us to understand the author's analysis of consciousness. Consciousness is not only the perception of one force, but of two, the subject and object, involved in a third, which freely creates these two finites. We are no more sure of our own existence, than of the existence of the External world; and we cannot go a step in thought beyond the simultaneous perception of the subjective and objective, without implying a perception of the Infinite Being, who bears the same relation to the two finites, that we bear to our own thoughts. In short, consciousness is our intelligence of ourselves in our primal relations. We see ourselves intelligent, for we see that we see, by seeing what we see.

The World of Time is the next great question to which our author ap plies himself. No chapter in the book is so surprising as this, for its brief comprehensiveness. Read Brown's laborious evolution of the notion of time from the sensation of touch, in his lectures on Intellectual Philosophy; and St. Augustine's long disquisitions upon the first verses of Genesis, in the last books of "the confessions," and it will be easier to appreciate the clearness and force of mind that has made this simple statement. It evinces the power of thinking without words, which is an indispensable condition of a man's commanding his own age. The soul has its being in Eternity, he says, but lives in time. Time is a name for the accumula.

tion of the facts of memory. Our Life is measured out to us by our memory.

In this chapter, we must observe, that the word ideas is used in the colloquial sense, so that when memory is said to consist of "ideas which we have lived into existence," we must not understand the Platonic Ideas, synonymous with the logos of the New Testament, and the Hebrew Wisdom of God; but rather what the author elsewhere (pp. 13, 14,) calls notions. In the next chapter, for Idea, Logos, Wisdom of God, we find he has substituted the word Principle. And this is, perhaps, the wiser nomenclature, for the colloquial use, according to its etymology, of the word principle, renders it definite.

The fourth chapter states that Principles are constitutive of the transcendental world, strictly speaking; and demonstrates that the transcendental world is objective, as strictly as the material world is objective. It concludes that man lives at once in three worlds, the world of space, the world of time, and the world transcending space and time; in other words, the world of eternity.

On this objectivity of the transcendental world, simply and clearly stated, every one must take his stand who would not surrender himself to perish in the age into which he was born, but stand over and criticise it. Whether it belongs to Mr. Greene's genius to make use of it in criticising the literary, artistic, and political life of our times, yet remains to be proved; and will, in some degree, depend upon his disposition and leisure to make himself master of details in these various departments. But there are some who find his abstract statements full of suggestion, and to whom his method is a guiding light, for which they are grateful. In the book before us, which gives us all that we have a right to know of him as an author, he only makes a few theological applications, which I will now very briefly consider.

From the triplicity of man, manifested in consciousness, he goes directly to the Trinity of God; and, even in the erroneous Sabellian statement finds a truth, as he says, which has caused it "to be perpetuated thirteen centuries." This truth he promises to bring out distinctly in his chapter on the Atonement. Perhaps he hardly redeems his pledge. He thought it too obvious to dwell upon, it may be; but if he will allow himself to be counselled, in the art of authorship, I would say that he must not trust too much to the intelligence of his readers. There is very little voluntary thought to be relied on, in the puny thinkers, or rather reverieers of every day.

Tritheism he despatches in one paragraph; which is enough room to give to it, in a book that pre-supposes some reasoning power in the person who has read to the 28th page. But should he ever find himself speaking from the pulpit, or in pastoral conversation, he will learn that there is need of some considerable instruction, in order to do away a not uncommon view of the Trinity, which obscures to multitudes the fact of the Unity of God.

Lastly, he speaks of Unitarianism, which denies all triplicity of the Divine Nature; and he declares that by this, it denies all LIFE to God. This part of the subject needs, for Unitarians at least, more full illustration. Unitarianism is too important an error, and has too intimate relations with the intellectual vices of our times, both as effect and cause, to be dismissed in so summary a manner. Few minds that are in its toils

have the intellectual acumen, to make, without assistance, that analysis which shows that in the last analysis "it is in no wise different from naked ⚫ atheism!" And besides, the persons who hold it as their speculative creed, are, as we have seen, inheritors of much of that spiritual life which has grown up, by the Trinitarian Church. I do, indeed, believe it can be proved to a demonstration, that there is no worship possible, but of a Triune God, and that there is no devout man who calls himself Unitarian, but would find, could he analyse his own mental acts, that just so far as he worships, he is a Trinitarian, and all that he lacks of the spirit of worship, is to be resolved into the hindrances produced by his Unitarian formula. But, like Mr. Greene, I must pass by this, at this time, with the mere statement of my conviction, though I should like to resume it at another time.

Having assumed that God is alive, according to the sense of the word Life, as defined in the first chapter; and that the difference of the life of the Creator from that of the creature, consists in God's having the highest object in Himself, and so being self-existent, while man has it out of himself, he proceeds to show, that the very assertion that God lives, is the assertion of his triplicity; while the declaration that he has his object in himself, is the assertion that his triplicity is in Unity. His quotations from Scripture, in this point of the argument, seem to me luminous by their position in it. And if any person finds it difficult to seize the force of the doctrine of the Trinity, I advise him to take up the formula hypothetically, and read in St. John all those apparently mystical passages where Jesus' life in God, and God's life in him, and the true life of man in them, are spoken of: we think he will speedily conclude, that according to St. John at least, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is a Trinity, made manifest in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

In Jesus Christ, (that is, in the incarnate wisdom of God, the Logos, the Platonic Ideas,) God and man meet and live one life. For, as the old Theologians used to say, "God contemplates his own glory in the face of the Son ;" and, as Jesus told Philip, "Whoever hath seen the Son hath seen the Father." The Holy Ghost, which sanctifieth the soul of the believer, proceedeth from the Father AND the Son. And so Coleridge, when asked by the late Dr. Channing to state the Trinity, which he declared to be the Perfection of Reason, said, "it is God the Thinker, God the object of his own Thought, and the relation between them, in which man finds his life." Mr. Greene's is a fuller and less technical repetition of the old formulas, and avoids the ambiguities which have given rise to Tritheism and Sabellianism, and by reaction perhaps, to Unitarianism itself.

Having settled his theology in the three words, triplicity in unity, he proceeds to a consideration of the fact of the Fall.

It is by the Fall, human nature began to exist. Man could hardly be said to live at all, till he was divided from the life of God, by going into the finite object, thereby seeing himself to be a force. To gainsay God, and ask, "Why didst thou not make me all, instead of a part of thy creation? that which I am not, is the complement of myself," was the prevailing temptation. That man is capable of this blasphemy, proves him the image of God, and imposes on him the obligation to vindicate that image. This he can in nowise do, of himself, for the blasphemy by which he begins to live, turns him away from the Love that created and would