ings, while at the same time he looks upon the external revelation as a guide into the internal, into the very marrow and life of the truth.

Dr. Bushnell is no puny fastidious soul; there is a kind of Luther-like audaciousness at times in the treatment of divine themes; but he is nevertheless a man whose emotions are under control; he is eminently an intellectual preacher; so that when speaking of Christ it is said, "Had he been chloroformed and laid by these thirty-three years, he would be as far one in all that constitutes character," we confess to an unpleasant sensation, because the expression seems to be a deliberate one. The ground-tone, we think, of every sermon should be a reverential one without losing its freedom, and it should in no portion of it run into irreverence, or even ill-taste, because it forms a part of the worship of God.

Samson did not need the weapons of the Philistines. Dr. Bushnell is so strong that there would seem to be no necessity for his employing words that are not, and never will be, true English words; and the time gained in such telegraphic brevities as "dumbed," "infinited," "Christed," etc., etc., is more than overbalanced by the shock given to well-regulated minds. Dr. Bushnell's style is not classic-that we would not find fault with, for there are higher qualities than classical puritybut where for the sake of emphasis, the style runs into strained abnormal expressions which look more odd to the calm reader than to the aroused author striving to utter a forcible thought in the most energetic way, surely no authority, however great, can defend it. The English language has resources which are equal to the most violent call upon it. Yet how much more often are we reminded, all through Dr. Bushnell's sermons, of the nervous strength of the older English writers like Fuller and Bishop Andrews, whose words sometimes fairly bend and crack under their weight of meaning.

Whatever language a strong man uses that language becomes his own, fits him, looks like him, is the garment of his mind, is luminous with the shining of his spirit in it, as Dr. Johnson looms colossal through his ponderous and vapory Latin-English, and Swift gleams malignant across the clear atmosphere of his translucent prose, and Carlyle utters himself in the jagged,

abrupt thunder-claps of his harsh Olympian speech. This grand quality of individuality no writer of the day possesses beyond Dr. Bushnell. His style is open to criticism, but it is his own. It is Hercules' lion-skin and must be treated with caution and respect, for to touch his language is to touch him. The picturesque strength of his words gives a sort of Homeric vigor to them. He seems sometimes to dig up a word like a big unhewn rock out of the ground. He uses what comes best to his hand, and what will do the most damage, let it be the homeliest and roughest, or sharpest and most scientific phrase. Such a sentence as the following is thoroughly Bushnellian:"Terrors and reproofs, let fall thumping on the world out of abstract deity, do not come in power. They sufficiently impress only when they speak out of a mind that feels, or that is visibly bathed in sympathy and sorrow. Who but Christ ever gave

us any vital impression of God's hatred to sin?"

We feel that we have not as yet touched upon the higher or the very highest qualities of Dr. Bushnell's preaching, and these are indeed more inner and spiritual, belonging to the inmost nature and theory of his preaching. They are connected with his views of the spiritual source and force of words. They are connected with his whole theory of Christ's spiritual control of the preacher's very being, will, thoughts and modes of expression and impression. They look beyond the mere outer qualities of language. They draw from those hidden inspirational fountains that issue from the Holy Spirit, through faith in that great irruption, or inundation, of the divine upon the human, in the incarnation and work of the Son of God, to vivify, spiritualize, and deify the human soul. He bases himself profoundly in the spiritual truth, and for this reason rises the higher. He is like a great mountain whose sides are clad with green fields on which all that is wholesome and gladsome grows-for there is nothing more sensible and devoid of asceticism than his views of lifebut its lonely summit is lost in the clouds of heaven. The preacher of the Plymouth pulpit is like a bounteous river which flows along the lower levels of human nature and carries with it the freightage of human hopes, doubts, joys, and sorrows. One is distinguished for majestic altitude of thought, the other for splendid breadth of sympathy. One sees humanity in divinity, the other divinity in humanity.

What is the hope of the American pulpit, as represented by these the two greatest living exponents of it? This is a deeply interesting question. In some respects the prospect is very bright, in others not so bright. Such great preachers bring into the Christian pulpit new freedom, nature, rationality, common sense, and common interest, genial hope and breadth of religious views, culture, and relief from narrow intolerance and oppression in religious things.

But in addition to the loftiest thought and the freest sympathy, to the most scientific intelligence and hospitality to general ideas of the advancement of knowledge, there should be more of clear, primitive, simple faith in the divine doctrines of the gospel, and confidence in the attractions of the cross upon the heart. In American preaching we lack what the best Scotch, French, and German preachers have-unction. There is a marvelous degree of keen intellectual power among us, but little of Pauline spiritual sensibility. Very few American preachers, although their sermons excel English and European sermons in solid substance of thought, and although they sometimes utter moving, piercing, and passionate words, have the ability to move others, because, with some rare exceptions, they almost utterly lack the first quality of moving others— feeling.

ARTICLE VI.-CASUISTRY.

SYSTEMATIC casuistry is properly but the application of ethical principles to particular instances of duty. If moral science be distributed, as it has been by able writers, into two parts, speculative and practical,—the theory of morals and the application of the principles of morals to practice, casuistry is the proper name for the latter department. But casuistry, like astrology, has come to signify to most minds at the present time something very different from a scientific treatise on practical morality. By many, perhaps most, it would now be defined somewhat after the manner of Le Feore, the preceptor of Louis XIII, who called it "the art of quibbling with God;" or perhaps as the art of mystifying for the sake of ensnaring weak consciences. From the diligent cultivation of this department of science under the name of Theologia Moralis by the Jesuits, casuistry has become almost synonymous with Jesuitism, in the offensive sense of that term. The radical vice in their systems that have been elaborated with so much diligence and taught so assiduously in their schools for training candidates for the priesthood, lay in the fact that they were wrought out in the interest of the confessional. Consciously or unconsciously the authors and teachers of moral theology, in its practical applications, seem to have been governed by a single aim to give to the confessional lordship over the conscience. By multiplying moral distinctions in kind and degree, almost endlessly in application to concrete instances of duty, adepts in this kind of moral theology were able, under that most convenient distinction of mortal and venial sin, to lead unsuspecting penitents to acknowledgments of any degree of guilt, or to dismiss the grossest offenders with consciences disburdened from all sense of wrong. Vice, falsehood, robbery, murder, could find an excuse somewhere in ignorance, in the severity of the temptation, in some compulsion, in some righteous end intended, or some good resulting, or if not otherwise, could be shielded against the penal consequences of mortal sin

under the sheltering wing of that marvelous doctrine of casuistical refinement-probabilism. The casuistry of the Jesuits indeed seems to have culminated in the multiplicity and subtlety of the distinctions elaborated in this department of its teaching. It was the part upon which Pascal in his Provincial Letters struck his most effective blows of argument and ridicule. As such culmination of the practical moral theology of the Jesuits and also as the occasion of one of the bitterest and most important theological controversies of the last two centuries, as well as for its relations to our subject, it seems to demand from us something more than this mere incidental mention.

The original germ of the doctrine of probabilism, so-called, is to be found in a sentiment uttered by the Spanish Dominican Bartholomew de Medina, in his commentary on the Summa Theologiæ of Thomas Aquinas, to the effect that an opinion is lawful if probable, although its opposite is more probable. It was Vasquez, a noted Jesuit, however, who first formally advocated the doctrine of probabilism as applied to morality, that if an act has a probable support, it is lawful. This probable support may be from one's own reason or from the authority of others.

The doctrine was elaborated with the most refined subtlety of logic to the extreme of license. Pascal quotes the following language of Layman, one of the leading Jesuit moralists, in which he is expressly supported by high authority: "A teacher, being consulted, may give counsel not only probable in his own opinion, but contrary to his own opinion, if it is esteemed probable by others, when this counsel contrary to his own happens to be more favorable and more agreeable to the person who consults him,—si forte et illi favorabilior seu exoptatior sit. But I say further, that he will not transgress reason if he give to those who consult him counsel held as probable by any learned man, when even he is himself assured that it is absolutely false."

The batteries of the Port Royalists under the lead of Arnauld and Pascal, irresistible as they were, did not utterly destroy this doctrine, so convenient for confessional uses. A controversy sprang up between the Probabilists and the Probabilior