God is wont habitually to bless, in the revival and flourishing life of his work:-while passivity districts are left without a miracle or a mystery, arid and moistureless as the sterile summits of Gilboa; and their destitution OFTEN shamefully charged upon the sovereignty of God. How comfortable to indolence, false orthodoxy, and Antinomian presumption, thus to pervert the articles of faith, and transgress the best, plainest, and most practicable rules of action!

But do you not believe that God is the giver of the increase? Yes, I believe it; for it is an article of faith, inasmuch as it is a subject of revelation: I believe, love, admire, adore, preach, and praise it! I trust it too; and thus it becomes an infinite strengthener to all my efforts for God. But-must I make it a rule of action, and myself a fool of action to honour the perversion and stupidity I have shown in doing it? I ought to have said-ought I to infer passivity, and practice stagnation, and come to pure fatalism, in honour of it? But still, says the objector, "Paul may plant, Apollos may water, God only CAN give the increase." I answer-this is what I do not believe, because there is no such text in the Bible. When you take it from its proper historical form, as an article of faith and a glorious fact; and throw it into the potential form, where it becomes, in the common perverted parlance of millions, a mischievous and deceitful paralysis of action, with its can and its cannot-a corrupt rule of action, or rather of inaction, I demur, I protest, and I preach on the soul's activity in regeneration! See the passage, according to the rule of how readest thou? and this-its Scriptural connection and use. 1 Cor. iii. 6. 13. 15. But it is very hard, says one, to know just how far we are to depend on God! Is it? I think quite otherwise. Depend ALL on him, and do your duty! and he will work in you, and by you, and accept your praise. Obey his orders, trusting in his prosperous government and infinite all-sufficiency. You have nothing in the world to do but-obey! If any thing else is to be done, it is not your duty, province, or concern. "Have faith in God." the thirty-seventh Psalm, with the forty-sixth-Luther's Viaticum; Zech. iv. 6—10, and just DO YOUR DUTY, world without end.

Read

Still, it is important to teach men the secret of their dependence; to make them know it, the whole of it, and confess and feel it to his praise. In this position, all Christians are agreed; with all my heart, I grant it. The means, the style,

the manner in which we shall attempt to bring them to a proper sense of it-this is the question that possibly divides us! One way is to stop them (at least negatively) from doing their duty, till they feel and own aright their dependence! to admonish, and doubt, and embarrass, and warn, and hamper them-till they are incapable of confidence in God; and become afraid to do any thing; and then they learn to give all the glory to God. The glory-of what? Of passivity, of dependence that prevents obedience, and of devoutly doing nothing in an orthodox style. So does not God! The sense of dependence, and the only one, that he cares to foster in us, results from a cultivated and practical sense of our obligation to love and serve him: and this he inspires in all his word, as the only legitimate mode of arriving at the other! Let a man feel, as he ought, his accountability; let him see its absor lute perfectness; let him be stimulated through the truth to avoid sin with an ingenuous antipathy, because he cordially approves of the law of God and affects holiness:-that is the man, and the only man, whose acclaim of glory to God, as the author of all his religion, will be steady, intelligent, sincere, unaffected, undragooned, and worth observing. Such homage will be acceptable to God. I have often mecum characterized or classed preachers in a two-fold axeous, in reference to the inculcation of religion, as those who think it best to subserve the piety of their hearers, by constantly insisting on dependence; and those who think it best to subserve the same end by constantly insisting on obligation. Now, of the latter class, thus generalized, I say, in the fear of God, the following things: 1. That theirs is the way of the Bible. That the Bible inculcates both, is certainly true. But who can doubt that all its influence natively tends, and that with a prodigious and a momentous persuasion, to beget and to mature a perfect sense of perfect accountability? Let any man who doubts it, keep the problem in his thoughts and read the Bible (systems of divinity and technicalities of thought forgot) with it in his eye, that he may be able to know "what saith the Scripture" on this qualifying and controling question of questions. 2. Exceptions apart, God blesses them with the revivals. As this is a question of fact, I leave it for individual observation; remarking, that some illustrious exceptions are no exceptions at all! the reason:-they preach obligation, and offer the gospel so simply, fully, honestly, powerfully, and constantly, (I do not say quite uniformly,)

that in effect (when not in name) they belong to New School and not Old; sit venia verbo! They are no passivity men in their example; and very little such in the engrossed scope of their ministrations. I add, 3. That where very passive, very dependence inculcating views, have distinguished the preaching, my observation is utterly wrong, if the rebuke of Gilboa has not been just as manifest! 4. The inculcators of dependence first, and of obligation second or never, have not, I think, been distinguished for the miracles of Omnipotence with them, which they seemed to expect: and when I have read or heard their arguments, telling of the glorious ground of hope for success, affected myself with the encroaching paralysis, I have said-show me your facts! I have glanced at the official history of the sermonizer himself, and have not been malignant in supposing that certain influences of a personal nature might have had an unconscious action on his mind, in discolouring and passivizing its theology, seemingly with an angel hue of superior devotion, and a flame of more empyreal piety! It may look modest, and work withal a great lustration of character, to say-divine sovereignty has denied me the great favour of a revival, and I am resigned to it! God is a sovereign-amen! 5. The man who is willing to do his duty, and who actually and habitually does it, is the only one who does not make his dependence an excuse for his sin!-I observe this, as a characteristic of those Christians who are made under the high-pressure influence of the preaching of obligation first, and dependence next, and both in musical accord, to the glory of God. I subjoin, that it follows, 6. That the only legitimate and safe way of urging dependence, is by urging (of course with a rich and varied enlargement) obligation, in its full and absolute and perfect finish in the constitution of God. I do not mean that we should legalize, be rigorous, and irony; or keep out of view God forbid! the other pole from that!-the infinitely rich and melting mercy of God in Christ Jesus, or fail to exhibit all the touching notes and tones of the history of our redemption: but so to preach, as to produce, and vindicate, and continually to deepen, the impression of perfect accountability. In this way we may give light and force to the idea of superabounding grace. There are preachers, indeed, of the New School, who seem to make moral government (and what is the definition of this cardinal matter but the administration of lawnot gospel necessarily, but law-over accountable creatures?)

a succedaneum for the gospel; some who inculcate obligation, as if they had never read John iii: 14-18, or as if obligation merely, were the only idea in revelation, or as if there was "a law given that could give life!" These hammer cold iron, or blow the embers that will not ignite, in a style that forcibly reminds one of the poetical clatter of the subterranean Cyclops, at work spondaically on the anvil, very regularly and monotonously industrious in their vocation! A tune that suits the forging of thunderbolts

Olli inter sese magna vi bracchia tollunt.

On this account perhaps as a specimen-BELLAMY'S TRUE RELIGION DELINEATED ought to be called THE DOCTRINE OF OBLIGATION HAMMERED IN AND CLINCHED! for, excellent as the book is, and I love it, as a treatise on accountability and a vindication of the preceptive perfection of law, I think it wrongly named, as not a good delineation of true religion! The tree of life is scarce found in it, and then not "in the midst of the garden." It might suit hypocrites, to unmask them; and old Christians, to search and chasten them; and ministers and students of divinity, to acuminate their views of the subjects of which it treats; but I would keep it ordinarily from young Christians:-for, ONE* I lament, these twice seven winters, whom I suppose it first palsied in mind, and then literally killed in body; and from the unconverted, for it is very questionable if it would not harden them alone; it preaches as the gospel, or the Bible, does not. It exemplifies little of the revealed connection and use of the truth-though far is my heart from wishing to disparage so excellent a treatise! I give it as an example of the style in which obligation is truly, but not well, preached; "being alone:" and add, that such is not the way to convert souls, especially when it pervades the preaching. "Because the law worketh wrath: for where no law is, there is no transgression. Therefore it (salvation) is of faith, that it might be by grace, to the end the promise might be sure to all the seed." The direct rays of mercy should always pour upon the path of the preacher, and make for the hearer the day of legitimate hope in Jesus Christ, our glorious propitiation. But what I mean is-that obligation, as such, should be shown in its perfection, so that grace. * C. G. An accomplished son of Nassau-Hall, and I doubt not, a son of heaven too!

-dulce decus meum!

VOL. III. No. IV.-3 T

may be appreciated in its true nature; that obligation, as such, like the steady law of attraction among the spheres of our astronomy, should never be affected by the variations common to subordinate and terrene locations-by darkness or day, summer or winter, sunshine or storm, tornado or inundation, good or evil, of partial and personal experience.

I was surprised to read the parenthesis in the paragraph with which you concluded; "with the exception of the mere extent of the atonement, a point of very subordinate importance to that of its nature. A true view of its nature, will, I think, lead to a just view of its extent. But truly its extent appears to me of VERY GREAT and daily of more and more importance; and that it is not so seemingly in your estimation is the occasion of surprise. Of course I cannot now take up that other world: yet well am I aware of the connection between limited atonement and passive regeneration; and of the growing disconnection of revivals of religion with both!

I shall not subjoin any asseveration of pure motives, &c., in this communication. What my motives are, God knoweth; and this is enough, certainly for my responsibility, possibly for my consolation. But one grand desire of my soul, congenial exquisitely with the 'o yeygapa preceding, I will yet inscribe. Let its seeming audacity be forgiven and its exhortation suffered; for this world will soon contain us no more. Its apology may be read in Leviticus, xix. 15-18. Possibly there is little in it of party or earth; possibly something of "glory to God in the highest; on earth peace, and good will to men. It respects that peerless circle of promise and probability, in the government of God, whose lucid centre is

THE DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL ECLAIRCISSEMENT OF THE

PRESBYTERIAN MINISTRY IN THIS COUNTRY! I believe they are now incomparably the first for intelligence, piety, and usefulness: that they preach the gospel with more sense, force, and efficiency, than any other description of the ministry in this nation; and that they are better suited to the times, places, and manners of the country, than any other. Were they all more discriminating; more disabused of passivity forms and stumbling blocks of doctrine; more addicted to a direct and clear and complete offer of the gospel with importunity of zeal to every creature," and an unfettered cordiality in urging their hearers immediately to accept of it; more like Paul in the versatility of their address, in the free, open, unembarrassed style of their ministrations; (see 1 Cor. ix. 19