CHAPTER VII.

TENACITY OF UNINSPIRED DOGMAS AN UNPROMISING MODE OF ENTERING INTO GOD'S PLAN.

As our power of doing good must be proportioned to our knowledge of, and conformity to, God's plan of converting and saving men, the question is, how can these be gained the most rapidly and in the highest degree. To this question, we shall devote the remainder of these pages. And by way of contrast, we will begin by noticing a few things from which Christians are apt to expect much, but which will afford them little, if they do not stand as obstacles in their way. The efficiency of machinery is improved by diminishing its friction, as well as by adding directly to its power. On this principle, scarcely less is to be expected to the evangelizing influence, by withdrawing the hearts of God's children from unproductive channels of effort, than by directing them to those which are right.

And I see not how any faithful, intelligent disciple can fail to see, that in order to enter into God's views, we must not take them second hand,

by setting up the dogmas and standards of men as our guides; but must obtain them directly from God himself, by the untrammelled study of his holy word, by prayer, by fasting, by holy living, by cherishing and not repressing the Spirit's work in our souls, and by the discreet and persevering use of our powers, in conversing with truth in its native sources and primeval elements. The amount of darkness and imbecility, which is at this moment accruing to the church, from the rabid determination of its several divisions, to keep up and perpetuate to all coming time, uninspired dead men's philosophies of religion, as wrought into their several creeds and platforms, is immense, is unspeakable! Oh, what a fitting subject for sackcloth and ashes, throughout the whole family of the redeemed! God would have his children, not innovators, not heresiarchal system-makers, not lovers of telling and hearing new things and of breaking up old landmarks merely for the sake of doing it; but simple, honest, holy, sincere, diligent, and so untrammelled by the thinking of all our uninspired predecessors, as to take up and carry out the results of faithful investigation in every thing, assured that his promise cannot fail, of giving wisdom to those who thus ask him. But when he sees one party fighting about an uninspired creed, and exscinding those who are suspected of not coming up to

its measure; another party shaping all its literature to a few dogmas which have become its favorite shibboleth; and all parties more solicitous to maintain the sectarian individualities which human weakness and folly have done much to impress upon them, how can He admit them to' his own counsels, or impart his Spirit to acquaint them with all things, yea even the deep things of God? Alas, darkness is not more opposed to light, than this tenacity of uninspired dogmas is to the true secret of acquainting ourselves with God's plan of saving souls.

We will instance the pernicious tendency of this tenacity, in the prevailing philosophy of conversion. The first propagators of the gospel, appear to have regarded religion, not as a state or condition, into which a man is put by decree, by purpose, or by some power acting upon him, as heat acts upon metal in fusing it; but as purely a voluntary thing. When they went to urge a reformation of life upon a man's conscience, they took the common sense view of regarding it as reasonable and right; and therefore, that the man had every requisite ability to attend to it, so soon as they succeeded to make clear to his mind, the nature and reason for such a reformation. Hence, they plied themselves to the work of making them clear. They did not go to tell the man that the Gospel claims were indeed rea

sonble, but that he could not comply with them, however clear they might be to his view, till God had wrought a change in the taste or nature of his soul, by an act of power that should set at nought his voluntary agency. No; their's was too much a common sense business, for these refinements of a subtle philosophy.

And thus matters went on for about four hundred years, abating the growth of various errors on other subjects, till in the fifth century, Christians began to philosophize upon the nature of this process of reformation. One party, at the head of which was Pelagius, held it to be a reformation to which the sinner is in himself and apart from all Divine agency every way competent; while the opposite party, headed by Augustine, taught that man by nature has lost his free agency; that this must be restored to him by a direct act of Divine power changing the nature of the soul, before he can obey the gospel; that God does this for a part of mankind, thus ensuring their obedience, not as the result of their free choice, for that they had not the power of exercising, but of his own sovereign will and pleasure; that such are saved in pursuance of an eternal decree of election, and the rest of the human family are damned, because, not being elected, God does not effect upon them the requisite change, and consequently, though the

gospel is preached to them, they cannot submit to its claims. Thus, while the scheme of Pelagius obstructs the moral power of the church, by depriving it of that element which the Spirit supplies, that of Augustine does the same, by merging all power for building up holiness on earth, in the omnipotence of God.

Now, this great controversy has swept the field of theology for the last fourteen hundred years. Not a creed or a dogma has been framed, during that long period, throughout the Christian world, Protestant and Catholic, which has not verged to the one or the other of those belligerent theories, or which has not received its cast and character from the conflict between them. On both and all sides, they have their proof texts drilled to the service of speaking the sense they wish, which, in most cases, is utterly at variance from the sense of the inspired men who penned them. Through the careful study of the Bible, this fact has been gradually developing itself in the mind of the writer for the last twenty five years, till now that book has become in his view entirely a different thing, from what the theories, foisted upon him at the outset, had taught him to suppose. And his experience is doubtless the same with that of hundreds of others. How therefore, can the thirty nine articles, or those of the Westminister Assembly of divines, or any