and grandchildren. The Wesleyans in England still practice the timehonored usage with slight modifications. They usually first read the whole hymn through, often six six-line stanzas (they make much use of the 6-8 measures), and then they repeat it, verse by verse, as it is sung. The practice evidently improves the performance, for they are generally good readers of hymns, while with us there are very few such. A hymn properly read is also interpreted in the reading, and its chief points are emphasized and made impressive. There is all the difference in the world between the mere recitation of a few lines of poetry, and rendering the piece in such a manner that the soul of the reader shall go out with his words to the hearts of the hearers. It may be doubted whether by any other method so much of the very best forms of scriptural theology can be taught not as dry dogmas, but as living spiritual verities—as by a judicious use of our hymns; but in order to this, the reader must himself be in sympathy with their spirit; must have rooted in his mind and heart what he reads; and must render this service not merely perfunctorily, but as an integral part of the worship of the house of the Lord.

PHILOSOPHICO-THEOLOGIZING.

It is a remarkable but a very obvious truth, that one's own failures seldom convince him that he is not still entirely competent to teach others how to succeed; and accordingly your thoroughly "played-out" genius usually assumes to speak oracularly concerning the things as to which he has most surely demonstrated his incompetency. Accordingly, Mr. O. B. Frothingham, whose name is sufficient introduction to our readers, and who has certainly proved a most conspicuous failure as a religious teacher, and at length has abandoned not only the pulpit but also the Church, seems now to expect that he will still be regarded as quite competent to dispose of all the great questions respecting the subjective phenomena of "religious experience," and therefore he asks us, in a late number of the "North American Review," to sit at his feet and learn of him.

It must not be supposed, however, that when he talks about " conversion" he uses that word as one of the cant expressions of those from whom he differs. Quite the contrary; he includes himself among the "all religious people (who) believe in a new life as the condition of spiritual peace and contentment, and of that tranquillity of soul in which is supreme felicity." All who are familiar with the dialect of the class of quasi-religionists, in which Mr. Frothingham must be reckoned-though the classification is rather loose-know very well that almost the whole vocabulary of evangelical religion has been made to do service in setting forth their "other gospel." They can talk as readily as any revivalist or mystic of "the new birth," "change of heart," " 'sacrifice," and "consecration;" and, indeed, of whatever is understood by evangelical believers as precisely indicative of the very things as to which they and their "liberal" antagonists are diametrically separated. But a very

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tle attention to their utterances makes it manifest, that while the words are the same the sense is wholly different. It is not their method, however, to openly reject and antagonize that which real Christians hold to be fundamental and indispensable, but to ignore all these, and then by another form of teaching to infuse new meanings into the language used, and so to divert the whole train and substance of thinking toward new, and distinctively other, modes and tendencies. It is known that in adopting the Greek language as a vehicle for the deep spiritual truths of the Gospel, new meanings were infused into the terminology of that classical language; insomuch that a lexicon of the ancient Greek is not a proper exponent of the Greek of the New Testament. A reverse course is now pursued; and the language of the religious life is, by a process of evisceration, compelled to indicate an unspiritual naturalism. The word and its cognates, which in the New Testament is used to indicate evangelical repentance, in its classical use implies simply "consideration" and "change of proceeding," in respect to either methods or objects. Accordingly, it is now the fashion to restore to this word (and others in like manner) its old heathen import, and so reduce the repentance of the Gospel to a "reformation" of life and manners more or less thorough and far-reaching.

The great and controlling design of the so-called liberal pulpit and press of the present time is to eliminate the supernatural from religion. Just as the Scientists have been especially concerned to get rid of God in nature, so are these, above all else, solicitous that their theology shall have the least possible of God in it. And as those find in nature the "promise and potency" of all the phenomena of the material world, so these profess to be able not only to explain all the phenomena of mind without going beyond itself, but also to provide for all the wants of humanity from within itself. And so neither class has any use for God. The language of Scripture is very freely employed by these writers and preachers; but clearly not to teach what must be believed, but only for illustration and ornamentation. As one would quote words and phrases from Shakespeare or Milton in literature, or Bacon in philosophy, or Blackstone in law, so these employ the words of Scripture, for only secondary purposes. To the ingenuous reader who comes to the Bible that he may learn from it what is the truth, its teachings are scarcely capable of being misunderstood, for there are manifest in all its parts and in its totality a tone and tendency of spirit and a trend and drift of thought that cannot be mistaken; and by these the willing and believing will be almost infallibly guided into all needful truth. But if it is used only as a collection of historical illustrations, and of wise or not so wise sayings, the language of the Bible may be made the vehicle for a merely soulless naturalism. The process by which the words of Scripture are made to do service for the "liberal" theology affords a remarkable instance of what may be accomplished by unrestrained skill and ingenuity in replacing the substance of a thing by other matter without destroying its form, very much as a mass of so-called petrified wood retains its original outline, but none

of its substance. The fault of the system of thinking and believing of which Mr. Frothingham is eminently the representative, is not that its assumptions and conclusions are wrong as details of a system fundamentally correct, but that it is wholly and fundamentally wrong. Its God is not He whom the Bible reveals; its Christ is not the man of Nazareth and Calvary; its Spirit is not the divine one, but it is human; and its whole substance is not of heaven, but of the earth. It may, indeed, embody some things in themselves not unlike what may be found in the Gospel, just as similar details may be found in the most diverse specimens of natural history; but these in neither case disprove the essential distinctiveness of the two objects. In this case they are Christ and Belial. This may be seen in what are Mr. Frothingham's ideas of the nature of conversion and what are its conditions and resultant phenomena; which, though nowhere expressed in single phrases, are clearly enough seen in the course of his remarks. As it is simply a "turning," it may or may not indicate repentance in the writer's own naturalistic sense of that word, for he who has not gone astray need not turn again. Essentially, it is simply a good education-intellectual, æsthetical, and moral. Its only necessary conditions are opportunities and teachableness, and its results are good character and conduct, estimated according to conventional standards.

These, it will be seen, ignore and practically disallow all of the distinctive Christian characteristics of the subject. The "holiness" which, according to Scripture, is the ethical ideal of the divine character, subsisting in burning intensity, is reduced to the shadowy and uncertain, and at best unelevated, "virtue " of the Roman stoic. "Sin," the opposite pole to God's holiness in the ethical cosmos, appears simply as a more or less widely "missing the mark," by falling short or going beyond, or by aberrations to the right hand or the left-only an incompleteness, to be regretted rather than censured, and certainly not to be avenged. Such notions of the fundamental doctrines upon which all practical religions must be based render void, preposterous, and often odious, the distinctive doctrines of the evangelical Churches. The minified estimation of sin reduces guilt to a minimum, and so makes a deep and pungent "conviction of sin" the fancy of a disordered mind-perhaps the effect of a disordered liver. The only allowable atonement for sin is found in reformation and restitution, which become "vicarious" wherever there is a community of interests either good or bad, and in the exercise of kindly offices among men. For the Christ of the New Testament and the Church there is no place in such a system. If the historical Christ shed his blood for others than himself, so have thousands of others, perhaps quite as freely. If he died a martyr to his own teachings, so did Socrates to his; and so, in less conspicuous ways, have done untold multitudes of men and women. And because the Christ of the Gospels was at best only one of the great and good men of the world, Mr. Frothingham and those of the same way of thinking do well to refuse to specially honor him by consenting to be called Christians.

It is especially noticeable that in his crusade against the Christian doctrines, of which that of "conversion" is among the most considerable, Mr. F. found himself opposed to all parts and divisions of the Christian Church; and that by closer inspection it appears that between Catholics and Protestants the teachings of the latter are to him much the more objectionable, and among Protestants those are most astray, and most to be antagonized, who hold closely and tenaciously to the specifically evangelical doctrines. And yet he finds the nearest approach to the real. ization of his ideal in a “school of thought" in one of our less numerous nominal Protestant sects, "the Broad-Churchmen," whose title to this partiality may be the fact, assigned by another for a like preference, that they never trouble themselves about politics or religion. They "welcome every kind of culture;" are "indifferent to the current topics of theology;" and their "conception of Christ" is altogether "spiritual," so making him only a spiritual man in their own low sense of spirituality. It is, however, a real and valuable service rendered to the truth when the irreconcilable difference between the doctrines of the Gospel and those of rationalistic naturalism are thus clearly set forth in their essential antagonism.

"THE PHILOSOPHY OF CONVERSION."

The startling announcement made by the young Prophet of Galilee to the learned Jewish ruler, that in order to be found within the kingdom of grace a man must be "born again," elicited from the great man an expression of wonder and perplexity which took form in the question, "How can these things be?" From that time onward that question has continued to be asked, but it has never been answered. The fact that such a work is necessary is conceded by very many, including not a few of those with whom that young Galilean has not been accepted as a competent instructor; and though some have made tentative but abortive attempts toward the detection of its impulsive force, and of its processes, the more rationally thoughtful have conceded its practical insolubility.

In an article in the October number of the "North American Review," whose title stands at the head of this paper, Mr. O. B. Frothingham discusses this subject with characteristic acumen and force; but he reaches results that can be satisfactory to very few of his readers. Incidentally, however, some notable concessions are made, with some of which we are now chiefly concerned. Respecting the inconceivableness of the processes of a fundamental moral transformation he remarks, with a degree of force and clearness that may be commended to some dogmatizing philosophical theologians who profess to be able to solve all mysteries, but who so flatter themselves only because of the superficialness of their views:

Nothing is more incomprehensible than the moral process of reformation. To change one's mind permanently and resolutely; to take a new view of human

nature and human life, of providence and duty, of the world of causes and effects; to turn about and face in the opposite direction-is an altogether unaccountable thing.

This is strong language; and yet it is noticeably in agreement with what we read in the Bible-as when the prophet likens the perversity of the heart, in its unchangeableness, to the leopard's spots and the Ethiopian's skin, or when Joshua says to Israel, 'Ye cannot serve the Lord," or when Paul recognizes the invincibleness of the law of sin "in his members," effectually constraining him to do "the evil that he would not." Our Lord, in reply to the doubting query of Nicodemus, makes no attempt to solve this mystery, but concedes its inexplicability, while he reaffirms the fact itself. Like the phenomena of the wind, which are certain but inexplicable, so are the processes of regeneration. The claim which some make in favor of the sufficiency of the human will to effectuate such a change is simply nonsense of the most arrant kind; very much as if one should pretend to be able to lift himself by his boot-straps.

Any fundamental and essential change of moral character, in either direction, can be effected only by a power operating upon the subject ab extra-from beyond himself. As the stream cannot rise above its fountainhead, so the forces by which the established substratum of the moral character shall be removed and replaced must originate in a source beyond and above the subject of which such a moral nature is a predicate. Even Pelagianism did not assert the possibility of self-conversion; for, by disallowing that the human heart is so really bad as to require any essential change, it obviated the necessity of conversion; and, therefore, if any finally fail of eternal life, their falling away occurs in themselves individually, and not as the consequence of coming short of an originally necessary spiritual transformation. The problem of conversion is only one side of the broader one which includes all and any possible fundamental changes of moral character in either direction. The beginning of moral evil—that is, SIN, in the divine dominions-is a mystery, not only of the divine administration, but deeper still of essential possibility. Man, created in God's moral likeness, fell into sin; not by the spontaneous action of his free will, but by yielding to an impulse originating beyond himself. Nor is it possible to conceive that a moral agent, all of whose impulses are essentially good, and tend only to righteousness, could begin and prosecute and consummate a process of sinning against himself, as well as against God. And now, being alienated from God, first in character and afterward in life, to reverse the eccentric and downward course of his nature to change its polarity and turn its gravitation Godward—is certainly beyond the soul's inherent powers. As to its originating force, therefore, the work of conversion is not only beyond the range of our philosophy, but it is directly contrary to its certain requirements. Mr. Frothingham, who represents a not inconsiderable school of thought, even after granting the inexplicability of the beginning of the process, assumes to teach what must be its rationale, in doing which he most inconsistently reduces the whole matter to a system of naturalism.