We steamed by Liberia's low wooded shores without the chance to observe how the sable republic flourishes by a personal view of things. Report speaks evilly of her-of her pride and her vanity, of the disinclination of her children to work, and their pretensions. to high-sounding titles and high places. Those on board the "Benin," who have stopped at Liberia, say that mostly every other man is styled "Honorable;" that the people are fonder of standing in groups in the streets to discuss politics than of bringing the produce of the rich back country into the market for sale, which, if true, is very disheartening.-P. 9.

Statistics may show more favorable than the second-hand reports of a newspaper reporter, but our missionary reports speak from year to year in a very discouraged and discouraging tone with regard to this mission in Africa. The Liberia Conference, at its session in 1874, says in a strain of yearning appeal :

The universal cry of Liberia is, "Back to the interior!" back from the briny waves of the boisterous Atlantic to the peaceful, salubrious, and more inviting everglades and mountain fastnesses of the far interior. . . . Men of means cry to us from beyond the Atlantic waves, "Back to the interior!"... The Liberia Annual Conference stands ready and anxious, awaiting the advance of the mother Church in America to qualify her for this aggressive interior move. . . the most interesting portion of the work in connection with this conference is our native work, the work among the aborigines of the country. . . . We long for the time when the mother Church, through the Missionary Board, will, with a will, enter into missionary operations in Liberia as in days of yore... We have stations among the heathen occupied by strong men, but they and their work are feebly sustained.

Is it not time that the great Methodist Episcopal Church struck out for a new site, a new lead, something to create new enthusiasm, in the heart of Africa? Southern Africa is well manned; western Africa has had its share of our beneficence for forty years; might we not kindle the zeal of our ministers, members, and youth over some new enterprise in the lake region, some elevated and healthy position, where life and labor, and not disease and death, would be the rule? Women can live and labor in Africa. Mrs. Livingstone accompanied her husband from the Cape to Lake Ngami, a thousand miles inland; Mrs. Baker braved the Nile to the Albert Nyanza, over two thousand miles from the Mediterranean and civilization.

One of the most effective of the many choruses used by the union soldiers in the late rebellion was that which canonized the brave American who struck the first blow for the liberation of the blacks :

"John Brown's body lies moldering in the ground

His SOUL goes marching on."

Livingstone would have coveted a grave on the banks of the Bangweolo. He lies among England's great in Westminster Abbey, with a motto commemorating his abhorrence of the curse of Africa for thirty centuries. In the amelioration of the condition of the sons of Ham in both hemispheres, in philanthropic efforts and future missionary plans, HIS soul also goes marching on.

ART. II.-THE PROPÆDEUTIC OFFICE OF THE ETHNIC

RELIGIONS,

AND THEIR COMPARATIVE VALUE IN THE DIVINE EDUCATION OF

HUMANITY.

"The law was our school-master to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith."-ST. PAUL.

"One article of our faith, then, is possible, that Christ is the first begotten of God, and we have already proved him to be the very Logos (or universal Reason) of which mankind are all partakers; and therefore those who live according to the Logos are Christians, notwithstanding they may pass with you as Atheists; such among the Greeks were Socrates and Heraclitus."-JUSTIN MARTYR.

"God is the cause of all that is good: only of some good gifts he is the primary cause, as of the Old and New Testaments; of others the secondary, as of (Greek) philosophy. But even philosophy may have been given primarily by him to the Greeks, before the Lord had called the Greeks also. For that philosophy, like a a school-master, had guided the Greeks also... toward Christ."-CLEMENT, of Alexandria.

THERE are two words in the passage quoted from St. Paul, at the head of this article, which are employed by the writer in a peculiar sense. That we may fully apprehend the great principle here enounced, we shall find it needful to fix the precise meaning of these terins. The first of them is law, the second

is justification.

In attempting, therefore, to ascertain the exact sense in which

these words are employed by Paul, and to apprehend the specific idea which he designs to convey, we must be guided, neither by etymological principles, nor by classic usage, but by the consensus and use of Scripture alone.

The sacred writers must be allowed the indisputable right to this privilege of authorship, namely, they may create new terms in which to express new ideas, or they may employ old terms in a new sense, and infuse into them a new conception, provided this is clearly indicated by the connection, or else exhibited by a paraphrase; and in seeking to interpret their thought, we are bound to explain their terms according to their own peculiar usage. First, of the word law. The Greek vóuos, like the English correlative, law, is a generic term. In its most comprehensive sense it denotes that which is fixed, determined, settled, either by an inherent, subjective nature, or by an external objective power. As that which is fixed, determined, settled, it becomes a norm or rule for either voluntary or involuntary action.

The word is most commonly used in Scripture to express a definite rule of conduct, prescribed and fixed by a competent authority—that is, it is the expression and embodiment of the supreme reason enforced by power. This generic conception runs through all, or nearly all, the subordinate, and accommodated, and even figurative uses of the term "law" in the sacred writings.

In many passages "the law 99 means the ecclesiastical and ceremonial law of the Old Testament economy. But even here the fundamental idea is retained. The ceremonial law was a rule prescribed by a competent authority for the government of religious worship, determining its modes and rites.

In other passages it denotes the Decalogue or ten commandments delivered to Moses. This is called, by pre-eminence, "the law," because it is the appointed rule of moral, that is, of voluntary conduct, which determines or settles what ought to be our behavior toward God, and our conduct toward our fellow-men. Again, in other passages, it designates Divine revelation in general-the whole revealed mind of God, whether it relates to faith or to action, the conduct of the understanding or the conduct of life. In all these subordinate uses of the term "law" there is involved the fundamental con

ception of a norm or rule for the government of conduct, imposed by a competent authority.

In the writings of the Apostle Paul we recognize that this term is largely extended in its scope, and assumes a more abstract character. Nóuos, when used by him, especially without the article, embraces all powers and principles which influence the will, and determine the conduct of man, either by the im pulses of an inward disposition or the constraint of external motives, whether their behests be or be not expressed in definite form. These powers or principles are, in the last analysis, resolvable into the ideas of the supreme reason. Thus it is that we meet in his writings the frequent antithesis between "works of law" (¿pya vóμov)—works done under the constraint of outward formal rules-and "works of faith "—that is, works performed freely under the internal influence of faith. Accordingly we find in his epistles such correlated forms of expression as "the law of faith," (Rom. iii, 27;) "the law of my mind "vòvs, or reason, (vii, 23;) "the law of the Spirit of life," (Rom. viii, 2,) to denote an internal principle, or disposition moving men to action, in contradistinction to an outward prescribed, formal rule; "the law of works," (Rom. iii, 27.)

A still more remarkable use of the word "law" is found in Rom. vii, 23, where the power of sin over the will of man arising from a corrupt disposition is called "the law of sin."

Law, then, in the Pauline conception, denotes any ideas, sentiments, principles inherent in the nature of man which determine his conduct. When discussing the relation of the heathen nations to the moral government of God, he declares that "though they have not been favored with an oral, a wordrevelation of the will of God," they are "a law unto themselves;" that is, they are taught by a subjective nature-by their own reason and conscience, as by an inward law, what they ought to do. And this inward law, written upon their hearts, corresponds to the teaching of the outward law written on tables of stone, because both were written by the finger of God.

I think, therefore, we shall not be doing any violence to the doctrine of Scripture if we understand the word law, in its most comprehensive sense, as embracing the law of conscience as well as the law of Moses. Indeed, I think we shall not err if

we regard the law as the teaching of the human conscience in general-the voice of the immanent God speaking to all human hearts, whether as distinctly articulated by the mouth of Moses and the prophets, or by the less specially illuminated teachers. of the heathen world-those "prophets of the human conscience" who in the distant Orient-in Persia and China and India, in Greece and Rome and Alexandria and Arabia-proclaimed those moral principles whereby men found themselves allowed, forbidden, or excused in their dealings with their fellow-men and in their behavior toward God.* This interpretation is justified by the connection of the passage. "For if there had been a law given which could have given life, verily righteousness should have been by the law"- that is, if man could have been delivered from sin, and lifted up into spiritual power, and freedom, and purity, by an inherent law of conscience, or any inspired moral rules, no other agency would have been appointed,-"righteousness would have been wrought out by law." But so far from this being the case, "the Scripture hath concluded all under sin, that the promise by faith of Jesus Christ might be given to them that believe." Wherefore before the Gospel was published we (both Jews and Gentiles) were kept in durance under law-shut up to this only way of deliverance, to make us embrace the faith which should afterward be revealed. So that "the law was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ, that we might be justified by faith."

The second term to be explained is justification, (dikaloσúvn,) or, as it is used in the passage in the verb form, justified, (Sikawθῶμεν.)

This is one of the most significant words in the New Testament-the central word, so to speak, of the Christian system of doctrine-the word, in fact, which expresses the whole of Christianity. Christianity is called "the righteousness of God." "I am not ashamed," says Paul, "of the Gospel, for it is the power of God unto salvation to every one that believes, for therein is the righteousness of God revealed;" that is, the Gospel is the revelation of God's method of justifying sinful men. through faith. Or, to amplify the statement, the Gospel is God's method of making a sinful man actually righteous * Merivale's "Conversion of the Roman Empire."