through the power of faith. For, as it is scarcely necessary to remark, it is one and the same Greek word which in our English New Testament is translated justification and right

eousness.

I am not unmindful of the fact that in Wesleyan theology we have been taught to render the Greek dikaιoovn exclusively by the word "forgiveness." Justification, we say, is "the pardon of sin." And here, I think, we are wrong. Justification-righteousness-is a generic term, embracing several specific terms, as pardon, adoption, and regeneration or sanctification.

Of course, to justify means to forgive sin, but it means more than this. It means to be "made free from sin," and to be constituted inherently and actually righteous. This is unmistakably the sense in which the term is used in Rom. vi, 6, 7:

Knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. For he that is dead is freed from sin," literally, is justified from sin." So also in Rev. xxii, 11: "He that is unjust, let him be unjust still: and he which is filthy, let him be filthy still: and he that is righteous, let him be righteous still" literally, "he that is justified, or made just, let him be just still."

Many more passages might be given to show that the term justification is employed in so wide a sense as to embrace sanctification also. These are sufficient for our purpose. We claim that the righteousness of God (dikaioσúvŋ yàp Oɛõv, Rom. i, 17) expresses the whole economy-the whole method and process of human recovery or redemption; and that the phrase, righteousness of faith, (dialoovvη ev пíσтews, Rom. v, 1-11,) comprehends the totality and unity of Christian consciousness, from its first dawning light in the soul to its complete fruition in the eternal day.

I now sum up what has been so far said in the following words:

1. By the righteousness of God, I understand the whole scheme of Christianity on its Godward side. By the righteousness of faith, the whole development of Christianity on its historic and human side. In other words, I understand by these terms the method, the means, and the experience of redemption. This I call the religion of grace.

2. By the law I understand all the forms of ethnic religion which have appeared in the world as the outgrowth of certain ideas and sentiments implanted in the human mind by God. These I call the religions of nature, of reason and conscience.

In so far as Judaism was a national religion, I include it under the latter; in so far as it bore within itself the seeds of a spiritual and universal kingdom of God, I include it under the former.

Now, in regard to all the forms of ethnic religion comprehended under the generic term law, I understand Paul to say that, in the providence of God, they all had a propædeutic office. "The law was a school-master to bring us to Christ." The force of the great principle, here enounced, is lost in the English word "school-master." The pedagogue (Taidaywyoç) was the person who led the child to school. He was not the teacher, but the faithful attendant, who brought the scholar to the master. "He was a domestic servant who accompanied the child to school, bearing his satchel, and guiding and urging his steps."

The law, whether as revealed in the conscience or the ten commandments, could not convey any spiritual life-any inward power and grace by which men could be saved from sin. Its office was to direct and urge the wandering steps of men, to awaken in their hearts the sense of sin, to shut them up to the need of a Redeemer from sin, and bring the race, as it were, into the presence of the great Master and Teacher, that it might learn of hin the way of "salvation by faith."

The doctrine of Paul, therefore, is, that all the ages and dispensations of divine providence prior to the advent of Christianity-all the forms of civilization which preceded the Christian civilization-all the revelations of conscience anterior to the revelation of the New Testament-in a word, the law, in the fullest sense of that term, antecedent to the Gospel, was a preparation and a discipline for the reception of Christianity. This is the thesis we propose to discuss.

At the outset, then, it is best we should recognize the fact that the proposition we have thus formally announced must encounter strong opposition in the minds of unreflecting men in Christian communities. We have been so long accustomed to hear all the efforts of earnest thought to solve the

problem of the relation of the finite to the infinite denounced as "false philosophy;" and all the systems of ancient mythology and the forms of pagan worship ascribed to the invention of satanic mischief, that we are unprepared, and even reluctant, to allow them any place in the divine plan of history, and to regard them as, in any sense, a preparation and a discipline for the reception of Christianity. It has become, with most of us, a settled habit of thought, to regard a verbal revelation as God's only method of action upon the human soul— a "book-revelation" as the only mode in which he can communicate his will to man. A revelation through the symbolism of nature, through the ideas of the reason, in the voice of conscience, in the mysterious sentiments and instinctive yearnings of the human heart, is foreign to our modes of thought. A privileged minority of our race, a mere fraction of the teeming millions of humanity, has been regarded as under the care and direction of God. The family of Abraham-the Jewish nation have been thoughtlessly specialized as the immediate favorites of Heaven. To these God was pleased to make himself known, and for four thousand years the rest of mankind were, in a great measure, abandoned by God, and left to perish. The outlying millions of our race, who have not been favored with an oral revelation, and to whom Christ has not been preached, have, (to use the vigorous words of Dr. Whedon,) "by a sort of geographical predestination, been excluded from the covenant mercy of God, and damned by whole islands and continents."

One might have hoped that a living Arminian theology would long ago have sloughed off this putrescent mass of dead Calvinism. But we have scented this malodorous plague-spot in many a Methodist sermon. Preachers have sought to inflame our missionary zeal by highly colored pictures of heathen nations trooping en masse into the yawning gulf, because they have not believed on a Christ of whom they had never heard-of whom it was just as impossible for them to have heard, as of the politics of the moon. This is but another face of that "horrible decree" which consigns infants to perdition, who have neither the capacity nor the opportunity to know and believe on Christ. Such sermons never aroused our missionary zeal. They provoke hard thoughts of God, and foster unbelief.

A moment's reflection ought to have convinced us that such conceptions are unworthy of that God "whose name is Love." They are utterly opposed to the teaching of that revelation which, by pre-eminence, we call "the word of God." Every revelation of God which was given to the favored race taught that he is "the Father of the families of all the earth," and that he is "not the God of the Jews only, but of the heathen (¿0vn) also." "We are all his offspring." "His tender mercies are over all his works." He has compassion on all the sons of Adam. They are all the objects of his care, and the subjects of his providence. The origin, the history, and the destiny of every nation, has been ordered and controlled by him. "He has determined the time of each nation's existence, and fixed the geographical boundaries of their habitation, that they may seek after God, and feel after him, and really find him, who is not far from any one of us." Nowhere, and at no time, has the human soul been utterly abandoned by its Maker and Father. He has not for one moment forgotten, or ceased his action upon the human race. "God has set his heart on man, he visits him every morning, and tries him every moment." Even in heathen lands, the inspiration of God continually enlightens the reason of man; the eternal Word still speaks in the conscience of man; and the omnipresent Spirit still stirs the heart of man with desires and yearnings after a higher and nobler form of life. "The word of God," before he became incarnate, "was in the world, for it was made by him;" and in the ages before he taught the people in Judea, he was "the true Light that enlighteneth every man that cometh into the world," whether in heathen or in Hebrew lands. The mind of Confucius and of Zoroaster, of Pythagoras and of Anaxagoras, of Socrates and of Plato, of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, were visited and enlightened by the eternal Logos.* These men were raised up by God, and employed by divine providence as the lights and guides of heathen nations. He who

* "I read to-day," says Mr. Wesley, "part of the Meditations of Marcus Antonius (Aurelius.) What a strange emperor! and what a strange heathen! Giving thanks to God for all the good things he enjoyed! In particular, for his good inspirations, and for twice revealing to him in dreams things whereby he was cured of (otherwise) incurable diseases. I make no doubt but this is one of the many who 'sball come from the east and west, and shall sit down with Abraham, and Isaac, and Jacob,' while the children of the kingdom-nominal Christians-are shut out." FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXVIII.—3

called Cyrus, king of Persia, by name, and girded him for the work he assigned him, "though he knew it not," called these men to be "the prophets of conscience" in heathen lands. "The night of paganism had its stars to light it, and they (as said Clement of Alexandria and Origen) called to the morning star of Bethlehem."

The world, then, has not been left to itself; above all, it has not been abandoned to the government of the personal spirit of evil, commonly called the devil. The world is still God's world, for he made it, and still moves, vitalizes, and governs it. The evolution of the physical universe from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous has not been carried forward by the action of blind force, but by the immanent presence and immediate agency of God. And so the evolution of human history has not been an affair of accident or of chance, much less of pessimism, but of providence. God is in history as well as in nature. The comprehensive plan of divine providence sweeps over the history of all nations--it gathers into its movements all the systems of thought which have had a permanent vitality because they contained some elements of eternal truth, and it took up into itself all the forms of ethnic religion which were born of the sense of dependence, and the consciousness of relation to the Infinite. It made all these subservient to the final purpose of redemption, by awakening the consciousness of the want, and developing the desire, of salvation. So that all the moral truths known to the ancients were God's truth-that is, they proceeded from the same fountain-head of light as the "living oracles" we now call, par excellence, "the word of God." That fountain-head was the eternal Word "which was in the beginning with God," "which made the world," which in all ages had been "the light of men," and which, in the fullness of time, "was made flesh and dwelt among men." Christ was not only "the Hope of Israel," but, consciously or unconsciously, "the Desire of nations." The entire history of humanity gravitates around the grand idea of redemption. This, says Pressensé, is the pole-star which, even when unseen, holds together the moral system of the universe, and binds the past, the present, and the future of humanity, in one complete harmonious whole.

Therefore, as the same writer has well said, "Christianity