the voice of God sounded out of resplendent glory: "This is my Son; hear Him!" When Christ taught, some said, "Our heart burnt within us, as he opened the Scriptures;" or, "He speaks as one having authority," and a woman for joy over his doctrine, called His mother blessed; thus His word penetrated to the heart, thus it harmonized with conscience. Men were not pointed to the only teacher of humanity in a moment when He appeared terrible, but in the hour of bliss. For when He was transfigured on the mountain, floating in sunny splendor before the eyes of the chosen disciples, when Elias appeared at His side as a sign that truth was no longer declared in images, but had appeared in person; and Moses on the other side as a sign that the law of fear had become powerless, and had been resolved into the law of love; when Christ shone so gloriously in the light of truth that Peter, quite enraptured, forgetting every thing else, cried out: "It is good for us to be here, let us build three tabernacles," and, for joy, thought not of himself: then it was that the Father, His Father and our Father called out of His resplendent glory: "Hear Him."

Yes, with this kind of authority, coming from without, we find the internal voice of God in sweetest harmony. He whom we shall hear as the Teacher of Truth, is the God of our conscience. Truth flows from His mouth like light, and the law of love writes upon the tablet of our hearts: "Him will we hear!"

ART. VIII.-REGENERATION AND CONVERSION.

BY REV. WM. RUPP, A. M., BERLIN, PA.

THE order of salvation, or the subjective process by which the objective grace of Christ is appropriated, and salvation actualized in the individual man, includes a number of successive stages which are more or less distinct from each other. Among these Regeneration and Conversion are generally regarded as occupying a central, and, therefore, most important, place, though there is much difference of opinion in regard to the nature and significance of each, and in regard to the relation which they sustain to each other. Some would place conversion before regeneration; but we propose to discuss them in the order in which they are mentioned above, believing that the result will justify the adoption of this arrangement.

The presupposition of salvation is sin. Salvation is deliverance from sin and its consequences. Hence a correct understanding of the process of salvation presupposes a correct understanding of the nature and extent of sin. A Pelagian theory of sin, for example, leads necessarily to a false or defective theory of salvation. If the universality of sin were a consequence only of imitation; if it were true that individual men are now born without sin, and that they become sinners only when they begin to commit sin in thought, word and deed, which they learn to do simply by seeing others do the same; then salvation would evidently need to be nothing more than a process of outward reformation or improvement. The teaching of moral philosphy would then be as effective a means for the salvation of the world as the preaching of the gospel, and Socrates might be as good a Saviour as Christ. This, indeed, is the notion of many at the present time. They imagine that the power of sin may be broken, the reign of moral as well as

physical evil abolished, and a golden age made to dawn upon the world, simply by mental and moral culture, by the dissipation of ignorance and superstition, by the education of the masses, by the cultivation and development of human nature as it is. Hence the world is full of novel schemes for the improvement of humanity-schemes that make no account of the Gospel, of Christ, the Church, the ministry and sacraments. Instead of the Church we have societies; instead of the ministry, masters and grand masters; instead of sacraments, regalia and passwords; instead of regeneration, pledges; instead of conversion, enlightenment; instead of sanctification, improvement. But unfortunately the depth and breath of the evil which is to be thus removed, are not understood; and the result, therefore, is always an aggravation of it rather than an amelioration.

Scripture and experience teach a very different theory of sin from that which underlies and conditions all these superficial notions of salvation. Sin is not contracted and propagated simply by education; neither can it be removed by education. Sin does not consist merely in a wrong way of thinking, feeling and volition, that we fall into somehow when we come to self-consciousness. Its beginning or root lies back of all selfconsciousness, in the substance of our life itself. Our catechism teaches that we are "by nature prone to hate God and our neighbor," and hence unable to do that which God demands of us in His law. We do not become sinners only when we begin actually to transgress this law; on the contrary, we are sinners before we transgress, and we transgress because we are sinners. The proneness, tendency, impulse or bent to commit sin is in our nature from the very beginning of our individual existence; and the actual commission of sin, therefore, is but the legitimate outworking of what was in our nature, or in the substance of our life, before. The oak-tree does not become such only when it begins to produce acorns. It is an oak-tree from the earliest moment of its existence, because, though it has not yet borne acorns, it nevertheless possesses the nature and essential qualities of the oak; and there

fore its fruit can never be anything else than acrid acorns. And thus it is with human nature. This is perverted, disordered, depraved, corrupt in its deepest ground, and therefore nothing good can come out of it.

generic, bearing in itself the

And this corruption or depravity of human nature is the consequence of the fall and disobedience of our first parents, Adam and Eve, in Paradise. "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, inasmuch as (') all have sinned," Rom. v. 12. "By the fall and disobedience of our first parents," says the Catechism, "our nature," that is not simply the nature of the individual, but our generic human nature, which lies back of the individual, and from which the individual proceeds in the way of generation, "has become so corrupt that we are all conceived and born in sin." Adam was not simply the federal, but the organic head of his race. His life, while it was individual, was at the same time also possibility of all the numberless individuals that have ever been, and that may yet be, born; in the same way that the acorn involves in itself the possibility of a developed tree, and of a whole forest of trees that may proceed from it. The character of Adam's life, therefore, determined the character of the life of his posterity. Adam's descendants, accordingly, have become sinners, not simply by the imputation of his guilt and the consequent withholding from them of original righteousness, nor by the imitation merely of his example, but by having proceeded out of the substance cf his life both in respect of body and soul. We cannot enter here into the old dispute between Creationism and Traducianism; but we assume that the latter theory is in so far correct, that the human soul, as well as the body, is begotten, not in such sense, of course, that it could be said to be a part or offshoot (tradux) of the souls of the parents, by which these would be so much diminished, but nevertheless a product of the parental life, and not an original creation; for we believe that the doctrine of hereditary sin, so clearly taught in the Bible, is consistent only with some such theory as this. If an illustration be needed, we would refer to

the manner in which Adam's own life is said originally to have proceeded from God. God breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and thus he became a living soul. That lifebreath, in our opinion, can not be regarded otherwise than as an emanation from the being of God; and yet it could not be said to be a part of God, in such sense that God's being would now be so much less than it was before. In the same way, no doubt, the soul of the child is an emanation from the souls of the parents, and receives its characteristic qualities and fundamental determinations from them. The act of generation involves, therefore, both soul and body. That which is generated, or begotten, is not body only, nor soul only, nor body and soul as separate entities to be joined together afterwards in the process of growth or development, but soul and body as comprehended germinally in the power and principle of one life. In its origin, in the punctum saliens, human life is one undivided power, containing in itself the possibility or germ both of soul and body, and these are actualized subsequently in the way of evolution or development. But here already is sin too, as a disordering, disorganizing, disintegrating force, and hence the whole process of development is abnormal. This abnormal character shows itself to some extent already in infancy, as no careful observer can fail to perceive, and becomes continually more manifest in proportion as the individual grows older. All the faculties and powers both of soul and body, as soon as they manifest themselves in the way of action, are found to be disordered. The will is perverted, and bent upon evil rather than good; the understanding is darkened; the desires and passions are wild and ungovernable; the feelings are troubled and painful; and the body carries within itself the seeds of disolution and death.

The evil lies, therefore, in the depths of our nature, at the very centre and root of our spiritual, psychical and physical life; and here also the remedy must begin. We can easily see that no merely outward reformation or improvement, no merely mental or moral culture, however complete and thorough it might be, would avail here. "The leprosy lies deep within,"