Christian defense, Pressensé has illustrated at great length in his introductory volume to his history, (about to be issued by the Clarkes in an English dress,) in which he has traced, with a master hand, the ethnical preparations for Christ. There seems to us assuredly room in our theological libraries for a thorough discussion of this subject.

ART XII.-QUARTERLY BOOK-TABLE.

Religion, Theology, and Biblical Literature.

Discourses and Essays, by WILLIAM G. P. SHEDD. 12mo., pp. 324. Andover: Warren F. Draper. Boston: Gould & Lincoln. New York: John Wiley. 1862.

These Essays, by Prof. Shedd, (whose name now occurs for the first time, we believe, upon the pages of our Quarterly,) are, every one of them, a rich treat for the thinkers, the lovers of deep thought: of thought clothed in a strong, terse, stern, clear expression. They are addresses before literary societies, or articles in Reviews. Three of them are on æsthetic subjects; five of them are theological, or bear relation to theological science. The most attractive to the thorough theological thinker are the last two, namely, one on Original Sin, and the other on the Atonement. It must be taken as no token of hostile animus that we deal most fully with the one with which we least agree.

The Essay on Original Sin, (originally an article in the Christian Review,) is, with due credit given, very much a summary of the treatment of that subject in Müller's Doctrine of Sin. We wish Dr. Shedd had clothed that whole work in his powerful English. We may condense Dr. Shedd's condensation of Müller, so far as our purposes are concerned, to the following points:-1. Sin is not so much an act as a "nature," or "state," and as such is guilty and damnable. 2. This nature is "a product," namely, a product of the human will, and depravity lies properly "in the will,” and consists in the state of free self-determining, permanent tendency, or tending of the will in an evil direction. But, 3. The will is not the mere volitional faculty, but is inclusive of the affections, emotions, intellections; the whole man himself viewed as determined in unity to a given direction. 4. The origin of this tendency, as well as its specific volitions, is too deep for the recognition of consciousness; and, 5. Hence it is to be considered as taking its origin in our unconscious sinning in Adam. In all this Dr. Shedd conceives that he is reconciling the antithetic points, that sin is a nature and is yet responsible; and congratulates himself that thus the FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XIV.—33

intuitions of the soul are satisfied by our reinstatement on the old grounds of the creeds and theologies at and succeeding the Reformation. We believe, on the contrary, that it is an advance backward. Let us review the points.

No relief of the intuitional distress at a nature's being held as a guilt can be derived from holding that nature to be a fixed, necessitated, everflowing tendency of the will. To aid the relief by such prefixes as "free" and "self-determined," is to cure a fatal disease with medical talk. When WILL is so defined as to make it include the entire structure of the soul, the advances made by modern psychology are ignored. We are, by a retrograde movement, made to identify will not merely, like Edwards, with the necessitated emotions and sensibilities; but, like a still earlier and cruder mental analysis, to petrify it into the necessitated intellections, and even into the impressions of external objects upon the sensorium. All this brings us back upon the old and execrable dogma that a necessitated nature is responsible; that a being, a race, a universe may be brought into existence in a condition of fixed evil, and damned for being so. Upon that dogma all our moral intuitions rise up and pronounce a reprobation, a sacred curse. We treat it with no respect or ceremony. It is diabolical, dishonoring God and man, and has no fitting home this side of its infernal birth-place.

Of what use is it for Dr. Shedd at this point to say, "Were this nature created and put into man, as an intellectual nature or as a particular temperament is put into him by the Creator of all things, it would not be a responsible and guilty nature, nor would man be a child of wrath? But it does not thus originate. It has its origin in the free and responsible use of that voluntary power which God has created and placed in the human soul as its most central, most mysterious, and most hazardous endowment. It is a selfdetermined nature—that is, a nature originated in a will, and by a will." The man with his actions is as truly moulded; he receives as truly a necessitated, made nature from God as if he were run by a forger's hand, like molten metal in a matrice, to a statuary's model. A necessitated motion is as irresponsible as a necessitated being. A nature consisting of a fixed mode of action, is just as guiltless as a nature consisting of a fixed shape of substance. What boots it me, whether a superior being damns me for a necessitated doing or a necessitated being? Justice can just as readily hold me condemned for a necessary essence as for a necessary quality; and for a necessary quality as for a necessary operation: for a necessary operation is a property, and a property is but the essence manifest.

God can as well necessitate me to be a certain thing, and then damn me for it, as necessitate me to do a certain thing and damn me for it. For herein doing is being; for doing is nothing but necessitated changing states of necessitated being. Yonder metallic shrub, shaped by the cunning hand of modern art, standing with its stately stalk, lifts aloft a little wilderness of foliage and vines, most light and airy to the eye; but those clustering festoons and the rigid stalk are, alas! alike—cast-iron! So the stalk of a necessitated nature, and the wildest wreathings of necessitated action, are alike cast-iron-irresponsibly fatalistic. The actions and the being are one inseparable piece, one being, one nature. And this doing-being is created by God; for it is necessitated by him into existence, and to necessitate into existence is to create.

Nor herein does generation differ from creation. For God to set into necessary succession a series of matrices, of fixed and by him necessitated forms, regulated by him with necessitated modes, and then to push a quantity of being through them, is as fixedly to mould the last shape of the series of the forms of being as if he had created it. No matter through how lengthened a series of wombs I derive my being from the Maker's hand; if no free, unnecessitated, alternative will has intervened, I am as truly (so far as responsibility is concerned) created as if I were first in the series. And if my substance, qualities, and operations are all equally necessitated, then they are all equally irresponsible.

This cast-iron necessitation is not softened by expressing its quality under those fine old Arminian epithets that were invented and appropriated to express non-necessity, and which still, to the popular heart, have the ring of liberty, such as free, self-determining, and originating. It is a poor verbal solace which our fatalistic brethren so artificially construct for themselves, this carefully predefining all the terms of libertarianism into a fatalistic meaning in order to express their dogma in formulæ that sound like freedom, and so seem to accord with our intuitions. Before they are done these gentlemen find that they have given our whole theological vocabulary a double meaning. Theology becomes a duplicate science. Its nomenclature is a system of double-entendres. It has a complete strabismus. Its leading phrases have an outside and an inside meaning-outside Arminian, inside Calvinistic. The same gentleman is giving, in the same terms, two hostile theologies. He can, in the same words, preach Arminianism ad populum, and lecture Augustinianism ad clerum.

Should the leading paleontologist of the age announce to the world this proposition-The animal fossils of geology are nothing

ever,

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but plastic forms spontaneously produced by unconscious nature— the world would wait in rapt attention to hear his proof. If, howin his exposition, he should define plastic to mean "born in the process of natural generation," and "forms" to mean "once living animal bodies," and "unconscious nature" to mean a formative scheme in the hands of the living God," we think his proposition would be pronounced a positive imposture. And now, when a theologian announces, "A nature is sinful and guilty because it is a product; a product of the free, self-determining, self-originating will," we should expect its amplification in a clear Arminian exposition. But when he comes to definition, and makes "will" signify the entire stereotype fixed nature of the agent; and "free" to signify a limitation to one sole course or state; and “self-determining" to exclude all power of alternative action, and to mean an energetic forthputting in a solely possible direction; and "self-origination" to mean necessitative causation, we think he rivals the imposture of his paleontological brother. To the paleontologist the hearers would say, if you mean that the fossils are petrifactions of once living animals, why not say so without a set of words defined out of their ordinary sense. And to the theologian we would say, if you mean that a nature is sinful and guilty because its whole fixed being, by necessity, projects a series of necessitated volitions, why not say so? Why must nature mean a series of volitions, will mean the entire necessitated soul, free mean circumscribed, self-determining mean limited to a solely possible terminus, and self-origination mean automatic projection? In short, why, unless there be a settled predisposition to self-deception, must a principle be clothed in language that seems to express its contradictory?

But Dr. Shedd (after Müller) maintains that this permanent current of our will, inclusive of our whole soul as agent, which constitutes our depraved "nature,” resides and generally acts in a region below the reach of consciousness, and yet is none the less guilty and deserving the divine wrath. Men, as matter of fact, are perpetually sinning, without knowing what they are about, and a large share of moral effort is to be expended in bringing them to a consciousness of sin. "How often the Christian finds himself already in a train of thought or of feeling that is contrary to the divine law. Notice that he did not go into this train of thought or feeling deliberately, and with a distinct consciousness of what he was doing. The first he knows is, that he is already caught in the process. Thought and feeling in this instance have been unconsciously exercised in accordance with that central and abiding determination of the will toward self of which we have spoken;

in other words, the will has been unconsciously putting forth its action, in and through the powers of thought and feeling, as the self-reproach and sense of guilt consequent upon such exercises of the soul, are proof positive. The moment the Christian man comes to distinct consciousness in regard to this action that has been going on, without his thinking of it,' (as we say in common parlance,) he acknowledges it as criminal action, responsible action, action of the will. The fact that he was not thinking-that the will was acting unconsciously-subtracts nothing from his sense of guilt in the case." Dr. Shedd conceives this volitioning below the reach of consciousness to be a curious, a surprising fact; the dark problem of its blended unconsciousness and irresponsibility he feels, but does not attempt to solve. He unfolds its darkness without a ray of light; he deepens the snarl but gives no clue. The solution, we think, (overstretching the homeopathic maxim that "like cures like,") is contained in the very cause of the difficulty, "unconsciousness." For,

Not only are there unconscious volitions, but there is, in the same sense of the word, an unconscious consciousness. All consciousness is properly unconscious. If consciousness be, as Dr. Shedd uses the word, an inspection of our own thoughts, then while we are inspecting we are not inspecting our inspecting. Otherwise we are involved in an infinite series of inspections of inspections. If there be in that deep substratal region of the mind an unconscious, or rather sub-conscious, series of volitions, there is also a sub-conscious consciousness of those volitions. Surely if the mind be choosing, it is also perceiving the object of its choosing; it is cognizing, comparing, preferring motives, motives ethical and nonethical, and the whole apparatus of free-agency is in motion. The moral perceptions are as able to work sub-consciously as any other faculties. The consciousness is truly enough also at work; only all the movements are so intense and absorbing that the exterior recollective consciousness cannot recall and re-present them.

This underlying region of thought needs more analysis than we have room to give it. Dr. Shedd, as well as Müller, has, we think, failed to explore or properly comprehend it. But we may add the thought, that our moral nature is doubtless as truly in perpetual action as any other of our perceptive powers. An ethical quality in an object or combination is as readily perceived as any other quality, and with the same sort of consciousness or unconsciousness; and that ethical quality may be accepted or rejected as a motive by the free will as any other quality, and so be as truly a matter of responsibility as if the recollective consciousness could subsequently call it