-"They have taken away my Lord, and I know not where they have laid him."

It may be regarded as noteworthy, that whenever the friends of these schemes set forth their rival merits, and attempt to justify their respective claims to the original teaching of Jesus, they directly violate the fundamental condition upon which their acceptance with a third party is made to depend. They thus commit their systems to the pleasant work of self-repudiation. But, as often as they may be virtually disproved by their friends, in the labor of identifying them with Christianity, they are not the less urgent in their pretensions. Whence, then, did they come this Calvinism, now so flexible in its awful certainties this Arminianism, so inflexible in its awful uncertainties?

Speaking of them as systems simply, we are - content to connect them with a general historical reference; and we say that there is not an important doctrine presented by either, whose history, as such, may not be readily traced to an age later than that of Jesus. Whatever they really possess of Christianity, is in no way peculiar to them, but is what they hold in common with

most or all other Christian theories.

Whatever

they possess in doctrine which is distinctive, has

been brought into the fold and Christian, since the Apostolic era.

baptized as The history

of the Church is, in a large measure, the history of the process of paganizing the kingdom of God. The corruptions which the candor of history indicates, as having been engrafted upon the simplicity of the Gospel, constitute "the body and being " "of these systems. If it be not so, then either historical evidence becomes a standing cheat, or Christianity an unauthenticated tradition.

It is to be observed, that these distinguishing doctrines not only possess the peculiar and positive merit of being unreasonable, so much so that the mind can acceptably receive them only through supernatural interposition, but that they also possess the merit of an irreconcilable hostility of the instincts, the wants of our affectional nature. They spread themselves over the entire field of thought and devotion over the whole moral character of God, the work and mission of Jesus, the duties, the hopes, and the destiny of men; and the mind is everywhere tortured by

their crudities, and the heart scourged to wretchedness by their oppressions. Take, for instance, the doctrine of the Trinity. Now, although we may concede that the heart may freely and spontaneously love a Triune God, a being of whom it is impossible to have any just natural conceptions, yet it still remains difficult to discover how that heart can render the obedience required, while it escapes the imputation and the peril of idolatry. On the one hand, there is the distinct command to worship one God; on the other, there is the supposed obligation to worship three Gods as one, and one as three, each of whom is supreme, and all of whom united are no more than supreme. In this multiplication of deities, there is a proportionate distraction of the heart in the disposal of its affections; and the homage must be rendered under the apprehension that conformity to the command may be accounted scorn of the creed, or that conformity to the creed may be idolatrous before God, and on either hand there is hell.

Bewildering as is this doctrine to the intellect and the heart, it perhaps less endangers the sincerity of devotion than that of Vicarious Atone

ment. Here, the puzzling arithmetic of divine persons, while it is still retained, is in a measure overborne by a sense of horror at the transactions in which the moral character of the Deity is inevitably involved. Reprehension of reason and the plea of mystery still leave the heart room to distrust the rectitude of the Father, who could punish the innocence of his Son for the guilt of beings himself had made totally depraved. Connected with this, are other absurdities and blasphemies too numerous and appaling, to secure freedom for the offering of an intelligent and heartfelt devotion.

That, however, to which present allusion is the most pertinent, is the doctrine of Endless Misery, for it is this whose probabilities of result bear the most directly and fatally upon the affections. Explain the philosophy of its justice as they may, and mingle with the administration of that justice as much of the glory of God as they can, there is still the unmitigated blackness of the issue, upon which no human heart can look but with the intensest horror. It is the doctrine from whose dreadful grasp we cannot escape-whose searching applications no fortunate combination

of circumstances can ever remit, can ever render otherwise than infinitely personal. It comes with the affirmations of sovereign certainty, and declares to each heart that there is no object too dear to be damned that more or less of those you love shall be lost — that that you cannot yourself fully conceive of your own exposures to the "profoundest hell." Not content with rendering the cup of life "a cruel bitter," it points you to the consummation, and calls it the day of judgment, and rends your soul with the wail that goes up from a miserable universe the wail of parted and broken hearts—a wail which Heaven could not after hush in its halls, but by wiping out forever the last vestige of human affection!

And is this Christianity? this which all along confuses the mind and confounds the heartwhich all along excites our fears and disappoints our hopes - which everywhere outrages our reason and profanes our moral sensibilities; is this the Gospel of Jesus? O tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon, lest the daughters of heathenism triumph!