cern, they do not aim to acquaint themselves with the truths or what are said to be the truths of religion, and of course they take no interest and can have no affection for these things. They do not approach them. Religion, like the unseen world of which it tells, is afar off, and they never attempt to bring it near. The present is all in all to them. It invites, it engages, it absorbs. It is their world. It may not be large enough to satisfy, but it is large enough to shut out all other objects. It is bright enough to dazzle, and dear enough to chain, those who see not any thing else. Until men break from this charm, until they listen to the voice that is calling them away from the world of their senses and passions, until they give earnest heed to the truths, claims and hopes of christianity, it will be easy to see one great and melancholy reason, why there are so few Christians.

H.

LIBERAL VIEWS OF THE NEW HAVEN CHRISTIAN SPECTATOR.

Messrs Editors:

I look a good deal into orthodox publications, and I am sometimes inclined to think, that if liberal christians desire to see their own views of religion extensively inculcated, their best way would be to retire silently from the public contest, and let their opponents go on and do the business for them. If anything would tend to confirm me in this opinion, it would be an article in the Christian Spectator, for March, 1831, on the subject of Butler's Analogy. I hardly know what to make

of the writer. He is evidently a young man, and possessed of talents. I have been informed, on good authority, that he is the individual, respecting whose case the General Assembly, at its last sitting, came so near to an explosion. On inspecting the following extracts, your readers will not wonder that a person of his sentiments should create some tumult in such a camp. The writer denominates himself a Calvinist, and speaks with affected contempt of Arminianism. But if his opinions are Calvinism, they may be said to be Calvinism evaporated. Indeed, all his explanations and illustrations of Calvinistic doctrines, so far as I can comprehend them, approach very near to a refined German rationalism.

The object of the writer is to extend the argument of Butler to other doctrines besides those which the author of the Analogy compared to the course of ordinary nature.

Butler was not sufficiently evangelical for certain classes of Christians. A modern editor of his great work, the Rev. Daniel Wilson of London, was the first, I believe, to start this objection against his system. It is thought that Butler ought to have taken all the doctrines of Calvinism, instead of one or two of them, and shown that they are no more liable to objection then the doctrines of natural religion. This defect the writer in the Christain Spectator professes to supply. But, at the outset, he insists on his own interpretation as to what the doctrines of Calvin are. He disclaims that of imputed original sin, and that of a limited atonement. But you shall soon see whither the freedom of speech and speculation is carrying our rising orthodox divines.

The following is an ingenious excuse for Butler's omitting to include the doctrines of grace,' in his plan. To be sure, it implies that Butler had not sufficient sagacity to discern what the doctrines of grace really were. But aside from this poor compliment on that great writer's understanding, your readers will be gratified to discern that the doctrines in question are now undergoing a process which will render them more acceptable than formerly to the natural reason and conscience of men.

'It was not posssible for Butler, with the statements then made of the doctrines of grace, to carry out his argumeut, and give it its true bearing on those doctrines. The philosophical principles on which Calvinism had been defended for a century and a half, were substantially those of the schoolmen. The system had started out from darker ages of the world; had been connected with minds of singular strength and power, but also with traits in some degree stern and forbidding. Men had been thrown into desperate mental conflict. They had struggled for mental and civil freedom. They had but little leisure, and less inclination to polish and adorn—to go into an investigation of the true laws of the mind, and the explanation of facts in the moral world-little inclination to look on what was bland," and amiable in the goverment of God. Hence they took the rough-cast system, wielded, in its defence, the ponderous weapons which Augustine and even the Jansenites had furnished them, and prevailed in the conflict, not, however, by the force of their philosophy, but of those decisive declarations of the word of God, with which unhappily that philosophy had become identified. But when they told of imputing the sin of one man to another, and of holding that other to be personally answerable for it, it is no wonder that such minds as that of Butler recoiled, for there is nothing like this in nature. When they affirmed, that men have no power to do the will of God, and yet will be damned for not doing what they have no capacity to perform, it is no wonder that he started back, and refused to attempt to find an analogy; for it is unlike the common sense of men. When they told of a limited atonement—of confining the original applicability of the blood of

Christ to the elect alone, there was no anology to this, in all the dealings of God towards sinners; in the sun-beam, in the dew, the rain, in running rivulets or oceans; and here Butler must stop, for the analogy could go no farther upon the then prevalent notions of

theology.' p. 83.

Language like the following, Messrs Editors, would have been esteemed very daring, fifteen years ago, in any quarter professing orthodoxy.

'We are accustomed, in our ordinary technical theology, to speak much of the doctrines of christianity: and men of system-making minds have talked of them so long, that they seem to understand by them, a sort of intangible and abstract array of propositions, remote from real life and from plain matter of fact. The learner in divinity is often told, that there is a species of daring profaneness, in supposing that they are to be shaped to existing facts, or to the actual operations of moral agents. All this is metaphysics, and the moment he dares to ask whether Turretin or Ridgeley had proper conceptions of the laws of the mind, of moral agency, or of facts in the universe, that moment the shades of all antiquity are summoned to come around the adventurous theologian, and charge him with a guilty departure from dogmas long held in the church.

'Now we confess we have imbibed somewhat different notions of the doctrines of the bible. We have been accustomed to regard the word as denoting only an authoritative teaching, (Matt. vii. 28, comp. v. 19, xxii. 33, 2 Tim. iv. 2, 9,) of what actually exists in the universe. We consider the whole system of doctrines as simply a statement of facts.

What then are the doctrines of christianity? Simply statements of what has been, of what is, and what will be, in the government of God. In this, every thing is as far as possible from abstraction. There is as little abstraction, and why may we not add, as little sacredness in these facts, we mean sacredness to prevent inquiry into their true nature-as there is in the science of geology, the growth of a vegetable, or the operations of the human intellect. We may add, that in no way has systematic theology rendered more essential disservice to mankind, than in drawing out the life-blood from these great facts-unstringing the nerves, stiffening the muscles,

and giving the fixedness of death to them, as the anatomist cuts up the human frame, removes all the elements of life, distends the arteries and veins with wax, and then places it in his room of preperations, as cold and repulsive as are some systems of technical divinity.' pp. 87, 88.

Most of us were compelled, in our early youth, to learn, among other things in the New England Primer, that nice and mysterious point of faith, that

• In Adam's fall,

We sinned all.'

It is not an Unitarian, it is not a professed Arminian, or liberal Christian, who presents us with the following commentary on the above far famed distich.

'We know there has been a theory, which affirms that we are one with Adam-that we so existed in his loins, as to act with him-that our wills concurred with his will-that his action was strictly and properly ours-and that we are held answerable at the bar of justice for that deed, just as A. B. at fifty is responsible for the deed of A. B. at twelve. In other words, that the act of Adam, involving us all in ruin, is taken out of all ordinary laws by which God governs the world, and made to stand by itself, as incapable of any illustration from analogy, and as mocking any attempt to defend it by reasoning. With this theory, we confess we have no sympa. thy; and we shall dismiss it with saying, that in our view, christianity never teaches that men are responsible for any sin but their own; nor can they be guilty, or held liable to punishment, in the proper sense of that term, for conduct other than that which has grown out of their own wills. Indeed we see not how, if it were a dogma of a pretended revelation, that God might at pleasure, and by an arbitrary decree, make crime pass from one individual to another-striking onward from age to age, and reaching downward to the last season of recorded time,'-punished in the original offender; re-punished in his children; and punished again and again, by infinite multiples, in countless ages and in individuals—and all this judicial infliction, for a single act performed cycles of ages before the individuals lived, we see not how any evidence could shake our intrinsic belief that this is unjust and improbable. We confess we have imbibed other views of justice; and we believe that he who can find the head and members of this theory in the bible, will