must thereafter act towards that thing according to the nature He has given it, and not otherwise. For creation being the expression, in orders of being beneath the Divine, of qualities which constitute the nature of God Himself, to act upon created things otherwise than according to the nature He has given them would imply action against Himself, would indicate a lack of harmony between Himself and His creation, a lack of harmony, indeed, in His own nature. This limitation, also, we must style "self-limitation," and necessary to perfect creation.

I might follow the same line of thought further, and show that we must so think of the infinity of God as to make it compatible with change in Him. For if we push the idea of absolute infinity to the extreme, we arrive at the idea of a dead God; for all willing and acting imply change; and to will and act is to live. If there must be in a right idea of God that which is eternal and unchangeable, there must also be that which is mutable. We must even reconcile it with the conception of process in Him; for processes which we see in nature must be remote reflections of processes which take place in Him. There must be in Him infinite becoming as well as infinite being. In a word, we are compelled by our assumptions to think of God under many of the categories which are applicable to finite being; with a specific difference, however, as they are conceived to apply to Him.

The problem stated by Mr Stock is not solved by these considerations, but it becomes capable of being stated in another form. Is it conceivable that a God of infinite love and wisdom would create a world in which evil was possible? or,-to confine ourselves to man, in whom alone of created beings moral evil (which is the graver problem) is found,-would create man with some element in his nature which, although not in itself evil, was capable of becoming evil? "No one," says Mr Stock, "who allows evil is good." Surely he must be conscious of the ambiguity lurking in the word "allows." It may mean either "allows as approving" or "permits though disapproving." Many a good father and mother have permitted, and in this sense" allowed," a headstrong boy to take a course they disapproved, because they felt that further opposition from them would do harm rather than good, and that their boy must learn wisdom, if at all, from experience, and not from their teaching. Can there be anything answering to this "disapproving permission" in God?

An answer to this question is given by Swedenborg, discursively throughout his theological works. I do not attempt to discuss its validity, though I regard it as the only rational interpretation of the facts of life which is consistent with the belief that the whole universe has been created and is maintained in being by an infinitely loving and wise God. I merely wish to show that the terms of the problem stated by Mr Stock are interpretable in a sense which abolishes his dilemma.

The chief assumptions involved in this explanation are the following:The end or motive of creation is a vast and ever-increasing heavenly society composed of human beings.

Heaven consists in the presence of God in the whole and every member of it, as the spring of every activity; this intimate government and control being wholly in accordance with the affections of those who are subject to it.

The possibility of any individual becoming a member of this society depends upon an organic spiritual fitness. Psychologically it depends on his possession of some degree of the love of goodness or usefulness for its own sake.

This disinterested love of goodness is acquired, and acquired only, by a man's choice between good and evil, as they present themselves to him, during his life on earth. As to man's bodily nature, he is an animal like other animals. He is man because he has, added to this animal nature, a higher nature which brings him into contact with a whole world of spiritual facts which never present themselves to a merely animal mind. If man is really to have the power of choosing the better, he must be able to choose the worse. If he had not this power, he would be a mere automaton, mechanically obedient to the impulses that played upon him; destitute alike of virtue as of vice. Of such beings a heaven of willing

obedience could not be formed.

I hold that on the basis of these assumptions it is perfectly conceivable that a God of infinite love and wisdom should create man with a power of self-determination, out of which evil could arise, not by the act of God, but by the act of man through a power which God conferred upon him. To this extent God must be responsible for the existence of evil; responsible, that is, not as originating, nor as approving it, but as having created the conditions out of which evil could arise as well as good; because without these conditions the highest order of created beings— the likest God, self-limited by good like Him, through Him and under Him—would have been impossible. All that we could justly expect would be that whatever the choice might be, for good or evil, the best results possible under the given conditions would be educed for the individual and the race. If the choice of evil be final and irrevocable, we must still be able to regard Hell itself as a provision of the Divine mercy for those whose states are such as to preclude any method of government less sternly punitive.

LONDON.

J. HOWARD SPALDING.

THE GLADNESS OF THE PURITANS.

(Hibbert Journal, July 1904, p. 848. Review of The Cambridge History, by H. S. Perris.)

THE very title of the book would make one hesitate to rank Grace Abounding among the literary expressions of "the religion of the Law and not of the Gospel," or to find in it little but "a message of fear and not of gladness."

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And its contents justify this hesitation. The expenditure of a few pence and a few minutes will convince most readers that for almost every passage of mental torment and morbid introspection in this Puritan classic, you can light upon another which is aglow with the bliss and peace of genuine religion. The rhythm is as strongly marked in the one direction as in the other.

The fact is to say nothing of the rather heterogeneous character of the witnesses summoned by Mr Perris—although the indifference displayed by many Protestants of the school in question to the lighter and brighter aspects of existence is too palpable to be ignored and too exaggerated to be defended, it is only just to inquire how much was due to the exigencies of the historical situation, which forced religion into unwarrantable extremes and temporary phases of conflict. The martial temper does not make for intellectual impartiality, any more than for the softer graces of existence. But there is a time for war, among the times of the world, as Simon Memmi saw and showed at Florence. The Puritans and Covenanters, like their Protestant progenitors, conceived that stern work was the order of their day, and it cannot be alleged that impartial historical investigation has altogether disproved the accuracy of their estimate. The inference is perhaps too well-worn to need repetition. It is this, that the gun and axe of the pioneer must come into play, before flowers can be trained outside the log-cabin. A sentinel may be excused for indifference to horticulture. Were it only as a grave remedy for a grave disease, as a necessary reaction against the secularisation of piety, Puritanism might in this way be justified to some degree, even in its more sombre and unsympathetic phases. "Puritanism," says Mr Meredith, "I won't attempt to paint—it would barely be decent; but compare it with the spectacle of English frivolity, and you'll admit it to be the best show you make." Besides, when one discounts the constitutional idiosyncrasies of men like Bunyan and Cowper, looking narrowly into the private lives of the ordinary Puritans, a very different state of matters is presented from the picture dear to novelists, or to those who paint merely or mainly from Hudibras and a prosaic, literal interpretation of the more extreme or striking statements of some Puritan theologians. The idea of the ordinary, average Puritan as a sour, fanatical Intransigentist, gloomily nodding over existence, breaks like a bubble at the touch of the evidence furnished by the social mirth and pleasures of men like Cromwell himself, or—to take one Northern case out of many-Guthrie of Fenwick. As Kingsley was once at pains to prove, the Puritans were not strangers wholly to the House Beautiful of poetry and human joy; when worked out in practice, the movement in England and Scotland cannot be fairly described as having been necessarily antagonistic at all points to the innocent charities and courtesies and charms of man's existence. The Jesuit bogey has vanished before historical research. Surely it is time that the Puritan bogey were laid also and for ever.

Furthermore, when gladness is taken in its definitely religious sense, Puritanism held within its core the true corrective to any exaggerations of

melancholia, as is written plainly all over the works of men like Bunyan and Richard Baxter (whose Reliquiæ, by the way, is a more valuable clue to Puritanism than most other works). Certain people who had the misfortune to be born before either Augustinianism or the "softening influences of the Catholic cult,” are said on good authority to have received the word in much affliction, with joy of the Holy Ghost, and it was this genuinely Catholic conception and experience of joy, not any Renanesque sentimentalism, which Puritans sought to recover; their very sense of sin, acute and piercing as it was, reached down to a bubbling source of religious fervour under the hard soil of internal and external affliction. Dr Dale, if I remember aright, has somewhere traced the comparative absence of joy in a well-known Anglican's religion to his peculiar conception of God's saving work; "in parting with the Lutheran truth about justification he parted with the springs of gladness." Now it was the very tenacity and intensity with which the Puritan developed his doctrine of sin and grace that opened out into an experience of religious freedom and heart's ease which he would have counted well-won even at the expense of any livsglaede, Catholic or pagan; while often, as I have indicated, its sombre, austere exterior was built without serious detriment to a radiant, adorned interior of domestic and social enjoyment.

The subsequent and companion generalisation about Scotland and its liberal ideas invites a similar process of questioning. The kailyard is all right in its place, but I hope Mr Perris does not imagine it is the best standpoint for surveying the trend of modern theology in Scotland. If he does, it would suggest, as a recent legal decision has also suggested, that the judgments of Englishmen upon Scots' religion might profitably be added to the four things which a Semitic sage pronounced too wonderful to understand. On this, however, I must not linger. Only, I should like to quote one item of a proof which might be led against the rather sweeping statement upon the Protestant leaders and their tragic mistake of stamping religion as correct opinion. Intellectualism was rather the atmosphere of that controversial age, when dogma was being defined, than a spirit peculiar to one party. And even though the tendency was strong in Protestantism, it was not unresisted. The Racovian Catechism, for example, did represent the visible Church as a school rather than as a fellowship; but this Catechism was a Socinian manifesto, and, as Ritschl has argued, the Reformers maintained that the Church was essentially a fellowship of believing people, of whom the pura doctrina evangelii was indeed a mark, but only a mark. As a matter of fact, the publication of this very Catechism in England was strenuously opposed in 1652 by the Puritan leaders, including, as I have elsewhere pointed out, Dr John Owen, then Vice-Chancellor of Oxford. JAMES MOFFATT.

DUNDONALD, AYRSHIRE.

THE EARLY USE OF THE GOSPELS.

(Hibbert Journal, April 1904, pp. 607-612, and July 1904, pp. 803-807.)

DR STANTON objects to my ascribing to him "apologetical bias." I hasten to choose instead of this a purely objective expression and to say that his positions are well fitted to serve as the basis of apologetical efforts, and that in my opinion they are very difficult to reconcile with the facts.

The same character belongs to two arguments with which he tries to oppose me. I had said on p. 611, "What in reality was investigated before a writing could be incorporated in the Canon, was rather, whether the contents of such writing corresponded to the views of the Catholic Church." Dr Stanton replies (p. 806), “The words of the Muratorian Fragment refer, like similar words of Irenæus, to the harmony of the Gospels among themselves, not to their agreement with the Church's creed." In reality they refer to the harmony of the Gospels only so far as the Church creed is concerned: cum uno ac principali spiritu declarata sint in omnibus omnia de nativitate, de passione, de resurrectione, de conversatione cum discipulis (N.B.: after the Resurrection!) ac de gemino ejus adventu. This, as one can see, concerns hardly more than five of the twenty-eight chapters of Matthew.

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Dr Stanton's second objection against the above words of mine runs : Serapion, when he permitted the little Church of Rhossus to continue their practice of publicly reading the Gospel of Peter, certainly did not imagine himself to be settling the Canon of Scripture. He shows no disposition to adopt Peter at Antioch; and, indeed, it would have been thought ludicrous for the practice of Rhossus to be taken as a guide in a matter which concerned the Church at large." In reality, no question arises as to whether Serapion wished to adopt the Gospel of Peter in Antioch; for no one has desired this. Dr Stanton omits to add, what I have expressly adduced from Eusebius (H.E., vi. 12), viz., that Serapion had allowed the use of the Gospel of Peter in public worship in Rhossus before he was acquainted with it, and that, after he had learnt its contents and found heretical views therein, he would not suffer it even in Rhossus. If Dr Stanton declines to admit that Serapion intended to establish the Canon when he permitted Peter, so much the more certain is it that he had this intention when he prohibited its use, for he says expressly, "Peter and the other Apostles, we accept (as well) as Christ, but the writings falsely handed down under their name we refuse." The important point, however, is just this; that he did not regard the Gospel of Peter as a pseudograph until the time when he became acquainted with its heretical contents.

Dr Stanton's remarks on the force of cumulative evidence and on