It may be objected that Presbyteries might still be lax, and might license candidates concerning whom theological Faculties made unfavorable reports. True; but they would have no pretext, in their relations to the seminaries, for doing so. This unfortunate dividing of responsibilities would be avoided, which is usually the pretext for their neglect by both parties; and though the student who brought bad returns from his teachers might yet be licensed, the knowledge that such returns would be faithfully made, that all his negligences and deficiences would be publicly reported to that body, which was his spiritual guide and judge, would not a little stimulate to diligence. Much has been said about the unwillingness of our young men of promise to seek the ministry; and many explanations have been suggested for it. We verily believe that one of the most important is this that the honor of admission into the ministry has been too easily obtained. The spirited and ingenuous young man feels no inclination to enter the lists for a prize, which he sees bestowed with dishonest and indiscriminating looseness, on the most unworthy competitors. He is disgusted to see that bestowed on indolence and indifference, which he was proposing to win by strenuous exertion. Only the ignoble desire that the prize may be won without exertion er good desert. In illustration, we point to that fact, than which there is none more certain, that in those colleges or universities where a high grade of scholarship is rigidly applied, this strictness is the prime element of their popularity; and this popularity is greatest among the young men themselves: among all those young men who are worth having in a college. On this subject, we would commend to all, the wise remarks of Archbishop Whately, on the University of Oxford; that its history has always shown, literary honors cease to be sought whenever they become so easily attainable that nobody fails of getting them. Our unfortunate facility in granting admission to the ministry, has degraded the privilege in the eyes of young men of high spirit and ingenuous impulses. It is only the youth of low aims and grovelling spirit, who is attracted by this too facile reward. Let us elevate the terms of admission, and we shall see more men of elevated character seeking the sacred office. It may be said, in opposition, that if a Theological Faculty should make such reports of the diligence and scholarship of students, they would be treating them as schoolboys; that such a literary police is a reproach cast upon their principles; that if it has any effect, it can only be by substituting a mere carnal fear, and rivalry, for conscientiousness; thus degrading the nature of the student's motives; and that if a young man has not conscience enough to be diligent, without such stimuli, he is certainly not fit to be a minister. : True and the very thing we wish to find out, by holding him in the position of a candidate, is, whether he is fit to be a minister. What way so proper to settle that question, as to lay before the Presbytery, the judge in the case, the record of his conscientiousness? And that such a surveillance is an implied reproach on the honor of the diligent student, is certainly not the doctrine of the Apostle, who teaches us that the same law which is a terror to evil doers, "is a praise to them that do well." The short and complete answer to all such shallow remarks is, that by the same rule, all repressive or punitive legislation in church and State ought to be disused, lest we should seem to imply a suspicion of good people. Let the student show himself a good one, by his conduct; and then the report to his Presbytery will be naught but a testimonial to his honor. Nor is it easy to see how a conscientious student can be made less conscientious by knowing that if he were not so, he would incur certain unpleasant personal consequences. All desire of the approval of the good is not wicked. We can see no harm in a desire to commend one's self to the approbation of God's dear children, seconding the desire for the approval of God. But suppose there should be many cases in which students show none of this high, etherial conscientiousness, to which even the fear of the blame, and desire of the praise of the good, would be a taint; but in its place exhibit a painful indolence and carelessness? Is not even a little eye-serving industry better than sheer laziness? Practically, we think it is; though either of them would be a sorry quality in a gospel minister. But the philosophy of the mind, and common sense, both concur in teaching that if we would strengthen any virtue which was before weak or deficient in the soul, we must procure the outward exercise of it. It is by acting that it grows. We train our children to kindness by compelling them to forego acts of violence and cruelty. We do not argue that, because an enforced mercy is of no worth in the sight of God, therefore it will be better to permit every indulgence of angry tempers, until their own conscientiousness checks them! The object of the writer is to commend these thoughts to the reflection and wiser judgment of the Presbyters of our church. "A THEODICY; OR, VINDICATION OF THE DIVINE GLORY, AS MAN IFESTED IN THE CONSTITUTION AND GOVERNMENT OF THE MORAL WORLD. BY ALBERT TAYLOR BLEDSOE, Professor of Mathematics, &c. in the University of Mississippi. New York: Carlton & Phillips, 1853. THE deepest thinkers have always been the readiest to acknowledge the insoluble difficulties which meet the understanding of man when "sounding on its dim and perilous way" in the discovery of truth and especially when exploring the plans and dispensations of Him who shrouds Himself in an impenetrable veil of clouds and darkness. They know by many painful experiments, the very narrow sphere in which the human faculties have been ordained and constituted to move; and that the effect of enlarging the circumference of the territory of knowledge, is, according to the striking illus tration of Chalmers, only to multiply the points upon that circumference, at each of which, unanswerable questions may be asked in respect to the deep obscurity beyond. "Learned ignorance," as it has been called by the greatest thinker of this age, is one of the highest and most important results of their studies. The highest reach of human science is the scientific recognition of human ignorance : "Qui nescit ignorare, ignorat scire." These master spirits, who believe more profoundly because they have doubted more profoundly than the majority of their kind, conveyed by the course of their meditations into that thick darkness where God dwells, are overwhelmed and subdued under a sense of their own littleness, and with all reverence and humility confess that righteousness and judg ment are the habitation of His throne. But "fools rush in where angels fear to tread," and there have never been wanting those who are bold enough to grapple with any difficulty, however intractable in its own nature, or however it may, in point of fact, have baffled a thousand times, the subtlest power of argument and the most sagacious instincts of genius. Well and truly has it been said that "everything is a mystery, or nothing is a mystery." To the thinking man everything is a mystery; to the presumptuous pretender, who has never had the Cartesian proof of his existence, nothing is; and he will undertake to unvail that Deity before whose hidden majesty wiser men are content to prostrate themselves in adoring faith. He sees not the necessity of waiting till it shall please that awful majesty to reveal itself, (so far as it can be revealed,) and vindicate its ways to men; to abate something of that excess of light which occasions our darkness, or to purge and invigorate our vision that we may gaze upon it, without being smitten with blindness: but proceeds with all the coolness, of confidence, and selfpossession with which he would unravel a Chinese puzzle, to show us that really after all there is no great mystery in the matter. O! what need is there, that, in discussing such high arguments," we should offer the prayer of the glorious old blind poet: "What in us is dark, illumine: what is low, raise and support!" " It would perhaps, be unjust, certainly uncharitable, to refer to the last mentioned class the author of the work whose title we have placed at the head of this article. He is not without metaphysical acumen, and has revolved the problem of the origin of evil with the seriousness of a man who sees more in it than a mere instrument of discipline for the logical faculty. We feel bound to complain, however, of the confident tone which pervades his discussions, which transpires even in his confessions of diffidence and modesty, and unless we are greatly deceived, waxes stronger and stronger as he proaches the end. It is very edifying and pleasant to be told, for example, that the mystery which baffled the powers of Plato and Leibnitz, not to mention a host of smaller luminaries, is no mystery at all, but only "the sophism of the atheist." It is only "in accommodation to the views of others" that he speaks of "the great difficulty in question," and "the problem of the moral world," which ap he says is not high and difficult in itself." "It is certainly a mis take to suppose," as Dr. Johnson asserted, that "it must be entangled with perplexities while we see but in part." Our author maintains that it is only while we see amiss, and not while we see in part, that this problem" (called so, of course, out of concession to the weakness of Plato, Leibnitz and Edwards) must wear the appearance of a dark enigma," (p. 23.) We wish we had space for all he says on the possibility of a Theodicy. It is enough to move the bones of that great master of human ignorance and impressive example of cautious inquiry, the author of the "Analogy." We candidly confess that if the choice lay between the spirit of Mr. Bledsoe, and that of "the insect lost in the depths of a fracture in the dome of St. Pauls," to which he compares the soi-distant philosopher of Fernay, we should prefer the latter, as corresponding better with the weakness of our nature. It would be better than claiming to be the Christopher Wren of the universe, and to be able to see proportion, harmony, and order, where no other mortal and perhaps no other creature, however unshaken his faith in the existence of these elements, has been able to see them. In a word, we should choose rather to be restive under real difficulties, than deny their existence. : He The work we are noticing fell into our hands about the same time, some months ago, with "Beecher's Conflict of Ages," which also claims to be a 'Theodicy, though in a narrower sphere and we must. say that whatever may be thought of the intellectual calibre, respectively, of the two authors, Dr. Beecher appears to us to have the advantage, very decidedly, in the point just referred to, an appreciation of the true state of the question. He feels that there is a problem to be solved, a real and formidable difficulty to be met. seems to have had some personal experience of the power of that "law in the members," which brings the soul into captivity to "the law of sin and death." But we are sorry to say that the perusal of Mr. Bledsoe's book has left a very different, impression upon our minds. If his spiritual history had been similar to that of the great Apostle of the Gentiles, as recorded in the 7th chapter of the Epistle to the Romans; if it had been such as to enable him to sympathize in that "exceeding great and bitter cry" "O! wretched man that I am!"-it is, in the last degree, improbable that he could have been the author of this treatise. Its views of sin, and its "exceeding sinfulness" are miserably shallow; and, as a matter of course, there is no lack of great swelling words of vanity" and "promises of liberty." " There is another fact which cannot fail to strike any body who has read these two books, and that is the precariousness of all reasoning from so-called "moral intuitions." The author of the "Conflict. affirms that the eternal principles of honor and right require that every intelligent creature, who, er vi terminorum, is to be the subject of moral law, should be created in a state of virtue, in order to have a fair trial. It is upon this self-evident moral truth that the whole discussion rests; it is the pressure of this truth, standing as it does, in appalling contradiction to the actual condition of mankind, which has driven Dr. Beecher to the necessity of reviving the exploded absurdity of a metempsychosis. The author of "Theodicy," on the other hand, contends that the idea of a created virtue is a contradiction in itself, and therefore, an impossibility, a nothing, which cannot be the object of power, even Divine power. These learned advocates who have volunteered to defend their Maker at the bar of human reason, assume contradictory grounds of defence: each, in turn, pronouncing his own fundamental postulate to be a self-evident truth, and the postulate of his colleague a self-evident falsehood. It is not ours to compose this dispute. We only venture to suggest that one of them (not impossibly both) will certainly be asked as Job asked his friends, "Will ye speak wickedly for God? and talk deceitfully for Him? Will ye accept His person? Will ye contend for God? Is it good that He should search you out? Or, as one man mocketh another, do ye so mock Him?" Let them beware, lest the wrath of God be kindled against them," and He "deal with them after their folly, in that they have not spoken of Him the thing which is right." But vain man would be wise though man be like the wild ass's colt. If the history of opinions were not full of painful examples of the weakness of the human understanding, it would be incomprehensible how either the Doctor of Massachusetts, or the Professor of Mississippi could suppose that he had succeeded in vindicating the glory of God in the existence of moral evil, neve allowing that he had demonstrated his positions, and shown himself to be excepted from that melancholy destiny, which, according to South, belongs to fallen man, of "spinning his days and himself out into a pitiful controverted conclusion." Supposing with the one, that men are now expiating, by a condition of headlong proclivity to evil and of hopeless imbecility for good, the actual transgressions and apostacies of a preexistent state, or with the other, that the will is independent, self-determined, not subject to the law of cause and effect; (either of which suppositions, if true, is a greater mystery than that which they have been devised to explain) still the great mystery remains how, in the first instance, a God of infinite perfections should have constituted a system of things which involves, in its administration, such an overwhelming amount of evil of every kind. This is the question upon which philosophers and speculative theologians have always been and always will be crucified. Mr. Bledsoe is an "optimist." The actually existing system, then, is precisely that in which the maximum of good, and the minimum of evil have been attained. But why did God create at all? Shall we say, with the German philosophers and Cousin, that he is an "absolute cause," and could not bu create; or rather could not but become the universe? Shall we confound cause and effect with substance and mode, and plunge ourselves into Pantheism? Shall we be followers of Bolingbroke, and make a gospel of the "Essay on Man?" It is well enough for |