of declension from the true in opinion, seems to be wholly overlooked. Even the inquisitor, who insists on the duty of visiting error in opinion with the penalties of the rack and the stake, and who to justify his policy is obliged to maintain that errors are not merely errors but sins, is uniformly tolerant of the sin which produces the error, until the error becomes patent. Men may be practically heterodox to a large extent, and be subject to no inconvenient questioning. It is only when this practical heterodoxy has developed itself in the formal rejection of some received dogma that the cry of heresy is raised. But if men err in regard to the great facts of revealed theology, it is in general because they have first erred in regard to the ethical ground on which those facts are based. The fitness of the great doctrines of revelation, whether viewed in their relation to God or to man, is an ethical fitness. Nearly all objection to them, when examined, resolves itself into moral objection. The inner light which men oppose to these doctrines is not the light of mere reason, so much as the supposed light of their moral nature. They have come to regard them in the first place as morally exceptionable, and then have learnt to account them as speculatively untrue. No man, accordingly, can be a believer in the theology of the Bible, who is not a believer in the ethics of the Bible.

We hold these maxims to be clear and certain, and of much more practical significance than men in general suppose. For this purpose we shall endeavour to show what the ethics of the Bible really are, and how it comes to pass that men who err in regard to revealed morality, must of necessity err in regard to revealed theology.

Revelation teaches us that moral distinctions come from the Divine Nature-from what is eternally and necessarily in that nature. It teaches us further, that the will of the Deity, however made known, is the expression of his nature, and to us the rule of duty. And it teaches that the end contemplated by the nature and will of the Supreme Being is the good of the universe. The Divine Being speaks to us as he does, because he is what he is, and his purposes are ever in harmony with rectitude and goodness. Reverence of his greatness, love of his goodness, and gratitude for his bountifulness, to the extent possible to the nature of his creatures, is the obedience he demands of them in relation to Himself; and, furthermore, that his creatures should all be and do towards others, as they would that others should be and do towards them. These principles embrace all the harmonies we can imagine as possible to the universe. Every infraction of them must be not only discord, but sin, a transgres. sion of law.

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But in judging on this subject it becomes us to look beyond the theoretical principles of moral government, to their practical relations-to the facts of the universe familiar to us, Sin and which must be held to be consistent with them. manifestly exists. Suffering and death have come in its train. All the relations of sinful beings are of course powerfully affected by the fact of their sinfulness. Thus the ethics of the Bible come to be something very different in their manifestations from the ethics we could imagine as pervading the universe in the absence of sin. Right, indeed, is right in all the possible conditions and relations of being, but the application of the principles of right must vary as those conditions and relations shall vary. The justice of God is the same whether manifested towards the innocent or the guilty. But the manifestations of justice are What it might have become the not the same in the two cases. Divine Being to do towards sinful beings, we could never have known had not sin been permitted to exist. For our knowledge and certainty in such matters we are indebted, not so much to what we might have reasoned out for ourselves, as to what the Divine Being has himself said and done. It would be presumptuous enough were we to deem ourselves competent to distinguish in all cases between the ethically sound and the not sound even where evil should have no real place. But to imagine ourselves capable of deciding thus concerning the right or wrong in the conduct of the Divine Being towards a world like ours, would be, we scarcely need say, presumptuous to the last degree. The case is too complex-too profound in its difficulties, to be wholly comprehended or wholly fathomed by us. Truth, justice, goodness, mercy-these are terms about which we have no dispute. We did not need a revelation to enable us to conceive of these qualities or principles, considered in themselves. But there has been ample room for the coming in of new light to determine what may or may not be done consistently with those principles in the relations in which we find ourselves placed, both towards each other, and towards our Maker.

It is clear, then, that if we would be wise in such things we must take the place of learners. It is not the light we bring with us into the world, so much as the light which has come into the world independently of us, that must settle such questions. The primary application of the principles of moral government must be supposed to have had respect to innocent beings. Such a condition of being must be supposed to be the natural condition of creatures. The entrance of sin is the entrance of the unnatural. From sin all forms of the unnatural come as from their common root. The application of the principles of moral

government now-especially if its aim be to restore, and not merely to punish, the erring-opens a new field in the history of the Divine administration. The fitting now must be almost wholly a matter of Divine revelation, it can be scarcely at all a discovery of reason. Social government, and parental government, are adumbrations of Divine relations. But social government everywhere proceeds on the assumption of human depravity, and is everywhere modified by that assumption. Even the parental relation is necessarily influenced by the same consideration. The ethics of the governmental and the paternal relations among men, in so far as they are from above, must be in harmony with the ethics of the governmental and paternal in the relations of the Divine Being-himself the Supreme Ruler, the Great Parent. But we know all these things now only as they exist among a race of beings who are manifestly erring and sinning beings. As subjects men have revolted. As children they have become unnatural. As the effect of these changes the Divine administration has greatly changed.

We repeat, therefore, that if a man would know what is now most fitting in the relations between man and his Maker, and between man and man, he must learn these things mainly from the Bible; and that only as his feeling shall be in harmony with revealed ethics, is he likely to be a believer in revealed theology.

What then are these revealed ethics? We may see them embodied in part in the scriptural idea of civil government. Civil government is an ordinance of God,' and an expression of his will, in so far as it proves to be 'a terror to evil doers, and a praise to those who do well. As described in Holy Writ, it is no soft and sentimental influence-but a stern and coercive reality, designed to awe or to compel the most turbulent to submission. In all rude states of society government is, and must be, to a large extent, a reign of terror. Its penalties must go, and go often, not merely to the loss of property and of liberty, but to the life. We all know that the government-the divinely sanctioned government of the Hebrew people, as set forth in the Old Testament, partook largely of this complexion. When the Deity permits a people to come into such a state, he cedes existence to the kind of government proper and necessary to that state.

In truth, the idea of government in any other than a purely despotic form never entered the thoughts of men in the old eastern world. It is the same over those regions to this day. The notions of liberty which have found a place in Western Europe have no place there-have never been understood. What Russia is now in this respect, the eastern world has been through

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all time. The great distinction between a despotic and a free state is, that in the latter the rights of men, not merely in relation to each other, but in relation to the government, are largely ceded, and carefully defined. Even in despotic states, a man may often claim justice with a measure of success as against his fellow man; but justice as against a government, has always been another matter. In such states, the will and pleasure of the chief ruler have been as the beginning and the end of all law and of all right. The only check on such power has been, either the prudent consideration that to destroy the tree must be to lose the fruit; or, it may be, the influence of some priest caste, which being recognised, on a sort of theocratic principle, as representative of invisible powers, has been permitted to act at times as mediator between sovereign and subject. But in all such cases governmental ethics must be something very different from the state of things in this respect with which we are happily familiar. And to expect that the general morality of a people may be pure and elevated, while the morality on which their government is based is thus imperfect, would be to expect against reason. The estimate of human rights, of human suffering, and of human life, is more and more lowered in a state, as the government of the state becomes more and more arbitrary. The great necessity in despotic governments is, that a succession of wise and virtuous men should be provided to take possession of the supreme power. But everything in the working of such governments tends to ensure that there shall be folly and vice as the rule, wisdom and virtue only as the exception.

It is, nevertheless, a fact, that the Hebrew Scriptures never seem to anticipate anything other than a despotic government for those regions of the earth with which they are conversant. The only happy condition imagined as possible to the people of those lands is, that they should fall under the sway of sagacious and good kings. It is left to be very much thus even with the Hebrews themselves. In the seventy-second Psalm, which is commonly regarded as intended to shadow forth the millennial reign of Messiah, the imagery employed is taken wholly from the forms of despotic rule. One fact, indeed, is conspicuous-the chief ruler in this case is the model of everything enlightened, just, and humane, in place of being the contrary-but that is the sole difference.

Under the sway of a Solomon, or of any other king, whose reign should have its place in history as the type of the reign of Messiah, the Israelite might expect much. But from kings as he was generally to find them, no such happy influences were to come. Even in his case, the rule of the king would be, in

general, more arbitrary than limited, more oppressive than just. Had the Hebrews been content with that theocratic form of government under which they were at first placed; or had their kings been made to respect those theocratic laws to which they ought to have been subject, the case might have been otherwise with them. But when they claimed to be like the other nations in the matter of having a king, they soon became, as Samuel • had foretold, like the other nations in very much beside.

Now, several things are at this point observable. First, the Old Testament Scriptures clearly contemplate the oriental nations as incapable of attaining to liberty on any constitutional basis, or by means of any political system possible to those regions. In the second place, in giving their sanction to the principles of such rule as was alone adapted to the east, the inspired writers must be understood as giving their sanction to those special severities which are known to be indispensable to the upholding of rule in that form. In the third place, what it was right to sanction in the given circumstances then, it must be right to sanction in the given circumstances now and for ever. For the principles of right are eternal and immutable; they do not fluctuate with time and chance. We place no faith, accordingly, in the talk about the morality of the Old Testament as being imperfect-the word imperfect here being used to denote that what is called the morality of the Hebrew Scriptures is often no morality at all, but, on the contrary, something very immoral. Jehovah could sanction nothing as right then, which was not right in the conditions of things then existing; and which would not be right again wherever such conditions of things might again be found.

We feel disposed to look at some of the points relating to the ethics of the Old Testament, and which are regarded as being most open to exception, in the light of these facts. By the ethics of the Old Testament we of course mean its real moral teaching. We must distinguish between the actions of a moral nature which those ancient writers record, and record it may be without praise or blame, and the acts of that nature which they approve and commend. In regard to all sentiments expressed which may be deemed of questionable morality, the point to be determined is-are those sentiments recorded simply as parts of Bible history, or are we to accept them as the real teaching of the Bible? We may select the song of Deborah as a case in which a discrimination of this kind may be at least plausibly exercised. It was in the following terms that we expressed ourselves on this point seven years since :-'In itself, this story is by 'no means at variance with the rude notions of justice natural