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induction. What does he mean? Butler, in the Analogy,' founds the probability of a Divine moral government upon an induction, i. e. observation of present facts. So much, however, is clear, that Mr. Maurice says the argument which moralists and divines ought to use for their conclusions is the argument of induction, which Mr. Combe uses. But what can Mr. Maurice be thinking of, with his dislike of uncertainty, to rest the evidence of religion upon induction? How can he think that a satisfactory method' of proof? Will he say Butler has not made so much of it as he might have done? We shall be truly obliged to Mr. Maurice if he will make any more of it. Will he prove what Eliphaz the Temanite, Bildad the Shuhite, and Zophar the Naamathite, wanted to do, that virtue and vice have uniform consequences respectively of pain and happiness in this world? But till he does that, the induction from the facts of this life in favour of the truth of religion, or the ultimate reward of virtue and punishment of vice, must remain a very imperfect one. And, even supposing him to succeed here, a still greater difficulty awaits him. With the most perfect induction as to the consequences of actions in this world, it would be still a mere presumption and no more that there would be the same consequences in another. Religion would rest on the most uncertain basis, if induction were its primary proof.

Again, after objecting so strongly to the uncertainty of Butler's proof in morals, what does Mr. Maurice do but actually charge Butler-and a most serious mistake he thinks it-with too great certainty in that proof? We allude to the remarks on the subject of conscience. Butler thinks that conscience, though liable to be occasionally disturbed by superstition, is, in the main, to be depended on as a guide, and puts it forth as a sound foundation of morals. Mr. Maurice disputes this, and sees in superstition, not that mere exception to, which Butler does, but a general and wholesale proof against, the trustworthiness of conscience.

'The student of Butler's doctrine on the Conscience, is often forced even more painfully upon this conclusion. For he will say to himself, "My conscience ought, you say, to be a king. But it is not a king. It is a captive. How shall it be raised to its throne? And when it has got a temporary ascendency, can I trust it? Does not Butler himself admit the possibility of superstition acting upon it, and deranging its decisions? Is that a slight exception to a general maxim? Does not all history show that the decrees of this great ruler may be made contradictory, monstrous, destructive, by this disturbing force, which Butler notices, but hardly deigns to take account of?'-Ibid. p. 221.

Who is it here who is throwing doubt and uncertainty upon morals? Butler, who maintains the trustworthiness of conscience,

or Mr. Maurice, who seems to think conscience a mere guesser, and a very bad one? We have not time or space to enter at present further into this question, which is undoubtedly an important one, or explain how conscience may be an authoritative guide to us in action, though we may know it is not an absolutely infallible one. We shall content ourselves with saying that we think Mr. Maurice greatly exaggerates the errors of conscience, and, over-occupied with the effects of one disturbing force, forgets the many large fields of action on which it is quite clear sighted and not liable to mistakes: and with reminding Mr. Maurice that if he unseats conscience as a guide, he is indeed throwing us on the wide world for any standard of action or rule of life. He may think he has a corrective for this defect which he has discovered in conscience, but it is much easier to pull down than to build up again, and to inflict a wound than to remedy it. His remedy appears, as far as we can understand him, to lie in a certain regeneration' of the conscience. Christ, the true bridegroom of man's spirit, is ever drawing 'it towards Himself-is holding out to it freedom from evil, and 'the knowledge of Himself as its high reward. Owning Him, 'the man rises out of dark superstitions, out of immoral practices; he recognises the fitness of all God's arrangements in the physical and moral world; he claims for the body as well as the soul a redemption from all which corrupts and degrades it.' He enforces this discovery by a prayer of great

earnestness :

'But Thou, O strong Son of God! give Thy servants grace with all boldness to speak of Thee as that Lord of the inner man, in confessing whom each of us knows himself to be a person, knows himself to be a subject: knows that he is meant to rule the turbulent impulses and energies within him, because they are Thine, and have all been redeemed by Thee, and are all consecrated to Thee. Suffer us not to shrink through any shame, or through the desire of being reputed philosophical among philosophical men, or religious among religious men, from making this confession of Thee, seeing that Thou, who didst raise up men in other generations to speak that which was needful for them, hast mercifully awakened some of us to feel, that only in this way can we be saved from sinking into the deepest pit of unbelief, the most practical denial of that conscience, which, yet, not a few are ready to put in the place of Thee.'—Ibid. p. 229.

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We do not see, in spite of Mr. Maurice's earnestness, any correction here to the doubtfulness which he has thrown over the dictates and guidance of conscience. A regenerated' conscience is undoubtedly a better guide than an unregenerated' one; but how is a man to know that his conscience is regenerated?'

We have thought it right to notice this very groundless attack upon one of our great class-books in morals and philosophy; and now we go to other and more critical portions of

Mr. Maurice's Essays. And first, we shall make some remarks on the Chapter on the Atonement.

Many statements and arguments in this chapter appear to us not only highly dangerous, but positively unsound, and opposed to the doctrine of the Atonement as revealed in Scripture, and always understood in the Church. At the same time we are anxious, in justice to Mr. Maurice, to make a distinction. He appears to us sometimes more unsound as a destroyer than he is as a constructor. He has a bias against all existing forms of opinion, all doctrines in the way in which they are actually held and received, and seems to consider it his special vocation to assail them. But allow him to construct the doctrine himself, and put it out in his own formula, and it will be not so very unlike the original one. In the following passage, he protests against the doctrine of the death of our Saviour as a satisfaction for the penalty of sin. The first portion of it is not his own protest in form, so much as that of certain parties whose scruples and objections to orthodox doctrine these Essays are written to meet, and whose sentiments he here expresses. But, so far as that point is concerned, he avows agreement with their protest; and we must add that we cannot, from the whole context, but regard him as agreeing in the main with the arguments on which it is founded.

But I admitted that there were grave and earnest protests against much of what is called the Protestant doctrine of the Atonement. "You hold," it is said, "that God had condemned all His creatures to perish, because they had broken His law; that His justice could not be satisfied without an infinite punishment; that that infinite punishment would have visited all men, if Christ, in His mercy to men, had not interposed and offered Himself as the substitute for them; that by enduring an inconceivable amount of anguish, He reconciled the Father, and made it possible for Him to forgive those who would believe. This whole statement," the objector continues, "is based on a certain notion of justice. It professes to explain, on certain principles of justice, what God ought to have done, and what He actually has done. And this notion of justice outrages the conscience, to which you seem to offer your explanation. You often feel that it does. You admit that it is not the kind of justice which would be expected of men. And then you turn round and ask us what we can know of God's justice; how we can tell that it is of the same kind with ours? After arguing with us, to show the necessity of a certain course, you say that the argument is good for nothing; we are not capable of taking it in! Or else you say that the carnal mind cannot understand spiritual ideas. We can only answer, We prefer our carnal notion of justice to your spiritual one. We can forgive a fellow-creature a wrong done to us, without exacting an equivalent for it; we blame ourselves if we do not; we think we are offending against Christ's command, who said, Be ye merciful as your Father in Heaven is merciful, if we do not. We do not feel that punishment is a satisfaction to our minds; we are ashamed of ourselves when we consider it is. We may suffer a criminal to be punished, but it is that we may do him good, or assert a principle. And if that is our object, we do not suffer an innocent person to prevent the guilty from enduring the consequences of his guilt,

by taking them upon himself. Are these moral maxims in our case, or are the opposing maxims moral? If they are moral, should we, because God is much more righteous than we can imagine or understand, attribute to Him what we should consider a very low righteousness, or unrighteousness in us?""

'These questions are asked on all sides of us. It is obvious that they are most deep and awful questions. They touch upon the very principles of morality and godliness. I know well how clergymen persuade themselves that it is right and safe to pass them by. They say, "Such doubts bewilder the minds of our flocks upon a doctrine which is, of all others, the most vital. Let one of these objectors," they say, go with us to the bedsides of some of the humblest, purest Christians. We will show them those who have grown up from their childhood in love and good works. We will show them penitent Magdalens. The testimony of both will be the same. To lose this doctrine, of God having reconciled sinners to Himself, would be to lose everything. Without it we do not care for life here or hereafter. We do not know what life here or hereafter could mean.' Are we to rob such souls as these of their treasure, because some captious people find the casket which contains it disagreeable to their pride-because they cannot bend their reasons to the Cross?"

'I answer, No; you are to defend this treasure to the death. You are to let no man take it from those suffering spirits, or if you have it—from yourselves. You are to desire that all, you among the rest, should be brought, with all your notions and theories, to the Cross. But what is the treasure which you see your humble, dying saints, grasping with such intense resolution? Is it not the belief which is expressed in our collect for Passion Week, that "God of His tender love towards mankind sent His Son, our Saviour Jesus Christ, to take our flesh upon Him, that all mankind should follow the example of His great humility?" Is not this Love of God, this perfect obedience of Christ to His Father's loving will, the ground of all their confidence, their hope, their humility? Has their confidence, their hope, their humility, anything whatever to do with the theory that has fastened itself to this doctrine of Atonement, and, in many minds, has taken the place of it? Do you hear any allusion to it amidst the pauses of that sepulchral cough? Does the feverish hand clasp yours with thankful joy, when you speak of a Divine justice delighting in infinite punishment? Does the loving, peaceful eye respond to the idea that the Son of God has delivered His creatures from their Father's determination to execute His wrath upon them?

'But go from the dying chamber to the house across the street, or, it may be, to the fashionable withdrawing room below, and there you will find what hold this doctrine has upon your people. There you may hear some religious dowager, with the newspaper, from which she derives her faith and her charity, on the ottoman beside her, denouncing a youth just returned from Cambridge, and, as you enter, imploring your help in delivering him from the horrible scepticism into which he has fallen, respecting the faith which is her only consolation in time and eternity. That faith is not in the tender love of God, in the obedience of Christ, in His great humility; it is in the theory of the satisfaction He has offered to offended Sovereignty, or, as she calls it, justice.'-Ibid, pp. 137-141.

Here, then, Mr. Maurice plainly refuses to admit the doctrine of our Lord's atonement, in the sense of a satisfaction for the penalty of sin. He asks, Does the loving, peaceful eye respond to the idea that the Son of God has delivered His creatures from their Father's determination to execute His wrath upon

'them?' meaning, of course, that such a doctrine is essentially repugnant to true spiritual thought and feeling. He speaks of satisfaction to offended Sovereignty,' i. e. to the Divine wrath, as a theory' which fashionable dowagers, devoid alike of faith and charity, may hold and repose in; but which the contrition of real penitents thrusts aside as revolting, foreign, and unedifying. But what, may we ask, is the doctrine of the Atonement, if it is not the doctrine that Christ's death and sufferings have been accepted as a sacrifice in our behalf; and, whereas our sins would, in the natural course, have brought eternal punishment upon us, this sacrifice has redeemed us from it? We do not say that deliverance from punishment is the only mode of expressing the benefit of the Atonement: that benefit is deliverance from sin as well. The two consequences, indeed, cannot be considered apart, so far as this, that the individual cannot have deliverance from punishment, if he does not exhibit a deliverance from sin too. But the one consequence cannot be regarded as absorbed in the other; nor can we afford to throw aside the deliverance from punishment, as if it had no separate and independent interest to us. All that deliverance from sin can amount to, even if by grace we have cast off our sins, is repentance and reformation. But reformation can only affect our future life; it cannot prevent the sins we have committed. And if those sins remain, how do we escape their natural consequence, unless the atonement of Christ is a special rescue from that consequence-a satisfaction for, and removal of a punishment, which would otherwise have been executed upon us? Accordingly, when Bishop Butler defends the doctrine of a Mediator and Redeemer,' this is the doctrine which he defends. The Son of God loved us, and gave himself for us, ' with a love which he compares to that of human friendship; though, in this case, all comparison must fall infinitely short of 'the thing intended to be illustrated by them. He interposed in such a manner as was necessary and effectual to prevent that execution of justice upon sinners, which God had appointed should otherwise have been executed upon them; or in such a manner as to prevent that punishment from actually following, which, according to the general laws of Divine government, must have followed the sins of the world, had it not been for such 'interposition.' If repentance cannot of itself do away with the natural effects of our past sin upon ourselves—a power it is plainly repugnant to revelation to assign to it-we are evidently left without a remedy for those effects, and are still under sentence of eternal punishment, unless the Atonement is what Mr. Maurice denies it to be.

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We do not argue, however, with Mr. Maurice. All we are