the orthodox Creeds the character of God is love. These creeds are not mere dogmas, or theories about God, but declarations of His mind and will, and of His acts towards us. The old Unitarians did not see more in sin than the transgression of a rule. They had no idea of man being in a wrong state, having torment within himself. They did not speak to man as a sinner. They had no message to those who sought deliverance, they told men to repent, and they would be forgiven, but what men wanted to know was how to repent and what was to be forgiven. It is true the Church in the last century had acted in the same spirit, but this was because it did not much believe the creeds and the prayers of the Prayer Book. But they were there, and they were witnesses

of an Infinite Sin and an Infinite Love.

The object was to vindicate orthodox theology from the objections of Unitarians. The result was that both Orthodox and Unitarians turned upon the writer and repudiated his representations of what they believed. Starting with the idea of sin, he finds it inwrought in every fibre of man's nature. We cannot get rid of the sense of it, and not merely is human nature depraved, but there is an evil spirit tempting men to evil acts. There is, however, a righteousness in man. Christ the righteous Lord is in man. He is the source of all good actions, none of which are, as some have said, 'splendid sins. This righteous Lord is the Son of God.

The doctrine of the Incarnation is accepted for three reasons. The first is that we feel the impossibility of knowing the Absolute and Invisible God as we feel we need to know Him, and crave to know Him. The second is that we do not perceive how we can recognise a perfect Son of God such as we need and crave for, unless He were in all points tempted like as we are. The third is, that we ask of God a redemption not for a few persons from actual evil tendencies, but for humanity from all the plagues with which it is tormented.1

Objections had been made to sacrifice and atonement, as against our sense of right and wrong, but such objections were not really against the theology of the old creeds, but only against popular and scholastic explanations of it. In the atonement Christ shared the sufferings of those whose head 1 p. 102.

He is.' The atonement had its source in the love of the Father; He sent His son. They are one in will and purpose as well as in substance. Christ bore sin, not the penalty. He came to take away sin. That the law must execute itself is the common argument for the suffering of Christ, but the law does not execute itself if one against whom it is not directed interposes to bear its punishment. God was satisfied not with the punishment of sin, but with the purity and graciousness of the Son.2

Christ died and rose again from the dead. The resurrection was real, it was a bodily resurrection, and not merely a spiritual. His body saw no corruption. This interprets our resurrection. It will not be the gathering together of the material particles at some future day. This is a belief worse than the Romish worship of reliques, but the same in kind. The Adam dies and sees corruption, but the new nature which we have in Christ continues. He is the resurrection and the life. The body does not sleep till some future day. The resurrection is now. Body and spirit are not separate units. Adam is the source of individuality, disease, death. The Adam dies, but the Christ who is the root of man's nature lives. The foundation for a Universal Church is that Christ is in man. He will quicken the spirit and deliver the soul and the body from death. The Son of Man came to claim men as spiritual beings, as inheritors of the spiritual kingdom. Baptism is the declaration that we are constituted in Christ. The resurrection and ascension of Christ are not extraordinary and anomalous events, but events which exhibit eternal laws and vindicate the true order and constitution of man's existence.

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The historical interest of the Essays' centres in the last. For this the writer lost his professorship at King's College. That he was misunderstood is now the universal verdict, but the greatest of his admirers have wished that he had been gifted with the faculty of clear expression. His thoughts are definite enough, when once we have understood them, but to do this we have to undergirdle the shipusing helps.' It happens that the last Essay is about the clearest, and need not have been misunderstood, especially by those who

had entered into the spirit of the previous Essays. The objections of the Unitarians are supposed to have been answered. It has been shown that the Trinity is a rational doctrine, that it manifests God as love, and that all the popular objections to the orthodox creeds, usually fall not upon the creeds themselves but upon misrepresentations of the doctrine of the creeds. Now comes the objection that the God of orthodox theology cannot be love so long as that theology teaches that there is everlasting punishment after death. Some have affixed one meaning to the word translated everlasting or eternal, when it refers to blessedness, and another when it refers to punishment, but this was arbitrary. Whatever the meaning is, it is the same, whether applied to life or to death. Some define eternal as without beginning and without end. It is so applied to God, but it cannot have the same meaning when applied to bliss or punishment, for these have a beginning. We must take another view of eternity. It is not a continuation of time. It has nothing to do with duration. The spiritual world is not subject to temporal conditions. What we see is temporal, what we do not see is eternal. Eternal life is to have the knowledge of God and of Christ. Eternal death is to be without that knowledge. If we say that eternity in relation to God has nothing to do with time, or duration, we are bound to say that in reference to life or punishment, it has nothing to do with time or duration. Perdition is loss, the loss of an eternal good, which God had revealed to His creatures, of which He had even put them in possession. He wills all men to be saved, He maintains a fight with evil and must do so, while evil exists. 'I am obliged to believe in an abyss of love which is deeper than the abyss of death. I dare not lose faith in that love, I sink into death, eternal death if I do. I must feel that this love is encompassing the universe.' Those who condemned Maurice supposed that he taught that impenitent unbelieving sinners would ultimately be saved, but his argument is quite free from such an inference, for sin and impenitence constitute perdition.

The idea of revelation in Maurice's theology is different from that of either of the Church parties, which rested in some

Bampton Lecturer in 1858, his subject was The Limits of Religious Thought.' On Sir William Hamilton's doctrine of the unknowableness of the Absolute or Unconditioned, he erected an argument for the unknowableness of God. Revelation was merely regulative, to be received on authority because we had no internal faculty to judge of its contents. This was diametrically opposed to all that Maurice had taught. He entered into controversy with the Bampton Lecturer. In the inquiry 'What is Revelation' he made out that it was a direct manifestation of the infinite God, that God speaks to man's spirit. Neither Scripture nor tradition, nor both of them make revelation. It is the unveiling not of a system, nor of a religion, but of God. Christ is the visible image of the Invisible. What the Son is the Father is.

A regulative revelation, which makes religion a mere rule of life, does not satisfy the cravings of man's heart. Puritanism and Methodism give the satisfaction which could not be found in the outward rule. They appealed to the sense of sin, and showed that men might be partakers of the divine nature. For this it was not necessary to know the right doctrine of God's relation to the world, any more than to feel the sun's light and heat is it necessary to know the right doctrine of the heavenly bodies. Maurice argued that Mansel's view of Revelation was destructive of all religion which went beyond outward rules, that it made all who had deep spiritual feelings or divine intuitions to be mere enthusiasts, that there was no such thing as being taught of God But we have within us a deep conviction that if we cannot rise above our conceptions we can know nothing. Mansel aimed at Hegel and the German philosophers and Mystics, but the argument is equally valid against Augustine, Thomas à Kempis, and Leighton, yea, against the Prayer Book and even the Bible itself. We preach to the poor just because they have the faculty to receive truth, which by Mansel's argument they have not. It is quite independent of the faculty to form notions, judge of opinions, or criticise documents. Kant was consistent in believing in a moral sense above the conditions of human intelligence, while he resolved time and space into forms of human consciousness.

forms of consciousness, but have to do with that which is above the conditions of the intellect.

The name of Charles Kingsley will ever be associated with that of Maurice. The men were essentially unlike. The only point of agreement was that Kingsley took the theology of Maurice as his own, he was avowedly his disciple. Kingsley was Maurice made easy-Maurice put into practice with his theology as an applied science. Maurice's doctrine that Christ is in man, that man is constituted in the Son of God, that the Adam nature is an intrusion, and that we are sons of God and ought to realise our sonship, was by Kingsley transformed into the formula, that the world is God's and not the devil's, though for a time the devil has a footing in it. A corollary from this was the doctrine, that what is right in nature is right. In this way the constitution of the world is vindicated, with all its misery and sin and wretchedness. It is in itself right, and this will finally be manifest. Kingsley had the individuality of genius and was not confined to the boundaries of mere theology. He was orthodox in the sense that his master was, and like him be became enamoured of the old creeds, and especially that which bears the name of St Athanasius. He had little sympathy with the Bible critics, was devoted to the Prayer Book, and he even spent his eloquence in extolling the merits of the Church catechism.1

Frederick W. Robertson may be classed with Hare, Maurice and Kingsley, because of their agreement on the chief points of doctrine and the general interpretation of Christianity. Otherwise there is no individual connection. Robertson's development was independent and spontaneous. He had been educated among the Evangelical party, to whom he owed the spirit of earnestness and devotion, which relieve his sermons from the dry atmosphere of the merely rational preacher. At Oxford during the Tractarian crisis he did not escape its influence but resisted its principles. He clung to Evangelicalism, but that became gradually transformed. In Robertson's theology, Christ is the centre, His devotion to Christ is intense, earnest, rational. He was strong on the doctrine of the Trinity in its strict Nicene or Athanasian sense, but while he held by Christ's divinity he