supranaturalism; which owns and seeks the supernatural, in the Bible or in the Church, as the necessary and at the same time possible complement of the natural, but will not allow still the chasm to be in any way filled that sunders the one from the other. The relation remains at last, what it was at first, extrinsical and mutually exclusive; while all conjunction in the case is found to be mechanical only, and thus more or less magical and unfree. A general convenient illustration of both these errors, is furnished by the question concerning inspiration. Rationalism reduces it at once to a nullity, by resolving all into the natural activity of the human mind. Abstract supranaturalism asserts on the contrary a higher activity, the moving power of the Holy Ghost; but in doing so, at the same time, sets the Divine wholly on the outside of the human; in consequence of which, this last sinks into the character of a mere passive organ or instrument, in the service of the first. The error in this form is of course more respectable than the error in the other form; but in both cases the proper truth of the doctrine is missed, and its rightful authority more or less overthrown. Inspiration transcends nature; but it is on the other hand a real entrance of the supernatural into this lower sphere. The Bible in this respect is just as thoroughly human, as it is found to be also heavenly and divine. The evidence of this meets us from every page and line. Not merely are the words human words; but the thoughts also are human thoughts, as intimately joined with these words as thoughts are in any other case with their own lan guage, which we know to be the very intimacy itself of soul and body. No two of the sacred writers think alike or speak alike. On the contrary the individual nature of every one of them is exalted, and so made to be more specifically peculiar and characteristic, through his gift of inspiration, than it would be if presented to us under any other circumstances. How all this is accomplished, is not here the question. We have to do only with the fact. This includes two sides; one natural and the other supernatural; which however do not stand each on the outside of the other, in such a way that the action of one becomes all and the action of the other nothing; but are so brought together as to be both truly and really concerned, as joint factors, in the result which is brought to pass. Holy men of old spake, as they were moved by the Holy Ghost. The speech is human speech, in all respects, under Divine motion. Any theory of inspiration which leaves this out of view, or which implies the contrary in any way, is of course radically defective and false.

And so, we say, in the relation which God sustains to the world generally, as its Creator and Preserver, we are required to see neither pantheism nor dualism; neither a necessary self-explication simply of his own being, on the one hand, nor yet such an outwardness and disjunction, on the other hand, as im plies in fact two different worlds, two separate and independent spheres of being. Even Nature itself has a constitution and life of its own; it is no mere apparition or shadow; its powers are real powers; its laws are true laws; it is not in this respect a mere system of occasionalism, the inefficient show only of what is taking place, while all in truth proceeds by immediate act of God. And still under this form, it can never, for one moment, or at a single point, be sundered from God; it subsists in Him continually, as the very ground of its whole constitution; its powers and laws are of no force, save as they flow forth unceasingly from the activity of his will. This activity is just as full, as omnipotent, as universally present, in the preservation of the world from hour to hour, as it was in its original creation. Not a sparrow falls without his hand. In Him, really and truly, we live, and move, and have our being. Of him, through him, and to him, (ἐξ αὐτοῦ, καὶ δι αὑτοῦ, καὶ εἰς αὐτόν τὰ παντα, Rom. xi. 36,) from him as their beginning, in and by him as their constant cause and medium, and to him again as their absolute and universal end, are all things. Such pantheism the Bible teaches, and we are bound to admit. It is the very character of a true childlike religious faith itself, thus to see God in the stars, to hear him in the winds, to mark his stately goings in all the processes of nature. And so when we rise from the world of mere Nature up to the world of Mind, as this meets us in the constitution of man, it is still always the same mystery we are called to admire and adore. God is different from the thinking, and willing, and working of men; and yet all thought and will are conditioned and made possible, only through the universe of life which has its seat in himself. He is the foundation of the moral world. It holds throughout in the presence of his intelligence and the activity of his will. Truth and freedom exist from him, and by him, as their necessary ground. The law which upholds all ethical relations, and by which the organical structure of society subsists, is the utterance continually of his very life. History, unfolding from age to age the progress of humanity, is not something separate from God; full as little certainly, to say the least, as any such thought may be tolerated of the course of dumb blind nature. It moves throughout, though in a free way, in obedience to an all comprehending law or plan,

as truly as this may be said of the planets; and this law resolves itself finally into the intelligence and will of Him, who is at once the beginning, the middle, and the end of all things. The intelligence and will of God are immanent in the process itself; so that it may be said truly to be a revelation of what he is in the world; just as we may say the same thing of the natural heavens, which declare his glory and show forth his presence in the most direct and real way. This is not Buddhism. History is not necessary to complete God himself; as nature is not necessary either for any such end. It is no process of self-evolution, by which he is to be regarded as coming to be actually what he is otherwise only potentially, the transition of the logi cal Nothing into the logical Something; God as pure being into God as the living universe. History is not an emanation of the Divine life, in any such sense as to be the necessary form of this life itself. God is complete without it, and lives with absolute fulness beyond it in the way of personal self-consciousness and freedom. He is the free cause even of his own being; and how much more then of all his works. But still in such free view, we have a right to speak of history as the actual presence notwithstanding of his life, as the very form in which he reveals himself so as to show forth in an actual way the sense of what this life contains. By being free, it does not cease still to be God's act, and in this view a process of real self-explication, by which he comes forth from the depths of eternity into the syllabled speech of time, and so makes himself known for the adoration of angels and men. We see no pantheism in this; but only the pure living theism of the Bible, in opposition to the dead mechanical abstractions of that dualistic deism, which converts the world into a grand watch, and sees in the Maker of it the clever artist only who has contrived and set in motion its wheels and springs.

"Following modern philosophy," Mr. Brownson says, "which teaches that God is real only in that he is creator, the Reviewer can assert that God lives, is living God, only by asserting that he lives in the life of the world, that is, as he explains it, 'in the thinking and willing of single minds.' His system seems to us to be based on the supposition, that God comes to reality only in the life of the universe, and that the universe, whether natural or supernatural, is simply the evolution or development, that is, realization, of the abstract potentialities or possibilities of the Divine nature. -Hence the significance and sacredness of history. It is God's realization of his own potentiality, in space and time, or his coming to reality."-P. 208. This, it

will be seen, is a wholly false view of what we have wished to say. It makes no distinction between a necessary emanation and a free act, and reduces to the conception of a physical process what we hold always to be the work of intelligence and will in their highest form. Even the necessity by which God himself exists, what is sometimes called his aseity, we hold to be a free necessity, and not a blind fate excluding thought and will; for this would shut us up to the everlasting impersonal substance of Spinoza. The being of God is his own eternal act, resting in nothing and conditioned by nothing beyond the free activity from which it springs. All his works of course are no less free. But for this very reason, on the other hand, they have no subsistence save by the immanent force of his all-producing will at every point. The world has its end no less than its beginning, its terminus ad quem full as much as its terminus a quo, in God only. It is not in this respect like a plan which an artist projects, and then carries into execution. Plan and execution fall here completely together. To suppose an outward reason or aim of any sort, in the Divine Mind, is in truth to subject his action to a foreign force, and so to overthrow the absolute aseity of his nature. The universe must be taken, from first to last; as wholly and only from himself. The law itself in this view is his work. True, it is eternal, and has its seat in the very nature of God; but it has its seat there, not out of any necessity by which his will may be supposed to be ruled from behind itself, but by the infinite activity of this will itself.

It may now appear in what sense, and in what sense only, we have ever dreamed of allowing man a will or voice in the constitution of the law by which he is required to be governed. "To assert man's authority, or right to be governed only by his own will," according to Mr. Brownson, "is to deny that he is under law, or bound at all to seek God as the Sovereign Good. Does the Reviewer maintain that we are not morally bound to seek God as our ultimate end? Does he deny all morality, and assert that man is free to live as he lists ?" Nothing of this sort, we reply; nothing of this sort whatever. All we mean to say is, that mind is not matter; that morality is not nature; that the law of freedom, to be different from the law of blind necessity, must come to its actualization in the world, not in the way of merely outward force under any view, but through the selfmoving spontaneity of its own subjects, the thinking and willing of the created minds in which it works and reigns. The planets obey a law which they have no power to accept or not accept; it is in them, but not from them or of them in any way;

and for this very reason their action is blind and unfree. So throughout Nature, as such. Its very character is to be without autonomy in its own order of existence. The Moral, on the contrary, as distinguished from the Natural, is self-conscious, self-active, in a certain sense we may say even self-productive, and in such form truly free. It is not made, except as it at the same time makes itself. It is not moved, save as it originates its own motion. It stands, like all created existence, in the power of law; but the law here is not from abroad simply, as in the case of mere nature, not objective and outward only, but inward also and subjective; it is brought to pass, comes to its actualization in the world, only in the form of being apprehended and willed by its subjects. On the outside of such self-conscious life it can have no being in the world whatever. Turn it in any way into mere blind force, simple outward compulsion, and all proper morality is at an end. The necessary medium of its revelation, the very element in which it exists and makes itself felt, is the self-moving activity of the life it is formed to bind; which at the same time has full power to be untrue to itself by refusing the authority of its proper law, and which can be rightly bound by this in the end only as it receives the law freely into its own constitution, and so enacts it into force for its own use. Mind thus, by its very constitution, is required to be autonomic, self-legislative, a true fountain and source of law for itself; while the law notwithstanding has its ultimate ground only in God, and can be of no force whatever as the product merely of any lower intelligence. Objective and subjective here must fall absolutely together. The will without the law is false; denies its own proper nature; falls over to the sphere of bondage and sin. But the law, on the other hand, without the will, has no power either to accomplish its proper work. Only as the law, previously necessary by Divine constitution, is willed, freely embraced, affirmed and constituted, by the created intelligence it is ordained to rule, so as to be at the same time the product of this, its own act virtually and deed, can there be any true escape from the idea of slavery, any true entrance into the sphere of freedom, any morality or religion in the full and right sense of these terms. It is this union of law and will, necessity and liberty, not outwardly but inwardly, which brings the life of man emphatically to its proper form. This is what we mean by the autonomy of the human subject, the right of man to be governed by his own will and not simply by a heteronomic force acting upon him from beyond his will, the voice that belongs to him properly in the constitution of the law which he is called to obey.