sin, and feel that they had no reason to condemn their own hearts and frames of mind, without adding the qualifying admission that in ordinary circumstances such elevated communion with God and consecration of soul does not remain unbroken for days, and certainly not for weeks at a time, without the occurrence of some deviation from the straight course, that makes the tears run down. There is almost an appearance of egotism, moreover, in the author's style, from the very frequent use of the first personal pronoun; but we believe this to be more a mere mannerism than any indication of a heart defect. And the fact is, that where God has given a man great mental ability, we may generally expect a certain amount of consciousness of power along with it, and without which, indeed, it would not be made manifest to the world. As to the doctrine of the baptism of the Holy Ghost sealing the believer, and anointing him with a heavenly unction, it is, without doubt, one of the most important peculiarities of the venerable author's system. We can only say for ourselves, that we wish that we knew more fully, by a rich personal experience, what it means; and we cannot imagine how any man with any pretensions to spirituality of mind, could rise from the perusal of this book without hungering and thirsting after a more abundant measure of that divine influence which seems to have made the author and his brethren so signally useful in the work of God.

President Finney was honoured to do not a little good, also, in Great Britain, on the occasion of both his visits. His labours in Scotland were not so very successful; but in Dr. Campbell's Tabernacle, in London, in 1851, and in the town of Bolton, in Lancashire, in the early months of 1860, he accomplished really important results. After he had preached a series of searching sermons, night after night, for about three weeks in London, he had a desire to call a meeting of inquirers after salvation, in a room adjoining the Tabernacle, the British School-room, which would contain from 1,500 to 1,600 individuals. Dr. Campbell at first objected to the measure, because he thought it would be a failure. But Mr. Finney had had experience enough as a spiritual physician to be able to tell the state of the pulse of a religious meeting. The large room was crammed with bond fide anxious inquirers; and when the earnest evangelist invited them to kneel down at the mercy seat as imploring penitents, the entire congregation literally fell down before the Lord. In Bolton, again, the whole town was moved. As had happened in Rochester and other places in America, the good effects of the revival were felt in an empty lock-up and sparsely occupied prison; while thousands of

pounds were given back which had been stolen by those on whom Mr. Finney actually imposed restitution as a test of sincere repentance.

There is, indeed, one blemish in the book; at least for us of the Evangelical Union. We have hesitated about referring to it; but it is best to let the full truth be known. In his account of his visit to this country in 1859-60, Mr. Finney, after giving a narrative of his series of meetings at Edinburgh, in the church of the Rev. Professor Kirk, and at Aberdeen, in the church of the Rev. Fergus Ferguson, senior, makes the following reference to ourselves, and the Evangelical Union in general:

"While I was with Mr. Ferguson at Aberdeen, I was urged by his son, who was settled over one of the E.U. churches in Glasgow, to labour with him for a season. This had been urged upon me before I left Edinburgh. But I was unwilling to continue my labours longer with that denomination. Not that they were not good men, and earnest workers for God; but their controversies had brought them into such relations to the surrounding churches, as to shut me out from all sympathy and co-operation, except with those of their peculiar views. I had been accustomed, in this country, to labour freely with Presbyterians and Congregationalists; and I desired greatly to get a hearing among the Presbyterians and Congregationalists of Scotland. But in labouring with the E.U. churches, I found myself in a false position. What had been said in the Christian News, and the fact that I was labouring in that denomination, led to the inference that I agreed with them in their peculiar views, while in fact I did not.

"I thought it not my duty to continue any longer in this false position. I declined, therefore to go to Glasgow. Although I regarded the brother who invited me as one of the best of men, and his church as a godly, praying people; yet there were other godly, praying people in Glasgow, and a great many more of them than could be found in the E.U. church. I felt uneasy, as being in a position to misrepresent myself. Although I had the strongest affection for those brethren, so far as I became acquainted with them; yet I felt that, in confining my labours to that denomination I was greatly restricting my own usefulness. We therefore left Aberdeen and went by rail to Bolton, where we arrived on Christmas Eve, 1859."

At page 456 he mentions the points as to which he differed from us:

"Their view of faith, as a mere intellectual state, I could not receive. They explained away, in a manner to me utterly unintelligible, the doctrine of election; and on sundry points I found I did not agree with them.”

The venerable author might perhaps have spared us this somewhat slighting notice. The fact is, that in this highly Calvinistic country there was so much opposition to himself on account of his well known deviations from soi disant orthodoxy, that we do not believe that he could have got a hearing at all, except under the wing of the Evangelical Union. As to our intellectual view of faith, we believe that the great

majority of the world's theologians agree with us. As to our view of election, it is just the ordinary view which anti-Calvinists or Arminians maintain. We are surprised to find that Mr. Finney held any other; for, if he did uphold unconditional election, even in a modified form, he, without doubt, in so far stultified the entire theological testimony which he felt called upon to make to the religious world. We could quote a score of beautiful passages from this volume, in which the earnest author gives us a confession of his faith; for after the account of his labours in any place, he generally tells us the doctrines which he preached, and which were thus signally owned of God, so that there is quite an abundance of doctrinal declaration in the book. Now, in all these epitomes of belief, there is a most remarkable resemblance between the Oberlin deliverances and the Kilmarnock deliverances apparent, with the single exception of that little point about the nature of faith-even to the extent of warning the inquirer against prayer, lest it should lead him past the cross-one of the eight indictments, our readers will remember, charged upon James Morison in 1841. Since reading the foregoing paragraph, we have perused again the chapter on Election in President Finney's Systematic Theology, and we must confess that we had a great difficulty in making out what his opinion on the matter really was. In some passages he speaks as an Arminian, and in others as a Calvinist; but we are certain that, in so far as he was the latter (if he really was so), he was very inconsistent with himself.

One point we are willing to concede to the venerable author, now no more-namely, that we of the Evangelical Union have been compelled to contend for thirty years and more against what he calls "a terrible wall of prejudice." Indeed, it is wonderful that we are in existence at all. It is much to our credit, we think, that we have braved and breasted that difficulty from which Mr. Finney ran away. Of course, we required to bear it or die; whereas he was under no such necessity. Therefore, it was perhaps better for him not to come to Glasgow, but to go to Bolton, where all the dissenters in the town worked with him, and where he had great success. We heard a Congregational minister say, the other day, that he had heard Finney at the time, both in London and Scotland, and he was quite sorry to see him preaching only to a hundred or two in the north, while thousands had hung upon his lips in the south.

For ourselves, we believe that better days are in store for us. The movements in the U.P. Church, of which we speak elsewhere, must tell ultimately in our favour in the land; and it

is assuredly a significant fact that the Congregational Union of Scotland, the other day, appointed the Rev. David Russell of Glasgow, one of their most experienced and respected ministers, to represent them at the next Annual Conference of the Evangelical Union. So that the wall of which the President speaks shows signs of crumbling. But we gladly return from this unwelcome topic to bring our eulogistic notice to a close.

While Mr. Finney was labouring in Birmingham, in 1851, with Rev. Mr. Roe, a Baptist minister in that town, the renowned John Angell James was at first shy about him, as many people had warned him against what they conceived to be the American revivalist's erroneous doctrine. But Mr. James adopted a very good plan of action in the case. He called in the aid of the learned and judicious Dr. Redford of Worcester; and the two venerable men attended the meetings night after night, both in the chapel and in the inquiry room. The result was that their suspicions were completely removed, in proof of which it may be mentioned that Dr. Redford soon after wrote a most laudatory preface for the British edition of Mr. Finney's Systematic Theology that was issued by William Tegg & Co., Cheapside, London, and as to which he said that it was just the sort of book for which, when he was a young man, he would willingly have given away the one half of the books of his library. He also remarked that the very fact that Mr. Finney had studied theology at none of the schools, and was largely a self-taught man, taken into connection with his naturally great logical powers, made his work on Systematic Theology altogether unique, and, in some respects, altogether unrivalled.

The blessed impression, in fine, which the perusal of this volume is calculated to produce upon the minds of ministers of the Gospel is this, that if they only keep near to God in spirit, and pray and wrestle for the conversion of souls, there are almost no bounds to be set to the amount of usefulness which they may reach in the service of their adorable Master and Redeemer.

"His last day on earth was a quiet Sabbath, which he enjoyed in the midst of his family, walking out with his wife at sunset, to listen to the music, at the opening of the evening service in the church near by. Upon retiring he was seized with pains, which seemed to indicate some affection of the heart; and after a few hours of suffering, as the morning dawned, he died, August 16th, 1875, lacking two weeks of having completed his eighty-third year."-From conclusion of Finney's" Autobiography,” by a Member of his Family.

289

SIR WILLIAM HAMILTON'S PHILOSOPHY OF THE CONDITIONED.

It would be a somewhat invidious, though not an uninteresting task, to attempt to catalogue the various misrepresentations, graver as well as more venial, to which the "Philosophy of the Conditioned" has, in recent times, been successively subjected. Not unfrequently have its essential meaning and aim been almost reversed. It is perfectly legitimate, it must be at once conceded, to test any doctrine by even its remotest logical results; yet that doctrine should, in the first instance at least, be examined from the standpoint of its author, so that its real meaning, as apprehended by him, may be correctly ascertained. Many terms, indeed, may possibly be found appropriated to a very partial or unusual meaning, the propriety of which may be fairly questioned; still it must be evident that the validity of the inferences drawn from the data furnished, must be tested from the position occupied by the writer in constructing his system.

One fruitful source of confusion and misapprehension to many critics, is the failure on their part to keep steadily before them the important distinction, on which Sir W. Hamilton so emphatically insists, that the forms or laws of human thought are not to be identified with the laws or forms of outward existence. The alleged impotences of human thought, or the contradictions said to be involved in certain assumed forms of conception, are not, therefore, to be held to apply relentlessly to corresponding existence outside the sphere of thought. What is thus found impossible to human thought-what human thought, in other words, cannot compass-may not thereby be impossible in existence. We may be unable to realize the possibility of this existence; but this is merely the impotence of our own thought, and does not determine the impossibility of existence outside thought. Now, the neglect of this essential distinction appears to pervade and fatally vitiate the entire arguments and reasonings of Dr. Hodge on this subject. It may seem presumptuous thus to depreciate the writings of a man so distinguished, in many respects, as Dr. Hodge is held to be; yet this consideration alone prevents one speaking of his treatment of the subject with the severity it deserves.

Starting from the alleged limitations involved in the human conception of personality, Dr. Hodge reasons that, if the representations given of these be admitted, they involve the inadmissible consequence that the divine personality-even his very existence-is thereby virtually pronounced impossible.

No. 12.