an earnest and arousing tenderness of appeal palpitates throughout the discourse:

"O, my brethren, God loves us too well to leave us to the seduction of such a multitude of delights as we have mentioned !-'According to Thy fear, so is Thy wrath.' Of every other evil the fear is worse than the reality; apprehension mystifies and magnifies the object; but in this case, fear never adequately conceived of the extent of the loss. Imagination can picture nothing so dreadful as the reality of that which is imported in these words."

McAllum's loving and reverential appreciation of the character and ministry of his colleague is too characteristic to be omitted in the estimate of his own character. testifies of Stoner:

He

"He thought of no abatement from the sterling weights of the sanctuary. With all his heart, soul, mind and strength he aimed at usefulness, and especially at awakening, quickening and informing the conscience. . . The sword he wielded was of keen edge from the hilt to the point... After describing the displeasure of God in any one of its frowns, he would pray, 'The Lord save us from the wrath to come.' The hearer was never allowed to think of the preacher or the composition; all his thoughts and concern were forced in upon himself. . . Appeal following appeal lightened upon the conscience, revealing at once the darkness and the light, . . . bolt succeeded bolt.... Spiritual profit, the utmost profit, and present profit, was the thing aimed at. Thé.. vehement thirst of his soul was to do good. The zeal of the Lord ate him up; it was a fire in his bones; it was a torrent on his lips. His zeal was a stream whose strength is not in its current merely, but in its volume of water."

No wonder that the ministry of such men as these told visibly on the population of the stately cathedral city; and helped to make Methodism the power that it has long been in York. John Slack too was a man of mark,* not unworthy to superintend two such colleagues. Dr. McAllum states: "A multitude, both of men and women believed; a great proportion of whom continued to hold fast their confidence. At least four hundred persons were added unto the Lord." A close friendship sprung up between the two young ministers : one of Stoner's last letters was to his late colleague McAllum. The latter was in all the more request, for missionary anniversaries especially, as unlike the former, he was powerful on the platform as well as in the pulpit. His residence in York rendered him accessible to the great manufacturing centres; and round about to Manchester and Nottingham, McAllum was the man for great missionary festivals. In May, 1825, he was chosen as the preacher of the opening Missionary Sermon at City Road Chapel, his associates being Adam Clarke, at Great Queen Street, and Robert Newton, at Hinde Street.

*Father of the late modest and cultivated Mr. Slack of the Book-Room and the late Edward Slack, Esq., the eminent solicitor of Bath, who died suddenly in the year of his mayoralty.

MR. POPE, in his noble work on the "Person of Christ," justly and forcibly remarks that Theology "requires that allowance be made for

the essential inadequacy of the most carefully pondered formulas

a liberal and candid interpretation." (P. 4.) Assuredly, this is

most reasonable.

And the claim on liberality and candour of interpretation which those whose duty it is to weigh theological terms are bound to concede, they are both obliged and entitled to present, on behalf of their own frank and honest investigations. But there is also another virtue which it behoves theological writers and their reviewers alike to cultivate, namely, caution. The theologian is under special obligation to weigh and measure his terms, and see whether they fit the revealed facts which they are employed to indicate. And in a scarcely less degree, all openminded Christian thinkers are bound to look narrowly at a theological phrase, and to test its genuineness, before they allow it currency.

When is it incumbent on the Christian thought of an age, country or Church to demur to a new theological term ?

1. If the term be not used in its ordinary, obvious, Dictionary sense, and yet its conventional, arbitrary, technical sense be not clearly defined. 2. If it prove, on examination of its context, to represent a theory not reconcileable with Holy Writ.

3. If its advocates in defending or partially explaining it, be obliged to rest their theory on unsubstantial, or unsubstantiated, grounds, whether metaphysical, physiological or phy

sical.

4. If its advocates are obliged to concede in equivalent words what they deny in the particular term, and vice versa, to surrender what they affirm.

5. If it supply a convenient cover for heresy, being more apt for various forms of misbelief than for the truth.

6. If the term, with all its vagueness, pronounce on a mysterious subject with a precision which Scripture does not warrant.

On all these grounds we most deferentially request the acute and scholarly champions of orthodoxy who have adopted the term "impersonality of the human nature of Christ," to give it a candid and careful reconsideration. We are thankful to find that neither the questionable term nor the questionable theory occurs in the section on the Person of Christ in Mr. Pope's great work recently issued, bearing the modest title, "A Compendium of Christian. Theology," a work which will mark an era in Wesleyan theological literature, and that proportionate prominence and due significance are given to passages of Scripture which in our humble judgment, had scarcely their full share of consideration in his admirable Lecture.* Our strictures therefore, refer almost exclusively to other writers.

I. The term impersonality, when applied to the human nature of our Blessed Lord, is said to be not used in its ordinary, obvious sense, yet its conventional, technical, arbitrary sense is not clearly defined. The first thing a man of science does, in introducing a scientific term, is to strictly define it, and this all the more carefully if a technical signification be given to a word in common use. It might seem superfluous and irrelevant to allude to the ordinary signification of the word impersonal, since its advocates seem to solicit for it" a certain tolerance." (Pope. P. 4.) But, seeing that they must have had some reason for preferring this word to any other, as the term which, on the whole, came nearest to their meaning, it seems necessary to advert to the usual and untechnical signification of the word. That is clear enough. Its theological usage is obvious. When

* See this Magazine, for November, 1871. P. 527.

orthodox divines condemn the dogma of "the impersonality of the Holy Ghost," every one knows that the heresy aimed at is the reducing the Third Person in the Trinity to a mere influence. When Christian writers denounce the Pantheistic error of an impersonal God, we are all aware that the falsehood rebuked is that which robs the Supreme of His own free will, changing the glory of the all-loving Creator into a mere conception of the human brain-the self-consciousness of a mechanically moving universe. Certainly the theological antecedents and associations of the term do not favour its unchallenged admission to the deepest and holiest mysteries of our religion.

When Schaff says "The impersonality of Christ's human nature, however, is not to be taken absolutely, but relatively," ("History of the Christian Church." Vol. i. P. 757,) we could accord the term "a certain tolerance," if never used without the guarding epithets, "not absolute, but relative," as being capable of a construction not inconsistent with the truth. But when he adds "It cannot be said that the Logos assumed a human person, or united Himself with a definite, human individual," then we become aware that, after all, Schaff does employ the word in its ordinary sense, and that his qualifying adjectives, "not absolute, but relative," serve no purpose but to blind himself and his inadvertent readers to the unscripturalness of his dogma. We say Schaff thus employs it; for one grave inconvenience of the introduction of a term not accurately defined is, that two, or even twenty, men may use the self-same word, as the evellope of two, or of twenty, divergent doctrines. But Schaff does Theology the good service of placing the dogma before us in clear

definite outline: "It cannot be said that the Logos . . . united Himself with a definite, human individual." Here the issue is perfectly plain. In our humble judgment, the statements of the New Testament refuse to bear any such construction; no human ingenuity is capable of fastening it upon them.

II. Let us confront this dogma with those statements. First, Had our Blessed Lord a definite, individual human body, as definite and individual as that of any of His progenitors, Adam, Abraham, David or Heli? or did He take upon Him human corporeity, instead of a"definite, individual human" body? When Christ said "A body hast Thou prepared Me," did He mean an indefinite, unindividual body-idea? Nay, verily; the Babe that was born in Bethlehem was no babe-idea, any more than the manger in which they laid Him was a manger-idea. That the historical Christ, the Christ of the Gospel, had a definite, individual human body, no one can deny and retain his orthodoxy. Was not the denial of this the error of the Docete? And what warrant can we find in Scripture or in common sense for supposing that the human soul of our Blessed Lord was not as definite, individual” a human soul as His body was a definite and individual human body? Does not growth imply limitation? does not limitation define and individualize? As the body of Jesus "increased in stature," His mind increased in "wisdom." What can give definiteness, individuality, to human soul-nature, if a definite, individual will do not? Yet no orthodox advocate of the term "impersonality of the human nature," denies to our Lord a definite, individual human will. That was the heresy of the Monothelites. If then a definite, individual human body, a

66

definite, individual human mind, a definite, individual human will, be conceded to Christ, to what part of His nature does His human impersonality attach ? Is it that of which he spoke when he said "My soul is exceeding sorrowful; "Father, into Thy hands I commend My Spirit"?

were

If the human nature of our Lord unindividualized, human nature in the abstract, what need for His assuming it in the manner in which it was assumed,-by birth and descent, and not by direct creation or by direct assumption, if there exist anywhere, as the phrase seems to imply, in the universe some inappropriated fund of abstract, generic, human nature? When the Spirit, in the Epistle to the Hebrews, says "He took not on Him the nature of Angels," the antithesis is not, "but He took on Him the " nature of man- "but He took on Him the seed of Abraham." If that do not imply a definite, individual, differentiated human subsistence, what can it imply at all? Mr. Pope gives beautiful, though strong and rather transcendental utterance to a most precious truth, when unfolding "the significance of the term-Son of Man" he writes, "Not the son of a man, but the son of mankind, the ideal, the realised, the new, the representative, the perfect man." (Second Edition. P. 123.) This language will very well bear a sound, scriptural sense. "Unto us a child is born." Christ is the grand redeeming Kinsman, redeeming outbirth, of our race; the Heir-apparent of all human sorrow; the Chief Mourner over our dead hopes which He came to summon from the grave; the Model Man in Whom our nature realises all its highest possibilities, and reaches its supremest royalty. But this blessed truth, so far from being favourable, is fatal, to the

notion of an indefinite, unindividual merely ideal human nature in Christ. Though, in one historical and Scriptural sense, He was not the son of a man," yet in another, equal true and equally significant, He was "the son of David, the son of

Abraham." He had a human mother and human grandfathers. He was the veritable son of Mary, the veritable grandson of Heli or of Mattan. He was not "the son of mankind" in the sense of a universal, indefinite or ideal affiliation. If so, how superfluous, irrelevant, misleading, is the first verse of the first Gospel! Why does the Good News begin by so carefully recording His human descent? "The book of the generation of Jesus Christ, the son of David, the son of Abraham." Why is His extraction traced so minutely through all its definite, individual human links, if the nature He derived through a long line of definite individuals, was to be "not definite or individual "? True, "His relation to human nature is universal" (Ibid.); but it was none the less particular. It is not universal in any sense which would cancel the consanguinity of " James the Lord's brother," or compel a negative answer to the questions of his fellow-townsmen, "Is not His mother called Mary? and His brethren, James, and Joses, and Simon, and Judas? and His sisters are they not all with us ?"

human nature without personality. We make personality itself consist in intelligence and free-will, so that without it the nature sinks to a mere abstraction of powers, qualities and functions." Well, until we be prepared to adopt the Platonic doctrine of Ideas, or the scholastic doctrine of the Realists, we shall hold on in this "

our modern way of thinking," that without "intelligence and freewill," human nature cannot be conceived as complete; and that where "intelligence and free-will" exist, "personality" cannot be absent. A great many thinkers will find "very great metaphysical difficulty" in accepting the theory of the impersonality of the human nature of Christ, when it turns out to involve the acceptance of Medieval Realism or Greek Idealism. But the "psychological difficulty" and the physiological difficulty are, if possible, greater still. Even Mr. Pope seems to us to venture on very unsafe physiological territory, when he says: "The Son of God unites Himself with this new Man before any distinct personality could be predicated of it." (Second Edition. P. 139.) We are constrained to ask, When was that? and where? This statement implies that personality would have been inevitable to the human nature of Christ, had it not been forestalled by the effecting of the union at some stage in the mysterious genesis of a human being, when a man "exists, without personality. Here the boundary line of theology is crossed, the territories of psychology and physiology are invaded, and beyond these, operations are pushed into the vast terra incognita of speculation and hypothesis. Here we plunge at once into the unexplored mystery of origines. So far as Science has been able to advance in this direction, all the data yet

66 new

inference on those data, forbid the supposition that a new human subsistence, at any period of its being, either embryonic or pre-embryonic, waits for, or works towards, anything that goes to constitute its individuality. On the contrary, facts and inductions on facts alike go to show that it receives along with its existence every essential constituent of its nature. The discoveries and inductions of physical science are confirmations of, and comments on, the physiological assumptions of Scripture, which make personality— the I-begin with the very first beginning of individual being, e.g., Ps. li. 5 cxxxix. 15, 16; Job x. 9—11. It will be hard to hold fast the revealed fact of universally transmitted human depravity; impossible to account for those palpable moral phenomena of which those revealed facts afford the only solution; hard to justify the confession of David, "Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me," if it be maintained that human personality is not a direct derivative of human parentage.

There is a very curious passage highly illustrative of this point, in the only old classic English Divine, so far as we know, who ever propounded a theory closely cognate with that which is now indicated by the term "impersonality of the Human Nature; a passage not quoted by Mr. Pope, yet coming immeasurably nearer to the vague notions now crystallized into the word impersonality than his extracts from Drs. Owen and Jackson :

"The Word,' saith St. John, 'was made flesh, and dwelt in us.' The Evangelist useth the plural number, men for manhood, as for the nature whereof we consist, even as the Apostle denying the assumption of angelical nature, saith likewise in the plural number, ' He took not Angels, but the seed of Abraham.' It