actions to the immediate efficient agency of God. But, falling back upon the optimistic principle, they held that since God was bound to produce the best possible system, and is a most powerful and excellent being, we are shut up to the conclusion that the present system is the best; and, sin being found in this system, it is inferred that sin is an incident of the best system, and necessary to it. Sin, therefore, thus viewed, upon the whole, is not an evil, but a good; and hence it is consistent with God's character to produce it. It is only an evil, in that the sinner is not actuated by any such apprehension as this, but by selfish and malevolent feelings. Retaining the old forms of speech, these writers utterly rejected the old doctrines of original sin and justification.

So stood the "orthodox" theology of New England at the rise of the school of New Haven. And it is a significant fact, that the first public announcement of the inauguration of a new school of theology, by the professors in that institution, addressed a challenge to the optimists of the prevailing school to justify themselves in assuming that God could prevent all sin in a moral system.* Thus did the revolting fatalism which was involved in Edwards' theory of causation induce a recoil to the opposite extreme, in the assertion of Pelagian free will. The divines of New Haven found, in the very heart of Edwards' system, some of the fundamental and most fruitful features of the doctrine of Pelagius-that Adam was not the cause of his posterity;-that, of consequence, they were not really, in him, in the covenant;-that his sin is not theirs, nor its punishment visited on them ;-that depravity is not derived from Adam to his posterity;-and that sin consists in exercise or action. Accepting these as unquestionable principles, and recoiling, with just abhorrence, from the idea that God is the author of men's sins, they adopted the other alternative deducible from the premises, and concluded that men are created without moral character, and that their depravity is the result of example and circumstances. Boldly repudiating the system of constituted relations and fictitious intendments, by which the Hopkinsians had maintained a semblance of orthodoxy, they utterly denied any federal union between us and Adam, or any vicarious relation of Christ to his people. Every man comes into the world in the same moral and legal attitude as did Adam. Each one sins and falls by his own free will. Christ died, not as a legal substitute for us,-a vicarious satisfaction for our sins,-but as an exhibition of the love of God to sinners, and a display of the evil of sin; so that God may, consistently with the welfare of the universe, forgive sin. The sinner is pardoned, not justified ;-sin is forgiven, not taken away ;—and justice is waived, not satisfied. Again, supposing man's free will competent to sin in spite of God, it follows that the same power can cease to

Taylor's Concio ad Clerum, 1828, p. 29.

sin, independent of the Spirit of God. Regeneration is therefore the effect of moral suasion calling into exercise the unaided powers of man's own will.

There are probably few who would now be willing to adopt, in its abstract form, the theory of identity which is fundamental to the system of Edwards. But by many it is accepted in its application to the doctrine of original sin,-the very case for which it was invented. By them it is maintained that we are not, in any real sense, one with Adam; but, by a positive constitution, God has so ordered it that we are regarded and treated as one.* And yet, with all, we are no more intrinsically one with him, nor chargeable with his crime, than we were before. We are only held liable to undergo punishment on account of it. That punishment consists in the privation of original righteousness, and the consequent depravation of the soul. How much more this view harmonizes with that of Abelard and the schoolmen than with the Reformed confessions a glance will demonstrate. How foreign to the latter, is manifest. In those confessions, from the first to the last, we search in vain for a trace of the positive constitution here imagined, or a hint that the depravity of the race came upon it as the punishment of a foreign sin. On the contrary, they are unanimous in the testimony that not Adam but man sinned in the act of disobedience, and, by the effects of the sin, was depraved; that the race, generically, apostatized from holiness, and embraced depravity, in the person of Adam. In particular, the Westminster Confession, written when the Placæan controversy induced special care on these very points, knows nothing of the constructive system; but bases all its positions on our seminal inbeing in Adam; and, discriminating carefully between the criminal and the penal elements of Adam's sin, includes in the former the want of original righteousness and the corruption of nature; and charges the whole immediately upon us as elements of the sinfulness of that estate into which we fell by sinning in Adam; whilst all this is excluded from any place in the penal element,-the miseries incurred.

We venerate the memory of Edwards; and esteem and love many of the disciples of his theology. But the history of a century confirms the conviction resulting from a priori considerations, that the principles of his system are irreconcilably hostile to the doctrines of grace which he loved; and must operate, as heretofore, so always, to corrupt and destroy them.

"What exists at this moment. is a new effect, and, simply and absolutely considered, not the same with any past effect. . . . And there is no identity or oneness, in the case, but what depends on the arbitrary constitution of the Creator; who, by his wise sovereign establishment, so unites these successive new effects that he treats them as one, by communicating to them like properties, relations and circumstances; and so leads us to regard and treat them as one."-Edwards on Original Sin, Part iv. ch. 2.

THE

ELOHIM REVEALED.

1. God the Triune was the Creator.

CHAPTER I.

THE TRIUNE CREATOR.

"IN the beginning God created the heaven and the earth." With this announcement the Spirit of God commences the sacred volume. He is about to put upon permanent record a revelation, intended to answer all those questions which spontaneously spring, in the depths of the human soul, concerning our highest and eternal interests,-a revelation respecting the nature of God, the cause and the remedy of our ruinous estate, the purpose for which life is given, the immortality of man, and the alternative states of eternity,— themes which have perplexed and bewildered philosophers and sages in every age. The first line of the first page of this blessed book announces Him, whose nature and whose works are the theme of the whole. It unveils in sudden light a glorious One, whose lustre increases through every page; like a morning sun, growing continually in radiant majesty, pouring abroad a flood of unapproachable glory, alone in a starless firmament. When the student of the sacred volume reads, in that first line, the sublime announcement,—"In the beginning, GOD,”—he, at one bound, ascends a height as far above that lofty Olympus where fabled Jove sat enthroned, as the heavens are higher than the earth. Thus, taught the alone eternity of God, the Creator, and the temporary origin of all things else, visible and invisible, he has already gained a sublimity of science, which all the wisdom

and research of classic philosophy never attained. Gazing abroad from this mountain pinnacle, on the one hand is nothing but the eternity of God; on the other is the creation, just launching forth upon cycles, each one of which is the unfolding of a new chapter, in the revelation of the high and lofty One who inhabits that eternity. Before we attempt to trace the operations of his hand, in the works of creation and the scheme of providence, we will briefly and reverently glance at some things, which are made known to us in the Scriptures, in respect to the nature and purposes of the Creator.

The first point here claiming our notice is, that it is not merely God, but the Triune God, who is announced as the maker of all things. We do not design to enter at large into the argument, in proof of the fact that the name, Elohim, being plural in its form, is a distinct intimation of the plurality which subsists in the unity of the divine essence. Not only does the name itself— commonly, as in this place, used in the plural number, though with a verb in the singular-point to that fundamental fact in the nature of Him whom the creation was designed to proclaim, but, in the 26th verse, we are informed of a conference of the Elohim, in which it is said, "Let us make man, in our image, after our likeness;" and again, when man had fallen, "the Lord God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us."—Gen. iii. 22. In the book of Ecclesiastes, the preacher admonishes the young, "Remember now (7) thy Creators."-Eccl. xii. 1. Says Elihu, "None saith, Where is (y) God my Makers ?"-Job xxxv. 10,-thus using the name of God in the singular, whilst the appellative, "Makers," is in the plural. The Psalmist writes, -"Let Israel rejoice (ya) in his Makers,"-Ps. cxlix. 2; and Isaiah assures his people "(TT) Thy Makers are thy husbands, the Lord of hosts is (in) his name."-Isa. liv. 5.

Not only does the name of the Creator itself announce the work as the production of the Sacred Three, but in the progress of the narrative we have distinct intimation of the presence and several agency of the Three Persons of the Godhead. The first chapter, and down to the fourth verse of the second, is a rapid and comprehensive sketch of the whole work of creation, prefatory to the

more particular account of the creation of man, which occupies the remainder of the second chapter. Throughout the first part of the narrative thus divided, the work is, by the name, Elohim, referred to God the Father; that name being in the Scriptures almost exclusively applied to the First Person, as the representative of the Godhead. From the fourth verse of the second chapter, the title is changed; and in the particular narrative there begun it is Jehovah Elohim-the Lord God-who is represented as the actor. By this name is designated that glorious Jehovah Christ, "by whom God made the worlds"-Heb. i. 2. That he was meant by the name, Lord God, is demonstrable. On this point we will only pause to cite the testimony of the Son of God himself, in the last chapter of the book of Revelation, v. 6:-"The LORD GOD of the holy prophets sent his angel to show unto his servants the things which must shortly be done." v. 16:-"I JESUS have sent mine angel to testify unto you these things in the churches." Jesus, then, is the Lord God of the Old Testament writers. Here the reader will not fail to recall the account with which John commences his Gospel:-"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by him—John i. 1-3. In this connection the fact is very striking, that when, in the midst of that portion of the sacred record in which the title, Lord God, is constantly used, we come to the interview between the tempter and the woman, the style is changed. Satan, aiming to seduce the woman to a forgetfulness of the ever-present God, ignores that Lord God who was, alike, the creative Mediator to innocent man; as he is the atoning Mediator to man fallen. Thus, putting God afar off, he asks, "Hath God said?" The woman falls into the snare, and replies, "God hath said." But it was not Elohim, God, but the Lord God, who alike gave the command and called the pair to account for disobedience. (Gen. ii. 16, iii. 9.)

Nor are we without evidence of the of the Third Person of the Godhead.

presence and operation

Not only is his agency

announced in the second verse of Moses' narrative,-"the