merely the accessory circumstances that afford scope and verge for the working out of this primary relation. The answer to this question will diverge into two very distinguishable branches: I. What reason may gather from intuition and experience, without revelation. II. What more reason may learn from revelation, beyond what intuition and experience disclose. The former is the answer of philosophy; the two combined are the answer of theology to this fundamental question. Theology is that higher philosophy which entertains the facts of revelation, as well as those of observation, and by the principles of intuition combines them into a systematic unity.

3. I. Reason may gather from intuition and experience, without revelation, the following three facts: I am guilty; God is holy; and therefore I am doomed to die. These three propositions we may reduce to a unity by putting them into the form of a syllogism: I am guilty; the guilty are doomed by the God of holiness to die; and therefore I am doomed to die. It is here asserted that reason may go thus far, to intimate, on the one hand, that these steps are possible, and, on the other, that no more are possible for unaided human reason. Many, no doubt, fall short of these three conclusions, from want of thought or want of will; but all who have a sound mind are capable of arriving at these elementary principles of truth. Many will be disposed to demur against both sides of this intimation - some holding that it is not possible for reason to go so far, and others insisting that it can proceed further, than the limit here proposed. This divergence of opinion, however, is a presumption in favor of the limit so fixed, as it holds the position of a mean between two extremes. The further examination of these propositions will tend more and more to turn this presumption into a demonstration.

4. The minor premise is, I am guilty. It implies that I am a moral being. This follows both from experience and intuition. I find myself thinking, willing, acting, as a moral being. I apprehend and acknowledge moral obligation. I

detect and make account of moral motives in myself and others. I am familiar with the ideas of merit and demerit, of right and duty. Such is my experience. Moreover, 1 am a rational being. Reason, by its very nature, judges of the morality of actions, and assents to the fundamental principles of ethics. The axioms of ethics are as obvious to reason as those of mathematics. They are self-evident, because they receive the assent of the mind without any process of argumentation. They may need explanation, so as to make them patent to the understanding. But as soon as they are understood, they are accepted. So the axioms of mathematics may demand elucidation; but as soon as the mind clearly understands their meaning, they are admitted to be true. There is, indeed, an accidental difference in the way in which men may view mathematical and ethical axioms. The former are contemplated by the mind always in a state of cool indifference, unaffected by the bias of self-interest; and hence they meet with a prompt acquiescence. The latter are sometimes presented at a moment when they are felt to interfere with the aims of personal gratification, and this begets a reluctance to acknowledge their validity. To put the axioms of ethics on an equal footing with those of mathematics, therefore, it is necessary to exclude the element of self-interest; in which case it cannot be fairly denied that they are equally self-evident to the unbiased mind. Hence I perceive that my intuition entirely accords with my experience.

5. The presupposition that I have a moral nature being settled, I advance to the solemn affirmation that I am guilty. This is a matter of fact, and therefore can only be attested by experience. The history of man goes all the way to establish this fact. It is the history of war, of might overbearing right, of a struggle between the oppressed and the oppressor, in which the accident of preponderating power invariably determines, in the long run, which is the oppressor. It brings out the evidence, with more or less distinctness, that every man under the influence of some appetite gives way to a course of action or state of feeling which his own

conscience will, when the passion is over, pronounce to be wrong. We retreat, however, from the general to the individual. I find myself to be a microcosm-a little world within, corresponding to the wide world without. I stand by, and witness myself thinking, willing, acting. I am conscious of the secret dealings of my inmost heart. There is not a thought here that can be concealed from my knowledge. I am so made by the Author of my being that next to himself I know not only the outward appearance, but the inward workings, of my own heart. And I often condemn myself. I am not conscious of having sinned in all manner of ways, or against all manner of persons; but I know that I have sinned. I stand convicted at the bar of my own conscience. I am not aware that other men have sinned in the same way as I have done; but I am assured, from experience and from testimony, that other men have transgressed a law acknowledged by their own conscience, and I have no reason to suppose that there are any real exceptions to this general rule. Such being the case, my minor premise is a matter of fact, so far as I am concerned.

6. The next proposition is that God is holy. The holiness of God presupposes his existence. The existence of God is obvious to reason from experience and inference. The primeval intercourse of God with man, and the fall by which that intercourse was hindered, were matters of human experience, and have no doubt left their indelible trace in the memory of man. They do not belong to what is properly called revelation. quence of the fall.

The latter came in after and in conseHence we acknowledge that man in his aboriginal state had some direct knowledge of God by experience. But since the fall, apart from revelation, the existence of God is known to us chiefly by inference, that is, by a combination of experience and intuition, in which the steps of reasoning are sometimes so few that intuition is at a maximum and experience at a minimum. The old maxim that from nothing nothing comes, combined with the experience that I myself am, leads me up to God. For, since

something is, something must have been from all eternity. And this eternal something needs at most to be no more than a Being having power to originate all else that is, and, of consequence, myself and all other rational beings. But the Author of reason must be himself rational. And hence there must have been from all eternity a Spirit, whose attributes of power, wisdom, and goodness all nature concurs, and from the beginning has continued, to attest. This is the outline of an argument for the existence of God, which is capable of endless expansion and illustration, and in some of its aspects, when we dive into the depths of things, approaches very near the intuitive. The apostle Paul touches upon this great theme when he affirms that "the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and godlihood" (Rom. i. 20).

7. The holiness of God is a corollary from his reason and his power. Sin is not natural to reason. What is more, it is contrary to reason. It can have its rise only from the desire for that which one wants; and in its primary form it consists in appropriating, or having the disposition to appropriate, that which is not one's own, in defiance of the voice of conscience. Darker forms of malignity are only the habitual outgrowth of this germinating seed. But the infinite and eternal Spirit, who is not only rational, but omnipotent, cannot want anything, cannot behold anything, which is not his own, and therefore cannot be in the circumstances which constitute a temptation to sin; while, at the same time, his eternal sense of the right and the good constitutes in him the immutable essence of holiness.

8. The infinitely holy must condemn the guilty. This involves two propositions. He must disapprove of that which is wrong, and he must pronounce sentence of condemnation upon him that is guilty of sin. The former is a necessary consequence of the very nature of God. The essentially holy must abhor that which is unholy. This is a feeling common to all the holy. The latter is peculiar to God. It

involves the right and the obligation to judge. These belong, not to the creature, but intrinsically to the Creator, simply because he is the Creator, and therefore the only absolutely rightful Governor, who is bound by his very position to administer the law of equity. Having the legitimate authority, and being morally perfect, he must condemn. the guilty. And, reciprocally, every moral agent is responsible to his Maker for his conduct. He has not himself the liberty, even if he had the ability, to take the law into his own hand, and enforce compensation. His only course is to appeal to him who has both the power and the right, as well as the obligation, to vindicate the law.

9. The holy God must doom the guilty to death. In the first place, it is a matter of experience that all men die. And, as this event befalls the whole animal and vegetable kingdom, as well as man, if it had not been for sin it would have had no penal significance. It would, in fact, have been, not death in the sense which we now attach to it, but a change by which unfallen man would have passed into a higher stage of being, for which his spiritual nature when duly developed would have fitted him. But when we learn from experience that man has sinned, a gloomy foreboding of inevitable evil associates itself with our thoughts of that solemn change, and we begin to ask ourselves: What is death? Man is an intelligent and susceptible agent. He lives in a body- the organ by which he begins to know, feel, and act. Death, in the literal sense, is the separation of the soul and the body, a change from which nature instinctively shrinks. It involves the cessation of that large share of his discoveries, pleasures, and activities of which the body is the medium. These are all essentially related one to another, and culminate in the activities for the sake of the susceptibilities of his nature. Sin is the abuse of these activities. As the change of man's physical nature, if he had maintained his integrity, would no doubt have been an advance in dignity and happiness, we cannot but anticipate that in the event of his fall it must be a descent into