the Spirit of inspiration has put there; not to impart a meaning to the text which he thinks it ought to carry. When he opens his Greek Testament it is as a learner; when he writes out the results of his study it is that he may convey to others as clearly as possible what he himself has gathered. True enough, the state of mind and heart which makes him an evangelical Christian does not a little to invest the record with an aspect quite unlike that which it presents to the mental eye of a Tubingen critic; but, satisfied that there is a divine tone in this word of Scripture, he puts himself in the attitude of a reverent listener and a most conscientious interpreter,―appreciating at once both the sanctities and privileges of the office. He is both broad-minded and critical, rising with a ready power to the mastery of the general course of thought, and descend ing to the minutest details of expression with patient and careful search. The best results of his study appear in this exposition of the Epistle to the Hebrews. What he states in his preface would have been readily inferred, that "this volume is the fruit of long-continued study of the Epistle in the original, to which study the various helps of biblical literature have been subservient." His comprehension of the general and special aims of the document seems to lack nothing. His analysis of its contents and course of argument, found in his Introduction, is every way admirable, and goes a long way in expounding the Epistle by the rare force of the simple statement. The Notes are sufficiently full to satisfy almost any inquirer, and while they bring out the fruit of much scholarship and learning, they are plain in their style, wholly free from pedantry and illuminate just what was doubtful or obscure. The Essay on the priesthood of Christ is a fresh and thoughtful paper on a subject that has been extensively discussed, and the new translation at the end of the volume has been most conscientiously done.—Taken all in all, we have seen no other exposition of this Epistle which makes so near an approach to our idea of a model Commentary for ordinary use.

THE

FREEWILL BAPTIST QUARTERLY.

No. LXIII. JULY, 1868.

ART. I.-NATURE AND FUNCTIONS OF CONSCIENCE.

Upon scarcely another topic in the whole field of ethical science has there been in the past, and is there to-day, so much confusion of thought and contradiction of statement as upon that of the nature and offices of conscience. It has been designated in turn by as many different names as would serve to catalogue nearly all the classes of phenomena which the mind exhibits. It has been called an instinct, an emotion, a sentiment, a moral sense, a divine umpire, an infallible guide, the voice of God. Mr. Wesley calls it, "that faculty whereby we are conscious at once of our own words and actions and of their merit or demerit." Mr. Coleridge says: "Conscience is the ground and antecedent of self-consciousness." The Scotch philosophy

regarded it as a moral sense. "The testimony of our moral faculty," says Dr. Reid, "like that of the external senses, is the testimony of nature, and we have the same reasons to rely upon it." President Mahan says of this faculty that "its voice is, and cannot but be recognized as, the voice of God in the soul." And if we turn to German writers we find no less a diversity of definition. Wolff viewed the conscience as a mere theoretical judgment. Mosheim classed it among the perfections of the understanding, while Crusius regards it as "an in

nate instinct by virtue of which we feel ourselves bound to subordinate all our aims and acts to the will of God." Reinhard describes it as "a tendency we have of allowing ourselves to be guided in our actions by the thought of Deity." Kant defines conscience, in one place, as "the moral judgment in its act of self-criticism;" in another, as "the consciousness of an inner tribunal in one's self," and in yet another, as "the practical reason holding up before man in every case of a law his duty of approving or disapproving." He maintains that "it is not an acquired something, that there is no duty of seeking after one, but that on the contrary every man as a moral being has one originally in himself." Fichte holds that conscience is "the immediate consciousness of our specific duty," and which as such is the consciousness of our absolute primitive self, and above which there is no authority, but by which, on the contrary, every other must be proved and judged. All acting on mere authority, thinks Fichte, is in contempt of conscience. Dr. Schenkel defines [Herzogs Real-Encyk. Art. Gewissen] conscience as "the religious central organ in man;" but remarks elsewhere in the same essay, that, so long as man remained sinless, and in undisturbed communion with God, he as yet had no conscience. But Professor Wuttke of Halle says [Sittenlehre I., 379,] that "conscience is that revelation of the divine will which is given to the moral subject in his rational self-consciousness,” and adds, in the same connection, that "the conscience exists in its full purity and vigor only in a sinless state. Professor Trendelenburg, of Berlin, ventures the safe definition, that conscience is the backward and forward working of the entire God-directed man against the partial, selfish propension of his nature.

But these questions and partial statements might be indefinitely extended without better accomplishing our object, which was simply to advert to the infinitely varied ways in which conscience has been defined. They will suffice to awaken in all reflecting minds one or more of the following convictions, viz., either that the same idea is expressed in strangely varied language, or that the thing attempted to be defined is of a very obscure, undeterminable nature, or that different men apply the same term to widely different functions of the soul. Whatever

braces, in proportion as the writer assig

moral self-sufficiency to the soul and less of impor jective and subjective Revelation. And for a reason. For if man possesses in himself an unerr faculty capable of discovering the moral law, and o ly applying it to all the vicissitudes of life, where is necessity of a revealed law, or the great importanc lightening influences of the Holy Spirit? How w ference between the opinion of some, that conscien a religious emotion, and that e. g., of Rousseau that it is an infallible guide!

Such is our con

But is this conflicting use of the word necessary fiable? Is it not practicable, and if so, then very definitely to determine to what precise activity of t term is applicable, as to be enabled with assuran this or that spiritual phenomenon that it does or d within the sphere of conscience? to realize it shall be the aim of this needful to observe that we design to not in its loose and popular, but in its accurate and as expressive of the moral activity of the soul. T before us then is: What is the precise faculty or series of functions of the soul to which the term c strictly applicable?

paper. And i use the word

The words faculty and function we use purpo than part or department; for the soul is not like a other material object, capable of being surveyed uted into sections. It is a unit, and all its phenom tivities, not of this or that of its parts, but of its

It is not so well to say that it has understanding, imagination and feelings, as that it understands, imagines and feels. These words designate simply different directions of activity in the same substance. After itself, there is nothing else that we can predicate of the soul but its activities and the resulting habits. The inquiry is reduced, therefore, to this: Which of the activities of the soul is the conscience?

And we answer, first, negatively, that it is not any supposed one which confers on us this idea,—that there is such a distinction as right and wrong, good and evil. This idea does not come to the soul through its own activity, for it is one of the essential elements of its own existence. A soul is a rational, accountable spirit; but such a spirit without the idea of right and wrong is inconceivable; hence, this idea inheres originally in every human soul, and cannot be generated within itself or received from without. Without it there may be embryonic or idiotic capabilities of soul, just as in the seed there may be the capability of a tree; but in neither case is the soul or the tree, as yet, an actual fact. Even as in mathematics the whole superstructure rests on a few elementary axioms, so the idea of moral good and evil stands along side of these inborn ideas of existence, liberty, causality and divinity, as one of the fundamental elements of moral intelligence. Whatever, therefore, the conscience may have to do with the idea of right and wrong, it does not generate it or communicate it to the soul.

But is the conscience that activity of the soul by which we determine what is right or wrong, by which we classify actions as good or evil? No. And for the reason that the activity here called into play is exclusively intellectual, whereas the conscience, as is generally admitted and as we shall for the present assume, is a moral and religious function. But let us examine this matter. A classified knowledge of the moral law may be obtained in different ways. As soon as, by the aid of the intuitions of reason, the soul reflects on the relations of the finite to the infinite, the creature to the Creator, it perceives that they imply submission, reverence, etc. The duties of man to man may also be partially learned in the same way. It may be, and is in fact, largely obtained by tradition and by parental instruc