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With all this marvelous love the atoning Christ comes to each soul of sinner or saint, saying, "I died for thee, I died on the cross for love to thee. I died a ransom for thee in thy sin, to open a just door for thy pardon and life! Will you not now love me? Will you not now obey me? Will you not work with me and under my command in blessing others? Will you not dwell with me in my heavenly home! Oh, who will resist such love of God? Is it not a wonder, a marvel of human wickedness, that any one does resist its power?

Such, brethren, (would that it had been more adequately presented,) is the recovering and sanctifying power of Christ's atonement. It retains all the sanctifying influence of the law, fully sustaining it. Then, over and above that, it gives hope, awakening, stimulating, inspiring hope to sinners, for whom, under the law there was no hope; and it sets forth this new and amazing expression of divine love for each guilty child of Adam. And all that they may be holy-may be good in heart and life.

And now let it be said in conclusion, that the atonement, the expiatory work of Christ, instead of being a barren doctrine, is the great moral power of the Gospel. It is set forth in the Bible, as the chief recovering and sanctifying influence, so far as truth is concerned, for sinful men. And we have seen that it is so for, more than any other, more than all others, it brings God to human hearts, shows forth and communicates the mingled wisdom and love, justice and tenderness, of God towards guilty and degraded man. And they who undertake to win the world to repentance and holiness without it, must fail. They lack the mainspring, the chief motive power of the system. They lack a supply for man's chief need. You may present Christ as teacher, as guide, as example, as helper, as friend. All this is well. It is very important. It has been, perhaps, too much neglected. It is a side of the Scriptural representation of God manifest in the flesh, necessary to a complete view, and in itself charming and influential. But this alone does not meet the case. It does not supply the sorest human want. It does not relieve the great human burden. It does not constitute a ground of pardon on which the mind of a really convicted sinner can rest with satisfaction.

You have read the account of the poor heathen man, who, in his own land, mourning on account of his sins and his exposure to divine wrath, and seeking in vain amid the foolish and bloody rites of his country's religion, for a way of acceptance with God, was met by an English sailor, and

rudely told to go and learn about the "Christians' God who paid the debt." The Christians' God who paid the debt! The words touched the seat of anxiety in his soul, and gave a gleam of hope. He eagerly asked the sailor to tell him about this way of salvation. But he either would not in his impiety, or in his ignorance could not. He went on board an English vessel sailing for London. While on the voyage he anxiously asked those on board to tell him about the Christians' God who paid the debt. But they gave him no relief. When he arrived in London, he went about the streets, asking in his broken English, to be told about the Christians' God who paid the debt. But the unfeeling multitude rudely turned him aside, till one evening he met an evangelical clergyman, on his way to his Lecture. He invited the inquiring man to come with him. He unfolded that evening, in a simple way, the plan of salvation. He pointed him to the Lamb of God who taketh away sin. The benighted man heard with joy. His anxious soul was at rest. His want was met. He saw God (as the prophet says) "a just God and yet a Saviour." He stood, in faith and hope, at peace with God, on this sufficient ground of pardon.

Thus it is with sinful man all over the globe, when awakened to a sense of God and of guilt. He wants not only a teacher, a guide, a friend; though that teacher, guide and friend be divine. He needs a Redeemer. He needs "the Lamb of God who taketh away sin." He needs some one to bear his sins-to take the chastisement of his peace. He needs to behold "a just God and yet a Saviour." Nothing short of that suits his case. And that does, fully, satisfactorily. And, be assured, the love of God, which does that for him, is the love which, most of all, will melt and win and purify his soul. Here is the point in relation to our present topic. The love of God which does this for man, which thus supplies his deepest, sorest want-the love of God in the atoning sacrifice, is the love of God which will melt and win and sanctify him. So it has ever been (has it not?) in the history of man's recovery from sin, and advancement in goodness. Wherever the messengers and servants of the gospel have gone, on its errands of salvation, what is it, whether amid the snows of Greenland, the wilds of America, the sands of Africa, or the mountains of Asia, what is it, which has arrested guilty man's attention, and touched and won, and by the divine Spirit renewed his heart? What but the story of the cross-of the Lamb of God, slain to take away sin-of Christ, God manifest in the flesh, bearing our sins, the just for the unjust! And what is it that has most

attractive force upon the Christian's heart, and best draws him onward in the path of goodness and godliness, but this very doctrine of the cross?

Oh, brethren, for the sacred and blessed purposes of our ministry, for the purposes of the world's recovery from sin and sanctification to life, use the doctrine of atonement; wield the sanctifying force of the cross. Here, assuredly, is the great renovating and purifying power of the Gospel.

And let us, individually, my hearers, whether in or out of the ministry, yield our own hearts to this influence of the atonement, to the force of justice and law, to the attractions of hope, to the power of love, in the cross of Christ. Let us remember, that the object of Christ, in bearing our sins in his own body on the tree, was, that "we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness." Yea, let us remember that the object of God, in the whole mission and work of his Son, as far as we are concerned, was that we might walk, not after the bidding of the flesh, but after the bidding of the Spirit was to make us holy. If we are not thus holy, the whole object, so far as we are concerned, fails. If we are not holy, Christ left heaven, became man, taught, suffered, loved," befriended, wept and died on the cross, in vain, as it respects us. shall this be? By all the condescension of our divine Lord, we are exhorted to be holy. By all his sympathy, his compassion, his tears, his tenderness, we are exhorted to be holy. By his dying anguish, we are exhorted to be holy. All the voices, of his humiliation and incarnation, of his varied life, and of his death, unite in one, Be ye holy.

Oh,

ART. II.-REALISM REVIVED.

The Nature and Influence of the Historic Spirit. An Inaugural Discourse, by WILLIAM G. T. SHEDD, Professor at Andover. Bibliotheca Sacra, April, 1854.

The Necessity, the Reality, and the Promise of the Progress of the Iluman Race. Oration delivered before the New York Historical Society, Nov. 20, 1854. By GEORGE BANCROFT, a member of the Society. New York: Printed for the Society. Also published in the New York Tribune, Nov. 21, 1854.

THESE elaborate and eloquent discourses are among abundant proofs that German speculations in Mental and Moral Science, have not been without important influence in this country. As the evidences of their increasing power among us have multiplied during the past twenty or thirty years, notes of alarm have been sounded from various high places in the church. Checked here and there for a time by vigorous efforts on the part of a few leading minds, their progress, nevertheless, on the whole, has been rapid. Some have been taken captive by Coleridge, who sat at the feet of Kant and Schelling, and drew his inspiration from their oracular utterances. While Cousin, attempting to mediate between the German and the Scotch schools, has guided more to the former, than to the latter. Moreover, the ready intercourse between this country and Germany, created by steam and the press, has afforded facilities for an acquaintance not only with the writings of the gifted and learned in that land of scholars and thinkers, but with the living men themselves, who extensively mould religious opinion in Europe, as well as leaven the Theology of America. The influence of the German Universities and religious press is recognized in the leading periodicals of our various Christian denominations. The pages of many of our Magazines are enriched in almost every issue by translations from German writers; and the progress of religious opinion in that land is not only chronicled by our weekly Christian journals, but even the secular press frequently devotes columns to the same subject. Immigration is introducing more and more of this element into the American mind. Colleges and Seminaries are already established among us, where German professors inculcate their peculiar philosophy; and a German

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press, quarterly, weekly, and daily, is propagating the same with singular energy and talent.

This is one of the inevitable results of the rapid advancement of modern civilization. Those who dread the power of this Philosophy cannot stay or moderate its career in any other way than by a fair and open intellectual conflict with it. We cannot put it down by denunciations; we cannot set it aside by crying heresy and infidelity against it. We are told that the German mind is exceedingly acute and accurate, patient and enduring; that by long and earnest research it has made discoveries in psychology and the moral system of the universe more profound than any other. We must either gracefully yield to its alleged superiority or prove by adequate arguments that this superiority is imaginary, that these discoveries are ignes fatui, unreal and delusive. We may have an indiscriminate and undefined dislike of the German Philosophy in general, but it is too late to discredit that Philosophy with the independent and inquisitive minds of this free land by cant phrases and ex-cathedra condemnations. Men who earnestly seek the truth, seek for it wherever they think they can find it. The fellowship of kindred minds cannot be proscribed or forbidden in this day, and the attempt to prevent such communion will only recoil on those who make it.

The general name given to the German Philosophy, Transcendentalism, is, with many, equivalent to vagueness, unintelligibleness, and absurdity. We cannot unite in this opinion. The term in its proper, elemental signification, is representative of a fact, which cannot be ignored in our reasonings upon the great principles of Moral and Spiritual truth. That method of Philosophy which regards Phenomena as the only existences, can never satisfy the minds of profound enquirers. The opening remark in Dr. Thomas Brown's essay on Cause and Effect, will be assented to by only a small portion of those who study the science of the soul and of Theology. "The Philosophy which regards Phenomena as they are successive in a certain order, is the Philosophy of everything that exists in the Universe." Doubtless, the Inductive System, the study of phenomena in order to ascertain laws, principles, and essences, will never be set aside. But even this recognizes the grand truth which lies at the basis of the Transcendental Philosophy.

The prevailing Philosophy of this country-that of the Scotch school-deals with the phenomenal, with the ascertained facts of nature and of mind, with attributes and qualities, and makes little or no account of that which underlies all phenomena, of that to which they point, the substrate of them all, that

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