letter nor the smallest accent of the Hebrew law shall pass away till all be fulfilled. There is, it is true, a real distinction. between moral and ceremonial laws; between those which are founded on and derive in a sense their authority from the universal conscience of mankind and those which are prescribed for a temporary purpose in the administration of a special ritual; but it is not true that Paul recognizes any such distinction as this, or allows that the moral law plays any greater part in justification than the ceremonial. He takes the broad ground that men who find themselves estranged from God, and diseased in soul and spirit, are not to attempt to return to God or restore themselves to health by obeying laws, whether human or divine. The process of reformation and restoration is entirely different.

Will it, then, be said that law is of no use? that all law is obolished by the New Testament? that all men are freed from the obligation of law? This has been said, but this is altogether too broad a deduction from Paul's premises. He asserts, not that there is no use for law, but that it is not by obedience to law that man or society is to be reformed. There is a use for law, and in his epistle to Timothy he very clearly states what that use is: "Law is not made for a righteous man, but for the lawless and unruly, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murderers of mothers, for man-slayers, for fornicators, for abusers of themselves with men, for men-stealers, for liars, for perjured persons." Law is useful in restraining evil men and protecting the innocent and law-abiding from their lawlessness. It is necessary that the wicked and disobedient should be made to feel the force of law and should be kept under its necessary and wholesome restraints. It is useful, too, in restraining men from inflicting injury upon themselves, from their own disobedience, and in keeping them under such circumstances as render it possible to bring reformatory influences to bear upon them. It is also a standard of life, and so affords that consciousness of right and wrong without which reformation is impossible. But law and penalty are not of themselves reformatory. So far is it from being true that the object of punishment is the reformation of the offender, that, in strictness of speech, it is hardly true that this is even one of the objects of punishment, whether in society by the penitentiary, in the family by the rod, or in the individual by penance. The only or at least the chief reformatory effect of punishment is to compel a pause, and thus render it possible to bring other and higher influences to bear upon the offender.

Paul's declaration, then, "by the deeds of the law there shall no flesh be justified in his sight," is not merely as against Pharisaism, obedience to ceremonial law cannot save the soul from sin; nor as against the moralist, obedience to the moral law cannot vindicate the sinner from sins previously committed; it includes both of these principles, but it is a much broader statement than either or both of them combined: it is the enunciation of the broad general principle that reformation of morals and of life, whether in the individual, the household, the government, or society, cannot be brought about by the enactment of laws and an enforced obedience to them through fear of penalty.

God's method for the reformation of character is far different from that on which the world has placed so great and so vain reliance. The divine plan for the improvement of character is by the play of higher natures upon lower natures. It is by personal influence, not by penal enactment. On this plan is the family, the great institution for the building of character, formed. The child is made what he is, not chiefly by the laws imposed upon him by the father, nor even by the deliberate conscious instructions afforded to him, but by the pervasive influence poured out upon him. He drinks in courage or cowardice, kindliness or selfishness, vanity or humility, with his mother's milk. When he gets beyond the educative influences of his father's house he is sent to school, that he may receive the personal influences of experienced teachers. In college, his character is moulded by the character of the instructors and the classmates with whom he is in most vital and continuous sympathy; and in all the after-life he is made what he is by the influences that come in upon him from the companionship by which he is surrounded. A man's character is not only known by the company he keeps; it is determined by the company he keeps.

Now, the source and reservoir from which all upbuilding influences come is God himself. As the mother imparts to her child, as the teacher to his pupil, as the orator to his audience, as the hero to his nation, so throughout the ages God is imparting himself to all who will receive his influence, and He is doing this through the Lord Jesus Christ, the manifestation and disclosure of God upon the earth. To become Christ-like we are not merely to obey Christ's laws; this is not even the first step. We are to enter Christ's household of faith; we are to become pupils in Christ's school; we are to put on Christ as a garment; we are to dwell in Christ as in a house; we are to be grafted on Christ as on a

vine; we are to feed on Christ as on bread and wine; we are to be married to Christ and be moulded by our life with Him. Not by attempting to square our life to any rule and law, even the Ten Commandments or the Sermon on the Mount, but by throwing open our soul to the influence of the Life-giver, we are to be made like Him. The children of God are born, not of blood, deriving their hereditary virtues from their fathers, nor of the flesh, purchasing them by their own resolutions, nor of the will of man, compelled in the way of virtue by the force of others' wills; but of God, receiving his life as the plant receives light from the sun, and giving it forth again as the plant gives that light forth in all its varied colors. By the outpoured influence of God himself upon the human soul, by the outpoured influences of Godinspired agencies prophets, patriarchs, preachers of righteousness, Biblical and post-Biblical, ordained and unordained — the human soul, and so human families, human society, and human government, is to be cleansed, purified, perfected, in one word rightened in the sight of God. He does not wait until a soul is rightened before He receives it to himself; He does not receive it to himself before it is rightened. But He counts heart-hunger for righteousness; aspiration for achievement; desire for result. ""Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what man would do." God sees the harvest when the seed is sown; He recognizes the future saint when the sinner turns to Him for help towards sainthood. To desire God, to seek God, to perceive God, to open the heart to receive God, this is faith. Not to believe something about Him, but to believe in Him; not to hold an opinion, but to lay hold of God himself. And the instant the soul, awaking from its long slumber, reaches out its arms in groping after God, God reaches out his arms and draws the soul to himself, and there, as the babe nestles to its mother's side and draws its life from the current of her own life, so the soul that is born of God is drawn to his bosom, and lives by the life which flows from Him. This is Paul's doctrine of justification by faith. has a righteousness which prevents his love from working out love's benediction on guilty men, a righteousness which must somehow be overcome by the death of his Son in order that He may righten the unrighteous in spite of his own righteousness; not that if a man believes certain revelations concerning Jesus Christ as the sin-bearer and Saviour of the world, God takes that right opinion for righteousness and acquits the believer of his wrong and counts him righteous; but that God has a righteous

Not that God

ness which is forever putting itself forth in divine influences for the rightening of others; that this divine, forth-putting righteousness of God is seen in the life and character and death of Jesus Christ his Son; that he who abandons his sins, and opens himself to receive sympathetically this sunshine of divine, redeeming love, is instantly brought under its beatific influence; the seeds of aspiration are counted for the fruits of holiness; in the spring of desire the divine, prophetic hope perceives the autumn of ingathering; and the life for which the soul hungers is bestowed upon it, not as a reward of obedience, but as a free gift of love, given by grace, received by faith, and wrought out to its perfection by the ministrations of the word, the discipline of a divinely ordered life, the fellowship of the saints, and the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.

CORNWALL-ON-HUDSON, NEW YORK.

Lyman Abbott.

THE AMERICAN BOARD:

IS ITS PROPER RELATION TO THE CHURCHES THAT OF DOMINATION OR DEPENDENCE?

II.

FOR twenty years from the beginning of the civil war the American Board prosecuted the work for which it was called into existence, with a vigor and a singleness of purpose which secured for it the unqualified and undivided confidence of the churches. It could not be said that it belonged to any party. It had no policy of its own, apart from the churches. What was centralized and exclusive in its constitution did not obtrude itself; practical wisdom in administration served to compensate in good degree for defects in organization.

This happy state of things was suddenly, and unexpectedly, and we might almost say ruthlessly, disturbed at the annual meeting held in Portland in 1882, and it was thus disturbed, as we hope to be able to convince our readers, by no adverse influence from without, but by the deliberate act of men in the inner councils of the Board itself. Until then, the Brooklyn meeting, at which in the view of many of its friends the Board conceded too much to the pro-slavery sentiment of the time, was the anniversary of all others in its

history to be recalled with the least general satisfaction. But the action at Brooklyn was the result of a full and free debate, and it represented the opinions of a powerful majority in the churches. Nor was it brought to pass by any unworthy manoeuvring and management. Dr. Anderson was undoubtedly a diplomatist. It used to be said of him that he would make an admirable secretary of state at Washington; but his methods were believed to be above reproach. If, however, the Brooklyn meeting may be excused, and perhaps justified, at least as a response to the prevailing sentiment of the time, no such excuse or justification can be offered for the Portland meeting, which, unless we mistake the significance of all the attendant circumstances, was arranged in advance, conducted from opening to adjournment, and subsequently made use of, for the express purpose of creating a public sentiment outside in reference to a disputed theological question. The occasion was seized upon, and all the machinery of the society was put in motion, to give prominence and authority to a certain speculation limiting the opportunity for salvation for all men indiscriminately to the present life, and to denounce and put to silence all who refused, or even hesitated, to give their adhesion to it. There was hardly one in ten, probably, among those who came up to the meeting, to whom the issue, as it was presented, was not a new one; and not one in ten for whom it had any particular interest in the connection in which it was now made prominent.

The Portland anniversary was a missionary meeting in little more than in name. Apart from the few addresses in the main hall by missionaries, and the elevated and inspiring speeches of Dr. Hopkins, the President of the Board, and Dr. Hill, ex-President of Harvard College, there was not much to remind one of the great object for which professedly the assembly had been called together. Louis XIV. remarked, on leaving the chapel of Versailles one Sunday morning, that if the eloquent preacher to whom he had been listening had only spoken of religion, he would have spoken about everything. We had somewhat of the same feeling at Portland, and thought that if certain eloquent speakers there had only said something about missions, they would have told us of everything. But this was not the worst of it. Many of the utterances were harsh, censorious, and bitter. The speakers arraigned Christian brethren, judged them, condemned them, for the most part absent, and altogether unheard. More than this; they grievously and cruelly misrepresented them. They caricatured their opinions; they imputed to them beliefs which