Prosper, Fulgentius, and the others of the special Augustinian school, or indeed by modern Calvinist divines. While we are scarcely of opinion with those who think the translation of the tenth volume of Augustine would be a required accession to our modern theology,-for in fifteen centuries, modes of statement and exposition of the questions have, in form, a good deal changed,-we hold that no one, Calvinist or Arminian, is thoroughly a master of the whole question who has not studied that volume. It is pitiable to see that very able Arminian, Richard Watson, speaking of Augustine, whom he has obviously never read, as "a powerful but unsteady and contradictory writer."

We quote part of the description of the Pelagian paradise (Op. imp. c. Jul. iii. 154), “You who deny the fall, what sort of a paradise do you imagine? Are you willing to have these chaste men and virtuous women struggling against improper thoughts; women suffering under all the premonitory signs of labour, some bringing forth premature births, others at the proper period groaning and howling; their children all weeping when they are born, laughing later on, last of all speaking, but this only with the imperfect speech of infants; afterwards taken to school to learn letters, and there weeping under the application of the thong or the rod, variety of punishment being distributed according to the diversity of their minds; besides, innumerable diseases, and assaults of devils, and attacks of wild beasts, by which some would be tormented, others utterly destroyed; the children who escaped such calamities, reared up to youth with a constant parental solicitude, lest they should be carried off by some of the uncertainties of human life; further, this paradise would have to be full of every form of bereavement and of sorrow; the heart's grief drawn out by the unceasing losses of our nearest and our dearest friends. It would be tedious to go over in detail all the calamities in which this life of ours abounds; sorrows are everywhere plentiful, without needing to enumerate a single sin among them. If such things as these were to exist in paradise, without the previ ous existence of any sin to cause them, see how you can protect the description from ridicule. If any painter were to delineate such a paradise, no one would say it deserved the name, even if he read the title inscribed over it. He would not say that the painter had made a mistake, but would affirm that it was the production of a mocker. But nobody would wonder, of those who know you, if your name was added to the inscription, and the name ran thus, The Paradise of the Pelagians.' If this does not make you blush, then all sense of shame must have utterly forsaken you."

The City of God was written in order to defend Christianity against the reproach brought against it in consequence of the taking of Rome by the Goths. It occupied thirteen years of its author's life. It is the last and the greatest of the Christian Apologies. You do not find in it the indignant eloquence or the mere verbal pictorialism of Tertullian, the massive and immense learning of the Alexandrian Clement, or the careful and cultivated composition of Lactantius. But in thorough grasp of the difference and the contrast between nature and grace-of man without Christ, and man in Christ-of the historical, social, philosophic aspects of human nature unredeemed and unrenewed, and of the immeasurable superiority which the new birth has occasioned in every view of man for this life and the life to come, the City of God stands unrivalled by any production of Christian antiquity. Nor, indeed, has any modern work of a similar kind approached its blended intellectual and moral grandeur. It still remains the first historical comment on any verse of holy writ. "Glorious things" have been rivalledly spoken "of thee, O City of God." It should be read by every classical scholar, as the best of commentaries on the First of Romans; and as the yet fullest and noblest estimate of the utter moral inadequacy of Pagan philosophy and polity, superstition and art, to raise the individual or family, the neighbourhood or the nation. In it are refuted beforehand our contemporary deifiers of mere civilisation.

Bishop Downam and other evangelical writers in the great Puritan century, were very anxious to make out that Augustine was fully with them in the matter of justification. And no doubt not a few passages can be quoted where he speaks of justification by faith, of justification by free grace. But we have him in his latest years (Op. imp. c. Jul. II. 165) saying, "God justifies the sinner, not only by forgiving the evils he does, but also by giving love, that he may depart from evil and do good by the Holy Spirit, whose continual supply the apostle sought for those to whom he said, 'I pray to God that ye do no evil' (2 Cor. xiii. 17). Against such you wage war." We fear we cannot, after this, claim the great father as holding satisfactory views upon justification.

On inspiration, Augustine has given no theory, and no full exposition. He rests on the Bible, as fully in every part God's word, without specially searching into the modus of inspiration. But, like the other fathers, to him the Apocrypha is Scripture as much as Old Testament and New. Some of the curt and pat verses of the Apocrypha come, we think, fully as often from his pen as any verse of gospel or epistle, of psalm or prophet. And it is with somewhat of

recoil and revulsion that we find, e. g., in one passage pressing on the Manichees the essential oneness of Old Testament and New, by quotations from the former, all but one of which are Apocryphal!

On the Sabbath, he held what has been called the Dominical view. Church authority was his rule for the observance of the Lord's day. He, on several occasions, gives a merely mystical meaning to the plain literalities of the fourth commandment. And in the practical observance of the Sabbath, he, in order to shew that Christianity is something other than Judaism, pleads for doings on that day that go far beyond the evangelical "works of necessity and mercy."

Augustine effected one local church reform. He did away with the feasting in churches on the festivals of the saints and martyrs. Against this his Christian consciousness revolted. But, great saint, great doctor, great polemic, great preacher, great divine, in every sense but that of exegete, as he was, he neither was nor could be the reformer that a declining and corrupted church required. If temporal power could not be saved, if imperialism was doomed to decay, to give birth to new forms of policy and rule, the church could have been saved if suitable means had been used. The church can originate; she does not need to wait upon this or that political reform, this or that social improvement. But there can be no church reform without the preaching of "the glorious gospel of the blessed God." And, unhappily, Augustine took the latter half of the Romans (by a verse of which latter half he was converted), and left out the former. In the last century, a Lincolnshire clergyman was reading, in deep spiritual anxiety, the fourth of Romans, and, coming to the verse, "To him that worketh not, but believeth on Him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted for righteousness," he saw the saving truth at once, and rose from his study chair a converted man. The many conversions that followed from the changed preaching of Thomas Adam of Wintringham, were but a sample on the parochial scale of what, on a far wider field, was seen in half of Europe in reformation times, was repeated in the Methodist revival, and has been, on both sides of the Atlantic, beheld in our own day. But Augustine never grasped aright the "article of a standing or a falling church." Hence, while beyond the pale of Rome Pentecost repeated or outvied has followed the preaching of Christ the perfect Substitute and Surety, the religious awakenings within Rome's communion, all Augustinian in origin and nature, have never been wide and never been lasting. It is Boos persecuted, and Gosner obliged to leave. Rome ranks Augustine among

His use to the Theologian.

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her "first four," but practically sides with Pelagius and Julian against him. And when his influence at all revives, it is to meet anathemas from papal bull, or episcopal charge, or academical chair. All that is of grace in his volumes she reads and she disbelieves. It is not enough to rend her or to reform her, but it is a protest against her worldliness and her will worship. No virgin, saint, or angel, stands in the Confessions between the soul and God. And the Confessions have coloured the theology, and the very language and idioms, of Augustine all through. But the Confessions can only make a Romanist better than his system, they cannot lead him to renounce it. For the power to break with it, one must go, as Luther did, straight and only to the word of God, the gospel of Christ.

In conclusion, what is Augustine's usefulness to the theologian? He is now read far too little. Mr Ryle is, we suppose, a favourable sample of the reading of evangelical ministers of Great Britain. He quotes 16th and 17th century writers, Church of England and Puritan, constantly and aptly, but we remember only one allusion to the bishop of Hippo, and that is borrowed from Milner's Church History. Evangelism in the nineteenth century has flung itself away from its favourite patristic author two centuries ago. If one wish to arrange a library, as the Germans do, taking the best, ecclesiastically, of all theologians, then of the Latin Church take Augustine, along with Anselm and Aquinas, the three foremost of the pre-Reformation western mind. You divide divines into those whose chief power is to stimulate, and those whose chief excellence is to inform. John Howe and John Foster intellectually stimulate; you get a spiritual stimulus from such as Baxter, and Robert Bolton, and Thomas Vincent. You go to be informed by Owen, or Goodwin, or Charnock, or Edwards, or that first, and now too little studied of the Puritans, Perkins. Augustine will often inform you, but he will always stimulate you. Even amid his wildest exegesis (we venerate him too much to give specimens of it), he shews the power to touch your intellectual and your emotional nature alike. He is eminently a suggestive writer, eminently a spiritual one. Others have done greater service, but the church has never seen a greater thinker or author. They did more, because free from trammels by which, with all his intellectual and spiritual greatness, he was enthralled. While we bless God for our freedom, let us speak regretfully, not disdainfully, of his chains.

Mr Baillie has given the general reader a pleasant biograpy of Augustine. But the land and the language that God has used most to propagate, defend, and expound

Augustinian doctrine, owes to the great father a debt, which calls for the production of a work of foremost theological power on the life and time of Calvin's master. Why should not an early occupant of the Cunningham Lecture chair take Augustine as his theme, and then expand his lectures into such a work? Let the reproach be wiped away, that France and Germany, neither of which is Augustinian in the sense that Britain is, have done more for the memory of the bishop of Hippo than has been effected among us. Such a work would indeed require the study of years. Hut would any other yet untrodden field equally repay? Dr Schaff has well said, "None of the ancient writers have with such power of thought and variety of illustration examined, developed, and enforced the correlative doctrines of sin and grace." Equally true is Böhringer's remarks, "Reformation, the middle ages, and antiquity (western at least) have equally a share in Augustine." A great French critic has said, "We look across a gulf we cannot pass, when we attempt to estimate the greatness of antiquity." This is only true of heathen antiquity. One touch of grace has made the whole church kin."

ART. III.-Candlish's Cunningham Lectures.

The Fatherhood of God: being the First Course of the Cunningham Lectures, delivered before the New College, Edinburgh, in March 1864. By ROB. S. CANDLISH, D.D., Principal of the New College, and Minister of Free St George's. Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black. 1865.

THE scheme of theological opinion advocated by the writers of the Broad School is founded on a denial of the Moral Government of God; a large department of which they get rid of by identifying it with government by physical law; while so much as remains on their hands, intractable on this method, they resolve into a Paternal Disciplinarianism, grounded on their dogma of the universal Fatherhood of God.

PRINCIPAL CANDLISH has had the penetration to reduce the controversy between this school and the orthodox Evangelical Churches to these, its real issues: First, Does God govern his intelligent creation by true and proper objective Moral Law? Second, Is his administration sovereign, including probation and penalty proper; or is it merely disciplinary and paternal? In compelling a statement of the lists in this form, Dr Candlish