the taste and the imagination which feel without reasoning; to the sense of dependence upon a higher power, which within its proper bounds is religion, and beyond those bounds is superstition. It is not now. the hard, pretentious, arrogant demand of so-called science; it is the gentle, delusive persuasion of a siren singing a dreamy soothing strain, till the will and the conscience are lulled to sleep under the charm, to awake no more, or to awake when too feeble to resist. It is a dream not the less dangerous for being pleasant; not the less deadly for the charms of fancy that gild it :

"For like the bat of Indian brakes,

Her pinions fan the wound she makes,
And soothing thus the dreamer's pain,
She drinks his life-blood from the vein."

The life-blood is indeed drained when the sense of individual responsibility is destroyed. No man can be a moral agent by deputy: no man can be saved by deputy.

It is, no doubt, a source of false comfort, very pleasing to the indolence, or cheering to the timidity, of those who are unwilling or afraid to take upon them the burden of responsibility which God has been pleased to lay upon them, to think that the necessity, or even the possibility, of free volition and self-determined action is taken from them by the intervention of some necessary law or some infallible guide, which will relieve them from the duty of thinking and acting for themselves, or even will merge their apparent self-action in a necessity by which all accountability is abolished. Yet the whole analogy of nature, as has been conclusively shewn by the great master of this method of reasoning,-the whole course of God's treatment of man, as manifested by the

conditions which He has made essential to the very existence of human society, shews beyond all reasonable doubt, that man's position in the sight of God, as regards natural religion also, is that of a free agent, accountable for his personal actions, not that of a portion of the physical universe, governed by physical laws. And the same argument from analogy, if applied also to revealed religion and the institutions based upon it, shews with equal clearness that it is a contravention of God's purpose towards man, an anomaly opposed to the whole method and scheme of the Divine Government, to suppose that He should, in this instance alone, have designed to set aside the free-will and personal responsibility of the individual, by the interposition between man and God of an infallible guide, armed with authority to become accountable in each man's stead. It is not thus that God deals with us in the general course of His Providence, whether manifested in nature or in revelation. The laws of nature, like the truths of revelation, are in themselves sure and stedfast and unchangeable and free from all error; but man, in his interpretation of those laws, in his attempts to apply them to his own individual case, is ultimately dependent on his own judgment, fallible though it be; and is made to act on his own responsibility, however momentous may be the consequences. God has permitted laws of science to be established by human research,-laws which are of undoubted truth and authority when rightly applied; but in the actual application of them, they are guides and aids only, not masters; assistants to, not substitutes for, the personal judgment; acting with, not super

b See Butler, Analogy, part i. ch. vi.

Cf. Whately, " Essays on some of the Dangers to Christian Faith," &c. Essay IV. sect. 5. Sermons (1854), p. 318.

seding, the responsibility of the individual. The laws of chemistry and of mechanics are fixed and unchangeable; yet a slight mistake in the mixture of ingredients for a chemical experiment may cost the life of the operator; a slight miscalculation of the power of his forces, or the strength of his materials, may lay the mechanist, mutilated or dead, beneath the ruins of his own engine. How much better, men are tempted to say, would it have been, had God given to man an infallible guide to prevent his very pursuit of knowledge from being turned to his own destruction. Better indeed, as erring man would dictate to the omniscient God; but God has not given us such a guide; and therefore we judge more wisely and reverently if we conclude that it has been withheld because it was better for man that he should not have it; because the evil of such a gift would have overbalanced the good.

If we turn from nature to revelation, we see the same method of God's dealing with man. Why, asked the heretic of old, did not the Creator contrive some certain means to save man from falling? Could a Being of perfect goodness and wisdom and power have been unable or unwilling to prevent sin from entering into the world? Because, was the reply, man's likeness to God consisted in his free-will and power over his own acts; and God's goodness is more shewn in bestowing on man this excellent gift of freedom, than it would have been had he been made obedient by subjection to a servile necessity. Does not this shew how precious a thing in the sight of God is human freedom, that even sin and death were suffered to enter into the world, rather than that the majesty of that freedom should be violated? Nay more: when God Himself, in the form and nature of

d Cf. Tertullian, Adv. Marc., ii. 5, 6.

man, came into the world which He had made, to save His people from their sins, did He accomplish His warfare against evil by cramping the will of man and enforcing obedience to rigid rules and minute observances? Far from it. He censured those who sat in Moses' seat, for laying on men's shoulders heavy burdens and grievous to be borne: He abolished in His flesh the law of commandments contained in ordinances1: He lovingly invited men of their own free-will to take upon them His light yoke and easy burdens: He taught by figures and parables, by general precepts and principles, whose particular application to his own case each man must make for himself:-above all, He conveyed the best and highest teaching for meditation and practice, not in the rules of a code, but in the example of a life.

And does not each one of us, if he will but consult honestly and faithfully the witness in his own heart, feel that God is dealing with him, too, as an individual, called upon to work out his own salvation, to resolve as an individual, to act as an individual, to be saved as an individual? Does he not feel that, whatever aids and supports in the path of duty God may have been graciously pleased to grant to him— the precepts and examples of parents and friends, the free use of the Bible, the services and ordinances of the Church-all these aids in religion, like the analogous aids in nature, must co-operate with, and be appropriated by, his own free-will and personal responsibility, working with them throughout his life, even to the end? Does he not feel that there are daily placed before him opportunities of action, occasions of choice to do or not to do, the decision of which rests with himf Ephes. ii. 15. Matt. xi. 29, 30.

e Matt. xxiii. 1—4.

self and himself alone, in which no example of others, no associations or habits, no laws or customs,-no, nor even the Church of Christ herself, can relieve him from his immediate, personal, individual responsibility? Have there not been occasions in his life when passion, or prejudice, or predilection, or persuasion, or terror, have tempted him for the moment to strive to get rid of this burden of responsibility, to cast himself into the stream of some reckless course, to be carried onward unresistingly by the current; and when some seeming accident, some real interposition of God's Providence, has compelled him for the time to pause and act for himself, has placed God before him as his God, guiding him, reasoning with him, expostulating with him, speaking to him, as it were, face to face, as a man speaketh unto his friend? God's government of man in this world is made up of general laws and special providences mingled together; and neither is complete without the other. If law, and system, and rule be manifested, not merely in the labours of his temporal life, when he sows his seed. in the ground, that the crop may ripen by the ordained influences of soil and season, but in his spiritual life also, when he acts upon or is acted upon by others, in accordance with the general principles by which motives, persuasions, exhortations, examples, are recognised as forces influencing human conduct; there are no less moments, and those too lying at the very core and centre of his religious life, when he is withdrawn from all these influences, and enters into his closet, and shuts his door, to pray to his Father which is in secret, with the prayer which none but himself can offer; when the I and the Thou which mould each petition and each thanksgiving, each utterance of an individual need, each acknowledgment of an individual favour, shew that the