wishes forward; but, if we mistake in that which is the highest happiness, we shall doubtless apply the wrong means and dash both the happiness and benevolence forever. We cannot stand looking at the nature of the means, any more than, before, we could at the nature of the benevolence; for the nature of that happiness, to which the system finds itself intrinsically adapted, must determine both.

He must

He can gratThis imparta

We are thus logically turned to a new position, and must stand upon the nature of happiness. Benevolent happiness must be gratification in imparting, and not in directly receiving; and as this is now to guide in all the agency of the Deity, we have to contemplate its direction in its own tendency according to its own nature. God finds himself with a benevolent nature that can gratify itself only by imparting; and this impartation must be of that which he has to communicate. He is alone in his own benevolent perfections; he must thus create other beings than himself, to whom he may communicate himself. They must be intelligent, as only such can come in communication with him. impart, not literally a transfer of his own benevolent perfections, but a manifestation or display of them. ify his benevolent nature in no other manner. tion cannot be satisfactory to the benevolent desire by mere narration or description; it must be made in veritable fact. There must be such beings as shall bring out a manifestation of all his benevolent attributes in their own actual experience; and, as this cannot be done by displaying all his perfections in any one case, there must be varieties fitted to each manifestation. Some must display directly the benevolence of God in the various ways of rewarding them for their benevolence; and, as benevolence itself can never adequately manifest itself, but by displaying its hostility and hatred to its opposite, it must have such selfish beings as may afford the opportunity for manifesting this hatred to selfishness, in their punishment. There must, even in the very consummation of divine benevolence, be different vessels," some to honor and some to dishonor;" "vessels of mercy afore prepared to glory," and "vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." The

highest happiness of God's benevolent nature cannot be gained without such displays of both his love and hatred; and the highest happiness of his creatures, in the aggregate, cannot be secured in any other manner. He must have benevolent beings enough for displaying his love, in the varieties of his rewarding, and selfish beings enough for adequately displaying his hatred, in the varieties of his punishing. Thus sin and suffering are in the system to just the degree and manner dictated by Infinite Benevolence itself. The problem is solved: Omnipotence cannot gratify Infinite Benevolence in any other way. God's nature cannot prompt the exertions of his power in any other direction. The necessities of a benevolent happiness are, only in this, met and executed.

Here, then, terminates all legitimate theorizing, under the general form of Benevolence. There can be no other positions taken, in the proposition that Benevolence is the means to highest happiness, but, successively, on the nature of benevolence; its means; and its happiness; and, by a logical necessity, the first two must be determined from the last. The theory of Benevolence culminates in this point; and whatever modifications may be made in any of its three hypotheses, they must at length come out substantially in the above form. An advocate of the theory will, of course, make all its repellances as little prominent as possible; but in the collisions of controversial discussion, they will all be made to disclose themselves in their proper shapes and places. We shall have sin as the necessary means of the greatest good; obedience to the divine law no guide to the best result; the existence of two contradictory wills in the Divine Being, one preceptively forbidding selfishness, and the other decretively securing it; and especially the absurdity of being willing to be damned in order to the securing of the greater good. All these are involved in the system; and, if the foundation in highest happiness be true, they are both justified and reconciled in the system. The lost ought to "wish themselves accursed from Christ," for the sake of others' and God's greater happiness. Yea, they ought to be

the happier in and for their eternal misery; it is only selfdenial for highest happiness' sake; bearing the cross, benevolently, for others' greater good. The absurdity is much higher up than in the terms of these propositions, even rooted inherently, in the doctrine itself, of greatest happiness as ultimate end.

The important defect of the whole theory is, that it can possibly give no moral system. It is all founded in a constitutional nature. The happiness is from gratified susceptibility; and as that is, and the motives which reach it, such must the action be. God finds himself with a taste gratified in benevolence, and he is miserable except in following out its impulses; and he goes out, in action, in the same necessity of nature as the ox to his fodder. Motive governs everywhere, both in God and his creatures; and the objective motive is determined in the subjective susceptibility; and this susceptibility is an imposed constitution in the creature, and only not imposed in God's constitution, because the philosophy arbitrarily stops short of the causal constituting, and simply finds it already done and the taste already there. All is cause caused, and there is no free originating cause a cause causing—in the universe. Dr. Beecher would ask for " principles of honor and right;" there is no place for them. The Psychology will not admit of them. There is nothing but a want-an appetite; there is no intrinsic worth, no claim as an imperative. The Highest finds himself the most happy in benevolently imparting himself to his creatures, and he has nothing higher to guide him. The simple prompting of this appetite is "honor and right."

Although here is logically the consummation of the theory of benevolence, yet it were not possible that the human mind should be satisfied with it. This susceptibility to be nevolent happiness is not the highest principle in man or God. Rational spirit can, from its own insight of what it is, determine at once what is due to it, and what is worthy of it; and can thus sit in judgment and pass sentence upon its benevolent gratifications, and decide whether the happiness that is sought in imparting is a virtue or a vice; con

ness.

sistent with honor and right, or dishonorable and wrong. There is thus a power over, and thereby a freedom in, all this pathological benevolence, and the being knows that he is morally held to control all his happiness, even that of benevolence, by a regard to his own true dignity and worthiThe man will thus judge his logical theories, and not seldom does he find his logical and his moral convictions directly in contradiction. If his logic irrefragibly proves, that the sentient nature determines the motive which must be the strongest and must govern, and that thus he can act only as he is pleased to act; his moral being will as irreversibly decide, that he feels the constraint of an imperative above all his sentient being, and that this very pleasing to act is still under a liberty that keeps him consciously responsible for it. His rational spirit knows a law and an alternative force, which his logical understanding cannot find nor comprehend. It was thus to have been an anticipated probability, that this spiritual conviction of freedom should induce a higher hypothesis than any which the controlling efficiency of constitutional motives could tolerate, even before it had fully discriminated the peculiarities of its own origin. The nature of free-agency may be taken as a position, and yet all the really contradictory assumptions of the greatest-happiness principle be retained. The advance footstep will be in the theory of rectitude, while still the other foot lingers uncomfortably on the theory of benevolence.

This fourth hypothesis then is, that the nature of freeagency is such, that God cannot have more holiness and less sin. The very essence of free-agency is, a power to the opposite; and thus in its nature it is that which may sin in any possible appropriate circumstances of its being. In the absence of all proof but such as can be derived from the nature of free-agency, no one is warranted in assuming that sin is not somewhere incidental to the ongoing of a free system. This may be assumed to have been the only alternative to God, on the morning of creation, no moral system, or a moral system in which sin will be. The free-agency might ever keep itself holy, but no one can say from itself

that it ever will. God, as benevolent, will secure more holiness and happiness on the whole, than sin and misery, or he would withhold his creative act; but all that can be claimed is, that he exclude as much sin and include as much holiness as he can himself. He would desire all holiness and no sin, if his free creatures would voluntarily so act, but inasmuch as they will not, he takes the work into his own hand, and, through the grand means of gospel redemption, recovers from as much sin to as great holiness and happiness as is possible to himself to effect. The question is, then, hereby solved. There is sin; for, from the nature of free-agency it is, to any application of power that does not destroy it, impossible to prevent sin; but benevolence secures all the holiness, and excludes all the sin that is possible. God is good; and this limitation of power, in the nature of free-agency, is no imperfection in the divine being.

The objections to this hypothesis have been mainly by such as have viewed it only from the theory of benevolence, and hence it has certainly been more ably defended than attacked. The objections have been mostly derived from the limitations of power and of blessedness in God which are involved in it, but those are readily obviated by showing that such limitations of power are no defect, and that their own hypothesis involves equal limitations; and that God's blessedness is not diminished by any hindrances to benevolence, which lie in the nature of the case. It is no perfection to assume an ability to do absurdities; and it is no loss of any bliss that is wise, if it could only come through contradictions. It has moreover added to itself, in corroboration, the arguments of analogy, and conformity to Scripture and common sense. Sin has entered the present system, and substantially its elements must be in all systems of moral beings; from analogy we may infer that sin would enter any. The efforts to exclude sin from the present system, and which have been ineffectual, might lead to the safe conclusion that no ab extra efforts could exclude it from any. All the facts and declarations of Scripture, and all