"The imagination of man has led him to personify temptation, to regard it as an evil agency, external to ourselves, to embody it and call it a devil." "But then the devil or evil (for it makes not a pin's difference practically, whether we affix the 'd' or omit it,)”—

We will not stop to argue the point, which all who revere Christ's authority must admit, that if his testimony on any subject is to be taken, then the existence and agency of this enemy of all righteousness, must be soberly believed, all the sneers of neology to the contrary notwithstanding.

So, and for apparently the same reason, the Holy Ghost is - read out of existence or influence in the same summary manner. Speaking of the prodigal, in one of these sermons, he says:

"There was no unholy ghost that made him sin; there was no Holy Ghost that made him repent."

No substitutionary or mediatorial influence will he allow in man's recovery from ruin. In regard to this same prodigal he asks:

* If he himself did not recover himself, why was he rewarded with all parental endearments? On the supposition that he himself did not [unassisted] rise, the swine themselves might have been thus feasted, with as much propriety, as he."

So his sneers at the new or second birth, and at the needlessness of missionaries for the heathen, are not welcome to those who revere our Lord's teaching to Nicodemus, and his final commission.

The case of the Cawline Islanders, who believe that their entering heaven depends on the gladiatorial or pugilistic skill of friendly or adverse divinities, he adduces as an illustration of the absurdity of the Christian reliance on the substitutionary obedience, and sufferings and advocacy of Christ for us; "the subterfuge of substitution," as he expressly calls it. And again," Christ died to save sinners, not by substituting his sufferings for theirs-he was too wise and far-seeing for such folly as that, but by his example of fidelity to truth."

How little in harmony these sarcasms are with a petition in one of his prayers given in this volume, "that we may never visit with revilings any one of the human race, because

he does not see as we see," was not so obvious to Mr. Mann, we presume, as it must be to his readers. He would not, we are sure, burn Calvin with literal fire, for his supposed acquiescence in the persecution of Servetus; but he has over and over again impaled him alive on the barbed forks of his rhetorical execration.

The more than half willing assent which he seems to give to the infidel assumption of a few ethnologists, of a diversity in the origin of the human race, is of the same misleading character. His last discourse is on miracles-Christ's Miracles -and is a specimen of ingenious and mischievous sophistry. Without affirming or denying the truth of Christ's miracles, and overlooking entirely their declared import and design to prove his Messiahship, that men might see and believe on him as the God-sent Saviour-the sermon is an elaborate attempt to show that Dr. Howe, and Dr. Woodward, and Miss Dix work miracles as truly as Christ! O the miserable depth to which degrading the Saviour of the world to low humanitarianism, and exalting poor worms of earth to a kind of equality with him whom all heaven adores, has led even Horace Mann !

There is in these sermons much eloquence and ingenuity, and on some moral topics a worthy and noble vehemence. We had marked for transfer to our pages two extracts, one on the most formidable attribute of temptation, pp. 184-185, and several good arguments for the immortality of the soul, 265 and following pages; but we cannot command room for them.

For the same reasons we must dismiss the sermons of President Walker with inadequate examination. We have read most of them with pleasure, finding much to commend, and little to censure. Considering their source, we have been surprised at the amount of sound ethical and religious instruction which they embody, and at their careful avoidance of such utterances as might give offence to orthodox ears. Except in the affirmation of the native purity of mankind as the successive generations come into the world, there is scarcely a declaration in which the orthodox might not coincide. True,

there is a wide difference between the manner in which Drs. Arnold and Wayland and Huntington would treat "the Mediator," and the first sermon in this volume on that very subject. But Dr. Walker's is only the sin of omission, and he says many noble and true things of God, of Christ, of the Holy Spirit, and of man's infinite need. His style is a model of terseness and purity, sometimes rising almost to beauty. The volume may be read with profit by all classes, and by students especially.

ARTICLE V.-THE PENALTY OF SIN.

[BY REV. S. R. MASON, CAMBRIDGEPORT, MASS.]

We propose to consider the question: "What is the penalty of sin for man in the Government of God?"

Penalty has been defined to be "the suffering in person or property, which is annexed by law or judicial decision to the commission of a crime, offence, or trespass, as a punishment." The limitation, "by law or judicial decision," is essential to the correctness of the definition. Sufferings which are not inflicted by law, or judicial decision, are not penalty. It would, perhaps, express more accurately the relation of penalty to law to say, that it is the suffering which is threatened by the law itself, in its penal clause, as the punishment of him who transgresses it. When penalty is inflicted upon the transgressor of any law, it is just that which is thus threatened, and nothing else, judicially visited upon him.

Nothing can be properly named penalty which is not contained in this penal clause of the law, prescribing what shall be the punishment for its transgression. Other evils may be Vol. xxviii.-8.

suffered by the transgressor as consequences of his transgression. Inflicted penalty may, also, involve him who suffers it, in a long train of evil consequences from which he can by no means escape. But unless these consequences, whether of transgression or of inflicted penalty, enter into the publication of the law as its penal sanction, and are inflicted by judicial decree, they cannot, in any proper sense of the term, be called penalty. They are only consequences. For example: if a man commits murder in this Commonwealth, the only thing which the law that forbids murder carries with it in its publication, as a penal threatening, is death-" that intrusive reminiscence of more barbarous times," according to the quiet and very positive assumption of our progressive Chief Magistrate. Whatever else the murderer may suffer as the consequence of his crime, if he does not suffer death by a judicial sentence, the penalty of his crime is not inflicted upon him. Pangs of conscience, days of anxiety and nights of terror, disgrace to himself and his family, imprisonment and impoverishment, none of these enter into his penalty, though they are consequences, some of them of his crime, others of his being accused of crime. Again; one who commits forgery may suffer disgrace, may see his family ruined, his prospects in business hopelessly blighted, his property wasted; not as the immediate consequences of his crime, but of the penalty which the law threatens as the punishment of the forger, and which is inflicted upon him by judicial authority. His confinement to hard labor in the State Prison, this, and nothing else, is the penalty of his crime.

Such is penalty, regarded in its relation to law. It is found to be the same when we look at it in its relation to pardon. Pardon, in any given instance, is an exact and full measure of all the decreed penalty that has not been executed upon the transgressor at the time when his pardon takes effect. In the case of the condemned murderer, if executive clemency reaches him in the form of pardon, it simply removes from him the sentence of death. It does nothing more. It removes not one other consequence of his crime. And And so, if pardon is extended to the forger, who has been convicted and

sentenced for his crime, and is already suffering his punishment, it simply opens his prison door, and bids him go free, without suffering the remainder of his sentence. Not one of the many evils that his penalty has dragged in its train of consequences is removed by his pardon. It does not restore to him, nor to his family, the honor and respect which a convict's doom wrenched from them; it does not bring back his ruined business nor his wasted property. If he ever regains these he regains them through some other instrumentality than that of pardon. This has taken off from him that, and only that, which was made his punishment by the penal clause of the law which he transgressed.

Penalty is thus limited, whatever be the law for whose violation it is the punishment. All law, to be law, must be sustained by penal sanctions; and these, to be of effect, must be announced with the law itself in its publication. They are penalty only as they are sanctions, and they are sanctions only as they go forth in the publication of the law to deter those who are subject to it from transgression. We are brought, then, to this conclusion regarding the penalty of sin for man in the government of God; that it is just what the law of God, by its penal clause, announced to man as his punishment if he should transgress. The penal clause in the law of God, like the penal clause in any other law, is properly a judicial threatening of punishment to deter those to whom it is given from transgression, and to uphold the authority. To decide what the penalty of sin is, we have, therefore, only to look at the penal clause of the law of God in the only announcement of it which was ever made to men who had not already sinned. To these only could the penal clause be intended as a deterring threat. To such as have sinned it is the measure of the punishment to which they are already doomed.

We must go back, then, to God's dealings with sinless man, to find by what legal threatening he enforced upon him the authority of his law to deter him from transgressing it. The only instance on record of such dealing is that wherein God forbade the first, and only sinless man, to eat of "the