be proved as to the generated foundations of character. For the purposes of the Christian Church the fullest truth in this matter is welcome. Its relation to the doctrine of depravity has already been alluded to. The Church surely ought to hail any thing which adds dignity to life or to any of its functions. Mankind, when unmoved by the divine call, looks at life as a play-spell, a gold-hunt, a tread-mill, a wretched mystery. Christianity proclaims it a testing and a schooling. When, then, to the most imperious instinct of our nature science offers such a discipline as arises from the fact of heredity, the Church ought to rejoice. For no soul alive to the truth, or in any degree moved by intellect or conscience, will think of parentage without also thinking of qualities which ought to be transmitted and of taints which ought to be sterilized. The Christian conscience has in known cases been so victorious over instinct that conscious taint has been sacrificed at the altar of self-denial. A quickened sense of responsibility re-enforces conscience at a point where it sorely needs help.

Imperfect moral development is such a factor in society that all organizations are obliged to proceed on the certainty of weakness and wrong. Law is a proof of the failure of humanity to move instinctively toward the right. That which puzzles jurist and clergyman alike is to determine measures and moments of responsibility. The most strenuous advocate of the freedom of the will must admit the existence of some in whom hereditary taint has limited if not extinguished responsibility. The most Draconian judge is compelled to regulate penalty by his belief in degrees of responsibility, and to discharge some as irresponsible. But making allowance for these as the exceptions of the race, the mass of mankind must be treated as wholly responsible for motive and conduct. There is nothing more "solemnizing," to use the word of our fathers, than the study of divergences from the normal consciousness which develop into crankiness, eccentricity, immorality, and lunacy. The tendency of such studies is to enlarge our view of the circle of irresponsibility, and to quicken charity for those in whom an invisible evil ferment is at work.

But Christian hope exercises itself toward the confidence that heredity may yet prepare a better soil for the gospel seed than that which has thus far been furnished by the al

liances of passion and the parentage of accident. Beautiful characters are known to all, which are not passive or negative, but active and positive in good affections and instincts. Such seem to absorb the truth as the soil the rain, and their children often seem to receive an inheritance of clear and discriminating conscience. I shall never forget the intense earnestness with which the venerable descendant of a long line of religious ancestors said in my hearing, "Next to the grace of God in my own heart I prize my godly ancestry. What I have inherited from their struggles and victories has made my own life-work the easier." There is hope that as humanity is refined by Christian culture and the grace of God such sweet souls may be increased. But they are yet too uncommon to do more than aid us in indulging the hope that an ideal humanity is not impossible. Love will be more some day than the crazy fancy of the immature. The thoughtful will look behind the mask of a fine face and detect the tainted ancestry before it stains their own transmitted life.

I am anxious to emphasize the royalty of the self-determining will, not to preserve my theology, but to uphold a truth necessary to the moral growth of the individual and the good order of society. It is a very pleasant sop to a disturbed conscience to say, "I could not help it." In moral matters I hold strongly that, though a thousand generations crowd their tendencies on me, invigorating and giving quality to my temptations, the good I see I can still choose and follow by that gracious ability granted to all men by the Holy Ghost. I believe with all my heart in a divine force in which we are immersed, which is the antagonist of all the lower forces which take on sinful quality by their misuse and excess. The Spirit of God meets all souls entering the world with a gift of divine paternal strength, the undying foe of all inherited taint and wrong tendency. He is present in the thinking and the willing of all who have not extirpated their capacity for good by disuse. He presses on and around as the sea on and around the rock it does not move. The human gorilla of the Congo, whose fury hesitates at the writhing of his victim, is stopped by the divine Spirit long enough to do justice and love mercy.

While I believe that a wave, whose crest, if not its mass, is fanatical, is now passing over the Protestant Church, I hold

that we cannot be fanatical in the extent to which we may uphold the power of grace over all influences pushing or drawing the soul to guilt. Responsiveness to bad suggestion may be largely determined by hereditary influence. But it is as certain as the existence of man himself that God's grace can make the lying truthful, the jealous considerate, the vain humble, the obstinate yielding, the sluggish active, the stingy generous, the lustful continent, the drunken sober. When I can say, "My Lord and my God," I can defeat all bad ancestries.

Dan

Ram 4. Goodsell

ENVIRONMENT AND CHARACTER.

I was present by invitation, not long ago, at a gathering where the problem of conscience was the theme of debate. The most incisive comments were made by a man past middle life, a prominent and trusted member of a Christian Church, to whose words I listened with unqualified amazement. His thought was substantially as follows: "Character is the product of society. It is impossible in solitude. The idea of duty emerges only when another appears upon the scene, and morality consists in an amicable adjustment of personal rights. One man in possession of the globe could not possibly do wrong. The very idea would be wanting in him. But let him meet a second in his wanderings who has enjoyed the same prerogatives and at once a compact becomes necessary. Boundary lines must be drawn, and in this social limitation of personal rights we have the source and the substance of virtue." I wondered, as I listened, whether the speaker had read Herbert Spencer, but there was no allusion to the master. It was a case of unconscious infiltration and absorption, yet there could not have been a clearer and more compact statement of the Spencerian ethical philosophy, in which the origin and the rule of duty are traced to the evolution of social restrictions. I demurred to the plausible solution on the simple ground that

even the supposed single man could never be absolutely alone. He is himself a duality, composed of body and soul, with higher and lower impulses contending for the mastery. He can abuse and degrade himself. And, unless the idea of God be dismissed as a delusion, the relation between himself and his Maker must be taken into account in determining the grounds and the measure of moral obligation. At this point I arrested my answer, content to show that the social theory of right stopped short of its inevitable conclusion, even though a personal God be denied; since even then every man carries in his complex organism the conditions of moral action. In another company I would have carried the argument further. I should have insisted that upon such a theory as that advocated by the school of Spencer the divine character is itself an artificial product, based upon compromise and compact. The universe, in such a view, becomes the necessary condition and the primary ground of moral excellence in God, and we are left face to face with one of two alternatives-either that prior to the creative act moral life cannot be predicated of God, or that creation is an eternal exercise of the divine will, conscious, perhaps, but necessary and involuntary, and that in this eternal dualism of the finite and the infinite we must posit the source and the law of the divine holiness. For the agnostic this consideration will have no force; but with the Christian believer it must be decisive against what James Martineau happily calls "the theory of right by social vote."

The ultimate, creative springs of character, like those of knowledge, are internal, not external. There is cognitive power in man, independent of, and superior to, the sensations produced upon him from without. It is needless to renew the philosophic battle of the last century. The victory rests with\ Kant and his successors. Knowledge is not an impersonal photographic process, tracing pictures upon a sensitive plate; it is always and primarily a creative act, in which the sensations are apprehended, rendered to order, and interpreted by the reason in man, acting from its own impulse and in accordance with its own laws. The moral life, in like manner, has its source and spring in the personal constitution of the soul. It is a profound remark of Richard Rothe-profound because it commands immediate and universal assent, demanding no

labored proof-that "an ethical fact is such only in virtue of one's own self-determination; and therefore it is not so much an occurrence as it is an action." I am aware that many will draw back from such a proposition, because of the conclusions to which it leads. Its maintenance compels serious changes in the systems of Augustine and Calvin. It will be labeled as Pelagianism in ethical theory, and we have not outgrown the dread of being classed with the ancient heretic. But at heart both Augustine and Calvin are in agreement with Rothe. They, too, teach that sin is always voluntary; that sin and guilt are rooted in an act of personal freedom. The Augustinian logic, however, is realistic. It regards the human race as a moral unit, Adam being its natural head, representative, and root, while the later Calvinistic theology substitutes the idea of a covenant for that of natural headship. This leads to the claim that every man was not only involved in the Adamic apostasy, but took part in it and was guilty of it--not personally and consciously, but substantially and implicitly. Moral responsibility and freedom are regarded as co-ordinate and inseparable; the debate turns on the question where free-will takes the tremendous initiative by which guilt is contracted. In the Augustinian system no grades or degrees of responsibility can be admitted. The full guilt of the original apostasy rests upon every soul. The new-born babe is crushed by it. The will has sold itself into absolute moral bondage. Ignorance, faulty training, the force of evil surroundings, cannot in the least mitigate the awful doom. It is inevitable, and yet self-induced.

Here, then, we have the extremes on the question of the relation between environment and character. The Augustinian theology gives to the generic human will in Adam the moral initiative. By that character was determined for all individual souls. The generic apostasy has created the bad environment. It has degraded the home, and gives the reins to the most furious passions. Man has created his own surroundings, and he cannot plead them in excuse for his offenses. No allowances can be made for the most ill-favored, neglected, and degraded individuals and races. The Spencerian ethics, on the other hand, makes character the product of environment, and so shifts the ground and measure of responsibility from the individual to society, and to the framework of existence in which society is imbedded.