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18; 4th, It is hard to see how, if the tender of Christ's sacrifice is in no sense a true manifestation of divine benevolence to that part of "the world" which "believeth not," their choosing to slight it is the just ground of a deeper condemnation, as is expressly stated in verse 19. Are gospel-rejectors finally condemned for this, that they were so unfortunately perspicacious as not to be affected by a fictitious or unreal manifestation? It is noticeable that Calvin is too sagacious an expositor to commit himself to the extreme exegesis.

How shall we escape from this dilemma? Looking at the first and second points of the stricter exposition, we see that if it were question of that efficient decree of salvation, from which every logical mind is compelled to draw the doctrine of particular redemption, the argument would be impregnable. Yet it would make the Saviour contradict his own exposition of his statement. The solution, then, must be in this direction, that the words, "so loved the world" were not designed to mean the gracious decree of election (though other Scriptures abundantly teach there is such a decree), but a propension of benevolence not matured into the volition to redeem, of which Christ's mission is a sincere manifestation to all sinners. But our Saviour adverts to the implication which is contained even in the very statement of this delightful truth, that those who will not believe will perish notwithstanding. He foresees the cavil: "If

so, this mission will be as much a curse as a blessing: how is it, then, a manifestation of infinite pity?" And the remaining verses give the solution of that cavil. It is not the tendency or primary design of that mission to curse, but to bless; not to condemn, but to save. When it becomes the occasion (not cause) of deeper condemnation to some, it is only because these (verse 19) voluntarily pervert, against themselves, and acting (verse 20) from a wicked motive, the beneficent provision. God has a permissive decree to allow some thus to wrest the Gospel provision. But inasmuch as this result is of their own free and wicked choice, it does not contravene the blessed truth that Christ's mission is in its own nature only beneficent, and a true disclosure of God's benevolence to every sinner on earth to whom it is published.

In conclusion, the reader is entreated to take note again,

that this theory of the nature of God's active powers is advanced in the interests of the integrity of Scripture; and that its result is not to complicate but to relieve the exposition, and to enable the Christian to hold the Bible declarations concerning God's providence towards our sinful race, in their most natural sense. ROBERT L. DABNEY.

IT

CLASSICS AND COLLEGES.

Tis not the immediate object of this study to show the importance of the classics in any system of education, the indispensable necessity of them for all higher training. This is a thesis which has not lacked champions, and such is its nature that it is as inexhaustible as the history of human thought and human culture. The phases of the subject must be familiar to all; and it might be as well to take the point for granted, and to ask at once what can be done for the advanced study of the classics in our higher institutions of learning, and not pause to strengthen and widen the old lines of defence, to magnify the importance of the study of the ancient languages as an intellectual discipline, to insist on the æsthetic necessity of classical study, to expand on our historical relations to antique life, and to extol the intrinsic value of antique literature. And yet, at a time when the great masters of the department begin to show despondency, and ask what they must throw overboard in order to save the ship, the question does recur whenever any educational theme is broached: Is the ship worth saving? Is this plea for the classics any thing more than an oratio pro domo of a guild of needy schoolmasters, who would be utterly bereft of resource if their occupation should be taken away, and who pass on to their unfortunate successors the dreary watchwords of a hopeless cause? That is hardly the case. It is true that the vested interests of classical study are, even from a mercantile point of view, enormous. Not only teachers but bookmakers have a heavy stake in the fortunes of the classics, and the capital involved in them reminds us of the pecuniary hold of Paganism in the early Christian centuries.

But this is only one aspect, and it need hardly be said the lowest aspect, of the question. The ancient classics are life of our life, as has been well said, not merely money of our purse. A part of our heritage from the ages, they are an indefeasible possession. We cannot get rid of Greece and Rome if we would. The phraseology of Latin is wrought into our mother tongue. The scientific vocabulary of English is studded with Greek words. The whole body of our literature is penetrated with classical allusions. In the Märchen of Goethe the will-o'wisps "with their peaked tongues dexterously licked out the gold veins of the colossal figure of the composite king to its very heart, and when at last the very tenderest filaments were eaten out, the image crashed suddenly together." And some such fate would overtake our higher culture if the golden threads of antique poetry and philosophy were withdrawn. Not only, then, do the traditions of the classic nations encounter us at every turn. That might simply be an annoyance. But they have marked out our course, they have dug out our channels of thought and action. We build on Greek lines of architecture; we march on Roman highways of law; we follow Greek and Roman patterns of political and social life. Not to understand these forces, these norms, is not to understand ourselves.

Nor can we get rid of the ancients by the cheap assumption that we have nothing to learn from them. It is easy enough to repeat the familiar aphorism about the ancients, to say that we are the old and they the young, that we are richer than they by the accumulated experience of millenniums. There are departments of thought and art in which the problems are eternal, the results abiding, the achievements final. The old · thinkers have asked questions, the old moralists have laid down. rules, the old artists have moulded statues-questions which we repeat, rules which we must accept, statues which we can only admire, which we cannot emulate. Their observation of external phenomena may have been defective. Of that let professed physicists be the judges. It is not an unfamiliar charge. Admit, then, the imperfect character of their observation, not only in physics but in language, and show how narrow was their range, how imperfect their induction. And yet they propounded all the ultimate questions concerning language-questions which

we are grappling with in vain to-day; and Max Müller, after a wide survey of the field, says that "Plato's Kratylus is full of suggestive wisdom; it is one of those books which, as we read them again from time to time, seem every time like new books, so little do we perceive at first all that is presupposed in them: the accumulated mould of thought, if I may say so, in which alone a philosophy like that of Plato would strike its roots and draw its support." So far as the character and origin of language are concerned, we are little advanced beyond the earliest speculators on the subject; and while the ancients knew little of experimental science, while they had no proper conception of the right method of putting nature on the rack, nature seems after all to refuse to our severest torture the last secret which the ancients sought to elicit by divination, and while renunciation is often the wisest course as to certain problems, renunciation is not superiority. But this is a direction which it would not be safe to urge. In physical science, as in music, as in painting, the moderns may be supposed to have every thing their own way. "The history of sciences," says Goethe, "is a grand fugue, in which the voices of the peoples come in one by one;" and he who has no appreciation of the wealth of his own time has no right to speak of the value of antiquity for all time.

In ethics and politics we have had, it is true, the experience of centuries; but man in his essence has not changed, and in the ethical and political observations of those who stood, as it were, nearer to the nakedness of the soul as their art was more familiar with the nakedness of the body, there is a keenness of insight, a sagacity of counsel, from which we can still learn ̧ "The discoveries of the ancients in science," says Stuart Mill, "have been greatly surpassed, and as much of them as is still valuable loses nothing by being incorporated in modern treatises; but what does not so well admit of being transferred bodily, and has been very imperfectly carried off even piecemeal, is the treasure which they accumulated of what may be called the wisdom of life; the rich store of experience of human nature and conduct, which the acute and observing minds of those ages, aided in their observations by the greater simplicity of manners and life, consigned to their writings, and most of which retains all its

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