upon their own account, yet it was imputed upon their's and Adam's. For God was so exasperated with mankind, that being angry he would still continue that punishment to lesser sins and sinners, which he had first threatened to Adam only. The case is this: Jonathan and Michal were Saul's children. It came to pass, that seven of Saul's issue were to be hanged; all equally innocent-equally culpable.* David took the five sons of Michal, for she had left him unhandsomely. Jonathan was his friend, and therefore he spared his son, Mephibosheth. Here it was indifferent as to the guilt of the persons (observe, no guilt was attached to either of them) whether David should take the sons of Michael or of Jonathan; but it is likely that, as upon the kindness which David had to Jonathan, he saved his son, so upon the just provocation of Michael, he made that evil to fall upon them, which, it may be, they should not have suffered, if their mother

These two words are added without the least ground in scripture, according to which (2 Samuel, xxi.) no charge was laid to them but that they were the children. of Saul! and sacrificed to a point of state expedience.

had been kind.

ADAM WAS TO GOD, AS MICHAL TO DAVID!!! (TAYLOR's Polem. Tracts, p. 711.) And this, with many passages equally gross, occurs in a refutation of the doctrine of original sin, on the ground of its incongruity with reason, and its incompatibility with God's justice! Exasperated with those whom the Bishop has elsewhere, in the same treatise, declared to have been " innocent and most unfortunate"-the two things that most conciliate love and pity! Or, if they did not remain innocent, yet, those whose abandonment to a mere nature, while they were subjected to a law above nature, he affirms to be the irresistible cause that they, one and all, did sin!— and this at once illustrated and justified by one of the worst actions of an imperfect mortal! So far could the resolve to coerce all doctrines within the limits of reason (i. e. the individual's power of comprehension) and the prejudices of an Arminian against the Calvinist preachers, carry an highly-gifted and exemplary divine. Let us be on our guard, lest similar effects should result from the zeal, however wellgrounded in some respects, against the Church

Calvinists of our days: The writer's belief is, perhaps, equi-distant from that of both parties, the Grotian and the Genevan. But, confining my remark exclusively to the doctrines and the practical deductions from them, I could never read Bishop Taylor's Tract on the doctrine and practice of Repentance, without being tempted to characterize high Calvinism as (comparatively) a lamb in wolf's skin, and strict Arminíanism as approaching to the reverse.

Actuated by these motives, I have devoted the following essay to a brief history of the rise and occasion of the Latitudinarian system in its first birth-place in Greece, and a faithful exhibition both of its parentage and its offspring. The reader will find it strictly correspondent to the motto of both essays, cos Kar-the way downwards.

ESSAY III.

ON THE ORIGIN AND PROGRESS OF THE SECT OF SOPHISTS IN GREECE.

Η ὅλος κατώ.

The road downward.

HERACLIT. Fragment.

As Pythagoras, (584 A. c.) declining the title of the wise man, is said to have first named himself PHILOSOPHER, or lover of wisdom, so Protagoras, followed by Gorgias, Prodicus, &c. (444 A. C.) found even the former word too narrow for his own opinion of himself, and first assumed the title of SOPHIST: this word originally signifying one who professes the power of making others wise, a wholesale and retail dealer in wisdom-a wisdom-monger, in the same sense as we say, an ironmonger. In this and not in their abuse of the arts of reasoning, have Plato and Aristotle

placed the essential of the sophistic character. Their sophisms were indeed its natural products and accompaniments, but must yet be distinguished from it, as the fruits from the tree. Εμπορος τὶς, κάπηλος, αυτοπώλης πέρι τὰ τῆς ψύχης pashμara—a vender, a market-man, in moral and intellectual knowledges (connoissances)one who hires himself out or puts himself up at auction, as a carpenter and upholsterer to the heads and hearts of his customers-such are the phrases, by which Plato at once describes and satirizes the proper sophist. Nor does the Stagyrite fall short of his great master and rival in the reprobation of these professors of wisdom, or differ from him in the grounds of it. He too gives the baseness of the motives joined with the impudence and delusive nature of the pretence as the generic character.

Next to this pretence of selling wisdom and eloquence, they were distinguished by their itinerancy. Athens was, indeed, their great emporium and place of rendezvous; but by no means their domicile. Such were Protagoras, Gorgias, Prodicus, Hippias, Polus, Callicles, Thrasy machus, and a whole host of sophists VOL. III.

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