"4. The divine threatenings reveal the character of God in its glory and excellence. * # * * "This they do as they reveal his disapprobation-the full measure of his abhorrence of sin. This is God's holiness, and his holiness is preeminently his glory. Nor is it conceivable, that the greatest, most enrapturing of all truths in the universe of truth, THAT GOD IS LOVE, that God is a being who, more than all things else, loves the holiness, and thus the happiness of his creatures, should be so impressively presented to human apprehension—that the glory of God should be so poured upon human thought and human sensibility, in such full-orbed splendor, as through the divine threatenings. Here God's love for the happiness of his creatures may be seen in his intense abhorrence of sin, which destroys that happiness. There is no other mode conceivable, in which God can be seen as he is, and as all that. he is-loved as he is, and all that he is, as through this manifestation. "Some suppose that for a man to be moved by the divine threatenings, is to be moved by a mercenary influence; and to act under it, is, of necessity, to act in a selfish manner. Oh, how little such men know of God and God's government! Let the sinner look at that highest glory of God, in view of which heaven's song makes heaven's pillars tremble, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty;' let him thus look and love, and can his love be mercenary, or mean, or selfish? In kind, you see it will, it must be the same which the effulgence of the Deity awakens in the seraph's heart. "5. The divine threatenings unfold the claims of God for the sinner's obedience in all their pressure of obligation. "By these it is that the sinner is made to see, if he see at all, who and what that God is with whom he has to do. God comes out to the sinner with his claims, he unfolds his obligations to obedienee, as these result from his own infinite perfections, from his high and rightful supremacy over the creatures of his power, from the purity and excellence of his law, and from the great designs of his moral government; and now, for the single purpose of securing the ascendency of these claims and these obligations in the heart of man, he makes known the tremendous alternative of submission or death. Here are none of the decrees and threats of self-willed despotism, fixed upon its own selfish ends, at the sacrifice of all good to those whom it has power to torment. The denunciations of God, properly understood, bring no such thought to the mind of the sinner. They are simply the enforcement of the obligations of eternal righteousness. Their language to the sinner, under a full discovery of the claims of the Most High, is, 'Submit to these righteous claims of a perfect God, or die.' It is the direct tendency of these threatenings, not merely to make the sinner tremble, but at the very moment of excited fears of the curse, to array before him his duty, and to bring before him all its obligations and all its motives. They turn his eye downward upon the pit and its fires, and at the same instant raise and fix it upon God in all the authority of his supremacy, and in all the immutability and equity of his claims. He is made to see how perfect, how holy, how just, how unchangeable are the claims which a righteous God enforces by such awful sanctions. God, in all his majesty and perfection, is brought into nearer contact with the sinner than it is possible to conceive he should be by any other means. By the terrors of the Lord, all the sensibilities of his nature are appealed to, and he is made to stop in his career of rebellion, because his steps take hold on hell; and, by precisely the same means, he is in this attitude made to look upward, and to look intently, to the great reality of a living and a reigning God; and while he looks, all the majesty, and all the loveliness, and all the glory of God are brought to bear upon his conscience and his heart. Thus he sees what God ishow God feels towards him, and how he ought to feel towards God." pp. 263-6. We now come to Dr. Cleaveland's argument. That is not sound. No such inference can be fairly made as that which he makes from the language quoted from the Christian Spectator. It has no force whatever except by overlooking or ignoring Dr. Taylor's repeated definitions and explanations of the phrase "ultimate end," as used by him on this subject, and by giving to that phrase a very different meaning from that in which he used it, and repeatedly said he used it. He meant by it, "not the chief end, the object of the mind's choice, but the last, ultimate end." These are his own words, in one of his lectures. He meant by the language which Dr. Cleaveland quotes, that in an analytic account of mental choice, and of all voluntary action, the ultimate end or fact, the last thing, not without but within the mind, to which we come, is the mind's capacity of being pleased, its instinctive, involuntary, constitutional desire of happiness-to this ultimately all motives appeal. He meant, to use his own language, that "The soul chooses God as its portion, under the impulse of its inherent desire of happiness." He meant just what Dr. Cleaveland means when he says in the paragraph above quoted, "We choose God for our portion," i. e., a portion for ourselves, a portion pleasing, satisfactory to our minds, and fitted by its infinite worth to be thus pleasing and satisfactory-a portion which we could not choose at all if it was not pleasing. All this appears abundantly in the very discussion from which Dr. Cleaveland quotes. In that controversy, this very charge, founded on these very passages, had been made by Dr. Tyler and had been denied and completely refuted by Dr. Taylor. Dr. Taylor says, (Christian Spectator, Vol. II, p. 162,) "The term 'ultimate end,' we know, has often been employed to express the object, as wealth, power, the glory of God, &c., in which happiness is found. But it is obvious from the whole * * * tenor of our remarks, in the passages referred to by Dr. Tyler, that we were not speaking of any object external to the mind. It was a 'desire' of the soul, we were considering. And we only ask how desire could exist,-how any external object could become a motive-how man would differ from the clod beneath his feet, if it were not for the desire and hope of happiness prompting him to acts of the will?" "We maintained that man as a moral agent, who is addressed by motives, has a constitutional susceptibility to the good which those motives offer." p. 163. The italics are Dr. Taylor's. We will give another very decisive passage, p. 386. "Dr. Tyler makes one declaration in the work before us, which ought forever to end his contest with our reviewer (Dr. Taylor) on the main points at issue. 'I fully admit,' says he, the principle of Edwards, if nothing could be pleasing or displeasing, agreeable or disagreeable, to a man, then he could incline to nothing, and will nothing. And if this be all which the reviewer means when he says that 'self-love is the primary cause of moral action,' and that of all specific voluntary action happiness is the ultimate end,' as he seems occasionally to intimate, I have no dispute with him.' Now we can assure Dr. Tyler that this is all; and that we have not only occasionally intimated' this fact, but carried it along with us in all our reasonings, and declared it in express terms before he ever published a syllable on the subject. We stated, when we say that the soul in regeneration chooses God as its portion, under the impulse of its inherent desire of happiness,' we are SIMPLY stating the great principle of Edwards, that the will is as the greatest apparent good!" The italics and capitals are Dr. Taylor's. Here we pause, having proved fully that Dr. Cleaveland's attempt in this Statement to vindicate his misrepresentation of Dr. Taylor entirely fails, while it aggravates the original of fense. He has transgressed the rule of fair and honorable controversy in charging Dr. Taylor with holding an inference from his expressed opinion which he never admitted, but most explicitly denied in his lectures, and contradicted in his published sermons. And the inference itself which, if correctly drawn, should never have been charged as an opinion on Dr. Taylor, we have shown to be incorrect and illogical-made by putting a meaning on his terms which is in direct violation. of his own definitions and explanations, abundantly given in the very controversy from which Dr. Cleaveland quotes. We freely admit that some of Dr. Taylor's language, particularly the phrase "ultimate end," was infelicitous for his purpose, because liable to be misunderstood, unless defined and explained. But there can be no reasonable excuse for such a misunderstanding of it as is in direct contradiction to his repeated definitions and explanations. In conclusion, we say that it is with regret and pain as it respects Dr. Cleaveland-towards whom we have cherished and do cherish the feelings of fraternal affection and confidence that we have performed the duty, we might almost say the filial duty, which he has forced on Dr. Taylor's pupils and friends, of refuting-not a " dissent " from his opinions, as Dr. Cleaveland calls it-of that we should never complainbut a gross misrepresentation of his opinions-a representation dishonorable to his memory as a theological teacher, and even to his memory as a Christian man-a representation all the more grievous, because uttered and published in a community just bereaved by his death; in which are thousands who have honored and loved him as a man and a Christian eminently endowed, and who have hung on his lips with admiration and grateful affection as he has preached to them the gospel of Christ, especially in those times of refreshing from the presence of the Lord, when he has been God's honored instrument in leading many of them in faith and love to the Lamb of God who taketh away the sin of the world. ARTICLE VII.-PALESTINE A PERPETUAL WITNESS FOR THE BIBLE. The Land and the Book; or Biblical Illustrations Drawn from the Manners and Customs, the Scenes and Scenery of the Holy Land. By W. M. THOMSON, D. D., twenty-five years a Missionary of the A. B. C. F. M., in Syria and Palestine, (with maps and engravings.) Two vols., 12mo. New York: Harper & Brothers. 1859. Palestine, Past and Present: with Biblical, Literary, and Scientific Notices. By Rev. HENRY L. OSBORN, A. M., Professor of Natural Science in Roanoke College, Salem, Va. With original illustrations and a new map of Palestine. Octavo. pp. 600. Philadelphia: James Challen & Son. 1859. An Historical Text-Book and Atlas of Biblical Geography. By LYMAN COLEMAN. New Edition, Revised. Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co. 1859. Map of the Holy Land. By C. W. M. VAN DE VELDE. With Memoir. Gotha: Justus Perthes. Ir is seventy years since Volney pictured the desolations of Syria, in connection with the ruins of empires in the East, as a conclusive argument against the doctrines of the moral and the providential government of God, as revealed in the Bible. "Where are those fleets of Tyre, those dock-yards of Arad,* those work-shops of Sidon, and that multitude of sailors, of pilots, of merchants, and of soldiers? Where those husbandmen, those harvests, those flocks, and all the creation of living beings in which the face of the earth rejoiced? Alas! I have passed * Volney doubtless refers to the Phenician Colony on the island of Arvad, called by the Greeks Aradus, opposite Tripolis. (Gen. x, 18; 1 Chron. i, 16; Ezek. xxvii, 11; 1 Macc. xv, 23, where it is called "Apados; also, Strabo xvi; 731, 754.) |