He was also vigilant in maintaining the immediate agency of God in all the phenomena of nature. And he sometimes insisted on such anthropomorphic terms, expressive of God's agency in nature, that you felt as if you were, for the time, living in the old Hebrew atmosphere of thought, in which the Lord was heard to thunder in the heavens, and the Highest to give forth his voice, and was seen to send out his arrows and to shoot forth his lightnings. And when he added the usual metaphysical coloring to this sensuous view of God's acts in nature, there seemed but a shadow of difference between it and a system of physical pantheism, unless you eliminated from it—as was needful—the burning glow which his ardor had kindled in the subject. The inconveniences to an extreme advocacy of this view arise from inability to conceive or understand how an omnipotent act every moment applied immediately and directly to keep a thing in a made state, differs in degree or manner of application from the original omnipotent act to create that thing; and how, if there be no difference, an omnipotent sustaining act varies, in kind, degree, or manner, from an omnipotent creating act, so as to avoid the conclusion that to sustain nature every moment God must newly create nature every moment. And then, if God does thus newly create it, comes the metaphysical destruction of its identity with what it was ten or two moments ago. For repeating the constitution of a thing over and over does not make it, per se, the same thing this moment which it was in any past moment. Besides, "all souls are mine, saith the Lord." He has absolute proprietorship in mind as well as in matter, for he made and he sustains both. But let absolute identity of mind in its every successive moment be lost, so then will its responsibility also be null. We name inconveniences such as these to show that an extreme statement of even a proper doctrine is liable to the fallacy of proving too much by bringing into the case more than belongs to it.

To all the distinctive doctrines of the Church Dr. Dempster was strenuously loyal. They were to him the best statements of a conscientious interpretation of the Scriptures on the points to which they related. And he taught them, together with the whole evangelical scheme, with such a depth of living spiritual interest in them; with such an entering of his kindled intellect into their vital meaning, that as an instructor, often,

he contributed as well to the spiritual as to the intellectual growth of his students. His best thoughts would often flash out to the great interest and edification of his class when in familiar daily exercise with them. It was here that his greatness was most obvious to them. Long will his name be pre

cious in their memories!

We are compelled by the limits of our space to pass lightly over many topics bearing on his career on which we should dwell with sincere, heartfelt interest. We wish we had space to give our full estimate of him as a hopeful, warm-hearted man of progress. He loved the right as he loved the truth, and his earnest moral feelings impelled him, so far as in him lay, to join irrevocably the true and the right in all efforts at reform, whether in the Church or in civil government. His voice was heard in solemn and eloquent appeal on this subject, both in the General Conference of the Church of his choice, and before the chief magistrate of the nation. His eye too was ever toward the ages before him. He went not back into the past save to draw thence some lessons from errors committed there, as a way-warning to shun mistakes along the line of the future, whither his intense 'yearnings were directed. He placed his hope of the future on the young and rising talent of the Church-on young men of two generations behind him, with whom his heart did so beat in sympathy, that to the last day of life he was a fine specimen of a young old man.

No doubt he heeded too little the warnings of his bodily decay, because his will was firm and elastic as ever, his hopes as bright, his mental powers as vigorous as in years agone; and the illusion of possibly a decade of years to come, despite his feebleness, temporary, as he hoped, may perhaps have flattered him into the hope of full time yet to revise his piles of manuscript material, and digest them into publications of permanent worth. His work of pioneering in Biblical Institutes must first be finished, then he was ready, as earnestly urged by friends, to put his critiques and monographs in such form and character that the world would not willingly let them die. His work, long contemplated, on the Will was not completed. It will go to the press in the form of lectures, as he delivered them; but the revisions and the chasms which his own hand should have supplied will be untouched; nevertheless they

will have great interest to the thousands of his friends and former pupils. His latest writings of public interest were a series of papers in a weekly journal, introductory to a course of essays on Natural Theology, which he also hoped to have full opportunity yet to finish.

The truth in his case was, that his intense and deep nature was ever fastening itself on plans of work yet to be executed. With great painstaking, to preserve his habitually feeble health he had protracted his years far beyond what was once deemed a possible expectation, and he was doubtless fond of trusting that he might reasonably lay down his programme of mental work for many years longer. The reward, in this life, for half a century of self-denial and hard thinking, he did hope to enjoy; but he died on the threshold of his reward, in hope, but not in possession.

ers.

And we cannot repress the sorrow that comes every day unbidden for such a sudden disappearance from us of a nature so morally earnest, and of a mind so profoundly analytic and conceiving plans so broad and promising. But his work was done; and we honor his name. We honor him for creating such necessity, and inspiring such enthusiasm in minds around him to be earnest thinkers. We honor him, because, under the most stinted privilege, he was such a marvel of success in becoming himself, in given directions, the strongest of thinkWe are sure that he lamented the one-sidedness of his education. We know that he deplored the disadvantage of having had no instructors; no liberalizing atmosphere of learned halls for the moulding and sustaining of his intellectual growth, none of the sobering attritions that occur in daily recitation drill, and in hourly fellowship with earnest colaborers in study. And we know too how consuming was his ardor to leave nothing undone on his part, to offer every needed privilege to the generations of the Christian ministry that are to follow. In this mission, as well as in all his work for his Master and the Church, his eye was single, he walked by faith, and he lived in humble, habitual prayer. He filled distinguished posts with fidelity and success. Nine times he was appointed to serve in the quadrennial councils of the Church. His name and work are a savor of life in Great Britain and in both Americas. He will go down to posterity with reputation and honor.

ART. II. THE UNAUTHORIZED CALVINISM OF THE
ENGLISH BIBLE.

THE authorized English version of the Holy Bible is perhaps
as faultless as any modern translation. It by no means fol-
lows, however, that it is a perfect representation of the original.
It has been well said that "to err is human." Men investigate
and understand according to the bias of their minds. The
authors of the English translation were neither infallible nor
free from prejudice. While the Oriental Churches, both Greek
and Syriac, maintained the primitive doctrines held by the
Church before Augustine brought in predestination and neces-
sitated will, and even the Romish communion, while respect-.
ing the authority of Augustine, declined to accept his fatalism,
Protestantism early and prevalently became infected with what
is now termed Calvinism. It was thus the great theological
misfortune of that age that in abolishing the abuses in the
ritual and institutions of popery it departed from some of the
original doctrines of Christianity and the general Church.

When Luther was opposing the corrupt doctrines and practices of the Romish Church, with its pompous and multiform ceremonies, its penances, confessions, absolutions, and priestly assumptions, he readily and naturally passed to the opposite extreme of denying the good of all human effort, and even of asserting that there is no freedom of the will. He was the more inclined to these views from the fact that the Augustinian order of monks to which he belonged, whose doctrines he had early imbibed, and whose writings and libraries had been his chief study, followed the predestinarian theories of Augustine. These views being thus grafted upon the Reformation, spread with its growth. Afterward Calvin gave them a permanent form, and established them with all that force which this posi tion, learning, eloquence, and genius could so well give.

These doctrines became thus not only the most prominent but, we might say, the prevalent views of the Reformation. The discussions concerning them were not so much with respect to their truth as to the manner in which we should understand them, whether as supralapsarian or sublapsarian. Though Arminius afterward arose and opposed them, yet his views

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were condemned by the Synod of Dort, and Calvinism was publicly indorsed as alone orthodox. The errors of Pelagianism, which were propagated to some extent about this time, also did much to bring Arminianism into disrepute. The adherents of Calvin, blinded by their prejudices, either could not or would not see the difference between the teachings of the two systems, and a favorite method of confuting the latter was by imputing to them the errors of the former. Moreover, the philosophy of the age was all arrayed in favor of Calvinism, and whoever would aspire to the title of metaphysician must be a firm believer in the passiveness of man and the irresistibility of the laws of nature. Even at the present time our metaphysicians, in their doctrines on the human will, are not altogether free from the chimerical, foolish, and corrupt dogmas of the schoolmen. Subsequently to the time of James, under whom our translation of the Bible was made, Archbishop Laud endeavored to restore in England the primitive doctrines, which was one of the reasons of his execution by his Puritan opposers. A lax Arminianism prevailed in the English Church, but it was not until the Wesleys that the doctrines taught by Arminius himself were fully exemplified not only in their theory, but their practical spirit and power. Bishop Burnet, in his History of the Reformation in England, informs us (vol. ii, p. 180) that in that country the doctrines of predestination were not only the prevailing orthodoxy in the middle of the sixteenth century, but that some carried them so far as to "reckon that since everything was decreed, and the decrees of God could not be frustrated, therefore men were to leave themselves to be carried by these decrees. This drew some into great impiety of life, and others into desperation." The excesses of these men induced Luther to change his views, and Melanchthon to openly write against them. Under such influences and prejudices our translation was given to the world. It is no wonder, therefore, that there are in it so many unwarrantable expressions favoring Calvinism. No one word of our Bible exhibits more strongly the rigid predestinarian views of the translators than their use of the word ordain." Where the sacred writers speak of things as "made," "appointed," ," "disposed," "placed," etc., these men, thoroughly leavened with predestinarianism, conceive of them readily as ordained. This word is in twenty-one places of the New Test

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