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called the "Friends of the People," which gives free public lectures, secular and religious.

From all these facts it appears that the unclean spirit of polytheism, and of groveling baseness and brutality, which characterizes the Turk and the Arab, has gone out of the ruling spirit of the Hellenic people. The Greek mind is "empty, swept, and garnished" by literature and civilization, so far as that can be done by those agencies. Now the danger is that the unclean spirit, finding the Greek mind in such a prepared condition, will "take to itself seven other spirits," and re-enter, when the last state of that nation will be worse than the first. What is the duty of the living Churches in such an emergency? Is it not that at any expense and without the loss of a day they should preoccupy this educated moral vacuity with pure gospel truth? What missionary field on the face of the globe demands such haste? or where else shall we find forces so potential ready to our hand? Greece, to-day, is a magazine of literary and intellectual thunderbolts. These are active agents, that cannot lie inert, like buried gold and fossil remains, doing neither good nor harm for ages. It is in their nature to make themselves felt for good or for evil. If they are sanctified, Greece may soon be next to England as an intelligent evangelizer; if not, she will soon supplement German rationalism and French infidelity.

True to her ancestral character, Greece is destined to be a nation of ideas. Her thin soil and rugged hills necessitate this. Thought is born of rocks, and genius of hard times. In every age we find the muses and genius nestled among mountain peaks, and perched on crags, and dipping their wings in troubled waters. Greece, like New England, Scotland, and the hill country of India, is required by nature to give birth to intellectual greatness. Anciently she felt these mental throes indigenous to her soil, and, having no Star of Bethlehem to guide her wise men to the infant incarnate Light of the world, that lay sleeping in Mary's arms, they gave to the world the highest type of heathen philosophy, and a universal standard of flowing numbers. It was a spontaneity. She did her best. It was not her fault that some of her theories turned out to be philosophy falsely so-called; it was the want of light; and now that she has come out of her grave the only nation that has had

a resurrection in the history of the world, and is beginning instinctively to build up her ancient glory in the kingdom of letters, it must be that Providence has a mission for her of no ordinary magnitude. It may be the divine purpose that from this little "Ephratah" the Saviour shall go forth again to resuscitate the extinct apostolic Churches. The literature of Greece is now circulated in Thessalonica, Smyrna, and other sites of these old apostolic foundations. Greeks print twentyfive daily newspapers.

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The Church cannot afford to neglect these occult forces and pent-up energies of New Greece. They are irrepressible, and must become a savor of life unto life, or of death unto death." The duty of the hour is to saturate the schools and literature of Greece with spiritual Christianity, and we must cease to depend on the scholastic method, and mass our strength on direct preaching. Who will go, without purse or scrip, if need be, and preach on Mars' Hill? If I were young I would haste to this moral waste, where the letter killeth, asking only to be ac.credited by my Church and commissioned by the Holy Ghost.

ART. VI.-MILEY ON THE ATONEMENT.

THE Atonement is the heart of the Christian organism. As our Lord Jesus Christ, in the act of crucifixion, thrust forward his heart, as his head reclined to the right, and as the Roman soldier pierced the pericardium with his spear when the atoning death was achieved, making the physical organ visible, so is the heart of God revealed in all the vital functions which the atonement affects. A defective theory of Atonement involves cardinally a defective theology. It is heart disease in its highest, worst, and most fatal form. A true theory of Atonement sends its life-blood into every fiber and tissue of a body of divinity, and compels the health of symmetrical "proportion of faith," as the apostle calls it, by throwing off what is extraneous, and healing what is defective. Andrew Fuller thought systematic theology should begin at the cross as the center of divine manifestation, and from that focal point of infinite light, love, justice, wisdom, and condescending

almightiness, the endless rays of all divine attributes, purposes, plans, and works could be traced to best advantage.

Methodism has had from the start a homogeneous and symmetrical theology. It is such a theology as will bear being preached. It has not one set of dogmas for the creed and catechism and another for the pulpit. Truth never needs suppression; still less is it capable of contradiction. A complimentary representative from a Calvinistic denomination told our General Conference a few years ago that Calvinists preached like Arminians. If Arminianism is good for the pulpit, it is good for the creed, the catechism, the theologic treatise, the profession of faith; for the one ought to be the exponent of the other, and truth is sacrificed if there be disharmony.

So busy has Methodism been in preaching its saving truths, demonstrated as truths by their widespread saving efficacy, that we have had very little time to formulate them into a literature. Dr. Miley, who has shown by his footnotes and otherwise that he has surveyed the field, frankly confesses that our literature on this central theme of salvation is very meager. Methodism is rich in literature. We have our precious biographies, our sacred lyrics, our biblical comments, our systematic divinity, our homiletics; but anthropology and soteriology have not taken wide and specific literary form.

A new ecclesiastical era is upon us. What Amherst has been to Congregationalism and Princeton to Presbyterianism, Drew, Evanston, and Boston are about to be to Methodism. A book-making age has come to our Zion. Whether it will be best for the unity, simplicity, and effectiveness of our faith remains to be seen. This book of Dr. Miley's, at all events, is a great gain in the right direction. We hail it with pleasure.

It is natural for a teacher to write didactically. This excellent book is evidently prepared for didactic purposes. The didactic needs of the author in the lecture-room doubtless necessitated it, and the material is put in the form of a textbook, which will probably take its place in our theological seminaries and in the revised course of study for our traveling preachers.

Dr. Miley's cast of mind is logical, perhaps too severely so. Logic is shy of tropes and metaphors. Logic keeps the naked

thought in view; dressed in metaphor, it may mean too little or too much. In the work before him logic has cause for unadorned simplicity, severity, and directness. Nothing could take the place of it. But one cannot avoid the thought that a little ornamentation could with safety be occasionally indulged without peril to perspicuity and logical precision, and with manifest help to the average reader and student. Bald rock glints with mica and quartz. Frowning mountain peaks are decked with fern and ivy. Our Lord, the severest of logicians, abated no part of logical precision by parable and illustration. If our acute Drew professor had occasionally picked a flower by the way and indulged in an analogue, he might have made a book of less hard reading, and logic would not have been sacrificed to the graces of rhetoric.

Dr. Miley believes in short sentences. Manifestly he thinks each thought should be shut up to its own sentence. A thought has enough duality or plurality to be shut up in a sentence, as it were housekeeping in its own castle, without having the repulsiveness of a hermit. More than one thought, dual or plural in attribute, is often let into the homestead, at the expense of elegance, perspicuity, and effectiveness, on the principle that two families live in one house with less comfort than in two; but, without meaning to be hypercritical, it has seemed to me that in many cases the doctor might lengthen his sentences with happy effect, and with a gain in power.

The fact of Atonement is admitted by all who admit the Bible. Atonement is the fact of the Bible. Prophets before apostles testified the sufferings of Christ and the glory that should follow. A suffering Christ is meaningless except as he is an atoning Christ. God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. This is the central truth of Christianity. This is Christianity. Reconciliation involves atonement. Reconciliation is atonement. The word "atonement" occurs but once in the New Testament. "And not only so, but we also joy in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom we have now received the atonement." Rom. v, 11. The word is KaTaλhaуn. It is used four times. Twice it is translated "reconciliation," and once "reconciling." It is an old Saxon combination-at-one-ment: the means and act of being at one with one with whom we have been at variance.

Sin is alienating.

It alienates man from his fellow; it alienates man from God. "Your iniquities have separated between you and your God." Isa. lix, 2. The alienation is mutual. Not only does the sinner turn from God, but God turns from the sinner. Sin never can be regarded with complacency by a holy being, still less by one infinitely holy. "God is angry with the wicked every day." Psa. vii, 11. And the sinner turns with such malevolence from God that "the carnal mind," which man has apart from the renewing of the Spirit which makes him "spiritually minded," "is enmity against God." Rom. viii, 7. The Atonement is the means of ending this alienation. "God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." 2 Cor. V, 19. God loved his enemies, and in Christ looked upon them in compassion. God loved the unlovely, the hideous, the repulsive, and in Christ reached out in quest of the prodigal and the lost. And the Atonement is the means of ending human alienation from God. The ministry of reconciliation in Christ puts into operation influences divine, angelic, and human, by the highest motions of which our nature is capable, to induce us to be "reconciled to God."

Atonement reaches God-ward, not to make God placable; for the placability of God made the Atonement; but to remove all barriers in good and righteous government to the legitimate exercise of placability. Atonement reaches man-ward, to secure voluntary acceptance of the divine overture and all the blessings of reconciliation; for, as sin is voluntary alienation, the Atonement calls for a voluntary termination of it.

Our author fortifies impregnably the basal truth of the reality of the Atonement by what he calls "witnessing facts" and "witnessing terms;" and insists that a true theory of atonement should fit these facts and be in full harmony with these terms. As in any science, a true theory will be the outgrowth of the facts and an inductive generalization from the factors which the God of nature puts at our disposal in the revelation of his works; so in this science of redemption, a true theory will be the outgrowth of biblical facts and an induction from the inspired factors which the God of supernature puts at our disposal in the revelation of his word. Any theory is false if it is not true to all these facts and terms; a theory true to them all has highest proof of being true.

FOURTH SERIES, VOL. XXXII.—46

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