a constant discipline of the inhuman passions. After the empire had vanished, for long centuries there was no great improvement. The barbarism of the Frankish period may be seen at full length in the pages of Gregory of Tours. The Carling empire was an oppressive tyranny; the Feudal Age, one of lawless rapine on the part of the strong, and cowering anguish on the part of the weak. It was in this evil time that the Christian Theology was evolved, commencing with the great doctrines defined by the Fathers, and afterwards reduced to a logical system by the scholastics, especially by St. Thomas, the Angel of the schools.

With such visible rulers of the world before them, it is no wonder that men formed very dark and cruel notions of the invisible ruler, who disposed of all things. Cruelty, injustice, arbitrary power, were too familiar to be shocking, too constant to be supposed accidental or transitory. The real world before their eyes was taken as a dim pattern and foreshadowing of the ideal world beyond the grave. God was an Almighty Emperor, a transcendental Diocletian or Constantine, doing as he list with his own. His edicts ran through all space and time, his punishments were eternal, and whatever he did his justice must not be questioned. And thus those words came to be written, "Therefore hath he mercy

on whom he will have mercy, and whom he will he hardeneth. Thou wilt say then unto me, Why doth he yet find fault? For who hath resisted his will? Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour?" which, probably, have added more to human misery than any other utterances made by man. St. Paul's teaching fell on a fertile soil. For some fifteen hundred years the human conscience was not shocked by it. Since the rise of the Arminian theology there has been a gradual and growing revulsion of feeling, and now it is said. plainly that the "potter has no right to be angry with his pots. If he wanted them different he should have made them different." The pretensions of "an omnipotent devil desiring to be complimented" as all-merciful, when he is exerting the most fiendish cruelty, are no longer admitted in abashed silence. But if the great difficulty of hell and eternal punishments were happily surmounted, there remain, in the whole Christian scheme of redemption, moral iniquities and obliquities which no good man of the present day, whatever his religion or theology,

* Romans ix. 18-21.

would willingly be guilty of himself. The notion that God wanted to be propitiated by the death of the innocent Christ, is a thoroughly base and barbarous one; natural enough in rude ages, when costly sacrifice was a recognized mode of appeasing angry deities, but repellent now. Hardly the most depraved man, in his right mind, would accept the vicarious punishment of one who had not offended him, in lieu of one who had. A high-minded man would endure almost anything rather than countenance such an enormity. The idea is barbarous, well worthy of Chinese conceptions of justice, content if the executioner gets a subject to operate on, but indifferent whether it be the culprit or not. Yet this cruel and barbarous notion is the centre of the Christian religion; at least, it has not yet been discovered to be unscriptural, I believe. Again, Satan may well give latitudinarian theologians trouble in this world as well as in the next. When they have explained away his eternal function of tormenting souls in hell, they will have to extenuate his strange temporal avocations on earth, and to explain how they can be permitted by a merciful God. A fallen angel of vast skill, subtlety, and guile, is allowed to tempt men and women, even young children, to commit sin, to allure them away from Christ, to jeopardize

their hopes of Paradise. And God, who permits this, is supposed to hate sin. If he had wished sin to abound, what could he have done more than to allow the arch-fiend, aided by legions of minor devils, to go about like a roaring lion seeking whom he may devour, with constant access to men, nay, to their most inward minds, whispering evil thoughts, stimulating criminal passions, and, however often driven away by holy prayer, ever renewing his assaults on poor souls, up to the last moment of mortal agony, when he oftener succeeds than fails in carrying them off to his place of torment. Christ's petition, "Lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one," has never been heard, or it has not been granted. We are always being led into temptation; we are never delivered from the evil one on this side of the gates of death. A supernatural being who wrecked man's felicity in Paradise, and brought sin and death into the world, is appointed to the office of tempting men at all times, in all places, throughout life; he is able to enter into the minds of his victims and pervert their souls, in society and in solitude, in sleep, and even in prayer, capable of assuming all disguises, even to appearing as an angel of light. A human seducer, however artful and vile, is restricted as to times and opportunities in corrupting the innocent. Satan has

constant and invisible access. Now, a parent or guardian who allowed children under his charge to associate with bad characters, would be justly condemned as wanting in a sense of duty and humanity. But God permits something infinitely worse, by the whole difference between an immortal evil spirit and the most profligate of earthly tempters. Let any human father try and imagine the anguish with which he would see his innocent, inexperienced daughter walking arm-in-arm with an accomplished and fascinating seducer. Would not his instantaneous step be to put an end to such corrupting intercourse? Would not public opinion largely condone violent measures on his part, if it should appear that the designs of the villain had been crowned with a calamitous success? Yet the heavenly father is supposed to see this and far worse every hour and minute of the day; to see the young, the weak, the unprotected, assailed by a supernatural tempter, his own creature, his rebel angel, wholly evil and malignant; and to see him succeed in his attempt to ruin souls. And then the betrayed, poor human victim, not the fiend, is punished. The fiend, indeed, is punished, but not for these acts against humanity. The righteous God promptly avenged insubordination and disrespect to himself. But ever since man's creation Satan has had compensations. His do