nion, in which, as members of the same body, they must stand to one another. From this it was easy to deduce the obligation which they were under on this point towards society at large, since all men as rational beings, created for the realization of the kingdom of God, might be considered members one of another, and language was in like manner desigued for the maintenance and exhibition of this more general relation; Ephes. iv. 25. And he had confessedly no scruple, when sufficient confidence was not felt towards him by all the persons concerned, and where it was of special importance to obtain undoubting confidence in his assertions, to make use of a form of asseveration which would be deemed equivalent to an oath.

As the ethical element predominates in the Epistle of James, so an anxiety for the exclusion of every appearance of charging the causation of sin upon God is very conspicuous, and an emphatic maintenance of the freedom of the will, whose self-determination is the necessary condition of all the operations of divine grace. Let no one excuse himself (is the apostle's doctrine) for yielding to evil, on the plea that he could not withstand its enticements, that a higher power, a fatality, a divine predestination hurried him into sin. Far be it from God to tempt any man to evil. As no evil can affect Him, the holy and blessed One, so he tempts no one to evil; but it is the indwelling sinful desire of every man by which he is seduced to evil. This also makes an opening for the temptations of Satan, yet even by his power no one can be forced to sin against his will; iv. 7. Thus the ground is taken away from every man for throwing off the blame of his sins by pleading the temptations proceeding either from God or Satan; since to the believer the ability is given, by his own higher moral nature (the image of God in his soul), and the guidance of the Divine Spirit, to withstand his sinful desires and the temptations of Satan; it must be his own guilt if he yield and allow himself to be carried away to the commission of sin. He has only to subordinate his own will to the will of God, and in communion with God to withstand the evil spirit, who will then flee from him; all temptation to evil will fail before a will that is in real earnest and devoted to God. Only let a man surrender himself to God by a steady determination of his will, and God's

aid will not be wanting; i. 13-16; iv. 7, 8. James, like Paul, presupposes two principles of action in the believer -the image of God restored through Christ, and the sinful desire which still cleaves to the soul, and renders it accessible to temptations from without. When he says that the desire bringeth forth sin, (i. 15,) it is not meant, that, the desire itself is something purely natural, or morally indifferent, but it is rather presupposed that the element in human nature, according to its actual condition, which, when a man does not withstand, but surrenders himself to it, gives birth to the sinful act, is in itself something sinful. But James limits himself, for the most part, to the outward manifestations of the moral life; he does not, like Paul in the Epistle to the Romans, go to the root of the opposition between good and evil in the depths of the human heart; yet he forms, even on this side, an important link in the complete develop ment of Christian doctrine. The manner in which he expresses himself respecting the free determination of the will in relation to a divine causation in evil and good, furnishes us with an important supplement to Paul's doctrinal method, where, (as in discussing the doctrine of election, predestination, and the unconditionality of the divine decrees,) owing to his peculiar character, and his practical or argumentative object, only one side of Christian truth is brought forward, and other aspects of it are put in the background. Hence, if we wish to form a doctrinal system from such single passages, not taken in connexion with the analogy of the whole New Testament doctrine, errors must arise, which we shall learn to avoid, by comparing the degrees of development and peculiar schemes of doctrine belonging to the several apostles which serve mutually to complete one another.'

In reference to all the topics discussed in this chapter, I wish to direct the attention of my readers to an essay by Dr. Charles From mann, now pastor of the Lutheran church at St. Petersburgh, in the Studien und Kritiken, 1830, part 1. It will be clear to the attentive reader, that in the representation given above, I have viewed the subject, not from the stand-point of a contracted dogmatism which would adjust all contradictions, but from that stand-point which unprejudiced historical investigation and genetic development enable me to occupy. But I cannot hope to secure myself against the suspicions of the prejudiced, who, of all persons, deem themselves the most free from prejudice.

CHAPTER IV.

THE DOCTRINE OF JOHN.

THIS apostle, compared with Paul, has one point in common with James, that, by his peculiar mental development, he was not adapted and disposed to that intellectual cast of thought which distinguished the dialectic Paul. But if in James the practical element predominated, in John we find the intuitive, though deeply imbued with the practical; he presents contemplative views of the fundamental relations of the spiritual life, rather than trains of thought, in which, as in Paul's writings, distinctions and contrasts are made with logical precision and minuteness. In reference also to the peculiar development of his Christian life, he had not been led like Paul to faith in the Redeemer through severe conflicts and opposition, nor like him at last attained peace after a violent crisis. He resembled James in having reached his Christian stand-point through a course of quiet development, but differed from him in this respect, that his higher life had not been first moulded to a peculiar form in Judaism and that he had not from such a stand-point been gradually brought to faith in Christ, and at the same time had modified his conceptions of Christianity by his former views; but from the first, the whole development of his higher life had proceeded from the personal observation of Christ and intercourse with him. As the consciousness of his own moral disunion was elicited by the contemplation of a perfect divinely-human life, in which the archetype of man was realized before his eyes, so by continuing to live in communion with this model of perfection, he gained power to overcome that disunion. Hence everything in his view turned on one simple contrast; -divine life in communion with the Redeemer,—death in estrangement from him. And as the whole of his piety was the result of his personal experience and contemplation of the Redeemer, all his views of religion were grounded on the life of Jesus, and might be considered as so many reflections of it. It was this which gave them a vital unity, so that it was hardly possible to distinguish them into the practical and

theoretical. This is shown in those pregnant words by which his style is marked,—Life, Light, and Truth; and their opposites-Death, Darkness, and a Lie. As in communion with God, the original fountain of life, which can be obtained only through his self-revelation in the Logos, the spirit of man finds its true life,-as when in this true life, the consciousness of the spirit develops itself, the life becomes the light of the spirit, and the spirit lives in the truth as its vital principle; so by the separation of the spirit from its original, by the disjunction of the knowledge of man's self ind of the world, from the knowledge of God, death, misery, darkness and falsehood are the result. The human spirit created after the image of the divine Logos, must be enlightened by communion with this divine fountain of life; a life in God, divine life as the true life of the spirit, is naturally accompanied by the true light of knowledge. But since man by the direction of his will has turned himself to the undivine, he has in so doing estranged himself from the source of his true light and life, and is no longer in a state susceptible of its reception. The divine Logos never ceases, indeed, to manifest himself to the souls of men, as Paul declares, that in God they live and move and are; his light shines in the darkness of the human race, who have turned away from God; and from its illumination emanated all the goodness and truth that preceded the personal appearance of the Logos; but this revelation was opposed by an impenetrable intensity of darkness.1 Hence

I cannot entirely agree with the interpretation proposed by Frommann, in his excellent work on the doctrinal views of John; Leipzig, 1839, p. 249;-that John, in the first clause of i. 5, depicts the relation of human nature in its original state to the revelation of the divine Logos, and that, in the second part of this verse, kai okoría, he speaks of that relation since the Fall. According to this, the σKoría in the first clause, to use the language of the schoolmen, would describe the state of man on the stand-point of pura naturalia as informis negative, and from the revelation of the Logos the gratia informans must proceed, which man required for the perfection of his spiritual nature. But in John, we never find the representation of such a mere negative relation of the human spirit to the Logos, as existing apart from communion with him, and possessing a susceptibility not yet satisfied. "Darkness" always denotes, in his phraseology, an actual opposition against the divine light of the Logos, a predominance of the undivine. It is contrary to the style of his conceptions, that he should suppose the spirit of man, formed after the image of the Logos, to be

the Logos himself must break through the separating limits -bring himself nigh to man estranged from God-reveal and communicate himself as the divine fountain of life in the form of an assumed humanity, a visible human life serving as a medium for the manifestation of the divine life which is in him, and for bringing men to a participation of it. John i. 7 —14.

Satan appears as the summit and representative of this self-seeking tendency dissevered from connexion with God, and hence given over to darkness and falsehood; John viii. 44. He stands not in the truth;' with the disin its original state otherwise than in communion with that divine source of life and light. Verse 4 relates to what the Logos was or ought to be, according to his essential nature, to mankind; and in verse 5, John passes on to the state of mankind estranged from God by the misdirection of their will.

! Frommann maintains, in his work before quoted, p. 332, that Satan, according to John's views, is no other than "the seductive spirit of the world conceived of in concrete personality;" the principle of evil in the world hypostasized; and that the idea of a fallen Intelligence is altogether foreign to this apostle. But if this were so, we must explain his language in one of three ways. Either he intentionally chose the form of such a personification; or the prevalent religious conceptions, which had proceeded from an incorporation of the idea of evil, had taken possession of his mind without his making it a subject of special reflection (which is Scheiermacher's view); or he really considered Satan as an absolutely evil being who had existed from eternity. There appears nothing to favour the first supposition; with respect to the second, this doctrine is so closely interwoven with the whole system of John's theology, that we cannot help believing that he had been compelled to reflect on the meaning of this representation, and to form a definite idea respecting the nature of Satan and his relation to God. But the admission of an absolute Dualism is utterly irreconcilable with John's theism. There remains then no other alternative but the supposition that he considered Satan as the Intelligence who first apostatized from God. The passage in John viii. 44 contains nothing contradictory to it. The persons whom Christ there declares to resemble Satan in their dispositions, he could not intend to describe as absolutely evil by nature, but as those who, by the repeated suppression of their nature derived from God, had attained this unsusceptibility for truth and goodness, this habitual perverseness. Frommann says, p. 335, that the fall of a good angel presupposes an original evil principle operating upon him, and that, in order to explain the existence of Satan, we are again driven to the assumption of another Satan. But this objection is obviated by what we have before remarked respecting the necessary inexplicability of the origin of sin, founded in the very idea of evil. We must again maintain what we have asserted against all attempts to find an absolute Dualism in John. The doctrine of a fallen spirit from whom all evil proceeds, we are justified in presuming