• BOOKS.

A BARRISTER ON THE DOCTRINE OF ELECTEON.* Tins, though written by no professional theologian, but the work of a Chancery barrister, is one of the most closely reasoned theological essays, and, what is of much more importance, one reasoned on the most comprehensive pretnisses, that we have met with for many years. Mr. Fry, we need scarcely say, writes in opposition to the Calvinistic doctrine of election and predestina- tion. But if that ws.re all, we should take little interest in his essay, because we doubt whether the age when a Calvinistic creed is possible for thoroughly educated men, certainly when it is possible for thoroughly educated men to embrace a Calvinistic creed from the heart of a fresh conviction, is not in fact passed away. Even those who can refer such a question absolutely to the external authority of Scripture, who do not rather hold that it is predetermined by that universal revelation to the conscience of man which is assumed as the basis and condition of historical revelation, can feel but little difficulty in the matter if they look at Scripture with that wider and more comprehensive criticism, which regards the general drift and scope of the whole as far more authoritative and decisive than a few strong words dropped here and there on a special subject. And even these few em- barrassing texts cau only, as Mr. Fry has shown, when properly connected with their context, yield one meaning,—a meaning in perfect accordance with the natural interpretation of the consistent tenor of revelation. There are more, however, who with ourselves hold that a revelation would be self.contradictory which professed to teach that an arbitrary will, even if called God's, could overrule all those principles of righteousness which we know (if we know anything) to he divine,—and to whom therefore the only effect of proving (if it could be proved, which it cannot, since exactly the reverse is true) that the Calvinistic doctrine does really run through the tissue of revelation, would be to convince them that that revelation does not reveal the divine righteousness, but some other inferior, imperfect, and arbitrary will.

Both these truths,—the critical truth that the Bible is not Cal- vinistic but strongly anti-Calvinistic, and the moral truth that, if it were, it must lose its divine authority over us,—seem now so universally accepted by thinking critics and thinking moralists, that did Mr. Fry's essay only establish them or either of them afresh, we should feel its interest to be rather antiquated. In fact, however, it does much more than this. It not only shows us how the Calvinistic misunderstanding of Scriptures sprang up, but discusses with very considerable subtlety and ability the relation of Calvinism to the present rapid encroachments of nature and physical law or necessity on the world of moral freedom.

Mr. Fry's general account of tile doctrines of predestination and election appears to be this,—that they are taught both in the Old Testament and the New as applying to what we may call the spiritual influences and circumstances which determine on the whole the faith and lot of large communities, not to the in- dividual exercises of free choice which determine the moral worth or guilt of individual souls. If we understand hini aright, he distinguishes even in the strictly spiritual sphere between the influences and tendencies which God provides, so as to mould the destiny of societies and discipline them into a particular mood of faith or moral custom, and the use made of that faith and that custom within the narrow sphere of voluntary liberty. For example, he would say that the Providence of God took the Jews from Egypt into the desert, moulded them there by a series of new revelatioas and new institutions; and in this way entirely altered the general creed of the people, that is, the moral and spiritual scenery within which they lived,—but that the Pro- vidence of God did not provide bow individual Jews should use that discipline, did not will, for instance, that Moses should be so far elated by his position of leader as to forget for a moment that he was the mere servant of God, or that Korali should rise in insurrection against him. So we suppose Mr. Fry would say that for every person now existing, the spiritual faith into which he is born,—Idolatry, Mahometauism, Hindooism, Roman Catholic or Protestant Christianity,—is in some sense predestined for him at first by God,and that lie is responsible only for the use lie makes of that faith within the narrow limits to which the, force of free self- discipline extends. In the same way he makes the prophetic exposition of the right of the Potter to mould one vessel to honour,

• The 11,:arine of Elcction. All BUSY. By &loath Fry. Low:15u : Bell and B.ddy. 'cellist; I hate en-e,niuied tv earahl.

another to dishonour, extend only to the external spit Rued lot, if we may be allowed the expression, of Jew and Gentils—not to the dishonourable use which may be made by the individual of the more honourable destiny, nor to tho honourable use which may be made by the individual of' the inure dishonourable destiny. And in the same way he interprets the well-known argument of St. Paul, in the epistle to the Romans, on which the Calvinistic tenets are grounded, not at all in reference to any internal moral necessity by which men may he supposed to work out or fail in working out their own salvation, but in rela- tion to the general destiny by which God had pre-ordained that the Jewish Church should be widened into the Christian Church, and the Gentiles summoned within its pale. In other words, when St. Paul talked of predestination and election, lie was speaking of such predestination and such election as made Abraham, and Abraham's fain ily, and the nation which sprang out of it, worshippers of one personal God, which selected Jacob rather than Esau, for no personal merit of his, to continue the line of the hereditary faith in its purest form, and which in the last days had called St. Paul himself from amongst persecutors to preach the Gospel of Christ,—such predestination, in short, and such election as is the inevitable result of spiritual circumstances

applied in sufficient force to the temperaments fitted to receive ,/ I them, but not such predestination and election as overpowers in 1

any sense the limited freedom of the will within these circum- • stances, not such as could make a saint of Judas Iscariot without his concurrence, or even rob St. Paul of the fear that he may yet, in spite of all these spiritual circumstances in his favour, become a "castaway." Election, Mr. Fry teaches us, was simply a call by God to the true fait's—so powerful, and so certain in its action on

the natures to which it was addressed, that many might yield to it, and the majority of those so called were morally certain to yield, whose use of that faith, after they had attained it, was left absolutely to their own moral freedom. How the Church in later

days came to apply the terms election and predestination,—origi- nally meaning only election and predestination to a particular spiritual lot (as we might say that most living Englishmen are now elected and predestined to a Protestant Christian faith, and most Turks to a Mahometan faith) how this came to be confused with election and predestination to a particular moral and spiri- tual use and result of that lot, he tells us very clearly in the following admirable passage :—

"The change which had passed over the visible Church between the days of St. Paul and St. Augustine had, I cannot doubt, rendered the apprehension of the original doctrine comparatively difficult, and a departure from it comparatively easy. The Christians to whom St. Paul wrote at Rome or at Corinth were outwardly and visibly a selected few out of the great mass of the circumjacent heathen ; the fact that these Churches were elected to vast privileges was one which was indubitable and visible to every one who believed that the Gospel of Christ was a privilege to those who received it. But as Christianity spread, this select- ness of the Christian Churches disappeared, and in the days of Augustine Christianity had long been the religion of a decaying and dissolute State, and included the great mass of mankind,—the worldly and profligate, no less than the spiritual and holy. Thus that outward and visible fact of election, as it existed in the days of the Apostles, had long disappeared; and thus the thought would naturally suggest itself, that the outward Church, as it then existed, could not in its entirety be called elect ; a new sense was therefore sought for the term, and the selection now thought of was, not out of the world, but out of the Church itself ; and its end, therefore, could no longer be deemed to be the admission into the privileges of that Church, but into something else ; and what could that be but everlasting life itself ?"'"

Mr. Fry does not enter so much as we wish he had done into the sources of the great fascination which the Calvinistic doctrine has exercised over some of the noblest of Christian minds from the time of St. Augustine to the Reformation. If you look only at the positive side of the doctrine, the most masculine and the most pious men have frequently found a deep peace in the belief that their own greatest efforts are not really efforts at all, but the natural fruit of a divine necessity,—that they can neither fail nor succeed so long as they obey implicitly the highest voice within them, but can only transmit the energies and register the decrees of a diviner might and wisdom. Again, even the negative side of the doctrine, that which regards the falsities and devilries of this world as being swept away with little pity into a kind of limbo of defeated impotences, has its attraction for strong intellects too. No doubt this is the sort of strength which Mr. Carlyle, for example, still attributes wistfully to Calvinism, and which he

tries to translate into his own peculiar dialect alien he appeals to " the infinitudes " to sweep away some sham, or to re-establish seine coherent order in it world of sliallo v cap' ice. In such len- • A p 'maga quoted by Mr. Faber. 1% .19I. fnan the ....Tiler Ithmtt sre the Pseudo. Alan, ow, in which he makes to., ith.d4 nrC rte •ti in, cm taw int tho Chun eit puma- litie■C y, the ta.lwr oat pernwiell I. I 4.1 of the °Iteration of the train of guage he is but striving after his own eccentric method to exhibit the regenerators of human society as tools of a divine necessity, and the obstructions of those regenerators as certain to be crushed beneath the wheels of divine force and necessary law. No doubt there is a very great fascination in a mode of looking at things which almost obliterates the human instrtunent in the grandeur of the inevitable purpose ; and which treats the impediments to that purpose only as so many foils to set off the ease with which they succumb to the greatness, the swiftness, the sureness of that purpose. Calvinism is but the personal and Christian way of merging the individual in the grandeur of a universal destiny. Damnation is the religious equivalent for that ruin which comes upon everything that rashly tries to stop the wheels of a beneficent Fate. We can see the intellectual fascination in such a mode of faith, and we can see also the moral fascination that there must be in a system which, almost as completely as Buddhism, merges theindividuality of good men in the great process of the eternal decrees.

One of the most subtle parts of this book is the discussion of the argument for a divine necessity derived from the assump- tion of the divine foreknowledge. Mr. Fry evidently rests his own answer to this argument chiefly on the theory that with God there is no such thing as " time," and that He knows things as they are directly, whether we call them past, present, or future,— not through those chains of causation by which alone man can reach the future from the standing-point of the present. Mr. Fry believes that "time "is a sort of fiction of the human con- sciousness, and that God knows, for instance, what I shall be years hence (as we call it) just as He knows what I am to-day, or was years ago, by direct apprehension. He uses the following poetical illustration of this very difficult line of argument :—

"Prediction is a word which may, and does, rightly express our human apprehension of some of God's utterances to man; but in Himself the Word of God is eternal with the Father, and to Him I dare attribute, not time, but an unchanging eternity ; and so of all God's other manifestations to man, we must remember that these are always conditioned by the narrowness of our capacity to receive, and so seem to us to bear about them the attributes of that time in which we are ourselves dwelling.

"Let us for a moment suppose a man who had never from his birth come out into the light of day, journeying on through a long and dark gallery, lighted only by the taper he bore in his hand, but that here and there at long intervals crevices in the wall of the chamber let in broken rays of the glorious daylight without ; this man might well take up the conceit that the sun had, like his own little taper, been moving its place from crack to crack, travelling along as he travelled along,—he might well be pardoned if from such successive glimpses he gained no conception of the sun, with whose glory, be it where it may, the whole heavens are overflowed. And if we, in our own darkness, attribute motion in time to the Almighty, do we not act like such amen attributing change in space to the sun?"

This is finely put, but we suspect this metaphysical Kellam arti- fice for defeating the necessarian doctrine is neither needful nor sound. If it be possible at all that there is no such thing as time, then it must follow also that there is no such thing as change ; if what I was, what I am, what I shall become, are all equally present to God, and by Him identified as the same essential reality, then there is no such thing as progress, and all that was ever evil or good in me, all that was, or is, or shall be evil or good in me, must be fused together in the eternal view of my personality. If time is a delusion, then littoral change is a de- lusion too, and I must be deceiving myself when I conceive that I am not what I was, and that I shall be more than I am. To push to its proper conclusion Mr. Fry's illustration of the man walking in the dark gallery from gleam to gleam of light, not only must it be sunlight from the same stationary sun which enters at each slit in the wall, but the same " I " must really be ever standing at every slit, not passing (which implies change and time) from one to the other. If there is no time, there is no motion, physical or mental. The world becomes a vast pro- blem in eternal statics, and all dynamics a dream. This is not only inconceivable, but if conceivable it suggests much worse difficulties, than it solves. To vindicate the liberty of man, that is, the power to change himself, by denying the reality of all change, is to strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.

The true answer to the argument that foreknowledge in God implies a necessity over man is one which Mr. Fry implies at least elsewhere, namely, that if God's omniscience is inconsistent with our liberty, it is not more so than His omnipotence. If He willingly limits His own omnipotence to leave us a small area for personal freedom, there is no reason why He should not (if it be needful) accept the consequent limit on' His own omniscience for the same divine purpose. It would not in the least limit His Providence, which would be even greater and grander if it were to be, conceived as stretching into the Infinite future over every possible alternative left to human freedom, than if it were supposed that every alter- native chosen is specifically known from all eternity. If God's Providence provides against every divergent line of action open to man's freedom, it is certainly not less divine or less infinite, than if it provide for one such defined line of action alone as the only possible. Of course it may well be that the apparent contradiction between freedom and fore- knowledge is only apparent. The subject is beyond us. But the fact of our liberty is not beyond us. So far as that extends, that constitutes a voluntary limitation by God of His own omnipotence ; and it is idle to suppose that He who has thus voluntarily surrendered to our wills a minute portion of His own infinite Power should hesitate at a necessai7 consequence of that gift, if it be essential to it, by surrendering such portion of His own infinite power to know, as may be in- consistent with our real freedom.. It has been revealed to us that He "besets us behind and before," and that neither darkness nor light hides from Him. But it is also revealed to us that we possess a real (not a fantastic) freedom, and that is a far more certain fact for us than any limitation put upon it as a mere inference from the divine foreknowledge. Grant it true that we may do either right or wrong, and that the choice is absolutely with us ; we know that whichever we do God will still be before- hand with us, "besetting U3 before ;" but supposing it to be necessary to that free choice (which most likely it is not) that God should provide against both alternatives as equally pos- sible, we cannot for a moment doubt that He who abated some- thing from His Almighty Will in order to bestow on us a genuine freedom, would at the same time willingly abate something of His infinite knowledge for the same holy purpose. We cannot hold that it is essential; but were it essential, true piety would make no more difficulty in accepting it than in accepting, as it already does, a real and voluntary abatement of the absolute omnipotence of God.

Here we must leave this thoughtful and almost exhaustive essay, only observing that the answer (on p. 167) to the argument from analogy in favour of the necessarian philosophy, is one of the most satisfactory and felicitous portions of the book. The favourite form, says Mr. Fry, of the necessarian argument in the present day is to dwell on the evidences of inevitable law and unchangeable order in the world beneath us, bringing our illus- trations into closer and closer neighbourhood to the soul of man, till at last the wearied mind surrenders at discretion, not daring to exempt itself from so wide and close an induction. "It is," says Mr. Fry, "as if a man should see a train in motion," and seeing carriage after carriage, truck after truck, in long succession, that do not move themselves, but are attached one to the other, were to infer the same of the engine and deny it to be a locomo- tive; or as if, "walking over a plantation and finding that all the people are slaves, I should deny that there could be anywhere a master." That is the simplest of all answers to the one argument for what is called "philosophical necessity," which really im- presses most the modern imagination. The answer we think will impress it equally.