Contemporary Literature [pp. 175-196]

1874.]
CONTEMPORARY ULITERATURE.
177T
delivering up of the kingdom to the Father" as meaning, that the "union.
of Deity and Huumzanity in the fie.son of 7esus Christ becomes dissolved,
and the human alone, as the Son, miraculously created by God in the womb
of the virgin, hence onward with no divinity, is, like all created personalities,
subject to God;" that "the Word made flesh, but now disunited with humanity, takes the glory which he had with the Father before the world was.,
and the Godhead has tri-personality in intrinsic unity as before the Incarnation;" while yet "the purely human Son of God must still sustain peculiar
relations to the glorified church and the universal spirit-world" (pp. 357-8).
This seems to us to involve the assumption that there were two personalities
in the Incarnate Logos the divine and the human; and this seems hardly
consistent with the doctrine of the unity of Christ's person laid down, pp..
208-9, that "the personality incarnated in the Redeemer is the second,
known as Logos, or Word."
Our limits will not allow a detailed criticism of the special doctrinal statements, which are clearly and forcibly put, sometimes opening up new points
of view and challenging discussion. Though the author is not tied down to
any one type, yet for the most part he shows a strong disposition to recognize what is true in the conflicting schools of opinion. While advocating a
high doctrine as to the liberty of the will, he concedes that by sin it has lapsed
into a state of moral impotence. In regeneration the Spirit acts directly on
the soul; and though man may resist, "the effectual calling induces a complying will," and the Spirit "precedes and tends to right action by man."
Upon the subject of the temptation and fall, he holds that all sin entered into
the universe in connection with the apostasy of our first parents: "the first
angelic sin was the devil's temptation, and the first human sin was the
woman's listening and consenting" (p. 36). The Biblical representation
rather favors, we think, the current view, that the angelic apostasy preceded
the human; nor do we see that anything is really gained, on the score of
theory or reason, by the change.
In respect to the effects of the fall, it is taught, that after his fall Adam
ceased to act as the public head of the race; that a fallen humanity will perpetuate depravity through the race; while "every descendant of Adam has
his own trial and fixes his own disposition in his own consent to carnal servitude" (p. 56). The "native sense-pravity is vitimn not fieccatu;n;" "the
vitium is natural, the peccatum is moral and personal;" yet "Adam's posterity
take naturally and necessarily Adam's vitiated sensiblility, and under this
comes the certain voluntary disposing of the Spirit in subjection to the flesh"
(p. 58). Dr. H. uses the word "sin" in a strictly personal and voluntary
sense, which is hardly the sense of the older theology; and he resolves native
depravity into a more strictly physical condition than the facts seem to warrant. In the same way he contends that the atonement "was not in any way
of legal justice;"' that penal justice here takes an equivalent, yet an equivalent
by which the law is magnified; and that "the Incarnation has its equivalent
forpiety as well as penalty." In these statements it is apparent, that "legal
penalty" is used only in strict relation to personal guilt and desert, which of