HKB
his feeble offspring. But the question has been considered and earnestly examined, and the discussion of it has elicited the most outspoken opinions as to the result of the investigation.
Rev. W. W. Patton, D. D. of Howard University, has recently spoken very definitely on this subject, although he acknowledges that it has not been a legitimate one to be decided upon by the theologians of his school. He affirms that the Divine reason like our own (we being made in the Divine image) includes the eternal, unchangeable, and imperative idea of right, the practical synonym of which is love,--love being that which always, everywhere, and in all beings, expresses the right or sums up duty. He reaches the conclusion that God chooses love as the rule of his activity, that when he creates rational sensitive beings, by that very fact he put himself voluntarily into a relation which calls upon him to act upon the principle of love, which gives them a right to expect that he will so act.
It is an answer to the question of Abraham, "Shall not the judge of all the earth do right?" and of Paul, "Is God unrighteous?" In agreement with this reasoning of Dr. Patton, is that of Rev. John Miller of Princeton, N. J., who just now affirms:--
"A deformed God is a great light gone out from any religion, and is the chief ally of infidelity. God is not to be worshipped because he is powerful, any more than Satan is; but because he is moral. If he wrongs me in bringing me into being, he is no sovereign to me."[60]
In the same strain comes this testimony from Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, of Andover, in a late number of the "North American Review:"--
"The Bible meets us squarely upon the deepest and the highest question which the finite intellect has the right to ask: What, having made us at all, is God's moral attitude toward us? When he thrust into space this quivering ball of pain and error, did he mean well enough by it to justify the deed? Profounder than all our philosophy, wiser than all our protest, comes the sublime and solitary answer: 'He so loved the world that He gave his only Son.' This magnificent reply, which theology has distorted out of its grand and simple proportions, to which science has refused its supreme reasonableness, the true human heart and the clear human head have accepted. The contortions of faith and the malice of doubt have almost equally united to shake the hold of this great re-assurance upon the world. The world will have it in spite of both. The world will have it, because it is the best it can get; and by all the iron laws of common sense it will keep the best till God or man can offer it something better."
Even so. Amen!
At the present time the orthodoxy of Andover Theological Institution is assuming new and strange aspects. During the recent discussions respecting the invitation to Dr. Newman Smyth to accept a professorship at the institution, this avowal on the part of the professors still in their places there is given to the public:--
"It cannot be denied that the doctrines of eternal punishment and of the judgment have lost their proper place in the teachings of the pulpit. That method alone can restore them to a reflective age which refuses to put into them more than our Saviour left in them, and which brings them into accord with the knowledge of divine truth which the spirit of Christ is ever developing in his Church. Christianity educates men to ever higher, broader, more truthful conceptions of God. The questionings of to-day in Christian hearts respecting the doctrine of eternal punishment are a consequence of the elevating and spiritualizing power of the Gospel. The Church should seek out positions that can be held. It should be in advance of its enemies."
This change, it is affirmed by the Andover professors,--