and good for all his creatures, so far as possible in accordance with the principles and laws of reason.

Righteousness, and benevolence or good-will, are both included in love; they are simply two aspects of it. It is common for theologians and preachers to speak of righteousness as distinct and excluded from love; they habitually put God's righteousness into antithesis, and even antagonism, to his love. But righteousness is love in one of its aspects. It is love required by the eternal law and freely exercised in willing obedience to it. And God's righteousness, in enforcing the law throughout the universe by the punishment of transgressors, is love, maintaining and enforcing the law which requires love. Therefore love is universal good-will regulated in its exercise by righteousness.

In God's love " mercy and truth are met together; righteousness and peace have kissed each other" (Psalm lxxxv. 10). Righteousness, even in maintaining and enforcing the law by punishment, is exercised in an atmosphere of benevolence. Christ weeping over Jerusalem, yet not averting the punishment which by persisting in their wickedness its inhabitants brought on themselves, is the true exponent to us of the righteousness of God in punishing transgressors. And benevolence is in harmony with righteousness, because perfection and good are possible in this universe only in accordance with the principles and laws of reason which are the constitution of the universe. A good-will which seeks to secure to men happiness any other wise than in conformity with eternal truth and law is a mistaken benevolence which defeats itself and brings on its object evil instead of good; and equally the person exercising this false good-will brings evil and not good upon himself. The universe is constituted according to law. Therefore there is no place and no time in all the universe in which a person can be blessed even for an instant in a life of selfishness. Blessedness is possible only in a life of love to God and man. If this could be otherwise, the constitution of the universe would be broken up and the universe resolved into chaos.

Love in these two aspects is like electricity. In its ordinary action, coursing silently through all nature, it brings only blessing. But when interrupted, it smites in the thunderbolt. And its power to bless depends on its capacity thus to smite. Righteousness and good-will are in harmony, like light and heat. They

give light to all eyes and quicken and sustain all life and growth; but when accumulated they dazzle to blindness and consume with fire. And their power to bless depends on their power to dazzle and consume. When "God is a consuming fire," it

is his love which is the burning fire.

These two aspects of love, righteousness and benevolence, expressed in acts of trust and service, are the true basis for the complete classification of duties or virtues in ethical philosophy.

There is now a marked trend of thought to present the Fatherhood of God as the name comprehending all his moral attributes, and to maintain that the revelation that God is our Father is the great and distinctive revelation of Christianity. But this is not accordant with the Bible. The name that is above every name is not God our Father, but God in Christ our Redeemer (Phil. ii. 9; Eph. i. 21). And God was revealed as our Father in the Old Testament, and his claims as such urged with tenderness and eloquence. It is but one of many representations of God by which in various aspects he is revealed in the Bible: father, mother, husband, shepherd, king, judge, lawgiver. Even our Aryan ancestors in heathenism knew God as father, as all-father, and as heaven-father. The designation of father was applied to the gods by the Greeks and Romans. Epictetus said, God is ever the father of men. It is not, therefore, peculiar to Christianity. This type of thought is sometimes presented as throwing into the background, or even setting aside, the righteousness and law of God. It is true that the idea of God, our Father, is not incompatible with the idea of law; for a father exercises authority over his family. Some of those who emphasize the fatherhood of God may have no thought of depreciating his righteousness and law, but only of presenting the truth that the righteousness of God is always exercised in an atmosphere of benevolence. God always. exercises good-will to all his creatures. He can exercise malevolence or malignity toward none. But the tendency to depreciate God's righteousness and law is sometimes obtrusive. President Bascom says: "The ease with which the mind dwarfs a truth as yet too large for it, is seen in the cunning mechanism of law which theology has built up between man and God, a mechanism so difficult of management that neither man nor God, nor both conjointly, can handle it without terrible loss." But law is 1 The Words of Christ, p. 49.

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eternal and unchangeable in God, the absolute Reason; it is the constitution of the universe, whereby alone it is possible for man to have a scientific knowledge of it, possible that there should be a moral or spiritual system, or any fundamental distinction of right and wrong, or any reality in the supreme and universal law of love. The law itself to all rational beings is the law of love; it is the law of reason which is the constitution of the universe. How, then, is law a mechanism built up by theologians between man and God? And what but disaster to every interest of morals and religion can come from any teaching which disparages or obscures the righteousness and law of God? Such teaching contradicts alike the Holy Scriptures, and the principles of reason which are the foundation of physical science, of speculative and ethical philosophy, and of all knowledge and religious worship of the true God. It is pre-eminently contrary to scientific thought, which finds the whole universe under law. It is true now, as it was in the days of Richard Hooker: "Of law there can be no less acknowledged than that her seat is the bosom of God, her voice the harmony of the world; all things in heaven and earth do her homage, the very least as feeling her care, and the greatest as not exempted from her power; both angels and men, and creatures of what condition soever, though each in different sort and manner, yet all with uniform consent, admiring her as the mother of their peace and joy." 1

God's righteousness, therefore, is the harmony of his will with his eternal reason in his own free and never-changing choice. His righteousness is essential in his love. A good-will that is lawless must bring a curse and not a blessing. And the law itself, which is asserted, maintained, and enforced by all the authority and power of God as inviolable, is the law of universal love. Here we see the atoning significance of God's action in Christ redeeming men from sin. Therein he reveals himself acting under human limitations and conditions in good-will even to sinners to save them from sin. At the same time he reveals himself also acting in obedience to the law of love, to the utmost extent possible under human limitations and conditions, even unto death. Thus he reveals his righteousness not less than his benevolence, controlling and regulating his benevolence in all its exercise. Therein he asserts, vindicates, and maintains the supremacy,

1 Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. i. chap. xvi. 8.

immutability, and inviolable authority of the law of love in the redemption of men from sin, and in justifying those who accept his grace and return to conformity with the law in the life of love. This is the atoning significance of his redemptive action in Christ reconciling the world unto himself. But in all his action in his moral government of rational persons, and in constituting and evolving the universe, he reveals his good-will regulated by righteousness in strict accordance with the eternal law as really as in redeeming man from sin. Therefore the atoning significance of God's action in Christ redeeming men from sin pertains simply to a peculiar revelation and exercise of God's good-will, regulated in its exercise by righteousness in strict accordance with the eternal principles and laws of reason, which is the essence of God's moral character as love and is exercised and revealed in all his moral government and in all his action creating and evolving the universe.

THIS attribute of God corresponds to man's susceptibility to rational motives and emotions, or the capacity of spiritual feeling. 1. This is an essential attribute of personal spirit, and not peculiar to the finite personality of man. It is, therefore, consistent with the absoluteness of God.

We attribute to God as personal only those powers and capacities which are of the essence of personal spirit. Some deny that personality is compatible with the absoluteness of God, because they erroneously assume that finiteness is of the essence of personality. But the limitations of man are not of the essence of personality; they are merely incidental to the personality of man as a finite being.1

This attribute, commonly called the capacity of feeling, is of the essence of self-conscious life. We have more difficulty in adjusting our thought to the idea of God as susceptible of feeling, than to the conception of him as reason and free will. But this susceptibility does not involve an inadmissible anthropomorphism any more than do reason and will. It is essential in the idea of spirit as living and self-conscious. A being without capacity of feeling or susceptibility of motives and emotions would rest in entire indifference to everything. It would have no motive to If it should create anything, it would be totally indifferent to the creation and to its own action in creating it. It would have no interest in its creatures, no motive to action, no end to be attained by action. It would be the God of Epicurus, not active in the universe, totally indifferent to everything in it. Right character and wrong, happiness and misery, would be alike to it. Plainly such a being cannot be God, the absolute Spirit. There1 See "The Self-Revelation of God," pp. 210-216, 334-339.

create.