stitute character and give it stability, and are the proximate, determining cause why our voluntary exercises and conscious states are what they are. This is what the Bible calls the heart, which has the same relation to all our acts that the nature of a tree, as good or bad, has to the character of its fruit. A good tree is known to be good if its fruit be good. But the goodness of the fruit does not constitute or determine the goodness of the tree, but the reverse. In like manner, it is not good acts which make the man good ; the goodness of the man determines the char- acter of his acts.
It is a New Life. 5. While denying that regeneration is a change either in the essence or acts of the soul, evangelical Christians declare it to be, in the language of Scripture, " a quickening," a faoiroitiZv, a com- munication of a new principle of life. It is hard, perhaps impos- sible, to define what life is. Yet every man is familiar with its manifestations. He sees and knows the difference between death and life, between a dead and living plant or animal. And, there- fore, when the Bible tells us that in regeneration God imparts a new form of life to the soul, the language is as intelligible as human language can be in relation to such a subject. We know that when a man is dead as to the body he neither sees, feels, nor acts. The objects adapted to impress the senses of the living make no impression upon him. They awaken no corresponding feeling, and they call forth no activity. The dead are insensible and powerless. When the Scriptures declare that men are spir- itually dead they do not deny to them physical, intellectual, social, or moral life. They admit that the objects of sense, the truths of reason, our social relations and moral obligations, are more or less adequately apprehended ; these do not fail to awaken feeling and to excite to action. But there is a higher class of objects than these, what the Bible calls " The things of God," " The things of the Spirit," " The things pertaining to salva- tion." These things, although intellectually apprehended as presented to our cognitive faculties, are not spiritually discerned by the unrenewed man. A beautiful object in nature or art may- be duly apprehended as an object of vision by an uncultivated man, who has no perception of its assthetic excellence, and no corresponding feeling of delight in its contemplation. So it is with the unrenewed man. He may have an intellectual knowl- edge of the facts and doctrines of the Bible, but no spiritual dis- cernment of their excellence, and no delight in them. The same
84 PART m. Ch. XV.— REGENERATION.
Christ, as portrayed in the Scriptures, is to one man without form or comeliness that we should desire Him ; to another He is the chief among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely ; " God manifest in the flesh," whom it is impossible not to adore, love, and obey.
This new life, therefore, manifests itself in new views of God, of Christ, of sin, of holiness, of the world, of the gospel, and of the life to come ; in short, of all those truths which God has re- vealed as necessary to salvation. This spiritual illumination is so important and so necessary and such an immediate effect of re- generation, that spiritual knowledge is not only represented in the Bible as the end of regeneration (Col. iii. 10 ; 1 Tim. ii. 4), but the whoxe of conversion (which is the effect of regeneration) is summed up in knowledge. Paul describes his conversion as con- sisting in Christ's being revealed to Him (Gal. i. 16) ; and the Scriptures make all religion, and even eternal life, to be a form of knowledge. Paul renounced everything for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ (Phil. iii. 8), and our Lord says that the knowledge of Himself and of the Father is eternal life. (John xvii. 3). The whole process of sa>ation is described as a translation from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of light. There is no wonder, therefore, that the ancients called regeneration a ^(otkt/xos, an illumination. If a man born blind were suddenly restored to sight, such a flood of knowledge and delight would flow in upon him, through the organ of vision, that he might well think that all living consisted in seeing. So the New Testament writers represent the change consequent on regeneration, the opening the eyes on the certainty, glory, and excellence of divine things, and especially of the revelation of God in the person of his Son, as comprehending almost every- thing which pertains to spiritual life. Inseparably connected with this knowledge and included in it, is faith, in all the forms and exercises m which spiritual truths are its objects. Delight m the things thus revealed is the necessary consequence of spirit- ual iHumination; and with delight come satisfaction and peace, elevation above the world, or spiritual mindedness, and such a sense of the importance of the things not seen and eternal, that all the energies of the renewed soul are (or, it is acknowledged,
Sers } deV°ted t0 SeCUring them f°r 0Urselves and
Thifl is one of the forms in which the Bible sets forth the doc- trine of regeneration. It is raising the soul dead in sin to spiritual