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and irreligion. We accompany it onward into the world, where it comes under the action of wise law and good government, the operation of which is, at least, coïncident with the requirements of moral and religious truth. And, finally, we mark it as a subject of the various means of what we may more strictly term religious growth; listening to numberless invitations and warnings, precepts and exhortations to holiness from a Christian ministry; checked by daily, perhaps hourly, rebukes of conscience, and moved by all the solemn or the significant changes in the Providence of God. And then we suppose this case, or something like it, to be that of a majority of the inhabitants of the country; while all have more or less of the same particular advantages, and come fairly under the action of the same general system. Having done this, we look for results. We examine the moral and religious character and condition of the people. In some instances, we find, as the fruit of all these means of culture, love for God and love for man, accompanied by much, if not all, that can bless and beautify man's earthly lot; and, in the general and visible aspect of society, we see much of the decent moralities and of the graceful decorums of life. But, upon close inspection, we find, in the great majority, the reign of selfishness, pride, and covetousness unbroken, and the apathies of cold neglect, or of hardened opposition to God, undisturbed; the great mass professing to believe the truths of religion, but practically living as though they believed them not; while, from these mingling shades of the picture, many stand out in bold and truly bad relief; some murderers, others drunkards, thieves, and extortioners; multitudes slaves to carnal lust, and multitudes more profaners of God's holy name, liars, slanderers, enviers, and such like.

Upon facts like these-for, what we have supposed are facts, not suppositions-we reason thus: If early parental counsel and prayers, early moral and religious instruction, and systems of public education, the discipline of human law and government, the constant preaching of a whole body of sacred truth, and the solemn movements of a Divine Providence, all accompanied by the sanctions of God's authority, and the motives of

endless life and of eternal death, and all jointly arrayed on the side of good morals and pure religion, and in hostility to vice and licentiousness; if all these mighty instrumentalities and restraints produce but such a limited amount of right result, what would the result be, if all these sanctions and restraints, as the peculiarities of a Divine Revelation, were taken away; or rather, if these sanctions and restraints had never been known? What, then could keep in check the powerful tendencies of our nature to vice and to every species of moral degeneration? If even these mighty barriers against the swelling flood be but partial in their effects, what outbreakings would follow their entire removal? In the forth-rushing of the ruinous tide, who would heed the words, however true, of mere human Reason? Who would stop to listen to her nice speculations and her curious conjectures? If a God omnipotent should speak the word, "Hitherto shalt thou come, but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be staid," there would, indeed, be a pause to the wasting flood; but no feebler voice could hush the uproar, or lay the billows to a calm!

The Bible, taking the human race in its state of manifest alienation from God and ignorance of Him, and considering it necessary that man should be restored to the knowledge and love of his Maker, shows God, standing on the Rock of Ages, stretching forth His fatherly hand, and working on through time, with a calm and steady omnipotence, in the wise and benevolent labor of raising His deeply fallen creatures to Himself. Skeptical Philosophy proudly rejects a Revelation, and, following a creed which takes little or no account of the immense moral distance between sinful creatures and their holy Creator, boldly advances to the amazing work, complacently puts forth her puny arm, and dreams that, if she had her way, she could, at once, lift a defamed world to heaven. Alas! she would find her arm scarce stronger than a rush, and her standing-place little firmer than yielding air!

Human passions, without efficient restraint and purifying discipline, are awful in the swelling of their power. It is true that, when they are under no restraint, they are not always in action; nevertheless, they are always liable to sudden and volcanic eruptions; and nothing is ever needed but a concen

tration of combustibles on a given point, and the dropping of a single spark, to produce an explosion which shall shake kingdoms and continents. The Bible only, as a Revelation from God; its sanctifying influences, its salutary restraints, its reverend sanctions, its rules of present action and of future judgment, and the numerous institutions which are its offspring, and which pour through the social body their regenerating or their regulative influence-these only can, with certainty, bring and keep mankind within the bounds of wellordered, and peaceful, moral and virtuous society.

Let us make the most favorable supposition, which the case admits. Suppose that the Bible had never been written, or that no light, direct or reflected, had ever shone from Revel ation upon the human mind; and that, in such a condition, Reason, instead of falling under the darkness of an universal Fetichism, might have reached by conjecture, or reduced to probability, the following notions: that there is a God; that He is to be worshipped; that piety and virtue are important parts of our duty to Him; that the soul is immortal; and that there will be future rewards to the good, and future punishment to the evil; (though this is granting what can by no means be claimed, yet, for the argument, let it be supposed;) what would have been the practical effect of the whole without the rules, and sanctions, and fuller light peculiar to a Revelation? Where would have been the certainty to faith of any one of those notions? Where amid the dark wilderings of the soul, could it have found a satisfying assurance of the divine favor, or relief to the agonies of an awakened conscience? Where could it have found any fixed standard of truth and duty? Where, in a word, could it have found a recuperative power to restore mankind from their lapses into general degeneracy?

The mere ethics, or morals, of the Bible itself, if they had been proposed as the speculations of human Reason, and if they had never been accompanied by the solemn sanctions, and never associated with the higher truths, which are peculiar to a revelation from God-would have had little or no effect in reforming the errors, the vices, and the disorders of society. The great power of the Bible-the heavenly temper of

that "Sword of the Spirit"-lies in the fact that it is an alleged and believed revelation from God; that its teachings are clothed with a divine authority; and that its sanctions of future blessedness, or of future woe, have issued from the perfect justice, and will be enforced by the changeless truth, of God. Take away these sanctions and this certainty, and you leave the Bible-as the wily Philistine left Samson when shorn of his marvellous locks-powerless.

Look at the ancient heathen, who had no well-accredited revelation from God, or nothing more than the faintly reflected light of such a revelation. They felt the need, and therefore fabled to have received the light of a directer revelation. They could not govern men without, at least, the supposed sanctions of a higher than human power.

Is it said that, since their times, men have grown more civilized, more enlightened, more rational, and hence, more manageable? In many countries, we reply, this is not the fact, as we shall see before we close. In some countries, we admit the fact, but inquire what has wrought the change? and to this inquiry, we apprehend, no sufficient answer can be given, short of that which admits, that a divinely accredited revelation from God, in all its direct and in all its collateral influences on civilization, learning, and science itself, has achieved the work. Take away all that the Bible has ever done, directly and indirectly, and it may be believed that even these humaner nations would revert to the heathenism of ancient Greece and Rome, if not to the barbarism of uncivilized races.

In the Bible lie three great ideas, which, to the rejectors of revelation, are peculiarly distasteful: the universal sinfulness. of man, the doctrine of an atonement, and the eternity of future retributions. And yet, without these, as certainly revealed truths, the Bible would be practically a weak book. Without the first, it would leave the very head-spring of this world's miseries-sin-not only open, but pouring forth unchecked ruin. Without the second, it would leave the deepest moral and religious wants and sympathies of our nature untouched; and without the third, it would have no power over VOL. VI.-41

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the conscience and the conduct of the lawless offender. them with all their accompanying sanctions away; and then, while the future Senecas and Platos of our race, the Socrates, the Epictetus, or the Tully of posterity, were philosophizing about the beauty of virtue, and the probabilities of moral science, the great mass of their contemporaries, heedless of their unsanctioned speculations, and following some new-born Epicurus of the age, would be plunged in the pleasures and the debaucheries of life; or, unknowing the philosophy of any school, would lie sunk in the darkness of ignorance and in the defilements of vice.

Even if we could encourage the belief that mere unaided Reason could do something towards correcting the evils of our nature, and carrying the race in the direction of perfectness; yet we may argue that it would not; and the argument may be rested on well-known facts, and on well-founded inferences.

When Skepticism, following the leadings of mere Reason, has rejected Revelation, it is never found, from year to year, and from age to age, devoted to the work of giving instruction in morals and natural religion, to all classes, high and low, in public and in private, for the purpose of blessing the poor and of saving the lost. It never supports a great body of laborers, and a vast system of institutions, for the purpose of carrying the seeds of moral light, the principles of saving truth, to the masses, and of planting these seeds for growth in the lower soils of our common humanity. It never can do these things. On its hypothesis, there is no sufficient motive. Man's indomitable love of money, ease, and power, can never be brought to yield to such a course of voluntary, painful, and persevering effort and sacrifice, by any feebler or less ascertained considerations than those which are peculiar to the Bible as a Divine Revelation; and which, bringing all the truths of God and all the sanctions of eternity to bear on the conscience, the understanding, and the will, put into the mind a new and conquering power, which enables it to resist the selfishness and the sinfulness of nature, and thus fixes in it the mainspring of a divine movement for the moral and spiritual regeneration of the world. The rejecters of the Bible will indeed engage

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