warmly in argument for the sake of converting men to their opinions; but when their arguments have ensnared the minds of their victims; when, under their teaching, weaker intellects or more depraved hearts have burst away from all moral restraint, and are rushing downward on a fearful career in vice toward utter ruin; then the hands that have wrought their fall are folded in quiet inaction; the tongue whose wiliness hath beguiled them is silent; it hath no words of sweet persuasion or of holy power to stay them in their desolating course, much less to raise them up, and restore them as blessings to mankind. That tongue is still, and the beguiled ones plunge down to deep perdition. No man was ever made better by rejecting the Bible; but myriads have been ruined by its rejection, and ruined without an effort on the part of their seducers to restore and save them.

It is nothing to say that some skeptics are moral men and good members of society; for the question at once arises: What has made them such? and the answer is ready: Not their skepticism; they have either received a Christian education, or, at least, lived amid the kindly influences of Christianity; and have had their moral sympathies and susceptibilities first called forth, impressed, and fixed under the great and benign system of society, and of institutions, which Christianity has reared. Here is the secret. Their early characters have been formed and developed in a Christian community, or by influences antecedent to their unbelief. Skepticism never improved a man's moral character. Its own tendencies are a loosener of moral restraint, and a nurse to careless habits of life. It can not muster enough of force and motive to secure that amount of patient effort, and self-denying sacrifice, which the moral culture and religious elevation of a race require.

But, that mere human ethics, studied out by reason alone, amid conjectures and probabilities, or in the light of natural intuition, consciousness, and conscience, would be insufficient for the guidance of the soul, the government of life, and the well-being of society, may be inferred from the fact, that the ancient heathenism, with all its ethical and metaphysical philosophy, indebted as that philosophy may have been for its

most vital conceptions to some early, however faint, outshinings of the light of the elder Scriptures, never effected, nor even sought, a thorough general revival from a state of moral declension and degeneracy. That old paganism never knew, never dreamed of any thing analogous to the Protestant Reformation. When early Christianity had expelled that paganism from a large part of the earth, and when, with a sort of stealthy instinct, the expelled power had gradually crept back, and succeeded in filling the Church, for long centuries, with the darkness of heathen corruptions and debasements, there was still found in Christianity an unextinct, unextinguishable spark of life, a potent, undying energy, which, collecting itself for the effort, was able again to drive out the mighty evil, and to raise up nations into moral life and strength. And it is worthy of special note, that this vast revival took place at the time when the Bible, after having been long kept from the people, locked up in the mysteries of dead languages, was once more brought to light and given to men in their vernacular tongues! But paganism-with its ethics and philosophies, the conjectures and probabilities of Reason, speculating in the dark, or with no light but that of natural intuition, consciousness, and conscience-never thought of effecting such a recovery as this; and if it had, it would certainly have failed, because it had no recuperative principle, no divine sanctions, no standard of authority, which was acknowledged to be obligatory on every conscience, to which therefore a great public appeal might be made, and by the rules and decisions of which, the public conscience and the public conduct might be raised to light and life, to the health and activities of general purity and virtue.

The same point may be illustrated by a more modern instance. Half a century ago, our own nation had, on one point, fallen into a state of deep degeneracy. I allude to what may, with some propriety, be termed the Intemperance of the nation. Now, what began, and has thus far carried forward, the work of reformation from this debasing vice? We reply, the disclosed facts of the case have been thrown upon Christianized consciences. The sanctions of eternal truth, the

authority of a revealed God, the retributions of eternity; these combined and formed the great lever which put this reformation in movement. If this power had been wanting in consequence of a universal rejection of Revelation, what could have been effected, even with all the moralities of a once received Revelation yet lingering among us? What good would it have done to hold up, before the eyes of men, the spectacle of thirty thousand dying drunkards per annum, and all the other horrors of the vice, and to speculate, however finely, about the turpitude of drunkenness, and the miseries which it inflicts, while there was no operative belief, no practical conception of that future account with God, and of that irretrievable ruin of the soul, which are approaching? What would the all-grasping avarice of some, and the cold, interested, and partisan selfishness of others, have cared for all the evils of the vice, especially as the worst of those evils do not often meet the eye, and even when seen, would be regarded as about to terminate, like the sufferings of the dying brute-in the grave? We have a firm persuasion, that, under such circumstances, not only would the most scanty effects have followed an attempt at reformation, but also, no attempt at reformation would have ever been made. What, then, would have been the result, had not only Revelation itself been rejected, but all its old moralities also finally died out from among us and left us both infidel in theory and licentious in principle? Why, instead of men attempting a reformation, the god of wine would again. have been worshipped, and his praises have been sung in Bacchanals through our streets!

But the argument from this case of illustration is not yet complete. We inquire still further; if the strong influences and sanctions of the Bible are so evidently necessary in effecting a merely partial reformation from a single vice, in a nation as moral as any upon earth, what could mere Reason, unaided by such influences and sanctions, with nothing but its native intuitions, consciousness, and conscience, hope to effect in a case of universal degeneracy; when not only one nation, but the whole human race, lay sunk, not only in one vice, but in every species of vice; and when there was no universally ac

knowledged standard, no divinely sanctioned rules of truth and duty, to which an appeal would lie, to which all consciences would bow, and to a conformity with which all conduct might be elevated; nothing but the uncertain conjectures, the dimly seen probabilities, of mere human speculation? In such a case, what could have been done? Is it not perfectly apparent that Reason, powerful as she might be in matters of science, would here find herself utterly at fault, not only in her efforts to discover the needed truths of God, of religious duty, and of future destiny, but also, and especially, in her endeavors to give even the little which she might conjecture, a practical influence upon individual character, and upon a great world's welfare?

It is abundantly confirmatory of this conclusion, that the mind of the ancient heathen world, even with the light which it increasingly received from the Bible, although it wrought shining results in literature, science, and the arts, yet, instead of effecting any great amelioration in systems of moral and religious truth, and in moral character and conduct, only wit nessed the gradual increase of confused ethical theories, and the gradual deterioration of all moral character, until, finally, one broad night of religious falsehood, and of moral corruption set in and ruled in profound darkness round the earth! It would be impossible, even with ample leisure, to do justice, by way of description, to the fearful horrors of the scene thus presented. The moral degeneracy of the old heathen world beggars description. In relation to God, and to religious truth and duty, they were indeed "given over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which were not convenient." They were "filled with all uncleanness," and the earth groaned under the enormity of its load of tolerated guilt!

Is it said that modern heathenism has grown purer? Hear what a late traveller,* of great intelligence and veracity, has to say on this point: "Of all the idolatries I ever heard or read of, the religion of the Hindoos really appears to me the worst, in the degrading notions which it gives of the Deity;

Bishop Heber.

in the endless round of its burthensome ceremonies;" "in the filthy acts of uncleanness and cruelty, not only permitted, but enjoined, and inseparably interwoven with those ceremonies; in the total absence of any popular system of morals, or any single lesson, which the people at large ever hear, to live virtuously and to do good to one another. In general, all the sins which a Soodra is taught to fear, are killing a cow, offending a Brahmin, or neglecting one of the many frivolous rites, by which their deities are supposed to be conciliated. Accordingly, I really never met with a race of men, whose standard of morality is so low; who feel so little apparent shame in being detected in a falsehood, or so little interest in the sufferings of a neighbor, not being of their own caste or family; whose ordinary and familiar conversation is so licentious; or, in the wilder and more lawless districts, who shed blood with so little repugnance. The good qualities that are among them" 66 are, in no instance, that I am aware of, connected with, or growing out of their religion, since it is in no instance, to good deeds, or virtuous habits of life that the future rewards, in which they believe, are promised."

Heathenism, then, in its descent to our times, has passed through no purifying process. We may rather say, with another author: "In India, we behold all around us smeared with blood, and polluted with lust and cruelty; scenes of such detestable barbarity, as seem to be intended for the very purpose of displaying the triumph of infidelity over all the instincts of human nature; rendering parents destroyers of their children, and children of their parents; in short, in every way of horror, that can be conceived, mocking and rioting in deadly triumph over all the tender feelings of the human heart, and all the convictions of the human understanding."

Such are the results of the working of the mind of man when left with little more than the mere light of nature! Nor is there any force in the suggestion that improved education might be expected to remedy, at length, these deep and widespread disorders; since the tendency of moral and religious

Wilberforce. See Bishop Wilson's Christian Evidences, § 3.