instantly exposed; or where, it may possibly be found, that such is the marvellous truth even in their most singular and most startling affirmations, as to stamp upon this extraordinary volume the credit and the character of that divinity which it claims.

11. But, as in other examples, this part too of the subject-matter of scripture has been turned into an objection against it. It is not to be told, how much of odium and resistance the affirmation in the Bible, of the blight or the great moral degeneracy wherewith our species have been smitten, has had to encounter. Had it kept on the ground of vague and inapplicable generalities, the doctrine might have been tolerated, as a harmless, or even a plausible speculation. But it has not only made a sweeping and indiscriminate charge against humanity in the lump; it has brought the charge so specifically home to each individual, it has sent it forth with an aim so pointed and so personal, that there is not any who can make his escape from it. While it has made broad and general accusation of all, it has also given such express and special direction of it to each and to every; it has spoken so unsparingly and in such unmeasured terms even of the loveliest of our kind; and, without regard to the varieties of the better or the worse, hath lifted the stern denunciation that none is righteous, no not one, that all the righteousness which our nature can claim is as filthy rags, that the whole world is guilty before God, that all are the children of wrath, that all are the heirs of damnation, It is

truly not to be wondered at-it is a most natural reaction on the part of arraigned and vilified humanity-it is just the revolt that we should have expected, and expected too from those of her children who were the loveliest in charity or stood the most erect in the pride of their own native integrity and honour-when they shrink with veriest disgust from such a low and loathsome representation of our nature; and are heard to exclaim against it as the hateful dogma of a theology the most unfeeling and barbarous.

12. We feel too, that, by such an averment as this, invasion is made on the province of man's own natural and independent knowledge. It makes no transgression of its legitimate boundaries, when, on the question of the quid oportet, it claims a right of cognizance over both the terrestrial and the celestial ethics; and, on the question of the quid est, though it has given up the celestial to the informations of a messenger from heaven, yet, on the terrestrial field, it hath a prior and independent observation of its own, and can lay its immediate hold on all the facts which Ze within the confines of sight and of experience. In virtue then of this ample cognizance which it is competent for it to take of the quid oportet, we should at least know what of duty we owe to the God who formed and who sustains us. And, in virtue of that more limited cognizance which we can take of the quid est, we may at least, one should think, venture so far as to judge of our own hearts and our own lives, and pronounce upon the home question of fact-whether this duty be actually rendered. At

this part of the investigation, we stand upon that debateable ground, on which an adjustment ought to be made, between the light of conscience and observation or the light of nature on the one hand, and the light of a professed revelation on the other; and it is wholly impossible to avoid making reference to both. In this instance these two lights as it were cross each other, or rather, both have descended upon the same subject; and each hath given to it a special illumination of its own. They are like two witnesses who might be confronted either to their mutual discredit, or to their joint and honourable vindication. At all events, the one has uttered an affirmation in regard to a matter, upon which the other has an immediate eye; and, out of the discrepancy or out of the agreement between the utterance of the first and the finding of the second, we might draw a conclusion of highest importance to the claims and the credentials of both.

13. First then as to the quid oportet of this question, the duty or the ethical relation that subsists between the creature and his Creator_let nature be called in to pronounce upon it, and by the light too of her own principles. Let her but attend to the complete sovereignty on the one hand, and the as complete subordination upon the other. Let her think more especially of man, upholden, in the mechanism of his delicate and complicated frame work, by the care of an unseen but unerring hand-of that wakeful guardianship which never for one moment is intermitted, and is kept up for years together under all the thoughtless ingratitude

of him who is its object-of the thousand circumstances above all, of which the great and the living energy that is above us has the most perfect control, and, by the slightest defect or disproportion of any one of which we might be haunted all life long by the agony of a sore endurance-of the fact notwithstanding, that, throughout the vast majority of our days, there is perfect ease, and many precious intervals lighted up by positive enjoyment of all the tenderness which this implies on the part of the heavenly father whose workmanship we are; and who spread around us an external nature, that teems with adaptations innumerable, to the senses and the organs wherewith He Himself has furnished us. Let us only think that on His simple will is suspended, the difference between our annihilation and our being; and that, if by the withdrawment of His sustaining energy our heart should cease to beat or our blood to circulate, the change to each of us would be fully as momentous, as if all the lights of the universe were put out, and this earth and these heavens were swept away. Let us then think of this God, on whom we so wholly depend, calling for no other return, than the services of love to Himself, and of kindness to all the children of His family; and, in the rendering of which, we advance to the uttermost the worth and the dignity of our own nature. Let us think too of God as a Being concerned in the morality of his creatures; that He holds their virtue to be His glory, and their vice to be that nuisance upon the face of creation by which the high majesty of heaven is put to scorn. On these

premises surely-on what we feel and know of the relationship between the thing that is formed and Him who has formed it, we might confidently say, whether ought can be named, that is a greater violence on the propriety of things, than the ingratitude of man to his Maker-or whether in all the records of jurisprudence any guilt can be specified, of more deep and crimson dye, than the guilt of a careless and thoughtless and thankless ungodliness.

14. So much for the "quid oportet"-a question on which man can pronounce by his own moral light, even though it concerns the relationship in which he stands to those objects that are exalted above him, on the lofty and to him inaccessible region of the celestial ethics; and then as to the "quid est" of this argument-a question on which he may pronounce by the lights of memory and observation, when, as in the present instance, it is a question of fact, the materials of which lie near at hand on the surface of our terrestrial arena. The reply to this question glares upon us from the whole colour of our past history. There is a voice within the receptacles of the heart, that sends it in secret but impressive whispers to the ear of the inner man. It tells us, and with a power of moral evidence from which all escape is impossible, that we are aliens from God. It makes known to us, that a sense of the divinity is habitually absent from the mind; and that, in the busy engrossment of all our faculties with the things of sense and of time which are around us, there is scarcely the recognition of a God all the day long. One man