have been objects of preferential regard. But no! They "called even the master of the house Beelzebub." And he has said, "If ye were of the world, the world would love its own; but because ye are not of the world, but I have chosen ye out of the world, therefore the world hateth you." This is the inspired explanation of that strange mystery which has appeared so prominently in all ages, persecution for religious opinions, persecution for conscience sake. It is the reason why so many seemingly amiable men in other respects, can violate the plain rules of common charity, can forget that forbearance which is due from man to man; and, because a fellow-creature cannot, in religious matters, see exactly as they do every horrible engine that can be moved, is set to work to coerce, annoy, and damage the unhappy dissident. Our Lord said this would go so far it is so congenial to the natural heart-" that they that kill you will think that they do God service." And this feeling, the feeling of thwarted pride and self-convicted insincerity and hypocrisy, is the source of all the violent persecution in the dark ages of Romanism; and all the bitter hostility shown to, and all the misery inflicted on, Presbyterians and Nonconformists, in the days of that tyrant dynasty-the Stuarts. The damp unwholesome dungeons, and the blood-stained scaffolds of both Scotland and England, bear fearful witness to the transmission, from age to age, of the spirit and practice of the Pharisees. The Papist spared no severity, for centuries, in the hope of annihilating that true religion, for which they had always some convenient nickname. The Stuarts were little, indeed, behind them in cruelty. Mr. Macaulay's history of the reign of the second James, shews up unequivocally the true spirit of religious persecution, and the extremities to which it is quite willing to go. And modern times, even in our own land of liberty, have proved that the evil principle is neither dormant nor inactive. The prison is still the panacea to which the religious persecutor would have recourse

to heal religious divisions; and there are those of the Puseyite party who affirm that there will never be peace again till the Church can rear again without control, as her legitimate and irresponsible province, her penal and severe tribunals. They have ascertained the inanity of superstitious inventions as the antagonist to truth; and they would gladly revert to something more tangible—the mysterious scrutiny and the ingenious coercions of inquisitorial power.

And what has been the result throughout the history of the world? The practical issue everywhere is, "See ye how ye prevail nothing? behold the world is gone after him!" The divine system of religion-the system of inspired Scripture-is an appeal to common sense, Judge ye." It is a call to judge of the proposed truths and principles as adapted to the true state and necessities of human nature. It carries along with it no coercion but that of the soul's true interests. So our blessed Lord proposed it to the Jews. He opened the sacred volume. He read to the people, a prophetic intimation of the true spirit of religion. He came "to preach the Gospel to the poor, to bind up the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and recovering of sight to the blind." And then he said, "This day is this Scripture fulfilled in your ears. This is the appeal to common sense: "Is not this a religion suited to your needs." It announces a gracious providence returning in mercy to heal the miseries of a revolted and unhappy world; and it asks only that men should receive it as a gracious power in the heart, and find in it a real and effective exoneration and

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escape from the guilt and the bondage of sin. And those who are in earnest, and feel their need, perceive the legitimate influence of revealed truththe mighty power of its appeal to the conscience and its renewing power on the heart. They find it is an energy which no coercive statute, and no personal infliction, could wield; a renewing power-so that it makes him who receives the truth a new creature. And that the love of

a discovered Redeemer constrains him who apprehends it, "to live not to himself, but to Him who died for him."

All the powers of the fiery furnace; all the horrors of the den of lions, or of the dungeon, cannot bind the soul to the mere formal adoption of a dogma, while the understanding revolts against it; nor remove it from the heart when it is acknowledged and cherished as a divine truth. It is abundantly shown also, that one of the collateral but necessary effects of a system which thus proposes itself to the understanding-which calls for and justifies inquiry, and which counts for acceptance on the result of such inquiry-is to foster and to spread liberal institutions. Its essential character is a liberal and enlightened charity-love to God, founded upon love to man. It regards, therefore, the rights and interests of all, and teaches man to adopt the principle on which the proposal of religion itself proceeds. It appeals to men's common sense, and candour, and good feeling-as brought under the influence of revealed truth-for the due consideration of all the interests of others of all; and demands that wherever true Christianity comes, it should colour and characterize even political institutions, and breathe a spirit of equity, and fairness, and evenhandedness through them all. Thus, in proportion as men are really enlightened, they see-that liberty of conscience must follow the due regard to the dignity of truth-that the narrow bigotry of the coercive school is unscriptural, unjust, and vain; and that the whole system of penal compulsions for uniformity, instead of really aiding the cause into which it is unwisely introduced, will only command the dull, unmoveable conformity of death. Men fly, therefore, from a compulsory religion. spirit and the schemes of the Pharisees become hateful to them, both as they are seen to be unsound and also unavailing. The language of even merely political men is, " Refrain from these men, and let them alone, for if this counsel or work be of men

The

it will come to nought, but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it." It is MAY-1849.

true that after the darkness and the compulsion of centuries, men fly with a tremendous rebound from the evil which they have discovered; and many seek refuge in opposite errors to those which they once held; but, under the influence of revealed truth, the human mind will, after all, gradually right itself, and find that where the spirit of truth is, there is liberty-a due and proper liberty-liberty to be good and holy under the working of free motives-liberty to hold conscientious opinions and practices morally harmless to the community; and liberty to rejoice in that freedom which equally allows on either side a difference of opinion.

This is the legitimate collateral influence of revealed truth. It is the certain consequence of Scriptural light-of free religious opinion. The men of the narrow pharisaical, and tyrannical school-who would adjust by elongation or curtailment upon a Procrustean bed, the varieties of opinion and of belief-may be very wrath; and be eager to run back to the halcyon days, when, if they could not eradicate, they could at least silence, the objection; but the reviving energies of the party have come a day too late. Toleration, in respect to religion, must be henceforth an unmeaning by-word. It can have no proper existence in truly Scriptural legislation. Full liberty of conscience to think, to choose, to act in things relating to God, is, and must be allowed to be, man's inalienable birthright; and anything that really works in opposition to that sacred right, will be gradually eliminated from the code of Christian national law. The men of the narrow school may mourn for a time; but if they look back on the past history of their principles and proceedings impartially, they will see as their result nothing but division and sectarian bitterness; and if they look forth to the operation of truth, unfettered truth, proposed on its own merits and sanctions to the understanding and the heart, they will ultimately see "the world gone after it"-the multitudes won by the triumphant influence of its unveiled beauty, and mercy victorious through

out the Church of God in the blessed unity of the Spirit.

Let us go one step further. Wherever the spirit of the ancient Pharisees exists, it is the contest of ecclesiastical pride and formality, and of the carnal enmity of the heart against Omnipotence. The special demonstration may wear the deceitful aspect of zeal for God, of specious objection to certain ways or seeming errors; but it is, in fact, fighting against God. The issue, then, must be discomfiture. "Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds of the earth, but woe unto him that striveth with his Maker." The Jews have been miserably scattered over the earth for eighteen centuries, while the world has been going after the crucified Jesus. The papal power, which has maintained the idolatrous worship of Mary against the kingdom of Christ, is breaking up. Its veriest slaves, the Italian people, are casting it out. The conscience of men, springing up elastically from lengthened pressure, demands liberty to think on religion uncontrolled. Resistance may, how

ever, yet be attempted in one form or other, and may occasionally prosper but the ultimate triumph of revealed truth is certain. The honour and glory of its divine Author demands

it. The manifestation of the absolute safety of its proposed principles must appear in the affectionate adoption of them as a gracious and effective power, independent of compulsory control. God, in the person of Emmanuel-the embodiment of his own attribute of love-must be seen to be governing the world by a direct and effectual power-the power of truth; and when the remaining clouds of this dispensation shall have rolled away, and the Son of Man, the once coerced and crucified-the ever sympathizing with his suffering members-shall come in his glory, and an unnumbered host, redeemed out of every clime and kindred, shall bow in grateful remembrance before him; the discomfited advocates of bigotry and coercion will cry out in despair, "See how we prevail nothing? a pardoned, sanctified, and saved world is gone after Him."

LATIMER.

THE earliest human remains that exist lead us to infer that the form of man has been the same in all ages: and the records of history shew that his moral constitution, since the Fall, has always been distinguished by the same peculiarities. The various superstitions of mankind-(which may be considered as erroneous glosses or interpretations of the only true religion,)—though varied by the social habits of their professors, or the circumstances of their foundation, still wear a common likeness, and their errors can be traced to a few general forms of development. As the most ancient errors in religion still exist, in a modified shape, even among

professedly Christian nations, it may not be unprofitable to consider under what forms these errors formerly manifested themselves, as we shall be thus put on our guard against admitting them into our own minds, however stealthy may be the mode in which they seek an entrance.

1. One great form of religious error has ever been a deification of the powers and operations of nature. The traditionary account of the creation of all things by one God, which was possessed by the early tribes of our race, soon became confused and distorted. Man found himself in a world which, to the uninstructed observer, divided itself into two parts :

the earth on which he stood, and the heaven above him. The earth was, to a certain extent, his own: here was the ground which, as he cultivated it, yielded him food, here were his dwelling and his possessions; but, above him, hung the heaven in calm magnificence, in unapproachable distance, hiding in its depths recesses into which he must have longed to pierce, and secrets which he must have sighed to know: while in the midst of its spacious and mysterious plains stood brilliant bodies, looking down upon him by day or by night, and exercising on his mind an influence for which he must have been unable to account. To those among whom primitive tradition had become obscured, how natural was it to look there for the rulers of the world, and to bow idolatrously before the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness. And this error once admitted, other idolatries would soon follow the earth yielding from its bountiful bosom regular supplies of food, the sea with its unfathomable depths and boundless expanse, the rivers and springs affording the grateful draught, all the beautiful or beneficent productions of nature became to be considered as animated by separate deities. Thus, from the contemplation of this lovely world, on every part of which the name of its Maker is, as it were, legibly inscribed, did the perverse minds of fallen men deduce fables and absurdities, amid which the belief in the one God almost disappeared from the earth: "the very magnitude and beauty of His gifts," as Theodoret observes, "supplying them with an occasion for ingratitude."*

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And as, on the one hand, men seized the various parts of nature, and formed of them a host of deities without number, so, on the other hand, when they attempted to combine the whole, they still did not look towards a Creator, who, separate from, and superior to, the world, is yet ever present and active in its every part; but, mingling the ideas of God and his creation together, they gave to the universe the

*Serm. ad Græc. p. 39.

name of God. Augustin, arguing against this notion, says, according to this opinion, "there can be nothing whatever left which is not a part of God. Should this be the case, who does not see what great impiety and profanity follow: namely, that on whatever a person treads, he is treading on a part of God, and in every animal that is killed a part of God is slain? I am unwilling to express all the considerations that may occur to the thoughtful, for they cannot be uttered without shame."*

To these various idolatries, then, did the contemplation of nature lead men unenlightened by the Spirit of God. Philosophy was unable to arrest the evil: in comparatively modern times, and when the light of the Gospel was already spread on the earth, the accomplished Julian was not deterred by the philosophy which he preferred to Christianity, from worshipping the Sun, of which he fancied himself the favoured servant, and to which he prays for eternal life.t

It is objected to the Bible by some scientific unbelievers, that it relates events which are irreconcilable with the uniformity of natural laws, that it records miraculous occurrences which contradict experience, and mentions beings of whose existence we can give no proof. It should be remembered, however, that it is in the Holy Scriptures that the uniformity of the laws of nature is most strongly established, in opposition to the capricious and arbitrary method of world-government laid down by the Pagan mythologies. In the latter everything is miracle the most common operations of nature are attributed to the special intervention of countless supernatural beings: the sky, and the sea, and the earth had their respective deities: mysterious genii conducted the rivers, or lurked in the trees: beneath the volcano the giant struggled and the cyclops toiled. But the Bible solemnly rebukes this fantastic worship it even protests against the comparatively pure religion in which

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*De Civ. Dei. lib. iv., c. 12.

† See his hymn or oration to the Sovereign Sun.

only two supreme principles were acknowledged.* The throne of heaven is claimed for the one God: and the various phenomena of nature are but movements in accordance with fixed laws. The Psalmist considered the heavens: but in all the glorious orbs that glittered there, he saw only the work of God's fingers. He describes the sun in language of incomparable beauty;+ but that magnificent luminary was to him no deity, but the obedient minister of the Creator, issuing from the pavilion set for him in the sky, and performing in uninterrupted regularity his appointed course. The scattered rays of worship which, among the heathen, were dissipated among numerous deities, governing the world by arbitrary and conflicting decrees, were, among the pious Jews, concentrated in one God, whose laws universal nature obeys, and between whom and the highest of His creatures there lies an infinite distance, while the admixture of foreign elements in their national worship was provided against by the command to worship in one temple, according to fixed rites. And as the religion of the Bible recalled men from the debasing superstitions of polytheism, so did it also warn them of the atheistical folly of believing that there was no supreme Judge of the earth. It shewed the infinite superiority of God to all the works of nature, but it also proclaimed His omnipresence and ever-acting energy in all parts of His creation. By the sacred writers "nature is pourtrayed, not as self-subsisting, or glorious in her own beauty, but ever in relation to a higher, an over-ruling, a spiritual power. The Hebrew bard ever sees in her the living expression of the omnipresence of God in the works of the visible creation."

Such then were the ancient superstitions induced by the adoration of nature, and such is the protest made against them in the Bible. And though the grosser forms of this kind of superstition are now extinct among professedly Christian nations, do we *Isaiah xlv. 7. + Psalm xix, Humboldt's Cosmos. (Sabine's translation,) Vol. ii. p. 44. Fifth edit.

not find vestiges of a similar idolatry even among them? In the tutelary saints of the Romanists we have copies of the ancient deities. "The sea and waters," says the 14th Homily of the Church, "have as well special saints with them as they had gods with the Gentiles, Neptune, Triton, Nereus, Castor and Pollux, Venus, and such other in whose places be come St. Christopher, St. Clement, and divers other, and specially our Lady, to whom shipmen sing, Ave, maris stella. Neither hath the fire escaped their idolatrous inventions: for instead of Vulcan and Vesta, the Gentiles' gods of the fire, our men have placed St. Agatha, and make letters on her day for to quench fire with."

The worship of the universe as a whole is also in existence among us. In the adoring apostrophes to nature, in the fervid addresses to the soul of the Universe, or to Necessity, the mother of the world, which disfigure poetry otherwise exquisite and elevating, in the pantheistic doctrines so openly divulged by writers of transcendent talents, in the sighs over the extinction of the Pagan mythology which are from time to time breathed into our ears both in verse and prose, we may find abundant proof that the superstition to which we have been referring is by no means altogether extinct in Christendom. To adduce examples is unnecessary, and would be offensive. That the evil exists, and is menacing, every literary student is aware: and it becomes the Christian both to keep a watch over his own heart in this respect, and also to warn others against the imperceptible approaches of a mode of thinking by which the mind is alienated from the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It is not that a lively sensibility to the beauties of natural phenomena, or a diligent study of the laws of the physical universe is calculated of itself to lead us from God: on the contrary, all His creatures are telling His glory; but when through human weakness we suffer ourselves to be so absorbed in material contemplations as to lose sight of the spiritual and moral world, when we make of the knowledge He