classes of religionists make concerning each other's faith. This is owing in part, no doubt, to the practice of ascribing to each other, not the positions merely which they profess to hold, but the contradictions which they are thought to involve, and the results to which they are supposed to give rise.

Now this whole course of procedure is unphilosophical, unfair, and tends to incense the worst passions without doing any good. If a system whose positions are above our ability to reconcile among themselves must fall to the ground, neither nature nor revelation can stand. They both contain many facts whose harmony we shall never see, till the light of a more brilliant world opens upon our vision. We should be cautious, therefore, not to array ourselves against positions merely on the ground of our inability to reconcile them with each other. We are unable to tell how Paul, after receiving an unconditional pledge from God that all on board the wrecked ship should be saved with himself, could afterwards say of those who were about to escape by the long-boat, "except these abide in the ship, ye cannot be saved." But shall we presume to make our limited perceptions the standard of all truth? Shall we fix our stakes and mark out the course of truth through regions which are not subjected to our sway? Shall we build dikes along the shores of the vast ocean of knowledge, and say to its proud surges, "hitherto shalt thou come but no further?" We may do it; but as soon as the swelling current receives new streams from the Infinite Fountain, our feeble barriers will give way, and truth spurning our puny efforts, will strike out its own channels, like the ocean wave.

That "rolled not back when Canute gave command."

Notwithstanding the proud pretension of sectarists that their system is perfectly clear and without irreconcilable points, to minds competent to judge they will all be found in this respect alike; inexplicable

things, if not springing from their inherent absurdities, must attach to them from the nature of the human understanding and from the limited materials of our knowledge. To have a system free from these we must have one destitute of truth.

SECTION II.

Modifying the facts of revelation by those of nature.

There seems to be with many a feeling of apprehension, that if they allow the Bible to speak just the meaning which its language conveys when interpreted according to the ordinary laws of language, it will bring itself under the reprobation of men of sense and science. They take the liberty, therefore, to model and prune and soften down its statements by means of the facts which they have derived from nature, history, science, and literature, or from other sources, in order to save its reputation with such men, or render it more palatable to themselves. They throw its teachings into the crucible with those notions, which they have obtained from sources wholly independent of its pages, of what it would be proper for the Holy Ghost to teach, and the compounded result they would fain pass off as the real meaning of the inspired pages. Whereas it would be just as philosophical to correct the errors of taste by means of sight, or of hearing by means of smell, as to judge of a revelation when it is proved to be such, by our other means of knowledge. For what is purely a matter of revelation depends upon evidence as independent of all other data of reasoning, as the impressions of one sense are independent of those of another.

It is true that revelation on some points aims simply

at strengthening the impressions of nature. This is perhaps its chief object in reference to the moral virtues. They are the same in the Bible as in nature, except that they stand out with vastly greater prominence and are urged upon the conscience by much more lucid and powerful motives. But the points about which dissensions arise, rarely respect those truths which are common both to nature and revelation. The duties of justice, love, mercy, truth, respect to the rights of property, purity, filial reverence and the like, are too plain and too intimately grafted upon the moral sense, to admit of opposite positions and conflicting sentiments.

But those truths which are purely matters of revelation, such as the origin of evil, the mission, character and atonement of Christ, the nature of the Holy Spirit's work upon the heart, and points of a like character, have furnished, first and last, endless topics of debate. This is doubtless owing in part to our being unwilling to measure and define our knowledge of them by the sense of the language in which they are revealed. What but difference and debate can be expected from appending to this sense, matter extraneous to itself, or modifying it by the other materials of our knowledge? What is supernumerary to the meaning conveyed by the terms of the revelation, originating as it must from minds between whose habits or materials of thinking there is little or no uniformity, cannot fail to produce an endless diversity

of results. Could a number of chemists, one of whom puts iron into his crucible with his gold, another copper, another zinc, and a fourth lead, expect that the compound would give the same result in every case? Whatever modification the statements of the Bible on subjects above human reason, receive from the knowledge derived from other sources, will serve to tarnish their lustre, just as every admixture tarnishes gold; and as the nature

and degree of this modification can be determined by no fixed rule, but depends wholly upon the caprice of different minds, there is no calculating the number or extent of the differences, which will spring up among a people who take such liberties with the inspired text. To prove the verity of our remarks, we need only advert to the endless differences of opinion that have first and last existed among christians, a large share of which, as all know who have looked into the subject, took their rise from this species of religious philosophizing.

The results of such a mode of treating revealed truth, are similar to what Lord Bacon, in the department of physics, calls "idols of the theatre," which are those false notions that arise from the tenets of philosophers, and perverted demonstrations.

"All the philosophies not founded upon the inductive system, like so many stage plays, represent nothing but theatrical and fictitious worlds." So in religious reasonings, all our ideas of things of which we have no means of knowledge but supernatural revelation, that do not exactly accord in form and degree to the sense of the language containing the revelation, lead to results equally theatrical and fictitious with per verted demonstrations in the natural sciences. The terms of the revelation, as we propose hereafter more fully to show, must be examined as we study nature, according to the true principles of induction, or our conclusions can neither be true nor uniform. Appending extraneous matter, while it cannot alter the thing in itself, will only serve to introduce falsehood and error into our conceptions.

Many seem to feel in regard to the Bible, as a scientific man might be supposed to, towards an ignorant wife, afraid to have it speak its own language lest its weakness should be betrayed. They are unwilling to have its plain statements go forth without being fenced around with their own interpretations,

or that its light should shine except through the shaded medium of their own reasoning. This assertion must be explained away, that one softened down and the whole tinged with their own hues, or it cannot be understood! But the question of the divine original and the consequent perfection of the Scriptures as a guide to faith and duty, being once settled, then, all we have to do is to acquaint ourselves with the precise import of its teachings; and with that conform our sentiment and practice as implicitly as we do to the facts of nature.

To allude to the illustration of a former chapter, we do not want to understand the nature of the process by which extraneous substances become incorporated with our bodies before we consent to eat; but millions daily receive food with as much confidence as if they understood all the mysteries of this process. We build houses, construct rail-roads, dig canals, and conduct innumerable branches of business, with reference to the attraction of gravity and the other laws of matter, though we know nothing of them beyond a few specific developements. And why should we not act on the same principle in relation to the facts of the Bible? Having ascertained that God speaks to us in that Book, why not conform to its precise statements as implicitly as to the laws of nature, or as if we could unfold all the grounds of harmony between its useful and sublime truths? Why should it be deemed any more necessary to trace out their connection with each other, or with the other materials of our knowledge, than to ascertain the grounds of harmony between the latter, or how they stand related to revealed truth? After all our researches, can we tell why God has spoken as he has, or wherein he ought to have spoken differently?

Now, my brethren, we imagine that when we have learned to treat the Bible as a book of ultimate facts,