There are those who tell you, that human reason is your friend and your safe guide. She is not your friend, my christian hearers! she is not your safe guide. Human reason is daring and presumptuous; ye should be meek and lowly: she fears neither God above nor man below; ye must work out your salvation in fear and trembling: she, in her haughty selfsufficiency, must needs examine and judge and decide; ye, in holy humility, must hear and believe and submit: she thinks her own thoughts, and puts her trust in man; ye shall think the thoughts of your God, and in Him only shall ye trust.

I seem to read in your looks of holy defiance, your contempt of the deep laid snare. I seem to read your resolution, when the tempter assails ye, to say: “ Get thee behind me, Satan !" With Hazael we would exclaim: "Is thy servant a dog, that he should do this great thing?" I rejoice in your pious courage; but, as ye value your immortal souls, trust not to it. The words of the prophet were fulfilled in Hazael; so shall my words be fulfilled in you, if that ye set up reason for your God.

Let us, my friends, for a moment, leave this world and its cares behind us; let us together descend to the bottomless pit; we shall there read a useful lesson. Let us together cross the great gulf, and stand on the banks of the fiery lake. And now, behold the picture. Gaze on the agonizing scene. See the writhings and the tossings of tormented hopelessness; see the imploring looks of wild despair. Listen to the ceaseless sighs that burst from burning hearts, never, never again to be quieted! Think that centuries shall revolve and worlds pass from existence, without change or alleviation or hope for them. Think that millions on millions of centuries shall pass, and find them writhing and tossing and tortured still; still imploring for one drop of water to cool the parched tongue, and still refused even that one drop! Sum up all the worst, deepest, bitterest woes that ye have felt or imagined on earth-one moment in that flame outweighs them all. Then add moment to moment and age to age, until your mind refuses to comprehend eternity and still ye shall fail to conceive even the commenceIment of Hell!

But stop! turn not, shuddering, from the scene, ere ye read its moral. What fiend peopled this region of horrors? Ask the poor victims. They chose Reason for their Deity, and she led them hither. The repentant thief and the contrite mur

derer ascended to Heaven; but in Hell does the proud votary of reason lift up his eyes; in Hell does he expiate-if indeed its heinousness can ever be expiated--the sin of presumptuous curiosity. In all the black catalogue of human crimes, this is the blackest. The reckless Roman dared to draw aside the sacred veil, and to enter the Holy of Holies, and on Pharsalia's plain did he meet his reward. Will ye imitate his example? at the day of judgment shall ye meet yours.

Trifle not, then, with sacred mysteries; lay not your human hands upon them; approach them not with your sacrilegious reason. Will ye not trust to God, unless, with impious suspicion, ye first examine his Sacred Word, and scrutinize his Holy Decrees? In that very suspicion, there is death. Ye must come to God as little children, confiding, trusting, believing all things; not enquiring or doubting. God will not be tampered with; who art thou, oh man, that repliest against him? It is enough that ye mistrust one another; insult not the most High with your surmises. If ye have reached forth your hands and put your fingers in the print of the nails, what merit is there in your belief? But blessed is he that hath not seen nor understood, and yet hath believed.

Ye have not to think for yourselves; God thinks for ye. Ye have not to ask why are these things?' ye have but to know and feel, that they are. God did not write for ye, that ye should criticise his writings; but that ye should believe them. He will not have ye seeking to be wise and prudent, and to know good and evil. He will have ye submissive and humble, as babes. He has told ye what is good, and what is evil; wherefore, then, should ye yet seek, by reason, to discover it?

All the other trees in the garden has God in his infinite goodness given ye for food, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, ye shall not eat. The command is plain, peremptory, positive; ye shall not cat. The accompanying threat is equally positive. In the day that ye eat thereof, ye shali surely die. Death is the punishment, not of wilful unbelief only, but of suspicious enquiry! Not alone he that wickedly despises, but he also that rashly approaches, has already merited his doom. And wisely and mercifully is the punishment thus severe. Enquiry is the first entrance to vice and infidelity; and well it is for us, that God guards it with jealous care; and that, to save his saints from doubt and death, He debars them from this strongest of human temptations.

Were our Creator less considerate, He might permit us to wrestle with the Evil One, and then justly punish us for our defeat. But He graciously forbids the combat. He will not

have us enter the lists with Satan; for He knows that the children of this world are, in their generation, wiser than the children of light. He knows that in worldly arguments the infidel will prove an overmatch for us; and therefore he forbids us to argue.

Profit, then, my brethren, by his tender mercy, and expose not yourselves to the arrows of the wicked. Enquire not; examine not; criticise not; argue not. Why would ye be smitten before your enemies?

In faith and hope and humility, there is life and safety; but in Free Enquiry there is disbelief and death. In wisdom, there is not only sorrow, there is also everlasting punishment. Eve desired to be made wise, and she reaped death-death for her. self, and eternal death for countless myriads of her descendants. The wisdom of this world is foolishness with God; and therefore are the things that appertain to salvation hidden from the wise and prudent. Seek not ye, therefore, wisdom or pru. dence; but seek faith and humility.

Does this counsel sound harshly in your ears? does it jar on your earthly pride? It may be: for pride goeth before destruction. Do ye dream of the dignity of human wisdom, and the noble consciousness of mental independence? Dream on then; be wise, be dignified; be independent; be Free EnquirersRudely and fearfully shall that haughty dream be broken. The last day shall dawn, and the last trumpet sound. Ye shall awake! happy if ye could but have slept on, in eternal forgetfulness!

NO. 7.

CONTAINING

EFFECTS OF MISSIONARY LABOURS;

BY

ROBERT DALE OWEN.

AND

RELIGIOUS REVIVALS;

BY

JOHN NEALE

NEW-YORK:

PUBLISHED AT THE OFFICE OF THE FREE ENQUIRER.

In this credulous age, whose very benevolence is whimsical, when men subscribe thousands of dollars to send theological students to Central Africa and farthest India, and think they are thus doing their fellow-men a kindness, and their God a service; it is worthy of earnest and serious enquiry, whether money and exertions which are so much wanted to correct the crying vices, and relieve the hopeless misery that surround us at home, are not worse than lost abroad.

If the following article serve to awaken in the minds of those, who have conscientiously supported what they thought to be the cause of Deity, a desire to examine farther into the actual effects which missions too often produce, the object for which it has been issued, will be obtained.

R. D. O.