mony between Natural Religion and our Christian faith. Such, for instance, is

1. The doctrine of the being of a God. I do not need to open the Bible to learn that. It is enough. that I open my eyes, and turn them on that great book of nature, where it is legibly written, clearly revealed in every page. God! that word may be read in the stars and on the face of the sun; it is painted on every flower, traced on every leaf, engraven on every rock; it is whispered by the winds, sounded forth by the billows of ocean, and may be heard by the dullest ear in the long-rolling thunder. I believe in the existence of a God, but not in the existence of an atheist; or that any man is so, who can be considered in his sound and sober senses. What should we think of one who attempted to account for any other works of beauty and evident design, as he professes to do for those of God? Here is a classic temple; here stands a statue, designed with such taste and executed with such skill, that one almost expects the marble to leap from its pedestal; here hangs a painting of some dead beloved one, so life-like as to move our tears; here, in Iliad, or Æneid, or Paradise Lost, is a noble poem, full of the grandest thoughts, and clothed in sublimest imagery; here is a piece of most delicate, intricate, and ingenious mechanism. Well, let a man tell me gravely, that these were the work of chance; tell me, when I ask who made them, that nobody made them; tell me, that the arrangement of the letters in this poem, and of the colors in that picture, of the features in the statue, was a matter of mere chance; how I should stare at him? and couclude, without a moment's hesitation, that I had fallen

into the company of a raving madman or of some drivelling idiot. Turning away from such atheistic ravings about the infinitely more glorious works of God, with what delight does reason listen, and with what readiness does she assent, and with what distinct and hearty voice does she echo the closing words of the seraphim's hymn, " the whole earth is full of his glory!"

2. Such also is the doctrine that man is a sinner. Who needs to open the Bible to learn that? It is enough that I open my heart; or read in the light of conscience the blotted record of my past life. "I know and approve the better, and yet follow the worse," was the memorable saying of one of the wisest heathens; yet it did not need any superlative wisdom to arrive at that conclusion. Dr. Livingstone tells us that he found the rudest tribes of Africa, on whose Cimmerian darkness no straggling ray of revealed truth had ever fallen, ready to admit that they were sinners. Indeed, they hold almost everything to be sin which, as such, is forbidden in the word of God. Nor is it possible to read his clear statements on that subject, without arriving at this very interesting and important conclusion, that the ten commandments received from God's own hand by Moses on Mount Sinai, are but the copy of a much older law-that law which the finger of his Maker wrote on Adam's heart, and which, though sadly defaced by the fall, may still, like the inscription on a time-eaten, moss-grown stone, be traced on ours. See how guilt reddens in the blush, and consciousness of sin betrays itself in the downcast look of childhood! Even when they drink up iniquity as the ox drinketh up the water, and wallow in sin as the swine in the mire, there is a conscience within men that convicts of

guilt and warns of judgment. Dethroned, but not exiled, she still asserts her claims, and fights for her kingdom in the soul; and, resuming the seat of lordly judgment, with no more respect for sovereigns than beggars, she summons them to her bar, and thunders on their heads. Felix trembles. Herod turns pale, dreading in Christ the apparition of the Baptist; while Cain, fleeing from his brother's grave, wanders away conscience-stricken into the gloomy depths of the forest and the solitudes of an unpeopled world. Like the ghost of a murdered man, conscience haunts the house that was once her dwelling, making her ominous voice heard at times even by the most hardened in iniquity. In her the rudest savage carries a God within him, who warns the guilty, and echoes these words of Scripture, Depart from evil, and do good. Stand in awe and sin not.

3. Such also is the doctrine that sin deserves punishment. Hell is no discovery of the Bible. In vain do men flee from Christianity to escape what their uneasy conscience feels to be a painful doctrine; one which, in their anxiety to lull conscience asleep, they reject as a doctrine of incredible horrors. If that is an objection to this book, it is an equally valid objection to every religious creed which man ever held and cherished. A great poet has represented with great power the cataracts and rivers, the rocks and glaciers, the hurtling avalanche and rolling thunders of the Alps, and those lovely valleys where summer, attired in a robe of flowers, scems sleeping at the feet of winter, as forming one great choir, and with their various voices all proclaiming, "God;" but it is not less solemn than true, it is no poetic fancy, but a plain strik

ing fact, that the voices of all nations, of all tongues, rude or polished, have proclaimed a hell. No heathen religion but had its hell, and warned its followers of a place beyond the grave where vice shall meet the doom which it escaped on earth. And in their pictures of the damned, where we see avarice forced to drink molten gold, and eternal vultures tearing at the heart of lust and cruelty, what, again, is the voice of nature but an echo of words we do well to take heed to, Be sure your sin will find you out?

4. Such also is the doctrine that man cannot save himself. In what country, or in what age of heathenism does man appear standing up erect before his God, demanding justice? In none. All her temples had vicarious sacrifices and atoning altars, at which man is on his knees, a suppliant for the mercy of the gods. The very Pagans had more sense than some of us. Glimmering as was the light of nature, they saw things more clearly than to be satisfied with themselves. They never believed that, through their own merits, they could be their own saviours. Hence their costly offerings; their hecatombs of victims; the painful and horrid sacrifices by which they sought to propitiate an angry God. They gave the fruit of their body for the sin of their soul; and, to the shame of those of us who will take no trouble for salvation, and grudge the smallest tax for the cause of Christ, they hesitated at nothing by which they could hope to avert heaven's wrath, and win its favor. The voice of that cromlech stone, which still stands on our moors, the centre of the Druid's gray, lonely, mystic circle, and on whose sloping surface I have traced the channel which, when human victims lay bound on this altar, drained off the

blood of beautiful maiden, or grim captive of the fight— the voice of those tears the Indian mother sheds, as she plucks the sweet babe from her throbbing bosom to fling it into the Jumna or Ganges' sacred stream-the voice of those ruined temples which, silent now, once resounded with the groans of expiring victims, what are these, again, but an imperfect echo of the words, Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us?

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5. Such also is the doctrine that the soul survives the stroke of death. Our spiritual, ethereal essence had its symbol in the heaven-ascending flame which the heathen carved upon their tombs; and their hopes of immortality were expressed, as well by the lamp they lighted amid the gloom of the sepulchre, as by the evergreen garlands that crowned the monuments of their dead. This hope has been a star that shone in every sky; a flower that bloomed in the poorest soil; a flame that burned in the coldest bosom. Immortality! that made heroes of cowards. It imparted to weakness a giant's strength. It made the courage of the bravest warrior burn high in the day of battle. It nerves yonder unbending savage to endure, without a groan to gratify his captors or disgrace his tribe, the tortures of fire and stake. Why do these weeping Greeks approach the dead man, as he lies on his bier for burial, and open his mouth to put in an obolus? The coin is passage-money for the surly ferryman who rows the ghosts over Styx's stream. And why, in that forest grave, around which plumed and painted warriors stand unmoved and immovable as statues, do they bury, with the body of the Indian chief, his canoe and bow and arrow? He goes to follow the chase, and