the amiableness, the loveliness of the intelligent nature, in whatever being, or whatever world it is found.

Man is not by nature the friend of God. He has no inherent moral dignity--no native innocence--no natural meetness for heaven. Under every form of human society, Pagan, Jewish, Mahometan and Christian, all are by nature the slaves of sin. There was a judicial connexion between the first offence of our progenitor and the sin and condemnation of his posterity. "By the offence of one, judgment came upon all men to condemnation." It is a search too elevated for fallen men to acquaint themselves with God. There is no "contact of heart" between them and the great Father of spirits. No hours of leisure, no retirement of the closet, no silence of the dawn or evening witnesses their aspirations after the "first Fair and the first Good." "God is not in all their thoughts," but is excluded alike from their toil, their recreation, and their joys. Nay, even in the pensiveness and agony of their sorrows, how few are there who say, "Where is God my Maker, that giveth songs in the night?" How immense the distance, how deep the chasm between fallen man and the Holy One! The mind, the heart, the will, bound together by common bonds, acting and reacting upon one another by a thousand unseen and uncontrolled influences, all combined in the unhallowed, the treasonable revolt!

And how can such a being become holy? By what instrumentality is a creature thus apostate to

be restored to the image of his Maker? By what agencies is he to be prepared for that world whose blessedness consists in deliverance from sin, and in the perfect and everlasting enjoyment of its Great Author and glory? What is the starting point, and what the impulse under which so degraded, benighted, depraved a being enters upon this new moral career? How shall he begin, in that growing transformation of character which in itself constitutes one of the chief elements of salvation, and one of the principal elements of the heaven where God dwells? Is it by the doctrines of human philosophy? Is it through the influence of good government? Is it by the power of false religion? Or is it only by the power of the Bible?

The view we have already taken of the pagan world shows nothing more clearly than that men have never become holy by the mere culture of the intellect. "Where is the wise? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?" Nothing is more definitely asserted in the word of God, or more fully and abundantly illustrated in the history of man, than that "the world by wisdom, knew not God." However the mind may be improved by culture, expanded and refined by science, and elevated by the moralizing influence which mere human agency may supply; there still remains a melancholy, nay, an invincible tendency to evil. The alienation of the heart, does not arise from

intellectual imbecility, or intellectual ignorance. The love of science is not the love of God. Religion is indeed not a little indebted to the researches of human science; but unhappily it is no uncommon thing for men endued with the most splendid genius and the most liberal acquisition in human science, to be distinguished for depravity of heart. True religion is not a mere intellectual theory, a philosophic system; nor does a man become the disciple of Christ in the same way in which he becomes the disciple of Plato, or Newton. Never was a lesson more effectually taught by the experience of our race, than that intellectu al culture cannot produce holiness. The learning of the Scribes and Pharisees did not prevent them from rejecting the Saviour; but rather qualified and tempted them to stand forth his malignant and infuriate opposers. The absurdities of a debased pagan ritual, were never confined to the ignorant and uninformed. Socrates and Seneca, Solon and Lycurgus bowed at the altars of Jupiter and Apollo. Idolatry erected her temples amid the groves of the Academy, and published her sanguinary and licentious code amid all the light and learning of the Augustan age. No instance is to be found where a nation, or an individual, ever became the friend of God through the influences of mere intellectual cultivation. At the period when our blessed Lord came into the world, intellect had made its highest efforts; philosophy had exhausted all her vigour and acute

ness; Greece and Rome had furnished the most splendid examples of reasoning and eloquenceexamples so splendid, that next to the Bible, they remain to the present day, the acknowledged standards of elegance and power; and yet they left the world "without God and without hope," and full of that "unrighteousness and ungodliness of men," against which "wrath is revealed from heaven." What has intellectual culture done for modern Europe? What has it done for France -the glory of all lands for purely intellectual and philosophical research? There is not a

combination of more learned or acute men on the earth, than the Royal Academy at Paris. Nor is there probably any where to be found a society of men more ignorant of God and holiness.

Nor will the institutions of civil government make men holy. Civil government may restrain the out-breaking of human corruption; may prevent lawless aggressions upon the welfare of society; may deter the abandoned from injustice and oppression; and while it is "a terror to evil doers," be "a praise to those who do well;" but it can never win back the heart of man to God. What civil government can do for men, it has done already. It does not make men holy in the best governed Christian States. It does not in Britain; it does not among ourselves. It did not in the best governed republics and empires of the pagan world. Not even Antoninus Pius could influence Rome to be either holy or virtuous. All the legislative science and

political advancement which rendered Athens and Sparta the models of their age, could not rescue them from a superstitious polytheism. Legislators as well as philosophers, have failed, and always will fail to regenerate the heart. No matter how wise and equal the laws; no matter what principles of government, or modes of legislation may be adopted and enforced; no matter with how much skill the affairs of princes are adjusted; none of these things convey the knowledge of holiness and salvation. It is an instructive fact, that while pagan nations were advancing from one degree of literary and civil refinement to another, their religious character sunk in progressive, if not in proportioned degeneracy. Not merely did it retain its uncultivated barbarism, but waxed worse with every accession of human wisdom. From the most exalted, or rather the least debasing system, that of siderial worship, it descended to "images, made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and to four-footed beasts, and to creeping things." Never did it reach a lower abyss of degradation, than when heathen lands had attained their acme of civilization and learning. And in a state thus abject did it continue "even under the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Cæsars in Rome," till "the fullness of time was come when God sent forth his Son."

Have then men ever become holy through the influence of false religions? Not certainly by paganism, as we have already seen. The Persians and Mohammedans have, it must be confessed, made