drawn from the premises, I think must be owned, unless some probable cause can be assigned, to account for those facts so authentically related in the Acts of the Apostles, and attested in his epistles by St. Paul himself, other than any of those which I have considered; and this I am confident cannot be done. It must be therefore accounted for by the power of God. That God should work miracles for the establishment of a most holy religion, which, from the insuperable difficulties that stood in the way of it, could not have established itself without such an assistance, is no way repugnant to human reason: but that without any miracle such things should have happened as no adequate natural causes can be assigned for, is what human reason cannot believe.

To impute them to magic, or the power of demons, (which was the resource of the heathens and Jews against the notoriety of the miracles performed by Christ and his disciples,) is by no means agreeable to the notions of those who in this age disbelieve Christianity. It will, therefore, be needless to show the weakness of that supposition; but that supposition itself is no inconsiderable argument of the truth of the facts. Next to the Apostles and Evangelists, the strongest witnesses of the undeniable force of that truth are Celsus and Julian, and other ancient opponents of the Christian religion, who were obliged to solve what they could not contradict, by such an irrational and absurd imagination.

The dispute was not then between faith and reason, but between religion and superstition. Superstition ascribed to cabalistical names, or magical secrets, such operations as carried along with them

evident marks of the Divine Power. Religion ascribed them to God, and reason declared itself on that side of the question. Upon what grounds, then, can we now overturn that decision? Upon what grounds can we reject the unquestionable testimony given by St. Paul, that he was called by God to be a disciple and apostle of Christ? It has been shown, that we cannot impute it either to enthusiasm or fraud; how shall we then resist the conviction of such a proof? Does the doctrine he preached contain any precepts against the law of morality, that natural law written by God in the hearts of mankind? If it did, I confess that none of the arguments I have used could prove such a doctrine to come from Him. But this is so far from being the case, that even those who reject Christianity as a Divine Revelation, acknowledge the morals delivered by Christ and by his Apostles to be worthy of God. it then on account of the mysteries in the Gospel, that the facts are denied, though supported by evidence, which, in all other cases, would be allowed to contain the clearest conviction, and cannot in this be rejected, without reducing the mind to a state of absolute scepticism, and overturning those rules by which we judge of all evidence, and of the truth or credibility of all other facts? But this is plainly to give up the use of our understanding where we are able to use it most properly, in order to apply it to things of which it is not a competent judge. The motives and reasons upon which Divine Wisdom may think proper to act, as well as the manner in which it acts, must often lie out of the reach of our understanding; but the motives and reasons of

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human actions, and the manner in which they are performed, are all in the sphere of human knowledge, and upon them we may judge, with a well-grounded confidence, when they are fairly proposed to our consideration.

It is incomparably more probable, that a Revelation from God, concerning the ways of his providence, should contain in it matters above the capacity of our minds to comprehend, than that St. Paul, or indeed any of the other Apostles, should have acted, as we know that they did, upon any other foundations than certain knowledge of Christ's being risen from the dead; or should have succeeded in the work they undertook, without the aid of miraculous powers. To the former of these propositions, I may give my assent without any direct opposition of reason to faith; but in admitting the latter, I must believe against all those probabilities that are the rational grounds of assent.

Nor do they who reject the Christian religion, because of the difficulties which occur in its mysteries, consider how far that objection will go against other systems, both of religion and of philosophy, which they themselves profess to admit. There are

in Deism itself, the most simple of all religious opinions, several difficulties, for which human reason can but ill account; which may, therefore, be not improperly styled, "articles of faith." Such is the origin of evil under the government of an all-good and all-powerful God; a question so hard, that the inability of solving it in a manner satisfactory to their apprehensions, has driven some of the greatest philosophers into the monstrous and senseless opinions

of Manicheism and Atheism.-Such is the reconciling the prescience of God with the free-will of man, which, after much thought on the subject, Mr. Locke fairly confesses he could not do, though he acknowledged both; and what Mr. Locke could not do, in reasoning upon subjects of a metaphysical nature, I am apt to think, few men, if any, can hope to perform. Such is also the creation of the world at any supposed time, or the eternal production of it from God; it being almost equally hard, according to mere philosophical notions, either to admit that the goodness of God could remain unexerted through all eternity before the time of such a creation, let it be set back ever so far, or to conceive an eternal production, which words, so applied, are inconsistent and contradictory terms; the solution commonly given by a comparison to the emanation of light from the sun not being adequate to it, or just; for light is a quality inherent in fire, and naturally emanating from it: whereas matter is not a quality inherent or emanating from the Divine Essence, but of a different substance and nature, and if not independent and self-existing, must have been created by a mere act of the Divine Will; and if created, then not eternal; the idea of creation implying a time when the substance created did not exist. But, if to get rid of this difficulty, we have recourse, as many of the ancient philosophers had, to the independent existence of matter, then we must admit two self-existing principles, which is quite inconsistent with genuine Theism, or natural reason. Nay, could that be admitted, it would not yet clear up the doubt, unless we suppose, not only the eternal existence of matter, independent of God, but

that it was from eternity, in the order and beauty we see it in now, without any agency of the Divine Power; otherwise the same difficulty will always occur, why it was not before put in that order and state of perfection; or how the goodness of God could so long remain in a state of inaction, unexerted and unemployed. For, were the time of such an exertion of it put back ever so far, if, instead of five or six thousand years, we were to suppose millions of millions of ages to have passed since the world* was reduced out of a chaos to an harmonious and regular form, still a whole eternity must have preceded that date, during which the Divine attributes did not exert themselves in that beneficent work, so suitable to them, that the conjectures of human reason can find no cause for its being delayed.

But because of these difficulties, or any other that may occur in the system of Deism, no wise man will deny the being of God, or his infinite wisdom, goodness, and power, which are proved by such evidence as carries the clearest and strongest conviction, and cannot be refused without involving the mind in far greater difficulties, even in downright absurdities and impossibilities. The only part, therefore, that can be taken is, to account in the best manner that our weak reason is able to do, for such seeming objections; and where that fails, to acknowledge its weakness, and acquiesce under the certainty, that our very imperfect knowledge, or judgment, cannot be the measure of the Divine Wisdom, or the universal

By the world, I do not mean this earth alone, but the whole material universe, with all its inhabitants. Even created spirits fall under the same reasoning; for they must also have had a beginning, and before that beginning an eternity must have preceded,