no retirement to 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 toils, their recreations, 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, were 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 imbecillity, 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 acquisitions 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 intellectual 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 acuteness; Greece and Rome had furnished the most splendid examples of reasoning and eloquence, examples 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 anywhere 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 outbreaking 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," may 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 sidereal 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 fulness 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 some advances in an apparent moral rectitude beyond the abject wickedness of purely pagan lands. The Persians were the descendants of Elam, the son of Shem; and with the rest of the nations early fell away in their apostasy from the worship of the true God. The purity of their faith was revived in the time of Abraham, but was corrupted again before the Babylonish captivity. It was revived again by Zoroaster, who maintained that there is one supreme God, and a general resurrection and retribution to all according to their deeds. But while the Persian religion for centuries held its sway over a multitude of minds, it never made men holy. "The Persians," says Sis

mondi in his History of the Downfall of the Romau Empire, "had laws emanating from despotic power, which preserve order, but which secure to a nation neither justice, nor happiness. They had that literary culture which feeds the imagination, but does not enlighten the understanding. Their religion and their aversion to idolatry, satisfied the reason, but did not purify the heart." It is also worthy of remark, that for all that is venerable in antiquity and purity, the Persian religion was indebted to the Bible. By those who are best informed in oriental literature, Zoroaster is represented to have been "cotemporary with Daniel, and if not a Jew, yet perfectly acquainted with the Jewish Scriptures."* Nor is it less true that all that is valuable in the system of Mahomet was drawn from the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. Colonies of Jews were once scattered over Arabia, at a period when the religion of the Arabians was polytheism, and when there were three hundred and sixty idols in their principal temple at the Kaaba in Mecca. The character of Mahomet was austere ; his imagination ardent; his temperance extreme; and he was disposed to religious meditations and lofty reveries. His chief thought at first was to fix his own belief, and purify it from the superstitions of his country. He recognized as God an eternal Spirit, omniscient, omnipresent, and incapable of being represented by any material image. He nourished this idea till the age of forty, when he resolved to become the reformer of his nation. He taught them the knowledge of the one God, but he called himself his Prophet. From the time he took this character, his life lost its purity, his temper its mildness, policy entered into his religion, and fraud into his conduct.

*Prideaux's Connexions, and Graves on the Pentateuch.