you, to the honour of the Giver, and as faithful stewards Occupy with the means of grace vouch

of the same?

safed to you, "for unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance; but from him that hath not, shall be taken away even that which he hath." Now you know the truth, but "hold it not in unrighteousness;" retain God in your knowledge, that it may be preserved to you, "if it may be a lengthening of your tranquillity."

How often has it happened to me to have found an aged person just trembling upon the brink of eternity without hope, and it may be said, without God. True it is, these have not denied Him: but then He is not to them the Christian's God, even a reconciled God and Father. These are then infidels of a sort; for they have not believed the message of peace which God has sent to them, and have not obeyed his commandment to believe on Him whom He hath sent, even on His Son Jesus Christ. And may we not ask, if, as we have seen, he that despiseth the goodness of God displayed in the works of Creation, is given over to a fearful state of condemnation; how shall they escape, and of how much sorer punishment shall they be thought worthy, who are not convinced by all that long-suffering and forbearance and goodness manifested by the Son of God; and how great must be that subjection to sin, which causes them to close their eyes against all the brightness of the Father's love, kindled and blazing forth as it does in the sight of our world! O! take heed to such a warning as this; "if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sin,

but a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation which shall devour the adversaries." And be not ye "of them who draw back unto perdition, but of them that believe to the saving of the soul."

But in what words of truth and love may I hope, finally, to carry conviction to the atheist himself; how may I discover suitable means to turn his disobedient heart to the wisdom of the just, and to lead him back into the way everlasting? Do Thou, O merciful Lord, instruct; do Thou, O Spirit of wisdom, guide me!

Surely, all that might be said, must be in vain : for it has already been said and he has rejected it, and he has hardened himself against all instruction, or he would not have been thus given over unto folly. Did the fool say in his heart, no God? Reason and Revelation contradicted it-conscience contradicted it; the heavens above told him of their Creator, and the earth beneath gave witness to Him; the firmament shewed His handy work, day and night, the sun and moon which he ordained, every springing grass and every smiling flower, all animate and inanimate nature united to make known a God. But none of these have profited him, and what can a feeble fellow-creature do more? Thine is indeed a sin unto eternal death if thou continuest therein-" destruction and unhappiness is in thy ways ';" and must we then leave thee without a hope?

1

1 I remember to have read in the annals of the French Revolution a remarkable illustration of the truth of this inspired description of the "unhappiness" of such characters. One of the most desperate of the factious of that time, (Condorcet, if

But thou hast hitherto been wise in the sight of thine own eyes, thine heart hath been lifted up within thee and thy mind hardened in pride; wilt thou see then by what has been written, that thou art convinced of folly in this matter, and that thy foolishness above all men has been made manifest? And wilt thou then be humbled in thine own conceit?

O that thou wouldst be humbled! For then might thy reason and thy understanding return unto thee, that thou shouldest bless the most High, and praise and honour Him that liveth for ever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, and His kingdom is from generation to generation!

I mistake not,) was surprised by his associates in the act of reading with his little daughter the Scriptures of the New Testament. They taxed him with duplicity, to which he replied, "I am an infidel as you are, I am miserable as you are, but if by belief in this book she can find happiness, let her alone."

APPENDIX.

EXTRACTS from Dr. Chalmers's Bridgewater Treatise "on the Power, Wisdom, and Goodness of God, as manifested in the adaptation of external Nature to the moral and intellectual constitution of Man." Part II. chap. iv. sect. 4.

"We cannot without a glaring contravention to all the principles of the experimental philosophy recede to a further disance from the doctrine of a God, than to the position of simple Atheism1. We do not need to take our departure from any point farther back than this, in the region of Antitheism; for that region cannot possibly be entered by us but by an act of tremendous presumption, which it were premature to denounce as impious, but which we have the authority of all modern science for denouncing as unphilosophical. To make this palpable, we have only to contrast the two intellectual states, not of Theism and Atheism, but of Theism and Antitheism; along with the two processes by which alone we can be logically and legitimately led to them.

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Sect. 5.-To be able to say, then, that there is a God, we may have only to look abroad on some definite territory, and point to the vestiges that are given of His power and presence somewhere. To be able to say there is no God, we must walk the whole expanse of infinity, and ascertain by observation, that such vestiges are to be found nowhere. Grant that no trace of

The word 'Atheism,' is used by this writer in a different sense from that in which we have taken it, namely, to denote a state of "unbelief," not of "disbelief," he expresses the latter state by another term, viz. Anti'theism."

Him can be discerned in that quarter of contemplation which our puny optics have explored. Does it follow that throughout all immensity, a Being with the essence and sovereignty of a God is nowhere to be found? Because through our loopholes of communication with that small portion of external nature which is before us, we have not seen or ascertained a God-must we therefore conclude of every unknown and untrodden vastness in this illimitable universe, that no divinity is there? Or, because through the brief successions of our little day, these heavens have not once broken silence, is it therefore for us to speak to all the periods of that eternity which is behind us, and to say, that never hath a God come forth with the unequivocal tokens of his existence? Ere we can say that there is a God, we must have seen on that portion of nature to which we have access, the print of his footseps, or have had direct intimation from himself, or been satisfied by the authentic memorials of His converse with our species in other days. But ere we can say that there is no God, we must have roamed over all nature, and seen that no mark of a Divine footstep was there; and we must have gotten intimacy with every existent spirit in the universe and learned from each that never did a revelation from God visit him, and we must have searched not into the records of one solitary planet, but into the archives of all worlds, and thence gathered, that throughout the wide realms of immensity, not one exhibition of a reigning and living God ever has been made. Atheism might plead a lack of evidence within its own field of observation. But Antitheism pronounces both upon the things that are, and the things which are not within that field. It breaks forth and beyond all those limits that have been prescribed to man's excursive spirit by the sound philosophy of experience, and by a presumption the most tremendous, even the usurpation of all space and of all time, it affirms that there is no God. To make this out, we should need to travel abroad over the surrounding universe till we had exhausted it, and to search backward through all the hidden recesses of eternity, to traverse in every direction the plains of infinitude, and sweep the outskirts of that space which is itself interminable; and then bring back to this little world of ours, the report of an universal blank, wherein we had not met with