assembly he was taken with a disease which at first did not seem alarming. A physician, with whom he was on terms of intimacy, went to see him. This physician was one who thought the soul of great value. He believed the disease one of those which flatter but destroy. He felt impelled to tell his friend so, and to ask as to his preparation for crossing the river of death. The lawyer answered him that he could not believe in Christianity. The doctor asked if he had ever investigated the matter? He replied that he had read such and such books on the subject, (naming over some five or six infidel authors,) and that he deemed this a sufficient research. Being asked if he had never read any thing on the other side, he confessed he never had. His friend told him that he deemed this a strange investigation, but would wish to hear the argument of his strongest confidence, that on which his hope leaned with the most quiet security. His answer was substantially as follows: "I can never believe in the darkness said to prevail over the land at the crucifixion of Christ. The strange silence of all writers, except the evangelists, disproves the statement: the elder Pliny particularly, who devoted a whole chap ter to the enumeration of eclipses and strange things, would surely have told us of this occurrence had it been true.” His friend the physician answered him with the following facts:

"My dear friend, permit me to tell you where you obtained that statement concerning the silence of cotemporary authors, and the chapter of Pliny devoted to eclipses. You read it in the second volume of Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. There would be some degree of force in the statement, were it not for one individual circumstance; that is, it is not true!

A tree painted on paper may resemble an oak, but it is not an oak. There is not a word of truth in Mr. Gibbon's account, although the falsehood is polished. That which he calls a distinct chapter of Pliny devoted to eclipses seems to have taken your full credence. Pliny has no such chapter! It is only a sentence, an incidental remark as it were. It consists of eighteen words. I will repeat them to you, if you wish to hear them. The import of the remark is, that eclipses are sometimes very long, like that after Cæsar's death, when the sun was pale almost a year. A man hears of many things which he does not write. Pliny does not mention the darkness, but Celsus does, and so do Thallus and Phlegon, Origen, Eusebius, Tertullian, and others, some of them Christians and some of them pagans. (The reader can see Horne's introduction, 1 vol., chap. ii.) "I am sorry you took the word of that author, splendid as were his talents, for he sometimes penned falsehood without scruple, if religion was his topic."

The sick man was silent-fell into a long deep revery-after a few days he said to a relative, "If what I read in youth gave my mind a wrong bias, I suppose I must abide the consequences, for I cannot investigate now.' He fell into convulsions and died.

Reflections.-Poor man! The truths of the Gospel and the evidences of Christianity were presented to him, and he turned away. He read a statement against the Bible, made by a modern historian who hated Christianity, and he received it at once, without asking further! He took hold on a falsehood without one moment's delay or hesitation, relied upon it, and continued to believe it for twenty years, never asking after further testimony! Surely men love darkness rather than light. Ten thou

sand fruitful facts were before him and around him, on the page of history-they favoured Christianity, and he did not observe or remember them. The first historic lie he met, satisfied him. It seemed opposed to revelation.

CHAPTER XVIII.

MEN HAVE LOVED DARKNESS RATHER THAN LIGHT.

Case 2.-Several physicians of Virginia declared to each other that the Bible could not be true, because the doctrine of the resurrection was taught there, and this they deemed impossible. They mentioned the case of a man whose body was carried in fragments to different parts of the earth, and asked, with exulting laughter, how he was to recover his body after it had been dissolved, mingled with earth, grown again into vegetables, then again forming a part of other animals and other bodies, age after age ? Hundreds and thousands make this the strongest prop of their system of unbelief, but physicians are mentioned here because they are familiar with facts which would utterly forbid any one being influenced a moment by such reasoning, unless he had a strong appetite for falsehood, and a full disrelish for the truth. That men of science have trusted in the hope that the resurrection could not take place, because part of the same body may have belonged to different men and different animals, exhibits so glaringly and undeniably the love for darkness, that we must take some time and some space to review the fabric of their confidence. We must encounter some toil, and exercise some patience, to make that perfectly plain to the youthful, or

the unlettered, which is so readily understood by the anatomist. We must and will expose, if we can, that which has led the scientific to propose a difficulty in the doctrine of the resurrection. Let enlightened readers then bear with us, whilst we explain things well known to them, for the sake of the uncultivated. The inferences will be of equal importance to all. The application is profitable to each one of us.

Let the following facts be noted and impressed on the memory:

First fact,-God tells the righteous that their bodies, although made out of the materials belonging to their present frames of earth, will shine and be very splendid! (See xv. Chapter 1 Cor.) God can make very durable, and very glorious things out of materials the very opposite of firmness, or of brilliancy. He has done this. Of all the substances with which we are acquainted, we esteem diamond the hardest, and the most glittering. Charcoal is as black and as crumbling, as any other body known to us; yet, these two bodies are the same! The learned know, the ploughboy does not, that the difference between charcoal and diamond is, that the Creator has ordered a different arrangement of particles! The same materials are differently placed, that is all. If any are wishing for a body more beautiful than they now have, they may be assured that God can, if he chooses, take a part of our present fragile, corruptible forms of clay, and make out of it something exceedingly glorious. "It is sown in dishonour, it is raised in glory." Out of a certain spot of earth a flower arose, which waved in splendour; the soil from which it grew was very black.

Second fact,-God has not told us how much of our

present body goes into the composition of the new, on the morning of the resurrection.

The figure used as an illustration by the inspired writer, to make his instructions plain on this subject, is the grain which is sown in the earth, decays, and out of which springs the new grain. It is perhaps a twentieth, or thirtieth part of a grain of wheat, which springs up and forms a part of the new grain; the rest rots and stays in the ground. It is not needed in the new body which God gives the wheat, and is not called forth again. Whether it will be a tenth, a twentieth, or an hundredth part of our present body, which is to enter into the formation of the new, God has not chosen to tell us, and we need not care, for the work will be well done, and we shall know enough after a time.

Third fact, The man who has lived here seventy years, has had very many bodies: perhaps less, perhaps more than seventy. God has not condescended to tell us out of which of these bodies he will take the new, or whether a portion of each will be used.

Here let the young reader be very careful to note and remember, the body he has now is not the same body he had last year. Our bodies change continually. The man who is kept from food, in any way, no longer than one week, finds, at the end of that time, he has not as much body by many pounds, as he had seven days before. In this way, how fast the body wastes, is not yet accurately agreed on. Our food is only supplying this continued waste. The bones change also, but not so fast as the softer parts of our frames. How the body can waste, and be again renewed, is singular and interesting; but not easily understood without close thinking. It will be worth while to take some pains, and