involve the subject, until desperation or despondency puts an end to their fruitless labor, in a state of scepticism. It is a law of heaven, that men shall acquire knowledge on all subjects, in the first instance, by instruction, and careful, persevering mental application. But sceptical men insist on being self-taught, and that, also, without the tax of patient mental application.

The pushing of investigation beyond the boundaries of knowledge, is a frequent cause of discouragement and scepticism-going beyond the sphere of consciousness, or of intuition, or of the senses, into the territories of theory, and twilight, and conjecture. These, often, are men of vigorous minds and impatient desire; and comet-like, launch forth in their fiery career: but having gone beyond the centripetal attractions, of the moral universe, they fall by their own density, and flounder amid the bogs and quagmires of chaos and old night, or like the adventurous navigator, they launch out on an unknown sea, tempest-tossed and not comforted; ever dreaming that some land is near, and straining their sightless eyeballs upon darkness, in the constant expectation of the bursting out of some great light, to whom is still reserved the blackness of darkness. For though their strength were equal to that of Polyphemus, it is exerted without vision in smiting upon the waters, to raise a mist about their own heads.

The society of sceptical men, who are scoffers and partizans in the warfare against Christianity is a powerful cause of scepticism.

All whose confidence in the Bible falters, are not scoffers. Many venerate Christianity and would by no means impair its influence on other minds, who feel, and sometimes lament the unsettled condition of their own. But there are men who are inflamed

with the madness of unbelief, and who associate and systematize their efforts, to undermine the confidence of the community in Christianity, and to the young who fall under their influence their words of scorn are terrific as batteries, contagious as the plague, corrosive as canker and deadly as poison. In their associations they assail the inexperienced with false statements which they are not able to contradict, with sophistry which they cannot detect, and with objections which they cannot answer, and with blasphemies made eloquent by the inspiration of the bowl, which amaze and confound them. The den of lions and the retreat of adders and vipers, are not more perilous to life than these evil communications are to a sound mind and confidence in evidence.

LECTURE II.

THE

CAUSES AND REMEDY

OF

SCEPTICISM.

COLOSSIANS, II. 8.

BEWARE LEST ANY MAN SPOIL YOU THROUGH PHILOSOPHY AND VAIN DECEIT, AFTER THE TRADITION OF MEN, AFTER THE RUDIMENTS OF THE WORLD, AND NOT AFTER CHRIST.

PHILOSOPHY is the nature which God has given to things, as perceived by the human mind-to matter and to mind, in the endless relations of cause and effect, motive and choice; and so far as the properties and laws of created things lie within the cognizance of our faculties, they constitute the material of all knowledge and of all experience.

The bible itself, while it never professedly teaches, always assumes and never contradicts the true philosophy of things. When it describes things as they appear to the eye, the appearance corresponds with the description; when they assume the nature, or attributes, or relations and consequences of things, observation verifies always the

accuracy of the assumption. It cannot be interpreted without it, and cannot be explained in opposition to it. Indeed the interpretation of language, as figurative or literal, turns on the known properties of the subjects spoken of; and of several meanings possible, the nature of the subject decides the selection.

The difficulty in the primitive age was, and ever has been, that false philosophy has been interpolated in nature's book, and the attempt pertinaciously made to accommodate the bible to those facts which never happened; and to make those theoretical apparitions the expositions of truth;a process which has kept torture upon holy writ, and an earthquake in the church to this day; and never will the river of the water of life run pure and copious, and irresistible, extending universal life in its course, till all the interpolations of a false philosophy are blotted out from nature's page, and rent from the system of interpretation, and thrown away.

With these remarks in view, I proceed to observe, that the creeds of the reformation are also made often the occasion of perplexity and doubt, to inexperienced minds.

But

They contain unquestionably the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures, and they have stood through ages against the encroachments of error-as the iron bound shores to the ocean. they were constructed amidst the most arduous controversy that ever taxed the energies of man, and with the eye fixed upon the errors of the day

and on the points around which the battle chiefly raged; on some topics they are more full than the proportion of the faith now demands; some of their phraseology also once familiar, would now without explanation inculcate sentiments which are not scriptural, which the framers did not believe and the creeds were never intended to teach.

They present also the results of investigations without giving to the reader the intervening steps, without which minds not favored with leisure and disciplined by study, could not easily arrive at the conclusions.

Of course they appear rather as insulated, independent, abstract propositions, than as the symmetrical parts and proportions of a beautiful and glorious system of divine legislation, for maintaining the laws and protecting the rights of the universe, while the alienated are reconciled and the guilty are pardoned and though as abstract truths correctly expounded, according to the intention of the framers, they unquestionably inculcate the system of doctrines contained in the Holy Scripturesand though, as land-marks and boundaries between truth and error they are truly important; yet, as the means for the popular exposition and the saving application of truth, they are far short of the exigencies of the day in which we live-mere skeletons of truth compared with the system clothed and beautified, and inspired with life, as it exists and operates in the word of God. Unhappily also some of the most important truths they inculcate are in their exposition so twisted in with C