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SERMON II.

THE POWER OF RELIGION ON THE HUMAN INTELLECT.

BY THE REV. H. MELVILL, M.A.

LATE FELLOW AND TUTOR OF ST. PETER'S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, AND MINISTER OF CAMDEN CHAPEL, CAMBERWELL.

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The entrance of thy words giveth light; it giveth understanding to the simple.”—
Psalm cxix. 130.

may look to bring speedily round the wished-for result. The effective machinery is Christianity, and Christianity alone. Propagate the tenets of this religion, as registered in the Bible, and a mighty regeneration will go out over the face of the long degraded community.

THERE is no point of view under which | earthly legislation, any more than by the the Bible can be surveyed, and not com- tyrannizings of earthly might, that you mend itself to thinking minds as a wonderful book, and a precious. Travelling down to us across the waste of far-off centuries, it brings the history of times which must otherwise have been given up to conjecture and fable. Instructing us as to the creation of the magnificent universe, and defining the authorship of that rich furniture, as well material as intellectual, with which this universe is stored, it delivers our minds from those vague and unsatisfying theories which reason, unaided in her searchings, proposed with respect to the origin of all things. Opening up, moreover, a sublime and simple system of theology, it emancipates the world from degrading superstitions, which, dishonouring Deity by the representations propounded of his character, turn vice into virtue, and so banish what is praiseworthy from human society.

And thus, if you kept out of sight the more important ends subserved by the disclosures of the Bible, there would be no single gift for which men stood so indebted to the Almighty as for the revelation of himself in the pages of Scripture. The great engine of civilization is still the written word of the Most High. And if you visit a tribe of our race in the lowest depths of barbarism, and desire to bring up the debased creatures, and place them on their just level in the scale of existence, it is not by the enactments of

We need hardly appeal, in proof of this assertion, to the records of the effects of missionary enterprise. You are all aware that, in many instances, a great change has been wrought, by the labours of faithful and self-denying men, on the savage clans amongst which they have settled. We omit, for the present, the incalculable advantages consequent on the introduction of Christianity, when another state of being is brought into the account. We consider men simply with respect to their sojourning upon earth; and we contend that the revolution effected in temporal affairs should win, even from those who prize not its disclosures in regard to eternal, the warmest admiration for the Bible. There has succeeded to lawlessness and violence, the beautiful scenery of good order and peace. The rude beings, wont to wander to and fro, alternately the prey and the scourge of neighbouring tribes, have settled down to the quiet occupations of industry; and gathering themselves into villages, and plying at the businesses of handicraft or agriculture, have presented the aspect of a well-disciplined society in exchange

for that of a roving and piratical horde. | setting them to grasp and measure those And when a district which has heretofore, truths. If the human mind grow dwarfboth morally and physically, been little better than a desert, puts forth, in all its outspread, the tokens of a vigorous culture, and the sabbath-bell summons from scattered cottages a smiling population, linked together by friendship, and happy in all the sweetnesses of domestic charities; why, the infidel must be something less than a man, if, with all his contempt for the Bible as a revelation from God, he refuse to admire and esteem it as a noble engine for uplifting humanity from its deep degradations.

But we wish rather to draw off your thoughts from what the Bible has done for society at large, and to fix them on what it effects for individuals. It follows, of course, that, since society is the aggregate of individuals, what the Bible does for the mass is mainly the sum of what it does separately for the units. An effect upon society presupposes an effect on its component members in their individual capacities; it being impossible that the whole should be changed except by the change of its parts.

Now we are persuaded, that there is no book, by the perusal of which the mind is so much strengthened, and so much enlarged, as it is by the perusal of the Bible. We deal not yet with the case of the man who, being under the teachings of God's Spirit, has the truths of revelation opened up to him in their gigantic and overwhelming force. We shall come afterwards to the consideration of the circumstances of the converted; we confine ourselves, for the present, to those of the unconverted. We require nothing but an admission of the truth of Scripture; so that he who reads its declarations, and statements, receives them as he would those of a writer of acknowledged veracity. And what we contend is, that the study of the Bible, even when supposed without influence on the soul, is calculated, far more than any other study, to enlarge the mind, and strengthen the intellect. There is nothing so likely to elevate, and endow with new vigour, our faculties, as the bringing them into contact with stupendous truths, and the

ish and enfeebled, it is, ordinarily, because left to deal with common-place facts, and never summoned to the effort of taking the span and altitude of broad and lofty disclosures. The understanding will gradually bring itself down to the dimensions of the matters with which alone it is familiarized, till, having long been habituated to contracting its powers, it shall lose, wellnigh, the ability of expanding them.

But if it be for the enlargement of the mind, and the strengthening of its faculties, that acquaintance should be made with ponderous and far-spreading truths, it must be clear that knowledge of the Bible outdoes all other knowledge in bringing round such result. We deny not that great effects may be wrought on the peasantry of a land by that wondrous diffusion of general information which is now going forward through the instrumentality of the press. It is not possible that our penny magazines should be carrying to the workshop of the artisan, and the cottage of the labourer, an actual library of varied intelligence, without producing a universal outstretch of mind, whether for good, or whether for evil. But if a population could be made a Bible reading population, we argue that it would be made a far more thinking, and a far more intelligent population, than it will ever become through the turning its attention on simplified sciences, and abbreviated histories. If I desired to enlarge a man's mind, I should like to fasten it on the truth that God never had beginning, and never shall have end. I would set it to the receiving this truth, and to the grappling with it. I know that, in endeavouring to comprehend this truth, the mind will be quickly mastered, and that, in attempting to push on to its boundary lines, it will fall down, wearied with travel, and see infinity still stretching beyond it. But the effort will have been a grand mental discipline. And he who has looked at this discovery of God, as made to us by the word of inspiration, is likely to have come away from the con. templation with his faculties elevated, and,

at the same time, humbled; so that a|tions with a mind a hundred-fold more vigour, allied in no degree with arrogance, expanded, and a hundred-fold more elewill have been generated by the study vated, than if he had given his time to of a Bible truth; and the man, whilst the exploits of Cæsar, or poured forth his strengthening his mind by a mighty ex- attention on the results of machinery. ercise, will have learned the hardest, and the most useful, of all lessons, that intellect is not omnipotent, but that the greatest wisdom may be, oftentimes, the know-classes of our community. We are far ing ourselves ignorant.

We are not, you will observe, referring to the Bible as containing the food of the soul, and as teaching man what he must learn if he would not perish everlastingly. We are simply arguing that the bringing men to study the Bible would be the going a vast deal further towards making them strong-minded, and intellectual, than the dispersing amongst them treatises on all the subjects which philosophy embraces. The Bible, whilst the only book for the soul, is the best book for the intellect. The sublimity of the topics of which it treats; the dignified simplicity of its manner of handling them; the nobleness of the mysteries which it developes; the illumination which it throws on points the most interesting to creatures conscious of immortality; all these conspire to bring round a result which we insist upon as actual and necessary, namely, that the man who should study the Bible, and not be benefited by it spiritually, would be benefited by it intellectually. We think that it may be reckoned amongst incredible things, that converse should be held with the first parents of our race; that man should stand on this creation whilst its beauty was unsullied, and then mark the retinue of destruction careering with a dominant step over its surface; that he should be admitted into intercourse with patriarchs and prophets, and move through scenes peopled with the majesties of the Eternal, and behold the Godhead himself coming down into humanity, and working out, in the mysterious coalition, the discomfiture of the powers of darkness-oh, we reckon it, we say, amongst incredible things, that all this should be permitted to a man-as it is permitted to every student of Scripture and yet that he should not come back from the ennobling associa

We speak not thus in any disparagement of the present unparalleled efforts to make knowledge accessible to all

enough from underrating such efforts; and we hold, unreservedly, that a vast and a beneficial effect may be wrought amongst the poor through the well-applied agency of vigorous instruction. In the mind of many a peasant, whose every moment is bestowed on wringing from the soil a scanty subsistence, there slumber powers which, had they been evolved by early discipline, would have elevated their possessor to the first rank of philosophers; and many a mechanic, who goes patiently the round of unvaried toil, is, unconsciously, the owner of faculties which, nursed and expanded by education, would have enabled him to electrify senates, and to win that pre-eminence which men award to the majesty of genius. There arise occasions when, peculiar circumstances aiding the developement, the pentup talent struggles loose from the trammels of pauperism; and the peasant and mechanic, through a sudden outbreak of mind, start forward to the places for which their intellect fits them. But, ordinarily, the powers remain through life bound up and torpid; and he, therefore, forms but a contracted estimate of the amount of high mental endowment, who reckons by the proud marbles which cause the aisles of a cathedral to breathe the memory of departed greatness, and never thinks, when walking the village church-yard with its rude memorials of the fathers of the valley, that, possibly, there sleeps beneath his feet one who, if early taught, might have trod with a Newton's step the firmament, or swept with a Milton's hand the harpstrings. We make then every admission of the power which there is in cultivation to enlarge and unfold the human understanding.

We nothing question that mental capacities are equally distributed amongst different classes of society; and that, if it

were not for the adventitious circum- fascinate him, if he look not beyond the stances of birth, entailing the advantages present area of existence. In all the wide of education, there would be sent out range of sciences, what science is there from the lower grades the same propor- comparable, in its sublimity and difficulty, tion as from the higher, of individuals to the science of God? In all the annals distinguished by all the energies of ta- of humankind, what history is there so lent. curious, and so riveting, as that of the infancy of man, the cradling, so to speak, of the earth's population? Where will you find a lawgiver from whose edicts may be learned a nobler jurisprudence than is exhibited by the statute book of Moses? Whence will you gather such vivid illustrations of the power of truth as are furnished by the march of Christianity, when apostles stood alone, and a whole world was against them? And if there be no book which treats of a loftier science, and none which contains a more interesting history, and none which more thoroughly discloses the principles of right and the prowess of truth; why then, just so far as mental improvement can be proved dependent on acquaintance with scientific matters, or historical, or legal, or ethical, the Bible, beyond all other books, must be counted the grand engine for achieving that improvement; and we claim for the Holy Scriptures the illustrious distinction, that, containing whatsoever is needful for saving the soul, they present also whatsoever is best calculated for strengthening the intellect.

And thus believing that efforts to disseminate knowledge may cause a general calling forth of the mental powers of our population, we have no other feeling but that of pleasure in the survey of these efforts. It is indeed possible-and of this we have our fears-that, by sending a throng of publications to the fireside of the cottager, you may draw him away from the Bible, which has heretofore been specially the poor man's book, and thus inflict upon him, as we think, an intellectual injury, full as well as a moral. But, in the argument now in hand, we only uphold the superiority of scriptural knowledge, as compared with any other, when the alone object proposed is that of developing and improving the thinking powers of mankind. And we reckon that a fine triumph might be won for Christianity, by the taking two illiterate individuals, and subjecting them to two different processes of mental discipline. Let the one be made familiar with what is styled general information; let the other be confined to what we call Bible information. And when, in each case, the process has gone on a fair portion of time, and you come to inquire whose reasoning faculties have been most im-tration of our text. We might occupy proved, whose mind has most grown and expanded itself, we are persuaded that the scriptural study will vastly carry it over the miscellaneous, and that the experiment will satisfactorily demonstrate, that no knowledge tells so much on the intellect of mankind as that which is furnished by the records of inspiration.

Now we have not carried on our argument to its utmost limit, though we have, perhaps, advanced enough for the illus

your attention with the language, as we have done with the matter, of Holy Writ. It were easy to show you that there is no human composition, presenting, in any thing of the same degree, the majesty of oratory, and the loveliness of poetry. So that if the debate were simply on the best means of improving the taste of an indiAnd if the grounds of this persuasion vidual, others might commend to his be demanded, we think them so self-evi- attention the classic page, or bring for dent as scarcely to require the being forward the standard works of a nation's mally advanced. We say again, that if you keep out of sight the concern which man has in scriptural truths, regarding him as born for eternity, there is a grandeur about these truths, and a splendour, and a beauty, which must amaze and

literature; but we, for our part, would chain him down to the study of Scripture; and we would tell him, that, if he would learn what is noble verse, he must hearken to Isaiah sweeping the chords to Jerusalem's glory; and if he would know

what is powerful eloquence, he must stand by St. Paul pleading in bonds at Agrippa's tribunal."

It suits not our purpose to push further this inquiry. But we think it right to impress on you most earnestly the wonderful fact, that, if all the books in the wide world were assembled together, the Bible would as much take the lead in disciplining the understanding, as in directing the soul. Living, as we do, in days when intellectual and scriptural are set down, practically, as opposite terms, and it seems admitted as an axiom that to civilize and to christianize, to make men intelligent, and to make men religious, are things which have no necessary nor even possible connexion, it is well that we sometimes revert to the matter of fact; and whilst every stripling is boasting that a great enlargement of mind is coming on a nation, through the pouring into all its dwellings a tide of general information, it is right to uphold the forgotten position, that, in caring for man as an immortal being, God cared for him as an intellectual, and that, if the Bible were but read by our artisans and our peasantry, we should be surrounded by a far more enlightened, and intelligent, population than will appear on this land, when the schoolmaster, with his countless magazines, shall have gone through it in its length and in its breadth.

illuminated, or strengthened, through acquaintance with the contents of Scripture. We thus vindicate the truth of our text, when religion, properly and strictly so called, is not brought into the account. We prove that the study of the Bible, when it does not terminate in the conversion of the soul, will terminate in the clearing and improvement of the intellect. So that you cannot find the sense wherein it does not hold good, that "the entrance of God's words giveth light, it giveth understanding to the simple."

But we now go on to observe that the passage applies with a vastly greater force to the converted than to the unconverted. We will employ the remainder of our time in examining its truth when the student of Scripture is supposed also the subject of grace. It would seem as though this case were specially contemplated by the Psalmist, there being something in the phraseology which loses otherwise much of its point. The expression "the entrance of thy words," appears to denote more than the simple perusal. The light breaks out, and the understanding is communicated, not through the mere reading of thy words, but through the "entrance of thy words;" the Bible being effective, only as its truths pierce, and go deeper than the surface. And although it must be readily conceded that the mere reading, apart from the enBut up to this point we have made no trance of the word, can effect none of direct reference to those words of David those results which we have already which we brought forward as the subject ascribed to the Bible, we still think the of the present discourse. Yet all our chief reference must be to an entrance remarks have tended to their illustration. into the soul, which is peculiar, rather The Psalmist, addressing himself to than to that into the understanding, which his God, declares, "the entrance of thy is common. We may also remark that words giveth light, it giveth understanding the marginal reading of the passage is, to the simple." Now you will at once"the opening of thy words giveth light." perceive that, when taken in its largest If we adopt this translation, which is, signification, this verse ascribes to the Bible precisely that energy for which we have contended. The assertion is, that the entrance of God's word gives light, and that it gives also understanding to the simple; just as it has been our endeavour to show that a mind, dark through want of instruction, or weak through its powers being either naturally poor, or long unexercised, would become either

probably, the more accurate of the two, we must conclude that the Psalmist speaks of the word as interpreted by God's Spirit, and not merely as perused by the student. It is not the word, the bare letter, which gives the light, and the understanding, specially intended; but the word, as opened, or applied by the Spirit. Now, in treating the text in this its more limited signification, we have to

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