don-how often has the fire passed over it, and yet it has risen to augmented wealth and grandeur! Lisbon, destroyed by an earthquake - how soon did it rise again! Why, then, are Babylon, and Tyre, and Petra, and Tadmor, doomed to perpetual desolation ? And how could it be known that they would be? But there they are, now, in this nineteenth century, precisely as the prophets said they would be-piles of ruins; utter desolations; the habitation of dragons, and satyrs, and owls.

Fifth. It remains, then, in summing up what I have said, to observe that these things are beyond the range of the unaided powers of man. They are not a mere guess, or a vague conjecture of what might be, like Macaulay's remark about the New Zealander; they are positive affirmations of what would be. They can not come under the province of hope, for their enemies could have seen no ground of hope that they would be thus permanently desolate. They are not the result of ma: hematical calculation, as the movements of the heavenly bodies are, for ruined cities come under no such laws. The predictions are not the result of political sagacity. In particularity; in definiteness; in minuteness; in detail, they are wholly unlike the predictions of Burke and Canning, for even Burke, wonderful as his sagacity was, never ventured on any predictions that would correspond in detail with the events following the French Revolution and the Regicide Peace. They are, therefore, the result of PROPHECY—the effect of a supernatu. ral endowment of man, on a line similar to miracles; and a confirmation now, like miracles, of the divine origin of the book in which they are found.

The following, then, is the argument in this nine. teenth century:

(a) There are the books containing these prophecies. They have come down to us from the far-distant past

the most venerable books in the possession of mankind. Those books do not pass away as their authors did. They live. They have lived for more than two thousand years. They will live on to all coming time. They do not change. Not a word is altered; not a letter is lost. They may be examined with the utmost patience and leisure of criticism, and the world is invited to the examination.

(6) There are the facts. The East is full of them. They, too, do not now change. Babylon and Tyre are what they have been for more than a thousand years, and they will remain what they are for more than a thousand years to come, except that the corroding tooth of time will slowly remove the proofs, as now found in their remains, that they once existed at all. They, too, may be examined as leisurely as the books. Travelers tell us what they are, and they do not vary in their statements. Any man, if he has any

doubt on the subject, may go and examine those ruins. “I would,” said a countryman of our own, when speaking of the ruins of a city in the East, “I would that the skeptic could stand, as I did, among the ruins of this city, and there open the sacred book, and read the words of the inspired penman, written when this desolate place was one of the greatest cities in the world.

see the scoff arrested, his cheek pale, his lip quivering, and his heart quaking with fear, as the ancient city cries out to him, in a voice loud and powerful as one risen from the dead; though he would not believe Moses and the prophets, he believes the handwriting of God himself in the desolation and eternal ruin around him."* * Stephens, Incidents of Travel, etc., vol. ii., p. 76.

LECTURE VII.

INSPIRATION OF THE SCRIPTURES WITH REFERENCE TO

THE OBJECTIONS MADE IN THE NINETEENTH CEN

TURY.

The subject of this Lecture will be the inspiration of the Bible as an argument for the divine origin of Christianity, keeping before us, in the discussion, the main thought which lies at the foundation of these Lectures —the argument as it exists in the nineteenth century. The point of the inquiry is not what the argument for the inspiration of the Bible, and the consequent proofs of the divine origin of the system, would have been when the canon of the Bible was complete, and it was first submitted to the world, but what it is now, after the volume has been before the world for eighteen hundred years. It has been fairly tried. It may be presumed that all the objections that are ever to be made to its inspiration have been already made. It may be assumed that its teachings are understood, and that we now understand what its influence will be at any time, in any land, or in relation to any class of men, barbarous or civilized, or in its bearing on the morals, the manners, and the laws of men. It

may be assumed, perhaps, that science will have nothing more formidable to oppose to its claims to inspiration than it has already alleged, and that no discoveries will be made in the ruins of ancient cities and towns, or in the structure of the earth itself, that will add any new facts to strengthen the argument against its divine origin. What, then, is the evidence, in the age in which we live, that this book was inspired ?

It would not be practicable in a single Lecture, on such a subject, to enter into details, and it is not my purpose to attempt it. This one subject itself might extend beyond the entire limit of this course of Lectures, and still be unexhausted ; for the field is ample;

; the difficulties are great; there are important questions which are not yet settled; and perhaps, as compared with other subjects pertaining to the Bible, there is no more inviting field on which a student of the sacred Scriptures, who would wish to prepare something that might be the great work of his life, could more properly employ his talents than in endeavoring to determine the yet unsettled questions about the inspiration of the Bible. Into the questions, therefore, about the modes of inspiration; whether it extends to the words as well as to the matter; how far the sacred writers availed themselves of their own knowledge and observation, and the knowledge and historical records in existence when they wrote; how far, as inspired men, they are responsible for statements on other subjects than those pertaining to the immediate purpose of inspiration - the ordinary facts of history, or the statements of science ; how far they were permitted to employ their own powers, and how this is consistent wth their being inspired; how the apparent discrepancies and contradictions in the book can be reconciled with the idea of inspiration — into these and kindred questions I do not propose largely to enter. I may be permitted, also, to say, that on some of these points there are difficulties which have not yet been met, and which perhaps none of us are prepared to meet.

I shall, therefore, limit my remarks to considerations of a very general nature, designed to show that the Bible can not have been the work of the unaided human powers, but that there are things pertaining to it which show that it must have come from God, or that it was inspired. In a parallel case, we might show that the worlds bear marks of having been made by God, and that any other theory would be incapable of defense, though there may be a thousand difficulties in our minds in respect to that creation, and a thousand things which we are not competent to reconcile and explain.

There are certain characteristics of mind which, however unnatural it may seem at first sight to place them together, appear to lie in the same line, or to have a relation to each other which has not yet been explained; where one closely borders on another; where one may be mistaken for another; and where, in describing the operations of the mind, there may be danger of ascribing that to one which properly belongs to another. I mention them in the following order: Genius; Inspiration; Insanity.

I mention them in this connection and this order, not because this order is always found, or because the one naturally develops itself into the other, or because the one is to be explained on the same principles as the other, but because there is a certain resemblance in them which would not be likely to be found in other characteristics of the human mind as bearing on the production of a work of art, or in relation to the developments of the highest forms of thought. The Bible is the creation of one of these. The word inspiration is often applied to the works of genius; among the Greeks, and the ancients generally, the idea of inspira