convinced of his own sinfulness, gratefully and affectionately to welcome the dispensation of the Gospel, which reveals God to man as a reconciled Father in Christ Jesus; which announcing the completion of the inestimable sacrifice voluntarily offered for our ransom, proclaims, Herein is love; not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins: God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son, that whoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting lifewhich calls men to love Him who thus first loved us; to walk henceforth under the influence of sanctifying grace in newness of heart and life; to live no longer to ourselves, but to Him who died for us; to be followers of Him who gave Himself for us, that He might purify unto Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works.

In the situation of man upon earth there is a feature, which not only is intimately and at every moment connected with moral discipline, but is in itself so remarkable, and in its implications so pointed, that it must not be left without distinct observation. Man, stationed as it were in the centre of the visible works of God, is endowed with faculties rendering him capable of discover.

ing by means of those works the existence and many glorious perfections of his Creator. He has intellectual powers qualifying him to glorify that Creator, to adore Him, to praise Him, to feel His excellences, to comprehend His will. For these very purposes man appears to have been formed. Yet from immediate and open intercourse with his Maker, he stands debarred and cut off. He addresses the Divinity by prayer as by a messenger conveying to another world the sorrows and the petitions of the sup plicator. He knows his God, as he knows the wind, by effects. But his God meets not his eyes; utters not an audible voice; discloses not Him. self to the organs of mortal sense; grants not to the human race the degree nor the kind of in. tercourse for which, by faculties bestowed, He has graciously vouchsafed to make them competent. I speak of the human race collectively, and of the state of facts as it manifests itself to Natural Theology; not of those few individuals, Prophets, Apostles, and other holy men of old, excepted from the general law ordained for the countless myriads of mankind, and admitted for the furtherance of the divine plans of mercy to special and miraculous communications with

their God. Is not then the condition of man, in the particulars at present under contemplation, marked by a close analogy to that of sons dismissed in consequence of flagrantly evil conduct from the presence of their parent, yet not cast off from his affectionate solicitude; furnished by him with means of subsistence and various comforts; permitted to communicate to him by letters and messengers their wants and their wishes; but prohibited from personal access to him and from personal intercourse with him, although allowed to hope that, if ever a radical change of character shall have been effectually wrought and manifested, the period of penal exile will be terminated? Is it conceivable that man, spontaneously and benignantly fitted in his faculties for a measure of immediate intercourse with his heavenly Father, would be debarred from it, if he had not forfeited the privilege by disobedience? Observe the accordance between these views, suggested by Natural Theology and the Scriptures. Man in Paradise had direct communication with his God. Man, renovated through his Redeemer, shall enjoy it again, and for ever.

CHAP. XII.

ON COINCIDENCES, RESEMBLANCES, AND ANALOGIES, BETWEEN THE ACTUAL STATE OF THINGS AS MANIFEST TO NATURAL THEOLOGY, AND THE SCRIPTURES.

THE Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament whether contemplated with an eye of faith, or of incredulity, must be acknowledged, if surveyed collectively and candidly, to constitute a progressive and regular whole. The Deist and the Christian may alike behold in them one subject, call it a delusive falsehood or the most momentous of truths, steadily pursued through several thousands of years from the beginning of the Bible to the end; the alleged history of man from his entrance into the present world to his final lot in another and an eternal state: a his tory opening with his creation; speedily an nouncing his fall from righteousness, his sentence of condemnation accompanied with intimations of provided means of mercy through a Deliverer in due time to be revealed; disclosing a gradual and connected scheme of preparation for the com

ing of that great and mysterious Redeemer, by the separation of the descendants of Abraham from an idolatrous world, by the precepts and types of the law enjoined upon them, from Mount Sinai, and by the successive declarations of professed prophets from age to age conveying characteristical marks by which the Deliverer was to be known; subsequently affirming His appearance upon earth, and graphically describing His manner of life, His miracles, His sufferings, His expiatory death, His resurrection from the grave, His ascension into Heaven; tracing the proceedings of His immediate followers in spreading by preaching, sustained by miraculous attestations, His doctrine through many and distant regions; and proclaiming by a fresh accession of prophecies the approaching and joyful union of all the kingdoms of the earth in holy subjection to the Lord and to His Christ, and the ultimate consummation of the purposes of God respecting mankind by the establishment of the righteous in eternal blessedness, and by the everlasting perdition of the wicked. In the case of an ordinary book, the corroboration of some one part by incidental evidence tends to evince the veracity of the writer in other parts. But when