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of moral science, are vastly too general to be of any efficacy with the unlettered multitude. And therefore it is well, that the delusion which we now endeavour to expose, is not the one by which they are most liable to be misled. They see the truth more in its nakedness. It is not so hidden from their view, by the gloss of sentimentalism— nor in humble life, must it be confessed, do there exist so many of those graces and plausibilities of character which have served, but served most unjustly, to alleviate, among the higher classes of society, the felt guilt of their real and practical indifference to God. This guilt, wherewith the book in question charges one and all of the children of humanity, it is found of the unsophisticated peasant, that he more willingly takes home, than the votary either of imagination or of science. There lies, as it were, a more open and unobstructed avenue between the volume in his hand, and the conscience that lies within his heart-so that the representations given by the one are more frequently and faithfully responded to, by the echo of a consenting testimony on the part of the other. It is thus that the evidence in question multiplies upon his observation, more than it often does on a reader of lofty scholarship and academic cultivation; and that whether scripture tells him of the moral disease that is upon his spirit, or proposes to him its own remedy for the removal of it-there is a coalescence between all that he feels within himself, and all that he descries on the outer page of revelation. The very simplicity of his mind lays it open to a more correct impression

of the external truth; and his exemption from the prejudices of taste and vanity and refinement favours a clearer discernment, both of the matters that lie within the recesses of the inner man and which are cognizable by conscience alone, and also of the matters that lie on the face of the world and of general society-on which even the homely and unlettered peasant is often known to cast an eye of most intelligent observation. It is thus-that, having access on the one hand to the volume of a profest revelation, and access on the other to the whole of that home territory which forms the scene or the subject of many of its descriptions, he has two sides of a comparison, from the one to the other of which, there might be a busy play and interchange, between the readings of the book and the reflections of an independent consciousness. It is the sustained and the varied and the unexcepted coincidence between the sayings of the volume and the findings of him who peruses it it is this which constitutes the internal evidence on which we now insist. It is this which, even at the very outset of our inquiries, stamps a verisimilitude on this profest record of an embassy from heaven,-a verisimilitude that we believe will with every honest and persevering inquirer be heightened at length into the impression, and that not a fanciful, but a most rational and well-warranted impression of its verity so as to make stand out, even to the eye of our general population, such marks and characters on the face of the volume itself, as might palpably announce to them the divinity that penned it.

18. There is the philosophy of the subject as

well as its poetry in the following beautiful lines of Cowper-when he compares the happier intelligence of a poor and an aged female with that of Voltaire :

"She for her humble sphere by nature fit,
Of little understanding and no wit,

Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true,
A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew;
And in that charter reads with sparkling eyes
Her title to a treasure in the skies.

"O happy peasant, O unhappy bard
His the mere tinsel, her's the rich reward.
He praised perhaps for ages yet to come,
She never heard of half a mile from home;
He lost in errors his vain heart prefers,
She safe in the simplicity of hers."

19. It should be remarked, that, though in illustrating this branch of the experimental evidence, we confine ourselves to the affirmation which the Bible makes of human depravity, this is but one example of the accordancy which obtains between the statements of scripture and the felt state of the human heart. The Bible is instinct throughout with this evidence-so that a reader, at once enlightened in the knowledge of himself and in the knowledge of that book which pictures man forth to the eye of his own consciousness, feels in the perusal of it, a powerful and penetrating intelligence lighting up its pages. Even the one doctrine of man's moral depravation is set forth, not nakedly and dogmatically like the article of a creed-but often with incidental touches of graphic and descriptive accuracy which awaken the most vivid recognition in the mind; so that when telling in various ways of man's alienation, of

his "living without God in the world," of his "not seeking after God," of " God not being in all his thoughts," of his "loving the creature more than the Creator," of God being a "wilderness and a weariness" unto him, of his "walking in the counsel of his own heart and after the sight of his own

eyes," of his " turning every man to his own way" -these sayings come home to consciences made alive, and serve to build up, at length to establish, the confidence of the reader, whose repeated observation of the Bible as an unfailing discerner leads him to submit to it as an infallible guide.

20. Even in the readings of ordinary authorship, when either a faithful picture is rendered of human manners, or a correct delineation is given of the human heart-how quick and vivid is our perception of the likeness. To the voice of the witness from without, there is an instant echo given by conscience which is the witness in our bosom. The remarkable thing is, that in this way a skilful observer can make us recognize, and that immediately, what we have never adverted to before; and what, but for him, might ever have remained among the unnoticed peculiarities of our own character. The truth is, that within the recesses of one's own breast, there may lurk a variety of affections that are of daily and hourly influence, but of which to this moment we have been wholly unconscious having never once cast an eye upon them of reflex observation.* But on the moment that some sagacious acquaintance, or some pro

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See this further explained in our “Natural Theology," Book IV., Chap. I, Art. 3 and 4.

found and penetrating writer, hath by his shrewd remark directed our eye towards them-it is a remark the truth of which we may instantly recognize, and a flood of new light is made to break in upon the before unrevealed mysteries of the soul. This is what has well been called the manifestation of the truth unto the conscience-a manifestation that is instantly followed up by the consent of the inward faculty to the outward affirmations-which affirmations, we repeat, might be so varied, and reach so far among the recesses and profundities of the human constitution, and be so evidently beyond the compass of all human sagacity-that when actually either heard or read from without, and then responded to by the light of one's own conscience from within, they might impress and most warrantably impress the belief that they have. proceeded from a sublimer and more searching intellect than any which is to be found among mortals here below.

21. Now what is the nature of those scriptural affirmations which conscience may try and may decide upon? They relate of course to those matters which fall within the recognition of this faculty, or lie upon that territory over which its view is extended. It is indeed a most peculiar averment on the part of the Bible, when it announces, and that without reserve or modification, the deceitfulness and desperate wickedness of the heart; when it predicates not of one mind but of every mind which has not been transformed by the influence of its own doctrines, that it is enmity against God; when it casts abroad over

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