the face of a world teeming with specimens of humanity, the charge that in each and all of these specimens we shall detect such a love to the creature as is exclusive of love to the Creator; when, with the most unveering and unabating consistency, it charges a great moral and spiritual corruption on all the members of the human family -insomuch as to affirm that there is none righteous no not one, and that all are so much by nature the children of disobedience as by nature to be the children of wrath. On this particular ground, the Bible stands aloof from every composition that has not borrowed from its own pages. We meet with

nothing like it in the whole region of authorship. There is misanthropy we admit. There is the indignation of man against his fellows. There are satire and severity and sentiment directed against the vices of society. There is the soreness of human feeling on the part of those who have been outraged of their rights, or mortified in their vanity, or driven to spleen and to solitude by some morbid peculiarity of temperament, and there find relief from their agitations by wreaking a wholesale contempt upon the species. There is the distempered eloquence of Rousseau, and there is the darkly vindictive poetry of Byron, and there is the biting irony of Swift, all arraigning the nature which they wear. But each is evidently asserting his own controversy. Each of them is avenging his own quarrel. It is not the ungodliness of man which forms any article of their impeachment against him. Theirs is all an indictment preferred against men for their universal deceit and ma.ig

nity, the one against the other; and, with such a tone of resentfulness too, as implies that they had felt themselves to be the sufferers. It is in the Bible alone, where we see an indictment preferred against our whole species in the name of God. It is there alone where the universal charge is advanced, of departure and revolt against Him who made them. It is there alone where, without any tincture from the soreness of wounded humanity, we meet with the grave and unimpassioned and at the same time most decisive and persevering assertion of a great controversy, between God and all that is human in this world's wide and peopled territory. It is there that, in the records of an embassy, the profest object of which is not to retaliate upon man by severe denunciation, but to reconcile him by the offers of pardon, he is charged with a sinfulness as universal among the individuals of his race, as is the death which they have to undergo. It is not with the Bible as it is with the capricious judgment of man upon his fellows, who at one time pours forth upon them the vindictiveness of his injured feelings, and at another would clothe them in almost poetic excellence-ever changing his impression of the species with the varying hue of the individuals who pass before him; and, under the impulse of his wayward imagination, vilifying or idolizing his own nature, just as self is affected by it. There is something which stands most manifestly and separately out from all this in the one constant deliverance of Scripture, which, without faltering, affirms this province of God to be in deepest

rebellion against Him; and that, in reference to Him, all have come under a curse, and all are dead in trespasses and in sins

22. Now for the manifestation of the truth of this word unto the conscience, it is not necessary that each should have a conscience for all-it is enough that he has a conscience for himself. It is enough that each individual man carries home to himself, what the Bible says of all men. What is true of all, is true of every; and though each reader should retire within the chamber of his own separate consciousness, he will find materials there with which he can confront the Bible, and bring it to the test of a comparison between what it confidently says and what he certainly knows. He will be able to convict this book of rash and ignorant affirmation, if, on consulting his own heart, he ascertains that it loves God; or if, on reviewing his own life, he finds that he lives with God in the world; or if, on reflecting upon his own tastes, he can aver that no created good has such charms for him, as has the Being from whom it all originated; or if, on considering what the prospects are which chiefly engross and delight his imagination, he can say with conscious assurance that it is the prospect of a glorious eternity in Heaven, and not of some fair resting-place within the verge of our lower world. If these be indeed the habits of his nature, then has the Bible put itself into his power, and furnished him with a weapon by which he can disprove and may disown But if, instead of speaking against, it in every particular speaks with his intimate experience; if,

it.

on entering the penetralia of his inner man, it there evinces itself to be indeed a most piercing and enlightened discerner; if, on reading its pages, he is conscious all the while that he is reading the characters of his own soul, and is holding converse with an author whose eye and whose intellect has taken a correct survey of his moral constitution throughout all its hiding places; if, through the consenting testimony of his own heart, every charge brought against man in the Bible is followed up by the conviction that of him at least, and of his heart it is true; if he is sensible that he really is all that the Bible affirms man apart from the transforming influence of its own doctrine to be-that he lives without God and without hope in the worldthat, unmindful of the desire of his Maker, he follows after the desires of his own flesh and his own mindthat, whatever the power may be of civil and natural restraints over his conduct, the direct authority of God has no presiding influence over him that he neither seeks after his Maker, nor cares to understand Him that he either dreads God or practically disowns Him, and at all events has no filial confidence or affection towards Him-that self and sense and time are his idols and that God is too far removed in the distant heavens, and the ultimate enjoyment of His presence too far removed in the distant eternity, to be motives of any ascendancy over the doings or the deliberations of his personal history in the world. If he read all this in the Bible, and conscience respond to it all in his own bosom, then might we not conceive such readings to be so multiplied, and such responses in every

instance to be so accordant with them, as to stamp on this book all the credit of the inspiration which it claims ?

23. There is no wisdom which so commands our reverence, as that which evinces its discernment of man; as that which can enter the recesses of the heart, and there detect all its lurking and unseen tendencies; as that by which our mysterious nature is probed and penetrated, and there are brought out, to the conviction of those who wear it, the lineaments which are actually thereupon engraven. We must all be sensible of the charm with which we have looked to a picture of human life, the fidelity of which we recognize; and also of the homage we render to him who can shrewdly find his way through the ambiguities of the human character, and lay before us in just delineation the various feelings and principles which belong to it. There is no way in which one man could earn from another the credit of a more marvellous sagacity, than by presenting him with a copy of himself that his own conscience told him was true to the original_ and that, just in proportion to the number of the lines of resemblance that he introduced, and to the secresy in which they lay wrapt from common or general observation. But in this way, is it possible to conceive, that the marvellous may rise into the miraculous-and, instead of a skilful moralist, may he who thus anatomizes my mental frame and reveals to me its structure and its parts, impress me with the belief of a gifted Apostle; and whether I hear from his own mouth the divinations that he has practised upon me, or read