simple change. If there be any truth in the first and second of the experimental evidences that we have attempted to explain, it will instantly make them manifest. For the purpose of being impressed by these evidences, there must be a comparison of two tablets-one the inner tablet of the heart, and the other the outer tablet of a profest revelation. If we have no distinct perception of either, then we have not the materials before us on which a comparison can be made. But suppose, that, by our increased faculty of vision, each becomes visible—and then the accordancy between them, if such an accordancy do really obtain, becomes visible also. The one might now stand forth to our newly enlightened discernment as an accurate counterpart of the other. And this perception coming to us, not in the train of any logical process of reasoning, not as the fruit of human argument or human explanation, but simply and directly from the more penetrating consciousness that we now have of our own heart upon the one hand, and from the more powerful intelligence wherewith we now view the positions of the written record upon the other such a perception arising in this way, after a season perhaps spent in the prayers and the efforts of great moral earnestness, might pass, not merely into a vivid and instantaneous, but also into a most warrantable conviction, that the great and unseen Being who all the while has been the object of our many aspirations that He whose eye is upon all the characteristics of that microcosm which is within the heart of man, that it was He alone who constructed that volume in which we

now behold so minute and marvellous a reflection of it.

45. We must here observe as formerly, that by this process the caprice and the variety of unbridled imagination are altogether precluded. The man who is the subject of it, only sees better than he did before, those permanent and indelible characters that stand out in the written record; and he sees better than before, the stable identities of human nature. It is not among illusions, but altogether among realities that he is conversant; and it is out of the comparison between one set of these realities and another, that the evidence in question emerges. Out of such a process as this, it is not a fantastic but a sober and intelligible Christianity that is evolved a Christianity restricted to the things which are written in a now unalterable book; and to those enduring attributes of the heart and of the will, by which abiding and universal humanity is characterized. We believe that in all ages and nations, there have been specimens of Christianity formed in this way; and, so far from that interminable and fantastic variety which is apprehended in the process of sentiment that we have now endeavoured to explain, we believe, that the thus originated Christianity of a genuine convert in the farthest outskirts of the species, whether at Greenland or in the Islands of the South Sea, will be found by enlightened observers to be in substantial agreement with each other, and substantially the same with the Christianity of the Archbishop Fenelon or of the profound and philosophical Pascal.

46. But to satisfy us that at every step the evidence is valid, and that there is no delusion at any one point or turn of the process-let us have recourse to a parallel in nature. We have seen a distant land on the other side of a bay or arm of the sea, stretching along the horizon, and too remote for the observation of its scenery. But the power of vision may be strengthened by a telescope; and they are not illusions surely, but stable and antecedent realities-which we are made by the telescope to perceive. Suppose different individuals to have the advantage of this help to their vision,-still each would behold the same things, and, instead of the phantasmata of an aerial imagination, the eyes of all would rest upon and recognize the very same objects-the actual houses and spires and fields and forests of a landscape that had now for the first time started into sudden, yet sure and satisfactory revelation. But this is not enough to complete the analogy. We know the power of that chemical preparation which receives the name of a sympathetic ink. By it the impression of lines and characters and pictures may be made on paper, but an impression which in the first instance shall be invisible, and shall remain so, till, by the application of a certain chemical agent, it can be made to stand ostensibly out in the proper form and colouring that belong to it. Let this be done on the apparent blank of some tablet which we have in our hand; and only suppose that what is evolved in consequence, is the accurate representation of that very landscape which the telescope has just

disclosed. Let the picture now made manifest for the first time by one agent, be the precise counterpart, in all its features and lineaments, to the distant scene now made manifest by the other; and the conclusion is irresistible, that he who drew the picture had his eye upon the landscape, or copied from him who had direct and original observation of the scene. The conclusion is truly a sound one; but not more sound than that of him, who, in virtue of some new power of discernment, can perceive in the book of a professed revelation, an accurate reflection of the character of his own heart-who, a stranger before both to the characters of the outer and to those of the inner tablet, now beholds them standing out in visible manifestation, and can note their perfect respondency the one to the other. The inference is valid, and such as to stamp entire rationality on the faith of many an unlettered Christian-when he feels how that He who constructed the Bible had preternatural insight into the mysteries of his own spirit that the Architect of this wondrous volume was no other than the Architect of man's moral economy, and who alone could pourtray the hidden man of the heart, and bring out to view the secrets of that mechanism which He Himself did frame.

47. Now, it may be thought, that, by this process however real, there is nothing gained additional to the first and the second experimental evidence, which we have already endeavoured to expound that by it we are only made to see the accordancy between the now understood statements of the Bible, and the now felt or perceived state of

our own hearts; and also to see the accordancy between the provisions which are addressed to us there, and those moral or spiritual necessities of which we have now been made sensible-that still we have not advanced any further than to these two kinds of evidence; nor is it seen immediately, how a third evidence can be founded on that peculiar method by which it is that men are conducted to the former ones.

48. But the truth is, that this peculiar method bears upon itself another impress of the divinity. And that, not merely because light hath been made to arise in the mind by a way altogether distinct from any of the processes of human teaching, but also, in the very way that is specified and laid down in the book itself. Being "renewed in knowledge;" being "called out of darkness into marvellous light;" having the "eyes opened to behold;” having the "secrets of the heart made manifest ;" being struck with the conviction of inward want and worthlessness on the one hand, and also on the other with the efficiency of the proposed application-these all point to a great event at the outset of a man's real and decided Christianity: and, should the event happen to any individual, there is to him a correspondence between the announcements in the book, and what to himself is a most interesting passage of his own history, which might serve still more to evince the powerful and the presiding intelligence by which it is animated. What it affirms is, not a something which is within us, but a something which will befal us-not, as under the first and implicitly too under the second evi