dren of men. Above all let him be made to know the purposes of His death; and his mind be opened to behold the great mystery of the atonement, the union of heaven's justice with heaven's clemency. It is then that the scales fall from his eyes; and in the propitiated pardon of the Gospel, blending the honours of a vindicated sacredness with the freest and fullest proclamations of mercy, he at length finds that alone remedy by which the misgivings of his guilty nature can be met and satisfied. By one and the same manifestation, even the spectacle of the cross, his confidence, though a transgressor of the law, is restored; while his reverence for the law's authority is exalted-and, in the transition which he now makes to peace and holiness, he learns what it is to mix trembling with his mirth, to combine with the security of the Christian faith the diligence of the Christian practice. But his experience does not stop at this great event of his history, which might well be termed the turning point of his salvation. It rather only begins here; and, along the career of the new creature in Jesus Christ our Lord, with the power of sin broken, and a constantly increasing delight in that law which was formerly his terror, the descriptions of the book so tally with the findings of his own heart and his own history, as to multiply the evidence upon him that Christianity is divine. Under the teaching of the Bible which he daily reads, and of the Spirit which he daily prays for, these signatures of heaven in the whole religion of the New Testament become every day more legible and more convincing-till

a belief never to be shaken be fully established within him, that verily God is in it of a truth.

6. Now throughout the whole of this schooling, we never once come into converse with the historical or the literary evidence for the truth of the Gospel. The aids of a critical and controversial authorship, with its scientific apparatus of polyglotts and grammars and lexicons, are never called for. These mysteries of a higher scholarship are beyond the reach of our common people-who yet, with no other apparatus than that of a Bible and of a conscience, are capable of being introduced to the mysteries of a still surer and more satisfying revelation. There is a process by which the things that are hidden from the wise and the prudent, might be abundantly made known to the veriest babes in the learning of this world. them have but Bibles in their hands, and consciences in their bosoms-then, with that power from on high which operates on these and is given to our prayers, we are in possession of the adequate means for the saving illumination even of the humblest and homeliest of men. In other wordswithout either the gift of miracles or of profound erudition or philosophy, we might be in a state of full equipment for the christianization of the world.

Let

7. There is a twofold application that might be made of this subject. First, the encouragement derived from it to efforts in behalf of the education of our own countrymen-secondly, the like encouragement to efforts for the civilization of the nations beyond the limits of Christendom. The philosophy of missions in their two great branches,

the Home and the Foreign, receives its best vindication on the ground of the self-evidencing power of the Bible as portable, therefore, as the truths of the Bible are portable; and we hope it will not be deemed an unreasonable digression if, at this stage of our argument, we now advert to the likelihoods of both.

8. I. In the Gospel then there is a sure testimony, “making wise the simple"-the line whereof goeth out "through all the earth," and its "words to the end of the world."* This diffusive property signifies more than the property of stretching to a far distance. To overspread implies a filling up, as well as an expansion. That Christianity go completely through all the earth, it must not only be carried forth to its remotest extremities— there must be no intermediate vacancies left, else the knowledge of the Lord does not cover the earth as the waters cover the sea. For a thorough fulfilment of missionary work, we must not only expound, we must also pervade. The object is not merely to enlarge the borders of Christendom; it is to reclaim the interior wastes of Christendom itself and, for this purpose, we must visit the desolate places that are within as well as those that are without the territory. When we hear of a missionary enterprise, our thoughts would carry us afar to the remotest isles of Paganism, or to those vast and yet unexplored continents, which have not been penetrated by the light of revelation. It is not recollected, that, beside these unvisited

Psalm xix. 4,

regions at a distance, and still under the shadow of death, we have unassailed fastnesses at homewhole masses of irreligion and deepest spiritual apathy, whether in the putrid lanes of our cities or in the remote hamlets and villages of our country parishes thousands of imperishable spirits of men living at our own doors, who personally are within the sight of churches and the hearing of churchbells, yet morally are at as great a distance, not from the spirit and power only but from the knowledge of the Gospel, as if they had been born and lived all their days in the wilds of Tartary. the splendour of the distant enterprise, we are apt to overlook these; and, with imaginations fired by the project of an attack on the primeval seats of idolatry in other countries and other climes, the claims of our own kindred and our own countrymen are apt to be forgotten.

In

9. Now, when we speak of the portable evidence of Christianity, we mean that evidence by which it can reach the consciences and the conduct even of the unlettered multitude. We distinguish it from that other evidence, the understanding of which requires a science and a scholarship that are confined to the few. It is that in virtue of which we are placed in circumstances for addressing with effect the hitherto most untutored of our own population, though sunk in deepest ignorance-as well as those rudest of nature's children, those wanderers of the desert, where the sound of the Gospel was never heard. All men have in them the common faculty of a conscience that suggests the same notions of right and wrong-the same

sense of their moral want and their moral worthlessness to all. And Christianity has in it the property of an adaptation to the conscience by which it might commend itself to all, and so find proselytes for itself in every quarter of the globe. It is this self-evidencing power of the Bible which makes its doctrines portable to every understanding, and its lessons portable to every heart. And it not only explains the full and final entrance of Christianity into the mind, when, in the moment of conversion it is at last admitted as the settled belief of the inquirer. It also explains the welcome of its first approaches; for the same characteristics of this religion which seen fully at the last secure for it the full conviction of the mind, though seen but dimly at the first, give it a certain creditable aspect even at the outset so that, though not received all at once, it may still be entertained even at the very first; and we have no doubt that this operates most powerfully, as an ingredient in that facility of access, which the bearers of Christianity experience, when, passing from house to house, they make offer of their christian services, and announce the errand on which they have come, of doing all which they can and are permitted to do, for the moral and christian good of the families.

10. And accordingly what is the experience of those who make this attempt-who go forth among the households of the poorer classes, not with the offer or silver and gold for of such they may have none, but with the offer of their devotions through the week and of their christian advice upon the Sabbath-whose only errand is as the messengers of