gious teaching, it might appear to them less unreasonable to suppose that, having permitted such a special exigency to exist, the Divine Being has adopted special means for meeting it. Certainly, if the book of nature be perfect, man's power to interpret it is not perfect. A thinker of the class under consideration has confessed, that the bulk of mankind everywhere, must have ́ a well-defined, positive, somewhat dogmatic creed, deriving its sanctions from without.' What is this but saying, that to leave men to nature, is to leave them to an insufficient guidance; that to give them a revelation is to give them what they want. What the human intellect may imagine itself capable of doing when familiarized through its whole culture with Christian ideas, and what it has been found capable of doing where such ideas have been unknown, are not the same thing.

The pretence that there is no such certainty in history or in language as would be required to render a written revelation effectual, is a modern fiction which has grown up in a night and will wither in a night. It is an objection which proves nothing by proving too much. If our sacred writings must lose all authority on this ground, then all writings contemporary with them must lose authority for the same reason. worthless as having respect to religion, it is not easy to see how it If human language be thus should be valuable as relating to anything beside. The common sense of mankind may be safely left to deal with such paradoxes.

An objection much more plausible is that founded on the law of progress said to be natural to the history of society. It is deemed unreasonable to suppose that a number of men in remote time should have been deputed to settle so grave a matter as religion for the men of all time. Physical progress in these later times has been wonderful. Its effect on general progress has been wonderful. Is religion, then, the only thing that is to come to us stereotyped from the past? We answer-certainly not. Your laws of taste in literature and art have come to you from the past. Your psychology and your ethics have come to you from the past. You have not gone much beyond the ancients in these things, you have rarely risen to their level. May not the remote time when so much of this higher kind of truth was perfected have been the time when religious truth was perfected? May not the time when all that was most cognate with religious culture had thus ripened, have been the time when religion itself was to be matured and fixed for the ages to come? We are better chemists and better astronomers than the ancients, but, left to ourselves, should we have been better moralists or better religionists? There is at least room to doubt on that point. What is wanting to us, is not that Christianity should be

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other than it is, but that we should ourselves give proof that we know how to separate between those corruptions which the infirmities of past ages have encrusted about it, and those hoarded treasures wherewith it waits to enrich the ages to come. Our modern world has much work to do before it will come into possession of the latent wealth that will be some day found in this ancient mine of thought.

In brief, what an enigma is man on the supposition of his holding no intelligible relation to a hereafter! In his nature we see the mysterious-the enthroned power of conscience. This power requires that he should choose right as right, and avoid wrong as wrong; that he should be a creature of moral acts and moral intentions. He is a being, moreover, whose nature transcends the limits of the visible and the finite, and craves a place with the holy and the everlasting. If his only end be that he should live to the agreeable in this life, whence this waste of powers, and such a mockery of pure and earnest aspirations? Can we venture to charge the Just, the Wise, the Good, with having made His creature capable of a destiny so high, and doomed him to a destiny so low?

There is nothing valid, then, in the ground taken by those who deem it unreasonable to suppose that an inspired and infallible message has been addressed by the Creator to our race. Everything rather combines to show that, improbable as it may be that any such communication should be made in our time, it is highly probable that something of the kind has taken place in past ages. Man's great need of such assistance is a strong presumptive evidence that it has not been altogether withholden.

3. It may not be unuseful to ask, at this point of our inquiry, what those features are which may be expected to characterise teaching coming to us by inspiration? It will of course be teaching that will assume that we need to be taught to be taught what we do not know, and to be taught what we know in part, more fully, and with more authority. It will suppose man to be capable of distinguishing to a large extent between truth and error, and between right and wrong, and to the individual responsibility of men as thus based its appeals will be made.

It is to be expected, moreover, in a communication of this nature, that much as it may reveal, it will leave much unrevealed, and that its tendency will be rather to abate difficulty than wholly to remove it. In every department of knowledge, what men know is little compared with what they do not know. We get our truth by glimpses, not by full manifestations. Our knowledge of the past is as nothing in comparison with our ignorance. Even of the present we know only the immediate. The nearest

wave is visible the ocean of billows which stretch off beyond it we see not. The multitude are observant of phenomena, the few only pass on to their causes, and to the secret place where the Cause affecting all causes doth work! Even the few can travel but a little way in that direction. The material and moral laws of the universe are, as we believe, everywhere the same: but what know we concerning the modes in which those laws are carried out in the numberless systems about us, or even in the planets of our own system? Those innumerable worlds have their relations to all space and to all time, but what know we, what can we know, of those relations? If the Being who has given existence to this universe, and who still rules it, should speak to men, we may be sure from what we know of his ways, that the knowledge conveyed will be limited, relating mainly to our immediate moral necessities, and that he will often be silent where we could have wished Him to have been communicative. That the sacred writers have known where to stop, and that they have delivered their message so dogmatically and authoritatively, are among the most striking evidences of their inspiration.

We should also bear in mind, that a necessary effect of the coming of new light on the path of man, must be not only to diminish the nearer darkness, but to make the more distant darkness visible. With us, the known everywhere loses itself in the unknown. Our light always dies away into its opposite. All things have their root in mystery, so that the more things we know, the more of mystery we know. This test to humility, and to the spirit of obedience, is inseparable from the condition of all creatures. In the experience of the highest of such existences, to believe in God is to bow in the presence of an infinite mystery. So it must be for ever. What we need is to be saved from sin, not to be no more beset with mystery. To this end, our great want is faith in God-faith in Him, grounded on what we know of Him, and warranting us to have faith in Him, when, from His thoughts being higher than our thoughts, His ways differ from our ways.

But the idea of an inspired mind is inseparable from our idea of inspiration. It consists in the Divine speaking through the human. Man is here a worker together with God. In its substance the message may be purely divine; in its manner of conveyance it must be in great part human. It is thus, in fact, in all departments of moral agency. In physical changes the elements themselves are wholly inert-the tendencies, or powers, which seem to belong to them, come wholly from the Creator. But in the mind of man there is a separate motive power, and a separate will, and while the rule of the world is from God, the

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men of it are free. Men may become blind to evidence-if they will; may harden themselves against goodness-if they will. Man may sin even in Paradise. Angels may sin even in heaven. On these grounds, it is reasonable to conclude, that if in inspiration there be much of God, there will also be in it much of man. The very elevation to which the mind is raised by inspiration, should be expected to bring out the human with special vividness and force. Whatever may be peculiar to the man, may be expected to give its impress to the message. What men are as men, everywhere gives the complexion to the moral systems which they devise, and to the Christianity which they profess. But if by reason of the moral freedom of man, the human does blend itself with the Divine in this manner up to the line where Divine influence becomes inspiration, the question naturally occurs -will not the human be present there also? Of course, the liability to err will be extruded. The purpose of inspiration supposes that much. But to almost any extent compatible with that principle, the human may be expected to be conspicuous even in inspired utterances.

Nor should it surprise us greatly if, in the communications so made, the Deity should seem to concern himself with the small affairs of men no less than with the great. The small in creation is from Him as well as the great. He has bestowed as much elaboration on the one as on the other; and in His providence He cares for the one quite as truly as for the other. In ways innumerable He tells us that great and small is for us, not for Him. What He is as known to us through nature and providence, we should expect Him to be as known to us through inspiration.

4. Such considerations as the preceding must be kept in view by any intelligent man who would come to the question of inspiration in a condition of mind proper to such an investigation. It will be well, also, for such a man to mark the strong presumptive evidence in favour of the inspiration of the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures before directing his attention to the positive evidence relating to it. After all the objections that have been taken to the claims of the Hebrew Scriptures, there is much in their contents that cannot be explained if those claims are not admitted. The views concerning the Divine Being, and the nature of religion, in those writings, are such as could never have originated with the Hebrew, and such as could not have been borrowed from any other people. What the Egyptians and the early Asiatic nations were in these respects, the Hebrews would have been had they been left to themselves. In general culture, they were, for the most part, below their neighbours. This phe

nomenon has been felt to be perplexing. Great pains have been taken in modern times, as in ancient times, to detract from its weight, by traducing the character of the Hebrew nation. Their writings, it is alleged, are not so ancient as we affirm— their theology was not so pure-their religion was outward and unspiritual, and their morals below the ordinary level, even in those times. Our answer is, that the Book of Job, the Psalms, and the pages of Isaiah, are a sufficient refutation of such calumnies. It is true the character of the Hebrew nation was always below the special grandeur of their theology; and we see that they were with difficulty kept in anything like a true allegiance to it. But what is the fair inference from these facts? Clearly, that if the Hebrews had been left to have originated their own theology, they would have originated something very different. Their lofty monotheism is as light opposed to the surrounding darkness-whence came it? What short of its Divine attestations could have given it authority through so many centuries over such unwilling subjects?

The moral code of the Hebrews is scarcely less remarkable than their theology. The decalogue is some ten centuries older than the oldest system of ethics that has come down to us from the ancient world. But while thus before all such systems, it would be easy to show that it embraces the essence of them all. The first process of scientific intelligence in this field, is to collect facts; the last, to digest the material brought together, so as to give us a few great principles. But Greece was an outskirt of barbarism, when the Hebrew intellect was capable of this ripe service in the science of morals. Prudhon, a man of great power, and, we regret to add, no friend to Christianity, writes,- Even 'the number of the commandments of the decalogue, and their order, has nothing in it that is fortuitous. It is the genesis of 'moral phenomena, the ladder of duty and of crime resting upon an analysis wisely and marvellously developed.'-(De la Celeb. Dim. 17.)

The relation is intimate, between this scheme of ethics, so comprehensive and so spiritual, and the scheme of redemption, which forms the great subject of the Hebrew and Christian revelation. It is no marvel, indeed, that this scheme should recognise man as an offender, needing forgiveness and amendment. But it is marvellous that it should set forth the guilt and sin of man on such a scale, and that the restoration it contemplates should be so transcendant, and that the means by which it is to be realized should be so extraordinary. In all this there is a profound recognition of the greatness of human nature, which has no parallel in the history of merely human speculation.