hand, to greet the regenerated vision of man! I fasten my eye upon thee, and anticipate with rapture that jubilee of the world. Thou hast come up from the conflict of ages amidst the songs of victory! Thou hast all the nations at thy feet in token of thy gracious triumph! Let inanimate nature become vocal to welcome thy reign! Let rocks, hills, and mountains, welcome thee! Let oceans, rivers, and forests, welcome thee! Let the Heavens which look down upon us in their glory, welcome thee! Let universal nature break forth in one thrilling and rapturous shout of triumph, that the empire of light, and grace, and love, has become universal; that there was no darkness so deep but that it has fled away before the quickening beams of the Sun of Righteousness!

LECTURE III.

CHRISTIANITY CONTRASTED WITH DEISM.

ROMANS 1. 16.

I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ.

IN CONNEXION WITH

JOHN VII. 12.

Others said, nay; but he deceiveth the people.

When our blessed Lord came to his own, his own received him not. Notwithstanding he spake as never man spake, and performed works which showed that he was in intimate communion with Omnipotence, the great mass of his countrymen contrived to evade the evidence of his Messiahship; and not only refused to heed his instructions and acknowledge his claims, but openly accused him of being a deceiver of the people. And the same spirit which was manifested towards the great Founder of our Religion, has been acted out, in every succeeding age, towards the religion he came to establish there have always been those who have regarded Christianity as a cunningly devised fable; who have maintained that the only light which Heaven ever vouchsafed to man was the light of Reason; and that

every thing beyond this is alike incredible and unnecessary. While they profess to hold certain great principles which they denominate Natural Religion, but which, in many instances, are only a wretched perversion of it, their zeal is chiefly exhausted in a warfare against Christianity; as if she were not only the declared enemy of the Religion of Nature, but the enemy of every thing that involves the happiness of man. I need not tell you that the class to which I here refer are the Deists.Though they differ not a little among themselves, some of them professedly holding the truths of Natural Religion in a good degree of purity, and others holding doctrines which verge closely upon Atheism, yet the mass of them would agree with the Jews in saying of our blessed Lord, that he is a deceiver of the people; and of his gospel, that it is a system of imposture.

Lend me your attention then, while I consider the base charge of the Jews against our Lord, in connexion with the triumphant declaration of the Apostle respecting his gospel, as suggesting the contrast between Deism and Christianity. We will contrast the two systems in respect to

1. THE EXTENT OF THEIR DISCOVERIES: II. THE CERTAINTY OF THEIR EVIDENCE: III. THE ENERGY OF THEIR OPERATIONS: IV. THE CHARACTER OF THEIR RESULTS. I. THE EXTENT OF THEIR DISCOVERIES. As Deism claims that human Reason is a sufficient guide in matters of religion, it is fair to judge of the powers of Reason by what she has actually accomplished. And that we may ascertain this, we must look, not to those systems the materials of which Deists have pilfered, in a great measure, from Christianity, and which they

have proudly held forth to the world as the product of human Reason; but to those systems which have been formed where Reason has been left to do her work alone, You remember the results to which we were brought in our last discourse, in respect to the most enlightened Pagan nations of antiquity: we saw how the greatest. minds were bewildered in respect to the very first truths of religion ;-how Socrates and Cicero, Plato and Seneca, with all their intellectual greatness, were mere babes in religious knowledge; how the doctrines of man's accountableness and man's immortality, of the divine Providence and even of the divine existence, if not actually lost sight of, were, in a great degree, obscured and neutralized by a cumbrous mass of errour and absurdity. Now I say that all that the Deist can legitimately claim for human Reason is to be found in the records of Pagan philosophy; for while Reason was here cast entirely upon her own resources, she tasked her energies to the utmost, and what she did not accomplish then, we have no reason to believe that she could accomplish, unaided, in any circumstances. I know indeed that there are systems of religious doctrine which she claims as her own, which, so far as they go, are in accordance with divine truth; but she has here committed a plagiarism upon the Bible: she has sat down with God's written Revelation spread out before her, and has gathered from it some of the fundamental principles of religion, and incorporated them into a system, and then has exclaimed with equal complacency and injustice, "Behold, in the result of my efforts, evidence that a Revelation from Heaven is unnecessary!"

But while I maintain that it is fair to judge of the powers of Reason by what she has actually accomplished, I am well aware that a distinction is to be made

between what she can do, darkened and misguided as she is through the influence of depravity, and what she might do, if the legitimate operation of her faculties were not, in any degree, counteracted. Suppose, then, Reason, in her uncorrupted state, were to address herself to the business of religious inquiry,--how far may we suppose she could proceed with confidence and certainty; and at what point would her powers begin to falter? It would be fairly within her province to decide that there is an intelligent First Cause of all things; that this Being is omniscient, omnipresent, independent, almighty and eternal. So too she might legitimately arrive at a knowledge of his goodness; for the evidences of this beam upon us from every part of the creation. She might also read in the very constitution of our nature, and especially in the operations of natural conscience, some intimation of divine justice and holiness; though her conclusions on this point could hardly fail to be embarrassed by the apparently universal reign of depravity. She might infer from the perfections of God that he exercises a Providence; though her views of the nature of that Providence, especially as concerned in directing the destiny of the righteous, must, at best, be indistinct; because she knows nothing of God's covenant faithfulness to his people. The operations of man's moral nature very readily suggest the idea of a retribution; and as it is evident that nothing like an exact retribution takes place in this world, the conclusion is irresistible that there must be a future existence to furnish an opportunity for it. But though Reason might decide that the human spirit would survive in some other state of being, as the subject of a retribution, she could not decide that its existence would be immortal; for this best of all reasons, that she could never know what was the will of him on