gion.1 Revelation, rightly understood, is given to aid and improve nature, and to impart to man a higher knowledge of truth and right than it was possible for him to attain by means of unaided reason alone. It came to reform nature,

hath spoken to all mankind, the latter is that whereby He hath declared His will to the Church and His peculiar people." "Reason is very serviceable to religion, and religion very friendly to reason."... "The belief of our reasons is an exercise of faith, and faith is an act of reason." "The highest reason is to believe in God revealing."—(Reason and Revelation.) "The sound understanding and reason of man, his inward sentiment of what is true or false, good or bad, are, no less than revelation properly so-called, means whereby God makes known to us His will, and grounds and establishes his kingdom among us, or his moral sovereignty over us." (ZOLLIKOFFER.)

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Everything in the Christian religion is moral; the divinity of Christ, redemption, all mysteries whatsoever, are at bottom morality; their end is the salvation and regeneration of man."-(VINET.) "Religion is but morality sown in the soil of grace-it must be cultivated, and every theologian who is not a moralist is but half a theologian."-(Ditto.) "Whatever promotes the cause of revealed religion befriends morality, and whatever strengthens morality adds force to religion."-(Rev. J. BALGUY.) "The Christian faith is the necessary complement of a sound ethical system."-(ARTHUR H. HALLAM.) "The morals of religion. are only the perfection of human morals."-(HELVETIUS.)

2 "To assist the natural weakness of man, and correct his acquired depravity, is the avowed object of all revelations, whether real or pretended." (Dr. FAWCETT: Sermons.) "In Christ man is not abased, but exalted. To be a Christian is to be fully and entirely a man.”—(Dr. BRÜCKNER.) "Without the Gospel, nature exhibits a want of harmony between our intrinsic constitution and the system in which it is placed. But Christianity has made up the difference."-(ARTHUR H. HALLAM.) "The Christian who is most disposed on theory to refuse all reality and all value to human virtues, practically contradicts himself at every moment." -(VINET.)

3

...

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"All the precepts of Christianity are reasonable and wise, requiring such duties of us as are suitable to the light of nature, and do approve themselves to the best reason of mankind." They are such as tend to the perfection of human nature, and to raise the minds of men to the highest pitch of goodness and virtue, so that we owe to Christianity the discovery of the most certain and perfect rule of life that ever the world was acquainted withal."-(TILLOTSON: Sermons.) "The perfection of our rational nature is true wisdom, and the perfection of wisdom is religion." (ELLIS: On Divine Things.) "It is the honour of the Gospel that it makes the best parents and children, the best masters and servants, the best husbands and wives in the world."—(Rev. JOHN FLAVEL) "The great advantage of the Christian institution is, that it offers to the world a better method, and a more exact rule, for the conduct of life than was ever known before."-(NELSON: True Devotion.) "By a painful supposition, try to abstract Jesus Christ, with his power of mercy and his title of Saviour, from the world, and so to replace humanity where He found it, in presence of an unknown God, of the God of Sinai, wrapped in a darkness that is only lit up at intervals by the dread flash of the lightning; or in the presence of that God of Philosophy,―force without personality, un

to instruct reason, and to raise man to that high state of perfection of which his nature is capable, and in which he was originally created.1

Christianity is not simply designed for the next world,— conditioned essence, gulf of existence, terror of the imagination or the heart; or, finally, in presence of two closed doors,-the one that of hell, the other of annihilation."-(VINET.) "We may well concede," says Kant, "that if the Gospel had not previously taught the universal moral laws, reason would not yet have attained so perfect an insight of them." Christianity, "which has already wrought such changes in the world, is to work on with nobler disclosures and in wider spheres; it is to teach men how to resist evil; how to overcome sin; how to raise the wicked and degraded; how to reform the race; how, in short, to create a new heaven and a new earth, in which is to dwell righteousness.”—(H. W. BEECHER.)

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1 "The whole nature of the Gospel redemption means nothing but the one true and only possible way of delivering man from all the evil of his fall." -(A'KEMPIS.)"To enlighten our understandings in the knowledge of our duty, to influence our wills in the practice of it, He has revealed to us the Holy Scripture, which, as it lays down the best method for the attaining that perfection we are capable of in this life, so it furnishes us with the best arguments for the prosecution of it."—(R. NELSON.) The great aim of Christianity is to unite us once more to God, to transform duty into sentiment, to teach us to love what we ought to do, and to do what we ought to love."-(VINET.) "The design and end of Christ's religion is to amend and reform the manners of men, that he might purify unto Himself a peculiar people zealous of good works,' a people who might shine as lights in the world' by the exemplary practice of all virtue and goodness." (Ditto.) "To render us like to God, to restore His image in us, is the whole work of the Gospel, is the very work of salvation". -(DITTO.) "What was the fall and apostasy of man, and what is still his sin and misery, but the soul's revolt from the divine life? And what was the design of our Redeemer but to recover us to the divine and spiritual life again by the influence of His grace?"—(Rev. M. HENRY.) The will of God, saith Paul, is our sanctification, that the decays of our frame and the defacements of God's image within us should be repaired, that the faculties of our souls should be restored to their original integrity and vigour." (Dr. ISAAC BARROW.) "Enough appears of the admirable frame and structure of the soul of man to show that the Divine Presence did once dwell in it; more than enough of vicious deformity to proclaim that he is now retired and gone."-(HowE: Living Temple.) "It would be injurious to the honour of God to suppose that things were at first created in the state they are now in, or that they will always continue so."—(Rev. J. NEWTON.) "Man is in ruins, but the ruins are mighty and are grand, and tell us what he was; as broken arches and columns tell us what once Thebes was." (ALBERT BARNES.) Tradition has delighted to converse and poetry to sing of a golden age as the commencing one in our world; and both have fondly looked forward to a time when all things are to be restored to their primal purity. And surely philosophy should not pour contempt on those high expectations which form the noblest aspirations of human nature, and which we may suppose God would not have allowed to remain if there is to be no means of gratifying them."—(Dr. M'COSH.)

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a means to save the souls of men hereafter from the con

sequences of their sins.1 It is designed for this world

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Religion is viewed by many as a kind of transcendental matter which belongs to the outside of life, and has no part in the laws by which life is organized; . . . something holy because it is from God, but so extraordinary, so out of place, that it cannot suffer any vital connection with the ties, and causes, and forms, and habits which constitute the frame of our history." (Dr. BUSHNELL: Christian Nurture.) "Many men seem to think that the Gospel is sent into this world as a life-boat to pick off from the foundering wreck as many of the great population as they possibly can, and let the rest go down. . . . But Christianity is not a mere wrecker's boat. In saving men, we ought to do it with the feeling that we are aiming toward the final consummation-the salvation of mankind."-(H. W. BEECHER.) "Large numbers of people are in the habit of thinking that religion has nothing to do with this life, but only with the next; that it is a thing for dying men, not for men in health and strength."-(Rev. R. W. DALE.) "Religion has, I fear, been too much presented by the popular Evangelical leaders of the Church as if it were a thing only for the next world, or for securing to us a happy eternity, and only for men in mature life, and after becoming fully developed sinners, instead of being intended also to prevent this,adapting itself to the child, the youth, the young man, and so penetrating his spiritual nature and moulding his inward life, as to keep him from evil, that it might not grieve him."-(Rev. T. BINNEY.) "In our preaching we press upon men the fact of their danger, the terrors of a violated law, the displeasure of God. We urge them to flee to Christ as the refuge from the wrath to come.' As a sequel to this teaching, when successful the prominent sentiment with the convert is, 'I am safe; I am saved from perdition.' Is not such teaching erroneous, or, at least, defective? May it not even nourish a spirit of selfishness ?"-(Rev. JOSEPH BEAZLEY.) "If we confine the Gospel to the proclamation of pardon, we rob it of its principal glory. Precious as pardon is, it is not to be viewed as an isolated blessing; it is a means to the moral end of our sanctification: and to the latter it is subordinate. The revelation of pardoning mercy is the foundation of other blessings. It is, in particular, the moral means by which we are delivered from the dominion of sin. A sense of unpardoned guilt, and the dread of vengeance, foster the enmity of the heart against God."-(E. RUSSELL.) A "judgment. . . rather extensively prevails.. which subordinates all other purposes of the ministry to that of the conversion of the ungodly. . . . Do we not frequently hear the end of it stated to be to convert men,' to 'win souls to Christ,' as though any service it was able to render those who were converted and won was of quite subordinate consideration ? But if we call to mind how the perfecting of the saints,' 'the presentation of every man perfect,' is declared in the Divine Word to be the end of the institution of the Christian ministry, and how the Master himself and his apostles laboured for this, we shall be slow to admit that anything else is of far more importance, or to give this but a secondary place in our aims."-(Rev. D. THOMAS.) Many are prone to imagine nothing else to be meant by salvation but to be delivered from hell, and to receive and enjoy both heavenly happiness and glory; but the conformity of our heart to the law of God, and the fruits of righteousness with which we are filled by Jesus Christ, in this life, are a necessary part of our salvation."-(MARSHALL: On Sanctification.) How many Christian parents are like Mrs. Worboise, in Guild Court, who "did

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H

as well as for the next,1 for the bodies as well as for the souls of men,2 to keep them from sinning not less than not torment her soul... with the fear that her boy should be unlike Christ-that he might do that which was mean, selfish, dishonest, cowardly, vile; but with the fear that he was, or might be, doomed to an eternal suffering."-(GEO. MACDONALD.) "The solicitude (of Christians) is limited too much to the attainment of salvation, and that signifies too exclusively escape from the evils to come, and participation in the future blessedness." (Rev. D. THOMAS.) "Whoever is possessed of true faith will not confine his inquiries to the single point of his acceptance with God, or be satisfied with the distant hope of heaven hereafter. He will be likewise solicitous how he may glorify God in the world, and enjoy such foretastes of heaven as are attainable while he is yet upon earth."-(Rev. JOHN NEWTON.)

1 "If, without looking for a present holiness on earth, he pictures to himself a future beatitude in heaven, he resembles the man who, across that haze of nature's atmosphere, which wraps all things in obscurity, thinks to descry the realities of ulterior space, when he has only peopled it with gratuitous imagery of his own."-(Dr. CHALMERS.) Religion "is a means to promote God's glory, and the practice of virtue and piety amongst men, in order to their present and future happiness;" and "unless these ends are answered, mere devotion is nothing worth."-(Rev. T. FOTHERGILL.) "Great multitudes of ignorant people that live under the Gospel harden their hearts in sin, and ruin their souls for ever by trusting in Christ for such an imaginary salvation as consisteth not at all in holiness, but only in forgiveness of sin and deliverance from everlasting torments."—(MARSHALL: On Sanctification.) 'Many are apt to believe the article of remission of sins, but they believe it without the condition of repentance or the fruits of holy life." (JEREMY TAYLOR: Holy Living.) We may seize on the topic of imputed righteousness by an effort of desire, or an effort of imagination; but if the man who does so have an unseeing eye towards the topic of his own personal sanctification, he has just as little of faith towards the former article as towards the latter, whatever preference of liking or fancy he may entertain regarding it."-(Dr. CHALMERS.)

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2"The immortality of the Gospel is not simply the immortality of the soul, it is the immortality of humanity. It is man that is to live hereafter, and whose whole nature, so to speak, is to be perpetuated for ever.' (Rev. T. BINNEY.) "Let me never at any time, in any circumstances, lose sight of this solemn thought: that the deed which I am now doing in the body, the thought I am thinking now, the word I am speaking now, the work I am working now in the body must follow me. I may, perhaps, lay it down at death, but I must take it up at the resurrection. This deed of mine must follow me into that future, eternal life. . . I am to live, not a ghost, a spectre, a spirit, I am to live then as I live now in the body." "Then (in that future life) you live again in the body-in the very body, as to all essential properties and to all practical intents and purposes, in which you live now.”—(Dr. CANDLISH: Risen Saviour.) "The souls of the blessed shall not only be glorious, but their very bodies shall be filled with glory."-(JEREMY TAYLOR.) "Jesus Christ is come to seek and to save that which was lost. . . Not only all men, but also all man; consequently all his faculties, all his aptitudes, the man of earth as wel as of the skies; in other words, humanity as well as man."(VINET.) "Christ partook of human nature, and associated it with the divine. a clear proof that God has not cast off human nature, but designs to exalt and dignify it.”—(Rev. J. SMITH.)

to save them from the consequences of their sins.1 Christ took upon himself our nature, lived, suffered, and died here, not only to provide a blessed hereafter for the righteous, but to diffuse a knowledge of truth, and to instruct in the practice of righteousness; and in this He calls upon all

2

1"Never forget that the object of the Saviour is to redeem you from all iniquity; and that every act of wilful indulgence in any one species of iniquity is a refusal to go along with Him." (Dr. CHALMERS.) "The Christian teaching strikes right against the tyranny of the master, and the skulking and the bad work of the workman, and the false weights and measures of the trader, and the shiftiness and dishonour of the political adventurer, and all the social wrongs and sins which fester into sores and sometimes deepen into wounds from which the life-blood of the nation is flowing."-(Rev. Dr. RALEIGH.) "Religion is and can be nothing else but a design to make us like God, both in the inward temper of our minds and in our whole deportment and conversation."-(SCOUGAL: Life of God.) "For what else is religion in mankind,

But raising of God's image there decayed?
No habit, but a hallowed state of mind
Working in us, that He may be obeyed."

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(Lord BROOKE.)

"We should desire to be holy, not primarily because without holiness eternal happiness is impossible, but because our Father which is in heaven is holy." (Rev. H. DARLING.) "They who have risen to distinction in the Christian life are moved more by the love of righteousness than the desire of happiness. They esteem it more to be like Christ than even to receive from Him. God Himself is greater and better in their eyes than His gifts."-(Rev. D. THOMAS.) When souls are shaken with terror under alarming appeals, and cry out, What must we do to be saved? we are likely to think more of the way to comfort and peace than of the way to holiness and Christ-like living. We run a risk of falling into the notion that the Gospel is meant merely to soothe the conscience, to pacify the spirit; whereas its highest end is to renew the soul in righteousness, and to make it good-good like God. It is not a true revival which ends in merely giving men peace. That is only a true revival which ends in making men good."-(Rev. J. STOUGHTON: Revivals.)

2" Jesus Christ did not come to earth merely to die. He taught, worked miracles, lived in the different relations of human life; and the Gospel, in preserving for us other memories besides those of His death, has recommended to our study as to our veneration Jesus Christ as a whole. It is not alone by the sufferings comprehended between Gethsemane and Calvary, nor by the passion, properly so called, that Jesus Christ saves us, but by all the sufferings of His life, which was throughout a passion. It is not even by the sufferings of all His life that He saves us, but by all His life . . by all that He effected; by His actions and by His words; by what He did and by what He suffered; by His life as by His death." (VINET.) "To be in the truth is to become, by our affections and conduct, ever more and more like Jesus Christ; it is to follow Him spiritually in all the events He has gone through in a word, we must spiritually live over again the whole life of Jesus Christ; and this alone can be called knowing the truth and walking in the truth. True worship in spirit