adultery, Thou shalt not steal, Thou shalt not bear false witness, Thou shalt not covet, and if there be any other commandment, it is briefly comprehended," added the same apostle, "in this one saying, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." Again :-"Love (Christian love) suffereth long, and is kind: love envieth not: love vaunteth not itself; is not puffed up; doth not behave itself unseemly; seeketh not her own; is not easily provoked; thinketh no evil; rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth." And, once more: "Be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love; in honour preferring one another. Not slothful in business; fervent in spirit; serving the Lord. Distributing to the necessities of saints; given to hospitality. Rejoice with them that do rejoice; and weep with them that weep. Mind not high things; but condescend to men of low estate. Be not wise in your own conceits. Provide things honest in the sight of all men. If it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men.' Oh, beautiful morality! Does not the Conscience instinctively pronounce this judgment on it; aye, and with the Reason and the Heart consenting? cious" indeed! How little could Tacitus have known about the religion so to characterize it! Who sees not that, were such a moral code to be universally received, and fully acted on, it would in every family, in every social circle, and yet more widely among all nations of the world, put an end to those feelings and actings of jealousy, envy, pride, selfishness, and ambition, which have ever caused, and still cause, one large part of the sufferings and miseries of humanity.-A morality too, observe, so peculiar! So utterly different from, and superior to, whatever hest may be found in the moral doctrines of Greek or Roman philosophy; or of the religions of Mohammedanism, Hindooism, Buddhism! Well might the infidel but sentimental Rooussau reply

"Perni

to some infidel friends who surprised him reading the New Testament with certain children whom he was educating; "Show me any other book with a morality so pure as this, and I will give up the New Testament for it."* But where is such a book to be found?

And the more striking certainly was this morality of Jesus Christ's teaching, and the more an evidence of the truth of his divine mission, because of its being all so perfectly exemplified, and carried out, in his own life and character. For where was ever a life of such continuous self-denying benevolence? Where such tenderness of sympathy for the sick and suffering, the bereaved mourner, the weeping penitent, the bruised reed? Where such humility, though mixed with such greatness? Where such yearning of love towards friends; -love even to the extent of dying for them? (For such indeed He declared to be the real object, and purpose, of his death.) Where such compassion even for enemies-weeping, as He is recorded to have done, over Jerusalem, at the thought of its coming woes, when about to crucify Him; and, in the agonies of death, interceding for his murderers?-All this love to man, moreover, in union with such love to God, its ever meet accompaniment :-his meat and drink, we read being to do the will of his heavenly Father: his bestloved solace, after the day's hard toil spent in teaching and ministering, the passing of the night in prayer to God on the mountain-top:-his spirit of submission, and acquiescence in the Father's will, such as that expressed at Gethsemane, "The cup which my Father hath given me, shall I not drink it?"—and his confidence in that heavenly Father's love, even in the agony of the cruel death permitted by Him, such as to prompt

*I cite from recollection; and suppose that the children were those of the brother of the Abbé de Mably, of Lyons, in whose family he was for a while preceptor. His own children Rousseau, with that want of natural affection which not seldom characterizes infidelity, abandoned to the care of a Foundling Hospital. Alison, French Revol. i. 20).

his dying ejaculation, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit:"'-a confidence, must add, accompanied with the conscious sense, thence arising, of a plenary power over death and Hades, even when so dying on the cross; as expressed in those words to the penitent thief, "This day thou shalt be with me in paradise." "Truly," said the same infidel Rousseau, whose testimony to the matchless morality of the Christian doctrine I was before referring to, "if the death of Socrates was that of a sage, the death of Jesus was that of a God."

2. And then, in answer to the charge of superstitious views of God, observe, further, that in this intimacy of union, and almost identification, of Jesus Christ with the eternal Father, there presents itself in the Christian Gospel a reflected view of the moral character of GOD, such as, alike to the Reason, the Conscience, and the Heart of him who fixedly and candidly contemplates it, must appear alike overwhelmingly awful, glorious, and attractive. Awful, as showing the infinity of that divine attribute of justice which could offer mercy to sinful man on the terms of no less costly a sacrifice than that of the self-substituted Divine though Human One on Calvary :-attractive, by the manifestation of love and pity towards us on his part infinite even as that of Jesus; seeing that in that self-devoted sacrifice on Calvary He was Himself, in some mysterious way, a participator; Christ being, according to his own words, (i.e. in regard of his divine nature) one with the Father, and the Father with Him; so that, to use the Apostle Paul's words, "GOD was in Christ reconciling the world unto Himself, not imputing their trespasses (if real believers in Jesus) unto them: "-once more, glorious in the thus manifested attribute of holiness, such as to shrink from admitting any one less perfectly sinless of the children of men into his heavenly presence than such * Quoted from Rousseau's Emile, by Dr. Hales, in his Chronology, vol. iii., p. 273.

as might have been perfectly cleansed from guilt by Christ's blood of sprinkling, and with Christ's own perfect righteousness imputed to them. "These are they that have washed their robes, and made them white in the blood of the Lamb:-therefore are they before the throne."

For, as regards the heaven of God's manifestation, and of the departed saints' bliss, here too shines forth the matchless excellence of the Christian doctrine. "Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy : I dwell in the high and holy place." And to this it is that Christ's disciples, too, are permitted and taught by their religion to aspire. Compare the poor and gross ideas of the heaven of habitation for the spirits of the good after death, taught in every other religion:-e.g. the Elysian fields of the old Greek poet, in which Achilles' ghost is represented as saying to Ulysses, when brought by some magical art to visit them, that the lowest state of life on earth was better than the best among the shades below;-the hunting-grounds, with abundance of game, and no Spanish man-slayers, fancied by the Red Indians of America; or the heaven of sensualism pictured by Mahomet for his Mussulmans. In the Christian books, on the contrary, we are told respecting the Christian heaven, that there shall be no more sorrow, because there shall be no more sin; and happiness perfect because of the moral likeness to God being then in each and every soul of Christ's redeemed ones perfected. In the beautiful words of St. John: "Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what (after death) we shall be but this we know, that we shall then be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is."

Dear young friends, after this must not the REASON, the CONSCIENCE, and the HEART, which we seated on the judgment-seat, as judges in our Court of Inquiry into the evidence of Christianity, find themselves all but forced to recognise it as a religion from God?

I admit, indeed, that one point of evidence may yet be wanting; and that an essential and most important one. The Reason approves and admires; but it cannot of itself get hold of that heart-faith, which the Christian doctrine tells of as needed in order to an interest in the blessings of Christ's redemption. The Conscience recognises in itself the guilt of sin, and fitness of the blood-sprinkling from Calvary to cleanse, and give it peace; but it cannot of itself obtain that sprinkling. The Heart feels that in Jesus Christ, and Him alone, is an object of love all-satisfying; and moreover that the love which He has first on his part shown to us is precisely the fittest motive-principle to stir up love to Him :-just indeed as fit, it has been well said, to act upon it, as the light of heaven to act on the bodily organ of the eye.* Yet to see this fitness, and to feel this desirableness, is not to love. Some further power is evidently needed so to influence the dead and corrupt human soul, as to make Christ's work of redemption practically applicable and successful. Indeed the very evidence of Christianity seems incomplete without this. For, except so, the whole scheme of Christianity, beautiful and wonderful as we have seen it to be, must necessarily fail of its grand divinely asserted object of man's renovation and salvation. And could God have originated the scheme, if thus from practical powerlessness disappointing? We ask then,-Is there in Christianity the claim to any such mighty power; and is the claim one experimentally proved to be true?

Thank God there is. And thus we come, finally, and

IVthly, to speak of the EXPERIMENTAL EVIDENCE of Christianity.

It is perfectly true, and recognised in the Christian books themselves as true, that the converting power spoken of must come from God Himself. "No man

*So in Erskine's Internal Evidences of Christianity.