Our Modern Unbelief

“For we are not ignorant of his devices.”

I. If Satan has the guile, the experience and the enmity which we commonly ascribe to him, he may be expected not to confine himself to one mode of attack on Christianity, but to bring up new forces and lay siege to new points in each successive age. And if the defenders of Truth have been as successful as we allege, they must make up their minds to see fresh reserves of argumentation, satire and obloquy taking the places of those which have been resisted and overcome. These antecedent probabilities are exactly realized in the actual strategy of our powerful antagonist. Christianity has been assaulted in every age since the beginning, but with a continual change in the object of the onset and the weapons and manoeuvres of the foe. The objec-

* New York, February 8, 1852.

tions of Porphyry and Celsus seemed formidable in their day, and called out early waiters in those Apologies, as they are named, which still exist in the libraries of the learned; but their objections would scarcely disturb the faith of a Christian child in our times; and they have long been laid asleep. A tremendous force was brought to bear against the Church by the English deists, and their successors, the philosophers of France. Prom the literature, the elegance, the occasional wit, the numbers and the skill of these opponents, an undeniable shock was given to the belief of thousands, as we may see in the period anterior to the Prench Revolution. There were not wanting men to predict that Christianity would speedily yield before such talent and daring as those of Voltaire, Rousseau, Hume, Gibbon, Diderot, and D’Holbach. The work wrought by these fascinating scholars, in academies, courts and drawing-rooms, was carried on lower down in society by such men as Paine, in clubs and pothouses. All these attacks of the eighteenth century had a common character. Whether sceptical, deistical, or atheistical, they all belonged to what has since been known as RationaHsm. All denied the Bible, and many of them treated it with scorn, sarcasm, and blasphemy; all set up human Reason as the sole origin of Truth on the points in question. Materiahsts and immateriahsts, sober theists and blank atheists, they agreed in this family likeness. There was no elevation, or enthusiasm, or mysticism. Every thing in religion was brought to the test of cold calculation.

The pretence of close logic was never more vauntingly put forth. It was by critical dissection and links of reasoning almost mathematical, that all these unbelievers undertook to demonstrate the falsity of our alleged revelation. This was the form of infidehty which prevailed in [France, Prussia, Scotland, and in certain circles in Amorica, during the youth of our fathers. It may be seen in its best colours in Volney and in the letters of Jefferson. What a sweep it made in France, even of the Romish clergy, is known to all who have ever contemplated the career of a Talleyrand, a Sieyes, or a Fouche. Some of the worst of the bloody actors were unfrocked priests. It was against this form of opposition that Divine Providence called forth such writers as Watson, Beattie, Campbell, and Robert Hall.* Some of our most valuable treatises on the Evidences of Christianity are the fruits of this warfare. Voltaire predicted that in twenty years Christianity would be extinct, and Mr. Jefferson seemed to smile in anticipation of an age in which superstition should be no more. Once in a while, and generally among the least educated, especially artisans and operatives who come to us from Great Britain, we find a knot of antiquated scoffers, who pore over these exploded books and shed Hbations upon the carcass of Paine. That grand army is as thoroughly disbanded as was Napoleon’s at Waterloo; but CMstianity still survives, and some of its greatest triumphs

* See Hall’s celebrated Sermon on Modern Infidelity.

have been made since this very epoch. We have beheld, not the enthroning of the goddess of Reason, but the era of the Bible Society, of Missions, of mighty Revivals, and of” increased Protestant union. If the citadel of Christianity is to fall, it must be by other weapons than those which He black and rusty around the fortification, like the spiked cannon and stray balls which mark the spot of former engagements. That campaign of the antichristian war has reached its close; and he who would bring forth against us the armament of an age utterly left behind, only betrays the simplicity of ignorance. But are we, therefore, to conclude that Satan has desisted from his attempts? By no means. He has only availed himself of the pause, to levy forces for a new campaign, and assault positions heretofore unattempted. And it is a most interesting and needful inquiry, in what shape the infidel incmsion of our own day is to be expected; for the whole fine of our defences must be conformable to the dispositions of the enemy. It is my desire, therefore, to ask your attention to some characteristics of the infidehty which we have most to fear for ourselves and our children. And here there is danger lest we make the field of observation too wide, and thus content ourselves with a superficial view. We ought therefore to exclude, however important in their place, all those forms of error which claim for themselves a part in the church foundation, and which name themselves Christian. It is not heresy, however noxious, which we would now examine, but infidelity. Nor

OUR MODERN UNBELIEF. •’ J/jr

must we err so grossly as to assert that all infidels belong to a single class. Their name is legion. It has been admitted that here and there a specimen may be found of the old-fashioned calculating unbeliever of the French or Jacobin, that is, the rationalistic school. Among the remainder there are also various degrees. No one is ruined all at once. In the awful descent each apostate finds “beneath the lowest deep a lower deep;” and the precise shade of blackness and darkness which we meet in him must depend on the stage of this downward progress at which we make our observation. Yet the infidelity of the nineteenth century has characteristics as discernible as that of the eighteenth; and if these are occasionally less distinct, it is because the unbelief of our day is forming, but not formed; the process is incomplete; the development is still going on. We have to examine tendencies rather than results; yet as naturalists can detect the poison fruit even in its blossom, and the viper in its egg; and as the premonitions of the earthquake or volcano give inarticulate warnings before the earth is cleft and the lava boiling over, so we have a right to sit in judgment on the falsities beginning to prevail, even though we know but in part whereunto they shall grow.

1. The beginnings of this contemporaneous infidehty were with a show of great learning and science. Assumptions of this sort were indeed made by the Encyclopedists and French atheists; but their attainments were limited and often superficial. Several great sciences, in their new forms, have been born since their day. We have only to read the “Jew’s Letters” to learn the ignorance of Voltaire as to some of the most ordinary matters of Biblical science; and the veriest schoolboy would scout the claim of probability for Volney. In our times, if one country more than another has the boast of leamiQg, it is Germany; and there, if anywhere, Infidehty has made its wildest ravages. It was Lessing who led the way in violent warfare against Christ; Lessing, the poet, the man of taste, the almost universal genius. Goethe and Schiller are claimed by the infidels; yet the last age has produced no greater masters of the human heart. The philosophy which takes its name from Germany, and which has penetrated France, and entered largely into the public institutions of America, was born and nurtured and matured in the bosom of noble universities, founded for the upholding of Protestant religion. The new sciences have been invoked to prove the Bible false. Astronomy has been placed on the rack, to testify that Creation at the scriptural date is absurd. Geologists, scarcely at the threshold of their discoveries, unsettled in their very nomenclature, and unwiOing to wait tiU they can agree among themselves, have so read the strata of the earth as to give the he to the books of Moses. Ethnography and Ethnology, puffed up in new-born strength, have uttered oracles showing that the negro and the white man cannot have had common progenitors. All have boasted superior letters and philosophy. But above all, the metaphysical reasoners, one after another, have, spider-Hke, spun a thread out of their bowels, wherewith to entangle and crush the doctrines of the Gospel. With a show of erudition and acumen never surpassed, one of the most prominent infidel theologians of Germany uttered a “Life of Jesus,” undertaking to show that, all the miraculous histories and most of the ordinary narratives in our four Gospels are poetic figments, mythic fables, innocent or heated inventions, like the story of the labours of Hercules, or the nursery legend of Jack Frost; pleasant personifications and instructive apologues, with scarce a line of real fact at the bottom. Whole libraries have been ransacked to give basis to this absurd structure, the mere statement of which ought to be its confutation. Let it be my apology for alluding to this poisonous book of Dr. Strauss, to say that it is circulated in English in many editions, and that it has, to my knowledge, entered the house of one of our own persuasion, and perverted the soul of one trained under the truth. Our popular literary men have in some cases drunk this poison. Certain portions of the Unitarian body, unable to keep foothold on the narrow edge between their attenuated Christianity and Deism, have cast themselves into the gulf of Germanism. If you would know what I mean, consider the teachings of Theodore Parker, Emerson, and their confederates. This is, as you perceive, no longer the vulgar infidehty of the last age; but it is not less destructive.

2. The Infidelity of our age affects to be religious.

This could hardly be said of that which prevailed before. The attempt was, in most, to scout every thing like devotion, enthusiasm, or inward affection, as superstitious. It was found that this was first impolitic, and then im-. possible. It was found that man as a religious being must have some outlet for the spiritual sentiments, and would make religions for himself, such as the French Theophilanthropism, or betake himself to the beautiful idolatries of Greece, as both Gibbon and SchiUer seemed half disposed to do. It was found that man, despoiled of all the religious emotions, became a Marat or a Paine, a tiger or a swine. It was necessary therefore for the arch-enemy to remodel his devices, and bring in a religion which was better than that of the Bible. This, my brethren, this above all things else, is the grand characteristic of infidelity, in its present most dangerous form. Your sons and your daughters may be breathing the fatal chloroform of German transcendentalism, when they seem to themselves surrounded by the familiar air of Christianity. They may hear much from popular lecturers of the ideal, the spiritual, the divine, even of God incarnate in humanity, of resurrection, of faith, of Christ himself, when the subtle deceiver, annexing to these terms his own antichristian meanings, is slowly and deliciously, but surely and fatally charming from them all that can renew and save the soul. Most of all dangerous is our spiritual enemy when he thus transforms himself into an angel of light.

You have need to be warned against this new form of error, because it employs almost every term of theology and experience in a false and deceptive sense, often applying the most sacred words of gracious truth to matters of literature, scenery, the fine arts, love, and alas, even to sinful indulgence. Some of the foremost poets of our day are chargeable with these insidious tactics; so that a father has need to look well to the books which lie upon his daughter’s table, as splendid presentation copies. I do not mean merely the avowed Atheist and convicted blasphemer, Shelley, who maligned Jesus and argued against marriage; but many seemingly pure and undoubtedly gifted authors, who sing beautifully of Nature and of God. And here we must remark, that while under the former phase of Infidelity, much was said of Nature, under its present phase as much is said of God. Yet be not deceived, my brethren. If frequent repetition of the Sacred Name could sanctify a cause, theirs would be hallowed indeed. But their God is not our God; not the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ; not the God of the Saints; not even a personal God. “With many varieties of expression, and many modes of veiling their horrid purpose, their inward thought is to remove ah that we mean by God. The more they talk of God, the less they believe in him. In their disguised atheism the term implies the sum of all things, or the everlastingly unfolding process of causes, or the universal Reason, as existing in all minds. Sometimes, in their glorification of humanity, they utter the scriptural phrase, God is man; but their inward meaning is that man is God. Man is the object -of their adoration. The highest manifestation of God, say they, is in the human mind. This they dishonestly name, at times, the Incarnation. Indeed, there is scarcely a precious term in the vocabulary of grace, which they have not stolen and defiled by their abominable prostitution. This is the form of atheism which now threatens the world, and which has been called Pantheism. Pew have gone the length of holding the system in all its parts; many differ as to minute tenets and explanations; but towards this vortex all the popular and poetical unbeliefs of the age are rolling themselves. This maelstrom has abeady sucked in and engulfed several sickly and half-living heresies, among the rest a goodly portion of the Socinians. The bloodless humanitarianism of Priestley and Belsham was too cold, too reasoning, too deathlike; their churches were too sombre and empty; their very ministers could not be kept from becoming authors, statesmen, or diplomatic agents; their creed was too near Deism. This was discovered by many of the shrewder sort. Hence the new method of reconciling opposites which had been discovered in Germany was seized with avidity; and from this arises the modern philosophical, poetical, pantheistical Christian. For a reason above given, such a one may, by dexterous use of scriptural terms, give his discourses a sound which is all but orthodox. But the more sober and rational Unitarian abhors these extravagances scarcely less than we. Never before has the world seen so large a body of infidels, really denying every tMng like a proper revelation, yet full of great swelling words about the Spirit, the God of History, the union of Virtue and Beauty, and the excellence of Rehgion.

3. The Infidelity of our age connects itself with freedom and social progress. So far as the infidehty of France was a reaction against hierarchy and the pope, it had the same colours. Hence the very men who murdered the priesthood in the September massacres, were loud in cries of liberty, equahty, and fraternity. But this poHcy of modern imbehef is much more boldly marked. Hence the cry, on every side, that Christianity is a failure; that the Church has not made men happy; that whatever good the Bible has accomplished, its work is done, and we must have something better. It is a part of this scheme to glory in humanity as such; to assert the independence and self-sufficiency of man; to deify the creature, and pushing the rights of man to a Jacobinical and impracticable extreme, to instal lawless Freedom in the pulpit. There is something so attaching and gracious in the first aspect of a levelling system, that any scheme of this kind gains multitudes of converts among the oppressed, the suffering, the discontented, the aspiring, and the greedy. Even in our own free commonwealth, where every man who deserves to rise may succeed in it, so far as outward restrictions are concerned, there begins to be more and more every year, a half-suppressed hum and murmur among certain large classes; as if all ranks must be brought to a common level; as if the capitalist and the transient worker must share alike; as if the accumulations of industry must become a spoil for the idlest; as if labour with the hands were the only title to enjoyment. This being openly and diametrically opposed to the letter of Scripture, these teachers, however they may begin, are pretty sure to end in discovering that the Bible is false. Thus, strange as it may seem, philanthropy, unsanctified, may lead unsound minds to unbelief; and there are no more reckless and bitter opponents of Christianity than a number of writers, lecturers, and editors, whom we once knew or heard of a ministers of Jesus Christ. The truth, however, must be told: just as with European grain we have brought into our fields the weeds of agriculture, so with the unheard-of emigration from foreign countries, we have imported infidel socialism and communism. It is no longer the books and arguments of false teachers, only, we have the men themselves, the ready-made disciples, clamouring in our public assemblies, and inflaming a peaceful population from the press. I leave, as not pertaining to the pulpit, the question how far this influx from corrupt sources may be expected to modify our pohtical institutions.

The device of Satan is most apparent in all this. The excesses towards which infidelity drives, are counterfeits and caricatures of the very blessings which we owe to true religion. Tor, is not Christianity the religion of the poor and the oppressed? Is it not the religion of philanthropy? Does it not teach the common origin and spiritual equality of all men, in the sight of God? Does it not seek, and at the safest moment procure, human freedom and social rights? Must it not be named pre-eminently the system of true progress? Yea, yea, in despite of Garrison and Proudhon, forever yea. But when God has launched his vessel, infidelity would board and master it, and, tearing its noble timbers apart, would frame a thousand fantastic and perishable rafts out of the dismembered hulk. Nay, circhng around the ancient ship, she would claim for her crazy floats, of stolen material, all the safety and all the glory of the original structure. The press of the day, deeply surrendered to the half-religions and mockreligions of the time, is ever and anon jeering at the Church and at Christianity, as not doing so much for mankind as these reformers would do, as jacobinism would do, as common property and unmarried alhance would do. Thus antediluvians laughed at the Ark. Hiding from view the fact that whatever philanthropy irrigates the desert of humanity, is the product of this very Church and this very Christianity. They calumniate the mountain spring, and claim all its flowing lakes and rivers as their own. But you will agree with me, that the prevalent infideUty assumes to be the benefactor of mankind.

4. The infidelity of our time is extending itself among the less cultivated classes. Begun in learning, it was almost proverbial in ancient times that Christianity was gladly received by the poor, while it was rejected by the learned. Something of this was true a century ago. The virus of French unbelief was generated among scholars, and fomented in courts and academies. During the progress of the anarchy which preceded Napoleon, the leading spirits were men of education; the brutal masses, it is true, maddened by long oppression, feverish with the thirst of freedom, and confounding Christianity with the despotism of the priesthood and the confessional, abjured the Redeemer, and well-nigh offered up the idea of God. This was more from false political notions however, than from any de-Hberate theory of religious unbelief. And when Deism, or, perhaps, Atheism, came over sea into many minds in America, it was principally among speculative men, who aspired to be philosophers. But our own day has seen a very great increase of this tendency in antichristian systems to popularize themselves. The most capable observers tell us concerning Germany, for example, that the language of unbelief and blasphemy is no longer confined to the schools and universities where it hngered long. The upland waters have broken themselves away, and are flooding the champaign. There is reason to fear that in central and northern Europe the masses of the people are rapidly becoming corrupt in regard to the essentials of religion. In lands where it is difficult to find a boy or a girl who cannot read, thousands and myriads are growing up to neglect all public worship and all private prayer. I grieve to say it — but a great number of the foreigners who emigrate to America are grossly infidel. It is the solemn and sorrowful testimony of most respected clergymen of their own race. It is attested by the radical, and often antichristian avowals of the numerous newspapers published among us in that language. Nor is the evil confined to one country. The contagion has spread widely among the working-classes of Great Britain, many of whom bring over their scepticism or their impiety. It may be safely asserted, that wherever we find a club, society or institute openly and loudly infidel, we may detect a large infusion of transatlantic people. Yet we must not flatter ourselves that our native population, especially in cities and large towns, enjoys an exemption. While the great body, through Divine favour, remains untouched, the new generation has many growing up without any Sabbath, indifierent to pubHc worship, schooled without the Bible, a ready prey to false religionists in the first place, and thus prepared to take the further step into denial of all revelation. The means of grace do not any longer reach our population in its length and breadth. Churches rise in great numbers, where the truth is preached and honoured; but other places of religious teaching, in equal numbers, draw crowds into Universalism, Socmianism, enthusiastic and fanatical heats, and insane pretensions to mysterious influence and spiritual revelation. And then, what numbers in civic populations frequent no house of worship! A late writer, of much observation and detail, speaking of the street-people of London, assures us that thirty thousand of this single class never enter any place of religious instruction. We have not reached this extreme; but are we not on the way? It is matter of observation, that our churches are generally filled with at least well-doing people. But where are the vastly greater numbers of those who still more need the consolations of the gospel? I bring no charges, brethren; indeed, I have the sickening faintness of one who beholds a great malady, but is not prepared to

announce a specific remedy; revived Christianity being the only real cure. Por my present argument, it is enough to point to this state of things, obviously increasing, as a proof that the modern irreligion is widely prevalent among the humbler portions of society.

5. The Infidelity of our times is strikingly immoral in its tendency. All falsehood in religion is by its very nature opposed to virtue; but in varying degrees, according to the presence or absence, and according to the degree, of the causes already enumerated. Satan does not always display the cloven foot. The minister of darkness does not at once disclose himself in the colours of the pit. It is the pohcy of unbelief, while working its way upward into public favour, to assume the garb of purity. Hence, there have been many avowed infidels who, out of the very pride of sect, have led lives of scrupulous outward virtue. Lord Herbert of Cherbury is not the only Deist who has seemed to outshine many a Christian professor. But in our day, the evil tree is hung all over with its proper loathsome fruit. The prevailing forms of unbelief in revelation are accompanied with manifest deterioration of morals. When men begin to go astray in conduct, and to indulge any great vice, they gladly embrace such errors as may stupefy conscience, and so enable them to sin unchecked. And then, the effect in turn becomes a cause; and by an inverse action the falsehood breeds irregularity and crime. Go where you will, among families, neighbourhoods or communities, where there has been shipwreck made of faith, and you observe a correspondent injury of the moral sense. It is almost an unfailing index of the modern infidel, that he inveighs against the perpetuity and sanctity of marriage. By an easy process, the sanctions of property are worn away. Inoculate any large class with antichristian opinions, and the contagious influence becomes horridly rife. An angry, relentless spirit of discontent, mutual distrust, lust of change, revolutionary fire, and general disquiet, plays on the features and inflames the language. The great and invaluable gift of freedom furnishes no safeguard here, unless it be coupled with true religion. Freedom is only a condition, under which men’s principles act. If those principles are destructive, freedom is but an open door to ruin. The absolute freedom of a thoroughly immoral people, “hateful and hating one another,” would be nothing short of hell. Indeed, the instinct of self-preservation does not allow men to remain long in any state approaching this; for, in dread of one another, they are fain to take refuge under the protective shadow of miUtary domination or imperial tyranny.

Blessed be God, the religion which fled to this new world for an asylum is still spared to us; and there are wide agricultural districts which have not been reached by more than the rumour of philosophic infidehty and disorganizing wrong. Yet, so far as this religious guard has been impaired, the consequence has been a relaxation of public morals.

It is not perfectly easy to declare, how far we may trace to this source the increase of crime, which is matter of every-day complaint. Some think that breaches of mercantile confidence are less rare than fifty years ago. The journals of every morning famiharize us to the record of murder. And suicide, the special crime of those who deny a future retribution, is committed with a frequency which often robs the gibbet of its prey. I might note other crimes, but your memory and observation will supply what it might be inconvenient to describe from this place. It admits no denial, that while individual exceptions occur, the usual result of disbelief in the Evangelical Scriptures, is an open declension of morahty, and that this result is especially remarkable at present.

II. In the opening of these remarks it was admitted that the period of Infidelity in which we are Uving has not reached its term, and that to judge it fully we must wait till the causes now in action shall have worked out their full results. Por there is a growth in opinion as truly as in the rise, progress and end of a human being; and though in both cases there may be further consequences, it is rather by lineal descent than by the continuance of individual life. There is, moreover, a wide extent in the prevalence of great falsehoods. Beginning in one comer of the world, they spread themselves from country to country; and just as the harvest comes at a different month in Canada, in Maryland, and in Mississippi, so the full crop of infidelity is not seen at one and the same time in all lands. In some it has begun to scatter its narcotic seeds, while in others there is but the tender blade emerging from the furrow; but this very gradation enables us to study the character of the growth. If in certain places we find the mature plant, with its poisonous juices thoroughly concocted, we thereby learn what we may expect from the young and perhaps attractive flower which blooms among ourselves. There are countries where infidehty may be said to have run its race and displayed all its stages of insidious promise and eventual desolation. Such was Prance under the Revolution. There are others in which it is only beginning. Dreadful as it is, it is nevertheless true, that the presses of New York and Philadelphia have issued thousands of copies of the last century’s infidelity, in the works of Voltaire, Volney, Rousseau, and Paine, in Spanish translations for the South American market. And, as if the malignity of Satan could have no rest, some of these same books have been laboriously and widely circulated in the native languages of the East Indies, to corrupt the ignorant and besotted Hindoo, and to close his mind against the gospel. Such states of opinion are widely diflPerent from that which exists among ourselves, as indeed our own state differs from that of some European nations, where vaster strides have been made towards the denial of all moral distinctions and of God himself. Thus the giant pestilence of our day, which circumnavigated the globe, began in Asia and traversed Europe before it showed its ghastly visage on our western shores twenty years ago. But this gradual accession of the plague allowed and encouraged medical skill to examine the nature of the disease long before the treatment of it became a practical question. We have been considering a more fatal malady which is traversing the earth, and of which the symptoms are not deathly coldness and spasms of bodily pain, but mental delusion, palsied conscience, and a heart ossified by godless falsehood. We have seen it seizing men of learning, taste and civilization, and then stealing like an infection into the crowded haunts of labour and the hovels of want. We have descried in it a type differing from the infidel deceptions of a former generation. We are old enough to remember its beginnings under this new form among ourselves; and we open our eyes to its more consummate virulence in countries where it has more deeply corroded the vitals of Christianity. We are alarmed at daily indications of its stealthy but effectual expansion in the literature and society around our doors. We begin to tremble for our children and successors. Unless the whole picture has been overcharged, we read in all this a lesson, which may cast a sober hue over the thoughts of even the most selfish and worldly.

1. We are loudly admonished to be on our guard. When pestilence is in the air, wise householders look well to the symptoms of their family. When enemies are in a land, true generalship throws out its parties of reconnaissance, and keeps a sharp eye on every suspicious wayfarer and every sign of treachery and ambush. When the freedom of a kingdom is endangered, patriots are awake to every sign of increased power. These are not tremors of cowardice, but salutary precautions of prudence and benevolence. It is because we are not ignorant of Satan’s devices, that we maintain an equal vigilance against our spiritual adversaries. Snares are harmless when discovered, and “in vain is the net spread in the sight of any bird.’’

But it is not enough to be aware of danger in general; we must know from what quarter and in what particular form to expect it. If infidelity made its first demonstrations in all the dark and bloody colours of downright atheism and Kcentiousness, it would never show a convert. It is the very insidiousness of the approach which magnifies our peril. Hence our first duty is to know the enemy, and if possible to know his most covert advances. We. must learn to pull off masks and see through disguises, to distrust honeyed words, and fear our foes even when they come bearing gifts. This imphes a sufficient acquaintance with the whole system of positive truth to know when any part of it is attacked, and then information as to the ways in which those attacks are likely to be made. Among the multitude of books, public journals, orations, lectures, sermons, poems, and common talk, in which we live, there are every day some which propose antichristian opinions. As truth is one and error manifold, no human faculty can foresee the precise mode in which falsehood will be presented by a wily foe; and therefore the grand safeguard, as we shall see, is a knowledge of the truth. But subsidiary to this is a watchful scrutiny of every principle which assaults or undermines any particular doctrine of God. These false teachings often begin far away from the point at which they really aim; but such is the contexture and harmony of the Divine system, that it begins to give way upon the surrender of any leading propositions. Those wretched persons who, from being speculative Christians, have become atheists, arrived at this catastrophe by a series of acts. Nemo repentefuitturjpissimus. Hence the need of watching the earliest, slightest symptoms of the disease. Our danger is all the greater in proportion as we have allowed the close and thorough religious instruction of households to fall into desuetude. There are many among us who read abundance of books, but among them so little of Christian theology, that they do not even recognise the deadly sentiments of the worst systems, if offered to them with prettiness of diction, cant phrases, pretension to philosophy, and the rounded voice of a popular lecturer.

The devices of falsehood are Protean. Let me cull out of a wide field of tares a handful for a sample. And for reasons already given we must include errors which echo from pulpits as well as from liberal clubs. Be on your guard then, brethren, against the doctrine of man’s irresponsibility for his belief. As soon as you have opened your mind to this pregnant tenet, you have admitted within your walls a Trojan horse, fraught with enemies to consume both hearth and altar. Por such is the blinding influence of sin, that you have only to make a man wicked enough, to make him capable of believing any thing, even that there is no harm in murder and voluptuousness, or that there is no God. Yet this is a popular doctrine of the age, the entering wedge which shall rend the entire evangelical fabric. Keep a watch against the absurd dogma, that man is the creature of circumstances; so that every human soul is in opinion and character just what the things around him necessitate him to be, and hence not responsible for the vileness or the crime which he could by no possibility prevent or remove. In this article of current unbelief, we have fatalism with a vengeance.

Shun, as you would sugared arsenic, the sHghtest suggestion that there are no essential moral distinctions. Your arch-poisoner is too crafty to teU you outright that there is no difference between right and wrong. But he will sweeten the cup of death with such forms as these, that Virtue has no essence but its tendency to promote happiness; or that sin is a very different affair when viewed from the side of man and from the side of God; or that God can no more make a universe without sin, than two mountains without a valley between; or that vice is no otherwise vice than as it is judged such by the conscience. Though the unsuspecting youth often receives these, from incapacity to reason far enough, he is actually preparing himself for the denial of eternal morality.

Recognise your antichristian enemy, though in gown and bands, when he whispers to you that there is no punishment after death, a doctrine which is spreading like a contagion in city and country. We may trace to it the relaxed morals of millions, and the manifest increase of self-murder, since many a villain would fly to the rope if he were delivered from the dread of a hereafter.

Guard your soul against the fallacy that there are no mysteries in religion, or that no man can believe what is above his understanding* In another place, it might be proved that this is as contrary to philosophy as to religion; but here we are simply denouncing traitors in our camp.

Above all, fix your eye with detestation on every attempt to deny or impair the Inspiration of the Scriptures. This it is, in which all schools of infidehty, ancient and modern, join hands. So long as a man admits the plenary inspiration of these books, we have some ground common to us and him, and some admitted medium of proof; and even though he be in grievous error, we may hope to reclaim him. He may be a Papist, but so was MartiQ Luther; he may be a Socinian, so was Thomas Scott. While a man hstens to God speaking in this Word, the case is not desperate. But how can we argue from Scripture with one who holds only so much of Scripture to be authoritative as he could have discovered himself, who selects the parts which he shall reject as fable, and who is a Scripture to himself? When these, or any of these, or any like these, present themselves for your belief, know ye, that your enemy is at your door; be on your guard, and be not ignorant of his devices.

2. The existence of such snares should urge us to seek protection against the invasion of falsehood. It is not enough to know our enemy even in his feints and subterfuges; to this we must add positive means to escape from his devices. All these means come at last to a single one, belief of the truth. This, being the fexact opposite of InfideHty, is incompatible with it, and exclusive of it. Large and iatimate knowledge of divine verities, and strong faith in the same, are the only protection; and this is infallible and sovereign, which ought to be comforting to those overtasked, feeble, or unlettered disciples, who cannot read many books, and who might otherwise be confounded at the sight of an enemy spread on every side, changing his martial columns at

38 OUR MODERlf XmBELIEF.

every instant, and seeking entrance at every avenue. Thanks be to God! in order to be an instructed and firm Christian, it is not necessary to answer all the objections of the freethinker, or even to know them. You are not required to soar into the metaphysic of Hegel, or plunge into the sty of Epicurus. Divine Truth is its own defence. Its system is so compact, ordered, symmetrical and harmonious, that it proves itself; and the more you learn of it, the more you find each portion demonstrative of every other. “He that believeth hath the witness in himself.” But for this, the humble, unschooled believer would be left to the impHcit faith of the Papist, for it is obvious he could not traverse the encyclopedia of scientific evidence. The engines of defence are subhme and impregnable, and have proved mighty in the hands of teachers and learned champions, to stop the mouths of adversaries. But they are not indispensable to the private Christian. His demonstration lies nearer home. Cowper felt this, when he contrasted Voltaire with the pious lace-weaver, a hapfy, humble woman, who

“Just knows, and knows no more, her Bible true, “A truth the brilliant Frenchman never knew.”

The divine method of arming the soul against sceptical attacks, is to shed into it belief of the revealed word by the Holy Ghost sent down from heaven. This is accomplished every day in those who never so much as spelled out the names of the great unbelieving authors. Indeed, even in the case of accomplished theologians, who are called professionally, and often with great pain to themselves, to turn over volumes of sophism and impiety, in order to frame a reply, the solid confidence of which they are conscious is not founded so much on these rephes, as on that inward demonstration of the Spirit which is common to them and the most unlettered hind. Every experienced Christian has proofs of the truth of Christianity, which no external science can shake. He is more sm-e that this Bible is the very word of his redeeming God and Father, than he ever can be that such or such an assertion of Geology or Astronomy is true. And to this interior citadel he continually resorts, under all the temporary shocks produced by the ever changing tactics of infidel discovery. The same is true of objections founded on doctrinal difficulties, on Scriptural interpretation, on alleged absurdities or contradictions in the revealed Word. His conviction and assurance of the great mass of divine truth is such, that he can wait for the resolution of particular doubts, as being certain that they admit a solution even if unknown to him. True piety teaches him, as clearly as does true philosophy, to acquiesce in that golden maxim of all healthy minds, not to let doubts about what is difficult disturb his belief of what is plain. Some indentations of the coast he may never have surveyed, he may have found them laid down on no chart; but those great lights and forelands which have guided all his voyage, lie will not surrender or deny, because they cannot be descried through the clouded glass of the scoffer. Such is the protective power of faith under infidel assault.

Confirmation of this is afforded by a fact, known to all who are famiHar with conversions of unbelievers, that these transformations are not commonly wrought by the slow process of taking down the infidel structure doubt by doubt, and building in its stead the Christian structure proof by proof; but that the scoffer is pierced by conviction of his guilt, like any common sinner, and led to the Lord Jesus Christ in childlike faith. It is often long before his doubts, in their entire series, are severally resolved, but the blow has been struck which prostrates the capital unbelief of the heart.

A deep and thorough acquaintance, therefore, with the positive truth of Scripture, followed by cordial and evangelical acceptance of it, is the sure bulwark against the operations of antichristian error on our own hearts.

There are, however, as was suggested before, some subordinate precautions to be observed. If it is necessary to have the mind possessed by the truth, it is all-important for this end to shut out the inroads of error. There is such a thing as foolhardy adventure into an enemy’s country. Religious falsehood sometimes comes in such a shape as to stimulate the curiosity of the unwary, as the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge tempted Eve. Sometimes it is the vehicle which is attractive. It may be elegant style, it may be romance, it may be closely-knit argumentation, it may be popular eloquence. The union of several such fascinations may invite the youthful student to taste the poisonous clusters, and acquire the taste for doubts and cavils. The most seductive and cunning argument against future retribution, which our age has produced, is contained in a poem of high talent, which you will find in every shop. The name and fame of some great heretical preacher, or some orator who dehvers infidel sermons under the guise of lectures to the people, summon numbers of half-instructed people, who admire and acquiesce, and go again, not knowing, in their simphcity, that the new doctrines which they drink in will presently unsettle all the religious belief of their childhood. Happier far is the faith of the vulgar, than literary advancement, bought at such a price. It is a plain maxim of common sense, not to tamper with infection; and he is a fool who, for the mere sake of proving his boldness and freedom from bigotry, rushes uncalled into the miasmatic influence of false teaching. “Cease, my son,” says the wise man, “to hear the instruction that causeth to err from the words of knowledge.” Prov. xix. 27. “Take heed,” said Incarnate Wisdom, “what ye hear.” The caution which is good for yourself, is good for your children and dependents. A little mineral admixture in their daily bread, a little morbific quahty in their daily milk, would be justly dreaded, as tending to wear away the health; yet the daily journal enters your doors, distilling by little and little false, latitudinarian and radical opinions. No marvel if you find your old age surrounded by sons who have made shipwreck of the faith. Christian parents and teachers, it is impossible to watch too affectionately the literature which comes into the hands of the young. If you desire them to be guarded and manly Christians, their pabulum must be truth. It is as certain of the mind as of the body, that whatsoever is taken into it should tend directly to its growth or strength; all that is otherwise, is noxious. Nutrition, moreover, is a gradual process, the result of repeated acts. If, then, the mind and character are to make progress, and acquire firmness, there must be not slight and occasional, but regular and extensive study of God’s revealed will. Nor is there a household among us which does not need reformation in this particular. Thus, by promoting knowledge of truth, anjd discouraging famiharity with falsehood, we may, under God’s blessing, do much to protect ourselves against abounding infidehty.

3. In such a time of prevailing error, it becomes us to prevent its diffusion in society. Let me not be considered an alarmist. There are ten thousand good things of which we are altogether undeserving, and for which we ought to be giving thanks; and among these we must reckon numberless Christian churches, comprising a host of God’s people. Yet I teU you no new thing, my hearers, when I repeat that there is a mixed multitude, especially in our towns, who have made terms with the enemy and sacrificed their faith. If frank Deists and open-mouthed Atheists are less common than they were about the beginning of the century; if, as is undeniable, it is disreputable for a man to attend no place of worship; if society shudders when one distinctly condemns or ridicules the Bible; it is still true that* disbelief in revelation prevails among a large part of our people, including men of letters and science, journalists and authors. And the danger is not lessened but much increased, when such persons, by a new device of Satan, profess to war by our side under the standards of Christianity, and even afiPect to preach that Jesus whom they disbelieve and despoil of all his glory. Nay more, few who have not made the inquiry a special business, have any adequate conception how many of another class are professed sceptics or real infidels; how many cherish a low and brutal materiahsm and atheism under some names of social reform; how many associations and meetings for debate are kept up by these so-caUed liberals; how many cheap volumes go to swell the black sewers of this underground torrent; and how many newspapers, in German as well as Eng-Hsh, are more or less characterized by abuse of the church, the ministry, and the Bible. Various methods may be proposed for stemmuig, averting and drying up this river of death, and no one of them is to be regarded with coldness. But after all, the great method, in accordance with principles already laid down, is to preach the gospel and gather the church. Other means, with incidental benefit no doubt, tend to diffuse themselves, and to be lost by too wide dispersion. The evangelic method tends to permanency and settlement. Every missionary effort, rightly conducted, fixes a centre, plants a standard, designates a rallying-point, draws in one and another, and at length a group, a society, a multitude, builds on a foundation, and binds together in a structure which shall abide. Every single church gathered in the truth and moved by the Spirit, is a permanent and energetic organ for the destruction of infidelity around it. Especially true is this among the more rude and ignorant, to whom the preacher’s voice is the instrument of instruction in divine truth, in place of printed books, reviews, magazines and religious newspapers. One bold and sustained effort to keep up gospel means at a fixed point, though among the worst dens of a great city or suburb, shall do more to root out impious unbelief in its precincts, than a thousand random assaults on the individuals who are misled and corrupted. Such has been the experience of all who thus laboured in the mighty work under Whitefield and Wesley. This is our chief hope for populations like our own. A single good beginning, in a small circle, does a certain amount of this warfare against error, by establishing a lasting spring-head of truth and grace. But. let these isolated posts become only numerous enough, and the widening circle of one will touch the widening circle of another, till whole districts will be so far occupied, that the unconquered interstices will be absorbed, just as the clearings of the new countries, at first mere patches in the forest, few and far between, grow and multiply and touch one another, and coalesce into the

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wide continuous civilization of agricultural territories and states. We find, therefore, in the prevalence of infidelity a new motive to attempt gospel effort. Even the freethinking and unbelief of the educated and tasteful will feel the impression of a wide-spread piety among the masses. Precisely in the way which has been indicated did Christianity make its conquest of GentiHsm in early times. Precisely in this way was the Reformation extended among our forefathers.

But you need not be told, brethren, that Christians possess other weapons for the demolition of InfideHty. The invention of printing has endowed the silent volume with a voice which is heard not only by the assemblage of a single edifice, but by tens of thousands at once. And when we allude to books against atheism, deism, and all varieties of unbelief, we cannot refrain from naming one which ought to be known and circulated. It has converted more opposers than any other; it answers every counter argument, and displays the entire force of Christianity. I have it here; it is the Bible. Safely may it be said, that the best possible way to be reclaimed from doubt and persuaded of divine certainties, is to give a serious and candid perusal to this portable volume; just as the surest mode of being aware of fight is to open the eyes upon the sun. The devil, among his arsenal of devices, has this for a masterpiece, to abstract, close, lock up, forbid, exterminate the Bible. Sometimes under a red cap of anarchy, and sometimes under a black cowl, he steals away or tears away the sacred Scriptures, from nations, from schools, from individual readers; but we are not ignorant of his devices. Let infidelity and superstition and hierarchy, change their tune at pleasure from wheedling to fury, we will clasp this book to our hearts, we will send it to our neighbour. We will multiply and cheapen copies; we will translate them into every tongue; we will despatch them on the wings of every commerce; we will carry them as angels of salvation into every willing house. Yea, “this will we do if God permit 1” And so doing, “we will not fear, though the earth be removed and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea. There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God.”

Yet, churches and Bibles depend for their efficacy on the direct influences of the Holy Spirit, an agency which it is part of the reigning infidelity to disbeheve, but for which we will pray, as the chief hope of our salvation. Who can tell how far the revolutionary atheism of Prance might have become the established irreligion of America, if it had not pleased God to make our country the theatre of mighty and extensive revivals? Perhaps I address some who love to recall these awakenings, as the scenes in which they were made to know Christ. Such will join in testifying, that the progress of convincing and converting grace did not wait for the tedious preparative of philosophic reply and formal argument, but went forth to consume at once and forever the difficulties of the sceptic and the cavils of

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the deist, as the flame of a conflagration reduces combustible obstacles in its rapid and blazing career. All other means together wiQ not do so much to rid our land of antichristian scoffing, as would one general communication of power from on high. Increased prayer for this fresh dispensation is the duty of the Church. This is the defensive means which Satan and his hosts dread, while they cannot emulate. They can blaspheme, they can argue, they can fight, they can write books, and, if need be, quote Scripture for their purpose; but pray they cannot. Our word should be, “Let God arise, let his enemies be scattered; let them also that hate him, flee before him.” Ps. lxviii. 1. The more we recognise the devices of the enemy, the more should we gather around the footstool of Him who will shortly bruise Satan under our feet. “In meekness, instructing those that oppose themselves; if God, peradventure, will give them repentance to the acknowledgment of the truth; and that they may recover themselves out of the snare of the devil, who are taken captive by him at his will.”