The Blessings of the Gospel

A Lecture Introductory to a Course of Pastoral Theology, Delivered in the English Presbyterian College, November 12, 1844

Gentlemen: There never was a period richer in the bequests of its predecessors, or more resdess in the consciousness of undeveloped power, than the period on which your lot is cast. The sciences are ail teeming with so many new results, that even those which keep their old names have wholly changed their character. It matters little which way you turn your eyes — wealth of observation and brilliance of discovery on every side encounter you. Beginning with the most stupendous, and, perhaps, most primitive of all the sciences, what a revolution has befallen astronomy since the wise men of the east first watched the sparkling heavens! An instrument of which they never dreamed has revealed neighbor worlds in our system, and dispersed into myriads of blazing suns those films of vagueness, those ghosts of light, scarce known to them as galaxies and nebulae. And while that instrument suggests the thought, that immensity may yet contain systems whose messenger rays have not had time to bring us news of their creation, and is at this very moment endeavoring to telegraph across the silent abyss of space tidings from other worlds — a balance, of which these ancients had no idea, has weighed each measured orb, and a calculus unknown to them has predicted their minutest movements for all time to come, and shown that, in all their intricate and tortuous paths, they can never err, nor ever stop, till the voice of the Eternal bid them. Returning to our earth, what strange traditions of forgotten times do we read on its rocky tablets! How suddenly have its stones begun to cry aloud! and what unexpected stories of creative wisdom and munificence, antedating the birth of man, have been heard from the sepulchre of worlds which long since ceased to be! Descending into the arcana of that great laboratory, whence the materials of each organic form are supplied in countless combinations and unerring proportions, what a change since the day when philosophy reckoned earth, air, fire, and water, as the only elements! And ascending again to organized existence, how has the field of observation widened since the time when one sage could speak of all the plants, from the cedar to the hyssop, and knew all that could then be known of beasts, of fowls, and of fishes!

And what makes our age so wonderful, is the simultaneousness of all sorts of discoveries. While the telescope of Herschel was revealing new worlds, the miscroscope

OF THE GOSPEL. Ill

of Ehrenberg was investigating a new animal kingdom in a drop of putrid water; and while the analytic prowess of Lagrange was demonstrating the perpetuity of the solar system, the sagacity of Dalton was bringing the elementary atoms of each simple substance under the dominion of mathematical laws. And at the same time that the potent agencies of light, and heat, and electricity, were disclosing the secret structure of substances the most recondite and enigmatical, these subtile agencies have in their own turn been subjected to a question as successful as ingenious; and what the sagacity of Franklin, and Volta, and OErsted, has done for electricity, and what the intuitive wisdom of Black, and the poetic ardor of Leslie, and the careful experiments of Dulong and Petit have done for heat, the elegant expedients, the mathematical resources, and the inductive minds of Young, and Brewster, and Arago, have done for light, detecting new and surprising properties, or bringing properties already known to arrange themselves under the raost beautiful principles. Lavoisier’s decomposition of air and water into their unsuspected elements; the publication of the atomic theory in the “Manchester Memoirs;” the dazzling experiments of Davy, which proved that our globe is but a mass of metallic oxydes, and a large portion of our bodily framework nothing more; Faraday’s brilliant researches, to demonstrate that the mysterious force which holds a particle of oxygen and a particle of iron together in chymic union is the same which trembles in the magnet, sweeps in the lightning, and roars in the conflagration; Liebig’s investigations in the substances of which living organs are composed, and which have rendered the laboratory of Giessen the metropolis of a new science, by which it is hard to say whether medicine or agriculture will profit most; Cross’s processes in his conjuring cave at Bristol, by which he can manufacture the most costly gems — good as nature’s own — from bits of flint, or coal.

or clay — all these, and many more, have rushed, one after another, with such exciting rapidity, that in the impetuosity of fresh enterprise, and in the quest of new revelations, chymistry has not time to admire her own discoveries. Under the blowpipe of Berzelius, and the goniometer of Wollaston, in the diligent hands of Klaproth, and Mohs, and Hauy, and Jameson, and Thomson, mineralogy, from a confused handful of ores, and spars, and pebbles, in a dusty cupboard, has grown up to a graceful fane of goodliest stones and fairest hues — a science as elegant as it is well defined. How Father Linnaeus would rub his incredulous eyes, could he see the comely stature to which his favorite Flora, his “amabilis scientia,” has attained in the fostering hands, and under the faithful tutorship of Jussieu, and Smith, and Decandolle, and Hooker — too tall a pet to dandle now. And entomology — its hawking eye has hunted out as many sorts of bees, for instance, or butterflies, as people once imagined there were of insects put altogether; and while the dissecting needle of Bonnet has shown the resources which Infinite Skill has lavished in making one caterpillar complete and comfortable, the arranging eye and busy fingers of Latreille, and Kirby, and Burmeister have shown that it takes nearly half a million different sorts of these forgotten minims to fill up the Creator’s scheme, and give each plant its appropriate tenants and each animal its congenial food. Time would fail to tell the labors of Cuvier, and Owen, and Fleming, in Comparative Anatomy — the toils which in some departments have left the zoologist little more to do. And though it might be pleasant to ramble with Wilson, and Audubon, and Charles Bonaparte, among the woods and waters of the western wilderness; or to visit, with Goold, the quaint old-fashioned birds of New Holland; or take a turn with Lamarck in his grotto of shells, or with Ellis in his coral cave; or grope with Buckland and Lyell, Brogniart and Agassiz, with Murchison and Miller, through the steaming forests, the muddy seas, and chaos-lighted fields of a world before our own — we forbear. We are content to say again — what it would take too long time to prove by enumeration — there never was a time when science was more wealthy, or the stimulated mind of man more certain of discovering yet greater things.

And it is our great advantage to live in this age of clear-seeing and clever-working. Now that London is the city, and all England the suburb — now that the brother in New York is nearer than the brother in Edinburgh once was — every urgent letter that twinkles from the land’s end to the capital, and every anxious journey by which you dart like a volition to the distant scene of danger, is a gift from science, a favor done you by James Watt, the Glasgow engineer. The invalid who recovers from diseases once deemed fatal, or, instead of the rough and torturing remedies of a ruder age, finds health and vigor charmed back by the genne THE BLESSINGS

tie treatment and elegant prescriptions of modern pharmacy, owes something to physiology and modern chymistry — just as the man who escapes entirely the most dismal of diseases, may bless the memory of Herbert Jenner. The sailor who can traverse ten thousand miles of ocean with gay security, owes his steady track to a science of which he possibly never heard the name — is guided to his haven by an Italian philosopher, who has been in his grave 200 years. The student who, for a few sovereigns, can surround himself with a store of books, such as it would once have needed the fortune of Moecenas or Ptolemy to purchase, is much indebted to the man who first made paper, and to that other man who first printed on it. Gentlemen, I trust that your faith is too firm to fear any of the sciences, and that your minds are sufficiently expanded to love them all. I trust that you will ever be ready to “give honor to whom honor is due,” and to acknowledge your obligations to living wisdom as well as to departed genius. I hope that you feel that “the lines have fallen to you in pleasant places,” when your lot was cast on this opulent age, with its quick-running knowledge, its countless accommodations, its unprecedented discoveries, and its vigorous mind. And I am sure I wish you joy of your own high calling, destined in such an age to study and extend a science nobler than them all. I congratulate you who are now preparing to issue forth on the busiest and most intelligent generation which the world has ever seen, with a science and an art in your possession capable of making this busy age a blessed one, and this shrewd and inventive generation a truly wise one.

I am anxious that you should understand what a power for benefiting the world God in his providence is now giving you; and therefore I beg your thoughts for a little to the specific benefits which the science you are now about to study is able to confer. But ere doing so, it may be well to glance at some of the indirect and incidental benefits which it has bestowed on the promiscuous world. Besides that smaller company to whom it has proved the power of God, and on whom its divine energy has told downright, there is a wide multitude on whom it has impinged obliquely, and whom it has affected sensibly, though not sufficiently. Let us look for a moment at some of those benefits it has brought, even where it has not brought salvation.

Imagine, what is very nearly the case, that the world is an island in immensity, cut off from all communication with other worlds, except when some “ship of heaven,” such as the gospel is, touches at its shores; and imagine, further, that there were few who availed themselves of that “ship of heaven,” to secure in it a passage for the better country; still it is possible that the world might be the better for the visit. The vessel that anchored at Juan Fernandez, and released Alexander Selkirk from his long captivity on its desolate coast, did him an unspeakable service. Its arrival was to him a second birth, for it introduced him anew to the society of living men. But when it left on the shores a supply of esculent plants and domestic animals, it did a service to any future ship’s crew which might visit the same harbor, and to any tribe of savage adventurers who might afterward take up their abode in its recesses. To the wistful soul of the captive, that ship’s arrival was everything. It was life from the dead; it was a sort of resurrection. But to any voyager who might afterward visit it, or any colonist who might afterward settle in it, the good things which it left behind it would be a mighty comfort — a prodigious accommodation. Now, it is much the same with the gospel. There are a few persons to whom it is everything. To their longing sin-wearied souls it is a second birth — it is a first resurrection — it is life from the dead — it is immortality. «But besides this happy few, there is an innumerable company to whom the gospel is a great comfort — to whom it has become a source of unspeakable advantages. They do not care for a passage in the ship, but they are glad to get the pleasant fruits which grow — a memorial of its visit; and it may be well to enumerate some of these.

There is among mankind a widely-diffused hope of immortality. It is not a “sure and certain hope,” but, so far as it goes, it is a cheering hope. It is not possible for any man to be absolutely certain of a happy hereafter, unless Christ be his “hope of glory.” None but the Christian can say, “Well, I know that worms will devour this body; but I also know that my Redeemer liveth, and that in my flesh I shall see God.” Still it is a comfort even to a careless world, that there are people who can say this. They will not come into the light, and yet they are glad that there is light. And some of them come near the light. They skirt its edge. They dwell in the ambiguous region, which is neither light nor dark; and it is surprising how much dim comfort men have got even in this twilight. It has been a source of much heroism. It has saved many from self-destruction. It has whispered like an angel-anthem among the churchyard-weeds; and it has burst a rainbow of radiant promise amid the tears of agonizing nature. The sure and certain hope is everything; however, the dim and doubtful hope is much. It goes far to ennoble life, and very far to palliate human wo. The sure and certain hope is the direct blessing which the gospel brings; the dim and doubtful hope is the indirect blessing which follows in widening wake wherever the gospel has passed before. And though we know that expectations of immortality can be quoted from classic pagans, and are found in different degrees in lands not Christian, we are strongly disposed to think that they are in every case the traditionary lingerlngs of a primeval gospel, or the faint echoes of the gospel of Jesus; in other words, were the traditional hints of God’s first promise, and the confused reports of later preaching of prophets and apostles — were these deducted, were all traces of the gospel filtered out of it, there would be left in the cup of human life none of that sweetest ingredient in it — a hope full of immortality.

Then the world is exceedingly indebted to the beneficence of the gospel. There were no hospitals for sickness, no asylums for age, and poverty, and insanity, till the gospel built them; no retreats for weeping orphanage or groping blindness, till the gospel opened them. Worldly men may patronize these things, but it was Christianity which invented them: they never occurred to mankind till they presented themselves as the natural corollaries from the benignant spirit of the gospel of Christ. So was it with slavery. The world saw no harm in slavery. It seemed perfectly fair and natural that the strongest should enthral the weak, and get their work done for the least possible wages, or for no wages at all, till the principle, “Do to others as ye would that they should do to you,” working its silent way, has abolished slavery through nearly the whole of Christendom. And just as the gospel has lifted Lazarus from the rich man’s gate, and bid blind Bartimeus cease to sit by the wayside begging — as it has extinguished Sathi along the banks of the Ganges, and is breaking the bondsman’s fetters all over the world — so, like its heavenly Author, it has extended its mercies to the beasts of the field. And, as if conscious that the only hope for its emancipation hinges on the ascendency of the cross, the whole creation groans and travails till the sons of God be manifest, and the sceptre of Jesus be supreme.

The world is much beholden to the refining influence of Christianity. It is the true antidote to the natural cruelty of man. The reason why we have not gladiatorial shows, is because we have the gospel. It has softened the heart of Europe. It has all but banished bull-baiting and prize-fighting, and those diversions where flowing blood and cries of anguish supplied the sport. The gospel is the true antidote to the surly selfishness of man. It is the parent of politeness. Working not on placid orientals, but on rude, cross-grained northerns, it has smoothed our Gothic grufFness into something like civility; and even at a period when its more palpable influence was lost, its refining influence effloresced strangely enough in the gallant and high-souled courtesy of the age of chivalry; and now it diffuses itself more widely in that conventional urbanity which makes intercourse so easy and society so pleasant. It is at least the wooden pavement, the sprinkled sawdust, over which the chariot-wheels of existence move more quietly than they were wont to do. And so is the gospel the real remedy for the natural lowmindedness of man. Good taste and intellectual activity go along with the gospel, vulgarity and mental torpor recede from before it; and though we dare not say that, but for the gospel, there would have been no science, we fearlessly affirm that, but for the glad impulse which the gospel gave to the mind of man — but for the elation, and conscious strength, and healthy energy, which the Reformation lent it — discovery would have advanced with drawling steps, if it had ever begun its modern march at all. The gospel, with its constant mefhentoes of immortality, with its hints of realities greater than those we see, with its joyful suggestions and its noble impulses, is the great dignifier of human nature, and so the great prompter to research, and the great guide to discovery. In the sense most eminent, the gospel is light. Its bland halo encircles the cradle of man’s infancy, and, soon as he is ready to start in the career of active life, its guiding ray is ready to start before him: it hovers like the star of Bethlehem above the spot where any great discovery or glorious advent lies; and when that path is terminated, it settles down a watchfire of faithful promise on man’s sepulchre. To this great leading light we directly or indirectly owe most of the surprising discoveries and dazzling inventions of this modern time; for apart from the intellectual quickening which the gospel has infused into the general mind of Christendom — without this precursor to clear his path, and this preceptor to direct his thoughts, there would be no one philosopher the mighty man he this day is.

The gospel is thus a public benefactor to mankind. Its saving benefits may be limited, but its humanizing, its comforting, and elevating influences, are abundantly catholic. It is much in the predicament of an opulent and open-hearted resident in some countryside. His stay may have been so long protracted, and his bounties may have become so customary, as to be almost conventional — as to be a regular ingredient in the every-day life of the neighborhood, and counted on as things of course. And it is not till he takes his departure — it is not till they see the weeds growing in the untrodden avenue, and the raven perched on the smokeless chimney — it is not till hungry families begin to miss the weekly dole, and weary invalids the frequent visit — it is not till they find that their former comforts were something more than a mere peculiarity of their climate — something more than a natural growth of their soil — that they begin to connect their by-past privileges with the kind heart of their benefactor, and feel that they ought to have been grateful. Now that he and his family are off and away, and enjoying themselves in other scenes, and gladdening another home, it is ascertained how important their presence was. Were the gospel to quit, not our kingdom, but the world, and take with it all which, from time to time, it brought; were it to soar away to its native skies, and take with it all that it has scattered on this abode of man, from the hour that, near the forbidden tree, God spake the primeval gospel — that promise which, in one form or another, has hitherto kept the world’s heart from breaking; were the gospel to glean back into itself all that it ever gave — it is not sabbaths only, and bibles, and sanctuaries, which would disappear, but civilization would flee away: freedom would flee away; happy homes, and smiling villages, and peaceful neighborhoods, would flee; schools and colleges would vanish; books and all the sciences would be annihilated; and in the universal blank of human joy I question if “Hope, the charmer, would linger still behind.”

But the benefits now enumerated are incidental and indirect. To see what the gospel really is, we must consider what it does, or is capable of doing, to its willing subjects — to those who, not content with its reflected lights and indirect illumination, come joyfully under its immediate effulgence.

1. And first of all, it gives them peace with God. The most unnatural state of the creature is enmity against its Creator — the most unnatural, and therefore the most wretched. The gospel slays this enmity, and so neutralizes the most torturing element in human misery. The gospel, when credited, reconciles the sinner to God, and sends him on his way rejoicing. It bids him eat his daily bread with alacrity, for God hath accepted him. The gospel turns the sinner’s confiding eye to a propitious God, and snatching him from the fearful pit of alienation and antipathy, from the miry clay of guilty convictions and fearful forebodings, it puts a new song in his mouth, and, with a firm footing on the Rock of Ages, gives him the upright bearing, and elastic step, and established goings of a freely-forgiven sinner. And it is here that you will see the superiority of your science to every other science. The gospel alone is able to make men happy. Philosophy can not do this. The utmost it can do is to gauge the mind of man, and tell how capacious it is — how much of the ingredient called happiness it needs to fill this greedy soul of ours. But philosophy is only a ganger of empty barrels, and can neither supply the new wine of consolation nor tell you where to find it; and if you would know how much misery may coexist with much philosophy, you have only to read the inner life of such a man as Mirabeau — a man of universal knowledge, of gorgeous imagination, of dazzling eloquence, the idol of a people who, alas! had no gods but the like of him; but himself without God, and so without a hope, at last almost without a motive; or of such a man as Rousseau, from whom nothing in the human heart seemed hidden, whose sentimental museum was stored with delicate casts and colored delineations of the morbid anatomy of each affection, and the minutest branchings of each desire and feeling; whose mournful pathology wrought out the true conclusion that the universal malady, the long life-fever, is a search of the impossible, a delirious determination to find joy in the joyless, infinite joy in the finite; but who with that induction stopped — a skilful pathologist but no physician, and, ignorant of the remedy, found his nearest approach to happiness in melodious sighings after it. And as mental science will not make you happy, so neither will the more tangible sciences which deal with matter. It is contagious, it is enough to make a man a chymist to accompany Davy in his investigations, and witness the poetic enthusiasm with which he prosecuted his midnight researches, and the boyish ecstasy with which he skipped about his laboratory in possession of some unprecedented prize. But it is heart-withering to read the records of wretchedness, the exclamations of ennui and dreariness, with which his later journals abound. And neither can the arts of life make you happy. Art has done its utmost to make the outer man easy, and outer life amusing; but ifrall stops outside. You may put an aching heart into a balloon, and send it up into the fields of light and air, but it will come down the same bruised and broken heart which it first ascended. You may whirl a guilty conscience along the gleaming track of the railway some forty miles an hour, and leave stormy skies or the smoke of cities far behind; but the cares, the remorse, and forebodings, which went in at the one end of the line, will all come out at the other, and haunt that conscience still. You may put a wounded spirit into a picture-gallery or a playhouse, and regale it with the wondrous creations of genius; but the picture of joy is like the picture of fire: it makes nobody warm; and from the exhibition of some radiant landscape or blissful home-scene, or the rehearsal of a most diverting comedy,

the joyless worldling may walk out into the midnight of his habitual gloom, or wakening up to the drearier daylight of a wretchedness all too real, may seek his guilty refuge from it in self-destruction.

2. It gives the sure and certain hope of eternal life. A man who does not believe the gospel may have a wistful desire or an eager hope, but he can not have the assured confidence of a glorious immortality. A thoughtful unbeliever may send a voice of plaintive inquiry into that dim future which lies before him; but no answer comes back from the unechoing void. It is the believer in Jesus who gets the answer from within that veil — no dubious echo, but a distinct response: “I am He that liveth and was dead, and behold I am alive for evermore. He that believelh in me shall never die.” The believer knows that, within that veil, hidden from his view merely by the fogs of mortality, is One who has worn human nature for eighteen hundred years; one who not only lives, but hath life’s fountain within himself, and one who has identified the believer’s life with his own, by the omnipotent pledge, “As I live, ye shall live also.” And so conscious, in the hours of his healthiest faith, is that believer that his eternal life is already begun, that he wearies till this life’s mist shall melt, and he behold himself conclusively in the sunshine of immortality.

3. The gospel gives the believer an ever-living Friend. Many of the productions of art, the hook and its eye, the joint and its socket, the tenon and mortice, however exquisitely finished, are incomplete without their counterparts. Their perfection consists in their incompleteness — consists in their being so formed, that they are not complete till they have received their complement. So is it with the soul of man. Just as when you see the ball of the hinge, it suggests the socket in which it ought to play; just as when you see the tendrils of the vine, they suggest the prop to which they ought to cling; so when you see the outgoing affections of the soul of man, you see that it is formed for union with other minds — that its completeness consists in a junction with reciprocal and congenial minds. Accordingly, you find that the usefulness and elevation of character greatly depend on fitting on to some superior mind, or associating affectionately and intimately with characters capable of elevating and ennobling your own. But when these characters are merely human — helpful as they often are, they labor under certain drawbacks. They are imperfect: even though they could transform us into their own likeness, we should still, in many things, fall short of the will of God. They are creatures: the love of them is apt to degenerate into idolatry. And they are mortal: they melt from our embrace, they vanish from our view. But the Alpha and Omega does not change. We can never lift our eyes to where we used to meet his own and encounter vacancy. We can never send him word of our griefs or our desires with any fear that the message will miscarry. We can not love him too much, for the more we love Immanuel the less idolatrous we are. We can not be too like him, for the more exactly we resemble him the nearer shall we approach to perfection. Remember this: it is not a theological formula, nor an historical fact, which the gospel offers to your acceptance, so much as an ever-Hving and all-sufficing Friend.

4. The gospel gives a man a conscience. There is a natural conscience, but it is not good for much. It is easily tampered with.

It maybe bribed, and silenced, and perverted. There is scarcely anything to which a natural man may not reconcile his conscience. But a conscience which the love of God has mollified is a tender one. It is distressed about sin in the heart as others are about sin in the life. Its sensitiveness shuns the appearance of evil, and its filial instinct makes it a far surer index of right and wrong than the evasive, extenuating, and special-pleading conscience of the unconverted man.

5. The gospel gives a man a heart. There are some people who look with a languid eye on everything; and there are others who have an interest in nothing which does not contribute to their own comfort. There are some absolutely joyless spirits, from which every particle of zest has evaporated — who lag through life so listlessly that nothing makes them smile, and nothing makes them weep — and merely to look at them is enough to give you wintry sensations on a summer’s day. Then there are others who have some evident joy of existence, but who are as evidently their own all in all — trim and tidy souls, like a box-tree clipped and rounded — not troubled with any tendrils — any outgoing affections or redundant emotions — snug, comfortable people, who carry their universe in a carpet-bag, who love some people very dearly, but who also love with the same sort of love the velvet cushion or the easy-chair, which fits their dispositions and accommodates their varying fancies. It is not good to have no heart at all, or a heart only for oneself. There is no need to be in such ignoble case. The gospel not only says, “My son, give me thy heart,” but it gives the man a heart to give. The moment its joyous life wells up in a weary soul, the desert blossoms like the rose. Seeds of unsuspected gladness are quickened into life, and existence begins to wear a face of interest and gayety, which perhaps it did not wear, even when viewed over the 12* cradle’s merry edge. And the churl’s heart grows bountiful. The litde self-contained soul of the worldling expands till it comes in contact with a broad surface of existence, and wonders to find so much that is kindly and forthdrawing in objects which he formerly dreaded or despised; and in the dila tation of his delighted heart, in the ready rush of his benevolent and compassionate feelings, and in the newly-tasted luxury of doing good, he enters on a domain of enjoyment, whose existence he formerly regarded as a hyperbole or a fairy tale. But, above all, perfect peace casteth out selfishness. The joy of an ascertained forgiveness; the happy outset on a Zionward pilgrimage; the felt shining of God’s uphfted countenance: it gives the man all the generosity of excessive gladness, the comprehensive good-will of a peace which passeth understanding; that eye-kindling, lip-opening gratitude, which relieves itself in doxologies of brotherly kindness, in deeds of tender mercy; and the love of God shed forth abundantly, teaches the man the newlesson — to love his brother also.

6. The gospel gives a man a soul — a mind. There is no theme on which we could so eagerly expatiate as the mental emancipations which the gospel has bestowed on the world at large. But we are now speaking, not of its general services, but of its specific influence on the individual intellect. If that mind be a vigorous or wealthy mind before, the gospel apprehended brings it at once fresh opulence and power. “The gospel,” says the greatest of modern historians, “is the fulfilment of all hopes, the perfection of all philosophy, the interpreter of all revolutions, the key to all the seeming contradictions in the physical and moral world. It is life. It is immortality. Since I have known the Saviour, everything is clear; with him there is nothing I can not solve.”* And just as it swept in a flood of sudden illumination over the wide page of universal history, as that page had long lain

* Müller, quoted by D’Aubigae.

enigmatical before the philosophic eye of Müller, so has it proved an intellectual birth to many an humbler mind. That gospel whose inspiration enabled the grovelling and besotted debauchee in the days of his moral renovation to write Oliver’s hymn — “To the God of Abraham;” that gospel which taught the blaspheming tinker of Bedford to write the “Pilgrim’s Progress;” that gospel which put the pen of a ready writer into the rough hand of the negro-kidnapper, and enabled Newton to compose his letters of delectable wisdom and sunny benevolence, as well as the good matter of his spiritual songs: that gospel is indeed the power of God. It renovates the intellect. It can give all the perspicacity of a clear conscience, all the discrimination and prudence of an honest heart, and all the animation and vivacious energy of an intellect quickened from on high. The gospel path is so plain, that a wayfaring man, though a fool, need not err therein; but he w411 not run in it long till he cease to be a fool. And

SO persuaded are we of the gospel’s enlightening efficacy, that when we meet with a Christian professor remarkable for want of judgment, we stand in doubt of him. We question, and question justly, if he can have received the truth in the full power of it; for, in every sense, it is light to the eyes, and makes wise the simple.

7. Perhaps it is saying the same thing over again, but we are disposed to add — the gospel gives a man an eye. An ignoble heedlessness characterizes the mass of worldly men. You point them to the stars, but if King David had been of their opinion, the eighth psalm never had been written: for they never “consider the heavens, the moon, and the stars,” which the Lord our Lord ordained. You point them to the flowers, but so far as they are concerned, the Great Teacher said in vain, “Consider the lilies,” for the lilies they will not consider. You send them to animated nature, but they refuse to go. The birds singing among the branches — the high hills, with

142 THE BLESSII^GS

their wild-goats, and the young lions in their darkling dens, are all alike to thenn. Their tuneless souls do not swing to the cadence of the hundred and fourth psalm. You send them to the structure of the earth, and bid them view the marvels of creative skill entombed in its rocky caverns; but so indifferent are they to the sublime research, that had they been among the morning stars when earth’s corner-stone was laid, and its foundation fastened, they would have refused to sing, and been offended with the sons of God for shouting so joyfully on such an occasion. And it is not so wonderful that men do not care to study mere lumps of matter and cold material laws. But when a soul is visited by the day-spring from on high, a flush of joyous beauty spreads over the face of nature, and there is nothing tame, and nothing formidable, when, born from above, the beholder can say, “My Father made them all.” Truly, the saints inherit the earth; for notwithstanding the strange frowning of some good men on the natural sciences, and all the unaccountable contempt which some eminent Christians have poured on the handiwork of Immanuel, they are the disciples of Jesus still who most admire and most enjoy the works of God. The eyes which have scanned the sparkling firmament, or dwelt on the ruby and sapphire dust of the insect’s wing — which have glistened over the laughing leagues of the golden harvest-fields, or tingled as they gazed on some fairy flower; the ears which have oftenest listened to ocean’s “billowy chime,” or to the grim cloud’s thunder-psalm — which have drunk the ravishment of multitudinous joys in the rich music of spring, or hearkened to the evening tune of the wildernessbee, and felt it like a hermit’s orison: those eyes and ears have been chiefly theirs to whom the brightness of each scene is the love of Jesus, and to whom the burden of every stanza in Nature’s ode of countless voices and uncounted ages is — “In the beginning was the Word, and all these things were made by him.”

I might say more. I might go on to show how the gospel gives to each one who receives it, and sufficiently avails himself of it, a pure morality, engaging manners, good taste, fitness for a higher and holier state of being, and above all, a peculiar charm, a beauty of outward holiness and a gloriousness within, an exquisite attractiveness which, by the instinct of congenial sanctity, draws toward him who has it the love of each who has got the same new name, and the complacency of God himself. So far as the gospel is credited, and its omnipotent resources for hallowing the family home or the individual heart admitted, there is no limit to the beatific influence of a dispensation which transmits no joy to earth which is not at least an equal joy to heaven.*

And if it be matter of congratulation to enter the ministry of such a gospel in any age, and especially in an age which has made its road so ready, and would make its triumphs so signal, as our own; it is no

* Luke ii. 13, 14; xv. 6, 7. Isaiah liii. 10, 11.

less matter of congratulation to comnnence the appropriate studies for that ministry at a time when the gospel is so firmly established, so well understood, and so variously applied.

The gospel is essentially a matter of fact, and its great fact was never more fully ascertained than in the days in which we live. Not long ago the question might be raised, and the answer might occasion some anxiety, how do you know that the New Testament is not a forgery of the dark ages? And even if it were not, how do you know that the events it records are true? But, thanks to the progress of exact criticism, we are now as sure that the New Testament was written in the apostolic age, and by such men as itself alleges, as if we had seen the pen in the living hand of Matthew, Luke, and John; and, thanks to the progress of the laws of evidence, we are now as sure that its main events took place, as if our actual eyes had seen the miracles, or our own ears had listened to its words of wonder. After the punctilious collation of manuscripts by Wetstein and Griesbach, and after the principles of internal criticism developed by Bentley, and Marsh, and Isaac Taylor, in England, and a more numerous band in the United States and Germany, no scholar will impugn the apostolic antiquity and textual genuineness of the New Testament Scriptures. And after the prodigious accumulations of Lardner, and the brief but resistless deductions of Paley, and the philosophic expositions of Chalmers, few who pretend to common sense will question the historic truth of the events which these Scriptures record. It has come to this happy issue, that the intellect which is not too obtuse for understanding anything, or the judgment which is not too unstable for believing anything, must, if in earnest, be shut up to the faith of Jesus. We do not say too much when we aver that, to a serious mind, the dilemma is now the simple one of believing the Scripture testimony concerning Jesus, or believing no testimony whatsoever. And just as the evidences of Christianity are now so reduntant as to make new corrobations little more than matters of curiosity, so the essentials of Christianity are so well ascertained, that few vital truths are the subject of longer controversy. After the unanswered arguments of Magee, the dispassionate statements and scriptural erudition of Smith; after the transparent reasoning and logical felicity of Wardlaw, and the candor, acuteness, and cogency of Moses Stuart; few who believe the Bible to be the word of God will deny that the pillar and ground of the truth Is God manifest in flesh. And after the calm and dignified prelections of O’Brien, and the vigorous expositions of Haldane — perhaps too dogmatic in his tone, but nobly tenacious of the text — few will gainsay the reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone. And though there are some fearful departures from the faith, and some keen debates among the faithful, we question if the church of Christ has possessed the truths of Revelation more copiously, or realized them more vividly, or avowed them more unanimously, since the apostles fell asleep, than now, when all are so agreed in looking on Immanuel as the Alpha and Omega in religion, the brightness of the Father’s glory, and the express image of the Father’s person, and in regarding the gospel as the divinely-contrived and divinely-conducted scheme for reconciling sinners to the character of God, with a view to renewing them into the image of God; and when almost all are so agreed in believing that before men are convinced of sin, and righteousness, and judgment, the Holy Spirit must come, and that where he is come, the living faith and the holy life, the fruits of his presence, will appear.

Besides, it is a distinction of these times that the gospel has entered more largely than ever on its legitimate domain. Man,

IN HIS MIGHTIEST UNDERTAKINGS AND MINUTEST ACTIONS, IN HIS MOST ISOLA-TED STATE AND MOST COMPLICATED AS-SOCIATIONS, IS THE GOSPEL’s RIGHTFUL

SUBJECT. This truth, often forgotten, and still oftener perverted, is now beginning to be better understood, and, notwithstanding all which “now letteth,” is working its onward way to its inherent and, predicted vindication. Within the years of our own memory, several steps have been taken in advance toward the great conclusion, and several doors have been opened to let the gospel in to the fields of its rightful occupancy; and while hitherto the gospel has been kept almost entirely within the precincts of churches and closets, an attempt is now making to send it up into cabinets and down into workshops — to give it control over the kingdoms of this world and the councils of nations, and to inscribe its mark of consecration on the horses’ bells and bridles.* In other words, while it has heretofore been too common to reserve evangelical religion for the upper room of Christian intercourse or the calm retreat of secret meditation, an

* Zech. xiv. 20, 21; Isaiah. Lx.

attempt is now making to bring it down into the morning parlor, and out into the market-place, as well as to give it a voice in the public prints and in the nation’s parliament. A literature, in which our American brethren have taken the unrivalled lead, has introduced the gospel into the large territory of daily life, and has shown how the slightest movement and the humblest meal come under the jurisdiction of the all-pervading Christianity. “Whether, therefore, ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God. Whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks unto God, even the Father, through him.” And ascending from this to the highest territory — from the independent man in his isolated acts to society in its miscellaneous interests and complicated movements, we recognise one pre-eminent name* challenging for the gospel the same ascendency over communities,

* It scarcely requires a note to say that Dr. Chalmers is here intended.

and nations, and universal man, which all concede in the case of the individual or the family. And whether he have stamped his impress on this age or not, the great philanthropist of our day can reckon on the establishment of those evangelized ethics, and that Christianized political ecomony, for which his life has been the protest, and much temporary fame the sacrifice — as not later than the final answer to the Lord’s prayer, and coeval with that time when God’s kingdom having come, his will shall be done on earth as it is in heaven.

Gendemen, I trust that before you pass forth upon this ministry, you will find yourselves in possession of something which you will not only deem it important for the world to know, but so important that you would rather die attempting to make it known than that the world should die without it. I hope you will be content with the old theology — the theology of the Bible, but that you will not be content till your own clear apprehensions and vivid experience give it all the zest of novelty. 1 hope that you will hold revealed truth so firmly, and survey the surrounding world so wisely, that you will be able to give your old theology fresh and effective applications every day. I trust that you will seek to give yourselves up in a joyful and exulting loyalty to the Lord Jesus, and in a meek submission to his teaching and transforming spirit. And thus issuing upon the world on the noblest errand and in the might which is alone resistless, I would not despair that the world should see in your persons a more devoted ministry, and should recognise in your preaching a more developed gospel, than these later times have been wont to witness; nor doubt that ere going hence you may do something to exalt and endear on earth that Name which is above every name, and in whose universal supremacy a consenting world at last will find the long-sought secret of its happiness.