excellent Barrow, the last of the disciples of Plato and Archimedes among our modern mathematicians, shall give the description and state the value and in his words I shall conclude. "Aliud agere, to be impertinently busy, doing that which conduceth to no good purpose, is in some respect worse than to do nothing. Of such industry we may understand that of the Preacher, The labor of the foolish wearieth every one of them." 257 APPENDIX, CONTAINING COMMENTS AND ESSAYS. (A.) In this use of the word 'sufficiency,' I pre-suppose on the part of the reader or hearer an humble and docile state of mind, and above all the practice of prayer, as the necessary condition of such a state, and the best if not the only means of becoming sincere to our own hearts. Christianity is especially differenced from all other religions by being grounded on facts which all men alike have the same means of ascertaining with equal facility, and which no man can ascertain for another. Each person must be herein querist and respondent to himself; Am I sick, and therefore need a physician?-Am I in spiritual slavery, and therefore need a ransomer?-Have I given a pledge, which must be redeemed, and which I cannot redeem by my own resources?—Am I at one with God, and is my will concentric with that holy power, which is at once the constitutive will and the supreme reason of the universe? -If not, must I not be mad if I do not seek, and miserable if I do not discover and embrace, the means of atonement?* To collect, to weigh, and to appreciate historical proofs and presumptions is not equally within the This is a mistaken etymology, and consequently a dull, though unintentional, pun. Our atone is, doubtless, of the same stock with the Teutonic aussöhnen, versöhnen, the AngloSaxon taking the t for the s. S means and opportunities of every man. The testimony of books of history is one of the strong and stately pillars of the Church of Christ; but it is not the foundation, nor can it without loss of essential faith be mistaken or substituted for the foundation. There is a sect, which in its scornful pride of antipathy to mysteries (that is, to all those doctrines of the pure and intuitive reason, which transcend the understanding, and can never be contemplated by it, but through a false and falsifying perspective) affects to condemn all inward and preliminary experience as enthusiastic delusion or fanatical contagion. Historic evidence, on the other hand, these men treat, as the Jews of old treated the brazen serpent, which was the relic and evidence of the miracles worked by Moses in the wilderness. They turned it into an idol: and therefore Hezekiah (who clave to the Lord, and did right in the sight of the Lord, so that after him was none like him, among all the kings of Judah, nor any that were before him) not only removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves; but likewise brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made: for the children of Israel did burn incense to it. (2 Kings xviii.) To preclude an error so pernicious, I request that to the wilful neglect of those outward ministrations of the word which all Englishmen have the privilege of attending, the reader will add the setting at nought likewise of those inward means of grace, without which the language of the Scriptures, in the most faithful translation and in the purest and plainest English, must nevertheless continue to be a dead language,—a sun-dial by moonlight. (B.) Reason and Religion differ only as a two-fold application of the same power. But if we are obliged to distinguish, we must ideally separate. In this sense I affirm that reason is the knowledge of the laws of the whole |