passionately investigated; in the confidence, that the Spirit of God has suffered nothing to enter into the sacred volume, of whose clear and uncoerced meaning we need entertain any apprehension.

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What, then, is that high state of Christian attainment, which the strongest of these texts describe, but the being impressed with certain incontrovertible facts, to the degree and in the manner, which, considering the interest we have in those facts, strict common sense itself would dictate? If the Gospel be true, it is a concern of such magnitude as should in all reason be paramount in our minds; and the Gospel being indubitably and irrefragably true, its not being thus paramount implies the grossest and most irrational infatuation. But why has it not this ascendency? St. Paul answers, "The animal man knoweth not the things of the they are foolishness unto him, neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned ;" that is, the Gospel is diametrically opposite to the taste of depraved human nature; the unchanged, unpurified heart goes quite another way, and the understanding goes along with it; taste dictating to understanding, in almost every instance in this world. An inward influence of divine grace, therefore, is necessary, to dispel this delirious dream, to rationalise the mind, and to liberate the higher faculties from their captivity to the lower; to emancipate thought and ratiocination from that inner prison of sense, wherein their feet are, as it were, made fast, in the stocks of appetite and passion. When this is once fully done, or in proportion as it is done, the facts of religion, as recorded in Scripture, and borne witness to by internal conscience and external nature, are apprehended as facts; and proportionably to their

being thus apprehended, do they engage, and influence, and felicitate the soul. Reason and conscience informed the heathen sages, that there was a chief good of man, compared with which earth and all its seductive contents were very vanity. They saw, that this chief good, implied predominant virtue in man; but they did not clearly, though some, in part, did see, that the soul of virtue is to love the living source of virtue. But to them, this living source of virtue was little more, than undefined, as well as unapproachable brightness. This, however, is actually defined to us, in the Gospel, in a manner fitted, by the very skill of God himself, to attract, inform, and satisfy our minds; to operate, in the aptest way conceivable, on all our passions and affections; to subdue all that is evil in us; to quicken, exalt, and make ascendant, all that is rational and noble in us; to engage us in looking at the things which are not seen, and to enable (us) to endure, as seeing Him that is invisible. The facts of the Gospel need only to be fully felt, in order to these effects being produced. "We,' says St. Paul, "beholding as in a glass the glory of Same the Lord, are changed into the mage."

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What, then, is really the difference, between the merely rational, and the spiritual Christian? Is it, that the latter receives an hypothesis which the former rejects? I conceive not merely, nor chiefly, this; but, rather, that the one is more deeply impressed by the indisputable facts of Christianity, than the other. The one feels, while the other only reads or hears. Why was it that, through the death of the Son of God, the world was crucified to St. Paul, and he to the world? Clearly, because he apprehended this fact, in rational proportion to its weight and magnitude; and he who at this day is enabled, by the grace of God, to contem

plate the same divine object with equal realisation, becomes inspired with the same holy temper. "Ye shall know the truth," said our Saviour, "and the truth shall make you free."-" Faith," says an apostolic writer, "is the ToσTaσis (substance) of things hoped for, and the eλyxos (evidence) of things not seen." What is this, but the apprehending of divine things as realities? He who finds himself in a storm on shipboard, needs not argue himself into alarm, nor strive to recollect all the various circumstances of danger. If, therefore, divine and eternal things do once impress themselves on the mind as facts, religion will grow out of that impression by a necessity of nature; and, in proportion to its strength, it will influence all the movements both of the inner and outward man.

The making this impression, then, is the great operation of divine grace. Man cannot give it to himself; we are made sensible of this, times without number. When we wish to rise above worldly uneasiness, or to resist alarming temptations, we endeavour to call up stronger feelings of religion, as our sole resource: but experience tells us how little we can do in this way; and even our very endeavours are too often cold and half-hearted; we are conscious that, if our sense of God, of Christ, of heaven, and of hell was more lively, we should find it our best support, both against trouble and temptation. If, then, after many such ineffectual wishes and endeavours, we feel those things at length taking real hold of our mind,—so that the awful apprehension of eternal things, excites in us a salutary and effectual watchfulness, and the warm sense of the divine excellence, engages and spiritualises our affections, raising them to high and heavenly objects, and, by that means,

making us superior to temptations by which hitherto we were led captive, -this, I conceive, he who feels it, will never attribute to mere reason or conscience, or to any less cause, than His influence, who quickeneth all things.

But, though it be divine, it is most rational. It is, indeed, a felt return to right reason, after phrenzy : "When he came to himself," says our Saviour of the prodigal: all before was infatuation. Now, for the first time, the mind begins to discover realities. It perceives, that its former insensibility to these was an absolute sleep of the soul, and that it only then awoke, when it became sensible of them. In such feelings, then, the genuine religion of the Gospel commences: and, as the matter-of-fact persuasion of divine things increases, it increases, also, until all painful conflict is put an end to, by the decided ascendency of spiritual objects and attachments.

It is in this sense, that so much efficacy is attributed to faith, by our Saviour and his apostles: "How is it that ye have no faith ?"-" It is because ye have no faith."-"By faith Moses endured, as seeing him who is invisible." To have faith, then, is to have that lively sense of divine things, which makes them efficient on our hearts, and tempers, and conducts. It is selfevident that such a sense, in proportion to its strength, must produce this effect; and it is equally clear that, when it is strong, it will imply the clear consciousness of its own existence in the mind; such a consciousness, however, will necessarily set a man in complete peace as to his spiritual state; and from his sense of divine things, and that peace conjointly, will arise multiform comforts, and satisfactions, and instances of continued advancement, answering to every thing which St. Paul has described, in the unparalleled

passage quoted above, from his Epistle to the Ephesians.

To me, then, the more I consider the subject, the more evident it is, that the radical, substantial disagreement, between the merely moral Christian, and the experimentalist, (if I may use such a term,) is, that the former has a weaker sense of the religious facts recorded in the Scripture, than the latter. If these be felt only as they should be, the consequences are infallible. When, therefore, such consequences are not found, the inference, I conceive, ought to be, not difference of judgment, nor different habits of intellect, but actual deficiency in the radical principle.

I grant fully, that differences of temper and mind have their great effects, and, therefore, allowance must be made for much variety in degree and circumstance. A man who has not quick sensibilities in matters of this life, will probably have a proportionably weak, or rather less impassioned feeling of divine and eternal things but, perhaps, this makes little difference on the whole; for they who are deficient in any one faculty, have it generally made up, to a competent degree, in some other; and, thus, he who is apparently cold in affection, may have solider judgment, and steadier resolution. These qualities, therefore, will, in religious matters, make abundantly up for the want of warmth, if, as I said, the matter-of-fact apprehension be at the bottom: and, though such minds seldom feel ecstatic pleasure, they, if faithful to divine grace, are compensated, in a more uniform peace of conscience, and a deeper, because reflective sense of satisfaction. The influential facts of the Gospel, are ineffably adjusted to all possible minds. The person of a poetical mind, finds them set off by every adjunct that can engage his warmest imagination; while the