still stronger-those for life and happiness-are disregarded in God's administration. Life and immortality were brought to light by Christ, and were only guessed at by the heathen; and there is nothing in mere Theism to satisfy the soul that it shall exist after death; or, if it does, that existence can be otherwise than wretched. Men are pushed up to the brink of the grave with no light beyond-doubtful, at best, of all beyond. The vast procession of humanity, swept on by an invisible fate, plunges into a midnight gulf. Generation after generation disappears, and no one knows their destiny. We look above, around to men, onward to the departed, to all in vain, for a solution of our dreadful doubts. No voice

is heard. It is a still and dark domain, that of death. Is the soul to think, to feel, to joy, to suffer, to hope, to aspire no more? Is all to return to dust? Will the uplifted arm of God crush the spiritual as it demolishes the material? Will there be no more imaginings-sleeping, waking visions? no more communings with those we love? no greetings? no sympathies? The deep struggling of the soul against depravity and corruption-the hungering and thirsting after the true, the pure, the lovely-was it all for naught? Does it end here? Shall this struggle be the end of me? the gloomy pit of corruption be my home evermore, and make me the equal—the victim of the loathsome worm, that but to-morrow shall begin his feast upon my flesh? Has the wisdom of man, has the experience of the entire race, has the religion of nature-Theism or Deism-has any but God, has God out of Christ any answer for these interrogatories of a dying, despairing race? No! there is no answer. Earth, and the shades below, and heaven above, deny all response-all hope to the soul in its hour of suspense, and agony, and doom. And here we are driven forward, an unwilling herd, toward this fatal limit-looking for light, and there is no ray; calling for help, and there is no answer!

This horror of being nothing would be the grand evil;

this suspense as to the future would be the natural and fierce plague of the soul under the circumstances supposed, and which must cling to our very being without the aid of the Gospel.

In some minds, the question of immortality has received a partial solution. Doubt, if not hope, has possibly taken the place of absolute despair. Let us suppose the light thus attained by a few to be general or universal; that through philosophy, or tradition, or innate teachings, the mystery were quite chased away, or that an audible voice proclaimed from heaven," Ye shall live forever. The body even shall revive, and the soul shall be immortal." Would such a faith satisfy the human mind? It would satisfy one demand of our nature and condition, but it would awaken new anxieties

harder to allay or appease. Who can feel the import of the announcement, You shall exist evermore? Under what conditions? With the same infirmities, liabilities, wants, tendencies, aspirations? Exposed, as here, to pain, loss, disappointment, toil? Surrounded, as here, with temptations, dangers, foes? with wicked men ? What joys are there really adapted to the soul's wants? I have tried wealth, luxury, ambition; and in less than threescore years and ten, have lost my relish for them. Friends have deceived. Success has palled upon me. All is vanity and vexation of spirit. Is there no better lot nor hope? Then death were better than life, and an untimely birth than endless being.

We must spend this eternity in the domains of an eternal, omnipotent God. We tremble at this association. We have no ascertained relations with the Almighty One. There is no covenant between us. What are his dispositions toward us ? We have known much of his severity and his judgments. Will he make my eternal lot happy or wretched? Perhaps wretched. The cup of human misery has even run over in his presence. Most are poor. Many suffer clear through this state of existence. May they not through the

next? The best men often suffer most here.

rity is there for the future?

What secu

Admit, now, the idea that man is alienated from God by sin, and nothing more is wanting to complete his despair. God's justice, then, requires our misery; his holiness, our banishment from his presence. There is in this Deistic dispensation no place for repentance. We see vice and sin left to produce their own consequences, and God does not interfere in compassion. Intemperance, prodigality, debauchery lead always to evil, often to ruin here; and we can only infer from the things seen that so it will be through eternity. Remedies, interpositions to rescue, mediation, substitution, pardon, all are unknown where Christ is not.

These considerations and statements expose the wants which a fuller, brighter dispensation is required to satisfy. Deism—“faith in God"—is adapted to awaken, not to calm our fears; to trouble the heart, not to assuage its griefs and anxieties. It may be a co-worker with the law. It may disclose our wants and perils. It may even bring us to Christ, but has no sufficiency to satisfy or save.

Believe also in me," is the complement of the text, which quite provides for all the contingencies and necessities of our moral and spiritual nature-all the wants which this train of reflections has suggested, and all that are liable to be felt or encountered by man in his endless career.

Nature teaches only the "eternal power and Godhead" of the Almighty-his terrible majesty, and his ability to destroy as well as aid us. Christ teaches that "God is love;" that he "careth for us;" that not a hair of our heads falls without him; that like as a father pitieth his children," so does God pity his creatures; that he is indeed our Father.

Death, "the king of terrors," the abhorrence of our nature and of natural religion, becomes, under the economy which "brings life and immortality to light," an open door into the

world of glory. Death has lost his sting-he is a conquered enemy.

The Gospel dispensation explains whatever is anomalous and unintelligible in our present condition. The labors, the anxieties, the disappointments, the mortifications, the bereavements, the sufferings that make up our history here are all clearly interpreted. These, to an irreligious mind, are wholly inexplicable upon any theory which stops short of rejecting a superintending Providence altogether, or which, indeed, does not go the length of absolute atheism, and leave the affairs of this world, so far as they transcend the grasp of mere human control, to the ministrations of blind, mindless accident. Many good men, too, who are far from calling in question the divine prerogative of God, and would shudder at the thought of dwelling in a world where he does not reign over all, are yet grievously puzzled with this class of phenomena. Conscious of their own demerits, of the justice of every chastisement that falls upon them, they are yet left to wonder why, if God is merciful, and they are his friends and his children, little or no distinction should be made between them and his open foes. They draw inferences not unfavorable to the divine mercy or veracity, but to their own real character and relation to God. They write bitter things against themselves, and conclude that they are bastards and not sons, because they have part in afflictions whereof all are partakers. I am not stating an imaginary or an unfrequent case in human experience. It is a view of God's administration upon which multitudes dwell habitually, and which has shed its saddening influences upon many passages in almost every good man's history. It is the natural fruit of a narrow, imperfect, deistic faith. Now faith in Christ-a simple, hearty reception of the whole truth as it is in Jesus-offers not some palliation of this chief trouble of so many sincere hearts, but a positive and satisfactory soution of the whole difficulty. Each of the hundred texts in

the New Testament which teach us that suffering here is rather disciplinary than punitive, and that temporal afflictions are busy in working out for good men, who walk not after the flesh, the most excellent spiritual and eternal results, teaches a philosophy in the light of which all doubt vanishes away, and all contradictions find reconciliation. We have here the true theory of the world under God's administration the basis of a system in which every intelligible fact, every dark event, the entire chaos of human affairs, have their appropriate place, and become explicable in perfect harmony with the divine attributes, and with man's nature and destiny. All appearance and suspicion of accident, or chance, or blind destiny vanish away at the coming in of this evangelical faith; and all the disappointments, and disasters, and sufferings of men, and all the confusion, and crash, and wreck of external things, stand revealed in the light of this large, divine philosophy as a vast apparatus for the production and culture of those high moral virtues which shall be in request in the society and services of heaven. Whatever may be the kind, or degree, or duration of a good man's sufferings, this last and proper view of the Christian dispensation is always sufficient to calm his anxieties. and silence all complaints. It is God's chosen way to make men holier on earth and happier in heaven. It is idle, it is hardly innocent, to talk of the mysteriousness of such providences. They constitute an important part of God's revealed and predestined plan for saving the world and refitting our fallen souls with such virtues and capabilities as are best adapted to a heavenly career. Every position in life, each mode of suffering, each sphere of acting, becomes a favorable point for the development of Christian virtues. The poor man's poverty, the sick man's suffering, the rich man's affluence, the wise man's knowledge, constitute occasions or instruments for promoting the highest conceivable ends of the divine administration. All apparently fortuitous changes are