but the offence; the object of the punishment is not to make the sinner suffer, but to make sin terrible; it is prevention, not revenge; its aim is to ward off the evil which must arise from tolerated sin; to ensure much good to the general body at the expense of suffering to a few. If a human governor should remit to any one of his subjects what was due from him, he would be bound by the laws of perfect justice to remit to all others what they owed; in other words to forsake his post, and conniye at the possibility of universal disorder and confusion God remit to any, the punishment due to sin, he must, as an all-just being, remit it to all, in other words he must connive at the possibility of sin's being universal. If God forgive sinful man for his own sake, Satan, if such a being exist, is unjustly condemned.

If

So long as we allow that all men are free agents and sinners, with unexpiated sins noted down against them ; that God is impartial and consistent; that sin is an evil which, tolerated by him at all, must be tolerated by him universally, and might be therefore universally prevalent; that life abounds more in good than evil; so long we must allow that all men, though spared at present, and even intrusted with a profitable place, are yet if they have never been redeemed from it, in the condition of rebels condemned by laws immutable as those of the Medes and Persians, to some future punishment, and cut off from all hope of future reward.

An objector says, if then we owe our exemption from punishment only to a sacrifice tantamount in price to the sum of our offences, where is the mercy of God? What room for its exercise? What then, is it nothing to have accepted for our sakes the sacrifice of a pure be ing; to have suffered innocence to give itself up for cor ruption? But this is not all, for if any atonement have ever been effected for us, the prospect of eternal bliss has also been held out to us; we have exactly the same foundation for belief in one as the other. If God have ever cepted an expiatory sacrifice for us, his mercy, not stop,

taken on himself, their sovereign should step forward, and invest them with honours, power, wealth, and dig. nity? To suppose an atonement for our offences does not necessarily suppose more than deliverance from punishment; all beyond is the free grace and mercy of God bestowing happiness upon his creatures the moment they are the fit subjects of it. To be made clean and pure does not after all suppose us any thing more than neutralized, if I may so express myself; than beings neither good nor bad; it delivers us from a load of evil but it does not necessarily invest us with any good; it wipes off an old demand, but it does not therefore give us a new claim; we are no longer debtors it is true, but we are not therefore creditors. Thus little can we hope to escape future punishment without an atonement, and thus little to obtain future happiness without the exercise of ineffable mercy on God's part accepting the proffered expiation, and bestowing the unmerited boon.

The book called the Scriptures, by declaring this expiation, and representing the Almighty as a being of infinite mercy, affords us a prospect of future bliss, that object of all our wishes, on grounds so satisfactory, so accordant with the character of an all-perfect governor of free and intelligent beings, that we should be half disposed to believe it previously to the investigation of its external proofs. If we are disposed to believe in a future reward, we should read with infinite respect, that book which gives the only rational account of it, and of the way in which it may be obtained. We ought as benevolent and consistent beings to be strongly prepossessed in favour of such a book.*

It tells us of the willing

* Archbishop Secker says that no benevolent man can fail to wish the Scriptures truč.

sacrifice for our sakes of a Being so great, that we feel no doubt of the sufficiency of the expiation. It publishes a scheme of redemption by which the mercy, the impartiality, the consistency of God act in such harmonious concert, no one interfering with or opposing another (which by any other scheme they must do) that we long to find it true, and to be assured that man has so good grounds for the hope that is in him. We long to find external proof corroborate that whose internal excellence is so great; we long for some sure foundation on which to build our expectation of so great salvation as is here promised.

We will hereafter examine the Scripture texts in favour of this doctrine of atonement, but first let us consider some objections made to the mode in which the gospel is said to have come to us, as they tend to disprove its being a divine revelation.

CHAP. III.

On the Objections which are made to the mode in which God is said to have revealed his will to us.

THAT

HAT an all-kind God should have given to man, overwhelmed with moral, religious, and intellectual darkness, a clear revelation of his will, and the consequences of obeying or disobeying it, was in no wise improbable. That he should have given such a revelation, weight and dignity by working miracles to prove its truth, was as little improbable, for nothing short of such an interference could have ensured to doctrines repugnant to the passions, the habits, and indolence of men, and even to the excessive pursuit of many things innocent in

war against the soul;" or on the worldly-minded man to think more of "righteousness and a judgment to come," than of his temporal affairs. Unless therefore doctrines

enjoining such sacrifices (however excellent in themselves) had some superhuman weight, they could have little chance of leading men to forego licentious indulgences. Miracles then, i. e. something done out of the common order of things, were absolutely necessary to establish these doctrines, and if (as who but must confess) a revelation itself was not improbable, the miracles that establish it were as little so.

"

But it is asked why did an all-kind, and perfect God withhold this gift so long?" Now the fairer question is, why did he ever give it at all? For servants who have disobeyed their master when they might have obeyed him, and who have neither made nor can offer any atone ment for their disobedience, who have proved themselves in short very useless servants, and the fit subjects of punishment for such servants, I say, receiving, contrary to all desert and reasonable expectation, an inestimable boon, to say why was this given no sooner, is surely the perfection of insolence,

But to take the objectors on other grounds, they ought rather to ask why this revelation came so soon. Man set out pure (his Maker could not create him otherwise) and then needed no revelation: he fell, and by a long repetition of wilful offences brought himself into a state of moral and religious darkness so gross that the light of revelation bursting suddenly upon it would but have played on the impassive mass. One people however seemed peculiarly distinguished by the excellence of their moral and religious institutions, and if we may believe their own records (records preserved with religious care, the productions not of one only, but of more than twenty

historians, all of them in the highest repute amongst their own countrymen) prepared by a long course of divinė discipline peculiar to themselves, and by a previous partial revelation, for the reception of a new and perfect dispensation. They seem in short, if there be any truth in history, any thing to be taken on testimony, to have been a Theocracy. To them the revelatich was made, and by them, if by any people, one should suppose it would have been received. They were better qualified to judge of its excellence, to understand its naturè, and to admire its accordance with the divine character than any other people, for they alone knew and worshipped the one true God. Yet by them it was rejected. To ask then why it was not withheld a little longer, that is till those people on whom so much trouble had been bestowed, should have been still better prepared for it, would be a much fairer question than to ask why it came no

sooner.

But lastly, says the sceptic, why was it not given to man in such a way as that neither those to whom it was at first committed, nor their descendants could possibly doubt of its truth ? I ask in return, why are not the heavens opened to us every morning, and an angel exposed to our view, declaring in a voice audible by all the world that the Scriptures are the word of God? If the miracles said to have been performed in their behalf were really so, to have witnessed them ought to have been as strong proof of the truth of holy writ to those by whom they were witnessed, as if they had seen heaven opened to them. And if it can be proved to us that either the Jews must have witnessed these miracles, or else that we, to hold a contrary belief, must tolerate absurdities and improbabilities a thousand times greater than belief in them involves; that a standing miracle now exists to con firm them, or if not to confirm them seems wrought without an end; then we are bound as rational creatures to believe both the miracles themselves, and the doctrines which they were wrought to establish. To prove that