testimony of Jesus" in every age; and, secondly, to mark the kindness of God in having given us such a sensible and everlasting illustration of the truth of our religion, and the reasonableness of our faith, and the solidity of our hopes of salvation:-for which great and unspeakable and unmerited mercy to his fallen and unworthy creatures, his holy name be praised, both now, henceforth, and for ever!

DISCOURSE XII.

ACTS, chap. xix. ver. 20.

"Mightily grew the word of God and prevailed."

In all that I have hitherto ventured to lay before you in defence of the truth of that religion by whose promises we are animated to the pursuits of holiness, and by whose awful terrors we are guarded against the temptations of a sinful, but seductive world; in all the Discourses which I have hitherto delivered, it has been my leading object to assign to each portion of the evidence its proper weight and place; and to shew that whilst all the various arguments have been appropriated, like the members of the human body, to the discharge of some special and important office, they have been so combined together at the same time, as to give the greatest possible degree of strength, and beauty, and order to the whole. To compare the probable with the actual result;

to compare the mighty growth of Christianity with the mighty means which were put in force for securing the reception of its doctrines; to compare the rapidity of its progress and the permanence of its conquests with the sublimity of its precepts and the grandeur of its miracles, would now seem to present itself as a natural conclusion of these arduous labours, and to afford a favourable opportunity for considering, not only whether the success of the Gospel has been commensurate with the strength of its evidences, but also, whether it be possible to account for that success upon any other supposition than that of the truth of the religion itself, and the divine authority of its teachers.-That the positive proofs of Christianity are in their nature so unequivocal and strong, as to justify the deepest prejudices of the Gentile and the Jew, in bowing down before their influence, is what, from our previous investigation, we have already seen. If then the history of the triumphs of Christianity be found to correspond with those expectations which the evidences for its divine origin had raised-if we find the philosopher throwing aside the foolishness of man's reasoning to learn the wisdom of God at the lips of the lowly, and the worldly prospects of the pharisee corrected and subdued by the spiritual consolations of the Gospel; -if we behold these changes taking place

in the opinions and feelings, not of a few isolated individuals, but of multitudes in the most bigoted and the most enlightened nations in the world; and if, after having attentively contemplated the subject, we find it impossible to attribute such numberless and wonderful conversions to any other cause than the miraculous powers and heavenly commission of the teachers of the religion, then may we safely infer that those miraculous powers, and that heavenly commission were indeed the sources of the victory of the Gospel; and by adding the subsequent fact of its success to the former proofs of its divinity, may draw, from the combination of the two arguments, a demonstration which none of our adversaries shall be able to resist.

But it is not merely when viewed in combination with the positive evidences of its truth, that the rapidity of the progress of Christianity assumes so important a character. It has a value also when separately estimated which it would be most unwise to overlook.-I am far from considering it as, in general, either a safe, or a sound method of reasoning, to rest the whole burthen of our proof upon any one particular fact: yet there are times in which the arguments from such particular facts may be urged with much greater effect than a more comprehensive and complicated

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detail of evidence. The human mind is weak often in the wisest; wavering often in the firmest of God's rational creatures. There are moments of despondency and dejection, in which the understanding is averse to the vigorous pursuit of any lengthened chain of reasoning, and almost incapable of appreciating its force and application. In moments like these, the heart turns away from complex and scientific demonstration, and seeks to satisfy its doubts by some single and simple argument. It knows its own wants, its own weakness, its own wilfulness, and desires, like the children of Israel in their Egyptian distress, to have some pillar of never-failing strength to look to in all its dangers-a pillar of fire by night to console and enlighten it in the darkness of its faithless hours, and a pillar of smoke by day to protect it by its friendly shade against the pestilential rays of perverted reason. Now there is no single argument for the divine origin and authority of the Gospel more simple or solid, and therefore no guardian more powerful against the fickleness and feebleness of the human mind, than that which is furnished by the rapid propagation of Christianity. That "mightily grew the word of God, and that mightily it prevailed," are facts to which, above all others, we may always, when assailed by the temptations of sophistry, appeal, and say, this is the rock of my confidence, and