carries the evidence of right written upon his brow. If you receive and entertain him, well; if you turn him from your door, it is at your peril; he will wipe the dust from off his feet as a testimony against you, that you love darkness rather than light, because your deeds are evil. So Jesus Christ preached, for "he taught as one having authority, and not as the scribes." So the apostles preached the Gospel in every city and in every land. So we are all commanded to preach the Gospel, the plain, simple, independent Gospel, to every creature. Not to the wealthy and learned alone are we to preach it, but to the poor and ignorant too, to the man who is as destitute of education as the birds, and beasts, and four footed things around him, as well as to him whose years have been spent in mental culture, and who has at his command all the wisdom of the ancients.

And what must be our declaration?

Not that the

door of salvation will be open, when any man shall have fully satisfied his mind whether the doctrine is of God, but that though his ears may now for the first time hear the tidings that Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God, came into the world to save sinners, he is under an imperative obligation, immediately to repent and believe that message, or he falls under the awful condemnation of having loved darkness rather than light, of having rejected the witness which God hath given concerning his Son. It must be presumed, then,

that there is a sufficient evidence of its Divine origin in the very doctrine itself, which man ought to perceive, and is guilty before God for refusing.

Or how shall one preach to the heathen a crucified Saviour with any hope? How, in the broken sentences of his imperfect knowledge of a strange tongue, can he call upon them with any authority to renounce their superstitions and believe in Christ? Surely, he cannot, unless the doctrine bears upon its very face an evidence that ought to attract and persuade the heart of man, and that may, by the grace of God.

How infinitely superior are the works of God to the works of man! Man can create nothing. He can only give some rude shape to materials already existing. God first creates the materials, and then clothes them with a beauty, a perfection, a sublimity, to which the utmost skill of man can make no approach. Shall we not then expect to see an infinite difference between the word which God shall speak, concerning the mysteries of his own nature, and of his dealings with the children of men, and the word of man, whose very wisdom is foolishness with God? Can it be otherwise, than that as the heavens are higher than the earth, so will his ways be higher than our ways, and his thoughts than our thoughts?

And besides this, is it probable that God would make a revelation to man, requiring so great an amount of evidence for its support, that it would be

absolutely impossible for a large proportion of those for whom it is intended, to ascertain with any certainty, whether it is true or false? May we not, must we not suppose that a revelation sent from heaven to the poor, the ignorant, to men of every nation, laboring under every disadvantage, will bear some evidence of its truth stamped upon its own form and substance, so that one who has not become incapable, by the perversity of his nature, of candidly judging and comparing, can distinguish it from error, almost as readily as light from darkness. Surely God's truth may be safely trusted to assert and establish its own superiority, and to confound those who would lead men astray by their wicked inventions. Confident of this, we scatter it abroad, boldly and hopefully. Did God ever manifest any fear that his own truth would not be triumphant? No! "The prophet that hath a dream let him tell a dream, and he that hath my word, let him speak my word faithfully. What is the chaff to the wheat, saith the Lord; is not my word as a fire, saith the Lord, and like a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?" Jer. 23: 28, 29. He would let truth grapple with error in free and open encounter. It could not be put to the worse, for he had clothed it with an energy before which falsehood should be broken in pieces, and scattered in the dust.

There is then, there must be some simpler method

of ascertaining whether the doctrine be of God, than by historic investigation, and one, the results of which shall be infinitely more satisfactory. There must be some means of establishing the truth of the word of God, beyond the possibility of a doubt, so that the soul shall be infallibly assured that it is not mistaken, by the blessedness which its new and joyful discoveries bring home to it.

Strange, indeed, if there were not an inherent excellence and beauty, a fitness and perfection in the Gospel, by the spiritual apprehension of which, the fool, the wayfaring man, and the child, may arrive at a perfect certainty that it is no fiction, but the result of the combined wisdom and goodness of God. Such was the express promise of the Saviour. "He that will do his will shall know the doctrine whether it be of God." Here nothing is said of history, nor of miracles. There is no allusion to the testimony of man. The inquirer is brought face to face with the word itself, and nothing but the word; and he is promised, that under a certain condition, he shall know that the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it.

God has not left his truth to depend entirely upon man for its confirmation. He has engraven his own name and character upon it; impressed it with the signet of his own glory, and given it a capacity, when studied with a single eye, to take captive every thought and every affection, and to bring the whole

soul into that subjection to Christ which is its only true freedom; into that deadness to sin which is its noblest life. "If thine eye be single, thy whole body shall be full of light."

We have already given a general intimation of the nature of this evidence, yet it may be well to present more definitely some of its principal features.

1. We have in the Bible an exhibition of the glory of the infinite Godhead, in the person of our Saviour. This book is either an infamous deception, or it is a revelation of the personal glory of God in the man Christ Jesus. The Bible contains the astounding announcement, that he who made the world and all things that are therein, touched with pity at the miserable condition to which its inhabitants had been reduced by their violation of his own law, assumed our nature, became a subject of the law, that he might redeem by his blood the lost and miserable out of every kindred, and tribe, and people, and nation; that as a man he lived for several years on the earth, in intimate intercourse with men; that during this time he publicly discoursed on subjects the most profound and interesting, and to confirm his instructions did many wonderful works; that having in his spotless life fulfilled all righteousness, he was finally put to death in our stead, in fulfillment of God's just sentence against our sins; and that on the third day he rose again, and ascended to the right hand of the