of lying outside the domain of Reason itself, they are those added experiences which raise man out of darkness into a region of dawning light. To confound those fetters by which the faculty of Reason in men in general is crippled and confined, in the usual conditions of their earthly life, with the glorious faculty itself, so that the gracious act of God, by which He removes the fetters, and calls reason to exercise itself on a wider range of facts, should be mistaken for its extinction, is a strange and prodigious error. He who has come near to us, and revealed Himself to the children of men in the Gospels, in the thirty-three years of an earthly lifetime, and in the glorious records of His sayings, and His works of Divine power, is Himself the Word, the Reason, the Truth, the "true Light which lighteth every man that cometh into the world." All reason in others is only like a spark derived from this glorious "Sun of Righteousness." The first rising of the sun would be a stupendous miracle to a race of troglodytes, who had lived till then in subterranean caverns, yet not the less would that sun have been the secret source of whatever feeble rays of moonlight or candle-light had previously reached them in their gloomy abode.

The relation of the facts revealed in the Gospels, to the great problem of natural and revealed religion, may be illustrated by the return of Columbus and his companions from their first voyage. The facts of their landing in Cuba and San Salvador have just the same relation to the great problem of the earth's geography, and the later discovery of the new world and its inhabitants. Those clever persons who refused to credit the report of Columbus and his crew, because ten thousand fishermen and mariners, after skirting the western ocean for

hundreds of years, had never brought any information worthy of trust concerning its farther shore, have their exact counterpart in those sceptics who refuse to credit the testimony of the Apostles and their companions to the fact, that they saw and conversed with the Lord Jesus after His resurrection for forty days, because no such experience, or similar experience, had ever been recorded before. For long ages, the shore of the great ocean had seemed an impassable barrier to human knowledge and exploration, towards the region of the setting sun; and so too the grave, "that undiscovered bourn from which no traveller returns,” had seemed to shut in and enclose all the children of men with a dark and impassable barrier. But with the return of Columbus, the ocean barrier was removed, the great problem was solved, and the landing of those few voyagers on the small islet, and their exploration of part of the coast of Cuba, secured an open pathway of discoveries which never ceased, till the whole of the American continent was explored and brought within the range of human knowledge, and "all the ends of the earth had seen the salvation of God." So too the facts in the Gospel, though few and simple, and unlike any previously recorded experience, and in that sense supernatural, were the key facts to a new and wider range of human knowledge, when man's acquaintance with the works and the ways of God should no longer be shut in by the darkness of the grave. "Life and immortality were brought to light" by the Gospel. The resurrection of Christ was never announced to the world as a solitary and unconnected fact, out of relation to all that had gone before, and all that was to follow. On the contrary, it was announced from the first as a great germinal fact, the fulfilment of voices of the prophets from the begin

ning of the world, and the pledge of the resurrection of all the dead. So St Paul proclaimed it to king Agrippa. "Saying none other things than those that the prophets and Moses did say before should come, that Christ should suffer, and that He should be the first that should rise from the dead, and shew light to the people and to the Gentiles." The resurrection of Jesus was announced as the first-fruits of a glorious harvest that should follow. So when Columbus and his companions announced their landing on the island of San Salvador, that fact was the pledge of the later discovery of the whole American continent. The resurrection of Jesus was the pledge and earnest of the truth of His words to Martha, "I am the Resurrection and the Life; he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."

A new era of spiritual light began, when man's knowledge of the character and purposes of the Creator ceased to be bounded by the darkness of the grave, and included the blessed certainty of a life beyond, of the resurrection and life everlasting.

The new facts reported in the Gospels were beyond | reason in this sense, that no process of abstract reasoning could have discovered them. They needed to be confirmed by clear and full testimony, but when so confirmed, there was nothing whatever to hinder the exercise of the reason and the conscience on their moral features, or to hinder the wayfaring man, though only a fool in natural wisdom, from seeing clearly and with the fullest conviction, that the Son of Man was no agent and accomplice of the father of lies, but a true messenger from the God of love and grace, nay, Himself the great Redeemer promised from the beginning of time. One would think that the sceptic who quotes

admissions of Christian Divines to prove that a message of supernatural truths is not credible unless supported by a supernatural guarantee, could scarcely be deceived by his own sophism, and confound together two things wholly different, because they are both sometimes expressed by one and the same ambiguous phrase, that they lie "beyond the range of reason.”

CHAPTER V.

REASON AND THE CHRISTIAN REVELATION.

THE great falsehood that the facts of the Gospel history, because they are unprecedented, and do not come within the range of previous experience, are therefore outside the range of human reason altogether, instead of forming the highest, noblest, and widest sphere for its perfect exercise, is reinforced by a special charge against the contents of that Revelation. The author affirms that a revelation of supernatural truths to promote the salvation of men from the consequences of their own sin is "antecedently incredible and contrary to reason." To prove this, he supplements the difficulties and mysteries of natural religion by various misrepresentations of the doctrines of Christianity. He says first that the existence of Satan, and the Temptation and Fall are not accounted for, and are incredible. Yet the ablest and most candid of modern sceptics, in his latest efforts to solve the great problem of the universe by the light of natural reason alone, is brought back to the very verge of the doctrine thus proclaimed incredible, a mitigated Manicheanism; or the doctrine of a God, vast and unsearchable both in wisdom and goodness, but, in some way we cannot understand or explain, limited in power, or counteracted and thwarted in His efforts