in the sphere of our accustomed course of studies; neither do I look forward with a fanciful enthusiasm to any mighty revolution in the state of the religious world as the immediate result of the change. I urge the subject as it stands connected with your duty. I press it upon your thoughts as it affects your own eternal happiness or misery in the world to come. To treat it upon the ground of mere present expediency is a narrow and unbecoming view of its awfulness, ministering perpetual cause of sophistry, and questions which may serve for strife, but not to godly edifying. What if there be some sacrifice to be made (though it may fairly be doubted whether any sacrifice at all will attend the measure); what if some portion of scientific glory may be lost, or some region of earthly and abstract knowledge be less cultivated? Is there nothing to make up for the sacrifice, nothing to compensate the loss? Meet the question as Christians. Meet it, as it only can and ought to be met, upon broad and Scriptural grounds-the ground of your duty to God's glory, your country's welfare, and your own salvation. Think not only of the sacrifice to be made, but compare it also with the advantages to be had in return-advantages as far superior to any other consideration, as the enduring blessedness of eternity is above the fading interests of time. If there be learning, it shall fail; if there

be sciences, they shall cease; if there be knowledge, it shall vanish away. But the word of the Lord endureth for ever; and that word hath proclaimed the decree, that every man should "be ready always"—and ready he cannot be unless he be able, and able he cannot become unless he be taught, "to give an answer to every one that asketh of him a reason of the hope that is in him.” What then shall be our reward in the great judgment of God, if we have fulfilled this decree, and what our fearful punishment if, either as a body or as individuals, it has been by us despised? "When the Son of Man shall appear in his glory, and all his holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory," and divide the sheep from the goats, the faithful from the faithless, and place them on the right or on the left hand of his throne. Into one of these folds we must enter. On the right hand or on the left hand of the Lord all that are around me must stand; and melancholy as it is to form the thought, it must needs be, perhaps, that some of those who now rejoice in the innocence and ingenuousness of youth, may find their final destiny amongst the faithless and perverse. For with all the energies which we may put forth, with all the diligence we may employ, with all the anxiety we may feel, with all the prudence we may exert, it is scarce possible but that some may fall away from virtue,

and sink down into the habitation of devils and the damned. When their voice of anguish, from the deep pit of their destruction, shall strike upon our ears, what is the impression it will produce upon our hearts? A feeling of sorrowfulness without doubt, to think of talents wasted, virtue lost, and the beautiful brightness of early hope broken and blasted by the chilly touch, the heartless reasonings of unrighteous unbelief. Yet if our duty towards these fallen ones has been done, it will be a feeling of sorrowfulness without fear, -chastened and subdued into pious regret, by the cheering consciousness that we are guiltless of their blood. But if their words be fraught with the language of excuse, and we hear them pleading for a mitigation of woe, because, though they rejected their Redeemer in their age, yet in their youth they were neither rewarded nor encouraged in the search after truth; then will the voice which cometh up from the prison of their misery, come loaded with a curse upon ourselves, and call us down from the blessedness we thought we had inherited, to be mingled in the flames of their wretchedness and remorse.

But, perhaps, I am passing the bounds which become my station and my age; and I forbear. Be it yours, my Fathers, to judge and to correct what is amiss. To me, or to any minister of

God, it can only belong, to exhort with all meekness, yet with all earnestness, them that bear rule in our University, to give a more direct and special fulfilment to the Apostle's injunction, by some additional regulations with regard to the public studies and examinations of those, whose instruction, both in worldly and spiritual things, is committed under God, to their charge.* I would beseech you as elders, so to divide the attention and the time of those who are sent hither to be imbued with all the necessary erudition of a man and a Christian, that every one, upon quitting this fountain of knowledge, may carry away with him "a reason of the faith and the hope that is in him."

* I cannot permit a third edition of these Lectures to appear without adding, that the subject here touched upon has been considered, and that such a change has taken place in the public examinations of the University, that no one can now obtain a degree without some portion of classical erudition, and some acquaintance with the principles of his religion.

DISCOURSE IX.

LUKE, chap. vii. ver. 22, 23.

"Then Jesus answering, said unto them, Go your way and tell John what things ye have seen and heard, how that the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, to the poor the Gospel is preached...... And blessed is he whosoever shall not be offended in me."

IN opening our views upon the evidences of Christianity we professed an intention of examining whether the answer of our Saviour to the Baptist contained a satisfactory solution of the question he had proposed, and whether the circumstances of Christians in the present day are so far similar, as to enable them to follow out the same course of reasoning for themselves, and to derive from it, when completed, a sufficient and solid demonstration that Jesus was the Christ. But we may seem, perhaps, to have forgotten the proposition with which we originally set out, in the impetuous pursuit of a peculiar system of our