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wrong or oppression operates to produce disapprobation and anger. God has put this tendency, energy, or efficaciousness, in the moral truth, and has endowed the soul with a capacity for receiving its influence, by which it acts for the production of a moral result.

This moral adjustment requires no direct and immediate energy supplemental to that posited in moral truth. If a man see, or do, an act of oppression without the corresponding emotion of disapprobation, or of remorse, his mind must be in a wrong state: and this wrong state of the mind will cause wrong actions, as is exemplified, for instance, in drunkenness, or obduracy. Before the actions of the soul become right, the soul itself must be restored to a right state. Hence arises the problem which has occasioned so much moral speculation and scholastic disquisition, in what manner, and by what process, is such a disordered mind to be restored into a right state? In the investigation of this subject we cannot fail to perceive that moral truths and principles require no change; and the adapted influences, in them, call for no alteration; and the laws of their operations require no modifying, much less do they require strengthening or invigorating. All these remain in their adjusted relations, as if the mind had never lapsed into a wrong position; and neither of them require any change or improvement in adaptation, tendency, and energy. The deficiency is in the man, and not in them; consequently it is he that must be changed for them, and not they altered for him.

Apart from all theological prepossessions, let us examine the manner in which we would proceed to effect a change in a man's mind; say, to make the thief honest, or the unchaste pure. We feel conscious that romantic notions of moral influences, sentimental wishes, and earnest hope, would accomplish nothing. Something must be DONE, and done by us. The most wise and prudent method of proceeding, in such a case, is to discover the means and the agents most likely to conciliate his mind; and then to employ them in the manner most calculated to bring his mind into a position for moral truth to act on him, and thereby, for the influence of that truth to affect him and produce the desired moral results. If I wish to change a man's mind, I must ascertain the state of his mind on the question to which I wish to turn him. I must then with discretion, with a judgment cool, and yet with a heart burning in sympathies, use the best considered means

to bring my mind and heart into his understanding. I must get his mind to attend to my representations, and to dwell on them. This would detain his mind on the question, and detain his sympathies in direct communication with the influence of moral sentiments. Physical influences might force his conduct in a new direction, but would not change the state of his mind; and intellectual influences might silence him, without producing the desired moral effects. His mind, then, must be gained, or nothing is gained. His mind can be gained; a thousand means are adjusted by God to enable us to gain his mind, which if employed wisely by us, will certainly gain his mind. We see daily that minds are gained by the influence of moral truths rightly administered. We never conciliate a man's esteem, or reconcile friends who have been at variance, or gain the suffrage of constituents for a candidate without producing these moral phenomena.

The first position into which the mind must be brought from its wrong state, is that of attention or consideration; which in itself is neither moral nor physical, but is an act of the individuality, or of the spontaneity of the soul. If the mind be successfully restored into a right state, to what, and to whom, shall the change be ascribed? I have no doubt the writers of the scriptures would unhesitatingly, and even exultingly, have ascribed this delightful phenomenon to the supreme Author of every good and perfect gift. To God, indeed, alone is the glory really due; for the whole process is truly the operation of his own energy acting in the combinations of his own wisdom, and according to the laws which he himself had fixed. The result is as verily and really owing to Him, by the influence which he has posited in moral truth, as the benign products and harvests of the seasons are due to the physical and organic influences by which He renews the face of the earth. He accomplishes the one by moral combinations, as he produces the other by relations physical: and, in either case, there is no supplemental or added influence.

VI. The scriptural revelation supposes and affirms that a series of supernatural and miraculous influences have pro-. ceeded from the Blessed God.

These supernatural influences imply that God, in numerous instances, has exercised a direct and immediate agency, both on the intellectual powers of the mind of man, and on the elements of the physical world. The respective operations

of these influences are called, by divines, inspiration and miracles.

No mind can refuse to admit that, if spiritual intelligences exist, they must understand each other. This implies a power or faculty of communicating thoughts to others, and of exciting, and producing thoughts in the subjects of such communications. This is real INSPIRATION; it is some kind of communing impact between spirit and spirit without the intervention of means and symbols. It is in this manner that the "God of all spirits" is conceived to convey his mind and his will to created intelligences. Man is an intelligent spirit incarnate. His condition in the flesh has not excluded him from the sphere of the Divine energies and influences the difference in his case is, that they reach him only through the relations and operations of means. He feels, sees, and hears, through the means of his senses. The conceptions, emotions, and volitions of his mind are formed, excited, and produced, by the means of exhibited truth, conveyed through the medium of objects, words, and events. It is in this manner that one mind inspires another with knowledge, and dispositions, desires and aversions, hopes and fears. This seems the settled order for the mutual operations of embodied spirits.

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The Holy Scriptures contain the assertions and the evidences that the God of the spirits of all flesh can move beside this apparatus of means, or rise beyond it, to gain access to the mind of the human spirit, and to leave upon it such vivid impressions and characters of his agency as to distinguish them from the visions of the imagination, and the phantasies of enthusiasm. The mind, in this case, received an impression, or copy, of the truth communicated, so defined and distinct that it became its own conception, so accurately understood, that it could represent that truth as clearly as it could express any other of its perceptions. In the process or fact of inspiration, there is no derangement of the intellectual structure and mental functions. Inspiration does not interfere with the laws of thinking, but with the laws of the means for conveying and exciting thought: just as when a chronometer is worked by the interposition of a spring, the principle of elasticity does not derange a single wheel in the machinery, the novelty consists in working without the means of weight. That inspiration is not the reverie of morbid intellects may be argued from the facts of the case. For this inspiring intercourse God selected minds of the strongest

make and the firmest tension. While the Divine Spirit was moving holy men of old by acting on their intellectual powers and imaginative faculties, there was no unsettling of the mind: for even when their eyes were dazzled with the splendor of their visions, and while their bodily frames were prostrated by the grandeur of their revelations, they ever maintained a firm hold of a clear understanding, a free exercise of their reason, a strong and calm judgment.

Independently of the clear and well-defined character of inspiration impressed on the intellectual spirit, there was also instilled into the inspired mind an intimation that the same Operating Agent would, as an evidence of this internal communication, act on the physical element and organic structure of the visible world, to suspend, alter, and control the constitution and course of nature. If the living presence and plastic influence of God were in close impact with matter in the formation of it, and still are in the preservation of it, there is no absurdity in supposing that He can touch it, and retouch it, whenever it seems good to him, and whenever he wishes to secure an end of greater importance than mere physical regularity. He can with equal facility suspend and alter, sustain and preserve, the adjusted course of things. Such designed and intended changes, interruptions, and controlments, are decisive and visible attestations that there lives in the midst of the machinery of the universe a Spirit that says to one wheel "MOVE," and it moveth; to another, STOP," and it stoppeth.

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The questions of inspiration and miracles stand or fall together. Inspiration asserts that physical miracles have been wrought by God, and by men delegated by him. cles attest a communication and a mission from God to man.

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In our survey of the Divine influences already enumerated, it has been asserted that in all these phenomena there was no ascititious energy added to that already lodged or impregnated in the means. In this class of miraculous influences, the case is otherwise, for there is not only a new and additional energy brought into contact with the mind, but there is also, upon the mind itself, a direct exercise of an immediate agency of God independently, and sometimes to the exclusion, of means. This constitutes the distinctive peculiarity of miraculous influences, and distinguishes them from the gracious influences employed in conversion. The church of God is never taught to calculate on miraculous influences, nor to pray

for them, except when receiving or when delivering a new message from God to the world. In other circumstances to expect them is the fanaticism of guilty indolence, and to pretend to them is the delirium of sickly enthusiasm.

VII. There are also spiritual influences which proceed from God as the great fountain of all energy.

By spiritual influence, in the proposition, is meant the influence of a spiritual agent, or spiritual truth, acting on a spiritual subject and susceptibility, to produce a spiritual result. This is totally different from psychological influences, because it can be exercised only by an agent capable of wielding the operations of intellectual and moral influences. Spiritual influences are those which affect the constitution, function, and agency of the soul as an intelligent spirit, which give it perceptions and emotions as an individual spirit, independently of their moral character: for these influences do not seem to come into contact with the volitions of the personal soul. We can understand the meaning of spiritual perceptions and spiritual emotions, but we have no idea of spiritual volitions, except in the sense of desires or longings: a spiritual will seems unintelligible. A spiritual perception is the soul's consciousness of spiritual objects; as, of its own spirituality; of the spirituality of its Creator; of its immortal identity after the senses shall have perished; of the intimate connexion between itself and a universe of spirits; and of its susceptibility to the influence of spiritual agents. These spiritual perceptions produce corresponding emotions, spiritual hopes and fear, spiritual joys and sorrows.

By this spiritual influence, then, I understand, for the present, the influence which one human spirit can exercise on another human spirit. Though this influence operates by means of the other influences, as the causes of colors do by the means of rays, yet it is perfectly distinct from them, and is not to be identified with them. Suppose a case in which one person has, or may have an influence on the mind of another, exercised by means of intellectual and moral truths. A third person may state the intellectual theorem or the moral proposition with the same clearness and force as the first, and yet not prevail: for the first has some hold or grasp on the second person's mind which the third has not. Here is then an influence, distinct from the intellectual and moral influence contained in the exhibited truths, though conveyed and exercised by their means. There are, probably, no per

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