but do you love Him in his Gospel character as God our Saviour? Do you love God because He spared not his own Son, but freely gave him up for us all? Do you love Christ, because He first loved us, and gave himself for us? And does this love prove its sincerity by an uncompromising obedience to his revealed will? If we love Him, do we keep his commandments? Has the regenerating seed of the Word been sown by the Spirit in your heart, and are the fruits of the Spirit daily developing themselves in your life and conversation? Are love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance-are these the tempers of your mind, and the characters of your daily practice? Is the law of kindness ever on your lips, and the spirit of charity in your heart? Do you lament, and daily gain ground against the unmortified remains of inbred corruption? Do you thirst after, and daily attain, fuller communications of the Spirit of holiness, higher advances in the Divine life? Do you practically find that the doctrines of grace are never abused to the sanction of sloth and self-indulgence? Have you experimentally proved what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect will of God, which is our sanctification? Do you know by a happy experience, that "Blessed are the poor in spirit;" and that humility is the threshold through which the soul enters now into the kingdom of God? that "Blessed are the pure in heart," and that they now see God?" that "he who dwelleth in love, dwelleth in God, and God in him?" If thus, by experience, "ye know these things, happy are ye-the Spirit of grace and of glory resteth upon you." For it is this withering of the arm and the power of the tempter, this extirpation of sin, this implantation of holiness, this ripening of the fruits of the Spirit, which constitute, essentially, the salvation of a soul. To these, the great end, all the sufferings of atonement, all the pardons of grace, all the privileges of the Gospel, are but subsidiary means; and, except in so far as they affect these, but weak and beggarly elements. It is, in a word, this frame of spirit, filled with all the fruits of righteousness, with peace and purity, humility and holy love, which constitutes its present true happiness, and its indispensable meetness for the inheritance of the saints in light.

Nor suffer yourself to be deceived by that radical mistake of a deluded world, that present salvation would rob you of all present enjoyment: that such salvation is indeed desirable at the hour of death, because-sad to say-absolutely necessary to shield you from the wrath of God in the day of final judgment, and to prevent your being cast into the place of torment-some vague, but local and material hell that therefore to die a saint is desirable, because an indispensable condition of future happiness, but that to live a saint would be to poison life's every charm, and to render it dull, and vapid, and gloomy. O suffer not yourself to be thus deluded by a miserable and infatuated world. O shrink not from this spiritual cross on which your old man should be crucified with Christ, and which but points out the gate of a blessed resurrection to present happiness and an undying life. If we suffer with Christ, we shall also live and reign with him-now-as princes upon earth, for "the righteous man is more excellent than his neighbour." We, the Apostle says, are crucified with Christ, yet live-live now, by a present salvation-a life of true happiness; the only true, because a happiness within, a heart's ease and contentment of mind, a peace of God which the world can

neither give nor take away. Hear the Saviour himself, amid the agonies of the cross, declare to him who suffers with Him, " This day thou shalt be with me in paradise."

Nor think that this present salvation, this new birth, will send you forth into a barren and desolated world, stripped of all its former charms and long accustomed sources of enjoyment. Think not that you will henceforth walk the earth, a sort of living spectre, in some ghostlike, visionary state, uninterested by the circumstances of life, dead to the feelings and a stranger to the sympathies of your fellowmen. Let not the amiabilities of natural affection, let not the tendernesses of the natural heart, thus shrink, with jealous sensitiveness, as though the heart would be pierced to death on this spiritual cross, and perish under this sublimating process. All indeed that is vain and vicious, delusive and impure, will, blessed be God, lose its charm-that charm which but veiled innate deformity-that bait which but lured to destruction-that sweet which but concealed a bitter poison. But religion will deprive you of no object of pure and real enjoyment, of no innocent and truly happy feeling. It will indeed, as by a live coal from the altar, purify you. As by a presence, a contact of God, it will sanctify every object and feeling; but by sanctifying it will only enhance them, and invest them with a halo of Divine glory. When Christ liveth in you, there will not be less of humanity, but more of Deity, in the compound man.

But you may still say, Are we not told that self-denial, the most perfect and universal, is an essential element of pure and undefiled religion? that there is no possibility of attaining that kingdom of heaven within us, which is righteousness, and peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost, but through this strait and narrow gate? that if we would come after Christ, we must deny ourselves, take up our cross daily, and follow him? Now, not to speak of the agonies of the process, is it not, you will say, a risk from which we may well shrinka leap in the dark from which the soul may well recoil, not only to cease from exercising the affections upon the present objects of love, but even to pluck from the heart those deep-rooted feelings and affections themselves, which were coeval with its birth, and have strengthened with its growth, and which it knows by experience to be sources of enjoyment? Nay, still more, to kill, as vipers brooding within us for our destruction, every present feeling, sentiment, passion, and affection: and when this painful sacrifice of known materials of enjoyment has been completed-when we have stript the heart to the nakedness of desolation, and withered it to the death of apathy, then to look for some vague creation to a new nature of which we can comprehend nothing, some new constitution of soul, and frame of physical sensation, of whose mechanism, movement, and capabilities we have neither experience nor conception, and, consequently, with which we can as little sympathize as with the nature and enjoyments of an angelic existence. Does not such a state, you will say—and say reasonably-present nothing to the view but what is cold, and shadowy, and repulsive?

To all this my answer is, that you mistake wholly the nature of Christian self-denial. I say, indeed, that self-denial, the most perfect and universal, is the sole principle of happiness-of peaceful and permanent enjoyment. But I deny that self-denial thus kills the natural affections, and desolates the heart. True self-denial, like the storm

that roots the oak, strengthens, not eradicates. There is in our nature, as in our bodily frame, nothing positive and original but what God's creative hand has placed there, and which is not conducive to our happiness, here and hereafter, either directly, as a material and ingredient of that happiness, or indirectly, as a mean of sanctification. Nothing therefore in our nature, any more than in our bodily frame, can be profitably extirpated. But over all God should reign paramount. And the process which sullenly annihilates an affection, or heartlessly exchanges its object, instead of feelingly, though complacently, resigning it, is not that process which denies self to follow Christ.

Sin and Grace are not new faculties of the soul, superadded by Satan, and by God, respectively, to its original nature; but they are springs at whose impulse it is animated, and laws by which its movements are regulated. Sin does not consist either in the existence, or the exercise, of the passions and affections, but in the disorder, the insubordination, the abuse, the lavish waste of them. And therefore true self-denial does not consist in the extinction of the passions and affections, but in their due regulation and controul. Gospel peace is not the stillness of apathy, but the harmony of feeling. It is not the damp chill and dead silence of the cell or sepulchre; but it is the profound yet breathing repose, the serene yet living calm, of

nature.

This is, at once, the present and the eternal salvation of the soul. Thus, by grace, are all God's people, each in his degree, saved. To all is offered, and each who will receive it by faith may experience, a full salvation. To each who will pass on unto perfection, and study, in the combined exercise of lively faith, and fervent prayer, and honest effort, to cleanse himself from every pollution of flesh and spirit, and to perfect holiness in the fear of God, an abundant entrance will be ministered, by grace, through faith, into the present and ever. lasting kingdom of our God and Saviour.

To be without this salvation is to sit in darkness and in the shadow of death, destitute of the alone principle of life and happiness. To seek the attainment of this salvation, there is the most abundant encouragement: "Ask and it shall be given you." It is true that of ourselves we can do nothing; and that to raise us from the death of sin to the life of righteousness, demands the Omnipotent energy of that Spirit which raised up Christ from the dead. "By grace ye are saved, through faith, and that not of yourselves, it is the gift of God." But it is a gift which God is ready to bestow upon every man who asks it, "liberally, and without upbraiding" on account of past negligences or past sins. Whoever you be-whatever may have been your past character and conduct, only now "believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved:" saved with a present salvation: saved both from the guilt and from the power of sin-justified and sanctified. But think not that you can separate these. "Whom God did foreknow, He also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of His Son." "Whom He justified, them He also glorified." Pardon and purity, holiness and happiness, are inseparably and eternally wedded in the councils of the Divine will; and what God hath thus indissolubly joined together, let not man profanely think to put asunder. Receive the blessings of the Gospel as gifts of free, and sovereign, and undeserved grace; but be careful not to grieve, by sin,

that Holy Spirit whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption. Let it be your study, by frequent meditation upon the Divine word, and by fervent and persevering prayer, that your conscience may be spiritually enlightened-then keep it, as the apple of your eye, tender, and sensitive to sin, that it may be a faithful monitor, and an infallible index to your soul.

J. M. H.

OBJECTIONS TO MODERN GEOLOGY.

(Continued from page 154.)

YOUR correspondent, A SCRIPTURAL GEOLOGIST, in your January Number, quoted Poole, the compiler of the Synopsis Criticorum, in illustration of the first verse in the book of Genesis; but the quotation only tends to prove that Moses uses the term "In the beginning' with the view of shewing that the world had a commencement in time, and was not of eternal origin. The interpretation by the same author of the six days' creation, and two first chapters of Genesis, cannot be twisted to establish conjectural geology, if the whole context be read; nor indeed that of any similar old, learned, and sound theologist. In the same indefinite sense the expression is used by the Apostle John, " In the beginning was the word;" and the like mode of speech by our Saviour, "From the beginning it was not so." That materialism had a created existence at a determinate period of eternity past, is certain; and also that every subsequent and future modification of it has been, and will be, dependent upon the same power which gave it first being; but I disbelieve that the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms present the same appearance since the fall of man, as we may be led to presume was the case in a condition of Paradisaical perfection. On the contrary, both Revelation and nature are demonstrations that a material as well as spiritual change has taken place in the globe which we inhabit. The Apostle Paul-who, upon another occasion, ardently aspires after the hopes of its Christian and ultimate restoration to more than Adamic beauty and pristine excellence-here expresses significantly its intervening state of degradation. "For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now." (Rom. viii. 22). The effects, therefore, of human original sin are now operating upon animate and inanimate creation, under a dispensation neither of unmingled justice and holiness, nor that of pure innocence and beneficence; but under a chequered and tempered order of men and things which bespeak their history, and under which there is a conflict of two principles of good and evil, happiness and pain, both in cause and consequence, which betoken the lapse of this earthly tenant, his present thraldom, and his future destination. I am not so absurd as to presuppose the immortality of the instinctive soul in brutes; but I conceive that when man, who was lord of this lower world, and was endowed with an immaterial and immortal spirit, but with a body conditionally mortal, fell from his allegiance to his Maker, neither they, nor any other department of the creation, stood in an exactly similar relation to him, nor to themselves. I can imagine that upon the supposition of ages having elapsed before man disobeyed the Divine command, there may have existed, in the bowels of the earth, subterranean heat, as well as

there was a superincumbent ocean; that a system of production, decay, or change, and reproduction, may have taken place in the inferior ranks of creation, which would not be inconsistent with such a state of innocence and felicity, and which obviates the difficulty of conceiving their continued exercise, and the mode of providing for their sustenance, as well as space for their habitation, should no single individual of a species ever have ceased to live. But I cannot reconcile with such being any system of destruction to which pain is annexed, any throes of nature, any devoration of the creature, whether they may proceed from herbaceous or mineral poisons, stinging reptiles, carnivorous beasts, birds, and fishes, volcanic fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, electric clouds, inundating seas, the intense temperature of torrid sterility, or of perpetual ice. Nor can I admi that the disjointed strata of the earth, which is the more immediate topic of discussion, with those indications of their contents familiar to naturalists, present to my observation and judgment those appearances which would result from a supposed Paradisaical origination and dislocation,-I mean in accordance with the happiness of universal being, but they rather represent to me the arm of an Almighty Divinity, stretched out by miraculous interposition, in disorganizing and devastating the face and womb of nature which he had himself perfectly fashioned. Their arrangement suffices to record of them that they are not the effects of what is commonly called fortune or accident, while their derangement manifests the design of an infinite understanding. If we examine more closely the Mosaic narrative, we shall see and feel that, though Moses did not write it with an intent of exciting or damping geological inquiry, yet he intended thereby that all geologists should believe its verbal inspiration. Cuvier, at the close of his Introductory Theory of the Earth, indulges in the speculative hope, that if this study should attain greater perfection, "man, to whom only a short space of time is allotted upon earth, would have the glory of restoring the history of thousands of ages which preceded the existence of the human race, and of thousands of animals that never were contemporaneous with his species." The sentiments also of Professors Buckland and Sedgwick are in unison with those of the late French comparative anatomist. Did, however, any man peruse the first chapter of Genesis, without having admitted into his mind some preconceived impression, and arrive at the conclusion that the period of creation was a duration of six thousand years or more? If so, Adam must have been created during the last sixth thousandth year; for his fall could not have taken place till after the completion of the six days' work, whichever interpretation of them we adopt, since we read that "God saw every thing that he had made, and behold it was very good, and the evening and the morning were the sixth day." After the adult man and woman were made, (the man from the dust of the earth, and the woman from the substance of the man,) God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth." Now, as the first offspring of Adam was born in corruption, it is indisputable that no incorrupt posterity of their progenitor ever lived in this immaculate world during the imaginary period of its last age. We are therefore driven to the extreme improbability that it must have re