right ought to be rewarded, and wrong ought to be punished —so we are constrained to trace such a connection from our minds to the mind of him who framed them. This conviction is God's law, written in our hearts. When we do wrong, we become conscious of a feeling of remorse in our consciences, as truly as the eye becomes conscious of the darkness. We may blind the eye, and we may sear the conscience, that the one shall not see, nor the other feel; but light and darkness, right and wrong, will exist. The awful fact which conscience reveals to us, that we sin against God, that we know the right, and do the wrong, and are conscious of it, and of God's disapprobation of it, is conclusive proof that we are not only distinct from God, but separate from him-that we oppose our wills against his. And every pang of remorse is a premonition of God's judgment, and every sorrow and suffering which the Governor of the world has connected with sin-as the drunkard's loss of character and property, of peace and happiness, the frenzy of his soul, and the destruction of his body-is a type and teaching of the curse which he has denounced against sin.

5. The World's History is the record of man's crimes, and God's punishments. Once God swept the human race from earth with a flood of water, because the wickedness of man was great on the earth. Again, he testified his displeasure against the ungodly sinners of Sodom and Gomorrah, by consuming their cities with fire from heaven, and leaving the Dead Sea to roll its solemn waves of warning to all ungodly sinners, to the end of time.

By the ordinary course of his providence, he has ever secured the destruction of ungodly nations. No learning, commerce, arms, territories, or skill, has ever secured a rebellious nation against the sword of God's justice. Ask the black record of a rebel world's history for an instance. Egypt, Canaan, Nineveh, Babylon, Persia, Greece, Rome. Where are they now? Tyre had ships, colonies, and com

merce;

Rome an empire on which the sun never set; Greece had philosophy, arts, and liberty secured by a confederation of republics; Spain the treasures of earth's gold and silver, and the possession of half the globe. Did these secure them against the moral government of God?

No! God's law sways the universe; that law which, with the brazen fetters of eternal justice, binds together sin and misery, crime and punishment, and lays the burden on the backs of all ungodly nations, irresistibly forcing them down -down-down the road to ruin. The vain imagination that refuses to glorify God as God, leads to darkness of heart, thence to Atheism, thence to gross idolatry, onward to selfish gratification, violent rapacity, lust of conquest, and luxury, licentiousness, and effeminacy begotten of its spoils; then military tyranny, civil war, servile revolt, anarchy, famine and pestilence, and the sword of less debauched neighbors, Christ's iron scepter, hurl them down from the pinnacle of greatness, to dash them in pieces against each other, in the valley of destruction; and there they lie, wrecks of nations, ruins of empires, naught remaining, save some shivered potsherds of former greatness, to show that once they were, and were the enemies of God.

Oh, America, take warning ere it be too late! God rules the nations. "He that chastiseth the heathen, shall he not correct you?"

A day of retribution, reader, comes to you, as an individual. Neither your insignificance nor your unbelief can hide you from his eye, nor can your puny arm shield you from his righteous judgment. His hand shall find out his enemies. Oh, fly from the wrath to come!

while he may be found." He is not far

"Seek the Lord from every one of

us. His breath is in our nostrils. His Word is in our hands. "Whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

CHAPTER IV.

HAVE WE ANY NEED

OF THE

BIBLE?

RELIGION consists of the knowledge of a number of great facts, and of a course of life suitable to them. We have seen three of these: that God created the world; that he governs it; and that he is able to conquer his enemies. There are others of the same sort as needful to be known. Our knowledge of these facts, or our ignorance of them, makes not the slightest difference in the facts themselves. God is, and heaven is, and hell is, and sin leads to it, whether anybody believes these things or not. It makes no sort of difference in the beetling cliff and swollen flood that sweeps below it, that the drunken man declares there is no danger, and, refusing the proffered lantern, gallops on toward it in the darkness of the night. But when the mangled corpse is washed ashore, every one sees how foolish this man was, to be so confident in his ignorance as to refuse the lantern, which would have shown him his danger, and guided him to the bridge where he might have crossed in safety. Some of the facts of religion lie at the evening end of life's journey; the darkness of death's night hides them from mortal eye; and living men might guide their steps the better by asking counsel of one who knows the way. If they get along no better by their own counsel in the next world than most of them do in this, they will have small cause to bless their teacher. Who can tell that ignorance, and wickedness, and wretchedness are not as tightly tied together in the world to come, as we see them here?

Solomon was a knowing man and wise; and better than that, in the esteem of most people, he made money, and tells you how to make it, and keep it. You will make a hundred dollars by reading his Proverbs and acting on them. They would have saved some of you many a thousand. Of course such a man knew something of the world. He was a wide-awake trader. His ships coasted the shores of Asia, and Africa, from Madagascar to Japan; and the overland mail caravans from India and China drew up in the depots he built for them in the heart of the desert. He knew the well-doing people with whom trade was profitable, and the savages who could only send apes and peacocks. He was a philosopher as well as a trader, and could not help being deeply impressed with the great fact, that there was a wide difference among the nations of the world. Some were enlightened, enterprising, civilized, and flourishing; others were naked savages, living in ignorance, poverty, vice, and starvation, perpetually murdering one another, and dying out of the earth.

Solomon noticed another great fact. In his own country, and in Chaldea, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and some others, God had revealed his will to certain persons for the benefit of their neighbors. He did so generally by opening the eyes of these prophets to see future events, and the great facts of the unseen world, and by giving them messages of warning and instruction to the nations. From this mode of revelation, by opening the prophets' eyes to see realities invisible to others, they were called seers, and the revelations they were commissioned to make were called visions; and revelation from God was called, in general, vision. Solomon was struck with the fact that some nations were thus favored by God, and other nations were not. The question would naturally arise, What difference does it make, or does it make any difference, whether men have any revelation of God's will or not?

Solomon was led to observe a third great fact. The nations which were favored with these revelations were the civilized, enterprising, and comparatively prosperous nations. In proportion to the amount of divine revelation they had, and their obedience to it, they prospered. The nations that had no revelation from God were the idolatrous savages, who were sinking down to the level of brutes, and perishing off the face of the earth. He daguerreotypes these three great facts in the proverb: "Where there is no vision the people perish; but he that keepeth the law, happy is he."

Oh, says the Rationalist, the world is wiser now than it was in Solomon's days. He lived in the old mythological period, when men attributed everything extraordinary to the gods. But the world is too wise now to believe in any supernatural revelation. "The Hebrew and Christian religions like all others have their myths." "The fact is, the pure historic idea was never developed among the Hebrews during the whole of their political existence." "When, therefore, we meet with an account of certain phenomena, or events of which it is expressly stated or implied that they were produced immediately by God himself (such as divine apparitions, voices from heaven, and the like), or by human beings possessed of supernatural powers (miracles, prophecies, etc.), such an account is so far to be considered not historical."

Indeed, no just notion of the true nature of history is possible without a perception of the inviolability of the chain of finite causes, and of the impossibility of miracles."* A narrative is to be deemed mythical, 1st. "When it proceeds from an age in which there were no written records, but events were transmitted by tradition; 2d. When it presents, as historical, accounts of events which were beyond the reach of experience, as occurrences connected with the spiritual world; or 3d. When it deals in the marvelous, and is

*Strauss' Life of Jesus, 64, 74, 87.