register of their own offences, they would rather die than lose. "This," says the admirable Pascal, is an instance of integrity which has no example in the world, no root in nature.' In the Pentateuch and the Gospel, therefore, these parallel, these unequalled instances of sincerity, are incontrovertible proofs of the truth of both.

It is obvious that the impression which was to be made should owe nothing to the skill, but every thing to the veracity of the writers. They never tried to improve upon the doctrines or the requirements of their Master, by mixing their own wisdom with them. Though their views were not clear, their obedience was implicit. It was not, however, a mere mechanical obedience, but an undisputing submission to the divine teaching. Even at the glorious scene of the transfiguration, their amazement did not get the better of their fidelity. There was no vain impatience to disclose the wonders which had passed, and of which they had been allowed the honor of being witnesses. Though they inserted it afterwards in their narrations, "they, as they were commanded, kept it close, and told no man in those days what they had seen.

The simplicity of the narrative is never violated; there is even no panegyric on the august person they commemo→ rate, not a single epithet of commendation. When they mention an extraordinary effect of his divine eloquence, it is history, not eulogy, that speaks. They say nothing of their own admiration; it is "the people who were astonished at the gracious words which proceeded out of his mouth." Again, it was "the multitudes marvelled, saying, it was never so seen in Israel." Again, it was the officers, not the writer, who said, never man spake like this man."

In recording the most stupendous events, we are never called to an exhibition of their own pity, or their own admiration. In relating the most soul-moving circumstance, there is no attempt to be pathetic, no aim to work up the feelings of the reader, no appeal to his sympathy, no studied finish, no elaborate excitement. Jesus wept;- no comment. He is hungry;- -no compassion escapes them. He is transfigured;-no expression of astonishment. He is agonized; the narrative does not rise in emphasis. He is betrayed;-no execration to the betrayer. He is condemned; no animadversions on the iniquitous judge; while their own denial and desertion are faithfully recorded. He expires;-no remark on the tremendous catastrophe, no display of their own sorrow. Facts alone supply the void; and what facts? The earth quakes, the sun is eclipsed,

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the graves give up their dead. In such a history, it is very true, fidelity was praise, fact was glory. And yet, if, on the one hand, there were no need of the rhetorician's art to embellish the tale, what mere rhetoricians could have abstained from using it?

Thus, it seems obvious, that unlettered men were appointed to this great work, in order that the success of the Gospel might not be suspected of owing any thing to natural ability, or to splendid attainment. This arrangement, while it proves the astonishing progress of Christianity to have been caused by its own energy, serves to remove every just suspicion of the contrivance of fraud, the collusions of interest, or the artifices of invention.

Had the first apostles been men of genius, they might have injured the purity of the Gospel by bringing their ingenuity into it.-Had they been men of learning, they might have imported from the schools of Greece and Rome, each from his own sect, some of its peculiar infusions, and thus have vitiated the simplicity of the Gospel. Had they been critics and philosophers, there might have been endless debates which part of Christianity was the power of God, and which the result of man's wisdom. Thus, though corruptions soon crept into the church, yet no impurities could reach the Gospel itself. Some of its teachers became heretical, but the pure Word remained unadulterated.However, the philosophizing or the Judaizing teachers might subsequently infuse their own errors into their own preaching, the Gospel preserved its own integrity. They might mislead their followers, but they could not deteriorate the New Testament.

It required different gifts to promulgate and to maintain Christianity. The evangelists did not so much attempt to argue the truth of the Redeemer's doctrines, as practically to prove that they were of Divine origin. If called on for a defence, they worked a miracle. If they could not produce a cogent argument, they could produce a paralytic walking. If they could not open the eyes of the prejudiced, they could open the eyes of the blind. Such attestation was to the eye-witnesses, argument the most unanswerable. The most illiterate persons could judge of this species of evidence so peculiar to Christianity. He could know whether he saw a sick man restored to life by a word, or a lame man take up his bed and walk, or one who had been dead four days, instantly obey the call-"Lazarus, come forth!" About a sentiment there might be a diversity of suffrages; about an action which all saw, all could entertain

but one opinion. The caviller might have refuted a syllogism, and a fallacy might have imposed on the multitude, but no sophistry could counteract ocular demonstration.

But as God does nothing in vain, so he never employs irrelevant instruments or superfluous means. He therefore did not see fit to be at the expense of a perpetual miracle to maintain and carry on that church which he had thought proper to establish by miraculous powers. When, therefore, the Gospel was immutably fixed on its own eternal basis, and its truth unimpeachably settled by the authentic testimony of so many eye witnesses to the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus; a writer was brought forward, contemporary, but not connected, with them. Not only was he not confederate with the first institutors of Christianity; but so implacably hostile was he to them, that he had assisted at the death of the first martyr.

As the attestation of one notorious enemy in favor of a cause, is considered equivalent to that of many friends; thus did this distinguished adversary seem to be raised up to confirm and ratify all the truths he had so furiously opposed; to become the most able advocate of the cause he had reprobated, the most powerful champion of the Saviour he had vilified. He was raised up to unfold more at large those doctrines which could not be so explicitly developed in the historical portions, while an immediate revelation from heaven supplied to him the actual opportunities and advantages which the evangelists had enjoyed. Nothing short of such a divine communication could have placed St. Paul on a level with the other apostles; had he been taught of man, he must have been inferior to those who were taught of Jesus.

For St. Paul had not the honor to be the personal disciple of his Lord. His conversion and preaching were subsequent to the illumination of the Gospel; an intimation possibly, that though revelation and human learning should not be considered as sharing between them the work of spiritual instruction, yet that human learning might henceforward become a valuable adjunct, and a most suitable, though subordinate accessory in maintaining the cause of that divine truth which it had no hand in establishing.

The ministry of Paul was not to be circumscribed, as that of his immediate precursors had been, by the narrow limits of the Jewish church. As he was designated to be the Apostle of the Gentiles, as he was to bear his testimony before rulers and scholars; as he was to carry his mission into the presence of "kings, and not to be ashamed, "it pleased Infinite Wisdom, which always fits the instrument to the

work, and the talent to the exigence, to accommodate most exactly the endowments of Paul to the demands that would be made upon them; and as divine Providence caused Moses to acquire in Egypt the learning which was to prepare him for the legislator of a people so differently circumstanced, it pleased the same Infinite Wisdom to convey to Paul, through the mouth of a Jewish teacher, the knowledge he was to employ for the Gentiles, and to adapt his varied acquirements to the various ranks, characters, prejudices, and local circumstances of those before whom he was to advocate the noblest cause ever assigned to man.

Of all these providential advantages he availed himself with a wisdom, aptness, and appropriateness, without a parallel;—a wisdom derived from that divine spirit which guided all his thoughts, words, and actions: and with a teachableness which demonstrated that he was never disobedient to the heavenly vision.

Indeed it seemed necessary, in order to demonstrate that the principles of Christianity are not unattainable, nor its precepts impracticable, that the New Testament should, in some part, present to us a full exemplification of its doctrines and of its spirit; that they should, to produce their practical effect, be embodied in a form purely human,-for the character of the founder of its religion is deified humanity. Did the Scriptures present no such exhibition, infidelity might have availed itself of the omission, for the purpose of asserting that Christianity was only a bright chimera, a beautiful fiction of the imagination; and Plato's fair idea might have been brought into competition with the doctrines of the Gospel. But in St. Paul is exhibited a portrait which not only illustrates its divine truth, but establishes its moral efficacy; a portrait entirely free from any distortion in the drawing, from any extravagance in the coloring.

It is the representation of a man struggling with the sins and infirmities natural to man; yet habitually triumphing over them by that divine grace which had first rescued him from prejudice, bigotry, and unbelief. It represents him resisting, not only such temptations as are common to men, but surmounting trials to which no other man was ever called; furnishing in his whole practice not only an instructer, but a model; showing every where in his writings, that the same offers, the same supports, the same victories, are tendered to every suffering child of mortality,-that the waters of eternal life are not restricted to prophets and apostles, but are offered freely to every one that thirsteth,-offered without money and without price.

CHAP. III.

On the epistolary writers of the New Testament, particularly St. Paul.

CAN the reader of taste and feeling, who has followed the much enduring hero of the Odyssey with growing delight and increasing sympathy, though in a work of fiction, through all his wanderings, peruse with inferior interest the genuine voyages of the Apostle of the Gentiles over nearly the same seas? The fabulous adventurer, once landed, and safe on the shores of his own Ithaca, the reader's mind is satisfied, for the object of his anxiety is at rest. But not so ends the tale of the Christian hero. Whoever closed St. Luke's narrative of the diversified events of St. Paul's travels; whoever accompanied him with the interest his history demands, from the commencement of his trials at Damascus to his last deliverance from shipwreck, and left him preaching in his own hired house at Rome, without feeling as if he had abruptly lost sight of some one very dear to him, without sorrowing that they should see his face no more, without indulging a wish that the intercourse could have been carried on to the end, though that end were martyrdom.

Such readers, and perhaps only such, will rejoice to renew their acquaintance with this very chiefest of the apostles; not indeed in the communication of subsequent facts, but of important principles; not in the records of the biographer, but in the doctrines of the saint. In fact, to the history of Paul in the sacred oracles succeed his Epistles. And these Epistles, as if through design, open with that "to the-beloved of God called to be saints" in that very city, the mention of his residence in which concludes the preceding narrative.

Had the sacred canon closed with the evangelical narrations, had it not been determined in the counsels of divine wisdom, that a subsequent portion of inspired Scripture in another form, should have been added to the historical portions, that the epistles should have conveyed to us the results of the mission and the death of Christ, how immense would have been the disadvantage, and how irreparable the loss: may we presume to add, how much less perfect would have been our view of the scheme of Christianity, had the New Testament been curtailed of this important portion of religious and practical instruction.