conscience. Consider only the two classes of men on the largest scale. Leave out all doubtful individuals. Take the thorough and complete unbeliever and the thorough and complete Christian; and the more you examine the two characters in their principles, their practice, their claims to benevolence, their public labours and writings, their deaths, their fulfilment of the ends of their being, the deeper will be your conviction of the truth of the Christian religion, and the utter folly and impiety of infidelity.

I dare not pursue the subject further. I shrink from the contemplation of the eternal condition of the two bodies of men. I could dwell, indeed, on the ineffable joys of the humble Christian, his immediate access to his Maker and Redeemer, his freedom from all pain, all imperfection, all change; his fruition of all the bliss of which his body and his soul are capable but the other side of the contrast would be too fearful. I draw a veil over the sceneI have said enough.

I would fain persuade myself that there is not a young person before me, who does not feel convinced that the objections of infidelity turn out, as we predicted, to be a confirmation of the cause they were adduced to oppose; that

they not only lose their force, but become one of the most fruitful sources of subsidiary proof to the divine origin of the Bible.

Yes; the whole question about Christianity, and its importance and truth, may be settled by the subject before us.

Conceive all the wise and good men through every generation, and in the most distant countries, who have agreed in receiving the Bible as a divine Revelation, to be assembled together. Weigh their pretensions to your confidence. Many of them have been noted for seriousness, erudition, extent of talent, penetration, and impartiality in judging of men and things. They have taken the utmost pains to satisfy themselves upon the question of the truth of Christianity. Their holy lives and patient sufferings, and happy deaths, (many of them by martyrdom,) command the respect of all who know them, and are proper grounds of confidence, in their deliberate judgment, as to a question of religion.

Then assemble in another body, the leading infidels and unbelievers, who have lived in many generations, and in distant countries, and who have agreed in rejecting, on the ground of speculative, and inconsistent, and oft-refuted objections, the truth of Christianity. Weigh the natural grounds of distrust on a religious ques

tion, which their habits, their tempers, their pursuits, their vicious lives, their fearful deaths, present. Consider the atheism into which they have too often fallen. Consider the utter destitution of any thing in the place of Christianity, which they are compelled to confess. Observe the levity, ridicule, scorn, apparent in their spirit and conduct. Mark the impurity and sensuality, the pride and presumption, which prevail in their writings. Observe their awful deaths. Weigh the manner in which they respectively prepare for an eternal world.

TELL ME, THEN, WHICH COMPANY HAS TRUTH ON ITS SIDE. TELL ME WHICH COMPANY YOU WOULD WISH TO BE FOUND IN AT

THE BAR OF GOD.

I cannot but suppose that if an individual of any class of beings, of entire impartiality, of a sound mind, and of a holy disposition, should be shown the two companies of those who have received and those who have rejected the Scriptures; and should compare the se-. riousness, learning, patient investigation of truth, solid judgment, holy, useful lives, manly and becoming composure in a dying hour, of the one company, with the character and conduct of the other, he would be induced, though he knew nothing of the direct arguments for the Christian Revelation, to take up the Bible with

profound veneration, and the strongest prepossession in its favour.'

But, strong as this ground in favour of Christianity is, you do not merely stand here. You place your feet, my young friends, upon the mass of external and internal evidences, on

which its divine authority rests. You plant yourselves upon the testimonies by which it is maintained. You fix your standing, in the midst of a confused and dark world, upon an immoveable rock.

It is only as a subsidiary argument that I have been considering the vanity of the objections against Christianity in themselves and in the persons who advance them.

Choose, then, your part more decidedly and boldly. If you have been at all entangled by the artful sophisms of scepticism, (and nothing is more easy to the corrupt heart of man,) break through the fatal delusion. Awake to the true state of things. If you cannot answer those objections specifically, outweigh them by the positive facts of Christianity; outweigh them by considering the impertinence of speculative reasonings, against the historical and uncontroverted evidences of Revelation; outweigh them by remembering that they apply as much to Deism as they do to Christianity; outweigh them by recollecting that they are only trials of

1 Scott.

your sincerity and submission of heart to God. But, beside this, especially outweigh them by looking at the lives and deaths of those who make objections to Christianity, and of those who obey Revelation. Death is near. The solemnities of that hour, no trifling, no obduracy can lessen. The awful consequences of that hour no tongue can describe. Reject, then, all the overtures of unbelief, which has no blessing of God in life nor in death. Fly from the society of those persons with whom you would not wish to be associated in eternity.

Remember, if you would be joined with the righteous in their death, you must follow their example in life. I know that you would prefer to enter another world with the wise and good. But the question of most practical importance is, WHICH COMPANY DO YOU WALK WITH IN THE JOURNEY OF LIFE? Choose now, while time is granted you, the right path. Take, with wisdom and manliness, the side of truth. All ungodliness is essentially infidelity; it springs from that temper-it leads to it. Christianity is essentially godliness and holiness. Obedience and disobedience to Almighty God form the substance of the two classes.

All we have been stating in this Lecture, and, indeed, in all those on the internal evidences, are the declarations of the moral Governor of