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many of our present thinkers the form of skepticism we now describe and deplore. In our humble judgment, instead of miracles being the principal proof of Christianity, Christianity is a much stronger proof of miracles. Book intrinsically so divine, so simple, so far superior to all others, and so adapted to the wants of human nature, cannot be imagined to be deceived or to deceive others in the relation of facts. The quantity and singularity of such facts is itself an additional circumstance in their favor. A wise imposture would have sprinkled them more sparingly and artistically, and brought down in no case save in that of necessity, its Deus ex machina. The great purpose of miracles at first was to compel attention to the new system by the glare of grandeur it threw around it—a finger of supernal light must touch the head of the bashful boy-God, and mark him out to the world; their main use now is to corroborate a belief which has been formed upon quite independent grounds. "Culture," cries Strauss, "cannot believe in miracles." Culture, however, can and has believed in Christianity, and will not recal its belief, because she wears on her breast and forehead those mysterious ornaments which speak, not more forcibly than her whole dress and bearing, of a foreign and unearthly origin. Miracles must not be considered as splendid tricks-as mere mighty bravados, which whoso could not equal or explain was compelled to believe, as well as to believe whatever was said in the lecture that should follow or accompany those experiments. They were rather, in Foster's grand thought, the simple tolling of the great bell of the universe, to announce the great sermon that was to follow; and as the sermon continues after the bell has rung out, and becomes of its sound a memorial and testimony, so the marvellous words have outlived and do testify of the marvellous works.

A second cause of our recent refined skepticism may be found in the narrow, bigoted, and unworthy notions of Christianity which prevail, in the obstinacy with which they are retained, in the fury with which they are defended, and in the contrast thus presented to the liberal and fluent motion of the general age. This is a large text, and opens up a field which we have not at present time to em

brace. Religious authorship may be taken as a correct index of the general state of religious culture and progress. Now this has decidedly improved since John Foster wrote his first essays, where he so sternly characterizes a large proportion of its writings, where he speaks of "one writer who seems to value religion as an assassin his dagger, and for the same reason-of another, who in all his motions is clad with sheets of lead-of a third, from whose vulgar illuminations of religious themes you are excessively glad to escape into the solemn twilight of faith-and of a fourth, who represents the Deity as a dreadful king of furies, whose dominion is overshadowed by vengeance, whose music is the cries of victims, and whose glory requires to be illustrated by the ruin of his creation." For such, perhaps, we may now search our religious literature in vain; but we could point out some curious specimens still extant: here a writer who would sacrifice all the records of creation to the arbitrary interpretation of a Hebrew particle; there another, who, in order to prove Christianity the most excellent of the sciences, raves like a maniac against all science, and cares less for the sun, moon, and stars, than for a farthing candle glimmering in the corner of a conventicle; a third, propounding the horrible doctrine, that if you are not immersed in water you must be immersed in everlasting fire; a fourth, turning the Bible into a padlock on the chains of the slave; a fifth, seeking to excommunicate from fire and water here, and from water hereafter, one of the most gifted and amiable, albeit misled men of the age, who came an invited and unassuming stranger to our shores; a sixth, hanging around the majestic form of Christianity a dirty finery, picked up from the cast-off clothes of second-rate poets, and sinking the mother-tongue of heaven into the sickly whine of a mendicant, as though Isaiah had become an old Jewish clothesman; a seventh, indulging, while defending religion, in the worst of human passions and language, as if rancor, and want of charity, and spleen, could be baptized and consecrated to Christ's service as if the raven perched in Noah's ark were not a raven, a bird of foul feeding and bad omen still; an eighth, peppering bad poems with religion to make them sell; and a ninth, talking of the fearful secrets of future punishment as

coolly as if he were not also in danger of the judgment, and who perhaps goes smacking his lips from the side of the great universe-darkening sacrifice to the Lord Mayor's feast! Add to this the deluges of commonplace, issuing in the form of religious pamphlets and periodicals of the day, and the thousand narrow and fierce controversial productions which each month spawns, and conceive of the three-piled disgust, which in so many of the refined and intellectual darkens into a deeper feeling, and provokes the cry, "If this be religion, better skepticism, pantheism, atheism itself."

This, indeed, thank God, is not religion. But it must bear the reproach of having turned away many who otherwise would have come near and seen this great sight, and found how vast the difference between those crackling, whizzing, empty, and transient fireworks, and the low light of the wilderness, uneclipsed by the noonday ardors, clear, innocuous, but piercing as the eye of the Inspired, kindled from, and pointing above-the bush ever burning and never consumed.

Thirdly, The divided and unhappy state of the Church must bear its full share in accounting for the evil, and this the more especially when at present both letters and science are approaching closely the ideal of a commonwealth—when associations of the scientific and literary are the order of the day—when rancorous personalities and jealousies are dying out-when an appeal made in behalf of the family of a deceased poet is responded to with such promptitude by men of all politics and creeds, as to show that an electric cord of communication is fast binding the literary world into one. And yet alas! alas! for the divisions of Reuben, and the rents in the seamless garment of Christ. Where any real love between various parties? Where aught but hasty and ill-considered armistices? Where any broad comprehensive plan of union? Where a genuine esprit de corps among Christian churches? Where any actual unions consummated, except in cases where the parties had come so near before, that their union lost much of its romancewhere it seemed more a shaking of hands in the marketplace, than a marriage, and where, as at the peace of Amiens, every body on both sides was glad, but nobody proud? What philosophical examination of principles, conducted by

wise and impartial men, such as should precede a great scheme of permanent union, has ever been even talked of; and are even the meanest and basest of old arts of polemical depreciation and abuse altogether obsolete? It were long to trace the causes of this sad spectacle, which just amounts to the church inferior to the world, in culture and gentlemanly feeling, in Christian charity; but such is the fact, and prodigious the mischief which is springing from it. There are other causes which might have been illustrated, such as the contempt and prejudice entertained by many Christians for science and letters-the piece of well or ill adjusted mechanism to which the office of the ministry has been reduced -the superiority which the press has acquired over the pulpit -the political spirit which our churches of all kinds have been led to cherish-and the infection of German, and, in general of Continental modes of thought and speech. But, prominent above all, stands the enemy within the campthe ghastly fact that Christianity has not the vital hold over men which it formerly possessed-that we are now rather haunted by its ghost than warmed by its presencethat formality, mechanism, and a thousand other evil influences have crushed and choked it-and that its extension, however wide and rapid, will in all probability extend its evils at even a greater ratio than its advantages-propagate more tares than wheat. We unite our feeble voice with that of Chalmers, and James, and Thomas Binney, in proclaiming this alarming state of matters. It cannot now be concealed that a great proportion of the mind of the countryof those who make our laws, who distribute our justice, whose eloquence fills our courts, whose talent informs our press, whose energy inspirits our business, whose genius animates our higher literature, whose benevolence supports our charities, and whose beauty, taste, and accomplishments decorate and refine our society, have travelled away from churches, and resigned faith in creeds, and that this they have done principally because the charm and the power which were wont to detain them there have departed. Were a dance of the living suddenly turned into a dance of the dead, though there remained the same splendor in the decorations, and the same lustre in the lamps, and even the same grace in the movements, would there remain the same delight in the specta

tors? Would not they rush forth in confusion and shrieking dismay at the sight of this ghastly mimicry of life, enacted where its pulse was beating highest, and where its stream most richly and tumultuously ran? Thus feel many to our

deserted churches-deserted not of the dead but of the living, not of worshippers but of God. Pathetic the unseen Ichabod inscribed on the fallen cathedral-more pensive still the "Here God once dwelt," visible through the moonlight of meditation on the chambers of the soul in ruins; but, most sorrowful of all, the sight of a large assembly of professing Christians, where all the elegance, splendor, light, decency of deportment, eloquence of speaker-where sympathetic thrill, awful shadow, heaving breasts, and bursting tears themselves, will not disguise the fact that one is absent, and that this place is no more "dreadful" with his presence, nor glorious with his grace.

The statements thus made must be somewhat qualified. In the first place, we must not be understood to hold that all our modern skeptics are actuated by such motives, or influenced by such causes. Many, we fear, like their brethren in times past, just "hate the light because their deeds are evil," while others are stimulated to skepticism by vanity, pride, or ignorance. There is another class still, very intelligent but very inconsistent, of whom Miss Martineau may stand as a specimen, who, not merely doubting, but absolutely denying all the supernaturalism of Scripture, express their respect and reverence for the writers, although, on their own showing, those writers were either fools or rogues. But the class whom Sterling typified, while sorely perplexed about the supernatural part, and even the genuineness and authenticity of many of the documents, are smit to a passion with the grandeur and heavenliness of the system, even to its peculiarities of atonement, spiritual influences, &c.

Secondly, We must not be understood to homologate the train of thought which we have ventured to put into the mouth of the Sterling-skeptic, except so far as that relates to the insufficiency of external evidence, nor to insinuate that the causes we have mentioned excuse his skepticism. Prophecy, as well as miracles, we look on as powerfully corroborative of the divinity of religion, and the fate of nations, besides, not being the sole subject of prediction, is very im