The flood changed the constitution of the earth, and probably did it chiefly by changing its position; by sinking, as it were, one of its poles 23 degrees towards the plane of its own orbit, and elevating the other the same distance above it: thus subjecting it to a continual alternation of cold and heat, from the extreme horrors of a northern winter to the scorching heats of a tropical summer.

Moses induces the belief that a radical and extensive change has pervaded the entire constitution of our devoted planet. The cataracts of heaven opened the stores of indignation, and the deep dark fountains of the great abyss were broken up to consummate its ruin. An ocean's flood was heaved from beneath over all its fertile valleys, sloping hills, and lofty mountains. The planet yawned as if bursting asunder to swallow down the untold millions of its infidel and atheistic inhabitants. The solid crust of the "rock-ribbed earth" was rent in pieces, while the solid stratas ascending from the beds of ancient oceans, gave mighty proof that Omnipotence had indignantly risen to assert the rights of its insulted majesty before an astonished universe. The former abodes of men became the beds of new seas and oceans, while the channels of the ancient waters occasionally became the terra firma of a new world.

The sea-drenched earth, the miserable wreck of its ancient grandeur chilled by its long submersion in this watery waste, became the cold and comparatively dreary abode of the new family of man. But Noah, soon as it became dry, reared an altar to the Lord, and presented a grateful offering to his Almighty Benefactor, who had safely piloted his unwieldly ship on a dark and shoreless ocean to a safe and comfortable anchorage in the cliffs of Ararat-where we shall leave him till our next lesson.

A. C.

MAN'S CAPACITY FOR HAPPINESS.

WHEN We look at a man in his natural state we are compelled to regard him as being perfectly happy; violence and deceit had not entered his borders; pain of body and misery of mind were consequently far away, and equally unknown to him in that happy condition. He was full of knowledge; his duty was all before him; he attended to it and was completely blest. Sin, guilt, misery, and pain, were wholly preternatural, and lay beyond his state of unstained obedience; nor could he purchase the fatal knowledge of those things but by a price almost too terrible to name-disobedience,

Such, indeed, seems to have been the perfection of our first parents in regard to happiness, they do not appear to have even once thought of their own native defencelessness; nor does it seem to have occurred to them once, that they were naked, till the misery resulting from their shame for the past and fear of the future flashed upon their minds the whole state of the case, and caused them with intolerable mortification, to feel that now they were wholly unprepared to meet their Creator as when in a state of conscious innocence. In brief, they felt that they were naked; they felt they were in their persons defenceless, ignorant of death, afraid to meet it, and incapable of

either resisting, or escaping it. "And they heard the voice of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day; and Adam and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees in the garden. And the Lord God called unto Adam, and said to him, Where art thou? And he said I heard thy voice in the garden and was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself."

Innocence, then, is a glorious feast; it is the feast of the soul; while misery, like an evil angel, is the inseparable companion of disobedience; misery, indeed, follows sin, as the shadow follows the form of the hated Hyena, when it roams in quest of prey at the sultry hours of noon amid the wretched cottages of the sunburnt Hagarenes; but righteousness is like the resurrection morn, it is full of hope-it is full of heaven. Happiness, mental moral happiness, therefore, is to be referred for its origin to obedience to God; while obedience itself is to be referred to law-law to authority-and authority to rightand right to his property in us by creation, by preservation, by purchase, by inheritance; for we belong to God and to the Son of God by all these obligations-and to acknowledge God and his Son is "eternal life."

SHORT DISCOURSES.-No. VII.

THE SOWER IN THE KINGDOM OF GOD.

"THE kingdom of heaven is like seed."-Mark iv.

S.

RELIGION and nature, with power and great grandeur, publish by works and words this illustrious truth-" God desires to be known by his creatures." "The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament showeth his handy work." "The law of the Lord is perfect, converting the soul." Ps. xix. Of these two mighty systems the Apostle has affirmed "their line has gone out through all the earth, and their words to the end of the world."

But nature is first and religion afterwards. God first created Adam and afterwards imparted to him the institutions of true religion. So that we may say here what inspiration has elsewhere affirmed, that, "that is not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural, and afterwards that which is spiritual." In the order of creation it is first the seen, and afterwards the unseen; first creation, and then redemption. Reason first, and faith afterwards.

Seeing, however, that these are sister systems, and that the Most High is the great author of both, we may not improperly ask the question, Is it probable that in their great features God would create the one analogous to the other, and so render the knowledge of the first subservient to that of the last? This, by the way, is to ask no more than, Whether the rudiments of the divine character, as of thought, are laid in the system of nature?

Suppose the contrary were the fact that nature was dark and unlovely—that the fitness that meets our reason in that great system of final causes, had nothing similar to it in religion; that the power, and wisdom, and goodness of nature, found nothing analogous to them in revelation; in a word, that religion and nature were not homogeneous

but heterogeneous-inconsistent and incompatible, related to each other as contraries-as light and darkness, as good and evil; and not as contrasts, not as works and words, or as power and authority-then there would be in this point an evident absence of that economy of wisdom which in all other points eminently distinguishes the works and ways of their Creator; and it might thence be proved that they had not the same God for their author. It is prima facie probable, therefore, that nature and revelation are analogous to each other, and that as two great systems having the same God for their author, the knowledge of the one is subservient to the knowledge of the otherthat nature illustrates revelation—that they are analogous and like to each other in their grand features-that they are twin-sisters-the one born before the other, but both proceeding from the same great Father, and both conspiring by their displays of mercy and goodness, authority and power, to publish to the rational creation the eternal Godhead, the character of our great Father in heaven.

But the deductions of reason are made certain by the revelations of religion, and the conjectures of human wisdom proved true by the Oracles of heavenly inspiration-for it is a fact, that our Lord, in the holy Scripture, whence we have taken our motto, compares the one to the other; he likens the things of religion to those of nature, and by so doing establishes the truth both of their analogy and their mutual subserviency. He says, "So is the kingdom of heaven as if a man should cast seed into the ground, and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the fruit should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how (for the earth bringeth forth fruit of herself) first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear; but when the fruit is brought forth, immediately he putteth in the sickle because the harvest is come.' Mark iv. This is to our point; there is then upon the face of nature a feature of resemblance to religion-a homogenety of means and ends of divine goodness and human duty; for there is always something that God does for man both in nature and religion, and something else which man must do for himself; God gives the seed, but man must sow it; God makes it to grow, but man thrusts in the sickle and reaps it.

Is it asked, What is the design of the parable? We answer, It seems to have been spoken by the Lord for the encouragement of the preachers of the Gospel, to assure them that if they would cultivate, it should grow; if they would sow, they should reap-they should thrust in the sickle at last. The parable is evidently one of obligation and reward. Its moral is this, That, as in the kingdom of nature, in the kingdom of heaven industry shall be rewarded.

In the letter of the parable, the prominent points are these five, namely:

:

1. The sower.

2. The soil.

3. The seed.

4. Its progress and perfection.

5. The harvest.

In the spirit of the parable, the sower signifies the preacher of the Gospel; the soil the soul, or public mind; the seed the word of

salvation; its gradual growth the progress and perfection of Gospel principle in the heart and life of the hearers; and the harvest is the conversion of men at last. The man who faithfully labours in the field allotted to him, and soweth the seed of the Gospel in all minds, shall see converts to it at last. If he does not, others will, for the soul, like the soil, bringeth forth fruit of herself. She has, like the soil, the reproductive faculty-the grain-growing power-and will yield, through God's grace, a harvest of righteousness at last, to reward the husbandman by whom she is sowed.

We shall here submit a definition of the Gospel in its great features, as we understand it, and afterwards state what we conceive to be the truths indicated in the parable. The Gospel signifies good news, and is comprehended chiefly in three things, namely:

1. Remission of sins for the past.

2. The Holy Spirit for the future.

3. Eternal life in the end.

That is, first, justification; second, sanctification; and, finally, glorification. Popery has put sanctification before justification, and if men, as Catholicity affirms, are prayed out of hell, into heaven, then Rome has also put glorification before both sanctification and justification.

1. We deduce from the parable, then, this truth, namely:-That it is the duty of all the ministers of the Word of Life, and of all Christians, to hold forth the Gospel of Christ to all around-to proclaim unceasingly in the ears and hearing of all men the remission of sins by the blood of a crucified Saviour, the gracious gift of the Spirit by a risen and exalted Redeemer, and life-everlasting in the end.

2. We infer also, That it is the prerogative of all who do this to cherish the reasonable and Scriptural hope, that sooner or later, their industry and religious care shall be rewarded; that they shall reap if they faint not; that they shall see first the blade, then the ear, then the full corn in the ear; that they shall thrust in the sickle at last.

In a future discourse we shall argue out in detail these two propositions. In the meantime it is not to be doubted that the duty of all Christians, and of Christian ministers particularly, is to sow the public mind broad-cast with the seed of the Gospel, and to give assurance to all men that "now is the accepted time," that "now is the day of salvation," that the remission of sins, the Holy Spirit, and glory eternal at last, shall reward the sufferings of all who believe and obey the Gospel. And it is the privilege of ministers to do this in the blessed hope that their preaching will convert the people. The seed will vegetate. They may not know how far reproduction is like creation-mysterious in its mode, but it will grow and as the power of God in creation developed itself in seed, so by the same power the seed shall develop itself in fruit. "He that reapeth receiveth wages and gathereth fruit into life eternal; that both he that soweth and he that reapeth may rejoice together." So be it.

S.

LANGUAGE is neither so subtle or extensive as is truth and nature; and a glimpse into religious truth is often given to us in a figure which all the words in the language would fail to impart with equal distinctness.

KNOWLEDGE.

OUR capacity for knowledge gives birth to our right to free inquiry, without which we might sink into the most slavish ignorance, and be imposed upon by the more crafty of mankind, till our personal freedom, and the right of life, whence it springs, should either be wrested from us altogether or be rendered so intolerable as to make death, its opposite, the more desirable of the two. From the right of free inquiry all the knowledge of the world, all that we know of the earth, the sea, the air, the skies-all that we know of science, mechanics, astronomy, optics, mathematics, geography, electricity, galvanism, chemistry-all that we have learnt of the arts, whether useful or ornamental, music, drawing, engraving, sculpture, painting, poetry, eloquence and history-all that we know of natural history, anatomy, botany, mineralogy, arises from free inquiry and from the capacity of knowledge with which our Creator has endowed us. Take away free inquiry then, and you reduce a man to the level of a brute; you virtually adjudge him not to be possessed of a capacity for knowledge, and consequently injure, insult, degrade, and dishonour his nature. If we prevent a man from freely inquiring into "What is," we must not be surprised if he fails to know "What ought to be;" that is, deprive him of knowledge, and you divest him of morality,-that is, ignorance and immorality are inseparable-or, ignorance is the parent of vice.

TYRANNY OF OPINIONISM.-No. VI.

S

Present-Bishop Omicron, Doctor Virtuoso, Doctor Biblicus, Deacons Mutans and Equitas, Dr. Doubty and his party, together with Evangelist Zenas, and a great concourse.

MEETING opened by Bishop Omicron with prayer; after which

he said

Having assembled for mutual edification in things spiritual and eternal, I sincerely hope brethren, that the discussion may be conducted with great gravity, solemnity, and polite decorum. I was sorry, indeed grieved, at some indications during our late meeting on the questions now before us. I discover rather too much levity on some countenances now assembled, which I cannot but notice as incompatible with the objects of the meeting. It is a Wednesday evening, it is true, but our meeting is in a house sacred to the memory and the institutions of the Messiah, and on a subject involving more or less some of the fundamental principles of the Christian institution. I ask then, from all present, a decent respect to the audience, the place, and the subject in discussion.

Deacon Mutans.-Before the subject of the evening is introduced I desire to know, brother Omicron, in what point of view our brother Dr. Doubty, and those who withdrew with him, are contemplated by this church. Would the presiding Bishop inform the audience how these brethren stand with the church in this place?

Deacon Equitas.-I desire to know, brother Omicron, what this meeting has to do with Dr. Doubty and his friends, before any opinion is expressed in answer to our brother Mutans?