CHAPTER I.

CHARITY OF EDUCATION ENFORCED.

"Go and teach all nations."

JESUS CHRIST.

FROM GOD'S GENERAL LAW OF LOVE.

THERE is an impassable difficulty in that point in which every attempt to establish for ourselves a scheme of the moral universe must begin or end, the permission of sin, by the pure and Almighty God. Though we honour that Being in whose similitude we are, by thinking with deep care of our majestic race, and are justified in the same by the revealed account of our important interests, and thereby taught to give undivided attention to our own sphere of duty; yet we may grievously err in supposing that the plans of Deity,

or the great eternity, are exhausted by the destinies of our peculiar species, or of those other orders of created being of whom we have been told. There may be a thousand other worlds now existing, or yet to be created, for whose sake, and according to whose peculiar character, a sure barrier against lapse, and thus a wise provision for general happiness, hath been allowed in the example of the two orders of fallen beings. Or, in the growing ardour and capacities of the angelic nature, God may have left a pledge, that they should know him farther, and be subordinate, however high, to a God whose purity is not merely a passive exemption from stain, but enmity and power to subdue sin, where it hath appeared, that will arise to scourge it from the presence of His Throne, and from His Holy Heavens, and allow it a life somewhere, but to bear the everlasting brand of his displeasure, the seal of vengeance and holy active indignation, coloured with the red terrors of Hell. This lesson is from the history and fate of the fallen angels.

In that peculiar dispensation under which sin hath been permitted among men, but we more happily dealt with, God has been pleased to shew that, not merely in stern justice, but in every attribute, lies his enmity against sin; and that his love and mercy can subdue it, as well as the severe prerogative which hath condemned, without hope, the fallen cherubim.

Subordinate in extent to this general permission of sin on earth, but constituent of the same, there are circumstances, from the wide history of its nations, to that of each individual life, which, of whatever other parts of God's scheme they combine an illustration with the responsibility of our free-will, glorify at the same time, in their thousand concentric or involved cycles, the same large character of grace by which we are redeemed, and particularly, in this highest possible way, that the circumstances of our world require it as the model of a rule to man in all relations of his life.

FROM THE FATE OF ANCIENT NATIONS.

Now mark the general history of the world :-in no department can be seen any progressive power of self-amelioration; but on the contrary, an uncertain dependance upon circumstances, to say nothing of religion, for civilization itself in any wide degree.

Beyond the corrective memory of the first fall, the great and growing degeneracy of men brought on them the flood. From this point of example and deeply enforced instruction, man started anew, and with the retained advantage of having the knowledge which his antediluvian fathers had acquired; but, far from ensuring the continued improvement of man, these could not even stay his general declension and in downward history, even with the high blessings which the religion deposited with the Jews, and farther, the instruction of Christ himself, might have procured for the world, what do we find? Only points of civilization and knowledge, like stars amidst

wastes of darkness,-a doubtful philosophy with a few of the Ancients, a degrading ignorance and superstition and corruption with the many,—an inveterate prescription, defying the Holy Religion of Christ,-its influence communicating brightness but to a few places of our earth,—and the return of a darkness overlaying its lights, and filling up like "a poring vessel," the moral universe ;in all instances no wide result from the boasted native powers of man, but a perversion or natural weakness of apprehension, and equally the same in the face of offered instruction. The same general annals that strikingly illustrate our need of Divine Light, from a trial of nations in every situation of climate and country, and which seem at once to justify the conclusion, that the Spirit of God is further necessary to make His great act of mediatorial sacrifice of any wide ameliorating influence; if examined on a farther account, to find by what means, or from what want a general improvement has failed,-besides the corruptive