other hand, read books written to revile it, and have gladly caught at any apparently formidable or clever objections which you have heard from unbelievers, and, without seriously examining, have taken them as unanswerable. You have

often received suggestions, or sought for them eagerly, to support you in your infidelity; but never consulted any person well qualified to resolve your doubts, explain your supposed difficulties, and lead you into a full and clear view of the arguments in favour of the Bible; and, in all this, you have displayed a heart far more inclined to fall in with the dogmas of infidelity, than to do justice to the claims of revelation.

All this shows that your heart is in a corrupt state; that you are not prepared to receive the truth in the love of it; that you have dishonestly avoided it, and shunned the change which it enforces. You have been cleaving to your infidel opinions, not because they were really more evidently true than the contrary, but because they have served to screen you from the condemnation denounced in the Bible upon sin; and because you have found it convenient to profess yourself an unbeliever in order to keep from distressing qualms of conscience. You know that you have not desired supremely, perhaps not at all, to have your will brought into accordance with the Divine will. You must be conscious that you have not desired nor sought that moral purity, that love of God, without which you can neither hope to please him, nor to live for ever with him; but have been pleased with any opinions which did but seem to afford licence and irresponsible liberty to your corrupt nature. You know that any opinions, no matter how crude, inconsistent, and unfounded, which

did but seem to release you from all ideas of responsibility to any moral rule, or any supreme Governor, were favourably received by you. You may readily perceive that you have no foundation for your infidel opinions, but the dictates of men, who can show as little foundation for their doctrines as yourself. You must know, or may know, that in receiving these opinions, you have trusted men not trustworthy, men of small knowledge, and rash judgments, and bad characters; and that such are the great mass of professed infidels. You must know that the generality of these are men of bad morals, of violent passions, and evil tempers; who can scarcely trust each other, and are constantly fluctuating in their views, and possessed of little that can be considered fixed and settled opinion, except their common dislike of the Bible, and their wish to be free from all moral restraints. You must know that an honourable and virtuous character is an exception among them, and that the mass of them are any thing but honourable and respectable; that they are persons whom you cannot permanently esteem or trust, and that you would not yourself seriously wish your wife or your children to embrace their opinions, and follow their practice. You must have perceived that almost all pre-eminently vicious persons profess infidelity; that there is a most strong and marked affinity between infidelity and immorality; and that scarcely any one becomes systematically, openly, and daringly wicked, until he has cast off the authority of the Bible, and declared himself an unbeliever. Surely this undeniable fact should make you suspicious of this harmony, this conjunction between the two.

Hence, then, you must, or, at least, ought to

feel, that your association with such, your agreement with them, is a matter that calls for your most serious examination—an examination which ought, in particular, to regard this question: whether it is not the depravity of your heart which has made them agreeable to you, and their opinions welcome.

Surely you cannot deny, that it would be much for the good of your soul to embrace the glorious prospects of Christianity-that you can find nothing in infidelity to be compared with them. The system has nothing to offer you beyond a blank, an absolute and eternal blank, and a licence, an impunity to your depraved nature, for this life, a mere jubilee to your animalism. Think whether this is, or can be, in any sense worthy of a rational, an intellectual nature, capable, as it undoubtedly is, of the pure and seraphic joys of true religion. Think, again, of the slender ground on which your opinions rest; and if that ground should prove false, how irreparable will be the dilemma into which you will fall! The believer in Christianity can lose nothing; for if he is wrong, he is as well off as you; and if he is right, and you wrong, then you forfeit every hope and every joy, and fall under the heavy condemnation of your Maker's displeasure. Consider what it is that Christianity would enforce upon you, and imagine what sort of a character it aims to form, what duties it calls you to discharge, and what prospects it sets before you, and judge whether there is in them any thing to which sober reason can object. You are required by it to love God with all your heart, and your neighbour as yourself. Is there in this any thing objectionable? Does it not, rather, commend itself to every reasonable being who

admits that there is a God, and who allows that the whole human family are equally his care? Consider, further, that the peculiarities of Christianity-the doctrines of repentance, and of forgiveness of sins through the intervention of a Divine Mediator-really contain nothing irrational, but seem to be perfectly adapted to the consciousness of moral imperfection which we all have; and involve neither any thing unreasonable nor unjust, but, on the contrary, meet our guilty and helpless nature with assisting grace and pardoning mercy. Further, that Christianity, in requiring conversion and a change of heart, as essential to your acceptance with your Maker, and your final happiness, is in perfect accordance with the great fact, of which our own hearts, as well as the state of things around us, afford abundant evidence-that we are a race of fallen, guilty, and erring creatures. Reason itself assures us, that an agreement of our moral nature with the moral nature of God, must be an essential condition of our happiness, both in this life and that to come. Your own experience will afford sufficient proof, both in your sufferings of body, and your afflictions and embarrassments of mind; in the contrariety between your judgment and your passions, your conscience and your inclinations; that you need a change, a rad cal and entire change of heart, to bring you into a state of accordance with the will and nature of your Creator. And surely you can never hope to attain to immortal life, while you continue unconscious of that harmony of will and affection; or while you labour to detach your mind and heart from the thought of submission to God, and dependence upon him? Again, look at the miserable ends of infidels; at the darkness and dread of

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their last hours; at the absence even, to say the least, of any emotions, any aspirations, or any prospects in their last hours, worthy of immortal beings about to pass into the presence of their Maker, and ascend to their final state of being. Surely there is nothing inviting, nothing exhilarating, nothing joyful in such scenes as the following, selected out of many equally appalling. A respectable writer says Some years ago, I occasionally met with a disciple of the late Dr. Darwin. He had drank so deeply into the system and spirit of his master, as to consider him the very first philosopher of the age. I have heard him expatiate with enthusiasm on his writings and character, and revile the Holy Scriptures with all the vaunt of vulgar blasphemy. A few months after my last interview with this gentleman, I heard that he was no more. Struck with the event, I was solicitous to know how he died. The account I received was, that, as death approached, the confidence he had before expressed in his deistical opinions forsook him, and deep horror seized his mind. A short time before his departure, supposing himself alone, he was overheard, by an unobserved attendant, giving vent to the agonies of a tortured conscience. With despair, he expostulated with Dr. Darwin, whom he now reproached as his deceiver; and after loading his name with execrations which I dare not put on paper, he closed in some such terms as the following: Monster ! wretch! Is this the end of your boasted philosophy? Have you brought me to this?"-Are these the confessions of infidel philosophers?

such sayings as these have escaped them occasionally, what convulsive emotions must have been hidden in thousands of hearts! What unexpressed