the time being, credit all that his parents say, for, with new developements of reason, times of sifting will repeatedly come, when the arbitrary instructions he has received, must be severely scrutinized. Then the good of his past instructions may be retained, and the bad cast away.

This is the order of God in training human souls. It is not by giving every one a degree of intelligence which enables him, from the onset, to discriminate between all subjects before receiving them, but it is by endowing man with a capacity to believe almost all that is said, especially by friends, and then at a later period in life he gives him the power of bringing all the subjects of his store-house under critical review, that man may decide what shall remain permanently, and what shall be discarded as errors of youth.

Man, being possessed of such a nature, requires a religion of authority. As soon as he is capable of thinking on the subject of religion, he requires certain great principles of belief as the stand-point of all his thoughts. What if some of these principles should give way, and not stand the test of the future developements of reason? Even in that case, it is better for one to believe much that is false, than to credit nothing that is true. When every principle is shattered that cannot stand the severest test, enough of truth will be left, far preferable for a foundation than nothing at all.

Now, if, in accordance with the proverb, it be "better to be sometimes imposed upon than never to trust," this order of Divine Providence which renders it so easy for the child to believe, is a good arrangement. But how desirable an untarnished system of religion!

Such a system,

true, pure, unmixed with the least error, is found in the Bible. By this system, the young man may cleanse his way. It will rid him of all the false impressions received in childhood and youth. The need of such a clear, perfect and positive system of religion the ancients deeply felt and frankly acknowledged.

2. The world needed the revelation of Christianity, in order that the good of all past systems might be preserved. Without this consummation of the Bible's revelations, all preceding systems would have been unavailing and inefficient, but with it the past is invested with a most significant vitality. Says Neander: "As it had been intrusted to the Hebrews to preserve and transmit the heaven derived element of the Theistic religion, so it was ordained that among the Greeks, all seeds of human culture should unfold themselves in beautiful harmony, to a complete and perfect whole; and then Christianity, taking up the opposition between the Divine and the human, was to unite both in one, and show how it was necessary that both should cooperate to prepare for the appearance of itself and for the unfolding of what it contains. Origen had no hesitation in admitting, what Celsus, the great antagonist of Christianity maintained, when he ascribed to the Greeks a peculiar adaptation of talents and fitness of position, which qualified them for applying human culture to the developement and claboration of those elements of Divine knowledge they had received from other quarters, namely, from the East.”*

Neander's History of the Christian Religion and the Church. volume 1 page 4.

Admitting all this to be true, we may still hold Christianity to be that system which draws out of all other systems their real value, and preserves it for the good of humanity.

3. The world needed a religion adapted to both classes of mind-the philosophic and the superstitious. This necessity was felt and acknowledged by the wise men of antiquity. Strabo, who wrote in the days of Augustus Cæsar, says, "The multitude of women, and the entire mass of the common people, cannot be led to piety by the doctrines of philosophy; for this purpose superstition also is necessary, which must call in the aid of myths and tales of wonder.”* But the utter inefficiency of superstition to strengthen the unlearned heathen to perform the weary pilgrimage of life, and to console them in the hour of death is most graphically and almost fearfully set forth by Plutarch. This author, as quoted by Neander, says :-"Every little evil is magnified to the superstitious man, by the scaring spectres of his anxiety. He looks upon himself as a man whom the gods hate and pursue with their anger. A far worse lot is before him; he dares employ no means for averting or curing the evil, lest he be found fighting against the gods. The consoling friends, are driven away. Leave me, says the wretched man,―me, the impious, the accursed, hated of the gods, to suffer my punishment. He sits out of doors, wrapped in sackcloth or in filthy rags; ever and anon he rolls himself, naked, in the dirt, confessing aloud this and that sin. He has eaten or drank something wrong, he has

*Neander, volume 1, page 7.

gone some way or other, which was not allowed m by the divinity. The festivals in honor to the gods give no pleasure to the superstitious, but fill him rather with fear and affright. He proves the saying of Pythagorus false in his own case,—that we are happiest when we approach the gods, for it is just then, he is most wretched. Temples and altars are places of refuge for the persecuted; but where all others find deliverance from their fears, there the superstitious man fears and trembles the most. Asleep or awake, he is haunted alike by the spectres of his anxiety. Awake, he makes no use of his reason; and asleep, he finds no deliverance from what disturbs him. His reason always slumbers; his fears are can he find an escape from his imaginary terrors. men fear the gods, and fly to them for succor. They flatter them, and insult them. They pray to them and complain of them."*

always awake.

Nowhere

These

A description more true to the life could not be given of the great mass of modern, than Plutarch has given of the ancient heathen, and if, as Strabo intimates, such a system was necessary for the untutored masses, it was verily a sad necessity.

But what advantage had the philosopher over the superstitious? Did his system, though harder to learn, yet when learned, yield more consolation than superstition itself could afford? In answering this query, we can do no better than refer to the author already quoted. To use his own words "They, who without any deep sense of religious need, were yet unable to make up their minds to a

Neander, volume 1, page 13.

total denial of religion, endeavored to content themselves with that dead abstraction, which is usually left behind, as something to retire to, from the living forms of religion, when these are on the point of expiring,-a certain species of Deism, a way of thinking which does not indeed absolutely deny the existence of a Deity, but yet places him at the utmost possible distance, in the back-ground of his works. An idle Deity is all that is wanted; not one every where active-whose agency pervades the whole life of things. He who to satisfy his religious wants requires any thing beyond this meager abstraction, he who would know anything more respecting man's relation to a higher world appears already, to men of this way of thinking, a fanatic or a fool. The inquiries that suggest themselves under the feeling of a more profound religious need, are to such minds unintelligible; for they are strangers to the feeling itself. In the notions entertained by many concerning the anger of the gods, and the punishments of the lower world, they see nothing but superstition, without recognizing in them a fundamental truth, namely, the undeniable need, which leads men into various delusions, only when misunderstood. But, by minds of this stamp, the whole is ridiculed alike as mere dreams and fancies of limited man, who transfers all his own passions over to his gods. As a representative of this class, we may take that satirical castigator of manners in the age of the Antonnies, Lucian, who characterizes himself as the hater of lies, cheats and charlatanry. And Justin Martyn observes of the philosophers in his time, 'that the greater part of them bestow no thought on the questions, whether there is one God, or whether there is a providence, or no providence; as if