culiar line of argument which I have proposed to myself in this discourse will not allow me to enlarge on the utterly unfounded observation, That none but those who wished to calumniate the doctrine of the atonement ever represented it as having made God placable; nor on the strange expression of "expiating the guilt of sin," a personal, incommunicable thing, by the sacrifice of another not implicated in it; nor on the circuitous process, so unlike the simplicity of the divine works, by which the mercy of the Father is communicated to the sinner; nor on the inconsistency that one person of the co-equal Trinity should. ordain the sufferings of another. Every one may perceive that this system is an attempt to combine as much of Calvinism as may justify the use of its phraseology, with as much of reason and humanity as may enable it to stand its ground in a scrutinizing age. With all its cumbrous apparatus, does it make one truth respecting the nature of God, or the duty of man, more clear or more impressive, than the simple statement, that God forgives their sins to those who forsake them, and sent Christ into the world to teach and die, that he might thus reclaim them from those sins, by an example which his death must crown and doctrine which his death must seal? Which of

the perfections of God does it place in a clearer light? His wisdom?—it is admitted that we eannot trace it. His love?-the disposition to bless and to forgive is avowedly the same in both cases. His justice and his purity?—need we any stronger marks of the divine displeasure against sin, than the misery which attends it here, and the retribution which he has denounced against it hereafter? Can the torments of innocence prove his abhorrence of guilt? Does it make a man more zealous for good works, or more fearful of transgressing? It is well if, with all its refined distinctions, it do not rather encourage him in the opinion, that he has no longer any concern with repentance for sins already atoned, nor interest in performing those good works which are not the means of his everlasting happiness. Does it teach him more humility?--the proper sources of this virtue are a consciousness of the infinite distance between God and us, of the feebleness of our virtuous purposes, the number and guilt of our backslidings, the imperfection of our best services, and absence of all claim to heavenly felicity for having performed them, when they are so inadequate to our benefactor's earthly gifts. Gospel truth, therefore, gains nothing, either in distinctness or in force, by: the additions which this system makes to it,

but, on the contrary, this and every other scheme of atonement take something from its simplicity, its consistency, and its practical efficacy. Some of them may intercept more and some less of the rays of the divine benignity and mercy, or tinge what they transmit with a deeper or a fainter hue of blood; but they all spread a veil before our Heavenly Father's character; their operation resembles the optical experiment in which an image horribly distorted by the manner in which it is drawn, is imperfectly restored to the lineaments of nature by the counteracting influence of a second distortion.

But it is alleged that a system of Christianity, in which the atoning blood and merits of Christ form no part, is not" according to godliness," because it affords no ground of love towards the Redeemer. We cannot indeed say that he has rescued us from the wrath and curse of God, under which we must otherwise have perished; we dare not pluck up the foundations of the Father's throne, though it be to build an altar to the Son. We profess ourselves unable to conceive, how an infinite Being could endure the infirmities of mortality and the pains of death; or a mortal make that infinite atonement, which infinite sin is said to have demanded. These sources of love to

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Jesus we must therefore confess that we have not; but we do acknowledge in him the purest benevolence that ever claimed the gratitude of a human breast, and an assemblage of all the qualities which can most powerfully attract the affectionate veneration of human beings. We acknowledge in him the best friend ever raised up by Providence to bless mankind, their deliverer from the heaviest bondage in which the human mind has ever been enthralled. Nor were the blessings which the toils of his life and the agonies of his death procured, the portion only of some race of men long since extinct, and in whose welfare we feel but a languid interest: when we pour forth our souls to the Father of our spirits, in prayers which, but for the mission of Jesus, would have been offered to some monstrous fiction of our own benighted minds, or to some senseless block of matter; when the mild light of pardoning mercy breaks upon the soul, which the consciousness of guilt and doubts of the divine forgiveness, but for the Gospel, had involved in hopeless gloom; when a strong faith in the promise of immortality which Jesus brought to light, bears up our souls above the sorrows and temptations of this life, and gives us, even on earth, some foretaste of the joys of heaven; what motive is wanting to

raise in us gratitude and love towards the Saviour, which place him above every other object in our affections, except the Great First Cause of these and of all our blessings!

3. Christianity is a doctrine according to godliness, by teaching, and confirming beyond the possibility of doubt, the doctrine of a future life of retribution.

The almost universal prevalence of a belief in a future state, although a very insufficient argument of its reality, is a very strong proof how congenial the doctrine is to the feelings, how much adapted to the wants of man, and how important it was that it should receive some confirmation from evidence superior to that which the light of nature furnishes. For the lesser evils of life, besides a multitude of other alleviations, there is always the solace of hope, a gleam of brightness amidst the darkest clouds of adversity: but death, while it inflicted the deepest wounds of all, would leave us also most completely destitute of means for alleviating their agonizing pain. Without the hope of a future life, it might not always be possible to prove, even to the coarse and vulgar sensualist, that in bartering his moral and intellectual superiority for the miserable gratification of his appetite, he was not making a reasonable exchange; and all those acts of

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