Such is God. Such is man by Him created after His image and likeness.

That the subjection of a created being may be acceptable to his Creator, it is necessary that the obedience of the creature be free: but the will that is free to obey, is free also to rebel.

Man has rebelled and is fallen from the perfection in which he was created. Hence moral evil. Natural evil has been ordained as a corrective of moral evil.

Justice is in perfect consonance with wisdom. The Supreme Being, absolute in wisdom, is of necessity just. An offence committed by the creature against the Creator, subjects the offender to punishment. The Creator cannot remit the penalty; for that would be to deviate from justice: but he may Himself bear the penalty; thus preserving justice inviolate in the sight of all his intellectual creation, and restoring to that innocence, from which they are fallen, those of the sons of men who will accept their restoration as His work, His gift.

"The creature was subjected to vanity, not willingly, but of necessity, in hope." The necessity arose from man's abuse of his free will; the hope is derived from the atonement for sin by the second person of the Godhead, the WISDOM, the WORD; bearing to the first person of the same Godhead, the relation of Son to Father. The Son, made man by the operation

of the Spirit, the third person of the same Godhead, expiated man's offence by his own death, and assured our restoration to life and immortality by his own resurrection. His merit has obtained for us that regeneration by the Spirit of God by which we are made just before the Godhead, and able to do good works that merit in his sight when they are united to the merit of the Son. "As many as received him, to them gave he power to become sons of God, who are born, not of man, but of God." Such is the sum of the true revelation.

The Supreme Being is not more incomprehensible to man than man is to himself; his thought arrives, in an instant, at any point, however remote; for space exists not in respect of thought; and eternity is the only boundary of its excursions into time, past or future. That a being of such energies should be imprisoned in a body subjected to disease, decay, and death, this is the evil in which are comprehended all other evils of his earthly condition. He did not condemn himself to this state; he did not choose it; his soul would have recoiled from it with horror. His Creator, wise and benevolent, would not have compelled him to enter on such an existence without cause: justice and mercy united in the dispensation, that the ill by man here endured might rectify the perversity of his will and heal the wounds of his soul.

Banished from the more immediate presence of his Creator, man not only feels how painful is his life on earth, but how unsatisfactory are all its enjoyments, how insufficient to compensate that lost happiness which, by an instinct of his fallen nature, he craves, he regrets, and longs to regain. Pride, and a desire to be independent of his Creator, brought on his fall: here the very elements are his masters, and he is compelled, at every step, to call for help on beings weak and frail like himself. Thus is his stubbornness corrected, and he learns humility.

He feels that he is daily drawing near to the term of his abode on earth; but that his existence will then be terminated, is a thought which nature repels and drives far away. Some few, indeed, of the sons of men have died as if they believed that all would then be ended; but these have been few in proportion to the great mass of those who have passed the barrier of mortality: the conviction of the former, if real, may be imputed to the prevalence of some extraordinary influence or to some passing excitement; but the persuasion of the latter is cherished by those to whom it is a source of joyful hope, and cannot be rejected even by those who dread its accomplishment.

The false religions of the several ages and countries of the world, have, in various ways,

instructed men how to prepare for this great consummation: the moral sense, implanted in the heart, has, in general, dictated the lessons by which mankind has been taught the means of obtaining a happy future state; and it would be rash to assert that positive observances have been enjoined as available, independently of the discharge of moral duties. The genius of the poet could not preserve him from displaying the iniquitous prejudices of his time and creed in ridiculing those

"Who, to make sure of heaven,

Dying put on the weeds of Dominic;" and they may be`equally unjust who shall presume that ceremonial practices have been instituted anywhere without reference to piety, humility, or the love due from man towards his God.

But that man had fallen from the innocence in which he had been created, that the divine justice could not remit his sin without an atonement, that He who in human language, inadequate to express this mystery, is called the second person in the unity of the Godhead, would in our nature expiate our offences, and become our mediator of redemption, making us and our good works acceptable: these truths, necessary and consoling, and animating by motives and confirming by sanctions of charity, could be known only to those to whom God had revealed them.-HENRY DIGBY BESTE. MS.

ON SACRIFICE.

The immolation of brute animals, nay, sometimes even of man himself, in honour both of the true God and of falsely-imagined Deities, has been the practice of man from the earliest times. So widely prevalent and so long-continued has been the usage of sacrifice, that many have been inclined to think that its institution originated in some natural feeling: yet the religion of nature lays down no ground for such a mode of worship, and unaided reason can discover no motive for it. The followers of natural religion have ever reasoned, as does the Almighty himself in the Jewish Scripture, "Thinkest thou that I will eat bull's flesh or drink the blood of goats? Offer unto God thanksgiving, and pay thy vows unto the Most High, and call upon me in the day of trouble, and I will deliver thee."

It can hardly be supposed that the myste. rious prophecy-the seed of the woman shall bruise the head of the serpent-was the only indication given to Adam of the mode by which mankind were to be redeemed from the consequences of the fall of their first parents. No: the vicarious suffering of Christ was announced to him: that such was the proceeding of the God of Adam in this respect may be inferred from