moral perversity in the whole of this proceedingthat the sin of his judgment is the sin of his heart -and that unbelief which many would screen from condemnation, is in his instance unbelief fostered by his own wilful depravity, and an unbelief for which he deserves to be execrated?

And so may it be of Christianity. God may have sent a written communication to the world. And to every careful, and desirous reader, the evidence of His hand may be legibly inscribed upon it; and he who is willing to do His will, may recognise in the doctrine of Christ the traces of the divinity which inspired it; and the man on whose heart a weight of conscientiousness lies, may by the dint of patience and of prayer come to a full and rational assurance of its truth; and just because reading and enquiring and attending the ordinances, and all under the impulse of a sense of duty, may he become a steadfast believer. But if careless about God, he will be equally careless about any revelation that professes to have come from Him. The Bible may often solicit his eye, but still remain unopened and unused by him. That book from whose pages, if explored with honesty and prayer, there might beam a celestial effulgency upon his understanding, may be held in neglect or treated with insult and derision. For aught he knows, it may be the record of the will of Him who ushered him into life, and ministers to him all its enjoyments. And if ever the thought of this possibility visited his heart,

and he in the face of it joined in the infidel cry of those who deride and who disown it-then on another day may the remembrance of this visitation rise in judgment against him; and it be made clear to his own conscience, that, in spurning the Bible from his door he braved the hazards of a contest with Omnipotence.

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LECTURE VI.

ROMANS ii, 1—12.

"Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art that judgest: for wherein thou judgest another, thou condemnest thyself; for thou that judgest doest the same things. But we are sure that the judgment of God is according to truth against them which commit such things. And thinkest thou this, O man, that judgest them which do such things, and doest the same, that thou shalt escape the judgment of God? or despisest thou the riches of his goodness, and forbearance, and long-suffering; not knowing that the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance? but, after thy hardness and impenitent heart, treasurest up unto thyself wrath against the day of wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment of God; who will render to every man according to his deeds: to them who, by patient continuance in well-doing, seek for glory, and honour, and immortality, eternal life; but unto them that are contentious, and do not obey the truth, but obey unrighteousness, indignation and wrath: tribulation and anguish upon every soul of man that doeth evil, of the Jew first, and also of the Gentile; but glory, honour, and peace, to every man that worketh good; to the Jew first, and also to the Gentile: for there is no respect of persons with God. For as many as have sinned without law, shall also perish without law; and as many as have sinned in the law, shall be judged by the law."

BEFORE proceeding to the exposition of this chapter, it may be remarked of the concluding verse in the last chapter, that, with all the blindness. which the apostle charges on the heathen, and with all the dislike of retaining God in their knowledge which he ascribes to them-there was still

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one particular of this knowledge which they did retain. They still knew as much of God's judgment, as to be conscious that what they were doing, in the sinfulness and reprobacy of their minds, was worthy of death. There was still a remainder of conscience about them, in virtue of which they felt that there were a sin and a condemnation which attached to their own persons. With all the obliteration which had come upon their moral faculties -there were still the traces of a law which they could obscurely read, and of a voice which faintly uttered itself in notes of disapprobation. They were conscious that all was not right about them; and had the impression of a being greater than themselves, to whose account they were responsible; and the idea of a reckoning and of a sentence were not altogether strange to their understandings. For still, in the most sunken ages of our decaying and deteriorating species, did each man carry about with him such a light as, if he did not follow it, would render him a sinner-not against such principles as were altogether hidden, but against such principles as were partly known to him. And such vestiges of a natural sense about the right and the wrong, may not only be gathered from the books of Pagan antiquity; but they may be still more satisfactorily educed, from the converse that we hold in the present day with the living Paganism which still abounds in our world. We know not a more deeply interesting walk of observation, than that which is prosecuted by mo

dern missionaries, when they come into contact and communication with the men of a still unbroken country-when they make their lodgment on one of the remote and yet untravelled wilds of Paganism—when, after the interval of four thousand years from the dispersion of the great family of mankind, they go to one of its most widely diverging branches, and ascertain what of conscience or what of religious light has among them survived the lapse of so many generations-when they thus, as it were, knock at the door of nature left for ages to itself, and try if there yet be slumbering any sense or intelligence there which can at all respond to the message they have brought along with them. Nor do we know an evolution of the human heart which carries in it more of a big and an affecting interest, than that on which philosophy has never cast an enquiring regard-even that among its dark and long unentered recesses, there still subsists an undying voice, which owns the comfort and echoes back the truth of Christianity. Insomuch that, let missionaries go to the very extremity of our species, and speak of sin and judgment and condemnation, they do not speak in vocables unknown; and sweet to many a soul is the preacher's voice, when he tells that unto them a Saviour is born; and, out of the relics of even this deep and settled degeneracy, can be gotten the materials of a satisfying demonstration; and thus in the very darkest places have converts multiplied, and Christian villages arisen, and the gospel been the savour