ders," ""wherein they lay in wait to deceive;" and he reminds us of how they were at length brought to a stand, could "proceed no further," and confessed "This is the finger of God," thus "making their folly manifest," and giving a testimony to the divine mission of the prophet, which was the more convinc ing and important as it came from those who had before denied and derided it. Such the apostle would have us know must be the final issue of every conflict between truth and error. He who saith to the sea, "Hitherto shalt thou come but no further; and here shall thy proud waves be stayed," has always set bounds to opposers and scoffers, which they cannot pass. "He makes the wrath of man to praise him, and the remainder of wrath he restrains." "He taketh the wise in their own crafti ness." He allows them to oppose his truth only so far as will make their confusion the more complete, when their own weapons are turned against them, and their folly is made manifest" by means of their own deeds; and if the voice of uninspired history is to be credited, the apostle saw in his own day a signal instance of this, in one whose name is not embalmed but impaled in the pages of Scrip

ture.

Simon the Magician," an apostate from the faith he had once professed, "giving out that himself was some great one," seems to have been a leading man in propagating the sophistries of Infidelity and impiety and the occasion of his apostacy was so ordered by the overruling hand of God, as to demonstrate beyond all doubt the baseness and profligacy of the motives which led to his opposition.

f

From the days of the apostles, I might come down and recite to you the names of Celsus, Por, phyry, Hierocles, who were distinguished in the early centuries as Platonic Philosophers, and also as avowed antagonists of the Gospel. In the brief sketch however, to which we confine ourselves, we can barely, allude to such men.! The largest mea sure of liberality to their claims cannot require of us to do anything more. The great majority of them are like flies in ainber, preserved from oblivion by the medium in which they are held. Their names and their works are known to us chiefly through the writings of the Fathers, who quoted them in order to refute them; nor would they be acknoweleged by Infidelity as champions in her cause. ¿ -q.1. To find those to whom she would assign that

pre-eminence, we must turn to a later period in the history of the world and of the church. We must come down through century after century, till we have reached comparatively modern times. We!! must pass by what are usually termed the Dark Ages; for during that long slumber of intellect and learning, Infidelity, like every other movement of the human mind, seems to have been brought to a pause.] It was not the form in which the great enemy of Christianity then desired to act. While the Church and her ministry slept, it was his policy to remaini quiet, that they might not be waked up.

But when the trumpet of truth was blown in the days of the Reformation, and Religion and Learning began to bestir themselves after their long slumber; then also Infidelity raised its head and displayed its opposition. When Luther and Beza, and Calvin and Cranmer, and Latimer and Ridley, had taken their stand at the altar of heaven, and had brought into light the long-hidden truths of the Gospel; and when, in the generations following, such men as Bacon, Boyle, Locke and Newton in England; and Galileo, Kepler, DesCartes and Leibnitz on the continent of Europe, gave a fresh impulse,

with a new form and spirit, to Philosophy and Science; it was then that Hobbes displayed his art and subtilty in his work, boastfully called the Leviathan, endeavoring to subvert the cardinal principles of Christianity; then did Shaftesbury send abroad his polished blasphemies in his Characteristics; it was then also that Bayle, Spinoza, Blount, Toland, Bolingbroke and others, joined in the same guilty warfare. They were all met and overthrown by christian writers of the massive strength which belonged to the learning of that day; and as evil in our world is always overruled for good, their assaults led to the establishment of the famous Boyle Lectureship, as a permanent defence of Christianity, and from which have been produced some of the ablest discourses in our language, demonstrating the truth and authenticity of the Bible.

b. In referring to this multitude of freethinkers, who came forth as locusts over the land, it should be mentioned that we do not find many anong them who can be called men of great learning; and if a few of their number might claim such a dis tinction, their Infidelity was so revolting and mon

strous in its blasphemies, as to render it compara

tively harmless. They owed their fame, such as it was, to causes which existed before them, and in one sense called them into being. They generally flourished in what is known as the corrupt age of Charles the Second, when the land was deluged with practical irreligion, and the way prepared for the wild speculations of Infidelity. They were more like the insects which are generated in the miasma of a soil, already pestilential and deadly, than like the dragon whose pestiferous breath has been represented as having the power to blight and destroy whatever is lovely and precious in the Edens he invades. That gigantic power of mischief and ruin soon afterwards began to be developed, especially in three men, who were singularly adapted to act together as partners in their common object as infidels. And not waiting to enumerate many others who were their cotemporaries and fellow-laborers, let us contemplate that peculiar potency for evil which was displayed in Hume, Rousseau and Voltaire, when they formed their unholy alliance.

It has been justly observed, that there is scarce an avenue to the heart in all the varieties of human character, but some one of the three had ex