the work of one man, and should be framed cor composed in some one age of the world. Just ab cording as it multiplies either topics or authors, it increases its liability to exposure by multiplying the points on which it may be assailed by some sharp-sighted antagonist. But how is it with the "Bible? Does it treat of but one subject; or was it written by one man, or at one period of time? edt

No book was ever written, embracing subjects of such vast extent and such endless variety. It begins at the beginning. It recites the creation of the earth, and the heavens, of the sun, the moon and the stars also, and describes the final dissolution of our world, when "the heavens, being on fire, shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat; the earth also, and the works therein, shall be burned up." It shows

when and how man was created in the image of his eCreator, tells the sad story of his fall from primeval innocence, and spreads before us the good news of his redemption from sin by a Redeemer, and his final admission into the world of the blessed. It gives a code of morals so perfect as to be applicable to every. duty and condition of man, and foretells a doming

judgment, when it will be rendered to every man

according to that which he hath done. It draws

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aside the veil and shows us the attributes of Him who is over all God, blessed for ever," and brings down to our view that "great mystery of godliness, God manifest in the flesh." At times too, stepping aside as it were from these more sacred doctrines, it gives us its teachings respecting the physical i laws which sustain and govern the material world; it shows us the frame work of a civil government, which equally sustains the authority of rulers and sel cures the rights of the ruled; and it recites the his tories of nations in their rise and fall, often making us familiar with events of such remote antiquity that no record of them is to be found except in its and diversified revelations. There is indeed no department or branch of valuable knowledge upon which it does not touch, with which it is not directly or indirectly connected. It comprehends things past present and to come, visible and invisible, temporal and eternal. And then

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Look also at its numerous authors and the va rious circumstances and ages of the world in which they wrote. "It is a book which nearly fifty

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writers of every degree of cultivation and every condition of life, and living through the long course of fifteen hundred years, have contributed to produce. It is a book which was written in the centre of Asia, in the sands of Arabia, in the deserts of Judea, in the courts of the temple of the Jews, in the schools of the prophets at Bethel and Jericho, in the sumptuous palaces of Babylon, on the idolatrous banks of Chebar, and finally in the then centre of western civilization, in the midst of the Jews and of their ignorance, in the midst of Poly-" theism and its idols, as also in the bosom of Pantheism and its sad philosophy. It is a book whose first writer had been forty years a pupil of the magicians of Egypt, in whose opinion the sun and stars were endowed with intelligence, reacting on the elements and governing the world, by a perpetual effluvium; and whose last writer was a fisherman from the sea of Tiberias, called from his net to be an inspired Apostle." (mi to n

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Now, with all these facilities for exposing the falsehood of a book, arising from the number and variety of its subjects and authors, what deception or deviation from truth have the most able advèr- í)

saries detected in the Bible? Let them point out if they can, a single instance of discrepancy or contradiction, a single violation of the unity and har mony that should run throughout the whole, asia constantly brightening revelation of God's holy pur pose to save guilty men through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus. It belongs to the human mind, that when allowed to act according to its ordinary laws, it will invariably imbibe views and tendencies from the habits of the age and the na tion to which it belongs. But with the inspired writers of the Bible, it was directly the reverse. It matters not whether it was Moses, "learned in all the wisdom of Egypt," and a daily witness of the various idolatries interwoven with the character of the people; whenever he takes his pen to write for the Bible, his mind becomes clarified and elevated above all these superstitious delusions; not a trace of respect for Osiris, or Isis, or other divinities of Egypt, appears in his pages; while all honor and worship are rendered to Jehovah, the covenant God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, offering life and for giveness to men through a Messiah yet to come. It inatters not whether it be Paul, "brought up at the

feet of Gamaliel," a Pharisee, zealous for the tradi tions of the elders, and proud in the righteousness of a law by which he counts himself blameless; when he writes for the Bible, his Pharisaism and pride have disappeared, while Christ and the cross, as foreshadowed and foretold by Moses and the Prophets, become the all and in all of which he would speak, and in which he would have the world believe. In like manner we might speak of all the inspired writers. Whatever may have been the error or idolatry prevailing in their day, not a trace of it is to be found mingled with the pure truth that comes from their pens to be embalmed in this Holy Bible. Its ever brightening pages come down to us through generation after generation, untainted and untarnished, like the beams of the tising sun breaking through the mists and vapors of the morning, touching them only to dispel them, and then to burst forth in its own native splendor.

And while we find the Bible thus free from the delusions of former ages, see also how it har monizes with the best discoveries of Philosophy în later days. If we examine the writings of the wisest among uninspired men on questions of