to resent a personal injury; and the sentiment is but a fair verdict concerning infidel writers generally. They act under a bias that would exclude them from passing judgment on a question at issue between man and man in a court of justice. They feel that they have a personal controversy with the Bible, and they aim to discredit it as a measure of self-defence and self-justification.

"With such a temper apparent," says the venerable Wilson, in his lectures on the subject, "I have a key to the secrets of their unbelief."

"I see one writer speaking of the life and discourses of our Saviour with the ignorance and buffoonery of a jester, and asserting that ridicule is the test of truth; I want no one to inform me that he is an unbeliever.

"I see another virtually denying all human testimony with one breath, and with another defending suicide and apologizing for lewdness and adultery:-I do not ask if he is dissatisfied with the Christian evidence.

"I see a third, after composing a work full of hypocrisy and deceit on the subject of religion, publishing it to the world on the persuasion of having

heard a voice from heaven. I observe another explaining away the historical narrative of the Old Testament as a mere mystical representation of the signs of the zodiac. I see a late noble poet betraying, throughout his profligate writings, caprice and vanity, self-conceit and misanthropy, together with an abandonment of all moral feeling. I want no one to explain to me the sources of the unbelief of such writers.

"I turn to our modern historians, and I mark their blunders in whatever relates to religion, their inconsistencies, their misrepresentations, the impu rities which defile their pages, their vanity and selfconfidence, and the malice and spleen with which they pursue the followers of Christ. I ask no further questions.

"I open the works of the German infidels, and find the index of their true temper in the follies and absurdities with which they are content to forsake all common sense in their comments on the sacred text, and to exhibit themselves as the gazing-stocks of Christendom.

"I cast my eye on the flippancy of the French school of irreligion, and see such entire ignorance of

the simplest points of religious knowledge, such gross impurities, connected with blasphemies which I dare not repeat; I see such an obvious attempt to confound truth and falsehood on the most important of all subjects, and such a bitterness of scorn, a sort of personal rancour against the Christian religion and its Divine founder, as to betray most clearly the cause in which they are engaged. I take the confession of one of their number, and ask whether, in such a temper of mind, any religious question could be soundly determined. 'I have consulted our philosophers, I have perused their books, I have examined their several opinions, I have found them all proud, positive and dogmatical, even in their pretended scepticism; knowing every thing, proving nothing, and ridiculing one another.......' If our philosophers were able to discover truth, which of them would interest himself about it? There is not one of them, who if he could distinguish truth from falsehood, would not prefer his own error to the truth that is discovered by another. Where is the philosopher, who for his own glory would not willingly deceive the whole human race.'"

We are aware of the show of indignant feeling with which we have been told, it is not to be endured that such authors as Bolingbroke, Huine, and Gibbon should be charged with unfairness and dishonesty in their writings. But we have the facts, facts which speak for themselves, and by every righteous tribunal they will be pronounced decisive in the case. It is no pleasant labor thus to unmask opposers. We would prefer to leave their honesty unimpeached, and to meet them in a fair trial upon the strength of their arguments. They have not us to blame if we go farther back. They have themselves invited it. They have themselves put on record the proofs of their insincerity and inconsistency.

We know not indeed how far men may go in deceiving themselves, and thus at last become less dishonest because so blinded in their delusions as to have lost the power to discriminate clearly between truth and error. A man may so effectually destroy his own power of vision as to believe it to be dark night long after the rising sun has declared it to be clear day. Our Maker has made it a fixed law of our being that we cannot persist in abusing

or perverting any of the faculties he has given us without in the end destroying them. He has assured us that when men receive not the love of truth that they might be saved, for this cause he sends them strong delusions, that they should believe a lie. "There is a principle of belief implanted in our nature that seeks to avenge itself on the infidel for the wrong done to his own soul when he turns aside from reposing confidence in Him who is truth itself; and we have examples constantly occuring to show that when a man has rendered himself sceptical as to Divine Revelation, he is often left, as a just punishment, to become the dupe of the most gross absurdities. Indeed the most gross delusions of unreasoning, blind superstition, have been fully equalled by the weak credulity of those who have become most deeply involved in the maizes of infidelity. It was said of the notorious Vossius, who dishonored the name of a venerable father by his licentious and hardened irreligion, that he stood ready to believe any thing and every thing, except that the Bible was true; and that his faith was generally strong according as the falsehood was glaringly absurd.