accordancy between the felt wants of our nature, and the provision, that is there intimated to have been made for them. Both serve to manifest a power of divination. By the one it proves itself a skilful diviner of our thoughts; by the other a skilful diviner of our necessities. Had we time to

expatiate on this second argument, we think it might be made palpable, that the hand of a God may be as directly inferred, from the adaptations which there are in the book of a profest revelation to the wants and the well-being of our moral economy-as from the adaptations which there are in the book of external nature to the wants and the well-being of our natural economy. If the beauty that regales the eye, if the music that charms the ear, if the food that appeases the hunger and sustains the else decaying body in health and vigour, if the many fitnesses of outward things to the senses and the convenience of man-if on these there can be validly founded the conclusion, that the same God who constructed our material framework, may also be traced in the manifold congruities of the surrounding materialism-then might there likewise be such a varied suitableness between the needs and the fears and the appetencies of man's spirit on the one hand, and the doctrines or the directions of that volume which is addressed to him on the other, as to put the legible impress of a presiding and an inspiring divinity upon its pages. Were full development given to this most interesting conclusion, we think that the evidence of a designing God may be made to shine forth as directly from His word, as it does from His works.

And if we will only think of the vivid recognition, which even the most unlettered of our peasantry can take of his necessities and his dangers; and also of the distinct intelligence wherewith he can lay hold of the simplicities of Scripture-we shall perceive that between the one and the other, he may have all the materials within his reach for the argument before us. Let us add to this consideration the principle upon which Dr. Paley holds anatomy to be a better substratum on which to rear an argument for a God than astronomy. Let us think with him, that, within a narrow compass, the relations of fitness may be so crowded, as to give more intense proof of a divinity, than can the sublime but simple relations which obtain in the celestial machinery of the firmament and then perhaps we may apprehend, how even the homeliest of our population, with nought but the Bible in his hand and in his breast the microcosm of his own spirit, may nevertheless discern so many adaptations between the directions of the one and the desires or even diseases of the other, as to arrest him with the well-warranted conviction of the same divinity having been concerned in the formation of both. And it may not be the conceit of a fanatical imagination, it may be sound and sober rationality -when, after the experience that this is the book whose informations have quelled his fears, and cleared away his perplexities, and lured him to the path of hopeful and progressive virtue, and renovated his whole character, and brought him to peace with God, and poured health and holiness into all the recesses of his moral constitution—it

or, if reunion be possible, the place at which the reunion should be made. It is not by the most strict and scientific measurement of the various angles and unevennesses which have been made at the place of disruption, if we have only one side of the fracture to look upon. But if we have both sides to compare, the one with the other, we may, with the rapid inspection of a moment, perceive, what the labour of a whole life, expended on the inspection of one side, could not have enabled us to perceive. We may come at once to the belief, that here at one time a part was rent away-and this is the very fragment which has fallen off-and that on the rock from which it was detached, we behold its precise and certain counterpart a conclusion to which we never should have come by the single contemplation of the precipice that is above us, but to which we come immediately, and as if by the light of intuition, on comparing it with the dissevered piece that is beneath us.

35. There are many high and heavenly things announced to us in the New Testament. And there are earthly things too, such as the hidden things of the heart, for the full disclosure of which the eye of conscience must be opened, that we may perceive how truly it is that the Bible tells us of our wayward and wilful alienation from God-and how righteously therefore He may hold us in the light of everlasting outcasts from the place where His honour dwelleth, It tells us of a great disruption that took place between earth and heaven --and points out the way in which a connexion may again be established between them. We may

look to these lofty announcements with the eye of scholarship. We may survey in all its parts and varieties that doctrine which has been brought forward to our view from heaven above-and even delight ourselves with the symmetry and the firm connexion of all its articles. We may weigh the import of every verse by the lexicon; and, looking out on the face of the record, be the most skilled of all the theologians, in the system of truth which it unfolds to us. But that our Christianity should become a matter of home and practical exercise, instead of a matter of distant speculation or rather, that, beside its doctrinal we may obtain a view of its experimental evidence also, we must look to one side of the disruption as well as to the other of it and if by the eye of conscience we are made to see ourselves, while by the eye of a simple perusal we see the word of Him who hath spoken to us from heaven-then, as if by the light of immediate revelation, may we be made to recognize, in the adaptation which obtains between unaided nature below and that doctrine which is offered to our contemplation from above, that we indeed have broken loose from God; but that this is the way in which the old alliance between earth and heaven will again be cemented together. The conviction is imparted by what we see of the celestial part unfolded in the Bible, so tallying with what we know of the terrestrial part that lies in the recesses of our own conscience. This is a conviction which does not wait on the tardy processes of human criticism and while the laborious commentator has gazed for years upon the record, and never

felt the force of its personal application—the simple peasant who knows himself a sinner has found out the adjustments of Scripture with all the moral and spiritual necessities under which he laboursand so, without one ray of guidance from the literature of the schools, does he rejoice in his Bible, and has embraced its promises, and believes and most rationally believes in its truth.

36. It is thus that where there is a sense of guilt, a bare statement may do and do immediately, what, without that sense, cannot be done by the most ingenious and well-sustained demonstration. It is thus that the Gospel often finds a credence and an acceptation, when simply expounded among simple hearers who are practically in earnest, which is vainly attempted by a labouring and ambitious oratory among men whose fancies have been regaled, and whose feelings have been moved, and all whose reasoning faculties have been put on the play of their most congenial exercise while their consciences are in profoundest dormancy. Such men require a stream of argument or the flashes of imagery to keep them awake. The insipidity of a naked statement has no charms for them. Were it the statement of their deliverance from that which they actually dreaded, they would feel an interest-but they have no dread, and therefore it is that they seek for no deliverance. We stand in need of no literary attraction whatever, to secure a welcome admittance for the offer of a discharge from the debt which oppresses us, or of an unfailing cure for the disease under which we labour. But take away our personal interest