judgment, when it will be rendered to every man according to that which he hath done. It draws aside the veil and shows us the attributes of Him who is God over all, 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 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 secures the rights of the ruled; and it recites the histories 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 rich 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

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

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 Polytheism 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."

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 adver

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 harmony that should run throughout the whole, as a constantly brightening revelation of God's holy purpose 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 nation 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 forgiveness to men through a Messiah yet to come. It matters not whether it be Paul, "brought up at the

feet of Gamaliel,"a Pharisee, zealous for the traditions 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 rising 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 in later days. If we examine the writings of the wisest among uninspired men on questions of

Science, we find that the theories of yesterday have been exploded by the discoveries of to-day; and that the Philosophers of past generations are continually shown to be at war not only with each other, but also with truth, as it becomes better known. But here is the Bible, the oldest book that was ever written, in comparison with which every other is modern; it tells us of the heavens, the sun, moon and stars; of the earth and the sea, and all that in them is; of their origin and the laws that govern them and bind them together into a beautiful whole. It placed its teachings respecting these subjects on record thousands of years ago, when Astronomy was more of a dream than a Science, when Geology, Physiology, and Chemistry, were words and things unknown; and yet, notwithstanding all that Astronomy has since done to make us familiar with the countless orbs of heaven; notwithstanding all that Geology has done to extract from the bowels of the earth the remains of worlds which have existed before man was created; notwithstanding all that Physiology has done to reveal the laws of life; notwithstanding all that Chemistry has done. to analyse matter, we challenge infidelity to pro