looking,' said the infidel, 'into the nature of that law. I have been trying to see whether I can add anything to it, or take anything from it, so as to make it better. Sir, I cannot. It is perfect. The first commandment,' continued he, 'directs us to make the Creator the object of our supreme love and reverence. That is right. If He be our Creator, Preserver, and supreme Benefactor, we ought to treat Him and none other as such. The second forbids idolatry; that is certainly right. The third forbids profaneness; the fourth fixes a time for religious worship. If there be a God, He ought surely to be worshipped. It is suitable that there should be an outward homage significant of our inward regard. If God be worshipped, it is proper that some time should be set apart for that purpose, when all may worship Him harmoniously and without interruption. One day in seven is certainly not too much, and I do not know that it is too little. The fifth defines the peculiar duties arising from the family relations. Injuries to our neighbours are then classified by the moral law. They are divided into offences against life, chastity, property, and character. And,' said he, applying a legal idea with legal acuteness, 'I notice that the greatest offence in each class is expressly forbidden. Thus the greatest injury to life is murder; to chastity, adultery; to property, theft; to character, perjury. Now the greater offence must include the less of the same kind: murder must include every injury to life, adultery every injury to purity, and so of the rest. And the moral code is closed and perfected by a command forbidding every improper desire in regard to our neighbour. I have been thinking,' he proceeded, 'Where did Moses get that law? I have read history. The Egyptians and the adjacent nations were idolaters, and the wisest and best

Greeks and Romans never gave a code of morals like this. Where did Moses get this law which surpasses the wisdom and philosophy of the most enlightened ages? He lived at a period comparatively barbarous, but he has given a law. in which the learning and sagacity of all subsequent time can detect no flaw. Where did he get it? He could not have soared so far above his age as to have devised it himself. I am satisfied where he obtained it. It came down from heaven. I am convinced of the truth of the religion of the Bible!'

“The infidel—infidel no longer—remained to his death a firm beliver in the truth of Christianity. He lived about three years after this conversation. He continued to pursue the study of the Bible, his views of the Christian religion expanding and growing more and more correct. Profaneness was abandoned; an oath was now as offensive to him as it was familiar before. When his former gay companions used one he habitually reproved them; he remonstrated with them upon its folly and want of meaning, and said that he could never before imagine how painful profane language must be to a Christian."

Allow me, in proof of the Divine origin of the Holy Scriptures, to add to the testimony of this learned Advocate a brief but most conclusive, and, to every candid reader, most convincing argument, as given by the Rev. John Wesley, M.A. He says: "I beg leave to propose a short, clear, and strong argument to prove the Divine inspiration. of the Holy Scriptures. The Bible must be the invention of good men or angels, bad men or devils, or of God. It could not be the invention of good men or angels, for they neither would nor could make a book and tell lies all the time they were writing it, saying, 'Thus saith the Lord,'

when it was their own invention. It could not be the invention of bad men or devils, for they would not make a book which commands all duty, forbids all sin, and condemns their souls to hell to all eternity. I therefore draw this conclusion, that the Bible must have been given by Divine inspiration."

Such reasoning, conclusive and unanswerable as it is, however, is not, it appears, sufficiently so to meet the attestative requirements of the presumptuously dictatorial schools of M. Renan, Professor Tyndall, and others—the former of whom, as we have seen, in attestation of the supernatural, would see a miracle performed upon a corpse in presence of a select company of scientific gentlemen; while the latter would see one performed on behalf of the afflicted living within the walls of an hospital. Allow me, in this connection, to briefly refer to this professor's proposal to the Christian Church. By way of experiment—of which he is curiously fond, as he is accustomed to that sort of thing in his professional vocation- he would have the Church offer prayer for the miraculous cure of the inmates of a certain hospital. Now, the proposal of this modern sign-seeker is not altogether a novel one, as some might suppose; it had its counterpart, as to dictatorial and vain curiosity, among the wonder-loving sign-seekers who existed in the time of our Lord. For a suitable reply to it, therefore--a reply that shall be in accordance with the mind of God, we must consult Christ Himself on the subject, and learn of Him.. Herod, the tetrarch of Lower Galilee, it appears, was curiously desirous of seeing a miracle performed by Jesus; but notwithstanding his eagerness of desire, Jesus did not gratify his curiosity. And when the curious Scribes and Pharisees asked a miraculous sign from

1 Luke xxiii. 8.

Him, He replied, "An evil and adulterous generation seeketh after a sign; and there shall no sign be given to it" (in gratification of mere sight-seeing, wonder-loving inquisitiveness), but referred their credence to a miraculous sign that had been performed in a bygone age, and which had been duly recorded in God's book, the Bible.1 And to the miracles contained in this Book, including the New Testament, therefore, in imitation of Christ in such a case, the Christian Church must refer the "evil and adulterous generation" of the present day. Inquisitive sceptical "professors" of our time are to be regarded with the same degree of deference by the Church as they were by Christ, in similar circumstances, in His day, and no more So. "There shall no sign be given you of the nature you ask, but those which are recorded in that Divinely authenticated book, the Bible," must be the Church's prompt and unhesitating reply to such men.

God's mind on this, as on all other subjects, is to-day, yesterday, and for ever the same. Were the Church to take steps towards complying with the demand of Professor Tyndall, it would not be following Christ's example in such a case, and would therefore, without doubt, be doomed to disappointment. The Church could not rationally act faith for the accomplishment of such a work, for the plain reason that they have no Scriptural ground for it, but rather the opposite, as set forth in the precedent afforded us by Jesus Himself. And as we are not warranted to expect anything we ask, except as it shall prove to be in accordance with the Divine will, it would be the height of presumption and folly for the Church to attempt to pray and believe for such a manifestation of the Divine power. The age of special and extraordinary miraculous attestation passed away with the 1 Matt. xii. 39.

introduction and early establishment of the Gospel dispensation. But in view of the precedent before them, the Apostles themselves, doubtless, neither would nor could have wrought a miracle simply to gratify the sceptical curiosity of an avowed unbeliever. God's dispensations and plans of operation are not man's; neither is He to be dictated to by man. He will do all His pleasure, but cannot be supposed, at the unbelieving request of curious and vain. man, to do anything contrary to His expressed will, as taught us by the example of Christ.

But suppose it were possible for the Church in its collective capacity to believingly present such a petition before the throne of grace in the name of Christ, and that it were graciously accepted and answered, what effect religiously would it have upon the hearts and minds of such men as Professors Tyndall and Renan? What effect did the performance of miracle in evidence of the Divinity of our religion have upon the mind of their brethren the Pharisees of our Lord's day? They witnessed the unanswerable testimony of such works, acknowledged them to be notable miracles, but remained as to the special object of Christ's mission and their own natural condition, in unbelief, darkness, and spiritual death, still. Are we then to suppose that human nature in its unregenerate state is any more open to conviction now than it was in Christ's day? Certainly not. It is clear, then, that as unbelief, or a rejection of Divine testimony to the truth of our holy religion, was not from the want of indisputable evidence in the case of the Jews, so any amount of evidence, however unquestionably miraculous in its nature, would, in like manner, in our day be equally ineffective in producing that degree and kind of conviction in the minds of those who are "dead in trespasses and sins," which, independent of