yours of England, to lift a hammer or to loosen a stone. What God has prophesied, that He will perform. It is ours to mind duties, God will take care of his own prophecies; and therefore, so long as I can stand in the pulpit of my own National Church, which I love most, but not alone, for I see sister churches, that may be more powerful, but are not more pure that she is,—so long as I can stand in a parish church pulpit, so long as I can preach the Gospel with no man to touch me, and so long as no man can be ordained in that church without my consent as a presbyter in her courts, so long will I cleave to her. Let me be thrust out by force, which I do not expect, but go out I will not; for, while a timber holds together, I will stand by her, and when she goes down, as all our churches shall go down, I can see in the distant horizon the glorious ark which will bear me and all God's people, not to an Ararat to look forth on a world dismantled and depopulated, but to the hills of the heavenly Jerusalem, where I shall be for ever with the Lord." pp. 20, 21.

Nor is this all; in the same discourse Dr. Cumming, although a clergyman of the Scotch Church, one of whose primary and fundamental doctrines is that of unconditional election and predestination, as maintained by Calvin, entirely repudiated that doctrine in the following

manner:

"I have often stated to my people.--if any man perish eternally, that man perishes an eternal suicide; no decree of God sends him to hell. The corroding recollection in the hearts of the damned will be this,-I am here, but I did it all myself: nobody drove me here; nobody did it for me; I came here, and all the blame is mine. And I believe the thrilling recollections of the saved will be,—I did none of it; God did it all, from the dawn of grace to the first entrance into glory. To the pious, Christ says, 'Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;' but to the wicked he says, 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels.' Then what made you go there? Who sent you there? The only answer that can be given will be, Myself." p. 30.

Now these are striking signs of the times, which indicate that a great change is coming over men's minds. No preacher in the Church of Scotland thirty or forty years ago would even have thought of such things, still less have preached them. Had Dr. Cumming so predicted the destruction of the Old Kirk at that period, few would have heard him with any degree of patience, still less with any complacency and belief; but the audience to whom he preached heard him make these remarks about the Stone cut out of the mountain without hands dashing all other churches to pieces," with evident marks of satisfaction, and they immediately requested that the discourse might be published: But bad Dr. Cumming, in a former generation, so utterly rejected the Calvinistic doctrine of unconditional election and predestination, which certainly forms a striking part of the doctrinal frame-work of the Old Kirk, we can scarcely think that the General Assembly would have allowed him to remain a presbyter of that church, to which he seems,

although he knows and confesses that she is doomed to destruction, so much attached. But a church is doomed to destruction from some cause, and that cause can be no other than because she has not in her constitution the Genuine Truth of Christianity, that is, she is not founded upon the " corner stone" alluded to in our former paper, --the acknowledgment of the Lord Jesus Christ in His Divine Humanity, or Glorious Body," as the God of heaven and earth. And every church not founded upon this rock must sooner or later fall to pieces, and, as we think, the sooner the better; but when founded, both as to doctrine and life, upon this rock or this precious corner-stone, we verily believe that "the gates of hell shall never prevail against it," and that it, consequently, can never fall.

We sincerely recommend Dr. Cumming to examine the doctrines of the New Church, and we think, that although his mind has been long prepossessed and imbued with old traditional doctrines, he may nevertheless hear some tidings of that "Stone cut out without hands from the mountain," which as he believes, and as we also verily believe, is destined to supersede all other churches, and to bring on that glorious state which he so predictively anticipates.

THE DESOLATE STATE OF CHRISTIANITY.

(From the December Number of the Eclectic Review.)

In the New Church it is common for many to speak of the desolated, or consummated" state of the Old Church; but we do not often find that this idea of desolation is to be met with in other quarters, although, if people would but reflect, the signs are very numerous which powerfully impress the great fact upon the attention. We have not space for the whole of this eloquent and powerful description; the writer having enumerated various evils which every where abound, says :

"There are other ills behind. The written documents of the churches have lost much of their influence; always dry, they are now summer dust. What man among twenty thousand in Scotland has read the Wesminster Confession, and what man in a million in England the Thirty-nine Articles? The very curses of the Athanasian Creed have become cold, and now cease to irritate because they are no longer read. Catechisms chiefly rule the minds of children, who do not, however, believe them so firmly, or love them so well, as their fathers when they were children. Even to clergymen such documents have become rather fences, keeping them away from danger, than living expressions of their own faith and hope. They sign, and never open them any more! And

thus those unhappy books, although containing in them much eternal truth, although written by men of insight, learning, and profound earnestness, occupy a place equally painful and ludicrous; they are attacked by few, they are defended by few, they are fully believed by few, they are allowed to sleep till an ordination day comes round, and after it is over, they lapse into dust and darkness again. Sometimes editions of them are placarded on the walls as reduced in price.' Alas, their value, too, is reduced to a degree which might disturb the shades of Twiss and Ridgley. Ancient medals, marbles, fossil remains, nay modern novels, are regarded now with far more interest and credence than those Articles of Faith which originally came forth baptized in the sweat and blood of our early Reformers and Re-reformers.

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Nay, to pass from man's word to God's Word, the Bible itself, the book of the world, the Alp of literature, the old oracle of the past, the word of light, which has cast its solemn ray upon all books and all thoughts, and was wont to transfigure even the doubts and difficulties which assailed it, into embers, in its own burning glory; the Bible, too, has suffered from the analysis, the coldness, and the uncertainty of our age. It is circulated, indeed, widely; it is set in a prominent place in our exhibitions; it lies in the boudoir of our Sovereign, gilded elegantly, lettered, and splendidly bound. It is quoted now in Parliament without provoking a laugh; its language is frequently used by our judges, even when they are trampling on its precepts, and dooming poor ignorant wretches to be hanged by the neck till they be dead,' with sentences from the Sermon on the Mount in their wise and solemn throats. It is sometimes seen on the deathbed of sceptics; when assailed, the attack is generally prefaced by a deep bow of real or apparent respect; such a reverence as might be given by a revolutionist to a fallen king. But where is the crown wherewith its Father crowned it? Where the red circle of Sinaitic fire about its brows? Where the halo of Calvary? Where the awful reverence which once rang in its every page, and made even its chronologies and naked names hallowed and sublime? Where the feeling which dictated the title-which, although not expressly given by God, yet coming out from the deep heart of man's devotion might be called divine, and might be compared to God's naming of the stars' -the Holy Bible?' Where the thunder, blended with still small voices of equal power, which once ran down the ages, came all from the one Hebrew cave; and which to hear was to obey, and to obey was to worship? Has its strength gone out from it; is it dead, or has it become weak as other books? No; its life, its divine stamp and innate worth, remain; but they are disputed, or only half acknowledged, when not altogether ignored.

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Such are a few of the symptoms of our spiritual disease. We have not room to dilate on our conceptions of the remedy; this may, perhaps, form the subject of a future paper. * * * There seems nothing for this state of things, but down-right naturalism, which means flat desperation, or a return to Christianity in a new, higher, and more hopeful form." p. 726.

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ARGUMENTS AGAINST ATHEISM AND INFIDELITY.

(Being the Substance of Lectures delivered at Burnley, by the Rev. W. Woodman.) (Continued from page 136.)

LECTURE SECOND- ON THE TRUTH OF THE SACRED SCRIPTURES. THE arguments presented in the previous article went to shew the necessity of a Divine Revelation, by demonstrating that, without such revelation, man could have had no idea of God. The next point of inquiry will bear on the question, Whether the Book usually held to be a revelation from God has valid claims to be received as such.

In entering on this inquiry it will be necessary, in the first place, to lay down the principles we must bring to the investigation. That every science and art are based on their respective principles, is a proposition too self-evident to need demonstration. In judging of a work written on any art or science, it is equally clear that success will depend on the proper application of the principles on which the subject is founded. As an illustration, suppose the principles of chemistry to be applied to the productions of the historian, and the determination of historical characters attempted by chemical analysis: the results that would inevitably follow need not to be particularized. Take as another illustration, the application of the principles of orthography in the solution of the Differential Calculus, or any other algebraic problem: the "confusion worse confounded" that would result in this case requires no description. Or, again, suppose a musician to attempt to arrive at the “Q. E. D.” of any theorem, even the most simple, in Euclid's Elements of Geometry, by the principles of musical notation; what could follow but the most signal failure? But what would be thought of any one who should base an argument against a science on his ignorance of its principles? who should contend that, because the truth of history could not be subjected to chemical tests, algebra expounded on the principles of grammar, or a mathematical diagram made to square with musical notation, they are therefore fallacious? Absurd, however, as such a procedure would be pronounced by common consent to be, it is not more so than the course usually pursued by those who object to the divine origin and character of the Bible. The self-evident fact, that, in entering on an inquiry relative to the genuineness of a book claiming to be a revelation from God, the very first object should be to N. S. No. 149.-VOL. XIII.

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determine the principles on which the investigation should be based, is but too generally overlooked. Had due weight been given to these points, the mistakes into which so many have fallen would have been avoided. Instead of attempting a judgment of the Bible on the principles of geography, history, or any of the sciences, and passing a verdict of condemnation against it, on the grounds that it did not respond to the challenge of the historian and the savan; it would have been seen that the data by which any, and indeed all, human compositions might be expounded, would, when applied to a revelation from God, fail from sheer inadequacy. In the one case, both aspects are human; in the other, there is a divine as well as a human side. In the former instance, both the author and the reader stand on the same general level; in the latter, there is no ratio of proportion between them The object of a divine revelation being to convey an idea of the Infinite to the Finite, it postulates principles altogether distinct from those demanded for intercommunication between the finite and the finite.

It is nevertheless true that there are laws that apply to both. To instance one,—every written communication must contain the sentiments of its author, as is demonstrable from the consideration, that whatever is consciously done or said involves an act of the whole mind, including within it all the thoughts and purposes of the person acting or speaking. Even where sentiments are simulated with the view of concealing the real ones, the true are still there, and form a substratum on which the counterfeit lie as superincumbent coverings; and were it possible to remove the swathings, the naked thoughts and purposes of the heart would stand exposed in broad day, even in the very centre of the labyrinth of crooked expedients by which it had been attempted to conceal them. In a book having God for its author, and for its subject likewise, the infinite purposes and wisdom of God must, on the same grounds, lie treasured up in all their fulness. Besides, all we can know of God is his divine predicates-his love, wisdom, and power. To reveal God, therefore, is to reveal these in connection with his Being; in other words, to reveal him as a Being of whom these infinite attributes are to be predicated; and a book which contains such a revelation of God, must consequently be the depository of the wisdom adequate to teach their nature—in short, must have the Divine Wisdom for its essence. It is indeed by virtue of this that it is THE WORD, the LOGOS, or the DIVINE TRUTH.

But infinite wisdom in its naked brightness could not, under any circumstances, be made apprehensible to finite thought: it can only reach the finite through successive clothings or modifications. Not that