and then proceed upon this footing. God is every thing. "The heavens declare his glory." "His eternal power and godhead are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made." This lies at the foundation of all doctrine, precept, promise, threatening. The attributes of God are illustrated, displayed, made tangible, in all his dispensations, as the first and most important topic.

There is one, and only one, living and true God. This is the first axiom of Revelation—a glorious, selfexistent, independent, eternal Being, without body, parts, or passions; of infinite power and goodness; and who, as the Maker and Preserver of all things, requires, and is entitled to, the supreme veneration and affection of man, his intelligent and responsible

creature.

2. Accordingly all the descriptions of God's dealings with man, and all the language in which he is addressed, proceed on the existence of this only Potentate, and on his possessing these glorious attributes. This conveys the idea of the unspeakable importance of just views of his character. The language stoops, indeed, to our infirmities; that is, it is intelligible; but it stoops in order to raise up our ideas to some suitable conceptions of his glory, so far as our duties and interests are concerned. Further than this Revelation proceeds not: much less does it lower the Deity to human folly and vice, as all heathen writings do.

Take, as an example, the noble Psalm from which the text is selected; "The mighty God, even the Lord, hath spoken, and called the earth from the rising of the sun unto the going down thereof. Hear, O my people, and I will speak; O Israel, and I will testify against thee; for I am God, even thy God." What majesty, what sublimity, what a suitable and becoming language for the great God; how impossible to be misunderstood !

3. The harmonious and unvarying representation of the Divine character as given in every part of Scripture, under all circumstances, and in every dispensation, strengthens this argument. God is every where represented in one and the same majesty and holiness; nothing changing, nothing inconsistent, nothing ambiguous, nothing degrading, nothing weak, nothing arbitrary, nothing like the Heathen or Mohammedan fate hanging over him; much less any thing of the human infirmity, folly, and vice which the pagan mythologies constantly impute to their deities, and which utterly neutralize all the scattered fragments of sublimity or purity which their fables may contain. But there is in the Bible one and the same majesty, sovereignty, and power ascribed to the true God throughout; one and the same holiness; one and the same inflexible hatred of sin; one and the same justice and truth; one and the same wisdom, goodness, benevolence, mercy, love, compassion.

Much is indeed mysterious, much incomprehensible, but nothing unworthy of the infinitely holy God; nothing contradictory to the faint rays of glory reflected in the works of creation, or impressed on the heart of man, or brought out in their effulgence in the various parts of holy writ.

4. Further, the Bible calls on us to imitate God in his moral perfections, and places virtue in man's conforming himself to his will. "Be ye holy, for I am holy." "God is a Spirit; and they that worship him, must worship him in spirit and in truth." Be ye followers of God as dear children." "Be merciful, as your Father which is in heaven is merciful."

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5. The Bible, again, makes the love of this one glorious Being the first and paramount duty of man. "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and soul, and mind, and strength; this is the

first and great commandment." And this it is which renders the mercy of the gospel so essential to us. For no thoughtful person can deny, either the reasonableness of this holy love to God, the centre of all loveliness, goodness, and truth; or man's perpetual defects in complying with it.

6. Revelation, also, represents the glory of God as the last end of all his acts and dealings with man. "God doth nothing," says St. Augustine, "but for his glory. If he thinks, it is for his glory; if he speaks, it is for the honor of his name and power. If he has created the world, the heavens and the earth, angels and men, it is to form creatures to praise him, servants to fear him, children to obey and love him, a people to serve him, a Church to honor him. Time and eternity are consecrated to him. The sun when it rises and when it sets, blesses him and praises him without ceasing. Why? He is the only God, the Most High, the Almighty, the Master of angels as well as men. The heavenly spirits are in glory; but it is the glory of God: they contemplate him, they adore him; his glory is the centre of all things."

7. In short, if there were no other internal evidence of the truth of Christianity but this one, the character there given of the great God and the stress laid on it; and if there were no other mark of a tendency to the highest happiness of man in it, it would be of itself abundantly sufficient. Just as, on the other hand, if there were no other internal evidence in heathenism to convict it of a merely human origin, and of an injurious tendency upon all the interests of man, but the character there given of their gods, it would be enough. The inmost soul of man feels that the one God, the one only holy Lord of Hosts of the Bible, is the true and living Creator, Preserver, Benefactor, Savior, Judge of mankind. The inmost soul and conscience of man feels that the

idols of the heathen must be the offspring of human folly or of perverted traditions of the one true God. Let us then show, as we proposed,

II. The constant tendency of fallen man to frame low and unworthy thoughts of God-which constitutes the imminent danger against which we would solemnly warn you.

1. For to form becoming notions of the great God, is in itself difficult to man, even with all the aids of Revelation. For man is earthly; his ideas of invisible things are chiefly derived from external objects. From these he learns to abstract certain material properties; he then contemplates the abstract being he has formed, and proceeds to add intenseness to the immaterial qualities which this abstract being is supposed to possess; and thus he mounts up to the idea of a spiritual substance.

Thus it is with regard to the ever blessed God. For "God is a Spirit;" "No man hath seen God at any time." Man endeavours then to abstract from his conception of him every thing material and sensible-body, parts, and passions. He then adds to this notion all the natural and moral attributes which the Scripture ascribes to him. This he effects by removing, as well as he can, all defects from the power, knowledge, wisdom, justice, goodness, truth which appear in men; and by adding all imaginable extent, elevation, purity, permanency, intenseness to these attributes. He next endeavors to annex the ideas of self-existence, eternity, independence, omniscience, omnipresence, to his previous conceptions; and thus he approaches to some distant, but still immensely distant, idea of the divine Being.

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To assist him in this, the Bible represents the supreme Being much in the way of negation: God is not a man that he should lie." He is "the Father

of lights, with whom is no variableness neither shadow of turning." "My thoughts," saith the Lord, are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways."

The Bible, also, describes the great God under characters familiar to man; as a Father, a Friend, a Judge, a Legislator, a King, a Benefactor; and it is in these relations that much instruction concerning his mysterious nature is conveyed. The sacred books also stoop to convey ideas of the dispensations of the Almighty by a resemblance to certain actions in man. "The Lord cometh out of his place to punish all the inhabitants of the earth." "I will go down now," saith the Lord, "and see whether Sodom hath done according to the cry which is come up to me." "I repent me that I have made man. "I lifted up my hand to the house of Israel.” “I have cast all thy sins behind my back." Jesus standeth at the right hand of God."

Notwithstanding all this, however, man, as an earthly creature surrounded by objects of sense, must ever have an immense difficulty in forming any adequate thoughts of a Being so infinitely exalted above him. Even angels can never reach the full idea of God. As to any original idea of the glorious God, man, even before the Fall, could only attain it by the aid of three things united,-the impress of God upon his heart in creation, that is, the idea of a supreme Being infixed in the conscience within ; a divine revelation from without, either oral or written; and the illumination and grace of the Holy Spirit. In Adam, framed after the image of God, these things concurred.

2. But now the corruption of man's nature by sin, enhances inconceivably the danger of his entertaining unworthy and false conceptions of the Divine character. For the original difficulties of the finite creature are augmented by a wrong bias of all his

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