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LECTURE VII.

THE UNBELIEVING.

"But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death.” -Revelation xxi. 8.

I SELECT unbelief as the root and fountain to which all other sins are traced in Scripture. Unbelief prevented the entrance of the Israelites into Canaan. Paul, as one who was taught its heinousness by the Holy Spirit of God, addresses his Hebrew converts thus :-"Take heed lest there be in any of you an evil heart of unbelief in departing from the living God." It is a heart disease. Disease in the finger, the eye, the ear, is not fatal; but disease at the heart is not only fatal itself, but morally it is the prolific parent of the dark progeny enumerated in this

verse.

It has been made matter of complaint by persons of a skeptical mind, that heaven and hell should be made contingent on belief or unbelief; as if mere belief were the highest virtue, and the want of it the greatest sin. Faith in Scripture, however, is not mere intellectual evidence: it is, properly, confidence in God, or accepting his truth and promises, and all he is, as real, and placing implicit and unwavering confidence in his word, more than in the works of men. Is it no injury to human institutions to be denuded of all confidence? What becomes of a bank or insurance office, if confidence in their stability and substance be removed? Ruin lights on all. Destroy confidence between husband and wife, patient and physician, client and lawyer, and you paralyze every possibility of good. Exhaust from our social and commercial world all confidence, and you will soon find the whole system a rope of sand, destitute of cohesive power, and ready to fall to pieces.

This unbelief, or, as I have called it, want of confidence, while it is so mischievous, is at the same time the most subtle, evasive, and secret. It lurks under the affections like a caterpillar amid leaves, or a worm in a rosebud, and gnaws and wastes them. Other sins are easily seen: it is not so; but its existence can be detected by its effects-it always develops itself; the sins, in fact, in this very verse exude from it, and appear upon the surface.

It shows itself in the least subtle, and therefore most easily detected shape-viz. in positive rejection of Christianity; this is vulgar infidelity, according to which the Bible is a fable, and Christ crucified folly. It gazes on the Christian firmament, and sees no sun or stars; or on the earth, the ocean, and the forest, and the landscape, and sees in none of these the footprints of Deity as upon the sands of time; or in its more recent and perhaps perilous formula-American and German Pantheism-it rushes to the opposite pole, and sees every thing so overflowing with Deity, that it calls the proof of God's existence God, and every thing part and parcel of God. It is thus that the Pantheist in his blasphemy undesignedly praises God, by acknowledging every thing a vessel full of divinity. But in all its shapes, extravagances, and pretensions, its air is that of the dungeon, its dogmas icicles, its element the night, and its doom dissolution before that warm tide of light and life which shall overflow the earth.

This unbelief develops itself also in practical unbelief, combined with theoretical acceptance of every truth. Such persons profess to believe every truth of Christianity; they assail nothing, they dispute nothing; they are married, and their children are baptized according to the rites of Christianity; they enter the sanctuary full of apathy, and they retire having lost none of it. These are the most unmanageable of all persons; they are not to be laid hold of, there is no handle about them; they present perfectly smooth surfaces, and all appeals glide off, like water off the wing of a waterfowl. One longs to hear them contradict, or dispute, or deny, but they are incapable of this; and yet if you say they are unbelievers, they will repeat the apostle's creed and the ten commandments without a single omission. But the gospel has no hold of their hearts, no control over their affections, no echo in their conscience; its great voice has no music for their

ear, and its sublime hopes no attraction; they remain just what they would be if Christianity never had been proclaimed in the world. On them it has left no evidence of its presence. Disguise it as they like, they are unbelievers.

There is another class, who like much in the Bible, and are mightily pleased with a great deal of its theology, and so far think it inspired. But there are certain parts they do not like— great exceptions, they think; and they insist on it that their acceptance of the Gospel of St. John does not imply their belief in the Pentateuch, or their reception of the Apocalypse. They want, as they say, to weed the Bible; that is, really and truly, to make their taste, or convenience, or conscience, the Procrustesbed to which the Bible is to be fitted. These seem to forget, that if this be admitted, every transgressor will fit the Bible to his case; and when each has cut off from the Bible what he dislikes, or what rebukes his sin, there will be found a very small residue of influential or useful matter. This cannot be. We must receive the whole Bible or none of it. It is God's truth or Satan's lie-it is nothing between. It all rests on one basis; it assumes for all the same original; it is the highest truth, or the greatest blasphemy; it must remain unmutilated and unaltered. Our life must be brought up to its pitch; in short, we must be evangelical Christians or cold skeptics.

They, too, evince this spirit of unbelief, who reject particular truths of Christianity because they cannot comprehend them. Some reject the Trinity, because they cannot comprehend it; and for the same reason, the atonement and incarnation also, forgetting that they receive as facts and truths a thousand things in this world which they cannot comprehend. Every man acts, for instance, upon the principle, that by the volition of the will he can move his arm up or down, right or left, just as he pleases. Can you, for instance, explain this wonderful mystery—that thought -a thing which cannot be detected, which the chemist cannot analyze, which the anatomist cannot hold on his scalpel, which you cannot touch, weigh, or measure-that this imponderable, and intangible, and mysterious thing-thought-can make all the nerves and muscles of the hand cross and intertwine without delay in any direction it may prescribe; or how it can move all

the fingers of the hand upon the keys of a piano-forte, or on the strings of a violin, with such amazing precision, that it is the nearest possible approach to a miracle? Can you comprehend this mystery? And will you tell me you cannot receive the truths of the Bible because you cannot comprehend them, while you receive many equally as incomprehensible things in every-day life? It will be quite time enough to reject God's word or its doctrines because they are incomprehensible when you have rejected every thing in creation, and every day's experience, because it is no less so.

Another form of this unbelief is, the dislike of a simple, spiritual worship. I do not wonder that so many people become Roman Catholics, nor is it any matter of surprise to me that so many clergymen have become priests. My only surprise is, that every unregenerate and unconverted man does not become a Roman Catholic; and I declare, if I were not a Christian, I would become a Catholic myself. It is an externally beautiful and convenient form of religion. You can sin on one side of the street, and procure absolution on the other; its ritual services are fascinating to the senses, its incense fragrant to the smell, its music attractive to the ear, its architecture most gorgeous, its ceremonial grand, its robes splendid. If you are poor, your poverty will get you to heaven; if you are rich, your riches will help you to heaven; if you are fond of solitude, you may meritoriously retire to the cell or the convent; if you prefer splendid society, you can mingle with cardinals, popes, prelates, and other high occupants of power. I confess I wonder that every unconverted man is not allured and charmed into becoming a Catholic. But it is impossible that any man who knows what spiritual Christianity is-in whose heart there are throbs of the new life— should ever become a Roman Catholic. He knows in his heart, not by information, but by inwrought and sensible experience, that "God is a Spirit, and that they who worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth." It is their merely outside Christianity that explains the fact, that many of our own people, our Scottish people, when they come to London, are the first to follow the attractions of a more ritual worship; and not unfrequently they who have been the most staunch supporters

of a severe but scriptural form, have subsequently become the most outré Tractarians. So it will be: the most unsanctified must have elaborate gratification of the senses. But the spiritual heart, while it is delighted with the best music, the best architecture, and the best forms, provided there is no interruption to that true spiritual worship which seems to me to be the grandest worship, feels that God himself, and God's word, and God's worship, need but to be seen just as they are, to be presented in their greatest beauty. Such is another instance, then, of this unbelief. It also robes itself in pride and presumption, rushing irreverently where angels vail their faces; or, if not, it falls into despair. The eye of pride scarcely sees God at all; the eye of presumption looks at his mercy alone; the eye of despair, at his justice alone.

I must now notice unbelief in its special attitude of departing from the living God. God was, and is now, the great centre of the universe; and before sin was induced into this universe, every thing-every living and inanimate thing (if I may use the expression)-had the Deity for its centre of attraction. Every thing came from God: every thing moved onward to God, and found in him its repose, its happiness, its peace. Sin entered the world, and smote all the springs of things; and every thing has since this intrusion received a centrifugal tendency. At first all things were centripetal—that is, seeking the centre; now all things are centrifugal-that is, flying from the centre; and every object, therefore, which once carried man to God, now, through sin in it and in man, carries him from God; or he rests in the object instead of upon God, or he has gone with the object to a distance from God. If man had never fallen, the rich man would have been led by his wealth up to Him who is enthroned on the riches of the universe; and the man of great intellect would have been led by that intellect to seek more and more for light to enable him to decipher the inscriptions upon all things written by God's finger, and thus to be brought nearer and nearer to God; and the man of great rank would have felt his station but the reflection of the dignity of God, and have seen God in it, and by it; now all these things, through man's sin, carry him away from God, or become to him substitutes for God. The wealthy worship their wealth; the intellectual worship intel