tures that God is our Redeemer and our Sanctifier, without feeling corresponding obligations immediately rush upon our minds as the living, energizing representatives of the faith which is in us. Let us be only fully convinced, that our present life is the beginning of an eternal duration; and how irresistibly are we urged to a mode of conduct, answerable to that accession of importance, which our present condition in the world derives from the peculiar point of view in which we then contemplate it!

This obligation of religious truth to condescend to the wants of mankind, must have its effect on the nature of the truth imparted. If the doctrines taught supernaturally are to be practically brought home to us, or are necessarily influential on our conduct, they must be of such a nature as readily to combine with those natural principles of action which are inculcated on us by the course and constitution of the world. For. it is by these principles, instilled into us by the droppings of time, which have imperceptibly worked their way into our minds, growing with our growth,

and strengthening with our strength, that our conduct will ultimately be regulated, notwithstanding any fuller information respecting our duties subsequently delivered. These are laws written in our hearts, learned by dint of our very constitution: whereas the motives derived from Scriptural truth are received in the first place as laws of positive institution, and are afterwards discerned in their moral force. If the doctrines, accordingly, of the Scriptures did not harmonize with our natural principles of action, but taught a system of theology altogether abhorrent from them, they would reach the heart too late to establish their empire there, when the ground was already preoccupied by the aboriginal productions of the soil.

In order then that the practical obligations resulting from our natural and scriptural knowledge of divine things may not interfere and clash with each other, it is further necessary, whilst both oracles of truth impart a relative knowledge of God, that they should implicitly agree in unfolding the same general principles of the divine administration. For what else is

the instruction of nature, when considered in its practical force, but general views of the divine conduct translated into general rules of human life? All things having been ordered for the best under the providence of a wise, and good, and powerful God, a conformity with the proper course of natural events must be the sure and only means of attaining to that good, to which the excellent order of the universe is directed. But it is not the course of natural events, as they appear to the eye of superficial observation, encumbered and impeded with the accidental circumstances of an apostate world, which gives the true outline and form of that providence which sustains it; but it is their real tendency, abstractedly from those noxious incrustations, deposited, as it were, around the fact of nature by the turbid stream of the world, which is the truth as it is of God. The mind, therefore, in the very act of learning from experience, is compelled to generalize the particular facts submitted to its observation, and thus explores the laws of nature, or, in other words, general principles of the divine administration, as its rules

of action. Nor is this analytical process carried on in the mind of the philosopher alone, who studies the system of natural theology: but the common man, who requires the knowledge thence derived for the purposes of life, as much as the philosopher requires it for the purposes of science, has a capacity for it, in the adaptation itself of the human mind to the condition of the world; and thus, unconsciously to himself, philosophizes in secret concerning the facts of his observation *. So it is also with respect to the doctrines of Scripture. Practically considered they resolve themselves into general

*The faculty of generalizing is that which distinguishes reason from brute instinct. Without it we should only apprehend and know things according to their gross appearances. But that exercise of it in which it eminently appears as the proprium of man, is when it is employed upon actions as such, in selecting out of events those qualities which constitute virtuousness or viciousness in them. "It does not appear," observes Bishop Butler, " that brutes have the least reflex sense of actions as distinguished from events; or that will and design, which constitute the very nature of actions as such, are at all an object to their perception." Diss. on the Nature of Virtue, p. 434. Bishop Hallifax's Ed.

views of the divine procedure presented for the guidance of human conduct. In applying any scriptural truth to the purposes of our life, we examine the principles of action involved in it. As being a relative information concerning God, it represents to us God acting in some way towards ourselves: and we, accordingly, explore that way, that by acting ourselves in conformity with it, we may, as it were, express the doctrine in our lives. This appears to be the process by which a revelation of mysterious truth is practically received, and converted to the benefit of mankind.

Hence, though the holiest truths concerning God, and the world beyond our view, may be written in the volume of inspirations, and appear resplendent amidst its more homely themes-as the gold amidst the other riches of some lordly treasure-yet will not even such abstruse doctrines be without some principle of connexion with the instructions of the natural world. The same plan of divine providence will be found pervading both the miraculous and natural admonitions of God to man, as the primary