their attendance and worship regularly in the communion of our Church. For the benefit of such, we would enter generally upon some remarks on the subject of Hearing the Word. There is much important matter connected with this subject, which we ought to consider, and which, by the blessing of God, may be useful to us. The subject, taken in a large and general sense, will enable us to branch out into four different subjects, on each of which we may succinctly dwell. It will lead us to make some observations as to Why we hear? What we hear, How we hear, and Where we hear.

May the Spirit of God cause His blessed influence to descend upon all sincere and conscientious pastoral instruction; and make it useful to the souls of men, and to the glory of the great God and our Saviour Jesus Christ.

Now the first point proposed for inquiry is, Why we hear? Why we come up on the seventh day to the general assembly of the people, to hear instruction founded on the Scriptures? And to this the general answer may be at once given, that we believe the system of religion which those Scriptures inculcate, to be a dispensation of the great God; the only real means of knowing Him, of obtaining His favour, and serving Him acceptably. Such would be the answer of every one who had in any degree considered why they come to worship in a christian church. But here the knowledge of many terminates; and if they were pressed for the grounds of that conviction, they would find that it rested very much on the opinions of others, or on common custom, or on certain general notions which they could not explain satisfactorily to themselves or

others. We will proceed, therefore, to state summarily on what grounds we believe the religion of the Scriptures to be Divine? and the one main reason is, that we believe the writings which inculcate it to be Divine; we regard them on satisfactory grounds to be a revelation mercifully vouchsafed from God to His creature, man; and if we can make out this point, then the reasonableness of observing this religion will necessarily follow, on the ground that it is expressly enjoined by God Himself.

We proceed then to show why we accept the Scriptures as a revelation from God.

And, First, we would observe that it is certainly highly probable that there is, somewhere in the world, a revelation of the will of God. It is quite evident that man in his natural state does not know God as he ought. A comparison of the religious opinions and habits of all the different tribes of the earth, sufficiently shows this; for the notions of God entertained by far the larger portion of the earth, are nothing but a series of absurdities and monstrosities, degrading both to God and man; and the very contradictoriness of their several notions, proves that they do not know God. It does not, however, seem in the least likely that the Almighty, having made man a rational being,—with a moral nature and a conscience, with a certain impression of the existence of his God, and of his own responsibility towards Him,-should then leave him destitute of all means of knowing Him, and consequently liable to take up these false conceptions of his Maker, without any means whatever of correcting them. It is altogether improbable that the Almighty should leave his rational and moral creature to the

awful and unavoidable darkness and delusion of worshipping the planetary bodies, or the brute animals, or the monstrous conceptions of his own imagination-the work of his own hands, or the powers of evil and destruction, whose agency is so visible around him. With our natural notions of a benevolent First Cause, we cannot conceive that God would have created a world of moral beings in such a state; necessarily ignorant of the Great Author of all good, and necessarily open to such a gross misconception on these points,―to every variety of monstrous

error.

And it is no satisfactory explanation of the matter, to say that the tribes of the earth, to which we refer, are in a state of ignorance from want of education, and that if they would use their natural powers, they would attain to the knowledge of God; for we do not find this is the case. At this moment, large tracts of country, ancient and civilized empires, and a polished people,-India, China, Burmah, &c., are, with all their knowledge for this world, still in the gross est darkness on the subject of the nature of God. And other very extensive portions of the globe, the Mohammedan nations, are the dupes of a system which is known historically to be an imposture, as certainly as we know the fact of the reign of any king of our own country, or any other fact of our history. It is evident then that the advantages of civilization and letters are not sufficient to disclose to us the knowledge of God; for they do not enable men to detect a comparatively recent imposture of the grossest kind, and to say, "Is there not a lie in my right hand?" nor does the science and literature of India enable a Brahmin to see the

folly of worshipping an idol. Besides, if we refer to the experience of our own minds, we shall find that, independently of Scripture illumination, we have no means of discovering God, or His will. Go to those portions of our own country where scriptural teaching has been scanty, and see there what are men's views of God. Go to a neighbouring country, who threw aside the Scriptures and treated them as a human composition, and see what was the immediate result of that rejection, and what sad consequences are still discoverable. And go to the infidel men of our own enlightened country, and strip them of all the accurate and wise notions which they have insensibly imbibed from the Scriptures, and reduce their creed to their own unaided conceptions, and then judge by the tenor of their lives, what is the practical influence of their notions of God. All this will tend to show that the human mind has no power of discovering God, and setting Him adequately before it. And let us turn in upon ourselves, and recall the state of our own minds with reference to God, before we studied the Scriptures, and we shall find that they were fearfully dark upon the point; that we had no influential notion of God whatever; except so far as the twilight of Scripture had glanced upon us, through parental instruction, or cursory reading, or the general light of nominally christian society; and that if, in fact, we could have thrown off all the incidental knowledge derived, thus indirectly, from the Scriptures, our minds would have been as dark as any heathen mind whatever.

Now it appears very improbable that the great Moral Governor of the world would have left His crea

tures in this state of ignorance. Had He meant to deal with them altogether in wrath, as an avenger, they would soon have known Him in the terrors of His power; but dealing as He evidently does deal with this world, in kindness—not leaving Himself altogether without a witness, in that He does us good, giving rain from heaven and fruitful seasons, filling our hearts with food and glad ness,—it does seem highly probable that to the fact of His providential government, he would add some authoritative declaration or revelation of His will, that men might have the opportunity, if they would seek it, of knowing the mind of God respecting them, of knowing what is likely to be hereafter, and what is the rule by which they ought to guide their conduct here, and by which they are to be judged hereafter.

Allowing, then, the probability that God would communicate His will to man,-on looking round for that revelation, we find the book which we call the Bible. The latter division of which has been written eighteen hundred years, and at a time almost cotemporaneous with the events which it records; and the former part, at different periods, much earlier, so as to constitute it unquestionably the most ancient book in the world. The former part, or Old Testament, was placed from the very first under the jealous care of a whole nation,-a people separated by their peculiar habits from the whole world,-a people who it appears were possessed of letters before all other nations, and the formation of the alphabets of other nations may be traced to theirs. The reasons for receiving this book as genuine and authentic, are ample; and among the proofs of its truth we

may name the fact, that, as far as we can trace any rational account in the early traditions of the nations of the earth, it goes powerfully to establish the statements of the earlier Scriptures; and even their fabulous and distorted statements are founded upon and have their more simple origin in scriptural truths; and it is found that the more accurately learned men have been enabled to trace up the different nations of the earth to their original founders, they have discovered the account totally with the account which the book of Genesis gives of the branches of the family of Noah, and their settlement in different parts of the world. And to this we must add, that in no nation of the earth is there any account or tradition worthy of regard, which reaches beyond the scriptural date of the deluge, that in almost every ancient nation some tradition of the deluge has been found; and that now, as a fact, in natural history, the truth of an universal deluge at some time or other, at no very distant period, has been proved beyond all question.

And this authentic and ancient record, which, for undoubted antiquity, stands alone, and altogether unrivalled in the world; and which speaks not in an obscure mystic way like the heathen poets, but in the simplest possible language;—this book, in its earliest pages, and down to its latest page, speaks worthily of Godspeaks of Him in a way which no other book on earth does, except as such books can be shewn to have been derived from it; but yet in such a way as at once commends itself to our common sense, as truth, wisdom, and righteousness. And when we bring our mind to consider the God of the Scriptures, the self-existent Je

hovah, the God of justice, holiness, purity, and mercy, revealed to us, by His word, and in the providential dealings which His word records,and yet in no respect lowered and degraded to a human standard,—but while He communicates with man, still infinitely above him,-when we look through the whole volume, the accumulation as it is of forty centuries, written by different men, at different times, and recording the dealings of God with men of different periods, nations, and circumstances, and find the Lord spoken of by them all, to be the same conscious Being who acted in the earliest days, and with the same immaculate principles of truth, purity, justice, and mercy,so that not in the whole history is there one discrepancy of character, one departure from these principles;we feel compelled to admit that this is a revealed declaration to us of the character of that God, whom naturally we did not know. We feel that it presents an idea of the character of God, which we could not have conceived; but when it comes before us, we perceive its excellency and beauty, and receive it with reverence and delight.

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Thirdly. We find this book, which we have reason to believe authentic and genuine, and which is the only book that gives us right views of God, -records a series of facts of God's especial interference and manifest agency in the concerns of this world. Unless the book is a forgery, in the face of all our ample evidence to prove it true,- -a forgery by the best men of all ages,a forgery to teach us holiness and truth, and the reverence and the love of God,- -a forgery which has more of excellence in one of its pages than all the genuine and

true books in the world put together;

unless it is such a forgery, then the story of Noah and the deluge, of Abraham and his descendants, of Moses and the Exodus, of Israel and the prophets, of Christ and His apostles, is true; and if it is true, then we have the plain and palpable agency of the Great Jehovah set before us visibly in the world, in such a way as to intimate to us His near and intentional association with the events which that book records, and with the gradual development and establishment of that system of religion which it recommends. In fact, we have the truth of the God of heaven coming forth in visible glory on mount Sinai, to deliver His laws to the people whom He had miraculously redeemed,—and to establish that plan of formal and typical worship which the Jews maintained for so many years, and of which every point has now been shewn to have a bearing upon and a reference to a more spiritual mode of worship, which was afterwards to be developed. And in this way the most distant parts of the system are so linked together, that if the Bible be a true and authentic historical record, then the Christian religion is true and Divine; and that if the Christian religion be true and Divine, of which we have other proof of the most satisfactory kind, then the scriptural statements of God's manifest agency upon earth are true also. We must believe the visible, unquestionable, supernatural agency of that God whose character the Scriptures reveal. And then it follows, that if the Scriptures be a true and authentic account of facts which did take place, then these same Scriptures come to us as of Divine authority. They are evidently, upon their own