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TRUTH AND ITS COUNTERFEITS.

MY YOUNG CHRISTIAN FRIENDS,

I am permitted this evening to bear a part with you in the great work for which you are associated, viz., the encouragement of each other, by converse and by example, in your Christian course, each helping the other to lay aside every weight and the sin which doth so easily beset him, and to run with patience the race that is set before him.

I will not waste any portion of the time that ought to be so occupied by deprecatory remarks on my own insufficiency, but at once gird myself to the discharge of my duty, and humbly hope that by God's blessing on us this evening I may be enabled to speak, and you to reflect, upon the subject before us, in such a spirit as to strengthen us for the conflict with evil and the Evil One, that can cease only with our earthly existence.

The subject before us, "Truth and its Counterfeits," is in itself inexhaustible; for as truth embraces all existence, so do her counterfeits everywhere and at all times obtrude upon us their unreal mockery of her beauty. Hypocrisy has been characterised as the homage paid by vice to virtue, and the thought may be generalised. Virtue is but one modification of truth. The will of the Almighty Creator is the essence of all truth, and the Evil One, who was a liar from the beginning, believes and trembles, sees the loveliness of truth, but

irregular volubility turn themselves any way as it might happen; if the prince of the lights of heaven, which now as a giant doth run his unwearied course, should, as it were through a languishing faintness, begin to stand and to rest himself; if the moon should wander from her beaten way, the times and seasons of the year blend themselves by disordered and confused mixture, the winds breathe out their last gasp, the clouds yield no rain, the earth be defeated of heavenly influence, the fruits of the earth pine away as children at the breast of their mother no longer able to yield them relief— what would become of man himself, whom these things do now all serve? See we not plainly that obedience of creatures unto the law of nature is the stay of the whole world?"

The citation I have made is long, but I make no apology, for its beauty must please anew even those who have frequently perused it. I have purposely cited thus early two great authors of the Elizabethan age. Bacon has very recently been publicly styled 66 an over-rated man." I wonder what intellectual giant has measured his capacity. Never was there in the world's history an epoch in which the highest powers of the understanding and those of the imagination were so marvellously and simultaneously developed as in the reign of our Elizabeth. Can any three names in all time be mentioned of men who have combined poetical inspiration with reasoning power in such degree as Hooker, Bacon, Shakspeare? I attribute this prodigious and sudden development of the mind of man to the Reformation. The reasoning power had been set free, and, like the fabled infant Hercules, strangled the twin monsters of superstition and dogmatism in its very cradle; whilst the poetical element of man's nature was refreshed by a free and deep draught from those living waters which are the true source of the ideal, from that Book which contains the sublimest of all poetry in its purest form. But I digress. I proceed to show you that the one source

of all truth, namely, the will of God, has been recognised even by the natural reason of man, independently of revelation. The observation of man from the earliest ages led him t conclude that the natural objects around him were not selfexisting: He felt, from his personal experience, that there was within himself an originating power of thought, of will, of motion; and at the same time, from the like experience, he perceived that there were objects independent of his will, which if he opened his eyes he must see, if he extended his hand he must touch. Some of these objects would appear to him to be endued with organs and with powers, at least of motion and action, similar to those he was conscious of in himself; but the greater part would be found to be destitute of any such organs, and, unless moved or acted upon by some other power independent of themselves, would be motionless and inert. Now the earliest deductions which, independently of revelation, mankind were wont to make from such observations as these, were not those of the materialist or atheist, nor those of a pantheistic philosophy. They did not, that is to say, fall into the error of imagining that they and all around them were a series of material objects self-developed from all eternity, nor into the apparently (but only apparently) opposite extreme of supposing that this great series was itself the Deity under various forms-a mere difference, after all, of words. They believed that spirit could alone act, alone had vitality; and, in their ignorance of the one true God, they attributed to distinct spiritual sources, to the various deities of their Pantheon, the motions of the heavenly bodies, the phenomena of the air and ocean, and the powerful energy of other material inorganized objects which they could not otherwise explain. They were unable to reduce all the wonderful variety of sights and sounds that surrounded them into one harmonious system, so as to assign to it one sole author; but they did not commit the absurdity of supposing that a tree,

any more than a ship, was a self-developed object, independent of any contrivance or forethought. Their ignorance rendered them humble, but left them superstitious.

After a while, however, man, in the progress of civilization, became better acquainted with what we term the various properties of material objects, and more and more absorbed in the investigation of the manifold problems offered to his consideration by the external world, the solution of which is of the utmost importance to his physical comfort and advancement. A few of the more elevated minds soon began to taste the pleasure of increasing knowledge, and, being enabled to comprehend the operation of certain general laws of continual recurrence, they perceived that numerous phenomena might be removed from the sphere of a supposed capricious agency on the part of independent spiritual beings. They observed certain phenomena always to follow certain other phenomena, which they soon learned to regard as their necessary causes. The self-sufficiency and conceit, however, of those who were thus able to emancipate themselves from the superstitious terrors which peopled earth, air, and ocean with contending deities, led them to an opposite and certainly no less grievous error, that of an atheistic eternization of matter. Lord Bacon has beautifully said, and it is a favourite thought of his, repeated in various parts of his works: "It is an assured truth and a conclusion of experience, that a little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism; but a further proceeding therein doth bring the mind back again to religion: for in the entrance of philosophy, when the several causes, which are next unto the senses, do offer themselves to the mind of man, if it dwell and stay there it may induce some oblivion of the Highest Cause; but when a man passeth on further, and seeth the dependence of causes and the works of Providence, then, according to the allegory of the poets, he will easily believe that the highest link of

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