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one, we should behold a community of the same ablutions, the same abstinences, the same external observations. In the other we should behold a community, of a far higher kind, of soul with soul; a coalescence between the thoughts and affections and principles of the inner man. The votaries of other religions may have one baptism. They are the votaries of the Christian religion alone who have one Lord, that dwells in them and makes them one both with Himself and with each other; one faith, that, working by love, has the entire mastery over both their intellectual and their moral nature -and, subordinating the whole heart and history to the same great principle, begets that likeness or identity between all the members however scattered of Christ's spiritual family, which is expressed in our theological systems by the communion of the saints. They are bound together by the tie of their common sympathies, and their common hopes; and, in the topics of converse suggested by these, they have an interest which never fails.

CHAPTER IV.

On the portable Character of the Evidence for the Truth of Christianity.

1. THE epithet of portable, though alike applicable to the moral the experimental and the doctrinal evidence for the truth of Christianity, we should

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not have ventured to adopt in this place had it not been previously sanctioned by our admirable friend Joseph John Gurney,* whose writings have contributed so much to the defence and illustration of our common faith.

2. The meaning of it is, that, unlike to the historical or literary evidence, which, as requiring a higher amount of scholarship and education than is found to obtain throughout the general mass of society, can only be addressed to a limited class of readers the portable evidence, on the contrary, may be borne to every door, and find an opening for itself to the heart and the conscience even of the most unlettered of our species. Yet it is not by a reflex or philosophical exposition of this evidence it is not by such an exposition of it as we have attempted to give in the two previous chapters, that it is made to obtain an entrance into the minds of the common people. It works a way for itself there, and there achieves its main triumphs through the direct preaching of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. It is while the minister unfolds the contents of the Christian message, though without one word from him on the credentials of the message, that the best and weightiest of these credentials do of themselves find access to the popular understanding. It is thus that the subject matter of Christianity, instinct in itself with evidence, may, when simply told and explained, be left to vindicate its own authority; and does in fact carry its own proper weight, amounting to absolute

See his interesting little work on the "Portable Evidence of Christianity."

and entire ascendancy, over the convictions of the most ignorant and unlearned hearers. And this mental consent of theirs is not fancy but faith -the real substance of belief and not the semblance of it only the result of a process as legitimate and as logical, as any of those by which philosophy has been led to her soundest conclusions-a belief resting upon evidence presented in the message, though not pointed to or once named to them by the bearer of the message an evidence recognized by the people though perhaps never reasoned on by the minister.

3. And this self-evidence which lies in the matter of revelation, and makes it so applicable to the unlearned within, makes it equally applicable to the rudest and most unlettered tribes without the limits of Christendom. In the power and effect of the internal evidence we behold the rationale of a missionary enterprise the agents of which, with but the Bible in their hands and the spirit of prayer in their hearts, are in a state of full equipment for operating on the moral nature of man in every quarter of the globe. They are in possession of a key to all consciences; and, without the power either of working present miracles or of demonstrating to the apprehension of savages the certainty of past miracles, they, nevertheless, are in possession of vouchers to authenticate their mission, and by which to make full proof of their apostleship.

4. Before expatiating further either on the one or the other application, the evidence itself may again be shortly stated, even that evidence by

which the messengers of the Gospel might pioneer an access for Christianity to the consciences of the men of the whole earth-whether to the most sunken in the depths of ignorance and poverty at home or to the farthest removed in the wilds of distant and yet unexplored barbarism.

5. Each entire man has a conscience within his breast which tells him of the difference between right and wrong, and tells him somewhat of the God who planted it there; and each has a consciousness which tells him of his own delinquencies against this law of moral nature, and that, in the eye of him who ordained that law, he himself is an offender. Let the word which tells him the same things lay hold of his attention, and the recognized harmony between the lessons of the one and of the other-the felt echo in his own heart to the intimations of a message thus brought nigh unto him -the response given from within to the voice heard from without-will fix and perpetuate his attention the more; and all the discoveries made by this process of a joint or double manifestation, will have, at least, the authority of two witnesses to confirm them. Let us conceive that the ministrations of the spirit are superadded to the ministrations of the word, and that he who is the subject of these, obtains, in consequence, a clearer and fuller view both of himself and of the Bible. Under such a discipline as this, all his convictions, and with his convictions, his fears must grow apace; the feeble and incipient notices which first drew his regards, might now be to him the loud denunciations of terror; all that is said of the evil of sin

and of the vengeance which awaits the sinner under a holy and unchangeable lawgiver, might have tenfold greater weight and significancy than before; and he be haunted in consequence, by the thought of an angry God and an undone eternity. In the midst of these disquietudes which so agitate and engross his soul, let us further imagine that the same Bible which told him of sin, now tells him of salvation; and that the same spirit from on high which irradiated the one revelation and made it stand forth as if in illuminated characters of greater dread and majesty than before, casts a bright but pleasing irradiation over the other also. In answer to the prayers of this tost and tempest-driven supplicant, seeking for rest but hitherto finding none, let the revelation of grace be at length made as palpable as before was the revelation of terror. Let him now be helped to take a view of redemption, in its characters and in its footsteps of that great movement made from heaven to earth, and the object of which was to reconcile the outcast world and recall its wandering generations to the family of God. Let the law have acted its part as a schoolmaster in bringing him to Christ; and, in the history of Him who came, charged with the overtures of peace, and went about doing good continually, let him learn the possibility at least that there is an outlet of escape from condemnation that there is still a refuge from despair. Let this dawning hope ripen more and more towards a full assurance, as he becomes more intelligent in the doctrines of the Saviour, and listens to His repeated declarations of good will to the chil

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