Go and tell them that "like as a father pitieth his children, so the Lord pitieth them that fear him." Go and testify to them that "as one whom his mother comforteth," so God comforts his believing ones. Go and assure them that whosoever doeth the will of God, the same is Christ's brother and sister and mother. Go and proclaim the one great sacrifice for sins, and their sensibilities and sympathies will respond to it as your own respond to it. Were they a different race, we should want a different Gospel. They are the same race; therefore our own Gospel will do, will do for them; designed as much for them as for ourselves, to bring them from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. I trust, Are men of every peculiarity one race? Then it is thus far certain that the Scriptures are neither a fiction nor a fraud. Could an original diversity of mankind be made out, something would be done towards the subversion of the Scriptures, and that in more respects than one. But if such diversity cannot be made out, nay, if it can be satisfactorily disproved, then the Scriptures, both in the things which they state and the things which they assume, are the more confirmed. as the result of our interview here to-night, the Scriptures will be in your own esteem yet more profoundly than ever venerated, yet more richly than ever prized. This was the practical object I had principally in view; to make you feel that the holy books on which we rely for our salvation are authentic and truthful throughout, not cunningly devised fables, but documents which will bear the severest tests by which they can legitimately be tried. For, as with the course we have pursued to-night, so with every other, either of a literary or scientific investigation, which it may please you to pursue, you shall find that revelation has been well represented as the great fixed point around which all truth does reverently revolve. It is so in respect to geology, in respect to astronomy, in respect also to archæology, and it will be the same in respect to any other science attainable by man. With every advancement of knowledge, with every deduction of philosophy, with every result of observation, the Scriptures will be found, in the end, exactly to agree. Signally, triumphantly, right illustriously has this been the case with all discoveries in the past. Yet more illustriously will it be the case with all the discoveries which are to come. As the master-spirits of the age are carrying on their investigations, ----at one time up amidst the milky way, and at another within the bowels of the earth, and at another among the hieroglyphics of old Egypt and its older schools, sparing no labour, reverencing no opinions, caring for no consequences which may be entailed upon any theory of morals or upon the most ancient of our theological creeds, as they are doing and daring all this, you, the believers in revelation, may remain perfectly undisturbed. In dignified composure and lofty anticipation you may possess your souls, assured that ultimately, by what it proves and by what it leaves unproved, every science will do its homage to Revelation, as to the great harbinger of its sublimest discoveries, the venerable, everlasting oracle of universal truth. MODERN INFIDEL PHILOSOPHY. γου For will not marvel, my Christian friends, that I address you under an impression of a very overwhelming kind. There are scenes in nature that fill the soul with solemnity and awe. The majesty of the ocean; the sublimity of the midnight sky, studded with its countless stars; the everlasting mountains, hiding their crests amid the clouds of heaven ;—these overpower the mind with a sense of grandeur; but the scene on which it is my solemn privilege to look abroad at the present moment is immeasurably grander than all of them. I gaze on a mighty mass of immortality, a multitudinous gathering of mortal immortals, finite infinites. There is not an individual before me but enshrines a soul, weighed against which all "the dread magnificence of unintelligent creation" is poor. When every star shall have been swept from the firmament,when the sun shall have set to rise no more,—when the elements of the visible creation shall have melted with fervent heat, then each soul now thrilling with attention will be existing in full consciousness and imperishable being, in depth of terment, or in height of bliss. If there be a feature that can enhance the awful interest of such a scene, it is the circumstance that this is a gathering of young immortals; and these young immortals the citizens of the mightiest metropolis on the face of the earth. Who that has gazed, in one of our seaports, on a fleet of vessels, with a favouring gale, gliding forth on the mighty |