tain a general truth in relation to the characters both of God and of man; and that therefore the Apostles must either have witnessed them, as they assert, or they must have been the most marvellous philosophers that the world ever saw. Their system is true in the nature of things, even were they proved to be impostors.

When God, through his prophet Jeremiah, refutes the pretensions of the false teachers of that day, he says," If they had stood in my counsel, and had caused my people to hear my words, then they should have turned them from their evil way, and from the evil of their doings." This moral tendency of its doctrines, then, is the evidence which the book itself appeals to for the proof of its authenticity; and surely it is no more than justice, that this evidence should be candidly examined. This is an evidence, also, on which the apostle Paul frequently rests the whole weight of the gospel.

According to this theory of the mode in which a rational judgment of the truth and excellence of a religion may be formed, it is not enough to show, in proof of its authenticity, that the facts which it affirms concerning the dealings of God with his creatures do exhibit his moral perfections in the highest degree;

it must also be shown, that these facts, when present to the mind of man, do naturally, according to the constitution of his being, tend to excite and suggest that combination of feelings which constitutes his moral perfection. But when we read a history which authoritatively claims to be an exhibition of the character of God in his dealings with men,--if we find in it that which fills and overflows our most dilated conceptions of moral worth and loveliness in the Supreme Being, and at the same time feel that it is triumphant in every appeal that it makes to our consciences, in its statements of the obliquity and corruption of our own hearts, and if our reason farther discovers a system of powerful moral stimulants, embodied in the facts of this history, which necessarily tend to produce in the mind a resemblance to that high character which is there pourtrayed, if we discern that the spirit of this history gives peace to the conscience by the very exhibition which quickens its sensibility that it dispels the terrors of guilt by the very fact which associates sin with the full loathing of the heart-that it combines in one wondrous and consistent whole our most fearful forebodings and our most splendid anticipa tions for futurity-that it inspires a pure and

elevated and joyful hope for eternity, by those very declarations which attach a deeper and more interesting obligation to the discharge of the minutest part of human duty,-if we see that the object of all its tendencies is the perfection of moral happiness, and that these tendencies are naturally connected with the belief of its narration,-if we see all this in the gos pel, we may then say that our own eyes have seen its truth, and that we need no other testimony: We may then well believe that God has been pleased, in pity to our wretchedness, and in condescension to our feebleness, to clothe the eternal laws which regulate his spir itual government, in such a form as may be palpable to our conceptions, and adapted to the urgency of our necessities.

This theory of internal evidence, though founded on analogy, is yet essentially different in almost all respects from that view of the subject which Bishop Butler has given, in his most valuable and philosophical work on the analogy between natural and revealed religion. His design was to answer objections against revealed religion, arising out of the difficulties connected with many of its doctrines, by showing that precisely the same difficulties occur in natural religion and in the ordinary course of

providence. This argument converts even the difficulties of revelation into evidences of its genuineness; because it employs them to establish the identity of the Author of Revelation and the Author of Nature. My object is quite different. I mean to show that there is an intelligible and necessary connexion between the doctrinal facts of revelation and the character of God (as deduced from natural religion), in the same way as there is an intelligible and necessary connexion between the character of a man and his most characteristic actions; and farther, that the belief of these doctrinal facts has an intelligible and necessary tendency to produce the Christian character, in the same way that the belief of danger has an intelligible and necessary tendency to produce fear.

Perhaps it may appear to some minds, that although all this should be admitted, little or no weight has been added to the evidence for the truth of revelation. These persons have been in the habit of thinking that the miraculous inspiration of the Scriptures is the sole point of importance: Whereas the inspiration, when demonstrated, is no more than an evidence for the truth of that system which is communicated through this channel. If the Christian system be true, it would have been so

vealed to men.

although it had never been miraculously reThis principle, at least, is completely recognized with regard to the moral precepts. The duties of justice and

benevolence are acknowledged to be realities altogether independent of the enforcements of any inspired revelation. The character of God is just as immutable, and as independent of any inspired revelation, as these duties; and so also are the acts of government proceeding from this character. We cannot have stronger evidence for any truth whatever, than that which we have for the reality of moral obligations. Upon this basis has been reared the system of natural religion as far as relates to the moral character of God, by simply clothing the Supreme Being with all the moral excellencies of human nature in an infinite degree. A system of religion which is opposed to these moral obligations, is opposed also to right reason.This sense of moral obligation, then, which is the standard to which reason instructs man to adjust his system of natural religion, continues to be the test by which he ought to try all pretensions to divine revelation. If the actions ascribed to God by any system of religion present a view of the Divine character which is at variance with the idea of moral perfection,