how strange that men should be so anxious to get rid of a present God, and should be so desirous of demonstrating the extraordinary problem that the world is workable without God. Is it a more comforting belief that the world goes on, on its own account, without God; or that the world for its every movement in its orbit, and the human heart for its every pulse in your bosom, is dependent on the immediate touch and action of God? All the instincts of our nature lead us to think there is a God; that God not only was, but is, and will be; that God not only is, but acts, influences, governs; that the laws are living expressions from a Lawgiver; that incidents are not tumbling events, but emissaries from the throne of God himself. In the words of one of the most sagacious, acute, and reflective of minds-I mean Benjamin Franklin, when speaking in a great American convention in 1787-"I have lived a long time, now eighty-one years; and the longer I live, the more convincing proof I see of this truth, that God governs in all the affairs of mankind ;” a wise, a just, and a scriptural sentiment. It is said by Combe, an ingenious writer on physiology, a man of genius and intellect, but very wrong in some things: "Man is sole master of his own destiny, at least, in this world, by means of obedience to natural laws." I do not believe this; I would appeal from Combe, the great physiologist, to one who is greater still, but in another department, the great poet of our country who answers him in two lines, "There's a Divinity that shapes our ends, I leave the scientific man in his scepticism, and I take the poet in his inspiration; and believe that there is a Divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them as we will. In one sense, I admit, the fixity of the laws of nature as a right thing. It is necessary that things should continue in one sense as they are. For instance, the physician discovers that certain medicines are possessed of a certain action, and he administers them, assuming when he administers them the fixity of the laws which science has discovered. In the same manner we calculate that the sun will set at midsummer at such an hour, and at the equinoxes at such an hour, and that darkness will begin or darkness will depart at such an hour. These are continuous laws; and there is a sense, unquestionably most important, in which we can say all things continue as they were; if they did not, there would be no progress, no social comfort, there would be no discoveries that would be of value or of practical benefit to mankind. But it is too bad to quote the very thing that proves the perfection of the arrangement as evidence that the machine-maker has left it to itself; because it is perfect, and does not work by fits and starts and irregularities, to argue that therefore God is not in it, is neither logic, nor scripture, nor common sense. Because He has given us laws to regulate our conduct, and shown us a basis on which science can construct its inferences, and medicine can achieve its results; to say because the watch goes so well, there never was a watchmaker, and that there is no watch-keeper to take care of it, and there never was a world-maker, and there is no world-keeper to look after it now, is absurd; it is, to quote the very excellence of the work as disproof of the presence and control of the artisan or the maker. But we Christians need not reply to such arguments; 66 we have a more sure word of prophecy to which we do well to take heed, as to a light shining in a dark place. One solitary, "Thus saith the Lord," is worth a cartload of philosophical arguments; and the less a Christian looks to science for his religion, and the more he looks to the law and to the testimony," the brighter will be the light that shines upon his steps, the surer and the stronger will be his convictions. An old covenanter used to be plagued with several scientific persons, who quoted all sorts of ingenious things against his convictions and his creed. In his own Scottish dialect he answered them only in one way; "Rax me the book ;" that is, Give me the Bible. He held no argument on their grounds, no discussion on their premises; whenever they urged what seemed to them conclusive against a grand truth, the venerable old man opened the Bible, put his finger on the text, and read it, and said, "That assures me that what I hold is right, and I care not how you argue, nor how long you argue; what you say must be wrong." And therefore, "unto them that look for Him, He will come the second time without sin unto salvation." Therefore, "Behold, I come quickly;" therefore, "He shall be revealed to be admired in all them that believe;" therefore, "He cometh with clouds, and every eye shall see Him;" therefore, He shall ascend his throne, and summon all before Him, and assign to each an inexhaustible retribution. Therefore, there is but an empty scoff, there is no argument, no conclusiveness, no force at all in, “All things continue as they were from the beginning, and since the fathers fell asleep ;" for a word made the world, and a word will wind up and terminate the world. "Come, Lord Jesus, come quickly." Amen. LECTURE II. THE WORLD WILL LAST OUR DAY. God has proved more than once in history that the continuity of things and the fixity of laws are dependent on his will. We need much to feel this. "For this they willingly are ignorant of, and by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water; whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished."-2 PETER iii. 5, 6. In this passage, on which we proceed to make some remarks, we have the apostle's second answer to objections. He might have merely said, All things have not continued as they were from the beginning; but the Spirit has been pleased, by the pen of his amanuensis Peter, to adduce proofs, and facts, and evidences. The disproof of the scoffer's assertion here assigned is this—that "by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of the water and in the water; whereby the world that then was, being overflowed with water, perished." Here is an instance of God's word making a world; and secondly, of the same word destroying a world; in which last illustration he refers expressly to the flood. The argument of the apostle Peter here employed is just this; if the word of God as it fell from the lips of Deity, and was launched into space, created the material orbs, that word launched again from the same lips will destroy, if He has promised to do so, the orbs that He has made. If that word, according to his argument, opened the fountains of the great deep, and the windows of heaven, and brought upon the earth a flood that rose fifteen cubits above the crags of Ararat, his word is no less competent again, if He has said that it shall be so, to destroy the world. Wherever God has uttered a prophecy to accomplish anything, He has power, as these facts prove-apart from any power ascribed to Him in the Scriptures-to carry that prophecy into performance. Wherever He has uttered a promise, if the facts adduced be facts, He has power to fulfil that promise; wherever He has uttered a menace or a threat, He has power to carry that threat into execution. But perhaps these scoffers, who say, "Where is the promise of his coming?" deny what Peter here asserts, that God made the world. Theirs, if entertained, is a strange belief. The book to which we appeal says it is the fool, not the wise man, that hath said in his heart, "There is no God." But I may reason with them even on their own grounds. Suppose I shut the Bible, do we discover no footprints of Deity upon the sands of time? Is there in the length and breadth of the area of our world no vestige of a Creator, no solitary proof of design? Take a flower - the rose, the violet, or the lily-examine it minutely; analyze it. Chemistry can tell you and lay before you all its constituent elements; but no chemistry can rebuild or reconstruct it, give it its beautiful tints, or impart to it its rich and delicious fragrance. Man can mar, man can destroy, sometimes he can mend, but man |