us, ' accounted all things but dross, for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus his Lord;' that not depending on his own righteousness, which is of the law (of any law), but on the righteousness of God, which is by faith, he had laboured to attain unto the resurrection of the dead, not as though he had already attained, either were already perfect,' but he says, I follow after, if that I may apprehend that for which I am also apprehended of Christ Jesus. Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended' (that is, laid hold on Christ, as Christ had laid hold on him), but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before, I press towards the mark for the prize of the high calling of God in Christ Jesus.' Here is the portrait of a true Christian, already good, but not entirely satisfied with his own attainments, and therefore struggling for a farther advance towards Christian perfection; of a man, not unmindful of his own weakness, nor of the repeated warnings, given by Christ and himself, to all Christians, to beware of the enemy, and, as good soldiers, 'to fight the good fight of faith.' Ye believe in God, believe also in me,' saith Christ. He that believeth, and is baptized, shall be saved; 'Stand fast in the but he that believeth not shall be damned.' faith,' saith the apostle, to all believers, as much as to say, beware of wavering. Let them who have believed in God, be careful Shew me your faith by your works,' to maintain good works.' saith St. James. Faith is set forth to, and required of, a Christian, as the grand spring of good works, indeed as the only spring of works acceptable with God. But lest the wrong head, and worse heart, of an enthusiast, laying hold of the doctrine of St. Paul in various parts of his epistles, but particularly in the third, fourth, and fifth chapter to the Romans, should take faith to stand instead of good works, and so give himself little or no trouble about his life and conversation, let him only go forward to the sixth chapter, which will cure him of his wicked mistake, if he does not prefer his own to the inspiration of St. Paul. There he will find, that the good Christian is buried with Christ by baptism into death, that like as Christ was raised up from the dead by the glory of the Father, even so we also should walk in newness of life; knowing this, that our old man is crucified with him, that the body of sin might be destroyed, that henceforth we should not serve sin. Now, if we be dead with Christ, we believe, that we shall also live with him. Reckon ye also yourselves to be dead indeed unto sin, but alive unto God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Let not sin therefore reign in your mortal body, that you should obey it in the lusts thereof.' This exhortation, if fairly attended to, would do infinitely more towards the advancement of Christian perfection, than all that can be done by man, whatsoever pretensions he may set up to an inspiration, not only refuted, but fully proved to be from beneath, by the word of God himself, which he hath attested by his own miraculous interposition, and left not in the power of false prophets, either to support the credit of new inspirations, or of their forced glosses upon the old. St. Peter strongly enforces the necessity of faith, virtue, knowledge, and charity, &c. and tells us, that he that lacketh these things is blind, and hath forgotten that he was purged from his old (or former) sins. Wherefore,' saith he, 'give diligence to make your calling and election sure.' What, then? Is our calling or election nothing more than the light of Christianity afforded us in the gospel, and the aid of the Holy Spirit, the first of which we may forget, the second of which we may resist and quench? Does our election render us infallible? And is there not a possibility of falling from grace? Why otherwise this, and such other exhortations? Why, otherwise, among such as hold themselves to be perfect and infallible, is there such a world of preaching and exhortation? They certainly have no small doubts of their own perfection, as had dying Cromwell, when he asked his chaplains, if there was a possibility of falling from grace? They answered, No, and he cried out, Then I am safe, and so he died. But what occasion had he to ask this question, who was himself so mightily inspired, but that he doubted of the point; doubted, whether all the blood he had waded through, in gratification of his ambition, was pleasing or displeasing in the sight of God? Men may take it into their beads to think they cannot sin, either because they, in their opinion, find nothing at all amiss in their thoughts, words, or actions, which never was the case of any man, but Christ; or because they believe, that the same action may be very sinful in another, which is perfectly innocent in the elect and perfect. If a man of this way of thinking, does such an action as all mankind condemn, and as God abhors, and boasts it to the world, or pleads it with God as meritorious, can we suppose a man in a more deplorable condition? Need I say this in a Christian country? Did the Holy Ghost encourage him to this most flagitious principle? Yet Cromwell, and all his inspired soldiers, had no other principle to justify all the devastation, plunder, and murder, they committed. But, to conclude, if a Christian, in order to be forgiven by God, is required to forgive another four hundred and ninety times, I conclude it is because he himself stands in need of forgiveness for yet a greater number of sins, and possibly, of a more heinous nature. 180. There is nothing, which mankind are with so much. difficulty brought to believe or assent to, as a religion wherein the corruptions of their nature are condemned, and their sensual pleasures restrained and mortified, although it is a religion infinitely excellent in itself, and absolutely necessary to them. For this purpose, how many ancient prophecies must be accomplished! How many miracles performed! How many martyrs crucified, or burnt alive! On the other hand, no sooner is the most flimsy argument started against that religion, so formidable to human frailty, than it is without examination received as demonstrative, and handed about among infidels as unanswerable. An instance of this appears in Brydone's letters from Sicily. Here we are told of a promontory of lava from Mount Etna, pushed into the sea two thousand years ago, which hath, in all that time, collected but a thin or scanty covering of soil, Letter vi. and in the next letter, we are given to understand, that near Jaci, in digging into a bed of lava, seven strata of that substance were perforated, and between each two of them, a thick stratum of fat soil was found. On this the ingenious writer builds an argument, that the world must be fourteen thousand years old, say Moses and our chronologers what they will. For the truth of the data here fairly stated by me, as Brydone gives them, we have nothing to depend on but Mr. Brydone's word; and he nothing but a superficial cast of his eye from a distance on the promontory; and for the seven strata, &c. nothing but the report of an infidel priest, who does not so much as say that he saw these strata laid open. Now as to the age of the promontory, it can be only guessed at from the words of Diodorus Siculus, and from, the report of the same infidel priest, who, it seems, found some Roman inscriptions thereon, but says nothing of the age or purport of said inscriptions. But right or wrong, so old the promontory must be, to support the argument of Brydone. And as to the scanty covering of soil upon it, a point equally necessary to the goodly argument, Brydone trusts for that to a distant view of its produce; but finds himself embarrassed with some tall trees growing out of it, which, without any closer examination, he takes upon him to say, are rooted in certain crevices, where they might have a greater depth of soil. His crevices, we know, could have received no more than their proportion of such matter as fell equally over the whole promontory, but might have been, and undoubtedly were, washed off by the waves from the other parts of the rock. Had he told us the breadth of this promontory, and tried the depth of its soil at an equal distance from the sea on each side, we might have made some judgment, whether the waves, continually washing its sides, and there preventing the accumulation of soil, might not have done the same on its flatter and less exposed surface at top. This would have done a little more justice to truth than he intended. In his next letter, he takes up the report of the seven strata, &c. but never troubles himself to ask, who they were, or for what reason, some people had dug down through a rock of lava, nor to what depth they dug before they came to these strata, or whether, in quest of somewhat else, they dug any deeper. They did not seem to quarry for any thing but an objection to Moses. No, they had done enough for that purpose, and then held their hands. But to make his argument so far logical, ought he not to have given us the exact depth of soil, at least on the top of the promontory, and the depth of the fat soil between every two strata of lava at Jaci? This he hath not at all done. And yet, without doing this, how could he conclude the age of the world to be fourteen thousand years? For instance, had he told us, that the soil, at deepest, on the promontory, was one foot, which was all that could be accumulated in two thousand years, and exactly a foot deep also in every one of the seven strata of the same substance at Jaci, then his multiplying seven by two might have given his argument somewhat like a fair conclusion; and but half like, as I shall presently shew. To prevent a scrutiny, such as I am making, he carefully avoids bringing his premises together, giving one of them in his sixth, and the other in his seventh letter. Supposing however he had laid them as close as in a syllogism, and exhibited the measure of depths accurately taken by himself, as I have stated it, his conclusion of fourteen thousand years must have been miserably precarious. The promontory, exposed to winds and waves, could not have gathered soil so fast from the showers of ashes sent down from Mount Etna, and other volcanos, as the ground of Jaci, so much better sheltered, and so much better supplied with fat earth washed down by every shower from higher grounds adjacent. Besides, volcanos throw out various sorts of matter; stones, lava, and ashes, are not all they eject. Water, mud, and one or two other sorts of substances, which, in some time, crumble into common soil, run down from thence in the dreadful torrent. The lava itself is not always uniformly dense. The metallic, or heavier part, flows at the bottom of the stream; and at top, a more light, porous, and friable stuff, which, in time, exposed to the air, crumbles into a fatty sort of earth. The river Alcantara hath cut itself a channel fifty or sixty feet in depth, through a rock of lava, which proves, that at least some sorts of lava are not so tough and hard as others. Chesnut trees, of immense size, grow out of the lava on Mount Etna, with the help of its ashes; and these ashes, almost as heavy as sand, falling from eruptions of Vesuvius, sometimes cover the streets of Naples, five miles distant from that smaller volcano, to the depth of five or six inches. In how much greater abundance must they fall on the close adjacencies of Etna? In the midst of these known experiences, what can be made of Brydone's calculations? Of arguments, vomited out, as it were, by the mouth of hell, against the truth of our holy religion? Herculaneum was buried seventy feet under an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, in digging through which they throw up the matter of various strata, and among others, fat and black moulds. Lava is found in so many parts of the world, where there is not, or ever was, the smallest trace of volcanos, that we must think those lands once lay nearer to subterraneous fires, where alternate beds of lava and earth might have been laid over each other. The Giant's causeway, and the masses of basaltes, wherever found, is nothing else but lava. These, and the innumerable calcinations, found every where, induced Buffon to believe, that this globe was a part of the sun, and forced off by a comet. It is not easy to say what compelled this Frenchman to go so far for the effects of a fire, continually burning under his feet. He went on better grounds, when he took it for granted, on sight of so many submarine shells on our high mountains, that our present earth was once under the sea; and going so deep for these shells, it is odd how he missed the subterraneous, and I will add, subaqueous fires. But, like many other philosophers, he was unfortunate in a favourite hypothesis, that the volcanic fires are confined to the bellies of their mountains, and extend neither farther nor deeper, by which he wonderfully shortened |