LECT. I. within the range of events-remarkable, indeed,

in their character, but not beyond the power of natural causation, is to demolish with the one hand what they build with the other; and it would be acting a much more honourable, as well as a more consistent part, to reject the Scriptures altogether, and constitute the pure dictates of human reason, if such could be ascertained, the only standard of belief and practice.

It would seem absolutely impossible for any person who should peruse the Bible for the first time, and who should put upon its language such a construction as he would upon the language of any other book composed about the same time, and by persons circumstanced as the sacred writers profess to have been, to arrive at any other conclusion than that of a real celestial interposition having taken place in all those instances in which the Deity is said to have spoken, or to have revealed himself to certain persons specifically mentioned in the narrative. Such, in point of fact, is the construction universally put upon the language, not only by plain and ordinary readers, but also by persons of cultivated minds, who come to the perusal of the Scriptures unbiassed by hypothetical reasonings; and it must be obvious that, if such be not the doctrine which these writings were designed to teach, no language could have been adopted that was more likely to lead mankind into error than that which is there employed.

agent.

The agent by whom, according to the express_LECT. I. statements of revelation, the influence in question Inspiring was exerted, is the HOLY SPIRIT, or that distinct personal Subsistent, of whom Divine names, properties, and acts are predicated, and who, in conjunction with the Father and the Son, constitutes the one only God. The propriety of the name ПIveûμa, thus given to him, does not appear to be founded on any spiration, emission, or breathing, as an internal personal characteristic, descriptive of the mode in which it has been asserted the Divine nature was communicated to

him by the Father and the Son.* The only passage of Scripture to which an appeal has been made in favour of this hypothesis is John xv. 26, where our Lord promises, "when the Comforter "is come, whom I will send unto you from the "Father, even the Spirit of truth, which pro"ceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of

66

me," but in which no mind, uninfluenced by a speculative bias, or unaccustomed to scholastic or philosophical distinctions, could ever have discovered any reference to an immanent act in the nature of Deity; since the subject spoken of is the coming forth of the Holy Spirit, in the exercise of the functions ascribed to him in the economy of redemption, which was to take place after the ascension of Christ to glory. Indeed, this view of the passage is now adopted by all interpreters of Scripture of any note.

* See Note C.

LECT. I. But though the etymological import of the term Spirit, as applied to the Third Person of the Trinity, cannot be pressed into the service of metaphysical divinity, it would be unfair to conclude that no use whatever is to be made of it, or that the word itself is entirely destitute of force as applied to this Divine Person. That it is not given to him simply to denote his pure immateriality, seems evident from the consideration that, however it might thus serve to distinguish him from the Son, who united the humanity to his eternal spiritual nature (veûμa aiwvíov, Heb. ix. 14,) it would not distinguish him from the Father, whose spirituality is equally absolute with that possessed by the Holy Ghost. It can only, therefore, be applied to him in this appropriate personal sense in reference to his operations, which, as it regards both the natural and the spiritual world, are compared to those carried on by means of the wind acting upon the bodies with which it is brought into contact. "The Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters." "The wind bloweth where it 66 listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, "but canst not tell whence it cometh, and "whither it goeth: so is every one that is born "of the Spirit." (Gen. i. 2; John iii. 8.) He is the Author of all vivifying, purifying, and enlightening influences; and, specially with respect to our present subject, by his inspiration, or Divine inbreathing, were the prophets and apostles

qualified and enabled to communicate the mind of LECT. I. God to mankind. Hence the circumstance, to which sufficient attention has not been paid, that, in numerous passages of the New Testament the term Spirit is by metonymy applied to his agency, or to the effects which resulted from that agency, as made to bear upon the extraordinary qualification of the first teachers of the gospel.

to the claims

tion.

On the subject of Divine Revelation in gene. Opposition ral, and on that of the influence specially exerted of Revelaon the minds of those by whom the Scriptures were penned, no small diversity of opinion has obtained. To those who repudiate the claims of revelation altogether, are usually given the names of Deists and Naturalists; and to those who profess to believe in the Divine authority of the Bible, but explain away its miracles, prophecies, inspiration, and all its peculiar doctrines-reducing the whole to mere ordinary phenomena, popular prejudice, prudent accommodation, or philosophical hypothesis-is given that of Rationalists, which in reality differs from the former designations only in so far as it points to human. reason, or, more properly speaking, individual opinion, as the standard to which every thing connected with religious belief is to be submitted. The Naturalists may be divided into two classes-Deists, strictly so called, who avow their belief in one extra-mundane spiritual principle, from whose creative impulse the powers

LECT. I. and laws of nature originally proceeded; and Materialists, or Pantheists, who place the primitive cause of things in corporeal substance, or, carrying out and refining upon this principle, consider the universe itself to be God.

Deists.

be

Though some vague traces of Deism may discovered in opinions broached in the earlier ages of the Church, it was not till the middle of the sixteenth century that its principles were openly avowed;-first, by a number of persons in France and Italy, who are supposed to have assumed the name in order to prevent their opposition to all religion from being branded with the odious character of Atheism; and afterwards by individuals in different countries of Europe. Nowhere, however, did they obtain a firmer footing than in this country, in which, during the greater part of the two following centuries, they were propagated with indefatigable zeal, chiefly in the shape of attacks on the Jewish and Christian Scriptures, but partly also in specious attempts to recommend the sufficiency of the light of nature. By the great leader of the party, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, Deism was first formed into a system; and a few fundamental articles were selected as comprehending the whole of religion, to the entire exclusion of extraordinary manifestations of the Divine will, which he considered to be altogether unnecessary. Hobbes, Blount, Shaftesbury, Collins, Woolston, Tindal, Morgan, Chubb,