away the youths; it will be distressing to them, and they can be of no service. Yet I must not be alone. You will remain with me, and you alone; and then we shall have reduced the pain to the least possible amount." What a contrast between the dying infidel and the dying Christian! Would the latter, in such circumstances, say, that the chief care was to diminish the pain, and to keep his family from him? Would it not rather be to glorify God, by meekly bearing the appointed suffering? and would it not be his earnest desire to see his children, in the prospect of separation, and give them those counsels which, with the Divine blessing, might bring them to the same eternal blessedness which stretched out before him? I shall conclude these illustrations, which might be greatly enlarged, by quoting the case of Lord Byron, and contrasting with it the case of Henry Martyn, the late eminent Christian missionary to Persia. Both were men of first-rate talent and accomplishment, and both were called to the experience of the severest trials. The one was an infidel, the other was a decided Christian. Let us see their respective state of feeling in life, and judge whether unbelief leads to the perfectibility of man. On the death of one of his early friends, Byron thus writes: "My friends fall around me, and I shall be left a lonely tree before I am withered. I have no resource but my own reflections; and they present no prospect here or hereafter, except the selfish satisfaction of surviving my betters. I am indeed most wretched." On another occasion, he gave a more comprehensive view of the state of his mind : Why, at the very height of desire and human happiness-worldly, amorous, ambitious, or even avaricious does there mingle a certain sense of doubt and sorrow a fear of what is to come, a doubt of what is? If it were not for hope, what would the future be? A hell! As for the past, what predominates in memory? Hopes baffled! From whatever place we commence, we know where it must all end; and yet what good is there in knowing it? It does not make men wiser or better. If I were to live my life over again, I do not know what I would change in my life, unless it were for, not to have lived at all. All history, and experience, and the rest, teach us that good and evil are pretty equally balanced in this existence, and that what is most to be desired is, an easy passage out of it. What can it give us but years? and these have little of good but their ending.” On one of the anniversaries of his birth, he thus writes: I "At 12 o'clock I shall have completed thirty-three years. go to bed with a heaviness of heart, at having lived so long, and to so little purpose. three minutes past 12, and I am thirty-three. ⚫ Eheu fugaces Posthume, Posthume, Labuntur anni.' It is now But I do not regret them so much for what I have done, as for what I might have done." Poetically he thus describes his own career : "A wandering mass of shapeless flame, A pathless coinet and a curse, The menace of the universe, Still rolling on with innate force, Without a sphere, without a course A bright deformity-on high The monster of the upper sky." How different the feeling of Martyn! death of one most dear to him, he says,— On the "Can it be that she has been lying so many months in the cold grave? Oh, my gracious God! what should I do without thee! There is nothing in the world for which I could wish to live, except it may please God to appoint me some work to do. O thou incomprehensibly glorious Saviour! what hast thou done to alleviate the sorrows of life!" On another occasion he writes: "I like to find myself employed usefully in a way I did not expect or foresee. The coming year is to be a perilous one; but my life is of little consequence, whether I finish the Persian New Testament or not. I look back with pity on myself, when I attached so much importance to my life and labour. The more I see of my own works, I am the more ashamed of them; for coarseness and clumsiness mar all the works of man. I am sick when I look at the wisdom of man; but am relieved by reflecting, that we have a city, whose builder and maker is God. The least of his works is refreshing. A dried leaf, or a straw, makes me feel in good company; and complacency and admiration take the place of disgust. What a momentary duration is the life of man'! Labitur et labetur in omne volubilis ævum, may be affirmed of the river; but men pass away as soon as they begin to exist. Well, let the moments pass, They waft us sooner o'er Soon we shall reach the blissful shore Of blest eternity."" The last record from his dying hand was in these words "I sat in the orchard and thought with sweet C comfort and peace of my God-in solitude my company-my Friend-my Comforter." Such is a brief illustration of the pretension of infidelity to secure the perfection of man. I have not taken inferior men. I have drawn my examples from the most noted of their class. Suppose that all men were infidels that society was entirely made up of such persons as Voltaire and Hume and Paine and Byron, would its general happiness be advanced? would we be making an approximation to social perfectibility? Would we not rather be decidedly frustrating the hope of both? It is, comparatively speaking, the small number of infidels, and their conformity to Christian usages and institutions where they do exist, which render them tolerable. On the other hand, suppose that true Christianity were universal_ that the world were filled with such men as Haliburton or Martyn-who can doubt that the happiness would be universal, and that we would be upon the high road to the perfectibility of society? It is vain to urge the unhappy and immoral lives and wretched deaths of many professed Christians; these things will not prove infidelity to be the source either of personal or social happiness; the important point to mark is, that where Christians are wretched, as regards their comfort and hope, this is owing either to their not really being Christians, or to their falling far short of their rights and privileges as Christians. In no case is it owing to Christianity, but to the want of it; whereas, in the case of unbelievers, their disquietude and wretchedness can be traced directly to their infidelity, and so it is justly held responsible for them. While I have thus endeavoured to expose the false claims of modern infidelity to the character of the friend of knowledge, the friend of freedom, and the friend of social happiness, I have been indirectly recommending the Evidences of Christianity, by proving her to be the true friend of all these great interests. I desire to remind the reader, in taking leave of him, that it is not enough to study and be satisfied with the Evidences of the Divine authority of the Scriptures. A man may be convinced, from various external and other marks, that a letter has come from above, and yet be quite indifferent or hostile to the contents of that letter. He may receive the letter as from God, and still perish in his sins. It is indispensable that he receive the contents of the letter into his heart, so as to influence and regulate his life, as well as the outward letter into his hands; and this can be attained only through the grace of the Holy Spirit. Let every reader, then, clearly see the way, and the only way, in which he can partake of the real benefits of Christianity. Let him remember that it is through the faith of the Gospel, as a message of mercy to his own soul as a sinner, conveyed by the Spirit, that he can alone attain to the most conclusive of all proofs that the Bible is Divine, even the proof of a personal experience the proof of its marvellous adaptation to his circumstances and necessities-at once bestowing peace and purity and hope; and let him therefore pray to |