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ure. He fails to effect the work, and must pay the forfeit. If now I come forward, and pay down the ten thousand dollars to the original contractor, saying my brother has failed, but I am able to pay all his debts; what should I think or say of that contractor, if he were to refuse the money, and cast my brother into prison, under an allegation that I was not known in the original contract?

I would not push analogies too far, on so vast and awful a theme. If I rightly understand the Scriptures, it is an act of grace in God to accept a vicarious, instead of a personal righteousness; and yet the Scriptures do not intimate that God would be just in rejecting the righteousness of the law, when presented to him. Let justice, equity and love, then, entwine their unfading glories! Let others view matters in that light which is afforded them; but for my single self, I must say, that if the righteousness of God's law is in the world, he wills to be satisfied with it! What does he ask? The righteousness of his law. Does he ask more of me, or less of me? Neither less nor more. And can I imagine that the Father of all mercies, and God of all consolations, the Father of this spirit, and the fashioner of this mortal body, will show me the real righteousness of his law, already wrought out and finished, and demand of me, not to accept this righteousness, but to work out a righteousness of his own, which he knows I cannot do?

There is something in the human mind, like an enlarged intuition, a sort of vision, which is blind to the slow steps of verbal logic, but perceives with assurance, what is in the main truth and that intuition, or whatever it is, seems to assure me that if my elder brother is both able and willing to pay my debt; my

heavenly Father will not refuse to accept his due, merely because it is not I, but my elder brother, that has earned it with sweat and toil. Nay, when I stand before him, trembling for my doom, I think I hear him saying to me, your elder brother is both able and willing to pay your debt: nothing would give him greater pleasure bid him settle for you. Such, I must think, is something like the sentiments of the Father of us all. I cannot see how such a glorious Jehovah should proclaim salvation among his own creatures, the work of his own hands, and not command them to accept it.

A half-bred metaphysician is a wonderful enchanter: he lives in the middle of a great world of words. If you get in you will never get out, unless you draw your axe, and cut your way. Let me see. This same word representation, sounds to my ear very like gravitation. Old father Newton has demonstrated that bodies really and truly do gravitate, but if you ask him the cause, he sends you to the poets Aros d' eLeλello ßonx—it is the will of God: and all his sons vote with their old father. What short cuts these philosophers take of us! We call for reasons, for causes, for hows and whys, and they with most provoking gravity give us facts, plain naked facts, and nothing but facts. The fact occurs in nature, that's all. They have thrown away all this learned vocabulary of sounds about occult principles, and what not, and are content with the ascertainment of facts. And since they have acted in this manner their work goes on cheerily. It is amazing how they advance. An old hoary headed philosopher will have to ask his own son, before the lad is allowed to give a vote at an election, what the present state of science is. Certainly

the philosophers have got on the right track; they get along so rapidly. If they could only be kept from making worlds, it is impossible to say with what brilliancy science would shortly blaze.

Now it is to be hoped, that as soon as divines become philosophers, in the true sense of the word, their work will advance in the same rapid felicitous manner. Whenever that day comes, they will know that in respect to imputation of sin and righteousness in the covenant of works, all that can be known is the fact: That in respect to the reasonableness of that dispensation, all that can be known is that infinite reason established it that in respect to its justice, nothing can be known, save that Jehovah the source of all justice, has done it. If this will satisfy mankind, the preachers of the gospel can satisfy them with undoubted scriptural authority. And if that will not satisfy them, why let the worms crawl on their throne, and call their maker to account for having made them thus. He will trample them in his wrath-unless his bowels should yearn, and then he will give them a new heart and new mind; and they will acknowledge that he has done all things well. If any one imagines that he ever will know any reason why God created our race to be saved or damned, by the imputed righteousness, or imputed sin of a representative, let me hasten to cure him of his delirium; let me give him a lethean draught, that he may forget his terrene follies, and reconcile himself to his fate. This is the medicine of the mind.

Isa. 45, ix. &c. "Woe unto him that striveth with his maker! Let the potsherds strive with the potsherds of the earth. Shall the clay say to him that fashioneth it, what makest thou? Or thy work, He

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command ye me ! ! !"

I had thought to have paraphrased this passage: but I can't touch it. Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without wisdom? If you can see—see : If not, I can do no more.

SECTION XIII.

Those among men, who are devoted to high intellectual efforts, may be divided into two classes, the students of nature, and the students of grace, philosophers and divines.

"One sire begat them, and one mother bore!" And sorry I am, when I see any fraternal strife among them. Could they but agree, they would soon kick out of the world the bastard breed of sceptics, infidels, and atheists.

After all, the divines are of the nobler family. But the philosophers have, as yet, played the man in the higher style. Their scale goes down to the ground with a most ponderous gravity; while our scale kicks the beam, as if there was nothing in it. What can be the reason that for two centuries, less or more, philosophy should be making such prodigious advances, and divinity standing stock still?

Look, ye divines, at your twin brothers! There is one, with his crucible in one hand, and his thermome

ter in the other-covered all over with sweat and cinders-a true son of Vulcan, putting nature to the torture, to compel her to reveal some of her secrets. Look up! there is one of them scrambling to the very top of the Andes! Now I would not be along side of him for all beneath the sun. What does the fellow mean? Is he going to get a tenement among the stars? No! he is a philosopher, and bye and bye he will come down, (if he should not break his neck) and will bring in his pocket some lichens and mosses, and pebbles: and when he gets his brothers about him, you will wonder to hear what conclusions they will draw, conclusions which excite the sneer of ridicule only in countenances where the lambent smile of wisdom ne. ver played. Look there! just at your feet, there is one of them going perpendicularly down to the shades, through the shaft of a horrible mine-hole: before fifteen minutes he will be fifty fathoms into the very bowels of the earth, among pitfalls, and choak damps; and the earth every moment threatening to cave in on his head.

Well, are all these men fools? No. They are students of nature; and they mind their books. What is the result? Behold what the God of nature has given them as the reward of their devotion and industry. Tell any one of these blades that you have got a new theory; he laughs in your face; and asks you where are your facts? From that family theories have long been banished.

But how is it in the other family-among the theologians? What have you been doing all this time? What have you discovered for a few centuries? Just nothing. Did you mind your books-the books of the sacred volume-these are your books-did you mind

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