Christianity must recommend its miracles, rather than miracles confirm its doctrines. I shall have little dispute on this point. If, as I maintain, and as the New Testa ment constantly teaches, miracles are the direct works of God, I shall take it for granted, that in working so many of them in the first planting of our Holy Religion, infinite Wisdom had some important purpose in view. That purpose, according to the New Testament, was to prove Jesus' mission and Messiahship; and to say that the means were inappropriate or insufficient, to effect the end proposed, is modestly to charge God with folly! I may perhaps be told, as it has been repeatedly asserted in this country, that this means, if it were the means, actually failed that the miracles did not bring men to a faith in Christ and his gospel. If by this it is only meant, that the miracles of Jesus did not convince all who saw, or heard of them, it is readily conceded; but if it be supposed that this is any objection against the validity of this kind of proof, it should be remembered that it lies equally against every kind of proof, and indeed all proof of every kind which was granted to recommend and confirm the Christian religion; for both external and internal evidence was insufficient to convince some of the stubborn and malicious Jews, to whom the gospel was first preached, and some Gentiles, to whom it was afterward carried. Nor is there any kind of proof, except demonstration, properly so called, which does command universal belief; and this, from the very nature of the case, is not applicable to religion, natural or revealed, nor to any of the affairs of human life. Yet miracles approach as near to this kind of proof, as any thing in the whole range of human experience, and he who can resist their force, "would not be persuaded, though one rose from the dead."

From what I have now said, let it not be thought that I undervalue the internal evidences of our holy religion, o reject the moral arguments which have so often, and su powerfully been urged in its favor. Yet while I would place a proper estimate upon this evidence, and these ar guments, I cannot avoid the fullest conviction, that no man can reject the evidence of prophecy and miracles, without endangering the whole Christian faith, nay, without destroying it. It is not a case that admits of our election.

We are not at liberty to choose, that we will rest Christianity on merely internal evidence, to the exclusion of the external. We are not at liberty thus to do, because the Founder of Christianity himself has determined its proofs, and has so inwoven prophecy and miracles with his whole life and religion, that no man can separate, without destroying them. Historically, you can no more conceive of Christianity without miracles, than you can conceive of the free, democratic institutions of the United States, without the Revolutionary war. They are not only linked indissolubly together, but one is a growth, the developement of the other. Without miracles, no man ever yet assigned even a probable cause for the origin of Christianity, or its early and rapid progress. This has been the great problem for infidelity to solve, for eighteen hundred years, and it is as far from a solution now, as it was at the beginning. Take Christianity as it comes to us in its own authentic records, and it explains its own facts, and makes luminous every phenomenon which disturbs and harrasses the unbeliever. Reject the miracles, and as has been well remarked by a foreign writer, "the growth and spread of the Christian religion, may almost appear more miraculous without the miracles than with them."

I have before remarked, that this whole Neologistic, or Rational mode of thinking and of treating the miracles of the New Testament, is purely German. For the last hundred years, the German mind has been in a state of constant, and almost unparalleled ferment, and theology unfortunately, owing to the peculiar character of German institutions, has opened a wide field for the exhibition of every hypothesis and fancy under heaven. An unbounded reliance on philosophical Gnosis; an absolute rage for novelty, under the delusive notion, that whatever is novel, must therefore be true; a sincere desire, perhaps, in many cases, for a deeper insight and knowledge, and a real, but unavowed infidelity in many others; a wish, it may be in some instances, to remove our religion from the attacks of its enemies, by surrendering the chief points of assault, and a fixed purpose in others to betray it into the hands of the foe; a restlessness under authority, and a vain ambition to place Christianity in new lights, and on grounds; these, and the like dispositions, have conspired

new

to produce these results to which I have referred. Talents, learning, ingenuity, an unwearied industry and perseverance, have been consecrated to the furtherance of such ends and aims. But the mania has reached its crisis, and more truly rational views are prevailing. Many of the notions that were rife a few years ago, are now growing obsolete ; and I cannot doubt, that the time is hastening on when Germany shall take her place among the foremost of the nations of Christendom in a sound, a living, practical, Scripture orthodoxy.

Unfortunately for this country, a few, who are capable of better things, amuse themselves, and perhaps flatter a puerile vanity, by picking up the slough of the German mind, by gathering the froth and scum thrown off in its process of fermentation, and then sagely present it to us Americans, as the results of their own profound investigations, or lofty thought. But, beneath these Coryphei, there is another, and a less enviable rank, a class of young ardent spirits, who, ignorant alike of the German language and theology, have picked up, at third or fourth hand, a few German notions upon miracles and inspiration, and with a few learned words like "developement" and "moral consciousness," launch forth from this dark mundane sphere, into the bright Infinite, and revel to absolute satiety, amidst the Beautiful, the Good, and the True. What are miracles to them! What is the Bible, with its plain teachings, its simple gospel, to their illuminated souls! They can manufacture at will, their own Christs, and their own Evangels. They need no revelation from God, for their developed moral consciousness is at once the teacher, and the infallible judge of all truth. If they meet a miracle, which the dullness of other minds would require to be explained, it is easily done by appealing to animal magnetism, - of which it seems our Saviour was the original discoverer - or else to some mysterious laws of nature, to which they are just opening the way. To us poor plodders here in the dust of an earthly christendom; to us, the unphilosophical believers in Jesus of Nazareth and his religion, as they are exhibited in the New Testament, they seem, I confess, like men decked out in the threadbare, cast-off clothing of a Jew's shop, far more than like original gentlemen.

It is not for these I write. They are beyond my reach.

But there are some young minds, not well versed in the grounds and evidences of our holy religion, which the lofty pretensions and confident air of these sciolists, might affect and injure. To such I would say, in the very language of the apostle, "Beware, lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit." If there be any thing sacred in our holy religion; if there be any thing true, let it be reverently sought, not in the wisdom of the world, but in the inspired and authoritative teachings of the New Testament.

T. J. S.

ART. XXVI.

The Ministry.

To the gospel ministry, no period in the moral and religious history of our world is fraught with more peculiar interest, than the present. We seem to have arrived at that epoch, in which men begin to think that we are no longer necessarily bound to the past, with its antique forms and customs, but are permitted to stand alone by ourselves, and shape a new destiny for the race. The symbols of other ages are turned into facts, and the old dreams of poetry and philosophy, robbed of the mystery of night, are converted into tangible precepts and principles, reduced to the sternest ordeal of practicability. What was once merely believed, must now be acted. Ours is the crucible-age of the moral alchemist, which seeks only for precious metal, and casts away the dross. What was once only the object of blind, formal worship, must now be seen as something worthy of worship, and more; it must be seen as adapted to human wants, or the Moseses of our day will have no more reverence for the god or the creed worshipped, than the ancient Moses had for the golden calf of Aaron.

The excessive veneration and credulity of olden times, have been succeeded by a moral latitudinarianism. The priesthood of Egypt and Chaldea held almost illimitable sway over both civil and ecclesiastical affairs. Even that of the Israelites, by the time of the later prophets, had risen

to the excesses of authority, and, under the popular rule of tyrannical domination, the people at length became too imbecile to desire it otherwise. Primitive Christianity exerted an opposite influence for a period, but even for ages afterwards, ecclesiastical oppression appears to have gained a dominating ascendancy over the masses, -an ascendancy, the power of which has been but slowly weakening since the rise of Luther and Melanchthon. We come down to the present, and now find the religious veneration and credulity of the enlightened masses measurably reversed. A change has taken place, which perhaps is attended with some of the evils of libertinism in sentiment, but one, nevertheless, more favorable than a state of mental enslavement. Germany has experienced the effects of this change in the transcendentalism of its theology; France, in the scepticism of its philosophy; and America, in some of the radicalisms of its reforms; but these effects may be regarded as only the temporary extreme of mental independence, naturally following the former extreme of religious servitude; and another age, perhaps, may restore the public mind back to its proper equilibrium. Every revolution is liable to be followed by some evils, opposite to those which gave rise to the revolution; and although these may sometimes appear alarming, yet they shall prove ordeals for testing the true, and correcting the false and the impracticable.

These remarks may call our attention to the present state of Christendom, with more direct reference to the ministry of Universal Reconciliation. The religious revolutions of this and the last century, have established an idea of personal independence from all ecclesiastical restraint, and placed the clerical profession in a position entirely unknown before. The ministry of old theological systems formerly dictated, and the people implicitly obeyed. Its superior wisdom and authority were unquestionable. Sufficient that it had been baptized in a holy name, and had been solemnly set apart as the highest human office of divine appointment. Now men are demanding the credentials of the ministry, and the intelligent require tangible, practicable evidences of its authority. The day of clerical infallibility is fast closing. Even the Pope is sometimes questioned by his subjects, and in some of the darkest