Scriptures. Christians are left in these respects to their own judgments and consciences." "Point me if you can," answers the Unitarian in his turn, "to a single passage of the Bible, which forbids those particular amusements you condemn. Christians therefore are left to their own judgments and consciences in these particulars."

It is a curious coincidence that the same objection of free living should have been made to Christ by the Pharisees of his days, on account of his neglecting to employ the common means of securing a reputation for sanctity, a sour deportment, and a sanctimonious abstinence from the innocent festivities of life. "Behold a man gluttonous, and a wine-bibber, a friend of publicans and sinners.”

The Presbyterian, to whom we have alluded may rejoin, "I am sincere in my belief, that all Unitarians are lost." And is the Catholic any less to be believed when he says it is his honest opinion that all Protestants are lost? "No, he cannot be sincere, because he sees we live a Christian life." But you have cut yourself off from this plea. The Catholic may turn round and condemn you out of your own mouth. He may take up your own words and say, "He who does not receive the doctrine of transubstantiation, and the doctrine of the supremacy of the Pope, and the doctrine of the intrinsic efficacy of the sacraments and of absolution, does not receive the Gospel, and is consequently, no Christian. It follows irresistibly to my mind that he who rejects these fundamental truths, however

respectable, virtuous and apparently devout he may be, rejects Christianity as really, though not under precisely the same circumstances, yet as really as any Deist ever did. And that he cannot with propriety be called a Christian in any sense. Their preaching is to be avoided as blasphemy, their publications are to be abhorred as pestiferous, their ordinances are to be held unworthy of regard as Christian institutions; and these things being so, you ought to regard a proposition to go and hear them preach, or to read their publications, as you would a proposition to hear a preacher of open infi· delity, or to read an artful publication of a follower of Herbert or Hume." Your lips are sealed. cannot utter one word, not even bigotry or uncharitableness.

You

You openly profess to excommunicate and cut men off from the name amd privileges of Christians, merely for opinion sake, without regard to moral and religious character, nay in the face of their apparent existence. What more can the Catholic do? You answer. "In countries where he has the power, he burns the bodies and confiscates the estates of those who dissent from his creed. We do not this." We reply, The institutions of the country forbid it. You go as far as those institutions will allow. You attempt to deprive dissenters of their fair name, and to hold them up to the suspicion and odium of mankind, you attempt by legal means to drive them from their churches, and turn them from their flocks upon the world. If

you go to the very limit of the institutions under which you live, is there any evidence that you would not go further if you had the power?

But, you say, the Catholic rejects the Bible as the standard of faith, and refers to the authority of Popes and Councils. Do you try heresy by the Bible? No! You try it by the Confession of Faith and Catechisms of the Divines at Westminster, and what is that but throwing away the Bible and referring to the authority of Councils? You try heresy by the standard of the Council of Westminster, and they by standards established by Councils a few centuries earlier, and that is all the difference between you. The Catholic says the Scriptures are an unsufficient rule of faith; "they are a nose of wax," which you may turn just as you please. The Presbyterian rebukes him for his irreverence. But it is merely for saying in coarse language what he says in language a little more refined. For what do we now hear from all quarters of the Orthodox world! "The Scriptures are not a sufficient test of soundness in the faith. They are interpreted so many ways that it is in vain to think of having a pure church without something more definite and explicit."

But suppose one unacquainted with the distinctions and tactics of Christian sects were to land on our shores and chance to read these charges, and then to enter a church where God is worshipped in the name of Christ in Unity and instead of Trinity; would he not find it difficult to reconcile what he

saw and heard with what he read? "Can it be possible," he would exclaim, "that these people reject and disbelieve Christianity, and still build churches to teach, and hear, and maintain, and propagate it? Especially would they do so, if it subjects them to sacrifices and obloquy, when they might enjoy their unbelief unmolested, as many others do, and profit by a fair reputation for Orthodoxy, merely by external conformity to some of the reigning sects, and saying nothing about their belief, or might withdraw without more injury to their rights or characters from any connection with Christianity at all? It is impossible; there must be either some mistake or some wilful misrepresentation.” While in the church he would hear God worshipped in the name and through the mediation of Christ. He would hear his Gospel read and expounded as a divine revelation, as the word of God, and containing the only infallible rule of faith and practice. He would hear the reality of his miracles acknowledged. He would see him commemorated in the Supper as having died for man, as having risen from the dead, and as now living in heaven. An unbeliever rejects all this. "Can men," he would exclaim, "believe, and not believe at the same time? These men certainly do not reject, they receive Christianity; they have been either ignorantly, or maliciously slandered.”

He wishes to examine further into the justice of this charge, and he makes inquiry what it is necessary to believe, in order to be a Christian. How

is he to come at this? Why plainly, he must examine the arguments of believers with unbelievers, and see what the believer asserts and the unbeliever denies. He takes up a book on the Evidences of Christianity, perhaps those of Paley, and he finds the great proposition which his whole work was intended to sustain is this; "That there is satisfactory evidence, that many professing to be original witnesses of the Christian miracles, passed their lives in labours, dangers and sufferings, voluntarily undergone in attestation of the accounts which they delivered, and solely in consequence of their belief in those accounts; and that they submitted from the same motives to new rules of conduct." Or, perhaps, he might have taken up the book on the Evidences, published lately in this country by Bishop McIlvaine, a believer in all those disputed points we have been examining. The great question between the believer and the unbeliever is summed up by him in the following proposition, "Is the religion of Jesus, as exhibited in the New Testament, a revelation from God, and consequently possessed of a sovereign right to universal faith and obedience?"

The question between the believer and the unbeliever, according to both these defenders of the faith, is between miracles and no miracles, revelation and no revelation. He who believes in the miracles, and the reality of the revelation, receives Christianity, for it is the object of both to prove the truth of Christianity. He who rejects the miracles