become the prevailing characteristics of him who before was a selfish and ungodly creature. But while it thus revolutionizes the spiritual part, it may leave the natural economy of the taste and the intellect untouched. Abstracting from the moral change, it may no more alter the complexion of his mind, than it alters the complexion of his face; and just as the person and the features and habitudes of walk or gesture may remain what they were before, so also may the mental peculiarities of his constitution remain unaffected even after Christianity, with all its subduing power over the will and the conduct, has been grafted upon the inner man. 24. It is a great mistake to imagine, that Christianity, by taking the full possession and power over a number of men, overbears all the complexional varieties of character which formerly obtained between them. If there be any foundation for supposing that there is a reality in national distinctions of character, a thing of which we ourselves have no doubt then a Christian Irishman is just as distinguishable from a Christian Scotchman, as they were previous to the accession of this ingredient. And what is true of the national, is just as true of many of the natural distinctions between men. Christianity does not obliterate the variety of tastes and temperaments among men. In the New Testament this dramatic variety is exhibited, and a dramatic propriety is observed so that the zeal of Peter, the argumentative vehemence of Paul, the tenderness of John, all shine forth either in their history or their writ ings-insomuch that if the whole earth were brought under a Christian economy, we are not therefore to imagine, that all the phases of humanity would thereby be assimilated into one monotonous uniformity of aspect; or that human society would not be enlivened by as great and as graphic a variety as before. 25. Now what is true of the constitutional differences which nature has established between one man and another, is just as true of the artificial differences which civilization and learning have established between one man or between one age and another. It is thus that in our more polished day, we look back to our ruder, yet not on that account our less religious forefathers; and marvel, both at what we should feel the offensive indecorum of their behaviour, and the offensive crudities of their authorship. A bishop, in the present day, stands in as much need of being put upon his guard against the heart-burnings and the jealousies of evil affection, as in the first ages of Christianity. Only then they carried the matter a little farther out; and so the apostle, in enumerating the incumbent gravities and proprieties of a bishop, had to say among other things that he must be "no striker." The same principle will account for what to us appears a flagrant breach of all decency, which the Corinthians fell into, when assembled at the table of the Lord. And in short, we mistake the matter entirely, we misapprehend the proper fruit and function of Christianity, we are not distinguishing the things which differ if we expect, that, because the religion of the gospel has taken powerful hold of the consciences of men in a barbarous age, that therefore all the vestiges of barbarism are forthwith to be obliterated. 26. But our present concern is with the conceits and the crudities and the puerile extravagancies of an untasteful and unlettered age. Now it is no more the proper immediate effect of Christianity to teach men good taste, than it is to teach them good orthography. Every gross violation of morality will of course be abandoned by them; but, should they have occasion to be writers, there may still be the grossest violation of all the proprieties in belles lettres. If childishness and credulity and bad taste were their characteristics before the change, they might still remain their characteristics after it; and, without any imputation either on the worth of their principles, or on their competency as witnesses to the palpable facts that are transacted before their eyes-they might, if not kept in check by a supernatural power, fall into manifold errors both of false argument and of false illustration. Clement's bird of Arabia we hold to be a notable example of this; and when one compares, either with his epistle or with the works of any of the apostolic fathers, the compositions of the fishermen of Galilee; when one recognises the chaste and graceful propriety of the latter-how pertinent throughout, and as predominant in sense as in sacredness-how free of all that is irrelevant or absurd or inconsequential how unstained by any gratuitous folly or flight of extravagance-and yet how certain, that, if left to themselves, they would, like their immediate successors in the church, have betrayed the waywardness of unpractised infancy at that work of authorship, in which they were but infants-one cannot but feel that they wrote under some powerful hold which at once guided and restrained them; and that, in the simplicity and purity and orderly keeping of all the parts in that venerable record, we have an internal evidence of as broad a distinction between the canonical and the uncanonical, as either the authority of the church or the innumerable written testimonies of the Christian fathers would serve to establish. CHAPTER IV. On the Supreme Authority of Revelation. 1. Ir the New Testament be a message from God, it behoves us to make an entire and unconditional surrender of our minds, to all the duty and to all the information which it sets before us. 2. There is, perhaps, nothing more thoroughly beyond the cognisance of the human faculties, than the truths of religion, and the ways of that mighty and invisible Being, who is the object of it; and yet nothing, we will venture to say, has been made the subject of more hardy and adventurous speculation. We make no allusion at present to Deists, who reject the authority of the New Testament, because the plan or the dispensation of the Almighty, which is recorded there, is different front that plan or dispensation which they have chosen to ascribe to Him. We speak of Christians, who profess to admit the authority of this record, but who have tainted the purity of their profession by not acting when they ought upon its exclusive authority; who have mingled their own thoughts, and their own fancy with its informations; who, instead of repairing even in those questions of which revelation should have the entire monopoly, to the principle of "what readest thou?" have abridged the sovereignty of this principle, by appealing to others, which are utterly incompetent, as the reason of the thing, or the standard of orthodoxy; and so have brought down the Bible from the high place which belongs to it, as the only tribunal to which in all matters beyond the cognisance of the human faculties the appeal should be made, or from which the decision should be looked for. 3. But it is not merely among partisans or the advocates of a system, that we meet with this indifference to the authority of what is written. It lies at the bottom of a great deal of that looseness, both in practice and speculation, which we meet with every day in society, and which we often hear expressed in familiar conversation. Whence that list of maxims which are so indolently conceived, but which, at the same time, are so faithfully proceeded upon? "We have all our passions and infirmities; but we have honest hearts, and that will make up for them. Men are not all cast in the same mould. God will not call us to task too rigidly for our foibles; at least this is our |