us the mode by which this influence was exercised, nor yet have defined to us its different degrees-on these subjects we are not prepared to enter upon an explanation. None but an Atheist can deny the possibility of the exercise of this influence by the Omnipotent God upon the minds of men, and our inability to define the mode and the measure, is no argument against the fact.*

With respect to the inspiration of the Scriptures, we altogether differ with those writers who hold that any portion, however small or however trifling in the estimation of men, is not inspired. The entire Bible, every word of it, is inspired. To maintain the contrary opinion is, in effect, to yield the whole field to the Infidel; for who is to judge what portions are, and what are not inspired? Admit that a single passage is uninspired, and the Infidel of right enters the armory and takes away what weapons he pleases, and if he can carry off a single one, he has an equal right to take them all. Moreover, if the entire Bible be not inspired, one portion of it equally so with another, we are in no better condition than the church of Rome, with her traditions and her apocryphal books. For according to this hypothesis our Bible is in part made up of the uninspired sayings of Joshua, Solomon, Paul, Peter and others. Therefore to adopt the sentiment of Mr. Kirk, in his translation of Gaussen, God designed that the writers of the Old and New Testament Scriptures should say just what they did say, and he secured their saying it in their own way, but exactly as it should be, even to an iota and a tittle.'

To enter at large upon an argument to sustain our position against professing Christians, who upon reading these pages will object to it, would lead us from our proper subject. But we cannot pass on, without stating a few of the many objec tions urged by such persons, especially as we have reason to believe that many sincere Christians are in great error upon this subjeet; and the day is assuredly at hand when Infidels will compel the advocates of Revelation, to take the only true and proper ground-the entire inspiration of the Sacred Books.

Such objections as the following are often urged, not only by Infidels, but by professing Christians. It is derogatory to the character of God that his Spirit should dictate to the mind of Paul, the vulgar details into which he sometimes descends in his letters; those counsels to Timothy concerning his stomach and his often infirmities; or those commissions with regard to his parchments and a certain cloak, which he had left at the house of Carpus, at Troas, when he was leaving Asia.' To such cavils as these the excellent Gaussen gives a most admirable answer, which on account of its excellency, we present to the reader.

"The reader will suffer us to beseech him to be cautious of this objection, when, holding the Bible in his hands, he happens not to recognize on the first perusal, the signs of God's hand in such or such a passage of the Word. Let those imprudent hands not cast one verse of it out of the temple of the Scriptures. They hold an eternal book, all of whose authors have said with St. Paul: And I think that I too have the Spirit of the Lord!' If then, he does not yet see any thing divine in such or such a passage, the fault is in him, and not in the passage. Let him rather say with Jacob: Surely the Lord is in this place, and I knew it not!' This book can sustain the light of science; for it will bear that of the last day. The heavens and the earth shall pass; but none of its words shall fail, not even to the least letter. God declares to every one that heareth the words of this prophecy; that if any one shall take away from the words of this book, God will take away his part from the book of life.

Let us examine more closely the alleged passages. St. Paul, from the depths of his prison, sends for his cloak. He has left it at the house of Carpus, in Troas, and he entreats Timothy to hasten before winter, and not forget to bring it to him. This domestic detail, so many thousand times objected against the inspiration of the Scriptures, from the days of the Anomians, of whom St. Jerom speaks: this detail seems to you too trivial for an apostolic book, or at least too insignificant and too

As inspiration is not impossible, the only question at issue betwixt the Deist and the Christian is this, Have the writers of the Old and New Testament produced satisfactory evidences that they were the subjects of supernatural influence? This question admits of a clear and decisive answer; for, as the existence of any power is demonstrated by its operations, so the possession of supernatural knowledge is established by the performance of supernatural works. And as an acquaintance with any language is evinced by speaking it with ease. and propriety, so the gift of inspiration is proved by the foretelling of future events with precision.

Therefore, if it can be shown, that the authors of the dispensations

foreign from all practical utility, for the dignity of inspiration. Unhappy, however, is he who does not perceive its pathetic grandeur.

Jesus Christ also, on the day of his death, spoke of his cloak and of his vesture. Would you have this passage taken away from the inspired volume? It was after a night of fatigue and anguish. They had led him about the streets of Jerusalem for seven successive hours, by the light of torches, from street to street, from tribunal to tribunal, buffeting him, covering him with a veil, striking his head with staves. The morrow's sun was not yet risen, before they had bound his hands with cords, to lead him again from the high priest's house to Pilate's Prætorium. There, lacerated with rods, bathed in his own blood, then delivered for the last punishment, to ferocious soldiers, he had seen his garments all stripped off, that they might clothe him in a scarlet robe, whilst they bowed the knee before him, placed the reed in his hands, and spit upon his face. Then, before laying his cross upon his bruised frame, they had replaced his garments upon his wounds, to lead him to Calvary; but, when they were about to proceed to the execution, they took them away for the third time; and it is then that, stripped of every thing, first his cloak, then his coat, then of even his under-dress, he must die naked upon the malefactor's gibbet, in the view of an immense multitude. Was there ever seen under heaven, a man, who has not found these details, touching, sublime, inimitable? And was one ever seen, who, from the account of this death, thought of retrenching as useless or too vulgar, the history of these garments which they divided among them,-or of this cloak for which they cast lots? Has not infidelity itself said, in speaking of it, that the majesty of the Scriptures astonished it, that their simplicity spoke to its heart; that the death of Socrates was that of a sage, but Jesus Christ's, that of a God!-and if the divine inspiration was reserved for a mere portion of the holy books, would it not be for these very details? Would it not be for the history of that love, which, after having lived upon the earth poorer than the birds of the air and the foxes of the field, was willing to die still poorer, deprived of all, even to its cloak and its under-garments, and fastened naked to the malefactor's gibbet with the arms extended and nailed to the wood? Ah! be not solicitous for the Holy Spirit; he has not derogated from his own majesty; and so far from thinking that he was stooping too low, in announcing these facts to the world, he had hastened to recount them to it; and that too a thousand years in advance. At the period of the Trojan war he was already singing them upon the harp of David: They have pierced my hands and my feet,' said he, 'they look and stare upon me, they part my garments among them, and cast lots upon my vesture.' (Psalm xvii. 18, 19.; John xix. 23, 24.)

But it is the same Spirit who would show us St. Paul writing to Timothy, and requesting him to bring his cloak. Hear him; he too is stripped of every thing. In his youth he was already eminent, a favorite of princes, admired of all; but now he has left every thing for Christ. It is now thirty years and more, that he has been poor, in labors more than the others, in wounds more than they, in prison oftener;

contained in the Scriptures of the Old and New Testament did perform miracles; and that the writers of the books did predict future events, which found a precise accomplishment, then that great truth will be established. The religion taught in the Scriptures was communicated to man by God himself; for the performance of uncontrolled miracles, or the delivery of true predictions must communicate to every sane mind the conviction that the persons by whom they were performed, were employed by God, to reveal to men his will concerning them, and their duties to their Creator and to each other.

The great criteria, therefore, by which the divine authority of the sacred writings are to be tested, are miracles, and prophecy.

five times he had received of the Jews forty stripes save one; thrice was he beaten with rods; once he was stoned; thrice he has suffered shipwreck; often in journeyings; in perils upon the sea, in perils in the city, in perils in the desert; in watchings oft, in hunger and in thirst, in cold and nakedness (we quote his own words). Hear him now; behold him advanced in age; he is in his last prison; he is at Rome; he is expecting his sentence of death; he has fought the good fight; he has finished his course, he has kept the faith; but he is cold, winter is coming on, and he is poorly clad! Buried in a dungeon of the Mamertine prisons, he is so much despised, that all the very Christians of Rome are ashamed of him, and that at his first appearing, no man was willing to befriend him. Yet, he received, ten years before, while a prisoner at Rome, and loaded with chains, at least some money from the Philippians; who, knowing his sufferings, united together in their indigence to send him some succor. But now, behold him forsaken; no one but St. Luke is with him; all have abandoned him; winter is approaching. He would need a cloak; he has left his own, two hundred leagues off, at the house of Carpus in Troas; and no one in the cold prisons of Rome would lend him one. Has he not then left every thing, with joy, for Christ; has he not esteemed all the glory of this world as dross that he might win Christ; and does he not suffer all things cheerfully for the elect's sake? (Phil. iii. 8.; 2 Tim. ii. 10.) We were ourselves at Rome, last year, in a hotel, on a rainy day, in the beginning of November. Chilled by the piercing dampness of the cold evening air, we had a vivid conception of the holy apostle in the subterranean dungeons of the capitol, dictating the last of his letters, regretting the absence of his cloak, and entreating Timothy to bring it to him before the winter!

Who would then take from the inspired epistles so striking and pathetic a feature? Does not the Holy Spirit carry you to the prison of Paul, to astonish you with this tender self-renunciation and this sublime poverty; just too, as he shewed you with your own eyes, his charity; sometime before, when he made him write in his letter to the Philippians: 'I weep in writing to you, because there are many among you who mind earthly things, whose end is destruction?' Do you not seem to see him in his prison, loaded with chains, while he is writing, and tears are falling upon his parchment? And does it not seem to you that you behold that poor body, to-day miserably clothed, suffering and benumbed; to-morrow beheaded and dragged to the Tiber, in expectation of the day when the earth shall give up her dead, and the sea the dead which are in it; and when Christ shall transform our vile bodies, to make them like unto his own glorious body? And if these details are beautiful, think you they are not also useful? And if they are already useful to him who reads them as a simple historical truth, what will they not become to him who believes in their Theopneusty, and who says to himself: Oh my soul, these words are written by Paul; but it is thy God who addresses them to thee? Who can tell the force and consolation, which, by their very familiarity and naturalness, they have for eighteen centuries, conveyed into dungeons and huts! Who can count the poor and the

1st. The performance of miracles, by the authors of the dispensations contained in the Old and New Testament, prove that their authors were the subjects of supernatural influence, and the religion they taught is of God. A miracle may be thus defined; an event which, supposing a given connection of time, place and persons, would not have come to pass in the ordinary course of things, but for the instrumental causality of which the divine plan had fixed the requisite provision. It is no less a part of "the immutability of his counsel," than is any other fact in the series of God's operations. It is a deviation from the ordinary course of events, but accomplished

martyrs, to whom such passages have given encouragement, example and joy? We just now remember, in Switzerland, the pastor Juvet, to whom a coverlet was refused, twenty years ago, in the prisons of the Canton de Vaud. We remember that Jerom of Prague, shut up for three hundred and forty days in the dungeons of Constance, at the bottom of a dark and loathsome tower, and going out only to appear before his murderers. Nor have we forgotten the holy Bishop Hooper, quitting his dark and dismal dungeon, with wretched clothes and a borrowed cloak, to go to the scaffold, supported upon a staff, and bowed by the sciatica. Venerable brethren, happy martyrs; doubtless you then remembered your brother Paul, shut up in the prison of Rome, suffering from cold and nakedness, asking for his cloak! Ah! unfortunate he, who does not see the sublime humanity, the tender grandeur, the fore-seeing and divine sympathy, the depth and the charm of such a mode of teaching! But still more unfortunate perhaps he, who declares it human, because he does not comprehend it. We would here quote the beautiful remarks of the respectable Haldane on this verse of St. Paul. This passage, if you consider the place it occupies in this epistle, and in the solemn farewells of Paul to his disciples, presents this apostle to our view, in the situation most calculated to affect us. He has just been before the emperor; he is about to finish his days by martyrdom; his departure is at hand, the crown of righteousness is reserved for him; behold him on the confines of two worlds; in this which he is about to leave, ready to be beheaded, as a malefactor, by the orders of Nero; in that which he is going to enter, crowned as a just man by the Lord of lords; in this, abandoned of men; in that, welcomed by angels; in this, needing a poor cloak to cover him; in that covered with the righteousness of the saints; clothed upon with his heavenly tabernacle of light and joy; so that mortality is swallowed up of life.'

Ah, rather than object to such a passage, thereby to deprive the Scriptures of their infallibility, we should there recognize that wisdom of God, which, so often by one single touch, has given us instructions, for which, without that, many pages would have been necessary. We should adore that tender condescension, which, stooping even to our weakness, is pleased, not only to reveal to us the highest thoughts of heaven in the simplest language of earth, but also to offer them to us under forms so living, so dramatic, so penetrating, often compressing them in order to render them more intelligible, within the narrow space of a single verse.

It is then thus that St. Paul, by these words thrown at hazard even into the last commission of a familiar letter, casts for us a rapid flood of light over his ministry, and discovers to us by a word, the entire life of an apostle; as a single flash of lightning in the evening, illuminates in an instant, all the tops of our Alps; and as persons sometimes show you all their soul by a single look."

Thus does Mr. Gaussen not only refute the objection urged against a passage of Scripture, which among Infidels has long been a subject of scorn, and which many Christians have been ashamed to acknowledge as dictated by the Holy Spirit; but he also removes the veil and exhibits this precious gem in its true light, radiant with divine glory.

by the determining will of the Supreme Being, through the agency of the instruments proper in every case, and for purposes of the highest wisdom and goodness, requiring such an interposition. Indeed inspiration itself is a miracle. Therefore, before Infidels can with propriety urge their objections to the particular miracles on which its credibility is based, they are bound to show the impossibility of any miracle. Mr. Hume has objected against miracles, that they are opposed to experience; therefore, the performance of them is incredible. His argument is here presented:

"There is, in Dr. TILLOTSON'S writings, an argument against the Real Presence which is as concise, and elegant, and strong as any argument can possibly be supposed against a doctrine so little worthy of a serious refutation. It is acknowledged on all hands, says that learned prelate, that the authority, either of the Scripture or of tradition, is founded merely in the testimony of the apostles, who were eye-witnesses to those miracles of our Saviour, by which he proved his divne mission. Our evidence, then, for the truth of the Christian religion is less than the evidence for the truth of our senses; because, even in the first authors of our religion, it was no greater; and it is evident it must diminish in passing from them to their disciples; nor can any one rest such confidence in their testimony, as in the immediate object of his senses. But a weaker eivdence can never destroy a stronger; and therefore, were the doctrine of the Real Presence ever so clearly revealed in Scripture, it were directly contrary to the rules of just reasoning to give our assent to it. It contradicts sense, though both the Scripture and tradition, on which it is supposed to be built, carry not such evidence with them as sense, when they are considered merely as external evidences, and are not brought home to every one's breast, by the immediate operation of the Holy Spirit.

Nothing is so convenient as a decisive argument of this kind, which must at least silence the most arrogant bigotry and superstition, and free us from their impertinent solicitations. I flatter myself, that I have discovered an argument of a like nature, which, if just, will, with the wise and learned, be an everlasting check to all kinds of superstitious delusion, and consequently, will be useful as long as the world endures. For so long, I presume, will the accounts of miracles and prodigies be found in all history, sacred and profane.

Though experience be our only guide in reasoning concerning matters of fact; it must be acknowledged, that this guide is not altogether infallible, but in some cases is apt to lead us into errors. One, who in our climate, should expect better weather in any week of JUNE