would scarce have been sufficient to lift up Christianity to the esteem of such persons as now treat it with contempt. They who expatiate with the most indecent and most unjust severity upon the ignorance, the credulity, and the supersition of the Jews, would have urged the same defects in its professors, to the discredit of the Gospel, if the reception of it among barbarians had been alleged as an argument in favour either of its credibility or its excellence. When, therefore, it is asked why Christianity was not preached in all places at the same time, we may reply, that God accommodates his religious dispensations to the intellectual and social circumstances of his creatures; that those circumstances, in their utmost extent are known to him alone that the character of the Christian must, in general, be grafted upon the character of the man; and that, if a judgment may be formed of past ages from the present, the stock that was wild would also have frequently been barren.

But do not seventeen hundred years leave sufficient room for the universal diffusion of the Christian law? To our conceptions that space may appear very long; nevertheless to him who counts a thousand years as one day, the same space may be considered as too short for the introduction of so great a change as the objection contends for, or, indeed, of any greater than has been hitherto effected. Between the appearance and the propagation of the Gospel some time must have intervened; and if it had been published in any other age, or in any other country, we have no positive proof that the

reception of it would have been more favourable, or the progress of it more swift. Unknown impediments, far surpassing those with which it has struggled, and over which it has triumphed, might have sprung up, and the causes which we know to have assisted it might have been less efficacious, or might have had no existence.

The subject before us may catch a kind of side light from the manner in which the Gospel has been propagated among Christians, and which, in the utmost strictness of language, may be called partial. While the Apostles attended upon their Master, we should suppose this the most proper season for the fullest communication of religious knowledge; but the Deity, even in giving effect to miraculous interpositions, neglects not the use of moral causes. The prejudices of the Apostles were not totally subdued, nor their mistakes instantaneously rectified. Many things which their Master said not, because their minds were not able to bear them, were, in the fulness of time, conveyed by the supernatural effusions of the Spirit; and even after those effusions had been vouchsafed, their understandings seemed to have been susceptible of continual improvement, as well from the efforts of reason as from the aids of grace. Thus the attachment of the Jews to ceremonial observances was not torn up violently and at once, but gradually lopped away. The whole light of the Gospel did not burst out in a moment upon the minds of the Gentiles. Many truths that were for a time obscured in the gloom of Popery are now brought forth into open day; and from

some errors, which yet keep their ground in Protestant countries, posterity, we trust, will be happily delivered. As, therefore, the goodness of God is not impeached by the progressive communication of his will to those persons by whom his Gospel is known, his wisdom may be vindicated in regard to that entire ignorance of the Gospel in which whole communities of men are now involved.

Let me not be misunderstood. Christianity is a word capable of various acceptations. Sometimes it implies the doctrines of Christ; and in this sense of the expression Christianity can neither be increased nor diminished. Sometimes it signifies all the evidences, effects, and circumstances belonging to the whole scheme of our redemption. But those circumstances are more or less striking; those effects are more or less rapid; aud those circumstances vary, at various times and in various places. The capacity of man to understand and act up to the doctrines of Christ, is, we know, unavoidably affected by many collateral causes, which are in a continual, though it be sometimes an imperceptible, fluctuation. In consequence of these irregularities, which necessarily arise from the present constitution of the world, the cause of the Gospel sometimes appears to be endangered by outward violence, and sometimes to languish with internal decay. Yet, upon the whole, we have reason to pronounce that it is on the advance; and the time will at last arrive when the knowledge of it shall pervade every country where it has not been hitherto taught, and when every country where it

has been taught shall acquire more just and more comprehensive notions concerning the import of its doctrines, the credibility of its proofs, the connection of its various parts, and the utility of its general design.

For this auspicious and extensive improvement in the religious state of man, every philosophical believer must acknowledge a visible, though remote, preparation of causes, in the wide diffusion of commerce, in the successful cultivation of science, in the invention of printing, in the discovery of the Western World, and in a variety of other particulars, which no friend to mankind can contemplate without wonder, or mention without exultation.

Let us not, then, be alarmed at the misplaced sarcasms or the tragical lamentations of those who first exclaim that the Gospel is imprisoned within very narrow boundaries, and then rudely endeavour to banish it from the spot which it already occupies. Rather ought we to reflect upon the numerous and complicated difficulties which it has already encountered with success. More especially are we interested in recollecting that God, having accompanied the first Revelation of his will with miraculous signs, has entrusted the further propagation of it to human agency. This, indeed, is a point intimately connected with our practice as well as our speculations, nor can it, without impropriety, be overlooked in this part of our subject we may not be able to comprehend the counsels of God; but the enquiry is not altogether fruitless, if in the course of it we discern the duty of man.

The relation in which the Gospel now stands to us, as moral agents, is different, according to the talents with which we are respectively endowed, and the situations in which we are respectively placed. To some men, it forms a part of their trial whether they will believe or reject Christianityto others, whether they will obstruct or promote the reception of it. When, therefore, the limited diffusion of the Gospel is urged as a proof against its divine authority, we should not forget that the charge is usually alleged by those who have the least right to allege it - by those who multiply artificial obstacles, for the sake of bringing an odium upon such as are inevitable-by those who industriously create the very imperfection against which they clamorously inveigh.

In all religious enquiries, I wish to see zeal tempered by discretion; and as I sometimes lament that the belief of the Gospel is not rooted in the love of virtue, I do not always suspect the disbelief of it to originate in a predilection for vice. But, upon questions of such moment, we cannot be too much upon our guard against endangering the peace and innocence of other men, by the keenness of raillery, by the subtlety of sophistry, and the imposing force of exaggerated description. Whatever sentiments, therefore, it may be the lot of some men to entertain concerning the authority of the extraordinary original ascribed to Christianity, they cannot, I think, have any doubts as to the utility of its ordinary effects. Even in the lowest point of view, it forms an evident and a consider