national rituals. Individual crimes pressed upon the conscience of the perpetrator; the violated law of God asserted its dignity, unveiled itself to the eyes of the offender, and made him tremble at the sacrilege he had committed. "Men sin with confidence," says a Roman poet; "but when the wickedness has been wrought, then they begin to perceive what is lawful, and what not."* To look upon the form of Virtue, after having forsaken her for ever, to gaze and wither away at the sight, is assigned by another as the severest punishment which could be inflicted on the direst crimes. The most excruciating tortures which tyranny could invent are represented as coming short of that mental agony with which a sinner contemplates himself falling continually lower and lower in the abyss of guilt. The doors of the rich, in pagan Athens, were ever beset by crowds of impostors, professing, by means of incantations and ceremonies, to wipe off the stain of crimes that had been committed, and restore peace to the troubled spirit of the criminal.+ Look where we will, even where religion was most impure, and morals most corrupt, we still see outraged law vindicating itself, and the offender bowed down and crushed under the weight of an accusing conscience. And, if we turn from the unwilling testimony * Juvenal, Sat. xiii. 237, seq. Persius, Sat. iii. 36. Plato, Rep. ii. p. 364.

of guilt to the positive evidence furnished by those sages whose works, composed in the darkness of heathen times, have contributed to form the character and enlighten the understanding of Christians for more than fifteen hundred years, we surely can no longer doubt that that efflux of the Divine perfections, the Moral Law, was left so deeply stamped upon the heart of fallen Man as to enable him not merely to discover its existence, but even (doubtless with labour and toil, and self-sacrifice, continued through many generations,) to decypher its import. Without indeed proceeding so far in our admiration of the productions of Paganism as some of the ancient Fathers of the Church have done,-without deeming it necessary to regard them either as due to a participation in Divine inspiration,† or as derived from a direct primeval tradition; it

*For the earlier ages, see Arnobius adv. Gentes iii. 7; Augustine, Confess. iii. 46, and what Socrates (Hist. Eccles. iii. 16) relates of the effect of the Emperor Julian's law, forbidding the study of Pagan literature by the Christians.

Justin Martyr, Apolog. ii. p. 41, E.; 46, C. Athenagoras, Legat. p. 7, D.

Euseb. Præparat. Evangel. passim. The source of these views, which were so commonly taken up by the Greek Fathers of the early Church, was probably the Jewish peripatetic, (as Clemens Alexandrinus, Strom. I. p. 132, and Eusebius, Præp. Ev. ix. 6, call him) Aristobulus, who seems to have endeavoured, by means of a forced and baseless syncretism, to recommend the religion and sacred books of his countrymen to Ptolemy Philometor.

still seems impossible not to be struck with the wonderful perfection to which their moral investigations attained, and to acknowledge the validity of the evidence which principles, so educed, afford of the Divine character of Christianity.

Probably the importance of this evidence, and the legitimacy of its title, would never have been questioned, had not the nature of the Moral Law, and the relation in which it stands to Man, been falsely apprehended. If we regard the recognition of its commands merely as a result derived from the exercise of a human faculty,the expression of a certain moral sense,— nothing is more consistent than that we should suppose the source of this to have been affected by that transgression which affected every part of Man's being. But look at it in another light—as in its own nature eternal and immutable, an efflux of God himself, and we cannot expect that the fall of Man should influence it, although it would influence his relation to it. His back would be turned upon it as a guide, but it would still remain as a witness against him; never appearing to him except to show him his error, to convince him of his sin. And this, whether to Jew, or Gentile, or Christian forgetful of his profession, the law has ever done, and still continues to do. It is still, and ever will be, a schoolmaster to bring men unto Christ; to show them how they

all have sinned, and come short of the demands of God; how they are separated from the centre of their spiritual life, and cannot, by any effort of their own, be reunited with it. It will exhibit to them their needs, and their inability to satisfy them; their natural home, and the gulph which separates them from it. And when, tortured by the contrast which such a sight presents between their longings and their prospects, their convictions and their practice, the wishes which they cherish, and the disappointments which they experience, they raise their eyes to Heaven for relief, they will fall at once upon the emblem of their deliverance, the Cross of Christ!

CHRISTIAN EVIDENCES.

ROM. VIII. 9.

Now if any man have not the Spirit of Christ, he is none of his.

THE Moral Evidences of the truth of Christianity, the nature and bearing of which formed the substance of my last discourse, were found to depend upon three conditions, first, the recognition of the eternal and immutable Law of God, which, forsaken by Man in the primeval transgression, and, consequently, no longer serving as his guide, yet continued with him as a witness against him, not merely as exhibited in the code which a special providence vouchsafed to the chosen people; but, also, (unembodied indeed, yet not less really present) with