Other objections, equally specious and efficacious upon the popular mind, might be adduced and answered; but the time will not permit. None of them, however, are better founded than these, and they do not justify doubt concerning the inspiration of the Bible. My wonder is, that a book written at different periods, through the long lapse of so many centuries, should be so uniform in doctrine, so pure in its morality, and the characters of its good men so excellent, and itself open to so few exceptions. The difficulty is not that there is not evidence enough to sustain the claims of inspiration, but that there is too much, and spread over too great a surface, to be read and appreciated by many. Men engaged in the avocations of life have not time to travel through volumes, and, being unacquainted with argument and fact, are not prepared to encounter the shallow arguments of infidelity. My aim has been to select a few of the fundamental evidences of divine inspiration, and to show that the argument is logical, and the evidence conclusive, and that it goes to rivet on reflecting minds the proof that the Bible is a book of divine origin - Heaven's gift to man, to guide his footsteps till the day dawn and the day-spring from on high visit him; that it is not merely the iron-bound volume of duty, and restraint, and punishment, but the friend of man for time and for eternity, the friend of liberty, of science, of industry, of the people, and especially of the laboring classes and the poor. It is the world's friend, the light of the world, and the life of the world; God's wisdom and benevolence condensed in the smallest possible competent popular form, exerting the most benign intellectual and moral influence upon the human mind. No other book ever exerted so powerful an influence in dispelling popular ignorance, in alleviating the pressure of despotism, and the debasement of idolatry. No book so

embraces the cottage and the throne, and all between; so illumines the whole world, so invigorates the intellect of man, and so exalts and ennobles our race. It contains a comparatively perfect model of republican government, belonging to distant ages; and has been, and now is, and will be, the only hope of the world's elevation to universal civilization, and universal civil and religious liberty.

I am happy to know that the preceding exhibition of the republican tendencies of the Bible has been satisfactory, beyond my expectation. For multitudes have slept over or misunderstood the elementary wisdom and benevolence of the Old Testament. The book has been slandered, misunderstood, ridiculed, abused, and neglected, while the evidences of its origin and sublime contents have been unknown. I have endeavored to bring you, as patriots and republicans and Christians, on to the side of the Bible, to show you that it is the people's book, the working man's book, the poor man's book, able, if cordially received and obeyed, to fulfil all the purposes of God's comprehensive benevolence in the elevation of our race. God grant that these views may come home to your judgments, may fasten upon your consciences, and bring savingly the influences of the Bible upon your hearts! And when all men shall thus receive the Bible, then will the world be happy, and one blessed republic of benevolence and brotherhood unite the nations of the earth, and the earth itself be restored to the glorious fellowship of the universe of holy minds!

LECTURE XII.

PROPHECY.

WE have considered, in previous lectures, the nature and reality of miracles, as authenticating a revelation from God. It is said, however, that miracles, though admitted to be satisfactory to those who witnessed them, are no evidence to us who did not see them; for, how do we know they ever took place? But I have shown that the existence of a nation of peculiar and unparalleled institutions, coëxisting with the miracles, and confessedly founded on their reality, is evidence of their existence. We have seen that, if the miracles were not real, those peculiar and forbidding institutions could not be founded on them. The miracles and institutions also come down cotemporaneously from the beginning; a miracle, itself, if they were not real. The same is true of the Christian institutions. The era is settled. They assume to be based on miracles wrought before the eyes of those who died asserting the doctrines of the Gospel, and who spent their lives in the support of its institutions:

The evidence of the senses, it is admitted, is more impressive than any proof of a fact not seen. What is seen comes to the mind more easily than what is proved; but the wellestablished certainty of an event, when it is proved, does, in many cases, render the fact as certain to the mind, and create just as really an obligation to believe, as if it were a

matter of vision. Who doubts the existence of the Revolutionary War, any more than if he himself had mingled in the shock of battle? Is any one the less certain of it? Not a whit. Yet he has not seen it. Who doubts that the Declaration of Independence was signed by those whose names it bears, at all more than if he had stood by and seen the names written? The fact that Jefferson, and Adams, and Hancock, signed it, with the others, is in every respect as certain, and its results as obligatory on us, as if we had been actually eye-witnesses to the deed. So it is with the miracles of Moses; so with the miracles of Christ and the apostles. The fact is ascertained, then, that miracles were wrought in attestation of a commission to reveal the will of God to man. And in whatever way the fact is made certain to us, its evidence for the revelation is as real as though the miracle had taken place before our eyes; for it is its existence which includes the sanction of Heaven, and not the medium through which we are apprized of it. The obligation, therefore, in either case, is alike imperative, to receive the divinely authenticated records.

It is admitted, however, that a wider field is open for cavil and perplexity and doubt, in respect to matters of evidence, than where we have the testimony of the senses.

It is to meet this waning of impression, and facility of evasion, that God has condescended to authenticate his revealed will by another kind of miracle, which travels down the stream of time, and grows in its impressiveness in proportion as the evidence of miracles wanes, and accumulates upon us its authentications with the lapse of ages. If the one, like a cone, converges with distance, the other, like the cone reversed, expands; and both, side by side, constitute a body of evidence of equal diameter through all time.

This new species of miracle is called prophecy, and consists in the miraculous and extensive foretelling of future events, such, and so many, and so complex and various, that no finite mind could grasp the knowledge; as much beyond the powers of created mind, as miracles indicate power beyond the capacity of finite beings. It is a miracle of knowledge in one case, just as truly as it is a miracle of power in the other. God brings omniscience to authenticate his word in one case, and omnipotence in the other. Omnipotence is stamped on miracles, omniscience on prophecies.

The point necessary to make out the authentication of prophecy as a miraculous event, is the fact, that finite minds are no more omniscient than they are omnipotent, and that it surpasses the power of created minds to foretell an extended and complex series of far distant future events. When, therefore, developments are made including omniscience, it proves the inspiration of the records by prophecies, as much as developments including omnipotence prove their inspiration by miracles.

The impossibility, to created minds, of extensive complex accurate predictions of persons and nations, amounting to biography and history, ages before their existence, has been universally conceded; and, if denied, may be conclusively shown. Consider the utter incompetency of any man to predict accurately his own history for a single day. Who knows, and which of us can predict, the events of to-morrow. Perhaps the existence of the working man, whose days consist of a repetition of the same labors, like the movements of a clock, may be guessed at with tolerable accuracy; but where we go out into the tide of human affairs, and find our own free actions so interwoven with the actions of other minds and the unanticipated events of Providence, and so diversified in their