ONE word more -a word to my countrymen on the genius of Calvinism, its enchanting power and tendency, and opposition to the spirit of the gospel, and then I have done.

Fellow countrymen, listen for a moment to one who has no possible interest in this world in seeking to deceive you, but who feels bound solely by a regard to the interests of truth, and the concerns of another world, to speak according to conscience. Being no way bound by the subscription of any human creed, or by the ties of any worldly gain, to say one thing more than another, he is, as to all temporal and worldly interest on either side of this question, free as the mountain eagle, and what he honestly believes to be true, he will speak, fearless of all mankind.

Without, then, believing that most unreasonable and libellous doctrine upon our Maker, called original sin, I do believe and see this as a clear, undeniable fact, that man, in his natural, uncultivated state, is an ignorant, credulous, and superstitious being, the slave often of detestable selfish passion, abusing his own natural faculties, and creating for himself a thousand ills, which knowledge and the culture of true religion alone can prevent. All mankind are born in a state capable of, and essentially needing improvement. But man, in thus needing improvement, is no exception to, but is quite in keeping with the rest of Nature's works, which all need to be cultivated and trained up to usefulness, as well as he. The ground, left to itself is either barren, or full of weeds, or productive of no good fruit, without the labour of the husbandman; and the very seeds and plants, and different species of domestic animals, must all be trained, improved upon, and brought to perfection by the study and industry of man. So, again, the wealth of the whole mineral

kingdom is worth nothing without the labours and improvement of man. Even paradise itself required man to dress it. Should man himself, therefore, be an exception to the great law of nature? By no means. It is the very ordination of his Maker, then, that man, like every thing else, should be born in a state needing culture and education, and that he should be carefully trained, and gradually elevated to that high moral destiny for which he was originally formed: and different men need different degrees and modes of training according to their original constitution and capacity, which vary to almost infinity.

Now, taking man as he generally is, in his present ignorant or half cultivated state of mind, among other evil effects of such a state, there is a sort of universal tendency in him to fall in with the gloomy notions of fatalism. We find this tendency, this noxious weed of the human soil, largely developed among the Turks; but it is by no means peculiar to them: it is a weakness, a great pesterous moral weed, that has preyed upon mankind, less or more, in all ages and in all countries. Witness the greediness with which the people, in all ages and countries, have run after fortune-tellers, and have been made the wretched dupes of the gloomy and monstrous hallucinations of witchcraft, sorcery, astrology, and so forth.

Now, Calvinism is emphatically a system of fatalism of the most gloomy and fearful, yet strange to say, enchanting description. The iron fangs of it have pierced the soul of many an honest-hearted man and woman, and especially so among those of my own beloved fatherland, where, alas! how sadly have the fathers been made to eat sour grapes, and the children's teeth have been set on edge! As the people eagerly run to witness an execution, and as every tragiclooking, horrid thing, has a sort of popular enchantment about it, so is it more especially the case with this gloomy system, which finds a ready sympathy in the minds of the unthinking superstitious multitude, whose ears are ever itching after some uncommon stimulus to excite their admiration and astonishment. The love of the marvellous, the awful and the terribly mysterious, predisposes them to run after the preachers of this system, and to listen greedily to its horrific representations; it rouses their passions, their admiration. first, and then their credulity, just as we find it stated in the Scripture representation of "Mystery Babylon the Great," which all the world wondered after. When once such a thing is put into their heads, we all know how greedily children will listen to the old stories about ghosts and bogles, how readily they will drink in and believe.

such stories as if they were all true gospel. No matter how much they be frightened and terrified at the thought of seeing or meeting with such things themselves, still they have an unconquerable desire to hear of them, and to be told the same stories over again: and the more terrifying they appear in the recital, so much the more is the recital of such fearful things longed for. Even the greatest of minds that have been accustomed in youth to such stories cannot shake off the effects of them all their lifetime. Though their philosophy has long taught them to utterly disbelieve such things, yet still they will continue to the end of their days to be terrified on going into the dark alone. It is in this childish weakness of the human mind—in this tragic love of the marvellous-this superstitious tendency to be infected with the slavish horrors of fatalism, that Calvanism finds its stronghold. These are quite sufficient to account for the popularity of the system, apart from any real divine excellence belonging to it.

According to this system, Christianity is a kind of great lottery, by which alleged gospel tickets of good news are held out to all: but if men could see the right side of these tickets, they would find that there are only a few prizes, and all the rest blanks; that salvation is a prize intended only for an elect number; and that for the rest there was nothing ever intended but blank misery, and that to all eternity: nay, that the non-elect are to be eternally punished for not accepting prizes that never existed for them to accept, but which were mere blanks falsely held out to them in the name of prizes, and serving only as a cruel mockery to enhance their ruin. Hence the very capricious, uneven, and often sour melancholy temper of mind of many of the sincere professors of this system. At one time they are mounted to heaven in raptures of joy and confidence, that they are surely among the special favourites of God; at another time they are sunk to the very abyss of misery, under terror that their ticket in this awful lottery should prove a blank. God knows I speak not in raillery, but what is matter of serious and awful fact, true as I have to answer to Him at the great day.

I have spoken of the "horrific representations" of Calvinism, and I would just give a glance at the principal of these, with some of their most prominent effects upon the people. Following out the doctrine of the Westminster Confession of Faith (chap. iii., 5, 6,) let the reader consult such works as the Marrow of Modern Divinity, Toplady on Predestination, and Boston's Fourfold State,works reputed to be of the choicest evangelical sentiment, and there

he may read such things as this-I do not vouch for the words, but for the sentiment-there, I say, he may read such a sentiment as this, pretended to belong even to the holy gospel revelation of Jesus — that in hell there will be found infants of a span long, even nonelect infants doomed for original sin to swim for ever in a sea of burning brimstone! and then along with these there will be found a whole helpless non-elect world that were unalterably fore-ordained of their Maker from eternity to be such reprobates as they are in time, and then for being thus only what their Maker ordained them to be, to be turned into hell fire, and there tortured among devils to all eternity! Awful the thought to have ever been hatched by human heart, a monster born into the world that ought to have been smothered the moment it saw the light. This is the doctrine of reprobation, the counterpart of Calvinistic election. The doctrine, as commonly set before the people, is smoothed down exceedingly, its blackest parts patched over, and kept carefully out of sight. But the above is its full consequence to those who can reflect and fully see through it. Among all the horrible superstitions of Paganism, I doubt if there is any thing worse than this, or even for a moment to compare with it. The ignorant herd of mankind, who have no reflection on consequences, and who commonly hear the doctrine as smoothed down and set forth in the fairest disguise it can be put, may listen to the common honied exhibitions of this tremendous system with a sort of luxurious admiration, just as they would gaze upon an execution, or witness some horrible tragic representation in a theatre, never thinking of its touching themselves: but alas! how different and deplorable the effect upon many of those who can reflect and see the consequence of things! While it produces in a certain class a piety that is often none of the most inviting kind, from its breathing so much of that sour and superstitious austerity which is the native genius of the system, it has the effect upon others of completely scaring them into hardened, misanthropic hypocrites,' sneaking and selfish, ever ready to take advantage of others wherever they can find opportunity, their notions of divine equity being deranged, and themselves made sceptical at bottom of there being any thing truly 'good in the universe. If such be found out in their evil ways, and called to repent, some of them will tell you cooly, and truly, indeed, according to their system, that they were only what they were ordained to be, and cannot repent,-that it is only for the irresistible grace of God to make men repent, and that they, like the impotent

man in the Gospel, must wait their time at the pool side, till that come upon them. With another class of weaker mind it has the effect of breaking down their spirits to utter sadness, or sinking them to hopeless despair; while another again, a fourth class of hardier spirits, feeling such things as an outrage upon humanity, and as fit to be used only for striking terror into a herd of ignorant slaves, are made thoroughly disgusted with the whole system, and are emboldened through its means to throw off Christianity altogether as a galling superstition, mistaking for Christianity the revolting barbarities of a former dark age, which have been legalized in our country under the name of the holy religion of Jesus. Now, if such a representation were only an empty dream of my imagina. tion, it were truly well; but alas! how many have known, and do know, to their sad experience, the melancholy fact of it!

The only notions that we can form of the justice of God, are derived from what we feel to be just and right among men; and if, with Calvinism, you take away the latter as the only source from whence we derive a conception of the former, you leave us nothing in God to contemplate, but an arbitrary despot, whom one may live in awful dread of, and serve from motives of terror, but to have confidence in, and love cordially as a Father, is impossible. Thus it is that Calvinism, by aiming a death-blow at the very source of our notions of the Divine equity, goes to strike down the only conception of Divine justice that God himself has implanted in the human breast, and thus takes away the very foundation of filial trust in God, leaving us nothing that is fatherly, amiable, or trustworthy in him to contemplate, but only a stern, arbitrary despot, to live in a state worse than Pagans without a revelation — in a constant slavish dread of. I know well the logic of Calvin and Jonathan Edwards. But what does the strength of their logic avail me in such a case? The stronger their logic, the deeper the fang of despair it strikes into my bosom! Heaven itself could be no heaven to me without the feeling that the God of heaven is a Father of mercy and strict justice, good and just to all his creatures as well as to me, which he could not be upon their horrible system. The fact of their monster conclusion being ever admitted as proved by their logic, or as capable of proof by any logic, is only a proof of the semi-barbarous state of mind of those who could make such admission.

Thus by Calvinism, a gloomy and despotic fatalism is substituted for the gladdening news of the gospel of Jesus, that God is the just