ject the offer, and pérish; or to accept it, and live. The Gospel, instead of affording hope for the encouragement of his transgression, affords it only for the encouragement of his obedience. The amnesty by which he is to be saved, is an amnesty of covenant, and the covenant includes, on his part, righteousness, holiness, and faith. The sinner, therefore, unless he forsake his sins, must await their punishment. From him, if incorrigible and obstinate in his course of guilt, has departed the grace of that redeeming mercy, which descends in health, and comfort, and trust, on the children of obedience. He has rejected the offer of divine goodness. What remains but the verdict of divine justice?

We need scarcely inquire how far, to the pure and holy, the redemption of the Gospel is peace and hope. If they behold the justice of God in the satisfaction which has been made for sin, they behold also the mercy by which the satisfaction has been accomplished. If they look with awe to the cross of Christ, they may look also with humble and confiding trust. They are admonished, indeed, of the danger of guilt, but they are instructed in the promises which confirm their obedience. The reverence and love kindled in their hearts by the blessings which they have received, contribute to restore within them the likeness of God, and proportionally to confirm and augment their happiness. În all circumstances they may recollect with gratitude by whose blood they were bought; and in prosperity they may heighten and hallow their enjoyments, in adversity soothe and tranquillize their afflictions, in temptation renew and confirm their strength, in death fortify and cheer their spirit, by those inspiring anticipations which the atonement of Christ has autho

rized them to indulge, and which affords them a foretaste on earth of the happiness of heaven.

The redemption of the Gospel, then, we may now, perhaps, be permitted to conclude, is not wholly a mystery, incomprehensible to the affections and the understandings of men. As it refers to God, it harmonizes his justice with his mercy, and affords an intelligible and beautiful comment on the most awful, alike, and the most gracious of his attributes. With respect to Christ, it afforded him occasion to exemplify and confirm his precepts by a life of trial, and a death of ignominy and sorrow. In its reference to mankind, it supplies the saving efficacy which was to be found neither in the imperfection of their repentance, nor in the vanity of their oblations. If, in its cause and consequences, it be not wholly revealed to the ignorance of human, or perhaps, to the wisdom of angelic, beings, it discloses to us the remedy of transgression; the graciousness of the new covenant; the love which has redeemed, and justified, and accepted, the sinner; the full and perfect accomplishment of the types and figures of preceding ages; and the satisfaction which, accepted by the equity of God, has ransomed the sins of the whole world. In this sublime manifestation, an appeal is made, not merely to the reason, but to the senses, of man. We are addressed by facts, by visible objects, by the procession to Calvary, by the wonders of the cross. All that is awful is united for our edification with all that is beneficent and good. The heart of the sinner is warned of the danger of sin, and the necessity of reformation; a new solemnity is lent to pardon, a new force to precept, a new strength to motive, a new and more binding efficacy to obligation; and sure and adequate grounds, sup

plying the deficiency of all other religions, are afforded for hope, to confirm the righteous; for fear, to restrain the guilty; for confidence, to support the afflicted; for faith, to enlighten and strengthen the ignorant and weak; and for that holy and sublime conviction, which, illuminating and evangelizing the spirit and the heart, recognises, in God, the parent, and, in Christ, the friend and the redeemer, not of a party or of a sect, of Christian or of Jew, but of the human race throughout all generations, from the birth to the end of time. Such is the atonement of the Gospel, in its nature, its object, and its effects. Sacrifices, penances, pilgrimages, and lustrations, the hopeless expiations of guilt, have passed away. Types and shadows are no more. The promises of early days are realized. And the trust of man, so long resting on the vain satisfaction of his own oblations, is directed to an offering which human wisdom was equally inadequate to suggest or to provide, and which is coextensive, in its efficacy, with the disorders to be remedied, and the sins to be

redeemed.

CHAPTER XII.

THE FOUNDERS AND TEACHERS OF RELIGION.

SECT. I.

The founders and teachers of the religion of Greece-Bards and priests--Their doctrines confirmed by subsequent legislators-The mode of teaching inadequate-Precept unaided by example— Religion unsanctioned by due authority-Both equally unsustained by the character and conduct of their authors.

HE early bards of Greece were its religious

legislators. They copied, methodized, or embellished, the mythology of Egypt and of the East, and interwove with the materials which they borrowed, allegorical fables, and poetic tales, of their own creation. Each, in his turn, added something to the diversified but splendid tissue. The phenomena of nature were converted into gods. The hero, or robber, who wandered abroad for occasions of war and spoil, was to increase, in due time, the number of divinities; and Olympus was to be converted into a mighty temple for the reception of a crowd of alien deities, naturalized by the tolerating spirit, and classified by the fertile fancy, of the poet who imported them."

Orpheus, Homer, and Hesiod, were among the priestly bards who conveyed the polytheism thus framed and decorated to the Greeks. In accomplishing this work, they, sometimes, demonstrated a felicity of fancy, and even a taste and wisdom, which

merit, and have excited, the applause of mankind. If there was superstition, it was clothed in the most becoming and fascinating garb; if error, it was contrasted by precepts and institutions which might justly reach and influence the heart. But truth was often deserted for imagination, or overwhelmed by a mass of absurdity and incoherence. The teacher, hurried away by the enthusiam of an ungovernable fancy, or himself tainted by the creed which he announced, infused into his system the wildest and most pernicious dogmas; and, thus, a religion was gradually produced, if a religion it may be called, in which the moral was rare, and the inconsistency and contradiction unparalleled, except, perhaps, in the holy romance of Hindu idolatry.

Legislators of so frail a character, were not calculated to become useful preceptors of mankind. They affected, indeed, to have been taught by inspirations from heaven, and to teach, in their turn, what had been thus inspired. But they were poets not moralists, priests to conduct the populace of their day to the altars of superstition, not instructors to inculcate the necessity, and the obligation, of piety and virtue. The precepts of practical wisdom which they announced, were scattered, parsimoniously and incidentally, through their songs; but they perpetually recurred to the pernicious dogmas of their idolatry, or exhausted their genius in recording and embellishing the vices of their gods. In their capacity as public teachers, they were governed by no regular and benevolent design, and, apparently, by no wish, but that of engaging the passions, and winning the applause, of the multitude whom they addressed. They struck their lyre with spontaneous fervour in the assemblies of the populace, or in the