nals of Archbishop Usher, and the works of Lightfoote, of Horne, of Lardner, and, Calmet's Dictionary of the Bible. An immense amount of learning has been employed in framing commentaries on the Bible, and expositions of its several books. Pole's Synopsis of Critical Expositions, Blaney's Jeremiah, Lowth's Isaiah, Newton on the Prophecies, Ainsworth on the Pentateuch, Michaelis on the Old and on the New Testament, Campbell's Notes on the Gospels, Rosenmüller's Scholia, and the commentaries of Kuinoel, are all works of great learning, and they discover vast research.

Beside this, in reply to the objection of infidels, many able works have been written in defence of the Bible, from Watson's Apology, Leland's View of Deistical Writers, and Paley's Evidences, down to the Evidences as presented by Bishop M'Ilvaine of this country, and by Bishop Wilson of Calcutta. For vigorous thought, sound reasoning, lucid arrangement, and beautiful simplicity of style, many of the productions of this class stand unrivalled in our language. The works of Paley, especially, are models of composition, and of felicitous reasoning.

In other departments, the Bible has called forth the works of Bochart, of Reland, and Lowth on Hebrew Poetry, all distinguished for profound erudition; while, in our own language, (to say nothing of Milton, of Young, and of Pollock,) such writers as Jeremy Taylor, Horne, Hooker, Barrow, Sherlock, Bishop Butler, and a host of others (constituting the very flower of our English literature) were induced to write solely from reverence for the Bible. In English literature, the Bible has proved the most liberal of all patrons.

The Bible has greatly contributed to promote the general diffusion of intelligence among the mass of the people. Various considerations combine to assure us that such is the fact. The testimony of all competent and impartial observers declares, that among the mass of the people in those countries yet destitute of a knowledge of revelation, gross ignorance prevails. The little learning they do possess, is confined to a very small class, the privileged few: the body of the population are, in point of intellect, but little elevated above the brutes around them. Even in nations nominally Christian, the difference in the amount of intelligence among the common people, where the Bible is open to all, and among those where it is not in their hands, is almost incredibly great. Among the poorer population of Ireland, of

1

Italy, of Spain, or even of France, we find the grossest ig-
norance almost universally prevalent. They are taught
to delegate the care of their future interests to their priests,
and with the delegation, they seem to abandon almost the
power of thought. In such communities, many minds na-
turally shrewd, vigorous, and active, are shrunk and para-
lyzed, for want of having their powers called into proper ac-
tion. Relying on mere outward rites, truth, in all her majesty,
her beauty, and her far-reaching influences, seems hid from
their view, and lost even to their wishes.
Now, with
such a people, if we compare the same class of population
as found in Scotland, or in New-England, where the Bible
is, emphatically, "the people's book," where it is found in
every house, in the rich man's library, and on the cottager's
table, where it is read in every school-house, and where its
sacred precepts are reverently listened to around the cheerful
hearth of the day-laborer, and we shall find a great difference
in the amount of popular intelligence. This the Scottish
poet, Burns, well understood; and accordingly he describes
his cottage laborer closing the pleasant family intercourse on
Saturday night:

"The cheerful supper done, wi' serious face,
They round the ingle form a circle wide;
The sire turns o'er, wi' patriarchal grace,
The big ha' Bible, ance his father's pride:
His bonnet reverently is laid aside,
His lyart haffets wearing thin and bare:
Those strains that once did sweet in Zion glide,

He wales a portion with judicious care;

And, Let us worship God,' he says, with soleinn air.

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Then kneeling down, to Heaven's eternal King
The saint, the father, and the husband prays.

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From scenes like these, old Scotia's grandeur springs,
That makes her loved at home, revered abroad."

In such a country, we find a thinking, reasoning community, given to reflection, and comparatively free from superstition. Nor is the cause of this difference unintelligible or obscure. By the amazing truths which it presents, the Bible is directly calculated to awaken intense thought; and it furnishes abundant materials to feed and to maintain thought. Destitute of revelation, man's thoughts are confined to this world, its pleasures, its cares, and its interests: and what can

the mere notion of a local deity, like the heathen idols, or of a patron saint to look to for protection, do to elevate the thoughts and stimulate the intellect?

How meagre and uninfluential were the notions of superior beings, entertained by the most polished of ancient pagan philosophers. But, open the page of inspiration before man's eye, and what a host of glorious truths and ennobling ideas is at once presented to his mind! The nature and attributes of the Eternal Spirit, his boundless power, his spotless holiness, his inflexible justice, man's responsibility, and, above all, the stupendous discoveries of divine mercy in the plan of redemption, are truths blazing on every page of the Bible,-truths admirably adapted to arrest attention, to awaken profound, intense, long-continued thought, and by their influence, to touch the springs of human feeling, expand the dimensions of the mind itself, and new model the entire character. These and similar truths (presented only in the Bible) cannot be uninfluential on the mind that perceives and contemplates them. Just so far as the Bible is known and studied in a community, are these truths known; and so far must their influence be felt. But if an ennobling influence be thus diffused over the public mind, the effects of that influence cannot fail to show itself on literature, which is at once the offspring and the guage of popular intellect.

The peaceful spirit of revelation has spread its influence far and wide, through every part of human society. Men no longer deem all foreign nations barbarians, lying almost beyond the pale of humanity. No longer is warfare conducted in the spirit of sanguinary ferocity that prevailed among ancient pagans, and still prevails among heathen tribes. Formerly, captives taken in war were put to death in cold. blood, without any sense of injustice, any feeling of shame. The mildest doom impending over the captive, was to pass his life in hopeless slavery under his conqueror, or those to whom that conqueror might sell him.*

Just so far as the doctrines of the Bible are received which teach that men are all members of one family, children of the same Heavenly Father, may the spirit of humanity be expected to prevail; and when, moreover, the soul's immortality is fully admitted, it throws a sacredness over the estimate of human life, and presents war and bloodshed and

Kent's Com. Vol. I.

violence in a most repulsive light. Accordingly, a more hu mane and liberal spirit characterizes the intercourse of nations one with another: a resort to war (except in cases of absolute necessity) is everywhere condemned by public opinion, and modern literature shows the influence of this change; it is more liberal, it breathes less of a sanguinary spirit, and exhibits far more refinement, gentleness, and delicacy of feeling. More especially is this change apparent in the different manner in which woman is every where treated in Christian society, and the different light in which she is depicted and spoken of in literary works. On this point much might be said, but this brief allusion must here suffice. As woman sways a gentle, but all-commanding influence, at the domestic hearth, and in the community around her; as her spirit is preeminently the presiding genius of home, with all its calm joys; so, in the literature of modern times, the altered position of woman seems to show itself, in a pure and hallowed influence shed over the whole range of literary production. Her gentle spirit is there, as in the home of the mind. But it is the Bible that has elevated woman, cultivated her mind, polished her manners, and chastened her spirit; and through her it has sent this gentle influence on human intercourse and on modern literature.

The Bible has furnished to modern literature topics of peculiar grandeur, and thoughts of rare beauty, utterly unknown where revelation is not. How poor and unsatisfactory were the conceptions of the most distinguished writers of classical antiquity concerning the nature and the destiny of man, and especially concerning a superior power. How human in their passions, and degraded in character, are all of the numerous gods and demi-gods with which Homer peoples his Olympus! How even the wisest of the ancient philosophers encumber their description of a supreme deity by the notion of the stern decrees of irresistible fate, to which the highest of their deities is subject! Among many things that are beautiful, and some that are truly sublime, this poverty of thought respecting the Great First Cause, exerts a belittling influence that is continually felt. In the writings of the wisest of the ancients, man is often represented as equal in dignity of character to their gods, if not positively superior.

But now, what a commanding influence over the whole range of human thought and conception, flows from the

sublime idea presented in revelation, of One God, the cause of all things, himself uncaused, eternal, unchangeable, supremely independent, perfect in his nature, and infinite in all his attributes! The presentation of that one glorious conception to the mind, is like the rising of the sun to the bodily vision; the darkness and uncertainty previously resting on every object are dissipated, and a world bursts forth to view, in all its beauty of forms, its symmetry of proportions, and its multiplicity of mutual relations, each object appearing in its true nature, its proper position, its due connections! Who can estimate the far-reaching influence on human thought of the discovery of a spiritual Being, the Creator of all, who said, "Let there be light!" and there was light; who "spake, and it was done, who commanded, and it stood fast?" What a subject for reflection-an Almighty God, omnipresent and omniscient! How can it do other than influence and new model the whole current of human thought, and the very modes of expressing thought! Now, this grand idea is derived from the Bible, and no one yet has estimated the amount of sublime thought and ennobling sentiment it has shed over our modern literature, even those portions of it that have proceeded from men, who scoff at that very Bible, to which they are indebted for nearly ever thought that gives force and beauty to their productions: as, e. g., that conception of Byron's, presenting, in the presence of Manfred, the Spirit of Evil to the gaze of the startled Abbot, who exclaims, with pious horror,

"Ah! he unveils his aspect: on his brow

The thunder scars are graven: from his eye
Glares forth the immortality of hell!"

The doom of Cain was obviously in the writer's mind. And what but a reflected image of grand ideas presented in the Bible, is that beautiful passage near the close of Childe Harold, the address to the ocean:

"Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!
Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee, in vain :
Man marks the earth with ruin, his control
Stops with the shore: upon the watery plain
The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain
A shadow of man's ravage, save his own,
When, for a moment, like a drop of rain,
He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,
Without a grave, unknell'd, uncoffin'd, and unknown.