Infidelity in its Various Aspects.

INFIDELITY, though elaborating its own creed, is, properly speaking, a system of negations. It suggests rather what it seeks to demolish than what it attempts to build. In this respect, it is like the palmer-worm of the prophet,' the mere mention of which leads one to think more of what it has destroyed, than of what it has left to be eaten by the locust. But in the work of demolition, one man or class of men advances farther than another. Some sacred truths which one band of fell destroyers clear away in their march, another band, leagued in the same warfare, leave standing. Just as we may suppose some of the soldiers of Cæsar, in attacking the Massilian grove, went scrupulously and sparingly to work from a superstitious dread of invisible power, while others, less timid and superstitious, levelled to the ground everything that had for ages been counted sacred. Infidelity in one age or country may be much more sweeping

1

Joel, i. 4.

'Foster's Essay, p. 39, 15th edit.

than in another, and, as everybody knows, contemporaneous systems of unbelief among the same people may differ widely in the number of things sacred which they proscribe. But there is a clearly-defined body of religious truth, in reverencing which, people and nations who have had and fairly used the means of judging, however much differing on other points, have generally been agreed. This is the ark of the God of Israel; and however the Philistines may outstrip each other in laying hands upon it, they are yet to be numbered under one genus, on the principle that depredators are but depredators, though some may be braver or more successful in the work of plunder than others. This body of truth comprises all the commonly understood doctrines of natural and revealed religion: such as the independent existence of one absolutely perfect Being, the Creator, Preserver, and Governor of all things; the doctrine of the Trinity, or of three persons in the Godhead, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit; the Incarnation and Atonement of the Son for human salvation; and the necessity of the Spirit's influences to regenerate the souls of men, This is God's truth, the substance of all that material nature teaches, the purest reason has ever been able to discover, and the Scriptures have revealed. There is room for a diversity of opinion about modes of eccleciastical government, external rites and ceremonies, and the interpretation of certain Scriptural passages, but no one who has ears to hear, and who humbly listens to the voices of hature and revelation, can fail to discover what God

is, and what he has done, what man is, and what he needs. Infidelity, then, is found to manifest itself in such forms as the following: in the denial of the Divine Existence, or absolute Atheism; in the denial of the Divine Personality, or Pantheism; in the denial of the Divine Providential Government, or Naturalism; in the denial of the Divine Redemption (including, as it does, the doctrines of the Trinity, Atonement, and Spirit's Influences,) or Pseudo-Spiritualism. And to these may be added, what belong more properly to practical, than to theoretical infidelity, the denial of Man's Responsibility, or Indifferentism; and the denial of the Power of Godliness, or Formalism. These forms we shall now develop.

CHAPTER I.

THE DENIAL OF THE DIVINE EXISTENCE, OR ATHEISM.

Atheism completes the negation-A somewhat strange phenomenon -Its existence doubted-No man of straw-Processes by which men have become atheists-Prevalent in most depraved times— French atheism-Reign of Terror-An atheistical nation selfdestructive-No lack of adverse speculations respecting the divine Being, but absolute atheism comparatively rare-Development hypothesis not positively atheistical-Atheism, however, a fact― Involves a monstrous assumption-The existence of God an intellectual necessity--Arguments à priori and à posteriori-Exclu sive claim for either disposed of-Inductive proof from matter and mind-Defect of induction-Bible testimony-Practical Proof the real one-Dr. Arnold.

HERE the negation is complete. The work of demolishing things esteemed sacred, has advanced so far as to leave nothing more for the destroyer to do. He has reached the dreary brink from which many destroyers, by no means craven-hearted, have shrunk back. And from that bad pre-eminence he looks upwards to the heavens, vacant at first in his wishes, and now in his creed, and with as much boldness as if he had travelled through the realms of space and beheld all dark and desolate, says, There is there no God. He looks down to the gulf of annihilation, and, amid the troubles of his godless existence, feels something like a morbid satisfaction in the thought