admit of being applied to the literal Jerusalem. Thus, in our text, it is said of the city of our God, "God will establish it for ever"-a prediction which cannot belong to the metropolis of Judea, which was often given up to the spoiler, but which holds good of that spiritual city, the Church of God, aagainst which Christ declared that "the gates of hell shall never prevail." And when, towards the conclusion of the Psalm, the succored people are bidden to march in joyful procession round their beautiful city, that they might see how unscathed were its walls, how glorious its structures-" walk about Zion, and go round about her; tell the towers thereof; mark ye well her bulwarks, consider her palaces, that ye may tell it to the generation following" -you can scarcely fail to feel, that the thing enjoined is the considering and admiring the privileges and securities of the church, in order that we may both prize them ourselves, and be incited to the preserving them for our children.

We may therefore regard our text as uttered by members of the Church of Christ, that city of God which is made glad by the streams of the river of life. It is an assertion, made by those who had fled to the church for safety, expecting deliverance within its walls, that their own experience bore out to the letter what had been reported by the believers of other days. The difference between hearing and seeing, of which they make mention, is the difference between receiving truth on the testimony of others, and the being ourselves its witnesses-a distinction such as that which the patriarch Job drew, when humbled through a personal acquaintance with the dealings of God, "I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee; wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes." And the great principle, or fact, which it will become us to endeavor to establish and illustrate, in discoursing on our text, is, that before there is any personal experience in matters of religion, there may be an acting on the experience of others, and that, wheresoever this is faithfully done, the personal experience will be the probable result. We proceed at once to the exhibiting this

principle or fact; designing to adduce, if possible, the most practical, as well as the most apposite instances, in which men may say, as we have heard, so have we seen, in the city of the Lord of Hosts."

*

Now we shall begin with an applica tion of the principle involved in our text, which has been made at great length by modern writers, and whose importance seems to claim for it the closest attention. We refer to the way in which men reach their persuasion that the Bible is God's word; for they evidently, for the most part, receive the Bible as inspired, long before they can prove any thing in regard of its inspiration. We put the Bible into the hands of our children, as the word of the living God, and therefore demanding a reverence which can be claimed by no other volume in the whole circle of authorship. And our children grow up with what might almost be called an innate persuasion of the inspiration of Scripture; they are all but born with the belief; and they carry it with them to riper years, rather as a received axiom, than as a demonstrated verity. It is almost exclusively on hearsay, if we may use the word, that the Bible is taken as divine, and the Apocrypha passed by as human; so that numbers, who are perhaps strenuous for the right of private judgment, do virtually, in the most important matter, receive and reject on the sole authority of the church.

And it is well that it is so. If there were nothing of this taking upon trust; if every man, in place of having to set himself to the perusal of a volume which he regards as divine, must first pick out by laborious study, from all the authorship of antiquity, the few pages which really bear the signature of heaven, there would be an arrest on the progress of christianity; for the life of each would be exhausted, ere he had constructed the book by which he must be guided. And yet it cannot be taken as a very satisfactory account of human belief, that it thus follows upon human bidding. But it is here, as we believe, that the principle of our text comes beautifully into operation. The church, like a parent of a family, gives

Particularly Dr. Chalmers, in the fourth vo lume of his works.

a volume into the hands of those who join her communion, bidding them receive it as divine, and study it as the word which can alone guide them to glory. And her members, like the children of the household, have no better reason, at first, for receiving the Bible as inspired, than because they have heard so in the city of the Lord. They yield so much of respect to the directions of their authorized teachers, or to the impressions which have been graven on them from infancy, as to give their homage to a volume which is presumed to bear so lofty a character. But then, though it may thus be on hearsay that they first receive the Bible as inspired, it is not on hearsay that they continue to receive it. We speak now of those who have searched the Scriptures for everlasting life, and who feel that they have found therein a revelation of the alone mode of forgiveness. We speak of those in whom the word has "wrought effectually ;" and we confidently affirm of them, that, though at one time they believed in the inspiration of the canonical Scriptures, because their parents taught it, or their ministers maintained it, yet now are they in possession of a personal, experimental, evidence, which is thoroughly conclusive on this fundamental point. It is not that they have gone through the laborious demonstrations by which the learned have sustained the claims of the Old and New Testaments. It is comparatively a very small fraction of a community who can examine the grounds on which the church rests her judgment; and it is with the case of the great mass that we now wish to deal.

But we will give you what we reckon the history of the uneducated believer, so far as his acquaintance with revelation is concerned. He may perhaps have been neglected in boyhood, so that he has grown up in ignorance; but he is visited by the minister of his parish in some seasons of affliction, when the ruggedness of his nature is somewhat worn down by sorrow. The minister presses upon him the study of the Bible, as of the word of his Creator, assuring him that he will therein find God's will as revealed by his Spirit. The cottager has undoubtedly heard of the Bible before; and it is no news to

him, that it passes as a more than human book. But he has never yet given heed to what he heard the book has been unopened, notwithstanding the high claims which it was known to advance. But now, softened by the minister's kindness, and moved by his statements, he sets himself diligently to the perusal of Scripture, and statedly attends its Sabbath expositions. And thus, though he is acting only what he has heard, he brings himself under the self-evidencing power of Scripture, that power by which the contents of the Bible serve as its credentials. And this self-evidencing power is wonderfully great. The more than human knowledge which the Scripture displays in regard of the most secret workings of the heart; the marvellous and unerring precision with which the provisions of the Gospel adapt themselves to the known wants and disabilities of our nature; the constancy with which the promises and directions of holy writ, if put to the proof, are made good in one's own case-these and the like evidences of the divine origin of the Bible, press themselves quickly on the most illiterate student, when he searches it in humility, hoping to find, as he has been told that he shall, a message from God which will guide him towards heaven. He began on the testimony of another; but, after a while, he goes forward on his own testimony. And though he has not been sitting in judgment on the credentials of christianity, yet has he possessed himself of its contents; and on these he has found so much of the impress, and from them there has issued so much of the voice of Deity, that he is as certified in his own mind, and on grounds as satisfactory, of the inspiration of Scripture, as any laborious and scientific inquirer, who has rifled the riches of centuries, and brought them all to do homage before our holy religion. God has no more given to the learned the monopoly of evidence, than to the wealthy the monopoly of benevolence. The poor man can exercise benevolence, for the widow's two mites may outweigh the noble's coffers: and the poor man may have an evidence that God is in the Bible, for it may speak to his heart as no human book can.

And if you contrast the man, when

the minister of Christ first entered his cottage, with what he is after patient obedience to the injunctions of the church-in the one case, the mere giver of assent to a fellow-man's testitimony; in the other, the delighted possessor of a "witness in himself;" in the first instance, a believer not so much in the inspiration of Scripture, as in the veracity of the individual who announces it, but, in the second, a believer in that inspiration, because conscience and understanding and heart have all felt and confessed the super human authorship-Oh, as, by thus contrasting and comparing, you determine, that, through simply acting on what was told him, the man has been carried forward to a personal, experimental, demonstration of its truth, you must admit that he may class himself with those who can say, as we have heard, so have we seen, in the city of the Lord of Hosts."

१९

But the principle has been carried yet further than this, and, we think, with great justice. It must be believed of the large mass of protestants, that they have never even read the apocryphal books, much less searched into the reasons on which these books are pronounced not inspired. Here therefore it cannot be said, that what has been heard is also seen in the city of God. We can prove this in regard of the Canonical Scriptures, because we can prove, that, when perused in obedience to what is heard, they quickly evidence their origin. But we seem unable to prove this in regard of the Apocryphal Scriptures; for they are not used to be subjected to any such

test.

But suppose they were subjected to the like test, and why might we not expect the like result? There is to our mind something inexpressibly grand and beautiful in the thought, that God dwells, as it were, in the syllables which he has indited for the instruction of humankind, so that he may be found there when diligently sought, though he do not thus inhabit any other writing. He breathed himself into the compositions of prophets, and apostles, and evangelists; and there, as in the mystic recesses of an everlasting sanctuary, he still resides, ready to disclose himself to the hum

ble, and to be evoked by the prayerful. But in regard of every other book, however fraught it may be with the maxims of piety, however pregnant with momentous truths, there is nothing of this shrining himself of Deity in the depths of its meaning. Men may be instructed by its pages, and draw from them hope and consolation. But never will they find there the burning Shekinah, which proclaims the actual presence of God; never hear a voice, as from the solitudes of an oracle, pronouncing the words of immortality.

And we should never fear the bringing any canonical book, or any apocryphal, to the test thus supposed. Let a man take a canonical book, and let him take an apocryphal; and let him determine to study both on the supposition that both are divine, because doubtful whether the church be right in her decision, or desirous to gain evidence for himself. And if he be a sincere inquirer after truth, one really anxious to ascertain, in order that he may perform, the whole will of God, we know not why he should not experience the accomplishment of Christ's words, "If any man will do his will, he shall know of the doctrine whether it be of God," and thus reach a sound decision as to which book is inspired, and which not. As he studies the inspired book, with humility and prayer, he will find its statements brought home to his conscience and heart, with that extraordinary force which is never attached to a human composition. He may not be able to construct a clear argument for the divine origin of the book; yet will the correspondence between what the book states, and what he experiences, and the constancy with which the fulfilment of its promises follows on submission to its precepts, combine into an evidence, thoroughly satisfactory to himself, that the pages which he reads had God for their author. But as he studies the non-inspired book, he will necessarily miss these tokens and impresses of Deity. There will be none of those mysterious soundings of the voice of the ever-living God, which he has learnt to expect, and which he has always heard, wheresoever the writers have indeed been inspired. His own diligence may be the same, his faith, his prayerfulness.

But it is impossible there should be those manifestations of superhuman wisdom, those invariable sequences of fulfilled promises on obeyed precepts, which, in the other case, attested, at each step of his progress, that the document in his hands was a revelation from above.

It may be said that all the argument, which he can thus obtain, must be vague and inconclusive, a thing of imagination rather than of reason, and therefore, in the largest sense, liable to error. But we rejoice, on the contrary, in believing in the thorough sufficiency of the poor man's argument for the inspiration of Scripture. It is an argument to his own conscience, an argument to his own heart. It is the argument drawn from the experienced fact, that the Bible and the soul, with her multiplied feelings and powers, fit into each other, like two parts of a complicated machine, proving, in their combination, that each was separately the work of the same divine artist. And you may think that the poor man may be mistaken; but he feels that he cannot be mistaken. The testimony is like a testimony to his senses; if he cannot transfer it to another, it is incontestable to himself, and therefore gives as much fixedness to the theology of the cottage as ever belonged to the theology of the academy.

And if he can thus prove, from his own experience, the divine origin of the inspired book, he may of course equally prove, from his own experience, the human origin of the non-inspired. The absence of certain tokens in the one case, will be as conclusive to him as their presence in the other. So that, we may affirm of all classes of christians, provided only they be sincere and prayerful in their inquiry after truth, that, if not content with the decision of the church, they may put to the proof what they have heard in the city of our God. Let them take the apocrypha, and let them study it on the supposition that its books are equally inspired with those to which their church assigns so lofty a character. And their spirits may be stirred within them, as they read of the chivalrous deeds of the Maccabean princes, and even their tears may be drawn forth, as the Book of Wisdom pours its ele.

giac poetry over those who die young. But they will not find that moral probing, that direction of the heart, that profundity of meaning which makes a single text like a mine from which new treasures may continually be dug, those flashes of truth which suddenly issue from what had long seemed dark sayings. These and the like evidences that the living God is in the book will be wanting, however its pages may be printed with heroic story, or glowing with poetic fire. Even though the style and sentiment may be similar to those to which they have been used in holy writ, they will not experience the same elevation of soul as when they trust themselves to the soarings of Isaiah, the same sweepings of the chords of the heart as when they join in the hymns of David, nor the same echo of the conscience as when they listen to the remonstrances of St. Peter or St. Paul. And what then is to prevent their being their own witnesses to the non-inspiration of the apocryphal, as well as to the inspiration of the canonical Scriptures? What is to prevent their bringing their own experience in confirmation of what had originally been told them by the church, and thus joining themselves to those who can say, as we have heard, so have we seen, in the city of the Lord of Hosts?"

•

Now the points on which we have thus touched, have been handled at great length, and with consummate ability, by modern writers. And we have dwelt on them, not with any idea of adding to the strength with which they have been asserted, or the clearness with which they have been illustrated; but simply in the hope of fixing the attention of the younger part of this audience on what is called the self-evidencing power of Scripture. With all our desire that they should be thoroughly masters of the external evidences of christianity, we are unspeakably more anxious that they should labor to possess themselves of the internal; for, in searching after these, they must necessarily study the Bible itself. If they will learn to view the contents of Scripture as themselves its credentials, we shall engage them in the most hopeful of all studies, the study of God's word as addressing itself to the heart, and not merely to the head. For