belief of these two facts will make any man a Christian. He may carry them out in their vast dimensions and glorious developments to all eternity; he may ponder upon them until his spirit is transformed into the image of God; until he shines in more than angelic brightness, in all the purity and beauty of heavenly love. Man glorified in heaven, gifted with immortality, and rapt in the ecstacies of infinite and eternal blessedness, is but the mere result of a proper apprehension of, and conformity to, this confession. I am always overwhelmed with astonishment in observing how this document has been disparaged and set at nought by our builders of churches. It seems still to be a " stone of stumbling and a rock of offence." Yet Jesus calls it the rock. It is in the figure of a church or a temple-the foundation, the rock. When all societies build on this one foundation, and on it only, then shall there be unity of faith, of affection, and of co-operation; but never, never till then. Every other foundation is sand. Hence they have all wasted away. Innumerable parties have perished from the earth; and so will all the present built on any other foundation than this rock.

I again say that every denomination built on any other foundation than this rock-on this simple confession of faith in the fair, just, and well defined meaning of its words, will as certainly perish from the earth as man does. They may have much truth in their systems; but they have so much mortality with it that perish they must as sects, parties, and denominations. Their doom is written-"Dust thou art, and unto dust thou shalt return." They may pass through many changes in the progress of decomposition; for the Presbyterians of the 16th and 17th centuries are not just those of the 18th and 19th, as the sequel may yet show.

Whenever any man discovers this rock, and is willing to build on it alone; whenever he sees its firmness, its strength, and is willing to place himself upon it for time and for eternity, and on it alone, I say to him, Give me your hand, brother, you must come out and pass through the ceremony of naturalization; you must be born of water as well as of the Spirit, and enter into the new and everlasting covenant; you must assume the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. On that simple confession with the lips, that he believes in his heart this glorious truth, he is, by the

authority of the heavens, constituted a Christian; and he that treats him unkindly treats his Lord and Master so. Other foundation can no man lay that will endure; nor any one which, while it does endure, can receive the family of God.

We can neither in reason nor in conscience ask this person to subscribe twenty-five, thirty-three, or thirty-nine articles. He is but a new-born child. We expect him to grow. We will not put him upon the iron bedstead of Procrustes and stretch him up to thirty-nine articles. We will place him in the cradle of maternal kindness, and feed him with the sincere milk of the Word, that he may grow thereby. Nor will we, at any time, say to him, Brother, you must never grow beyond the thirty-ninth article; if you go to the fortieth we will cut you down or send you adrift. If you live three-score years and ten, remember, you must never think of the fortieth article. You must subscribe them all now, at your birth, and subscribe no more at your death. If y you should attain to the knowledge, the gifts, and the graces of the sweet psalmist of Israel, you must never think of transcending those nine and thirty, or those three and thirty articles of belief.

My objection to these documents is not merely that they are summaries, but that they are summaries made ready to our hands by the aids of orthodoxy-hereditaments of ancestral acquisition. God designed no summary. He could have made one by Paul, or all of the apostles, but he would not have such a thing. He intended us all to commune with him through his blessed, soul-illuminating, sanctifying, saving truth. He would have us dig in the mines of knowledge for ourselves. He would have us become intellectually and morally rich by our own labours. He would have us to apply our minds to the truth as we place an instrument on a stone to sharpen and polish it. By pressing that instrument, and holding it for a long time on that stone, by continual attrition, it becomes bright and sharp. So by the continual attrition of the word of God upon our hearts, and by the Spirit of our God upon our spirits, they become more discriminating in the things of God, as well as shine with the brightness and beauty of holiness. I never knew any one converted or sanctified by reading one of these summaries. These confessions of faith have been long in the

world. Has any one been converted by them?

Among all the published reports of converted persons, by numerous and various instrumentalities, I never knew of man, woman, or child, having been converted by reading articles of faith or books of discipline.

But they have been roots of bitterness, causes of division; have made numerous sects, and preserved and upheld those that, but for them, had long since perished from the earth. They are unsanctified documents. Pardon me for saying they are unholy things. They were not made by the authority of God, but in contravention of it, and in opposition to his own confession, given in the sixteenth chapter of Matthew. They are opsed, without intending it, to the last oracle we have heard from heaven, from the holy mount "This is my Son, the beloved, in whom I delight; HEAR HIM." Moses and Elijah came from heaven to do him honour. They laid their commissions at his feet. Heaven recalled them and left him with us as the Messenger of the everlasting covenant, with the solemn and final precept,

HEAR HIM.

It has been hearing him that has made the prophets of Greece, and Rome, and Geneva, and Westminster, children in my eyes. I once looked up to them, but thank my Lord, I now look down upon them, not in contempt for them, but as teachers of no authority with me. Over me they have no more authority than the dreams of my childhood or the fancy sketches of our modern poets. I stand upon higher, holier, stronger ground, than upon such a paper platform as they have reared.

This, sir, is the constitution of the Presbyterian churchthis volume in my hand, manufactured two hundred years ago, and from time to time amended in some points. Such documents men can make: for such churches they can make constitutions; but, sir, this book is not the constitution of Christ's church. They call these" branch" churches, branches of Christ's church. But these are words not found in the Bible. Jesus Christ has not said one word about these branch institutions. It is, then, from the very name itself, heretical and schismatical. It makes a branch. The Methodists, the Baptists, &c., are branches too, made by such heretical substitutes for, or appendages to, the Christian Scriptures. The more our brethren in these branch

institutions are ensnared and captivated by such designations and fallacious titles, the more are they false to the great catholic, all-absorbing, and soul-redeeming principles. The very fact, that this document is the constitution of this denomination, makes it both heretical and schismatical; for it is not a constitution of Christ's body, it is a rival of it. Such, then, is the argument which I would draw, and which I would delight to fill up on the fact and figure of the constitution of Christ's church. The sum of the whole matter, then, is this: We have a divine constitution for the whole kingdom of Jesus Christ, adapted to the genius of humanity, the circumstances of the human race, the churches' relations to worlds unseen, to the whole universe of God; and hence every other one is essentially and perpetually heretical and schismatical.

Hence, then, we are not only commanded to hold fast the form of sound words, but to "contend earnestly for the FAITH once delivered to the saints." I have shown that this faith is that of which Jesus Christ is both the author and the finisher; consequently, he is neither the author nor the finisher of the Westminster, nor of any other Confession in the world. So place we ourselves before this community; and in this attitude I desire to place myself before earth and heaven; as now contending for that faith, and that faith only, delivered by the great Functionary of the universe to us, fallen men, by the holy apostles and prophets.

RESPONSIBILITY.-No. V.

HAVING glanced at those elements in the condition of man which constitute him a legitimate subject of moral government, let us now survey the primary proofs which concur in demonstrating that man is veritably a responsible being. If it indeed be a fact, it is one of such magnitude, so great in its nature and issues, that we may expect to find its proofs corresponding in character. The evidence must be massy and various to harmonize with the majesty and connexions of the proposition.

We will notice in the first place Natural Responsibility, or the responsibility to nature. Presuming that we do not mean by the term nature a mystic being or personality; but the assemblage of created things, among which man has

to move, perpetually coming within the range of their influences.

On this subject let us quote from an illustrious author of a former age, whose work is one of the most elaborate and weighty in our language

"Now in the present state, all which we enjoy, and a great part of what we suffer, is put in our power. For pleasure and pain are the consequences of our actions; and we are endued by the Author of our nature with capacities of foreseeing the consequences. We find by experience he does not so much as preserve our lives exclusively of our own care and attention to provide ourselves with, and to make use of, that sustenance by which he has appointed our lives shall be preserved, and without which he has appointed they shall not be preserved at all. And in general we foresee that the external things which are the objects of our various passions, can neither be obtained nor enjoyed, without exerting ourselves in such and such manners. But by thus exerting ourselves, we obtain and enjoy these objects, in which our natural good consists; or by this means God gives us the possession and enjoyment of them. I know not that we have any one kind or degree of enjoyment, but by the means of our own actions; and by prudence and care we may for the most part pass our days in tolerable ease and quiet or, on the contrary, we may by rashness, ungoverned passion, wilfulness, or negligence, make ourselves as miserable as ever we please. And many do please to make themselves extremely miserable, namely, by doing what they know beforehand will render them so.. They follow those ways, the fruit of which they know, by instruction, example, experience, will be disgrace and poverty, sickness, and untimely death. This every one observes to be the general course of things, though it is to be allowed we cannot find by experience, that all our sufferings are owing to our own follies. Why the Author of nature does not give his creatures promiscuously such and such perceptions, without regard to their behaviour; why he does not make them happy without the instrumentality of their own actions, and prevent their bringing any sufferings upon themselves, is another matter. Perhaps there may be some impossibilities in the nature of things which we are unacquainted with or less happiness, it may be, would upon the whole