things celestial, spiritual, and natural; and that the resurrection and general judgment are already past?

But here, for the present, we must stop, as our space, if not time, would fail us to particularize farther in illustration of our position. Now we ask, Will any of the above partizans affirm our definition as true of the religion of his party? or that his religion is contained entirely and exclusively within the New Testament? Will he claim for those traditions, creeds, confessions, liturgies, disciplines, ordinances, and expositions, so conflicting and discordant, the sanction of the divine word? Not one of the above Protestant sects can claim for itself the antiquity of the religion of the New Testament. In vain would the ecclesiastical historian attempt. to trace their history beyond the last three hundred years. But within this period, every fact connected with their origin and progress can be found faithfully and particularly detailed on the page of church history. Not only, then, does our definition of the religion of Christianity disprove all the claims to the divine authenticity of the above named systems of religion; but likewise does the single fact of the greater antiquity of the New Testament religion, compared with the state or age of any of the above systems, demonstrably prove that they are not to be found upon the page of Inspiration.

We leave it now for the intelligent and candid reader to say whether we have proved and sustained the proposition with which we set out that the religion of Christianity is not the religion of any sect in Christendom. If we have proved this, then does it not follow that the religion of the New Testament can alone save men and unite them into one visible body or church? If, then, that form of divine truth which we call the Christian religion, and which we affirm is only set forth to us in the New Testament, and no where else is to be found;-if this form, we say, cannot save men and unite them in bonds of Christian love and church fellowship, who shall hazard the consequence of attempting to improve either in matter or form that religion of which Jesus Christ is the author and finisher?

Now as every thing must have form, and as the wisdom of the Maker is as much seen in the form as in the material composing it, he who changes the form unfits for the use intended by its Maker, and may, indeed, by so doing, convert its materials into an engine of evil. Such, then, we conceive to have been the capital error of all creed-makers. They have marred the symmetry of that divine form of sound words given it by the hand of Inspiration. They have broken the connexion, and have put asunder that which God

has joined together. The golden chain of divine truth, the links of which have been joined by the skilful hand of Inspired Wisdom, have been rudely broken asunder by the unskilful hand of the creedmaker..

Every human creed is consequently without the divine form and void, being destitute of divine power, and consequent darkness pervades the minds of the people.

Hence so long as we receive a human creed as the form of sound words in preference to that which, like its author is perfect and divine, we deprive ourselves of that which alone can save, sanctify, unite, and bless the children of men.

Every truly enlightened Christian, who prays for the conversion of the world and the union of believers in the bonds of Christian fellowship, will, therefore, as a loyal subject, use only that form of sound words, as the grand instrument furnished for this desirable purpose, by the Head of the church himself. Such a one must be the uncompromising opponent of all church standards of human contrivance, as means of conversion; or as bases of ecclesiastical union. And from the fact that such ecclesiastical standards of orthodoxy are common amongst us-he is to regard them as the signs of the times, and he can make it as clear as a sunbeam that the present are those perilous times of the latter days, in which professors, under the forms of religion, shall be money-lovers, despisers of good men, lovers of pleasure more than lovers of God.

The religious reformer of the nineteenth century must feel, in all its weight and importance, that solemn charge given by the Apostle to Timothy "To preach the word, to be instant in season, out of season; to reprove, rebuke; exhort, with all long suffering and doctrine;" for the prediction he now sees fulfilling, seeing the time has come, that many have departed from the faith, giving heed to seducing teachers, and will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own desires have heaped to themselves teachers, having itching ears, who have turned away the ears of the people from the truth unto fables. By thus contending for, and holding fast the form of sound words, the faith formerly delivered to the saints, he may consistently pray, "Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is done in heaven." A. W. CAMPBELL,

LETTERS FROM HON. JOHN QUINCY ADAMS-No. V. In the promise with which my last letter to you upon the Bible was concluded, I undertook a task from the performance of which I have been hitherto deterred by its very magnitude and importance:

the more I reflected upon the subject, the more sensibly did I feel my incompetency to do it justice, and, by a weakness so common in the world, from the apprehension of inability to accomplish as much as I ought, I have hitherto been withheld from the attempt to accomplish any thing at all. Thus more than a year has elapsed, leaving me still burdened with the load of my promise; and, in now undertaking to discharge it, I must premise that you are only to expect the desultory and indigested thoughts which I have not the means of combining into a regular and systematic work. I shall not entangle myself in the controversy which has sometimes been discussed with a temper not very congenial either to the nature of the question itself or the undoubted principles of Christianity, whether the Bible, like all other systems of morality, lays the ultimate basis of all human duties in self-love, or whether it enjoins duties on the principle of perfect and disinterested benevolence.Whether the obligations are sanctioned by a promise of reward or a menace of punishment, the ultimate motive for its fulfilment may justly be attributed to the selfish considerations. But if obedience to the will of God be the universal and only foundation of all moral duty, special injunctions may be binding upon the consciences of men, although their performance should not be secured either by the impulse of hope or fear. The law given from Sinai was a civil and municipal as well as a moral and religious code; it contained many statutes adapted to that time only, and to the particular circumstances of the nation to whom it was given; they could, of course, be binding upon them, and only upon them, until abrogated by the same authority which enacted them, as they afterward were by the Christian dispensation: but many others were of universal application,-laws essential to the existence of men in society, and most of which have been enacted by every nation which ever professed any code of laws. But the Levitical was given by God himself; it extended to a great variety of objects of infinite importance to the welfare of men, but which could not come within the reach of human legislation; it combined the temporal and spiritual authorities together, and regulated not only the actions but the pas sions of those to whom it was given. Human legislators can undertake only to prescribe the actions of men; they acknowledge their inability to govern and direct the sentiments of the heart; the very law itself is a rule of civil conduct, not of internal principles, and there is no crime in the power of an individual to perpetrate which he may not design, project, and fully intend without incurring guilt in the eye of human law. It is one of the greatest marks of divine favor bestowed upon the children of Israel, that the Legis. lator gave them rules not only of action, but for the government of the heart. There were occasionally a few short sententious principles of morality issued from the oracles of Greece; among them, and undoubtedly the most excellent of them, was that of selfknowledge, which one of the purest moralists and finest poets of Rome expressly says came from heaven. But if you would remark the distinguishing characteristics between true and false religion, compare the manner in which the ten commandments were proclaimed by the voice of Almighty God, from Mount Sinai, with

thunder and lightning, and earthquake, by the sound of the trumpet, and in the hearing of 600,000 souls, with the studied secrecy and mystery and mummery with which the Delphic and other oracles of the Grecian gods were delivered. The miraculous interpositions of divine power recorded in every part of the Bible, are invariably marked with grandeur and sublimity worthy of the Creator of the world, and before which the gods of Homer, not excepting his Jupiter, dwindle into the most contemptible pigmies; but on no occasion was the manifestation of the Deity so solemn, so awful, so calculated to make indelible impressions upon the imaginations and souls of the mortals to whom he revealed himself, as when he appeared in the character of their Lawgiver. The law thus dispensed was, however, imperfect; it was destined to be partly suspended and improved into absolute perfection many ages afterward by the appearance of Jesus Christ upon earth. But to judge of its excellence as a system of laws, it must be compared to human codes which existed or were promulgated at nearly the same age of the world in other nations. Remember that the law was given one thousand four hundred and ninety years before Christ was born, at the time the Assyrian and Egyptian monarchies existed: but of their government and laws we know scarcely any thing save what is collected from the Bible. Of the Phrygian, Lydian, and Trojan, states at the same period, little more is known. The President Gorget, in a very elaborate and ingenious work on the origin of letters, arts, and sciences among the ancient nations, says that "the maxims, the civil and political laws of these people are absolutely unknown; that not even an idea of them can be formed, with the single exception of the Lydians, of whom Herodotus asserts that their laws were the same as the Greeks." The same author contrasts the total darkness and oblivion into which all the institutions of these mighty empires have fallen, with the fullness and clearness and admirable composition of the Hebrew code, which has not only descended to us entire, but still continues the national code of the Jews, (scattered as they are over the whole face of the earth,) and . enters so largely into the legislation of almost every civilized nation upon the globe. He observes that these laws have been prescribed by God himself: the merely human laws of other contemporary nations cannot bear any comparison with them. But my motive in forming the comparison, is to present to your reflections as a proof, (and to my mind a very strong proof,) of the reality of their divine origin: for how is it that the whole system of government and administration, the municipal, political, ecclesiastical, military, and moral laws and institutions which bound in society the numberless myriads of human beings who formed for many successive ages the stupendous monarchies of Africa and Asia, should have perished entirely and been obliterated from the memory of mankind, while the laws of a paltry tribe of shepherds, characterized by Tacitus, and the sneering infidelity of Gibbon, as "the most despised portion of their slaves," should not only have survived the wreck of those empires, but remain to this day rules of faith and practice to every enlightened nation of the world, and perishable only with it? The reason is obvious: it is their intrinsic excellence which has pre

served them from the destruction which befalls all the works of mortal man. The precepts of the decalogue alone (says Gorget) disclose more sublime truths, more maxims essentially suited to the happiness of man, than all the writings of profane antiquity put together can furnish. The more you meditate on the laws of Moses, the more striking and brighter does their wisdom appear. It would be a laborious, but not an unprofitable investigation, to reduce into a regular classification, like that of the Institutes of Justinian or the Commentaries of Blackstone, the whole code of Moses, which embraces not only all the ordinary subjects of legislation together with the principles of religion and morality, but laws of ecclesiastical directions concerning the minutest actions and dress of individuals. This, however, would lead me too far from my present purpose, which is merely to consider the Bible as a system of morality; I shall therefore notice those parts of the law which may be referred particularly to that class, and at present must confine myself to a few remarks upon the decalogue itself, which, having been spoken by the voice of God, and twice written upon the stone tables by the finger of God, may be considered as the foundation of the whole system-of the Ten Commandments, emphatically so called, for the extraordinary and miraculous distinction by which they were promulgated. The first four are religious laws, the fifth and tenth are properly and peculiarly moral and domestic rules; the other four are of the criminal department of municipal laws: the unity of the godhead, the prohibition of making graven images to worship; that of taking lightly (or in vain, as the English translation expresses it) the name of the Deity, and the injunction to observe the Sabbath as a day sanctified and set apart for his worship, were all intended to inculcate the reverence for the only one and true God-that profound and penetrating sentiment of piety which, in a former letter, I urged as the great and only immoveable foundation of all human virtue. Next to the duties towards the Creator, that of honoring the earthly parent is enjoined; it is to them that every individual owes the greatest obligations, and to them that he is consequently bound by the first and strongest of all earthly ties. The following commands, applying to the relations between man and his fellowmortals, are all negative, as their application was universal, to every human being: it was not required that any positive acts of beneficence toward them should be performed; but only to abstain from wronging them, either: 1st. in their persons; 2d. in their property; 3d. in their conjugal rights; 4th. in their good name: after which, all the essential enjoyments of life being thus guarded from voluntary injury, the tenth and closing commandment goes to the very source of all human actions-the heart-and positively forbids all those desires which first prompt and lead to every transgression upon the property and right of our fellow-creatures. Vain, indeed, would be the search among the writings of profane antiquity, (not merely of that remote antiquity, but even in the most refined and philosophical ages of Greece and Rome,) to find so broad, so complete, and so solid a basis for morality as this decalogue lays down. Yet I have said it was imperfect-its sanctions, its rewards, its punishments, had reference only to present life, and it had no injunctions