There is nothing more evident than that the renovation and eternal exaltation of man is based primarily upon this immutable principle of human nature, and that it is the sense of what man seems to be in the sight of God, even in his present alienated and degraded condition, that encourages him once more to approach his Maker, and stimulates him to glorify his name by becoming in character what God has declared him to be by original position, and by a gracious adoption. "We love God, because he first loved us," is a proposition designed less to exhibit the logical connexion between premises and conclusion, than the natural relation between cause and effect; and it is, therefore, not so much a proof of the fact asserted, as a philosophical explanation of it. And, beyond all controversy, it is the true philosophy. For man never could have recovered, or saved or elevated himself; and had he not been sought of Heaven, he would have remained forever lost. It is the unspeakable love and condescension of God towards man which first awakens in his bosom life and consolation. It is when the "goodness and philanthropy" of God our Saviour appears, that men are led to reformation, and induced to seek for “honor, glory, and incorruptibility." It is God's love To us, shed abroad in the heart by the Holy Spirit, that must ever be the security of hope, as it is the subject matter of faith-the alpha and the omega of human renovation.

On this account, it becomes a matter of the utmost importance that the attention of men should be fixed upon the facts by which the love of God is exhibited, and that the gospel which announces them should be presented in its original simplicity, unincumbered with religious dogmas and theological abstractions. This is necessary to personal and individual reformation, and its accomplishment involves that very reformation of the religious communities of the day which is at present urged upon them. It must be obvious that the doctrinal discussions which have usually agitated and divided Protestant Christendom, however they may be supposed related to growth in Christian knowledge, are foreign from the matter in hand, and can have no other tendency, so far as this is concerned, than to lead the minds of men away from those revelations of the love of God, which are directly operative in reforming and redeeming the world.

Hence the call which is made upon the religious parties to abandon their sectarian distinctions; to forsake the vain philosophy of the schools, and the dogmas of councils and of creeds; and to renounce the business of metaphysical hair-splitting and contention,

for the promotion of peace and unity and love by the universally accredited facts which form the basis of an evangelical faith. They are urged to have respect to express divine authority, rather than to the opinions and traditions of men; and to exchange the subtleties of human reasoning for the simplicity of truth. It is on this account that the difference between faith and opinion has been so much insisted on, and that the most comprehensive views of the Christian institution have been presented, in order, if possible, to disentangle the minds of the community from the intricate web of organized sectarism and humanized religion.

It has heretofore been the practice to elaborate a complete religious system, and to demand implicit assent to it, as the only true exposition of religious truth. This at least has been the case with Protestants since the date of the confession of Augsburgh, which transformed, or rather deformed Protestantism, by prescribing a posi tive boundary to Christian faith and knowledge before the newly awakened spirit of inquiry had satisfied itself as to its proper territories and limits. Previous to the adoption of this Confession, the Lutheran reformation reposed upon the Bible alone for its authority, and the direct appeal was in all cases to the word of God. How different the phasis which the Reformation afterwards assumed, when a second-hand and humanized exposition of Christian doctrine was thus substituted for the gospel of Christ, as a bond of union, and an authoritative prescription of the faith! How reluctant its adoption on the part of some! How numerous the recusants! How interminable the debates to which it gave rise! and how completely the attention of men became diverted by its influence from the simple truths of divine revelation, to be engaged by the philosophic ab stractions of theoretical religionists!

No just objection, indeed, can be made to a confession of Jesus Christ, either verbally or in writing. Every Christian, truly, is called upon to make that GOOD confession-the only confession of Christian faith which may be emphatically so denominated-a confession of belief in Christ himself-of trust in a person, rather than superstitious reliance upon the meritorious efficacy of a doctrine, or the saving power of a system of theology. It is the sincere belief of the simple gospel facts concerning Christ, and a hearty reception of Him as the Messiah the Son of God, that should constitute the modern, as it was the ancient and original basis of individual salvation and of Christian union. Elaborate systems of religious faith, and the finely-spun religious philosophy of theological doctors, may gratify an intellectual pride, which presumes to intrude itself

uninvited into the councils of Heaven, and to attempt a formal exposition of the mysteries of redemption, and of the Divine nature itself, and to prescribe formulas and creeds which shall forever prohibit inquiry, dissent, and contradiction. But such systems have no renewing influence upon the human soul, and such efforts are as unavailing as they are alien to the just principles, purposes, and tendencies of Christianity, which, with a noble simplicity, presents an unadorned narration of facts, and is content to commit the salvation and elevation of the world to the presentation which these afford of the love of God to man. It is this love, thus exhibited and commended, that awakens man to a sense of his value in the sight of Heaven, animates him with courage to follow his Divine Leader in the conflict against the powers of darkness, and by introducing him into the divine favor and fellowship inspires him with the highest hopes, and communicates the sweetest consolations, and the purest joys in the universe. R. R.

LETTERS FROM HON. JOHN Q. ADAMS,

TO HIS SON, ON THE BIBLE AND ITS TEACHINGS.
LETTER VI.

I PROMISED you, in my last letter, to state the particulars in which I deemed the Christian dispensation to be an improvement or perfection of the law delivered at Sinai, considered as including a system of morality; but before I come to this point, it is proper to remark upon the character of the books of the Old Testament subsequent to those of Moses. Some are historical, some prophetical, and some poetical; and two may be considered as peculiarly of the moral class--one being an affecting dissertation upon the vanity of human life, and another a collection of moral sentences under the name of Proverbs. I have already observed that the great immoveable and eternal foundation of the superiority of scripture morals to all other morality, was the idea of God disclosed in them and only in them: the unity of God, his omnipotence, his righteousness, his mercy, and the infinity of his attributes, are marked in every line of the Old Testament in characters which nothing less than blindness can fail to discern, and nothing less than fraud can misrepresent.This conception of God serving as a basis for the piety of his worshippers, was of course incomparably more rational and more profound than it was possible that sentiment could be which adored devils for deities, or even that of philosophers like Socrates, Plato, and Cicero, who, with purer and more exalted ideas of the divine nature than the rabble of the poets, still considered the existence of any God at all as a question upon which they could form no decided opinion. You have seen that even Cicero believed the only solid foundation of all human virtue to be piety; and it was impos

sible that a piety so far transcending that of all other nations should not contain in its consequences a system of moral virtue equally transcendent. The first of the ten commandments was, that the Jewish people should never admit the idea of any other God-the object of the second, third, and fourth, was merely to impress with greater force the obligation of the first, and to obviate the tendencies and temptations which might arise to its being neglected, or disregarded. Throughout the whole law the same injunctions are continually renewed; all the rites and ceremonies were adapted to root deeper into the hearts and souls of the chosen people that the Lord Jehovah was to be forever the sole and exclusive object of love. Reverence and adoration, unbounded as his own nature, was the principle: every letter of the law, and the whole Bible, is but a corollary from it. The law was given not merely in the form of a commandment from God, but in that of a covenant or compact between the supreme Creator and the Jewish people; it was sanctioned by the blessing and the curse pronounced upon Mount Gerizim and Mount Ebal, in the presence of the whole Jewish people and strangers, and by the solemn acceptance of the whole people responding Amen to every one of the curses denounced for violation on their part of the covenant. From that day until the birth of Christ, (a period of about fifteen hundred years,) the historical books of the Old Testament are no more than a simple record of the fulfilment of the covenant, in all its blessings and curses, exactly adapted to the fulfilment or transgression of its duties by the people. The nation was first governed by Joshua, under the express appointment of God; then by a succession of Judges, and afterward by a double line of kings, until conquered and carried into captivity by the kings of Assyria and Babylon: seventy years afterward restored to their country, their temple, and their laws; and again conquered by the Romans, and ruled by their tributary kings and proconsuls. Yet, through all their vicissitudes of fortune, they never complied with the duties to which they had bound themselves by the covenant without being loaded with the blessing promised on Mount Gerizim, and never departed from them without being afflicted with some of the curses denounced upon Mount Ebal. The prophetical books are themselves historical-for prophecy, in the strictest sense, is no more than history related before the event; but the Jewish Prophets, (of whom there was a succession almost constant from the time of Joshua to that of Christ,) were messengers, specially commissioned of God, to warn the people of their duty, to foretell the punishments which awaited their transgressions, and finally to keep alive by unintermitted prediction the expectation of the Messiah, "the seed of Abraham, in whom all the families of the earth should be blessed." With this conception of the divine nature, so infinitely surpassing that of any other nation-with this system of moral virtue, so indissolubly blending as by the eternal constitution of things must be blended piety-with this uninterrupted series of signs and wonders, prophets and seers, miraculous interpositions of the omnipotent Creator to preserve and vindicate the truth, it is lamentable; but to those who know the nature of man, it is not surprising to find the Jewish history little else than a narrative of SERIES II-VOL. V.

42*

idolatries and corruption of the Israelites and their monarchs; that the very people who had heard the voice of God from Mount Sinai, within forty days compel Adam to make a golden calf and worship that as the "God who brought them out of the land of Egypt;" that the very Solomon, the wisest of mankind, to whom God had twice revealed himself in visions-the sublime dictator of the Temple, the witness, in the presence of the whole people, of the fire from heaven which consumed the offerings from the altar, and of the glory of the Lord that filled the house-that he, in his old age, beguiled by fair idolatresses, should have fallen from the worship of the ever-blessed Jehovah to that of Ashtaroth and Milcom, &c., the abomination of all the petty tribes of Judea that of Baal, and Dagon, &c.; that the sun, moon, and planets, and all the host of heaven-the mountains and plains, every high place, and every grove should have swarmed with idols, to corrupt the hearts and debase the minds of a people so highly favored of heaven-the elect of the Almighty, may be among the mysteries of Divine Providence, which it is not given to mortality to explain, but as inadmissible only to those who presume to demand why it has pleased the Supreme Arbiter of events to create such a being as man. Observe, however, that amid the atrocious crimes which that nation so often polluted themselves with-through all their servitude, dismemberments, captivities, and transmigrations--the divine light, which had been imparted exclusively to them, was never extinguished; the law delivered from Sinai was preserved in all its purity; the histories which attested its violations and its accomplishments were recorded and never lost. The writings of the Prophets, of David and Solomon, were all inspired with the same idea of the Godhead, the same intertwinement of religion and morality, and the same anticipations of the divine "Immanuel, the God with us:" these survived all the changes of government and of constitutions which befell the people: "the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night," the law and the prophets, eternal in their nature-went before them unsullied and unimpaired through all the ruins of rebellion and revolution, of conquest and dispersion, of war, pestilence, and famine. The Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian empires, Tyre and Sidon, Carthage and all the other nations of antiquity, rose and fell in their religious institutions at the same time as in their law and government: it was the practice of the Romans when they besieged a city to invoke its gods to come over to them; they considered their gods as summer friends, ready to desert their votaries in the hour of calamity, or as traitors, ready to sell themselves for a bribe; they had no higher estimate of their own than of the stranger deities, whom, as Gibbon said, "they were always ready to admit to the freedom of the city." All the gods of the heathen have perished with their makers; for where on the face of the globe could now be found the being who believes in any one of them? So much more deep and strong was the hold which the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob took upon the imaginations and reason of mankind, that I might almost invert the question, and say, Where is the human being found believing in any God at all, and not believing in Him? The moral character of the Old Testament, then,