Christ's death, which was, "to deliver us from all iniquity, and to purify us unto Himself a peculiar people, zealous of good works." If heaven consists in God's manifesting the spiritual glories of His holy and perfect character, then must our spirit and character be kindred to His own, before we can delight in the love and contemplation of such glory. To love and enjoy God, we must be like God. And they utterly mistake the design of the gospel, who conceive of it as a mere act of indemnity; and the gospel has not been believed by them at all, if it has not come to them in the power and beneficence of holiness and grace, to change their hearts and affections into the love of what is holy and righteous and excellent; nor can they entertain any well-founded hopes of heaven hereafter, in whom there is no process of restoration going on at present to the lost image of the Godhead, and in whose hearts grace is not exerting its reigning power, to assimilate them to the spirit and character of God.

Whatever there may be now, in the days of Paul, at least, there were men who turned the grace of God into licentiousness, and who ranked among the privileges of the gospel an immunity for sin. And it is striking to observe the effect of this corruption on the mind of the apostle ;-that he who braved all the terrors of persecuting violence, that he who stood undismayed before kings and governors, and could lift his intrepid testimony in the hearing of an enraged multitude-that he who, when bound by a chain between two soldiers, still sustained an invincible constancy of spirit, and could live in fearlessness, and triumph, with

the dark imagery of an approaching execution in his eye-that he who counted not his life dear unto him, and whose manly breast bore him up amidst all the threats of human tyranny, and the grim apparatus of martyrdom-that this man so firm and so undaunted, wept like a child when he heard of those disciples that turned the pardon of the cross into an encouragement for doing evil. The fiercest hostilities of the gospel's open enemies he could brave, but when he heard of the foul dishonour done to the name of his Master, by the moral worthlessness of those who were the gospel's professing friends, this he could not bear—all that firmness, which so upheld him unfaltering and unappalled in the battles of the faith, forsook him then; and this noblest of champions on the field of conflict and of controversy, when he heard of the profligacy of his own converts, was fairly overcome by the tidings, and gave way to all the softness of womanhood. When every other argument fails, for keeping us on the path of integrity and holiness, we should think of the argument of Paul in tears. It may be truly termed a picturesque argument, nor are we aware of a more impressive testimony in the whole compass of Scripture, to the indispensable need of virtue and moral goodness in a believer, than is to be found in that passage where Paul says of these unworthy professors of the faith, "For many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame, who mind earthly things."

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INTRODUCTORY ESSAY

ΤΟ

SERIOUS REFLECTIONS ON TIME AND ETERNITY.

BY JOHN SHOWER.

AND

ON THE CONSIDERATION OF OUR LATTER END,

AND OTHER CONTEMPLATIONS.

BY SIR MATTHEW HALE, KNT.

THERE are certain truths, which lie remote from all direct and immediate observation-and which require more than one step on the part of the human mind, ere they are arrived at—which can only, in fact, be reached by a reasoning process, that consists of many steps; and for the describing of which, the habit of sustained attention, and the talent of sound and legitimate inference, and the power of combining principles which are known, and thence eliciting a truth or a doctrine that was unknown, must all be summoned to the work, and be put into strenuous and continued exercise for days, or often for months together, ere the toils of the devoted inquirer be rewarded by the discovery that he is in quest of. There is much, for example, both of mathematical and political science, which is incontrovertibly true, but which, instead

of being taken up at one act by the understanding, as if it lay on the very surface of contemplation, can only be grasped into the possession of the mind, by being travelled to through a long intermediu of many transitions and many arguments-and they are only a gifted few who can bear the fatigues of such a journey, and to whom the labours of the midnight oil afford a congenial and much-loved employment, and who have had their intellectual powers disciplined to the march of a logical or lengthened investigation. The Smith of the one science, and the Newton of the other, afford very striking illustrations of this kind of mental superiority over the rest of the species-and in virtue of which they were enabled to discover what before to the whole of mankind was utterly unknown; and in virtue of which their followers are enabled to see what the majority of mankind do not see. It is only seen in fact from a summit of demonstration and this is only attained by a series of ascending movements-and the few who have made their way to the temple which stands upon such an eminence as this, find inscribed upon it "the temple of philosophy." Now, what we maintain is, that this is altogether distinct from "the temple of wisdom." Its successful worshippers are men of reach and men of acquirement, and men who, from the elevation they have won, and on which they have posted themselves, can command a farther prospect over some walk, or some domain of the great intellectual territory, than their fellows around them. And yet they are not on this account men of wisdom, nor have we arrived at the

true meaning and application of this epithet, if we either think that to be wise we must be philosophers, or that, if philosophers, we are therefore wise.

There are certain other truths, difficult of access, which are distinct, and distinguishable we think from those that we have just now adverted to not such as are gained by a continuous effort along a line of investigation-not such as come in view upon the eye of the beholder, after he has scaled one of the altitudes of science-not such as lie remote, by being placed at a distance, but such rather as lie hidden from common minds, because deeply enveloped under the surface of common observation. To come at these, is not to plod and to persevere from one acquisition to another, as in the former instances. It is done by a process perhaps, too, in which all the elements of ratiocination are concerned, but a process so rapid, as to be felt even by the owner of the mind through which it passes, like an act of momentary intuition. Such is the quickness of his penetrating eye, that what to others is a thick and impalpable veil, hides not from him the truth or the principle which lurks beneath it-and with one glance of perception, can he discern many of the secret things which lie under the broad and ostensible face of human affairs-and this faculty of his though certainly sharpened by cultivation, and cradled up to its present maturity among the varieties of experience and of life, is not of slow operation like the former, but is sudden in all its exercises, and quite immediate in all the information which it fetches to its owner. One of its main offices is to detect what is latent, and to