his wants, or save his soul. Thereupon you have a choice to make. You will either reject them all as insufficient and false, and seek for nothing better, since man can not invent better, and then you will abandon to chance, to caprice of temperament or of opinion, your moral life and future destiny; or you will adopt that other religion which some treat as folly, and it will render you holy and pure, blameless in the midst of a perverse generation, united to God by love, and to your brethren by charity, indefatigable in doing good, happy in life, happy in death. Suppose, after all this, you shall be told that this religion is false; but, meanwhile, it has restored in you the image of God, re-established your primitive connections with that great Being, and put you in a condition to enjoy life and the happiness of heaven. By means of it you have become such that at the last day, it is impossible that God should not receive you as His children and make you partakers of His glory. You are made fit for paradise, nay, paradise has commenced for you even here, because you love. This religion has done for you what all religion proposes, and what no other has realized. Nevertheless, by the supposition, it is false! And what more could it do, were it true? Rather do you not see that this is a splendid proof of its truth? Do you not see that it is impossible that a religion which leads to God should not come from God, and that the absurdity is precisely that of supposing that you can be regenerated by a falsehood? Suppose that afterward, as at the first, you do not comprehend. It seems necessary, then, you should be saved by the things you do not comprehend. Is that a misfortune? Are you the less saved? Does it become you to demand from God an explanation of an ob scurity which does not injure you, when, with reference to every thing essential, He has been prodigal of light? The first disciples of Jesus, men without culture and learning, received truths which they did not comprehend, and spread them through the world. A crowd of sages and men of genius have received, from the hands of these poor people, truths which they comprehended no more than they. The ignorance of the one, and the science of the other, have been equally docile. Do, then, as the ignorant and the wise have done. Embrace with affection those truths which have never entered into your heart, and which will save you. Do not lose, in vain discussions, the time which is gliding away, and which is bearing you into the cheering or appalling light of eternity. Hasten to be saved. Love now; one day you will know. May the Lord Jesus prepare you for that period of light, of repose, and of happiness! THE SCOTTISH PULPIT. THE history of the Scottish pulpit naturally divides itself into three periods: first, that between the Reformation and the Revolution in 1689; second, that between the Revolution and the ecclesiastical Disruption in 1843; and third, the modern period, or that from the Disruption to the present time. Previous to the time of the Reformation, the pulpit in Scotland, like that of other countries in Europe, was prostrate. The preacher had been supplanted by the priest, and the pulpit demolished to make way for the altar. Teachers of the true faith, probably as early as the last of the second century, had there instructed the people. The Culdees, or refugee-servants-of-God, as their name seems to imply, had early fled from persecution, and certainly, as soon as the sixth century, had made the island of Iona their home, and the seat of their Christian influence. Here they prosecuted their ministry, first among the warlike Scots and Picts, and then among the pagan Saxons, with no little success. But they soon began to melt away before the encroachments of the Roman pontiff, to whom they yielded up their spiritual liberty in 1176, and, a century later, were finally suppressed. Thenceforward the reign of popery was complete. Scotland was a rich inheritance of the see of Rome. Half the kingdom belonged to the clergy. From the power of the priesthood it is easy to estimate the power of the pulpit. It was imbecile for good. Gorged with wealth, reveling in luxury and sensual indulgence, what cared the clergy for things spiritual? Had they possessed the disposition to reform the people, they had lacked the power, from ignorance. Even the bishops knew little of the Scriptures. "I thank God," said the Bishop of Dunkeld, "that I have lived well these many years, and never knew either the Old or the New Testament." The chief care of the ministry was to preserve unbroken the spell of darkness that bound the whole nation. And they had long been successful. An act of the Scottish Parliament in 1525, prohibiting the importation of Luther's writings, alleged that that country had always "bene clene of all sic filth and vice !" But that is a long night which knows no dawn. The very act referred to is suggestive. It proved the uprising of a better day. The doctrines of the Culdees furnished points of connection for those of the |