sible that, with the eyes open and the mind disposed to sincerity, you can deny that Christianity found man possessed of a religious nature? Look at the multitude of deities with which even the material world was swarming, and then ask yourself if you can honestly deny that man's nature, whencesoever it came, was, at that time, disposed to adoration. But, you say, political men ruled the minds of the multitude and gave them this direction. But, because man's religious nature was used for political purposes, did therefore political designs create that nature? But, you may pretend, philosophers, though they saw the folly of superstition, found it for their interest to keep it alive in the minds which they wished to control for their own selfish ends. How came it then that the philosophers more deeply than any others felt the power of the same superstition in their own souls? Besides, what foundation did they discover in the common mind on which to build this broad and gloomy structure of superstitious observances and fears. But, you may inquire, was not all this religion but a magnificent piece of hypocrisy which the whole human race had taken upon itself to enact? Alas, to what extremities will your pretended disbelief in man's religious nature drive you? How does this inquiry suppose the falsehood of that testimony which is borne to us by all histories from all ages! But, supposing there was a place for the inquiry, you might be asked, where and what was the reality corresponding to this stupendous hypocrisy of the human heart. For all hypocrisy implies something real as its subject. I cannot pretend to possess a character of which no idea has entered my mind.

We will ask you to look at those portions of the world which the beams of Christianity have never touched and see if you do not find man a religious being there. See if you do not find him a religious being where even if philosophers could make him such, no philosophers exist, and where the rude simplicity of savage life precludes the idea that religious systems have been built on the basis of political intrigue. Look, for instance, at the accounts given by the missionaries to Polynesia concerning the degraded islanders whom they laboured to convert. "Religion mixed in all the occupations and amusements of the Polynesians, and its rites were interwoven with every act of their lives; but it was a religion that debased instead of humanizing.-There were gods of peace, several gods of war, the god of the ocean, the god of accidents, and the god of idiots,-for they believed that all

idiots were inspired.-Besides their divinities, the creative fancy of the Polynesians peopled their lovely isles with ethereal existences, who, like our fairies, sported in the moonbeams, and held their revels in the loveliest dells, and by the sweetest streamlets; or, emulating the dim visions of the Gael, robed themselves in the mountain mists, shone in the pale meteor's flame, and mantled amid the howling of the midnight storm."*

This may be laughed at and called superstition—and superstition it is. But superstition itself proves man's religious nature. For what is superstition but a wrong and perverse development of that nature? Those faculties in the soul which are the source of superstition cannot be annihilated,— the superstition must be corrected by their being trained aright.

The Gospel found the Jews a peculiar people,—why it so found them, it does not sufficiently bear on our present purpose to inquire. So it was. They were a nation by themselves, and with them the religious nature was in a peculiar condition. But, as we have already said, religion existed in some state, the religious nature of man was developed in some sense, all over the world. The question is, has Christianity retarded the perfection of man? And this question is in great measure answered when we ascertain whether it has had a happy influence on that religious principle which inheres in his very constitution and which, taken away, he would be a being of entirely different character. Let us then consider what influence Christianity exerted upon two things,—the Gentile philosophy and the Jewish religion. We say the Gentile philosophy, for that exhibited all the attainments even of a religious nature which man's unaided powers had been able to make.

Let it be observed the discussion proceeds now on the supposition, whose truth cannot be denied, that man is a religious, or, as the infidel may express it, a superstitious being. Adoration he will pay,-forms of worship he will have. He is made essentially religious, and he can no more forsake his religious than he can his intellectual constitution. The great question then is, has man, as a religious being, been benefited by Christianity.

What, then, before the advent of Christ, was the culture which Gentile philosophy gave to the religious nature of man?

"Progress of the Gospel in Polynesia."

The best of which it was susceptible? The question need not be answered. Who does not know that Gentile philosophy utterly failed to satisfy man's religious wants, and that, before Christ came, it was fast perverting his religious nature? Philosophy made religion a thing of metaphysical inquiries and scholastic distinctions, a thing for learned and acute minds, rather than the fountain of life and joy to the whole human race. It had taken it away from the warmth and action of real life, and removed it to the thin and cold atmosphere of wordy abstractions. It made it to consist in a set of dogmas for ceaseless intellectual contention, rather than in a system of life-giving truth, warming the affections and claiming the service of the heart. And, while Gentile philosophy thus gave a perverted development to the religious nature, it gave a wrong action to the intellectual powers. And why? Because, the religious nature being perverted, the harmony of the whole mental constitution was destroyed. The whole mind lost its balance and proportion. The religious nature lost its right action on the understanding, the understanding refused to be the servant of the soul. The human mind, becoming more and more disjoined in itself, exhibited itself in more and more monstrous developments, and thus the soul, instead of being led on under the influences of Gentile philosophy nearer and nearer to its perfection, by the disproportionate development of its powers, was filled with perpetual strife and discord. But Christianity comes and casts in its influence upon the elements that were thus darkly and restlessly struggling with each other. And what was its influence? Let history reply. Let her compare for us the philosophy of Christian with the philosophy of Gentile minds. Will the comparison justify the unbeliever's pretence that Christianity has kept the human mind back from its perfection?-or will it prove that pretence to have come either from dishonesty or ignorance?

Again, what was the effect of Christianity on the religion of the Jews? Did it, by its influence on that religion, keep the human mind back from its perfection? Was the Jewish nation suddenly arrested by the hand of Christ in an onward and upward path of glory? Christ found the Jews far before all others in their ideas concerning religion. We do not see how even the infidel can deny this. But he found them narrowing down religion more and more to a round of ceremonies and forms, removing it from its proper seat in the heart, and allowing it to preside only over the external man. He found them exhibiting in many things the greatest superstition,-and su

perstition results from a perverse development of the religious nature. Did Christ increase the evil? Did he make the Jews more superstitious, more hypocritical, more trifling, more heartless in their religious faith and practice? Or did his religion purify everything that it touched, turning even corruption into life, establishing itself in the heart of man, and going forth to destroy the wickedness of his hands? Did it not change the lifeless form into the living reality, the hypocritical service into the worship of sincerity and truth, the form of godliness into its power, and the agonies of superstition into the hope and joy of a reasonable faith? If it did, what becomes of the assertion that Christianity has kept the soul of man back from its perfection? Must it not come from dishonesty or from ignorance?

Christianity has then freed Gentilism from idolatrous worship, and false philosophy and Judaism from the hypocrisy and superstition that had corrupted its religious faith. The unbeliever says that Christianity has filled the world with superstition. Christianity, considered as an abstract system of faith and morals, has not the slightest tinge of superstition. It is as clear as sunlight, and, by the reasonableness of its statements and requisitions, it has commended itself, not only to the greatest minds the world has seen, but to minds the most scrutinizing and naturally the most cautious and skeptical. But, admitting for a moment the truth of the statement whose falsity we assert, suppose that superstition has sometimes flowed from Christianity as its source, and not invariably from those perversions of the religious nature which have been caused by the false religions and bad passions of the human Even with this concession, we should maintain that the superstition which Christianity has destroyed or prevented is infinitely worse and infinitely greater in amount than the superstition to which she has given life. But the influence of Christianity, so far as it has in truth been the influence of Christianity, and not of human additions to the teachings of Christ and his holy Apostles, has always been to save men from superstition. Had Christ not come, it is morally certain that the whole world would even now be tyrannized over by a merciless superstition that would crush the religious nature, and with it the happiness and glory of man, in its unrelaxing grasp. Christianity was absolutely necessary to save the soul of man from a monstrous development of its faculties, and to introduce harmony and beauty into its growth. Thus she has not only bestowed upon him the richest blessings he could

race.

enjoy, but saved him from the deepest miseries he could endure, blessings that crown this life as well as the future,— and miseries which, so far as human foresight can discover, and wherever the soul might exist, would not have ceased to embitter the waters of life;-and thus even the infidel and the atheist have cause, if they would open their eyes to see it, cause in every circumstance of happiness for which they are indebted to the institutions of society, to the improvement of the human mind,-nay, or to any intellectual advances they themselves have been enabled to make, to let their souls overflow with devout thankfulness to God for the mission of Jesus Christ. The Christian faith, wherever it has come, has taken away that ignorant terror on all the great subjects of death, judgment, the spiritual world, man's immortality, which in all ages has poured forth its dark floods of superstition over the benighted regions of the earth. Even now Christianity is anxiously and affectionately labouring to put away from the earth the superstition of infidelity. For even infidelity has its religion and its adoration. Its creed contains mysteries greater than any that ever claimed celestial origin, and it has an adoration as blind and senseless as that of the heathen idolater. It must subject the principle of faith to a severer torture than can be inflicted by any form of Christianity, however corrupted by superstition. We would beseech the unbeliever to come to a more reasonable faith. We would say to him,-faith in God is better than faith in Nature as God. Faith in a Creator is better than faith in an uncreated world. Faith in the spiritual world is better than faith in the powers and combinations of matter. Faith in the immortality of the soul is better than faith in its annihilation. Faith in another life can alone enable us to enjoy the happiness, to perform the duties, and to finish the work of this. C. A. B.

On the Characteristics of St. John's Gospel.*

THE most striking peculiarity in the Gospel of St. John and that which will be found to comprehend and explain nearly all the others, is the manner in which he proves the

The views which are offered in the following dissertation are taken principally from a work of Herder on the same subject.