ON THE UNliEASONAl'vLKNESS OF AGNOSTICISM. 75 



having of old time spoken unto the fathers in the prophets by 

 divers portions and in divers manners, hath at the end of 

 these days spoken unto us in His Son, whom He appointed 

 heir of all things, through whom also He made the world/'* 

 This revelation, which we call the Bible, in its entirety puts 

 man in possession of all he requires to know respecting God^s 

 character and his own responsibility to his Maker in this 

 present world, and his relation to Him in the future. 



The full consideration of the various evidences which may 

 be adduced to prove that the Scriptures of the Old and New 

 Testaments are what they profess to be does not come within 

 the scope of the present paper. Suffice it to say, that when 

 those evidences are submitted io the test of reason, they are 

 found to be credible. 



First. — There stands the fact that some of its writers 

 uttered predictions respecting persons and places which were 

 in subsequent times fulfilled to the very letter. 



Second. — There stands the fact, that the writings of forty 

 individuals living in difi'erent places, and embracing a period 

 of sixteen centuries, are on examination found to have a 

 perfect unity ; and running through them all there is a silver 

 line, which, when followed through all its windings, is found 

 to lead to the one incomparable Being, the man Christ Jesus. 

 Surely these things tend to prove that "holy men of old 

 spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.''' 



Third. — When the contents of the BiJDle are carefully ex- 

 amined, they are found to contain revelations of those things 

 which man desires to know. The human soul sighs to know 

 something of the future, and this the Scriptures reveal; man 

 wants to know how the future, which he instinctively believes 

 in, can be spent in happiness, and this the Scriptures reveal. 

 When man looks around him and sees wickedness unpunished 

 and virtue unrewarded, his moral sense is shocked, and he is 

 perplexed. But, when he opens the pages of sacred writ, he 

 finds that there will be a time when virtue will be rewarded, 

 and when vice will be punished, and thus he learns that in the 

 end the God of all fhe earth will do right, and thus he finds 

 that the revelation which God has given to man in the Scrip- 

 tures is in harmony with the moral sense of the race. 



And this is what might be expected, since God is the in- 

 finitely good. Of such a Being it is inconceivable that He, 

 ''loving man as His offspring and desiring his welfare, should 

 withhold from him that knowledge which must be the noblest, 

 the most desirable, and the most useful — the knowledge of 



* Heb. i. 1, 2.— K. V. 



