May the merciful Father of the whole human race, who, for reasons best known to his unsearchable wisdom, hath suffered many millions to die, and suffers many millions also now to live, in utter ignorance of that revelation of his will, which he hath given to the Christian world, accept our humble thanksgivings for such an inestimable benefit! May he establish, strengthen, settle the inhabitants of these kingdoms in the faith of Christ; and be graciously pleased to remove from all others, the ignorance that is in them, lest, in being aliens from the commonwealth of Israel, strangers from the covenants of promise, having no hope, and without God in the world, they become to every good work reprobate; lest, in being spoiled through philosophy and vain deceit, they fall into perdition, temporal and eternal.

SERMON II.

2 Pet. i. 16.

WE HAVE NOT FOLLOWED CUNNINGLY DEVISED FABLES, WHEN WE MADE KNOWN UNTO YOU THE POWER AND COMING OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST, BUT WERE EYE-WITNESSES OF HIS MAJESTY.

WHETHER the Christian religion be a revelation of the will of God, or a cunningly devised fable, is a question which, one might think, every serious man would examine with impartial attention. He would take, it might be expected, the New Testament into his hand, and observing that it consisted of various parts, and had been written by different authors, he would inquire what evidence there was for its being a genuine book. If he found, as I am persuaded he would find, that there were as solid reasons for believing that the gospel of St. Luke, and the Acts of the

Apostles, were written by him, and the other parts of the New Testament by the persons to whom they are ascribed, as that the history of the Peloponnesian war was written by Thucydi des, or the lives of the Cæsars by Suetonius; he would then inquire, whether the book was not only a genuine but an authentic one; that is, whether it contained a narration of events which had really taken place in Judea, near eighteen hundred years ago, or whether there was any reasonable cause to suspect that the authors of the New Testament had not honestly related what had really happened. With respect to the honesty of the writers, he would judge of that from their characters; and with respect to the reality of the facts mentioned by them, he would consider, that most of the writers of the New Testament did not relate what they had heard, but what they had seen; so that, if they were honest men, there could remain no doubt of the truth of what they had delivered. He would be ready to admit, that as simple historians, they might, notwithstanding their honesty, have fallen into trivial mistakes in their narration of what they had seen, and that, notwithstanding their honesty, they might have been full of credulity, and liable to

imposition; but he would think it quite impossible, that facts of such public notoriety and importance as the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, could have been the subjects either of human error, or credulity, in those who professed to have been eye-witnesses of what they related. He would therefore certainly conclude, that the Christian religion was true, if the writers of the New Testament were honest men.

If the writers of the New Testament were not honest men, they were impostors: now, that they were not impostors, may appear from considering-that they had neither motive to commence, nor ability to carry on an imposture-and from examining the account they give of themselves and of their associates, immediately before, and soon after the resurrection of Jesus.

Impostors are moved to the attempt of deceiving mankind by prospects of wealth, fame, power, pleasure; by some real or imaginary advantage to be derived to themselves, or, through them, to those whom they love and regard as themselves. Now no expectation of this kind can, with the least shadow of probability, be

ascribed to all, or to any of the writers of the New Testament. There is no need of entering into the proof of this; every one knows that Jews and Romans, Greeks and barbarians; that the powers of the world, wherever they went, were against the apostles; they durst not any where lift up so much as an arm in their own defence. Instead of temporal advantages of any kind, they had to expect, and they did in fact experience, hunger, and cold, and nakedness, and scorn, and contempt, and hatred, all the miseries incident to a state of poverty, all the calamities attendant on a state of religious persecution:-these are not the motives which induce men to become impostors. Read the history of the impostor Mahomet, or that of Alexander as described by Lucian, or that of Apollonius of Tyana; and contrast them with that of Christ, or any of his apostles; and you will at once perceive the difference between the manner in which imposture and truth are introduced and established in the world. Compare the miracles recorded in the New Testament, with respect to their publicity, their beneficial tendency, and their influence on the thousands who saw them, with the tricks of ancient or modern pretenders to magic; and you