If religion consists in listening to long prayers, and attending long sermons, in keeping up an outside appearance of devotion, and interlarding the most common discourse with phrases of Gospel usage:—if this is religion, then are the disciples of Methodism pious beyond compare. But in real humility of heart, in mildness of temper, in liberality of mind, in purity of thought, in openness and uprightness of conduct in private life, in those practical virtues which are the vital substance of Christianity,—in these are they superior? No. Public observation is against the fact, and the conclusion to which such observation leads is rarely incorrect. * * The very name of the sect carries with it an impression of meanness and hypocrisy. Scarce an individual that has had any dealings with those belonging to it, but has good cause to remember it from some circumstance of low deception or of shuffling fraud. Its very members trust each other with caution and reluctance. The more wealthy among them are drained and dried by the leeches that perpetually fasten upon them. The leaders, ignorant and bigoted—I speak of them collectively—present us with no counter-qualities that can conciliate respect. They have all the craft of monks without their courtesy, and all the subtlety of Jesuits without their learning.

—If of different denominations, how were they thus conciliated to a society of this ominous nature, from which they must themselves of necessity be excluded by that indispensable condition of admittance, "a union of religious sentiment in the great doctrines:" which very want of union it is that creates these different denominations?

Our Saviour never in any single instance reprobated the exercise of reason: on the contrary, he reprehends severely those who did not exercise it. Carnal reason is not a phrase to be found in his Gospel; he appealed to the understanding in all he said, and in all he taught. He never required faith in his disciples, without first furnishing sufficient evidence to justify it. He reasoned thus: If I have done what no human power could do, you must admit that my power is from above, &c.

Religion is a system of revealed truth; and to affirm of any revealed truth, that we cannot understand it, is, in effect, either to deny that it has been revealed, or—which is the same thing—to admit that it has been revealed in vain.

As to systems of religion alien from Christianity, if any of them have taught the doctrine of eternal life, the reward of obedience, as a dogma of belief, that doctrine is not their boast, but their burden and difficulty; inasmuch as they could never defend it. They could never justify it on independent grounds of deduction, nor produce their warrant and authority to teach it. In such precarious and unauthenticated principles it may pass for a conjecture, or pious fraud, or a splendid phantom: it cannot wear the dignity of truth.

Some indeed have sought the star and the sceptre of Balaam's prophecy, where they cannot well be found, in the reign of David; for though a sceptre might be there, the star properly is not.

The Israelites could not endure the voice and fire of Mount Sinai. They asked an intermediate messenger between God and them, who should temper the awfulness of his voice, and impart to them his will in a milder way.

To justify its application to Christ, the resemblance between him and Moses has often been deduced at large, and drawn into a variety of particulars, among which several points have been taken minute and precarious, or having so little of dignity or clearness of representation in them, that it would be wise to discard them from the prophetic evidence.

A distinguished commentator on the laws of Moses, Michaelis, vindicates their temporal sanctions on the ground of the Mosaic Code being of the nature of a civil system, to the statutes of which the rewards of a future state would be incongruous and unsuitable.

But the first law meets him on his own terms; it stood upon a present retribution; the execution of its sentence is matter of history, and the argument resulting from it is to be answered, before the question is carried to another world.

Except under the dictate of a constraining inspiration, it is not easy to conceive how the master of such a work, at the time when he had brought it to perfection, and beheld it in its lustre, the labour of so much opulent magnificence and curious art, and designed to be exceeding magnifical, of fame, and of glory throughout all countries, should be occupied with the prospect of its utter ruin and dilapidation, and that too under the opprobrium of God's vindictive judgment upon it, nor to imagine how that strain of sinister prophecy, that forebodes of malediction, should be ascribed to him, if he had no such vision revealed.

In order to evade this conclusion, nothing is left but to deny that Isaiah, or any person of his age, wrote the book ascribed to him.

But how does he express that promise? In the images of the resurrection and an immortal state. Consequently, there is implied in the delineation of the lower subject the truth of the greater.

When Cyrus became master of Babylon, the prophecies of Isaiah were shewn or communicated to him, wherein were described his victory, and the use he was appointed to make of it in the restoration of the Hebrew people. (Ezra i. 1, 2.)

Meanwhile this long repose and obscurity of Zerubbabel's family, and of the whole house of David, during so many generations prior to the Gospel, was one of the preparations made whereby to manifest more distinctly the proper glory of it, in the birth of the Messiah.

Behold I will send you Elijah the prophet before the great and dreadful day of the Lord.

He contends, without reserve, that the free actions of men are not within the divine prescience; resting his doctrine partly on the assumption that there are no strict and absolute predictions in Scripture of those actions in which men are represented as free and responsible; and partly on the abstract reason, that such actions are in their nature impossible to be certainly foreknown.

One point, however, is certain and equally important, namely, that the Christian Church, when it comes to recognize more truly the obligation imposed upon it by the original command of its Founder, Go teach all nations, &c.