And so on through the whole round of duties and affections. The demand is necessary.

II. It is right and proper that God hold men responsible for their religious principles:

(1) Because there is religious truth, and we have faculties given us to ascertain it. There are evidences, and we have capacities to appreciate evidence. The use of these powers is as truly subject to our will as that of our other powers. It is just as righteous to hold us responsible for the use of these faculties as of any others, and on the subject of religion as on any other subject. Is not the juror or the judge who fails to use earnestly this capacity to ascertain the claims or the responsibilities of prosecutor and defendant a guilty man? and shall not the man who will not use it to know the claims of God and his own responsibility at that highest tribunal of the universe be held a most guilty man? The relation of both nature and revelation to man is that of fact, truth, to faculties fitted to ascertain it - truth and not falsehood. They may be misused and grasp error. But the whole world knows that falsehood is not their element or aliment. They are not filled and satisfied with it, but they perpetually reach forth after solid fact.

Meanwhile the most vital facts on the most vital themes, the great moral interests of man, lie in the foreground of human vision; if not always recognized, yet, when pointed out, recognizable. How often have pagan minds asserted the very obligations which their lives have repudiated, and indignantly condemned and

punished the wrongs which they practiced, or which they enthroned in heaven! And when the clear teachings of the divine word have come, commanding reverence, love, beneficence, purity, repentance, reformation, how have they come like a sunbeam, carrying their own light with them! And God's historic ways, claims, and disclosures to man, though not seen by the same intuitive recognition, make their appeal to the same historic sense and judging power to which all great facts of human concernment bring their credentials. Now the God who comes with these supreme claims on man claims also to have borne witness of himself and his Word, not, indeed, enough to confound and overwhelm the resisting mind-for there is no such evidence in this world but enough to convince the fair-minded, earnest inquirer both of the fact and the chief contents of that Revelation. If he have given such evidences on a theme that infinitely transcends all other themes in importance, he may well hold us peculiarly responsible for that fair-minded, earnest inquiry. Brought as we are in regard to questions of inconceivable magnitude to the manifest alternative of this light or no light at all, it cannot but be that he who turns in levity away, or gives it but a passing thought, should deserve and incur a condemnation proportionate to the gravity of the issue, When we consider that the interests at stake so dwarf all other interests, and the relations in question so swallow up all other relations, and the views we take here so lie at the foundation of all we shall be and do as moral beings and human beings,

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fashioning our whole career in this universe of God and for all eternity, we may well ask, If we be not held responsible for the use of our faculties here, — for the sincere, devoted, and, if need be, protracted search for truth and duty, for what shall we be held responsible? What is there left worthy of God's attention after abandoning control of all that shapes and makes the man and his life? Nor will it avail to plead the difficulties that overhang some of the themes of religion, and to turn away from the whole subject. The plea he makes condemns him. "Thou knewest," may his Maker reply, "thou knewest that this gravest of themes called for the best of thy energies, and wherefore then didst thou so discard it from all serious attention throughout thy life?"

We cannot even plead novelty in this appointment. We are living daily under a system of Providence where we are assumed to have knowledge, right knowledge, of natural laws, to ignore which is folly and ruin. We are living under a system of human laws that require and assume the use of our means of knowing and hold us responsible for the knowledge we might have had. In regard to a multitude of interests the inquiry of the court is not, Did this party actually come to a knowledge of the facts or the requisitions? but, Was there a suitable notification, or means of knowing, so that with reasonable attentiveness he might have known? We pay roundly for simple neglect. There are business transactions of the gravest consequence, where the law is inexorable, and the most honest igno

rance of its required proceedings shall not save a man from those gravest of consequences. He ought to have informed himself; and the graver the matter the more culpable the neglect; yes, the graver the matter, often, as in case of a last will and testament, the more rigid the demand. And in the sphere of moral delinquencies, of a man mature in age and sane in mind the court never inquires, Did he know the exact law or penalty? The murderer might plead that he had never read the statute, or that he supposed the penalty to be not death but imprisonment; but it would be idle breath. The foreign thief and robber are not asked before receiving sentence whether they were familiar with the phraseology of our laws. Enough that they knew that they were doing wrong; and this is assumed and not proved. Should they bring witnesses to show their matured convictions that the rights of property are a fraud, or that polygamy and adultery are a part of their religious system, the prison is none the less their destination. Having sound faculties, they are held responsible for their right use. Human tribunals necessarily and continually explode the principles of the skeptic. In truth it would break up human society were not men in a multitude of cases held responsible for what they ought to have known. A being endowed with intellectual and moral eyesight, and in the presence of his highest truths, relations, and obligations, shutting his eyes and pleading blindness, can be allowed that plea neither by God nor man.

(2) It is right and proper to hold men responsible

for their religious principles, furthermore, because these principles are so largely determined adversely by their inclinations and will. It has been sometimes hastily asserted, as by Lord Byron and by many others before and since, that our opinions are entirely beyond our control. But whatever semblance of truth there. may be in the affirmation arises chiefly from the confusion of facts with opinions. Facts are not in our power; but there being facts, it is to a great degree in our power whether we receive or reject them. Truth we can neither make nor unmake, but we can embrace or we can oppose it. Truth is not under our control, but our moral inclinations do marvelously control our opinions of the truth.

It is a conspicuous influence that runs through all ordinary life, this emotional and voluntary bias one way and the other, this willingness to believe here, this willfulness to disbelieve there. Whose cause is not rightful? Whose enemy is not hateful? Whose sins are not venial? Whose case is not exceptional? How comes it that so many a young man has rushed reckless on to ruin, denying all danger when every other eye saw the danger, and the bones of the dead, as it were, lay bleaching in his sight? How comes it that so many a fair girl has thrown herself blindly into the arms of one whom all men knew and her friends proved to be a worthless wretch? "I will not believe it" is her resolute reply. "They told me, but I would not believe," is the voice of her unavailing sorrow. Ay, "will not" is the word. There is a will in the case