that refuses to look or even to see; that hearkens to the one side and turns away from the other; that distorts, perverts, misconstrues; that makes the whole. mind and man uncandid, unreasonable, impregnable, inaccessible. "I will not," once said an able and prominent man when three wise and good men urged him to a step of which every one but himself saw the propriety and necessity. "If you and all Europe and Asia and America should urge me to do this thing, I will not do it." And they saw it was true. Yet within three years of that time the providence of God shut him up in deep humiliation to the very course which all the angels of God could not persuade him to take.

Now this thing which so constantly takes place in common life still more certainly and constantly occurs in the field of religion. Men can set themselves successfully to resist the truth:

(1) They can banish the whole subject, or, what amounts to the same, can refuse it all earnest attention. This fact was strikingly illustrated in the eighteen years' labors of David Nelson to bring skeptical men, of whom he had been one, to the acknowledgment of the truth. Eminently successful whenever it was possible to gain a hearing for the gospel, he yet encountered invariably at first an apathy that would never of itself move towards the light, often a positive unwillingness hard to be overcome, and not seldom a dogged and final refusal to hear. Is it not the condition described in the proverb, "a price in the

hand of a fool to get wisdom," but "he hath no heart to it "?

(2) If not absolutely excluding the whole subject, men can deliberately recoil from all unwelcome truth and court palatable error. A young student, determined to cast off the restraints of religion, delivers himself up to the reading of the ablest skeptical writers, from Strauss upward and downward; he, a callow stripling, unfledged in knowledge and intellectual grasp and strength, throws himself unprotected into the talons of these veteran vultures with their vast resources of knowledge and of skill, and is it for one moment doubtful what shall be the poor sparrow's fate? When a man whose scheme and course of life render it indispensable that God should not punish hereafter, refraining from all honest interrogation of nature or the Scriptures, yields his mind only to that pleasant song in all its variations, "Ye shall not surely die," can it be doubtful, with his interests and his purposes, his heart and his hearing only in one direction, and all else shut out, that this concentrated motive power will propel his settled views in the same direction? When a man, conscious of sin already, listens consentingly and constantly to those persuasions fitted to pacify him in his guilt, does not the whole history of sin and crime. prove both the possibility of his success and of his final mistake and disaster? Did ever any man wish for annihilation but a bad man?

(3) If the truth and its evidences are before them, men may refuse to see the evidence that makes against

them, or may weigh it as unfairly or superficially as though they saw it not. Thus the Jews refused to receive Jesus on the same kind of evidence on which they had received Moses, but more and better. They admitted his miracles, and denied his divine commission. They saw his miracles and sometimes denied the testimony of their senses and sometimes ascribed them to Satan. They dismissed the gift of tongues as the effect of new wine. Was this all innocent candor?

The same spirit can be traced in all subsequent times; not the least notable in some most noted men. David Hume was in his day one of the acutest men in Europe; yet he made an argument against miracles which, to say no more, involved an equivocation of terms, a virtual begging of the question, and a principle which would render it impossible to prove any new fact of science; and when, apparently sensible of his dilemma, he finally admits that there might possibly be a miracle which could be proved, he yet instantly adds that should such miracle "be ascribed to any system of religion" we are authorized to "reject it without any further examination." Shall we call that fair dealing in the acutest man in Europe? When Ernest Renan pictured the Son of Man as a "delicate and joyous moralist," intoxicated with the life of nature. "on the banks of the Sea of Tiberias," "traversing Galilee in the midst of a perpetual holiday," "in rustic pomp," "much pleased with the little ovations of the children who formed a young guard of his innocent royalty," then the dreamer of "a fantastic kingdom of

heaven," soon made extravagant and "bitter" by opposition, and at length becoming a "thaumaturgist" and an accomplice of imposture, can we recognize this travesty as a genuine estimate by that brilliant scholar? When Thomas Paine and Lionel Zollemache, a century apart, hunted through the Book that breathes glory to God and good will to man, solely to find grounds for cavil, was it not certain that each should find only what he sought? When Professor Draper, in a volume claiming to be strictly scientific, avers, for example, that "the sacred science" of the "divine relation" "saw in God only a gigantic man," and that according to the narrative of the deluge "the water was dried up by a wind," -and leaves it thus, what is to be said of the honesty of such a scientific man? When a rigid scientist and luminous thinker like John Tyndall proclaims to the world, "I discern in the matter which we have hitherto covered with opprobrium the promise and potency of every form and quality of life," what shall we say of this reckless plunge beyond the actual, if not possible, range of scientific discovery?

These things and the like represent a current trivialness, unfairness, and readiness for foregone conclusions in dealing with themes and records which have busied the greatest intellects, filled the noblest hearts, and prompted the grandest movements in the world's history; they betray a spirit and method unfitted to command intellectual or moral approval. It is melancholy to see a man of world-wide fame spending his splendid strength in assailing the length of a "day" or the order

of actual events in Genesis, making war on the miracle of the swine in the sacred volume, without a word or a thought for the perfect moral code and standard of holiness, the breadth, fullness, and profound significance, the central depth, inner coherences and correlations, the subtle outer influences and mighty workings of that historically stupendous agency of light and life. Why should the scholar who freely admits the authenticity of scores of ancient classics, some of them on the slenderest of testimony, cavil at the evidences of some of the best-authenticated ancient writings in the world? What shall we think of men who repudiate the early facts of Christianity on principles which would tear up the foundations of history? If the legal gentleman construes the themes of religion and the claims of God's Word with a carelessness which he would never tolerate in a case at law, or the business man stakes his soul on hazards on which he would not risk his property for a day, or rejects in religion a far stronger showing than that which he accepts in the gravest concerns of life, how can he justify himself? When men whom no difficulties, doubts, or perplexities can deter from finding their way to the ends of the earth in the chase of a fortune plead the exceeding difficulty of finding the way to heaven, should God accept this sudden imbecility? When the actors of the first French Revolution, "with their hands all smeared with human sacrifice," inscribed over the gateway of their cemetery "Death is a sleep," was this the conviction of their candid judgment? No! a thou