certain process, into a likeness to Christ, which is the sum of all goodness.  In proportion also as the principles of the gospel gain ground in any community, they ennoble it, purify it, and inspire it with the spirit of truth and justice.  Very imperfectly is our country pervaded by this good leaven.  Yet it is this, small as is its measure, which makes the difference between the state of society here at home and in India or China.  Many thousands who do not personally receive the gospel thus experience its elevating power.  They receive at its hand innumerable precious gifts without understanding or acknowledging the source from which they come.

10.  As a final argument, may be named the power of the Christian religion to purify itself from the corruptions introduced into it by men.  It is not alone from the world without that Christ’s church has been assailed.  Corrupt men have arisen within her pale who have set themselves to deny or explain away her essential doctrines, to change her holy practice, or to crush and overlay her with a load of superstitious observances.  But the gospel cannot be destroyed by inward any more than by outward enemies.  From time to time it asserts its divine origin and invincible power, by bursting the bands imposed on it by men, and throwing off their human additions, thus reappearing in its native purity and strength.  So it did on a broad scale at the era of the Reformation, and so it has often done since in narrower fields.

10.  Let now the candid inquirer ask himself whether a book which gives such gloriously perfect views of God’s character and government; whose code of morals is so spotlessly pure that simple obedience to it is the sum of all goodness, and would, if full and universal, make this world a moral paradise; all whose parts, though written in different and distant ages by men of such diversified character and training, are in perfect harmony with each other; which displays such a wonderful knowledge of man in all his relations to God and his fellow-men, and therefore speaks with such authority and power to his conscience; which reveals a religion that satisfies all the wants of those who embrace it, that makes them victorious alike over outward persecution and inward sinful passion, and that asserts its invincible power by throwing off from itself the corrupt additions of men—­whether such a book can possibly have man for its author.  Assuredly in character it resembles not sinful man, but the holy God.  It must be from heaven, for it is heavenly in all its features.

PART II.

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INTRODUCTION

TO

THE OLD TESTAMENT

PREFATORY REMARKS.

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