which mortality may contemplate without profanation; if "Those thoughts that wander through eternity" may sometimes soar, with no unholy flight, to the pavilion of the Highest, what a theme of meditation, vast as the universe, unsatiating as the flow of a blessed eternity, may piety derive from dwelling on the beatific fellowship, with each other, of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost! Infinite wisdom holds high converse with infinite wisdom; infinite holiness commingles with infinite holiness; infinite love takes sweet counsel of infinite love. In that temple of the highest heavens, consecrated as the abode of the Godhead, each of its divine persons enjoys blissful and untiring communion with his two other glorious selves. Into this holiest of temples no discrepancy of views, no collision of sentiment ever enters. To the most perfect unity of action, thought, and feeling, the infinite personages, who make it their dwelling. place, are impelled by the elemental and immutable laws of their own being. Thus flow on, in high and incommunicable blessedness, the successive and cloyless ages of the triune God. It must be an iron-hearted theory which would seek to banish from the dwelling-place of the Highest the delights of social and equal intercourse, and to consign to lonely solitude the eternity of the Sovereign of the universe. The doctrine of the Trinity is, doubtless, above the reach of reason; but, when revealed, reason perceives and approves its fitness. The infinite Father can find no companion among the children of men; they are worms of the dust. Even the hierarchies of heaven are but his ministering spirits. He must have dwelt in solitary grandeur, but for his holy and rapturous communion with his august brethren of the Trinity. What desolation would pervade the courts of heaven, reaching even to the sanctuary of Him "that sitteth upon the throne," could a ruthless arm of flesh pluck from his right hand and his left the beloved fellows of his eternal reign! It is not, however, our object to demonstrate, by a regular argument, the doctrine of the Trinity. Not that we should think its demonstration difficult, with the Bible open before us. But those into whose hands these sheets will be likely to fall need no confirmation of their faith in this fundamental article of our holy religion. We may, then, for the purposes of our argument, adopt it as a settled truth, that there are three distinct persons in the Godhead: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost; and that these three persons are equal in all their infinite attributes and perfections. The fall of man was an astounding event in the history of the universe. A world, just created in all the freshness and loveliness of innocence, and pronounced by its Creator to have been "very good," was seduced from its allegiance by the prince of the powers of the air. The forgiveness of this apostacy without satisfaction would have violated the fundamental laws of the empire of the Godhead. The "angels who kept not their first estate," though their voices had so long helped to swell the harmóny of the heavens; though they had been ministering spirits around the throne of the Highest; though, ere this world sprang out of chaos, they had shone as morning stars; though they had been foremost among the shouting sons of God, had yet been cast out, and were confined in everlasting chains of darkness. Had rebel man been forgiven without satisfaction, the purity of divine justice must have been tarnished forever more. But how was rebel man, poor and utterly destitute, to yield satisfaction? The title to his new dominion had been cancelled by sin. If burntofferings would have sufficed, "the cattle on a thousand hills" were no longer his. He stood polluted, confounded, seemingly abandoned and lost. But pity had entered the heart of One, whose divine compassion was infinite as his omnipotence. A voice issued forth from the innermost sanctuary of the Godhead: "Deliver him from going down to the pit; I have found a ransom."-Job, xxxiii., 24. The ransom for delinquents, justly doomed to eternal suffering, was to be paid in the suffering of their great Deliverer. The development of this plan of grace, so surprising to the heavens, must needs overwhelm with astonishment the dwellers upon the earth. It was the mighty movement of a God, and all its mysterious and progressive footsteps were to be the footsteps of a God. Had it been decreed in the council of the Trinity that its second person should have suffered in the celestial court, at the very footstool of the throne of justice, human reason would have had no ground to interpose her speculative cavils. But infinite wisdom deemed it most fitting that the great Deliverer should suffer in the vestments of that fallen nature which he had so condescendingly and graciously undertaken to redeem; and that the new-made world, which Satan had fondly claimed as a permanent province of his own kingdom, should become the scene of the glorious triumphs of the cross. That this great atonement was not an illusion, but a solemn reality; that the second person of the Trinity, clothed in the habiliments of flesh, suffered in very truth for the re |