ter, there has been a wonderful identity. The same effects, essentially, have ensued under the application of the same gospel in the present century, as in the time of St. Paul; in modern Europe, as in ancient Greece and Rome; in Hindostan, as in North America; among Hottentots and the islanders of the South Sea and savages of our western borders, as among the polished inhabitants of New York or London. While all these varieties of age, climate, customs, and cultivation, give a natural and pleasing variety to what may be called the complexion and costume in which the conversion appears, the great change itself exhibits, under all circumstances, the same characteristic and inimitable features; insomuch that if you draw the likeness of a genuine convert to Christ in his chief peculiarities as manifested in this country, and send it to Burmah, or to the Sandwich Islands, or to Caffre-land, or to Whampoa in China, or to Greenland, it will be considered a good likeness in main points of the dispositions, affections, tempers, habits, and life, produced by the converting power of the gospel in any of those widely differing regions. A genuine convert to Christ in China or in Affica, may come to this country, and find among genuine Christians precisely his own feelings, tastes, sympathies, and labors, though he never saw an American or European before; and he will be more at home among their Christian feelings, than he can be among the manners and dispositions of the people among whom he grew up and has always lived. Thus it is evident, that whatever be the cause of these uni

versally similar effects, it must be the same cause universally the same in all ages, and in all parts of the world.

Now, whether the gospel of Jesus Christ produced these great and invariably corresponding effects, or whether they proceeded from some other universal cause, of which none of the subjects were ever conscious, and which was never known where the gospel was not known, and never operates but under the name and by means of the gospel, no man of any philosophical pretensions is at liberty to doubt. He has precisely the same reason to be assured that the gospel, and nothing else on earth, is the cause of these admirable fruits, as that any medicine is the cause of a sick man's recovery to health, or that any vine, rather than a thorn-tree, produced the grapes obtained from its branches.

Then, since these effects unquestionably belong to the gospel, how are they to be accounted for? It will not do to put them aside under the unceremonious imputation of fanaticism or enthusiastic excitement. Words are not reasons. Infidel cant is not philosophical argument. If the gospel be untrue, then not only must these most excellent fruits be attributed to a corrupt tree, and these wholesome streams to a poisoned fountain, but it must be supposed that such sudden and entire transformations of human character, from the lowest debasement of nature to the highest principles of virtue and purity, are nothing more than the results of human agency and natural But if this be the case, if a system of un

means.

truth in the hand of man has done all this, we have reason to expect that some other systems of doctrine, with the same agency, would be productive of equal effects. How then can it be accounted for that nothing has ever been invented or heard of, in all the earth, to which any results of a like kind could be ascribed? Other causes have produced strong excitements, but no transformation of heart and life from sin to holiness. Other means have improved the morals of men by slow and in small degrees, but none ever took hold of a human wreck, and lifted him up out of the mire and dirt of his profligacy and carried him at once across the wide gulf that separated him from pureness, and in a few days placed him in a new moral region, with a new heart, and in all things a new creature. How can this be explained, if the gospel be a human invention and its effects of human production? Why should not infidels be capable, with all their wisdom and eloquence, of getting up a set of influences to rival these gospel wonders, and deprive Christians of this monopoly of the work of new creation and of holiness? How is it, that in proportion as any church degenerates from the simplicity and purity of the gospel, it ceases to witness such changes in the people attendant on its preaching? It is nothing to say that many things called conversions eventuate in no good fruits, and are nothing more than the natural consequences of temporary excitement. This is freely granted. But you do not condemn a whole orchard because some of the trees were not successfully grafted; nor all virtuous men,

because some, under the profession of virtue, are mere pretenders. It is sufficient that thousands and thousands of these effects have been of the most - radical and permanently beneficial character. Were they of human production, something of a corresponding kind would have appeared from other sources; by other hands than those of Christians; in other countries and ages than those enlightened by the Bible. Inasmuch as this has never occurred, we are fully warranted in concluding that it could not; consequently, that these effects are above the reach of human power. To whom then shall we go but unto thee, O Lord? who hast committed this treasure of the gospel to earthen vessels, to feeble men, to dispense it, "that the excellency of the power might be of God, and not of us." That we cannot comprehend in what manner the power of God operates in the hearts of men, to work such wonderful revolutions in their characters, is no valid objection to the matter of fact. "The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh and whither it goeth." The phenomena of the winds are incomprehensible, and yet believed. "So is every one that is born of the Spirit."

Now, I think we may be content to pass from the position with which we began, that the moral transformations which the gospel in all ages has notoriously wrought, and by unquestionable proofs exhibited to the world in the character of those who have become its genuine disciples, cannot be accounted for but on

the supposition of a divine power accompanying its operations.

2. We proceed to speak of the fruits of Christianity, as displayed in the lives of its genuine disciples, in contrast with those which notoriously characterize the lives of its opposers. The virtues of true Christians have been the same in all ages of Christianity. It was "with well-doing" that, in the days of St. Paul, they were accustomed to silence their enemies. Having become freed from sin, they became servants of righteousness, and had their fruit unto holiness. "Such were some of you," said St. Paul to Christians of that famous brothel of all Greece, the city of Corinth-"such were some of you," partakers in all vice; "but ye are washed, but ye are sanctified, but ye are justified in the name of the Lord Jesus, and by the Spirit of our God." The apostles could appeal to whole communities for evidence of their blameless character. "Ye are witnesses, and God also, how holily and justly and unblamably we behaved ourselves among you." Even by the testimony of the ancient and deadly enemies of the gospel, the lives of Christians had no

The early defenders

parallel among any other people. of the faith publicly challenged a scrutiny of their virtue. It was their remarkable steadfastness in resisting the allurements of vice, and their heroic patience under all the tortures employed to break their attachment to holiness, that often excited the bitterest hatred of their enemies. Compare the purity, benevolence, and humility of the apostles with those