they rejoice, and in thy name shall they be exalted." He shall direct the paths of all those who acknowledge Him, and make even the munition of rocks their defence, and cause their bread to be abundant, and their water to be sure.

My dear, impenitent hearers, have you ever walked with God? Do you not even now fear him exceedingly? O, if you were wise, you would not permit this unmeasured alienation to exist between God and your own souls. You would seek a reconciliation before the judgment of the great day shall irrevocably fix your eternal destiny. Will you not do it? The piety of Enoch most likely commenced early in life-where and when the piety of every one should begin. And were all parents as faithful as Jared with Enoch, piety would be vastly more common in families than it now is. What sight on earth can equal the fervent manifestation of piety in the youthful heart? "A flower that's offered in the bud is no vain sacrifice." "I love them that love me, and those that seek me early shall find me." "Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth." My young friends, you never will find a better or more convenient time to make your peace with God, than now. You can ask for no more aids, or means, or opportunities, than God grants you now. Earlier habits are more easily formed, and when formed, are the most permanent and abiding. "It is good," says Jeremiah, "it is good for a man that he should bear the yoke in his youth."

Enoch was a man of great piety more than 300 years. How clearly are we taught that the pleasures of religion never cloy, but grow with their growth, and increase with their increase! Said David "Thy loving kindness is better than life, therefore my lips shall praise Thee. Thus while I live I will bless Thee. I will lift up my hands in Thy name. My soul shall be satisfied as with marrow and fatness, and my mouth shall praise Thee with joyful lips."

Enoch sustained this religious character as a father, and the head of a numerous family. Piety is a promoter of every social virtue-a sanctifier of every domestic relation-a strengthener of every pure affection. There is no relation in life more favorable to piety than that of a husband and a father-neither is there any relation where piety is so much needed. Children copy the example of their parents so thoroughly, that parents are said to live in their children. If there is a family on earth that excites my sympathies, and for whom I feel an intense interest, it is that family in the midst of whom there stands no family altar, and where the voice of thanksgiving and of praise is never heard-where no confessions are made for sin-no mercies asked-no pardon sought-no grace invoked. Better ten thousand times dwell in a roofless house, amid descending storms, with God's presence and protection, than in houses of cedar, on which the frown of heaven rests. How sublime was the purpose of Joshua, for himself and his house to serve the Lord, compared with that carnal and worldly ambition of Bonaparte, to make his family kings and nobles. Better, said an old heathen, to raise the souls of our children, than the roofs of our houses. How patriarchal and priestly, how dignified and noble it looks to see a father gather around him his family, while he calmly, and with seeming confidence and trust, opens God's holy volume, and reads the words of wisdom and spiritual knowledge, while every eye in that little admiring group is turned on him, while the entrance of what

he reads gives them understanding-then he kneels down in their midst, and offers for them all that petition which each seems to think and feel his own. They rise, and commence their various duties for the day with consciences calm and tranquil, and with an indefinable sensation of security and peace, as though God was their friend, and He would protect them their father's friend, and He would save them. Thus felt Enoch, as he walked with God-and thus will feel every saint who imitates Enoch. O may each of you be found-not like Peter, following afar off, but like Enoch, "walking with God."

But Enoch was carried bodily into heaven, that glorious, happy, holy place, into which all weary pilgrims will ultimately be received when they have served their generation according to the will of God, and have fallen asleep. And into the same divine and heavenly abode, just twenty-one hundred years afterwards, Elijah was borne in a chariot of fire, and on the whirlwind's wing; and nine hundred years after this again, in majestic sublimity, ascended the Captain of our salvation to the throne of universal dominion in the same lofty heavens, from the field of conflict and of death. Thus, before the law was given, Enoch was taken up to heaven, to show all who lived before the revelation of God was made, the certainty of the resurrection, and of immortality upon it. Then Elijah was taken up to heaven under the law-to represent the resurrection under that legal economy. And then Jesus Christ followed under the Gospel economy to represent that. So that each great period of the world had its representation of a final resurrection, and of a glorious immortality. Multitudes had witnessed the piety of Enoch, and then saw him depart from the world he had honored, not to the tomb, but to the bosom of God. Multitudes more had witnessed the piety of Elijah, and then, when his pilgrimage was ended, they saw the heavens opened to receive him amid its rushing hosts, and fiery chariots.

And then, again, multitudes more had witnessed the wonderful works of Jesus Christ, and after his Crucifixion, had seen him at the head of principalities and powers, ascend in triumph and in glory, as the first fruits of the resurrection of all the dead. The redemption of the body, therefore, must have been a matter of faith to all the godly, in every age of the world.

But now, dear impenitent hearer, you also will be raised from the dead-and where will you appear? You will surely stand in the judgment-but on which side of the Judge? Your eyes will behold Him as he descends from heaven-but will it be with joy or with grief? There you will see Enoch of whom I have now spoken-there Elijah that followed him on fire and flame-and there you will see Jesus who was marshalled amid unutterable sublimity and grandeur overpowering to that same immortal state; and there, God grant, for Jesus' sake, you may meet them all "robed in righteousness," and radiant in beauty--fully prepared to participate in the joys which are at God's right hand, and in the pleasures which are there forevermore.

BY REV. D. H. ALLEN, D. D.,

PROFESSOR OF SYSTEMATIC THEOLOGY, LANE SEMINARY, CINCINNATI, OHIO.

THE COMPREHENSIVENESS OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS. "For I determined not to know anything among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified."-1 COR. ii. 2.

THE Apostle Paul was a model preacher. In all that constitutes a wise, faithful, efficient and successful minister of the gospel, he stands next to him who "spake as never man spake." One important source of his power is developed in the declaration of the text: "I determined to know nothing among you save Jesus Christ and him crucified." Not more at Corinth than everywhere else, from the moment he bowed his soul to Christ, on the plains of Damascus, till his work on earth was finished, this language expressed his governing purpose.

Fitted by natural gifts and by liberal study to apprehend more fully perhaps than any other man ever did, what is implied in such a purpose, when Christ was revealed to him and in him -when he grasped the great thought wrapped up in the words "Christ crucified," it filled his whole being and absorbed all his energies. He bowed beneath its weight, saying-it is enough. Let this one idea fill my soul and govern my life. To study it, to fathom it, to preach it, this, by the grace of God, shall be my

* Preached before the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, at its opening in the city of Philadelphia, May, 1854, and published by request.

one business while I live. If I may know this, I desire to know nothing else I need to know nothing else. Thence, onward, that glorious truth was to the Apostle, not his guiding polar star, but the central sun, in whose light he pressed on his heavenly way. It was the very atmosphere he breathed-the vital element of the life he lived. Filling all his heart, and sent in full and strong pulsations through every limb and muscle of the frame, it made him a living, earnest, mighty man.

Was Paul herein the model for the preacher of our own day? In the progress of ages and the march of intelligence, in this day of intense mental action and of fearless plunging into the profoundest depths of philosophy, is there not devolved some other thought, better fitted to be the one idea of the preacher's life, than that old theme of the Apostle Paul? Does not our philosophy demand some other? Does not the upheaving of old foundations warn us that we must re-construct on new principles? Does not the tremendous pressure of the world upon the church instruct us that a mightier weapon of defence is needed? Does not the unequalled progress of the age justify the presumption that, if the ministry still cling to the old idea of Paul, they must fall behind the times, and lose their power over the people? Or if a new theme be not adopted, is it not at least due to the age that a new dress be sought in which to present the vererable theme, so as to make it more attractive than we are wont to make it?

Questions of this sort have suggested the subject of discourse on this occasion. They call upon us, as intelligent men, acting in behalf of great interests and with reference to permanent results, to examine our weapons, to review our principles of action, and to justify them to ourselves and to the world. The propriety of such a purpose as Paul expressed, depends on the question whether this theme be broad enough for all the exigencies of the ministry, and comprehensive enough to include the whole range of study which the minister needs to fit him for his work?

THE COMPREHENSIVENESS, then, OF THE DOCTRINE OF THE CROSS, is our theme.

I. I begin with its comprehensiveness in Theology.

The beautiful Bible figure concerning the relation of Christ to the church is equally applicable to the system of truth of which the church is the pillar and the ground.

Jesus Christ is the chief corner-stone-tried, elect, precious. But, more than this-that is a living stone; having life, and giving life; so that they that are built upon it, are living also; and so that the whole building, fitly framed together, and compacted by that which every joint supplieth," groweth in him into an holy

temple in the Lord." Such is the relation of the doctrine of the cross to the entire system of divine truth, necessitating its form and development, giving symmetry, beauty, life and power to

the whole.

It is a beautiful idea of Neander, though very unsound and unsafe, that the doctrine of a crucified Saviour-a doctrine that could come only from God, and is therefore inspired-furnishes a test by which to determine what portions of the sacred volume are inspired and what are not. Every thing that unfolds and impresses the Christian idea is, like that idea itself, inspired. The Christian consciousness of the regenerated man, in quick and lively sympathy and affinity with these truths, readily detects them, and separates them for its own use, as the magnet attracts the iron filings from out the mass of dust, and thus safely applies the test of inspired Scripture.

Rejecting utterly this theory of inspiration, both in its philosophy and in its application, we might yet say with truth that the inspiration of the Holy Ghost goes through the records of this sacred book along with the life-giving power of the cross of Christ; and then add, that there is not a branch, nor a twig, nor a leaf, that is not made comely and vigorous and green by the vital current from the living vine, and therefore that it is in whole and in every part the inspired word of God.

We can only glance a moment at a few of the relations of this truth to the system of theology. Who was Jesus Christ? God manifest in the flesh, or a created being? At what a measureless distance asunder do the different answers to these questions at once reveal men to be, in all their views of God and of man ;-of human character and human hopes. The divinity of Christ involves at once the tri-unity of the Godhead, the mystery of the incarnation, and the unfathomable depths of the infinite intelligence. Why was the Son of God crucified? This question brings before us on the one hand the fact and the nature of the moral government of God, the nature of Justice as an attribute of God, and as an attribute of his law; the nature of right and wrong, of freewill and conscience and involves, directly and indirectly, the profoundest questions of morals and of mental science. It points us on the other to the condition of those for whom the sacrifice was made, and involves the question of the fall as a tremendous fact of human history, and the influence of that event upon Adam and upon his posterity. Depravity, imputation, the nature of sin, original and actual, the whole group of correlated topics, assume their positions, and aspects and bearings, in accordance with the answer to this question. Nay more, this question sweeps back into the ages of a past eternity, involving the covenant of Redemption and the eternal, sovereign and immutable decrees of Jehovah; and it opens to our study those depths which no human mind has penetrated, in which lie hid the reasons