and preparing to bid a long farewell to all our liberty. You must reject these evil counsellors. You must appreciate the Bible, or you and yours will soon fall back into that state of hopeless ignorance, and poverty, and vice, from which there is no resurrection. The priestcraft which has darkened and enslaved the world is one which has rejected or sequestered the Bible; not that which gave it to the common people, and preached the Gospel to the poor. It is Christianity which introduces universal liberty, which equalizes and elevates, and it is its absence which puts you down. The conspiracy against your liberties is forming by those who would banish from you the day of rest, and intellectual and moral improvement, and doom you and your families to toil seven days instead of six without the least increase of remuneration. This it is which will dwarf the intellect of the laboring classes, and throw them back into the distance beyond the light of hope, and the reach of successful competition. If you wish to be free indeed, you must be virtuous, temperate, well instructed, with the door of honor and profit open to you, and to your children. As the sun draws up the whole body of the ocean it passes over, raising the tide in the career of his glorious way, so will the sun of righteousness take hold of you and your families, and raise them up, and bring them within the constant attraction of hope and virtue. Those who wish for the preservation of the Sabbath are not bigots; they do not seek a union of church and state; they seek the unextinguished lustre of that moral sun, for your sake, who with it will rise, and without it will go down to where all the laboring classes of the world have been, and now are, whom the Bible and the Sabbath have not emancipated and elevated.

It is the agriculturists, merchants, manufacturers, and daylaborers, of the nation, who must decide its destiny. It is

to it must be the sanctuary A

suces tl at must stand sentinel, to prevent hi and your bodies that must constitute a rampart around the holy and blessed institutions of heaven which God has given to man in the Bible, whose blessings our fathers, with toil and blood, purchased, which, with augmenting prosperity at every step, have come down, and are now encompassing us like the waves of the sea,-blessings, which urge themselves upon us, and from which we cannot flee, and whose blest intrusion we cannot resist, but by taking counsel to break the bands of Christ, and cast away his cords from us. We need not petition Congress to spare the Sabbath: if they do, the people can desecrate the sacred day. The people must decide, each man for himself and his family, whether they will live under the government of God, and enjoy its sunshine, and breathe its liberty, and be elevated by its power, and sanctified by its purity, and cheered by its exuberant, unnumbered, and inexhaustible blessings; or, go back to the midnight of ignorance, and the bondage of corruption.

LECTURE V.

THE ATTRIBUTES AND CHARACTER OF GOD.

And the Lord passed by before him, and proclaimed, The Lord, the Lord God, merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity, and transgression, and sin, and that will by no means clear the guilty; visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children, and upon the children's children, unto the third and to the fourth generation.

There

GREAT errors in doctrine result usually from mistaken conceptions of the attributes and character of God. are two extremes to which the mind is liable: the one is to regard the Divine Being only in his public character, as the lawgiver of the universe; and his power, and wisdom, and goodness, only as they are manifested in his public relations in the government of a sinful world.

In one view, all which is dark, and terrible, and irresistible, is gathered about him; all which is spotless in purity, and vehement in his hatred of sin, and inexorable in its punishment. He is surrounded by fire, and storms, and earthquakes, and pestilence, and war, the symbols of present and coming wrath, his eye is fixed on public justice, and his heart glows with a benevolence too vast to hold sympathetic communion with the guilty and the miserable.

Though there is some truth in these views, in their place and proportion, they are not the whole truth, and therefore

misrepresent the character of God almost as fearfully as if they were false. They constitute a dark cloud, behind which all heaven's artillery is put into action, to extinguish hope, and keep a rebel world in a state of terror and reckless desperation.

And they are doubly injurious, because, ever since the Fall, the fear of God has usurped the place of filial confidence, and has been excessive. A dread of him is upon the mind of guilty man, which, in imitation of the first pair, leads him to flee and hide from his presence.

In all false religions, fear has ever been the predominant principle of worship, and rage and cruelty the principles to be appeased. And even where the light of the Gospel has shined, and its voice has proclaimed peace, the quaking and standing afar off has not ceased. God, to the eye of guilt and unbelief, appears too great, too distant, and too much ⚫engrossed with his vast concerns of state, and too holy and too just, to inspire with confidence the guilty, and bring them with humble boldness near. It is the object, therefore, of God, in the Gospel, to reässure his ruined guilty creatures of his unextinguished kindness FOR THEM, and to bring them back, reconciled and forgiven, to his fellowship and favor.

It is, no doubt, important that man should be well certified of the holiness and justice of God; and that ultimately he will, by no means, clear the guilty. But, to overcome the panic, and bring the full and saving power of the Gospel upon alienated mind, it is not less important that sinners should be made to feel that God loves and pities them, than that he abhors sin, and will not fail to punish it. Compassion alone would create presumption, and justice alone, desperation. The mingled influence of both is needed to alarm the sinner

to flee from wrath, and to allure him with humble boldness to fly to God by Jesus Christ.

They divest the Most Holy

But instead of this justly balanced exhibition, many rush into the opposite extreme. entirely of public responsibilities, regarding him only in the capacity of a benevolent individual, consulting alone the direct impulse of kind feeling, without any reference to general consequences. They cancel all the public responsibilities of God to the universe, as its moral governor. With the magic wand of unbelief, they dispel the darkness round about his throne, and put out the fires, and stop the mighty thunderings and the voice of the trumpet, and array with smiles the face of Heaven alike upon the righteous, and the wicked-destined, by dint of omnipotence, to those transformations which shall consummate their meetness for heaven, and make them happy.

The fact is too evident to be denied, that both the majestic and terrific, the gentle and the winning exhibitions of the divine character, are contained in the Bible, and are correct exhibitions of the divine mind, as its attributes and character are developed in the creation and government of the intelligent universe. In the administration of moral government, there is occasion also for these seemingly opposite attributes and exhibitions of character. They are harmonious, and indispensable to a perfect character, and to the administration of a perfect moral government.

It will be the object, therefore, of this lecture, to give a concise account of the attributes and character of God, as disclosed in his works, and revealed in his word.

This will be especially important, because correct conceptions of the relations of God to the universe, as its lawgiver,of his providence, as the administration of a moral govern