e, 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.

* * * * *

INTRODUCTION

TO

THE OLD TESTAMENT

PREFATORY REMARKS.

* * * * *

To consider at length all the questions which the spirit of modern
inqu