its
reception is the aversion of the human heart. It is a rational creed in
all its parts and combinations. It has outlived the collisions and
conflicts of a hundred schools of infidelity that have had their brief
day, and died with their devotees. A hundred systems of philosophy
falsely so called have come and gone, but the one old religion of the
patriarchs, and the prophets, and the apostles, holds on its way through
the centuries, conquering and to conquer. Can it be that sheer imposture
and error have such a tenacious vitality as this? If reason is upon the
side of infidelity, why does not infidelity remain one and the same
unchanging thing, like Christianity, from age to age, and subdue all men
unto it? If Christianity is a delusion and a lie, why does it not die
out, and disappear? The difficulty is not upon the side of the human
reason, but of the human heart. Skeptical men do not _like_ the religion
of the New Testament, these doctrines of sin and grace, and therefore
they shape their creed by their sympathies and antipathies; by what they
wish to have true; by their heart rather than by their head. As the
Founder of Christianity said to the Jews, so he says to every man who
rejects His doctrine of grace and redemption: "Ye _will_ not come unto me
that ye might have life." It is an inclination of the will, and not a
conviction of the reason, that prevents the reception of the Christian
religion.

Among the many reflections that are suggested by this subject and its
discussion, our limits permit only the following:

1. It betokens deep wickedness, in any man, to change the truth of God
into a lie,--_to substitute a false theory in religion for the true one_.
"Woe unto them," says the prophet, "that call evil good, and good evil;
that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for
sweet, and sweet for bitter." There is no form of moral evil that is more
hateful in the sight of Infinite Truth, than that intellectual depravity
which does not like to retain a holy God in its knowledge, and therefore
mutilates the very idea of the Deity, and attempts to make him other than
he is. There is no sinner that will be visited with a heavier vengeance
than that cool and calculating man, who, because he dislikes the
unyielding purity of the moral law, and the awful sanctions by which it
is accompanied, deliberately alters it to suit his wishes and his
self-indulgence. If a person is tempted and falls in