"have everlasting life:" accordingly at his own proper time he does so. A long train of prophecies, delivered in many succeeding ages, identify, by precise and unequivocal signs and marks, the character and person of our blessed Saviour; they all meet in him, and answer to his person and character, and to him only, in so distinguished and remarkable a manner, as not to admit the possibility of any unless wilful mistake. He himself gives these unquestionable proofs of his divine origin and mission. He speaks as nò man ever spake; teaches doctrines calculated to make the souls of men happy in this life, and wise unto salvation; does works which no man ever did; performs miracles so various and public, so unpremeditatedly, and so adapted to the occurring occasion, as to any fair, candid, and considerate mind excludes all idea of counterfeit or forgery. He arises from death; appears after his resurrection to his disciples, with whom he eats and drinks, and his body is felt and examined by them; and after, by his death, opening the kingdom of heaven to all believers, he ascends into heaven, to be our Mediator and Intercessor with our heavenly Father, and promises to send on earth the Holy Ghost the Comforter, to dwell in the hearts of the righteous, and to sway them to the acquisition of that holiness, which it is required of every man to possess before he can be admitted into the presence of God. As these doctrines respecting our faith and practice are thus clearly and intelligibly expressed, so is the evidence which proves them equally convincing, when properly examined and attended to; of the truth of which no fair and candid person will dispute or entertain any doubt, when he considers, that this evidence, after the most elaborate investigation, and strictest and severest scrutiny, has invariably from age to age, during a period of more than seventeen centuries, convinced men of the greatest genius, learning, and talents, laymen as well as clergyof its truth. Now what ends can any man propose to himself to accomplish, from a mystical interpretation of Scripture, greater or nobler than is to be attained by this literal interpretation of it? For to the man who forms his ideas of the attributes of the Deity, and of his gracious conduct to the human race; and who in humility and sincerity of heart follows those rules of Scripture, which are given for his faith and conduct in life, in men, There e plain and literal way in which they are divulged to his understanding; the noble result will be, his enjoyment of the peace of God, and habitual cheerfulness in this life, and, through the goodness of God, and the merits of his blessed Redeemer, an entire belief, when he dies, that he shall enjoy everlasting happiness in a life to come. are millions of human beings who, receiving this divine theory in the literal manner in which it is expressed, and forming their faith and practice on it, are living testimonies of the truth of this assertion, as it relates to their present enjoyment of the peace of God: and millions more, who, in consequence of having adopted and practised the same theory during their lives, have proved its truth at their death, by dying the death of the righteous, and in the fullest persuasion of being admitted into the kingdom of God, and of partaking of those pleasures which are at the right hand of God for evermore. It is scarcely possible to imagine, that those who give way to Calvin's mystical interpretation of Scripture, with respect to their faith and practice, and who entertain such ideas as he did respecting the conduct of God to man, can either live or die with equal com posure and satisfaction of mind: happy, thrice happy, therefore, is the man, whether learned or unlearned, who receives those doctrines in the Bible which relate to his faith and practice in the literal manner in which they are revealed to him. A fondness for a mystical interpretation of Scripture I apprehend to arise mostly from that pride and folly of heart, which vainly inclines a man to consider it a greater honour to think with singularity, than to think justly, with humility, and with obedience; and therefore the observance of the rule recommended, of a literal interpretation of such parts of Scripture as relate to faith and practice, is extremely becoming a dependent being, whose intellect is finite, and whose particular duty it is to walk humbly with his God; and to whom God thus addresses him by his Prophet; "To this man will I look, even to him "that is poor and of a contrite spirit, and ❝ trembleth at my word*." Nothing indeed can be a greater proof of wisdom in any man, than in his curbing and resisting an intemperate curiosity to know more respecting God's decrees and conduct than he has been * Isaiah lxvi. 2. pleased to reveal concerning them. Unless he bounds his curiosity on these awful subjects entirely by the plain unforced text of Scripture, he soars beyond his nature and his reason; and the consequence is, and ever will be, chaos, error, and confusion. He thereby entangles himself and others in a labyrinth, from which neither he or they can escape: his presumption is a flagrant violation of his duty to God, and a great sin; it is analogous to the sin that caused the fall of our first parents, and is clearly and evidently pregnant with the most direful mischief to the individual who commits it: for, as the powers of his mind are quite unequal to the task he undertakes, and as he is not or can be in possession of such component parts relative to these subjects as the mind must possess before it can be capable of forming any true or satisfactory conclusion on them, the result of his rashness and presumption will be that cheerless and miserable feeling the mind experiences, when the ideas it combines and associates are of an indistinct, dangerous, and confused nature, and it cannot arrive at any true or satisfactory conclusion. But if the vanity and folly of such a man leads him to propagate his crude, erro |