of these obligations rests ultimately upon his recognizing his and their relations to God through a common nature as immortal beings. When we regard ourselves and our fellow-men as mere accidents of this earth, born to perish, our affections for them, our desire to serve them, must be of the same kind as those we may have toward the domestic animals about us, between whom and them we have effaced in our minds any essential distinction. To those who may think and feel thus, the happiness of mankind is not to be intrusted. Through the sense of personal suffering and wrong, through vindictive passions, or bitterness of temper, or the mere love of notoriety, the source of no good but of many bad actions, or from the desire to secure the power of oppression in their own hands and profit by it, men whose characters afford no ground for confidence may be ready to fight or to rail against the established abuses that are preying on the happiness of man. But from such men nothing is to be looked for but the substitution, through wasting and demoralizing violence, of a new class of evils for those that now exist.

The sole remedy against this flux and reflux of evils is to be found in the power of religion,

in Christianity, not such as it has often been

represented to be, but such as it is; in informing men of all classes with its spirit and its truths. It was through this channel alone, through the Truth, that the blessings of God communicated by the great Benefactor of our race were to be conveyed to mankind. On the last day of his life, that day of agony and triumph, he pronounced the declaration," I was born for this end, and for this end have I come to the world, to bear testimony to the Truth." He came to bear testimony to that truth, religious truth, which underlies all other moral truth, and which alone concerns man in his permanent relations, his relations to God and eternity. It was for the establishment of that truth that God manifested himself through Christ. It was by the name of "the Truth" that our Lord designated his religion, thus identifying it with all that it most concerns us to believe.

"I am the Way, and the Truth, and the Life,"

that is, Eternal Life. So he prayed for his immediate disciples, "Father, sanctify them. through the Truth; thy doctrine is Truth." So he promised them, "The spirit of the Truth," the spirit from God that accompanies the reception of my religion, "will guide you to all the Truth," to all the essential truth,

which constitutes it. Thus he told them, "If you remain steadfast in what I teach, you will know the Truth; and the Truth will make you free." They were expecting that the Messiah would deliver their nation from subjection to the Romans. But it was another sort of freedom that he promised them through the knowledge of the Truth.

A

DISCOURSE

ON THE

LATEST FORM OF INFIDELITY,

DELIVERED AT THE REQUEST OF THE

"ASSOCIATION OF THE ALUMNI OF THE CAMBRIDGE THEOLOGICAL SCHOOL,"

ON THE 19TH OF JULY, 1839.

20