may be called the religious importance of knowledge which might be drawn from the narratives of Scripture, there is abundance of still more direct proof in its merely doctrinal or didactic passages, On the one hand the knowledge of God and of Jesus Christ is said to be eternal life. And on the other hand many are said to perish for lack of knowledge. When Christ shall come in flaming fire and amid the elements of dissolving nature, it is to take vengeance on those who know not God. Knowledge and ignorance in fact are dealt with, even as righteousness and sin are dealt with. They are dealt with morally, or as the proper subjects of a moral reckoning; and whereas under our existing economy the pleasures and preferments of a joyful eternity in heaven come in train of the one, hell and destruction and all the penal consequences of guilt in most frightful aggravation are made to follow in train of the other.

Now the question is, ought this in moral fairness to be? The equity of such a dispensation has been stoutly and openly denied. It has been asked if man be responsible for knowledge or understanding or belief, just as he is responsible for the dispositions of his heart or the doings of his hand. They can understand how man should be punished for his wrong behaviour. But they understand not how man should be punished for his wrong belief. The difficulty is to conceive on what ground the mere views of the understanding should properly be made the subjects of count or reckoning at all. Are the

wrong views of the understanding to be resented or revenged upon, just as you would resent or revenge the wrong volitions of the will? You at once perceive the justice of retribution for the conduct. But you do not perceive the justice of retribution for the creed. You would never think of blame or of vengeance either for the height of a man's stature, or for the hue and the features of his countenance. And in like manner the opinions of the judgment are held by some to be equally exempted, as things of physical and organic necessity, from blame or from vengeance. Man is held by them to be responsible for his doings, which he can help; but not for his doctrines, which they say he cannot helpAnd so the God of Christianity has been charged with unrighteousness; and Christianity itself with this dread inscription upon its forehead that "He who believeth not shall be damned"-has been indignantly exclaimed against as a hard and a most revolting dispensation.

Now we shall not enter on the consideration that the punishment consequent on the unbelief is not all for the unbelief, but for the guilt of a broken law, the condemnation of which takes its own proper and primary effect upon you, because you have not found your way to the place of refuge or of protection therefrom. This is very true-yet it is further true, that the guilt of a broken law is every where spoken of as enhanced and deepened to tenfold aggravation by the guilt of a rejected gospel. There is a wrath that abideth on unbelievers-even

that wrath which their sins had excited in the bosom of the Deity, and which they have not escaped from by the way announced and intimated in the New Testament. But there is also a wrath added to the former, and augmented on the head of unbelievers, just because they have not betaken themselves to that way. In other words, there is a displeasure on the part of God towards unbelief, just as there is a displeasure towards any moral violation. The creed of the infidel is dealt with as his crime; and the question still remains, how comes it that the mere errors of the understanding should have the same sort of delinquency affixed to them, as the wilful errors either of the heart or of the conduct?

In reply to this interrogation, we fully admit that no man is punished for what he cannot help, but then we affirm that his belief in certain circumstances, (and we think that Christianity is in these circumstances) is that which he can help. We admit that a moral delinquency should be charged on that which is not wilful-but we affirm that many are the occasions in which the belief or the unbelief is wilful; and that therefore, there might be no contravention of obvious justice in pronouncing the one to be a duty, and in proceeding against the other as you would against a crime. It is utterly a mistake to imagine that knowledge and opinion and belief, and in a word the various states of the understanding, are in no way dependent upon the will. It is by an act of the will that you set yourself to the acquisition of knowledge. It is

by an act of the will at the first, and by a continued act of the will afterwards, that you first commence and then continue a prolonged examination into the grounds of an opinion. It is at the bidding of the will, not that you believe without evidence, but that you investigate the evidence on which you might believe. In all these cases the will either gives its consent, or withholds it. It cannot create the light of evidence any more than it can create the light of nature. But it lies with it whether the evidence shall be attended to or regarded with the eye of the mind, even as it lies with it whether the illuminated landscape shall be looked upon or regarded with the eye of the body. It is in your power to shut or to avert the mental eye, just as it is in your power to shut or to avert the corporeal eye. It is in no way your fault, that you do not see when it is dark. But it is in every way your fault that you do not look when either the light of the natural heavens, or the light of Heaven's revelation is around you. It is thus that the will has virtually to do with the ultimate belief, just because it has to do with the various steps of that process which goes before it. Where there is candour, which is a moral property, the due attention will be given; and the man will arrive at the state of being right intellectually, but just because he is right morally. When there is the opposite of candour-a thing pronounced upon by all as a moral unfairness-the due attention will be refused; and the man will be landed in the state of

being wrong intellectually, but just because he is wrong morally.

You find a most impressive exemplification of this in the history of those very Jews whom we now are considering. During the whole of our Saviour's ministry upon earth they were plied with evidences, which, if they had but attended to would have carried their belief in the validity of His claims and credentials as a Messenger from heaven. But the belief was painful to them; and at all hazards they resolved to bar the avenues of their minds against the admittance of it. This was the attitude, the wilful, the hardy, the resolved attitude in which they listened to all His addresses and looked upon all His miracles. That unwelcome doctrine which so humbled the pride, and did such violence to the bigotry of their nation, was not to be borne with— and, rather than harbour a thing so intolerably offensive, they shut their minds against all that truth which lay both in the words and in the works of the Son of God; and they shut their hearts against all that tenderness as well as truth which fell in softest accents from a Saviour's lips, or beamed in mildness and mercy upon them from a Saviour's countenance. Who does not see that the will had a principal concern in all this opposition-that the pride and the passion and the interest and the ease, that these propensities of man's active and voluntary nature, had undoubted sway and operation in this warfare; that their love of darkness and their hatred of light. affixed to their unbelief the stigma