and keep up the execution of that design? If they could, where is your proof from the unity of design? and how are you to prove that they could not? If you draw your proof from the disagreement which must necessarily take place among men, you then judge of the divinities by yourselves, making yourselves the standard of their actions, and making them no more gods than you are. This looks much more like the theology of Homer, who, Longinus being judge, has represented his gods like men, and his men like gods. The alternative is manifestly this: twenty gods may agree in producing the harmony of the universe; or should they disagree, that disagreement would prove that there are no gods, which contradicts the very terms of the argument, and is a begging of the question. My argument is a very plain one. Twenty true gods might agree perfectly, and you answer this by showing that they could not be gods at all! Well, then, your reason even now, with all that revelation has done for it, fails most lamentably in the proof that there is only one living and true God. In fact the doctrine of the ancient Persians, and later of the Manichees, that there are two principles, one good and the other evil, appears to be more consonant to de- . praved reason than the doctrine of the divine unity.

In the same manner it may be shown, that mere reason will not bear you out in the posi

tion that the one God is necessarily the Eternal, Immutable, Omnipresent, Omniscient. When you come to the consideration of his goodness, your difficulties increase. He does, indeed, pour his bounty upon the earth; but he also pours out his curse. A fruitful season is balanced by one of sterility. If you have one year abundance of food, you have a famine in another. If the heavens are now serene and pleasing, they are again charged with thunder and lightning, pregnant with hail-storm and tempest. To-day the genial shower descends; to-morrow a flood sweeps off together the fruits of human industry and of the earth's fertility, and carries away both man and beast in its impetuous torrent. At one time the atmosphere is benign and exhilarating; at another, charged with the pestilence, it causes us to inhale our death with the very instrument of life. Nature's light furnishes not the key to these apparent contradictions, nor enables us to conceive how a Being of boundless goodness can inflict so much suffering. tures, probable conjectures, we may have, but none can say that his conjectures are demonstrated; and therefore none can show a solid foundation on which the mind can rest.

Conjec

This deep and dreadful fluctuation of opinion, arising from the variations we perceive in the government of the world, shakes all our ideas at the same time of the divine immutability;

and a changeling God is a most fearful thought.

Should ever the query arise in our minds, and it has often arisen in the minds of many, what is the mode of subsistence in the divine nature? we stand at once aghast. "It is high as heaven, what can we know? Deeper than hell, what can we do?" Who among the children of men is not subdued, confounded, annihilated, by the majesty of the theme, by his own daring presumption? Here we stand, young and old, learned and unlearned, wise and foolish, alike petrified by our own intrusion "into those things which we have not seen." And who would ever have dreamed of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in that one God, had he not been pleased to reveal the fact by that Spirit who scarcheth "the deep things of God?" Yet if the true knowledge of the true God be essential in all circumstances to our duty and our happiness, the doctrine of the ever blessed Trinity must be a branch, and a material branch, of natural religion.

That the soul of man is immortal, has been argued from its immateriality-from its capacities-from its desires-and from the course of providence—all of which, when weighed in the balance, will be found wanting. None, upon which, in the hour of your utmost need, you could with confidence stake your eternity.

1. It has been argued that because the soul is immaterial, it must necessarily be immortal— because from its immateriality, it has no principle of dissolution. Now death is a dissolution, and that which cannot be dissolved, cannot die.

Granting that all this, except the conclusion, is correctly spoken; that there is no sophistry in the argument, no play upon the terms; how does the conclusion follow? Life and death depend upon the sovereign pleasure of God. Now where has he told you that he will never command an immaterial being back again into its original nothing? When did he deprive himself of his power to annihilate any of his creatures, and to create others in their stead? It will not do to say, that whatever be his power, it is not his purpose. How do you know that? Search the earth and the heavens till you find a proof of it. For aught that appears from nature's light, God may have many wise reasons to deprive even immaterial beings of existence. They come into the world by his almighty fiat. They there answer a temporary purpose, and then are ordered out of it. What have you to say, why it should not be so? You may not pretend that it contradicts all your ideas of the divine goodness and wisdom. But how are you sure that your ideas are right? things they are manifestly wrong.

In many other
A short proof

is, that your goodness and wisdom would do every thing in the government of the universe different from what he does. And suppose it be the same case here. You cannot show that it is not. Therefore, for aught you can tell, the soul's immateriality is no bar to its annihilation.

2. When we draw an inference from the capacities of the soul to its immortality, we talk at random. Those capacities are, indeed, in our view, stupendous. We can form no conception of the improvement and powers which the most unpromising of human beings may in due season develop. But what are these to the Infinite One? He could, with perfect ease, vacate all their stations in the scale of being, and instantly replace them with creatures far nobler, and of still greater capacities. The world, for aught we can tell, would be no loser by the exchange, and his glory might be a great gainer. What has your reason to say to the contrary? You may guess, you may conjecture: but guessing and conjecturing afford a very miserable foothold when you are about stepping into a state of untried being. And I will venture to say, that no man ever yet enjoyed any solid comfort, from the mere consciousness of a capacity fitted for lasting good. He must be equally conscious of a capacity of lasting wo. And the idea of miserable existence cannot be comfortable.