teacher would impress upon a child; but not in the "form' given by Mr. Barker-rather after that given by our Lord in his conversation with Nicodemus. T. Do you ever pray for a new heart? C-No, why should I? T.-Because the 66 66 66 bible tells you that, "except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God." C.-What is the meaning of being born again? T.-The entire conversion of your soul to God; being made a new creature; having your will, affections, desires, and feelings all changed; being made to hate sin and love holiness. Your heart is so deceitful," that you may fancy yourself good enough for heaven; but you must pray to be enlightened from above, that you may know the plague of your own heart," and see it to be, what the bible says it is, desperately wicked: " and then you must pray for a new heart, a new nature, and say, "Create in me a clean heart, O Lord, and renew a right spirit within me." C-How came my heart to be so bad? Did God make it so? T.-No,“God made man upright," but man fell from his uprightness by sinning against God, and so he became alienated from. God, his nature became corrupt and sinful, and that nature you inherit from your parents; so that you were born in sin, and are "by nature a child of wrath, even as others;" for "that which is born of the flesh is flesh," and can never be anything else, until it is born again of the Spirit. You may not be able to comprehend the whole of this subject at first; nay, there are mysteries in the gospel, which are beyond the reach of any one to fathom, as the bible tells us continually; but you must ask God to show you the plan of salvation, to teach you all that is necessary for you to know, to guide you into all truth, to keep you from all error, and give you grace to "receive with meekness" whatever he tells you in his word, however difficult or mysterious it may appear to your mind. C.-Is there any danger in disbelieving what God tells us? T.-Yes, "he that believeth not shall be damned;" but "he that believeth and is baptised shall be saved." C.What has God told us? T.-That he gave his only begotten Son to be the propitiation or atonement for our sins, and that whosoever believeth on him shall not perish, but have everlasting life. Saving faith is "the gift of God"; if you ask him for it humbly and earnestly, he will give it you; and then you will enjoy pardon and peace here, and everlasting happiness hereafter. Do you not love God, my child, for all this? Do you not feel thankful to him for giving his own Son to die for you, and promising to send his Holy Sprit to take away your heart of stone, and give you a heart of flesh? Is it not a delightful thing to think that, though you are such a lost, guilty, ruined creature, yet a remedy is provided, a ransom found, and a refuge open to you, which you may flee to and be safe? Is it not a delightful thing to think, that a Saviour is ready to receive you, who will wash you from your sins in his blood, who will cleanse you from their guilt, deliver you from their power, and after death raise you up to a glorious immortality, where sin, sorrow and sighing will flee away, and you will reign with Christ for ever and ever? Is this enough to make you love God, who has so loved you? and should you not pray for those of your fellow-creatures, who are so blinded by Satan, that being ignorant of their own guilty ruined state, they will neither seek to be born again of the Holy Spirit, nor to be washed in the "fountain of Immanuel's blood, that is " open for sin and for uncleanness"? Delightful! The highest Archangel might well covet such an employment as to instil such glorious truths into the child like mind. If children are only taught this doctrine in its scriptural form, and the Spirit's blessing accompany the instruction, they cannot fail to see its truth, and feel the utmost possible love and gratitude to the Being, who has made such a wondrous display of mercy and compassion. EPITAPH ON A TOMB-STONE AT CAMBRIDGE. Bold Infidelity, turn pale and die; Beneath this stone four sleeping infants lie: Say, are they lost or saved? If death's by sin, they sinned-for they are here; Revere the Bible's sacred page; the knot's untied; LECTURE VII. THE TRINITY. Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Matt. xxviii. 19. HAVING in our last Lecture shown one part of man's fall, from a state of loving obedient dependence upon God, with the remedy provided for it, in regeneration or being born again of the Holy Spirit; there remains to be considered the second part of his fall, from the favour of God into a state of condemnation, with the remedy provided for it, in the redemption, propitiation, or atonement of Jesus Christ. But as the efficacy of the atonement depends upon the Deity of Christ, it will be necessary to prepare the way for the proof of that, by first showing the scriptural evidence for the doctrine of the Trinity. The word Trinity is taken from a Latin word (tres) which means three; the word unity is taken from another, (unus) which means one: a triune being therefore is a being who is both three and one, both a Trinity and a Unity. Such a being, scripture teaches us, is God. If we are to believe God's own record of himself, we must be both Unitarians and Trinitarians; to be either without the other would be equally unscriptural. This shows, that when we call deniers of the Trinity by the name of Unitarians, it is only on the same principle that we call Papists by the name of Catholics; because, having assumed it to themselves, it has got to be in common use, and is generally understood. But it is necessary to protest against the usurpation; for, though we are Trinitarians and Protestants, we are also Unitarians and Catholics. All arguments and texts therefore brought to prove that God is One, that there is but one Lord, that his name is One, and so on, are just as much on our side as on the Socinian's. They establish one essential part of our doctrine-the Unity of God. People are often deceived by a great array of texts concerning God's Unity, which are produced to disprove his Trinity. We insist that God is One, just as strongly as our opponents do; therefore what can be the use, when arguing against us, of heaping up proofs of what we are both agreed on? The only use it can be, is to deceive ignorant persons into the idea that they have proved their point, when in reality they have only proved what no one denies they have proved the Unity, but have not gone one step towards disproving the Trinity. Let them bring a single text to prove that God's Unity is not a compound Unity, F that in his unity there is not a trinity, and then they will be coming to the point. But they well know that, however many are the assertions in scripture of there being only one God, there is not a word which can be tortured into a proof, that this one God is not also three Persons. But the thing is absurd, we are told, and impossible in itself: how can God, or anything else, be both three and one? Do you remember St. Paul's answer to the objector, who said, How are the dead raised up, and with what body do they come? If a bucket could be endued with speech and reason, and was to say, I'll not believe there is such a thing as the ocean, because I cannot contain it,-would it be greater folly than that of a worm like man, who will not believe what God reveals of his own nature, because the mysteries of the Infinite cannot be compressed within the compass of his finite mind; because he cannot conceive it, or understand how it is so? "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than hell; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. If he cut off, and shut up, or gather together, then who can hinder him? For he knoweth vain man: he seeth wickedness also; will he not then consider it? For vain man would be wise, though man be born like a wild ass's colt." Job xi. 7-12. Did you ever try to realise to your mind the existence of a God at all? Hear the words of a man who possessed one of the greatest minds that ever a Christian minister was gifted with, Robert Hall; "How the Divine Being exists in an essential and eternal nature of his own, without beginning as well as without end: how he can be present at the same moment in every point of boundless space, without excluding any one of his creatures from the room it occupies: how, unseen, unfelt by all, he can maintain a pervading and intimate acquaintance and contact with all parties and all portions of the universe: how he can be at once all eye, all ear, all presence, all energy, yet interfere with none of the perceptions and actions of his creatures,-this is what equally baffles the mightiest and the meanest intellect. This is the great mystery of the universe, which is at once the most certain and the most incomprehensible of all things; a truth enveloped at once in a flood of light and in an abyss of darkness. Inexplicable itself, it explains all besides. It casts a clearness on every question, accounts for every phenomenon, solves every problem, illuminates every depth, and renders the whole mystery of existence as perfectly simple, as it is otherwise perfectly unintelligible: while itself alone remains in impenetrable obscurity. After displacing every other difficulty, it remains the greatest of all, in solitary, insurmountable, unapproachable grandeur. So truly clouds and darkness are round about him; he maketh darkness his secret habitation, his pavilion to cover him thick clouds." Yes; to allow God's eternity, that he never had a beginning, and then to say that his Trinity is too difficult a thing to believe, is indeed to "strain at a gnat and swallow a camel." But although we fully acknowledge, that there are unfathomable mysteries connected with the doctrine of the trinity, especially in reference to the Son's incarnation, yet as far as the simple fact of a tri-unity is concerned, we contend that the idea is perfectly familiar to our minds, that numberless instances of it are perpetually before our eyes, and there is not the slightest difficulty either in understanding or believing it. The Pope's triple crown is but one crown. A committee formed of three persons is but one committee. The Prime Minister and other officers under the Queen form but one government All the electors in a borough form but one constituency, all the members but one House of Commons, the Peers but one House of Lords, and the two Houses together but one Parliament. Husband, wife and children make but one family, many houses but one town, many drops of water but one river, root branches and leaves but one tree. Many letters make but one word, many words but one sentence, many sentences but one page, many pages but one book, many books but one library. Again, many soldiers make but one regiment, and many regiments but one army. In fact we may safely challenge the Unitarian to produce a single thing, either in nature or art, that is a simple unity. Unities there are in abundance: an army, a parliament, a book, is each a unity; but they are all compound unities. And this, be it observed, is the thing cavilled at as impossible and absurd in the Godhead. No one pretends, that there is any peculiar difficulty in the number three, more than any other number: what the Unitarian pronounces incredible being the plurality of persons in the Godhead; that is, there being more persons than one-the word plurality being taken from a Latin word (plures) which means 'more,' How marvellous! compelled to acknowledge that every thing around him, down to the minutest atom that the microscope reveals, is a plurality or compound unity, he yet thinks it incredible, that the Maker of them all should be one himself! But the works of creation, be it observed, not only show a plurality in every unity, but in a wonderful number of cases that plurality is found to be a trinity; nay, the deeper science penetrates into the elements of nature, the more certain does it appear, that all creation is a "tri-une shadow" of it's Maker. Take for example the rainbow. What a trinity in unity is this! "The rainbow, which is light analysed, is but three colours, blue, yellow, and red, with their intermediate shades. I think no one of these can be mixed or made of others, and in their union they produce colourless light." Pure light has no colour; and therefore, although rendering other things visible, is invisible itself. Light is not a simple, but a compound, unity: and being composed of three colours, it is a trinity. In the rainbow, this in |