thought; and of this we are verily persuaded, that if he will consider the end of his calling, and seek for that aid which is from above, neither persecution, nor famine, nor the sword; neither joy nor sorrow; neither riches nor poverty; neither honour nor shame; neither life nor death, nor any other trial shall be able to separate him from his love and obedience to the Lord. Blessed Christian, heir of glory! Thou hast sought it and it shall be thine. Wretched unbeliever, child of darkness! Thou hast loved it and it shall happen unto thee, and under darkness shalt thou be reserved in everlasting chains unto the judgment of the great and awful day.

DISCOURSE X.

REV. chap. xix. ver. 10.

"The testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy."

Or the purity of the life and doctrines of our Lord we have spoken as designating the divine origin of his miraculous powers; of those miraculous powers themselves we have pointed out the peculiar utility and force, and to the predictions of the Old Testament, as they were fulfilled in the life and character of Jesus, we have paid a particular and minute attention. But the spirit of prophecy which rested upon Jesus himself, those clear and absolute predictions of future events which are recorded in the pages of the New Testament, have not yet found a place in our scheme. They form, however, so conspicuous a feature in the contemplation of the contents of the Gospel, and are so useful, as well as prominent, in their application to the evidences of

Christianity, that were we to leave them in silence or in obscurity, we should forego one of the brightest and most impressive of all the arguments which can be brought to bear upon the infidelity of modern days, and become justly obnoxious to censure, for a fault which we have already condemned-the error of resting our defence upon a very partial and imperfect estimate of the strength and bulwarks of our faith.

There is no end to the labyrinth of scepticism. The sceptic is one who has a conjecture for every thing, and a belief in nothing. He shuts his eyes to the force of moral proofs, and would rather give one of his doubtful assents to the most unreasonable possibility, if against, than to the most reasonable probability, if in favour of the Gospel. When, therefore, we press upon his attention the irresistible weight of testimony to the miracles of our Lord, and urge the certainty of the argument which those miracles afford to the divine authority of the religion for which they were wrought, he answers that it is possible that testimony may be false, and not probable that miracles should be true. He holds some events (as we have seen) "to be so extraordinary, that they can hardly be established by any testimony." He allows, however, that were he to become himself a spectator of any extraordinary event, he

*

would no longer hesitate to admit it, however singular, or however, abstractedly speaking, improbable. Now we maintain, that the whole of this reasoning is repugnant to the common sense of mankind, and we think we have shewn it to be altogether inapplicable to the miracles of the Gospel. But we rest not upon our own reasonings alone. It is precisely at this point that the argument from prophecy is of most avail, and meets the sceptic upon his own ground. The sceptic himself allows that a prophecy fulfilled is neither more nor less than a miracle. It is, in fact, the sure and certain sign of supernatural knowledge, in the very same manner, and to the very same extent, in which a common miracle is the sign of extraordinary power; and the founder of a new and a holy religion who predicts the future, and whose predictions are fulfilled, gives us as convincing and miraculous a proof of the divine origin of that religion he proclaims, as by the restoration of sight to the blind. For he who opens the eyes the blind, and he who opens the womb of futurity, do alike make men to see what they had never seen before, and never otherwise would have been able to see. If then we can prove in a manner which ought to bring the satisfaction of the

* See Discourse IV.

+ Indeed all prophecies are miracles." HUME.

of

sceptic himself, that the spirit of prophecy rested upon Jesus, we shall have given a testimony to his mission which he cannot but admit. If we bring before his view a prophecy of our Saviour fulfilling or fulfilled, we answer his own demand. We make him spectator of a miracle, and give him that, of which he talks so much, the testimony of experience to the reality of a miraculous event. We do more.-We render also every other miracle of our Saviour a probable occurrence, and capable of being established into certainty by the application of the commonest rules of evidence; and thus prove that the unequivocal and disinterested testimony of the Evangelists is as sufficient to prove the reality of the miraculous as the ordinary works of our Lord. For it is highly reasonable to suppose, that he who has done one miracle may also have done more. It thus appears that one of the most signal advantages of the spirit of prophecy is, as the Apostle expresses it to be, "the testimony of Jesus," to every generation to supply, by the continued wonder of its fulfilment, the cessation of miraculous powers in the Church-to convince every age not only of the probability but of the reality of the astonishing works of Jesus, and throw in such a flood of light and certainty upon the human and historical testimony in his favour, as to make it irresistible to every unprejudiced mind.