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SERMON I.

Character and Claims of Revelation.

JOHN V. 39.

SEARCH THE SCRIPTURES; FOR IN THEM YE THINK YE HAVE ETERNAL LIFE; AND THEY ARE THEY WHICH TESTIFY OF ME.

THE works of God confessedly invite and deserve investigation. The more carefully they are examined, the more fully and strikingly they reveal his wisdom, power, and benevolence. Even the scrutiny of philosophical research, when rightly directed, the farther it has been urged, has invariably led to wider and more accurate discoveries of the divine character. But such examination has never been thus directed by man's native powers. Left to himself, man has only departed farther and farther from those truths, which the simple school of nature teaches. And when it was found, that, amidst the grandest and most impressive features of the divine wisdom and goodness stamped upon the fabric of his material works, man by wisdom knew not God, by the loftiest stretch of his unaided powers gained no right views of his character, it pleased him, in condescension to that weakness and ignorance which sin brought over the human mind, to step aside from the course of his creative operations, and to disclose himself to man by intelligible enunciations of his own holy nature, his spiritual requirements, and his merciful designs. He gave to our world the volume of his grace.

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