grass that covers the distant hill, and not feel emotions of delight? It is their isolated and estranged position that creates our censure. Just so it is as regards the Bible. The sinner, while living apart from God, is compared to the weeds and stubble, and is threatened, unless he repents and believes in the Saviour, as ‘willing and able to save all that come unto Him,’ to be also condemned and to receive that awful sentence which awaits the impenitent. When pardoned, however, he is brought into close communion with God, and, being united, becomes a lovely plant in the garden of the Lord. If our hearts were more fixed on the entire purity of God, we should peruse the Scriptures with an emphatic earnestness which would elevate us far above sensual and infidel conclusions. The real character of many of the declaimers against the Bible is thus portrayed:—“In the middle classes, among the half-thinking, half-instructed young men, a sort of infidelity is not unfrequent, which, after deducting something for the influence of worse motives, is attributable to affectation more than to any other cause. It is a mere impertinence, and indicates a want of sense, or profligacy of manners.” {46} And, now, what says the late eloquent and pious Robert Hall? “Settle it in your minds, as a maxim never to be effaced or forgotten, that infidelity is an inhuman and bloody system, equally hostile to every human restraint and to every virtuous affection—that, leaving nothing above us to create awe, nor round us to waken tenderness, it wages war with heaven and earth; its first object is to dethrone God; its next to destroy man.” Would that these sentiments, so forcibly expressed, could be engraven on the hearts of the rising generation throughout the world!