Thus the gospel commends itself to my conscience and my heart, as “the gospel of the blessed God.” But there is other, and if possible still stronger, proof of its divinity; namely, its power to renew the human soul, and reform the human character. The Earl of Rochester was a great skeptic, and one of the most witty and sarcastic men of his age. In his last sickness, he was reading the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah; where the prophet, in so graphic and touching a manner, describes the vicarious sufferings of Christ. It scattered all his deistical doubts, as the sun scatters the mist of the morning; led him with a broken and believing heart to the atoning Lamb of God; and converted his death-bed into a vestibule of heaven. This is not a solitary case. Thousands and millions have been, in like manner, awakened and converted through the gospel, and brought to the knowledge of the truth as it is in Jesus. It is “mighty through God, to the pulling down of strong-holds; casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God; and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ”—turning men from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan to God, that they may receive remission of sins, and an inheritance among all them that are sanctified through faith in Jesus. Matthew at the custom-house, the woman of Samaria at Jacob’s well, the dying malefactor upon the cross, the penitent jailor at Philippi, the blasphemous persecutor on the road to Damascus, and three thousand souls under Peter’s preaching at the Pentecost, all found it “the power of God unto salvation.” And still it retains its convincing and quickening virtue. Wherever it is proclaimed in its purity, and accompanied with the power of the Holy Ghost, proud and hardened sinners are pricked in their hearts, and forced to cry out—“Men and brethren, what must we do?” It answers the question. It points to the crucified and saith—“Believe and be saved!” It reconciles the enemy unto God. It makes the blasphemer a man of prayer, the sensualist a man of purity, the inebriate a man of sobriety; and where sin abounded, grace much more abounds. The dead whom Jesus quickened had no time to inquire into the mysterious process by which the work was wrought. They sprang instantly into life by the power of God. Yet the evidence of the change was clear and incontestible. So it is with the transforming effects of the gospel. We cannot rationally doubt its power to raise the soul from death in trespasses and sins. Suppose I have been long afflicted with a cancer, or have been bitten by a mad-dog, or a rattlesnake; and I find a sovereign and instantaneous remedy; but after I am cured, a skeptic calls upon me, and tries to convince me that the remedy is good for nothing, insists that it is a cheat lately invented by a villain, demands of me to prove that such things were used before the deluge, and asks me a