"That the present existence is one of trial with reference to another state of being, is confirmed by all that we know in what is termed the course of nature. Probation is the only key that unfolds to us the designs of God in the history of human affairs, the only clue that guides us through the pathless wilderness, and the only plan upon which this world could possibly have been formed, or upon which its history can be explained." This world was not formed upon a plan of unconditioned happiness, because it is overspread with miseries. Neither was it formed upon a plan of unconditioned misery, for there are many joys interspersed throughout the whole. It was not formed for the unconditional existence of both vice and virtue, for that is no plan at all, the two elements being, as we know, destructive of each other. By the way, in this very fact we find the grand necessity for the remedial scheme. The mixture of vice and virtue, of happiness and misery, is a necessary result of a state of probation, trials and sufferings consequent upon offending or violating the will of heaven. The doctrine of the religion of Christ, with its ultimate object and its ideas of God and man, of the present and the future life, and of the relations which these all bear to each other, was and is wholly unheard of until you come to the teachings of Christ. No other religion ever drew such pictures of the worthlessness of earthly-mindedness and of living merely for this present world. And no other ever set out such beautiful, lively and glorious pictures of heavenly-mindedness, along with the joys of a future world, nor such pictures of victory over death and the grave, nor of the last judgment, nor of the triumphs of the redeemed in that tremendous day. The personal character of the great author, Christ, is as new and peculiar to this religion as anything else that we can possibly name--"He spake as never man spake." He is the only founder of a religion which is "unconnected with all human policy and government," and, as such, should not be prostituted to any mere worldly purposes whatever. Numa, Mohammed, and even Moses, blended their religious institutions with their civil, and by such means controlled their adherents. Christ neither exercised nor accepted such power. He rejected every motive which controlled other leaders, and chose those which others avoided. Power, honor, riches and pleasure were alike disregarded. He seemed to court poverty, sufferings and death.