A pagan might be as orthodox as Paul on the doctrine of works. First,--set aside the large portion of them that have their source in the constitutional temperament,--the merit of which, if any, belongs to nature, not to the individual agent; and of the remaining number of good works, nine are derived from vices for one that has its origin in virtue. I have often in looking at the water-works, and complex machinery of our manufactories, indulged a humorous mood by fancying that the hammers, cogs, fly-wheels, &c. were each actuated by some appetite, or passion--hate, rage, revenge, vanity, cupidity, &c. while the general result was most benignant, and the machine, taken as a whole, the product of power, knowledge, and benevolence! Such a machine does the moral world, the world of human nature, appear--and to those who seem ever more to place the comparison and the alternative between hell and earth, and quite overlook the opposition between earth and heaven, I recommend this meditation. EVIDENCES OF CHRISTIANITY. [1] I. MIRACLES--as precluding the contrary evidence of no miracles. II. The material of Christianity, its existence and history. III. The doctrines of Christianity, and the correspondence of human nature to those doctrines,--illustrated, 1st, historically--as the actual production of a new world, and the dependence of the fate of the planet upon it;-- 2nd, individually--from its appeal for its truth to an asserted fact,--which, whether it be real or not, every man possessing reason has an equal power of ascertaining within himself;--namely, a will which has more or less lost its freedom, though not the consciousness that it ought to be and may become free;--the conviction that this cannot be achieved without the operation of a principle connatural with itself;--the evident rationality of an entire confidence in that principle, being the condition and means of its operation;--the experience in his own nature of the truth of the process described by Scripture as far as he can place himself within the process, aided by the confident assurances of others as to the effects experienced by them, and which he is striving to arrive at. All these form a practical Christian. Add, however, a gradual opening out of the intellect to more and more clear perceptions of the strict coincidence of the doctrines of Christianity, with the truths evolved by the mind, from reflections on its own nature. To such a man one main test of the objectivity, the entity, the objective truth of his faith, is its accompaniment by an increase of insight into the moral beauty and necessity of the process which it comprises, and the dependence of that proof on the causes asserted. Believe, and if thy belief be right, that insight which gradually transmutes faith into knowledge will be the reward of that belief. The Christian, to whom, after a long profession of Christianity, the mysteries remain as much