"To you, who are initiated into a firm belief of the Divine origin of Christianity, this apparent adaptation of it to our moral condition and necessities, and its revelations of a future state of happiness, must appear as the consummation of wisdom and benevolence. But I cannot resist the impression, that it is to the activity of your imagination you ought to attribute this correspondence, rather than to any actual fact; and that you are, at least so I think, unconsciously beguiling yourself with pleasing anticipations which will all prove visionary." "The gospel, Sir, is a living reality, and it works moral wonders." "I don't quite comprehend your meaning." "I mean, that it answers the purpose for which it was intended, or, in other words, it does the moral work which is ascribed to it, and does it effectually; this I can prove by an appeal to living testimony. Hence, when it is received by faith, it _does_ give peace to a wounded conscience; it _does_ infuse a renovating power, by which man becomes a new creature, in his moral principles and social habits; it does administer the most soothing and strengthening consolation to the child of sorrow, and it animates the dying believer with the hopes of a blissful immortality. These are moral facts which the experience of myriads can attest." "Yes, I see how it is; the imagination traces a correspondence between its own impulses, and aerial flights, and the component parts of your scriptural theory; and you very naturally think that you would be robbed of an inestimable treasure, and the world at large sustain an irreparable loss, if your theory of faith should be exploded as a worn-out relic of an antiquated superstition." "But, after all you say against the Christian faith, I do not think you would vote for its expulsion from the earth, even if you thought you could succeed in effecting it; and I will tell you why. Its expulsion would be as great a calamity to the moral world, as the total disappearance of the solar light would be to the physical--we should at once relapse into a state of profound ignorance on all the important questions which relate to God, to our origin, our immortality, and our destiny. We should then find ourselves groping about, like the ancient heathen, amidst vain and foolish speculations, striving to unravel the mysteries of our nature, and finding no resting-place for our troubled spirits. I have often thought, when musing on such a fearful occurrence, what an awful gloom would spread over the world if we knew that the fatal hour was coming, when, by some supernatural process, all our knowledge of Jesus Christ, and the design of his mission and death, would suddenly pass away from human recollection; and when every leaf in our Bible, and of all other books referring to him, should become as blank as they were before they were printed--leaving us, like the doomed spirits of the infernal world, without a Saviour, or any promise of mercy."