THE BIBLICAL REPOSITORY AND CLASSICAL REVIEW. THIRD SERIES, NO. XIV.-WHOLE NUMBER, LXVII. APRIL, 1848. ARTICLE I. INFLUENCE OF CHRISTIANITY ON CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY. By Rev. ROBERT BAIRD, D. D., New York. Ir is Christianity alone which can give the noblest freedom. In the language of its glorious Author, this wonderful truth was uttered: If the Son shall make you free, ye shall be free indeed." Christianity comes to man like an angel of mercy, bearing in her hands the double gift of pardon and holiness. She brings to him a full and complete atonement for his sins, and secures the renovation of his soul. It reveals a Savior who suffered and bled on the Cross for our transgressions, and a Holy Spirit to renew and purify our hearts. How wonderful, and yet how simple! How simple, and yet how philosophical is the plan of salvation which the Gospel contains! What could be better adapted to the wants of humanity? What could better commend itself to enlightened reason, when revealed, although its discovery far surpasses all human intelligence? "Repentance toward God, and faith toward the Lord Jesus Christ," are the terms upon which salvation becomes ours. But what a repentance! Not only does it imply a confession of sins, but a heartfelt hatred and a sincere renunciation of them, together with a restoration of our affections to the ever-blessed God. And what a faith! Not simply an intellectual assent to the truth of the Gospel, but such a belief of it as "works by love, purifies the heart, and overcomes the world." Such is the religion of the Gospel,-presenting to our acceptance a Divine Victim, on which our faith may lay her hand in THIRD SERIES, VOL. IV. NO. 2. 1 confidence and peace; and bringing to our help a Divine Spirit, who can regenerate our hearts, enlighten our understandings, and make our wills to coincide with the will of the infinitely wise, beneficent, and holy Ruler of the universe. What a religion! How gloriously does it exhibit the character of the everblessed God, whom it sets forth as a just God, and yet a Savior! And how admirably adapted to man, securing to him both the pardon of his sins, and the restitution of the image of God to his heart-saving him from hell, and fitting him for heaven! Well, indeed, does the Gospel deserve to be called a glorious Gospel. Compared with Christianity, how inadequate to the wants of man appear all other religions which the world has ever seen; how vain and worthless even! But let us contemplate the influence of this blessed religion upon the character of the individual man and here we scarcely know at what point to begin, or where to end. 1. The Gospel, when it is truly received into the heart, annihilates the guilt which binds the sinner to that eternal punishment due to his transgressions, and announces to him that there is "no condemnation to them that are in Christ Jesus." It brings him into a state of favor with his Maker, and enables him to look with joy and confidence upon the face of his once offended Savior and Judge; it takes away the fear of hell, and fills the soul with the hope of heaven. O blessed liberation from the danger of being eternally lost! O blessed assurance of everlasting life! What but the Gospel can work such a transformation in the state and prospects of him who was before overwhelmed in condemnation! 2. The faith which saves, gives a blessed emancipation to "them who through fear of death were all their life-time subject to bondage." The fear of death! Next to the dread of the wrath of God, it is the most widely-spread and overwhelming of all the fears which mankind ever experience. Who has not trembled at the thought of death? Who has not shrunk from its cold embrace? What heart has not quailed before the mysterious gloom which hangs around the dying bed? Who has not dreaded to enter into the unseen and eternal world, of whose position, inhabitants, modes of existence, sources of joy or pain, we have no knowledge, and scarcely anything more than vague conceptions; for none, of all who have entered it, have returned to tell us anything about it. Ah, there is enough here to make the stoutest heart to fear, and cause the firmest knees to tremble, and smite one against another. But blessed be God, the glorious Gospel of His Son can overcome even this. Yea, it can not only overcome the dread of death, but it can make death itself the messenger, sent down by our Heavenly Father, to conduct the soul to the regions of everlasting blessedness. It can make those who once trembled at the very name of death to exult with exceeding joy at its near approach. Is not this a disenthralment of the most glorious nature? And what but the Gospel can effect this? 3. The Gospel delivers man from the greatest of all slaverythat of subjection to his passions. It teaches him to restore to their proper objects those affections which had become alienated from those objects, and restrain and regulate those which had transcended the limits which God in His laws, as well as in our nature, has assigned them. It can reclaim the violent, the covetous, the malicious, the sensual, the debauched, the drunken, -in a word, those who are degraded by the most debasing and inveterate vices-from the evil of their ways, and transform them into the image of God. For the love and practice of sin it can implant in their hearts the love and pursuit of whatsoever is pure, whatsoever is lovely, whatsoever is of good report. What renovations has it not made in its blessed career in our world of sin and wretchedness? What miracles has it not wrought?-miracles which attest, and establish beyond refutation, its claims to a celestial origin. 4. The Gospel delivers man from the bondage of many degrading and vulgar superstitions. It reveals to him enough of the invisible world to make him know that he can never be alone. But it teaches him that, with a mind solemnly and affectionately pervaded by a belief and a sense of the unseen presence of his Heavenly Father, he should have no other fear. Christianity teaches him that not a hair of his head can fall to the ground without the permission of that Great Being who walks by his side from the cradle to the grave. Why then should he fear any of those subordinate beings, whatever they may be, who are but His servants? What can harm him, if the Infinite God be ever with him, to protect and to save him? 5. And lastly, Christianity emancipates from the thraldom of debasing and miserable ignorance. It spreads before man the volumes of God's works, God's providence, and God's grace, and invites, solicits, encourages, and even commands him to read and study them. The Gospel is the friend of knowledge and of science. For there is no true knowledge or science, which is not of God, and which does not lead to God, when pursued by a mind renewed by God's Spirit. That ignorance is favorable to piety, or in other words, "the mother of devotion," as it is impiously expressed-is a dogma worthy of a Church whose origin is to be found in the dark ages, and not of one which is the habitation of that God "who is light, and in whom there is no darkness at all." And what fields are spread out for our contemplation, in which Christianity invites us to gather both rich and abundant sheaves of knowledge! The glorious heavens above us, the air we |