eral spread of the gospel, but whose benevolence is not of good report in their own neighborhood.* That tendency in our fallen nature which induces us to place reliance on a doctrinal creed, or on a zealous temperament, in the neglect of humane sentiments and of a generous disposition, is the reason why the apostles so earnestly admonish their disciples on the subject.

Nearly allied to this disposition, and, perhaps, a result of it, is candor in judgment,-a habit of putting a charitable construction upon the motives of our fellow-men; the absence of bigotry and exclusiveness; a resolute determination to judge of books, of systems of knowledge, and of men, with discriminating kindness. No one ought to be considered as eminently pious, who is rash and overbearing in his moral or literary judgments. If his piety does not enter into and control these matters, it is onesided and partial. We are not required, indeed, to remain ignorant of the deficiencies of our neighbors and friends; but we are required to throw the mantle of charity over their faults, and to maintain, in all our intercourse with them, the character of Christian gentlemen. Now these illiberal judgments, and uncourteous feelings are intimately connected with a narrow understanding and with confined intellectual opinions. The natural tendency of enlarged views and of extensive and patient reading, is to break down the barriers of party, and of a selfish bigotry, while it refines and ennobles the soul.

It implies an

Distinguished piety is conscientious. habitual performance of the smaller duties of life; a careful attention to the thousand minute occurrences of every day. It implies a wakeful moral sensibility, a delicate spiritual perception, an instinctive shrinking from the remotest contact with evil. Some individuals, who have been regarded as eminently pious, appear to have been very imperfectly controlled by their conscience. It took cognizance of the presumptuous sin. It laid its authority on the out-breaking enormity; but it slept over unnumbered nameless delinquences. It did not utter its warning in the incipient stages of transgression. In such

We have a well authenticated statement respecting an orthodox professor of Christianity, who declined to assist a neighbor's family involved in distress, on the ground of the heterodoxy of a member of that family.

cases, the conscience is not enlightened by knowledge. It is in a state of comparative eclipse.

In forming an estimate of what constitutes eminent piety, we sometimes err in not making sufficient allowance for diversities of natural character. We erect a standard, and determine that all men shall conform to it. We fabricate one suit of armor, and compel David and Saul alike to wear it. But there are innocent temperaments, diverse in different individuals, all of which we would extinguish. If we had our will, there would be one dull, tasteless uniformity in the character of our piety, eminent though it might be. But distinguished holiness is consistent with the countless varieties of innocent natu

ral temperament. That development of thought and feeling which, in one man, would be at war with his religious consistency, would be perfectly in unison with another, because it would be in accordance with the man and his general spirit.

Richard Baxter somewhere remarks, that, at one period, he entertained doubts in relation to the experimental character of the piety of Sir Mathew Hale, inasmuch as the judge was inclined, in his almost daily conversation with Baxter, to dwell upon abstract truth, or on speculative opinion, with scarcely an allusion to personal, religious feeling. Baxter was subsequently convinced, however, that he had formed an erroneous judgment. It would have been incongruous in Hale to have copied the ardent manner of Baxter. His unimpeachable integrity as a judge, his conscientious observance of the Sabbath day, were better proofs of eminent piety than any conversational powers could have been. Hale kept himself unspotted from the world in the court of Charles II. Could Baxter, or any other man, have done more?

3. The beneficial effects of piety on the human mind may be argued from facts. It has been contended, indeed, that distinguished holiness is of no importance to the mind, or is even positively injurious, from the circumstance that the intellectual powers have been cultivated in a high degree by many individuals who did not possess eminent piety, or, indeed, any piety whatever. Their interest in literary studies, it is said, was not distracted by religious duties. Their time was not wasted by the

agitating, never-ceasing conflict between the natural inclinations and the renewed nature, of which Christians complain so much. They could give an undivided attention to the culture of the intellect.

Some of these allegations cannot, of course, be denied. The mind may be disciplined by him who has no fear of God before his eyes, just in the same way that riches may be acquired by one who never acknowledges his dependence on an overruling Providence. A politician may have an insatiable desire to attain a place of honor. In order to accomplish his object, he must lay in large intellectual treasures. The hand of the diligent maketh rich. The hand of the diligent maketh learned also. It is possible that in some cases there may be such a total slumber of the moral faculty, that the intellect will proceed undisturbed in its movements, and may thus reach a more extraordinary growth when the affections are withered or scorched, just as the soil which has been burnt over, may send up a quicker and more luxuriant vegetation.

There are several considerations, however, which deserve attention before we conclude that eminent piety would have no influence in the case. It has never been proved that those distinguished writers, who are unfriendly to Christianity, might not have been more distinguished, if they had felt the power of the religion which they opposed. If Gibbon had had an experimental acquaintance with Christianity, would he not have better understood various portions of the historical ground over which he travelled? Are not some of his prominent and acknowledged defects owing to his prejudices on this subject? Would David Hume have been a less acute metaphysician, had he possessed the spirit of Robert Boyle? Christianity makes no war on those mental characteristics for which Hume was celebrated. It gives free passage to the sharpest intellect, while it would suppress that dishonesty, that love of entangling sophistry, which were a real injury to Hume's mind, and always will be to his reputation. His works are deficient in dignity. They betray many marks of having come from a laughing philosopher, to whom life was a pleasant riddle, and eternity an ingenious phantom. Faith in the realities of a future state would have imparted a grandeur to Hume's speculations, which would have been of immense benefit to them in a mere literary point

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of view. He would also have had some sympathy for his fellow-men, some interest in the well-being of his race. Religion would have divested him of that freezing indifference to the struggles of humanity which so strongly marks the pages of his great history.

Again, some men of the most hopeful intellect have felt it to be their duty to employ their whole time in practical exertions for the benefit of their fellow-men. They might have become rich in all literary acquisitions, if they had not chosen to go about doing good. Such men as Buchanan, Martyn and Charles Wolfe might have acquired a reputation in certain departments of knowledge as notorious as that of the apostles of infidelity. These last were subject to no such drawback. They were never guilty of a too lavish expenditure of beneficent

action.

Furthermore, the few individuals on whom the richest gifts of intellect have been bestowed, and who have toiled most earnestly in their improvement, in other words, the great lights of our race, Bacon, Newton, Kepler, Copernicus, Galileo, Pascal, Boyle, who possessed not merely a derived knowledge of the laws of nature which others had disclosed, but who themselves discovered the laws,all these were religious men. Some of them, as Kepler, Boyle and Pascal, were distinguished for the strength and elevation of their piety. The insight into the structure of the universe which they obtained, was a means of grace. Intellect and piety mutually and beneficially acted and reacted.

In relation to other great, but in comparison with the last named, inferior ornaments of science, who were unfriendly to Christianity, it seems to have been satisfactorily shown, that they were mere logicians or mathematicians, of deductive rather than of inductive habits,

Decided indications of piety are found in the letters and published treatises of Galileo. Religious reflections occur even in the mathematical writings of Copernicus. Kepler was a man of ardent piety. "This beautiful system of sun, planets and comets," remarks Newton, "could have its origin in no other way than by the purpose and command of an intelligent and powerful Being. He governs all things, not as the soul of the world, but as the Lord of the universe." The eminent piety of Pascal is well known. Many of Boyle's Dissertations convey trains of thought and reasoning which have never been surpassed for their combination of judicious sobriety in not pressing his arguments too far, with fervent devotion in his conceptions of the divine nature. See his Essay entitled, "The high veneration Man's Intellect owes to God." Whewell's Bridgewater Treatise, p. 235.

† Whewell, p. 244.

who rested in the laws of the universe as the ultimate and all-sufficient principles, who thrust in, as the poet says, some mechanic cause in the place of God, instead of lifting themselves to the source of all laws and principles. If the mathematical philosopher dwells in his own bright land of deductive reasoning, till he turns with disgust from all the speculations necessarily less clear and conclusive, in which his imagination, his practical faculties, his moral sense, his capacity of religious hope and belief, are to be called into action, he becomes, more than common men, liable to miss the road to truths of the highest value. So far their views are narrowed, and they become incapable of judging of moral evidence. Nothing, however, is gained to the cause of Christianity by depreciating such men, by branding them as sciolists or superficial reasoners. They were great men without Christianity. But if they had come directly and fully under its influence, they would have been greater still. Religion is not an enemy to mathematics; but she is an enemy to all prejudice, to every exclusive tendency, to every thing which would confine the mind to one mode of development, at the expense of its general and symmetrical advancement.

While, therefore, it is not denied, that the human mind is cultivated in a high degree, without, or even in opposition to, Christianity, still it can be maintained by facts, that the influence of this religion is decidedly favorable upon the intellect directly. All minds in the highest class, the discoverers, have gladly acknowledged its power. Nearly all the original geniuses in another department, that of imagination, have likewise borne the same testimony. Its witnesses in every other field of human knowl

*Bonaparte observed of Laplace, when he was called to a public office of considerable importance, that he did not discharge it in so judicious and clear-sighted a manner as his high intellectual fame might lead most men to expect. "He sought subtilties in every subject, and carried into his official employments the spirit of the method of infinitely small quantities." A very respectable mathematician of the Roman Catholic Church, said that it was the business of the Sorbonne to discuss; of the Pope to decide; and of the mathematician to go to heaven in a perpendicular line." Dugald Stewart, in quoting this last anecdote, remarks, that while mathematical studies exercise the faculty of reasoning or deduction, they give no employment to the other powers of the understanding concerned in the investigation of truth. The atheism and materialism professed by some of the French mathematicians, is to be ascribed, in the opinion of Mr. Stewart, to a credulity as blind as that of their predecessors who trusted in the dogmas of an infallible church.-Stewart, vol. iii, pp. 193.