CHRISTIANITY A RELIGION OF FACTS, NOT OF SPECULATION, BEING THE FIRST OF A SERIES OF NINE DISCOURSES DELIVERED IN SOUTH BRIDGE HALL, EDINBURGH. BY GEORGE GREENWELL. EDINBURGH: PHILIP CADELL GRAY, NORTH BRIDGE : AND T. KIRK, NOTTINGHAM. 1843. 43. 322. The subjects of the remaining Discourses are as follow: 2d. Credibility of the Witnesses. 3d. Provisions of Christianity in harmony with the Intellectual and Moral Structure of Man. 4th. Overthrow of Paganism by Primitive Christianity. 5th.-Nature and Criteria of Miracles. 6th-Nature and Evidence of Prophecy. 7th. Signs of the Times in reference to the Advance of Popery, Infidelity, and all the Agencies of Evil. 8th.-Man a Free Agent. 9th.-Man a Responsible Being. Should the First be encouraged, the Second will be hastened through the Press; and, depending upon the same condition, the whole of the series will follow. CHRISTIANITY A RELIGION OF FACTS, &c. TRUTH is the breath of God, and where He breathes there is life, health, and peace. Falsehood is the breath of the Evil One, the enemy of God and man, and where he breathes there is discord, disease, and death. But though the myriads of our fallen race have desperately battled against truth, age after age, compelling the heavenly visitant to prophesy in sackcloth, and mourn in the desert, with harp on the willows, yet truth remains. Though exquisite in loveliness, she is not frail, like the fair ones of earth; but strong and indestructible from her nature and constitution. Truth is the great want of man. It is celestial food adapted to his nature, and without it his life is but a complication of maladies. Without truth, men are but hordes of animals, cruel, selfish, tormented and enslaved, preying upon each other, and lacerating themselves. Without truth, the world is a wide, weary, tangled waste; and even home is barren, joyless, and unsanctified. Without truth, the marvellous temple of nature appears but a huge prison-house,-a dark and noisome dungeon, into which we have been cast by some merciless tyrant for the punishment of some unknown sin. The resplendent rivers may run in brightness beneath the sun; the cataracts may fall in sheeted silver, or fountains may spout in music under the shade of the sycamore, yet all is discord. The hills may rise like pathways into heaven; the fields may laugh out in the exuberance of joy; the glens may smile in the solemn beauty of old romance; yet all is barren! But give us truth, and the hovel is a palace, and the world an Eden; for truth is the parent of love, liberty, peace, light, joy, and hope. Oh truth! thou fairest emanation of the Holy One, Immortal, Benevolent, ill-used pilgrim of the world, lead us to thy hallowed fane and we will bow in lowliest abasement; for the lower we fall under thy influence, the higher we rise towards heaven and God. Bring us to that consecrated prophetic grove which is thy serene retreat; and let us drink in largess from thy undefiled wells, and bathe our soiled and heated spirits in the renovating streams which mumur there in such placid melody.-Hasten, or we die! All truth is valuable, and man is ennobled in proportion as he thirsts after truth on all subjects. But that truth which has reference to the supremacy of the moral man, and the eternity of such a condition, must necessarily be of the highest kind, and claim the most engrossing interest. Christianity is the truth, by way of eminence; being a full disclosure concerning the character of God-the nature of man, and the relation which subsists between them. A grand remedial scheme for the reconciliation of an apostate and wandering race; proposing to secure to them the pardon of all past guilt, and the undisturbed possession of more than their original felicity. But, to approach more closely to the subject of the present lecture, Christianity is not only truth of the highest kind, but truth in the most awakening shape. Facts have moral and spiritual power which abstract truth possesses not. Hence, when any important truth is enshrined in a fact, when it is embodied in deeds, and thus rendered palpable in the living world, it finds readier access to the understanding, the conscience, and the affections, and has more impulsive power than it could have in any other form. To illustrate this matter, we shall remark that-If the angels that stand in the presence of God had come down to earth and spoken to men in the music of heaven,-if they had attempted to convince the human family that sin is a fearful thing in the sight of God; so dire and malignant in its nature and consequences, that He cannot look upon it with any degree of allowance: And if they had attempted, at the same time, to convince our race, that though God hates sin, yet, being the Creator and Father of us all, He loves us with an overflowing love, and yearns over his children. Had the angelic beings attempted to make these two truths clear to us from the reason and nature of things, we might have been silenced perhaps, but we should neither have been enlightened nor consoled. Though it is no paradox in statement, yet it would have been one in action ;-when we had begun to think upon the bitterness and the evil of sin considered as rebellion against God, our minds would have been so torn by anguish, and crushed by despair, that the fair idea of His overflowing love could not have entered or existed in us at the same time. On the other hand, if we had cherished the idea of His unbroken love, and thought of God as of a Father of great indulgence, always yearning over his children, our conceptions of the guilt of sin would have been slight and disproportionate; and thus we should have abandoned ourselves to licentiousness in the dream of mercy, and lived in sin amid the visions of heaven. But when Christ, the brightness of the Divine glory, and the express image of His person, divested himself of his regal honours, and came out from the imperial splendour in a body of flesh,-when he humbled himself, by taking the nature and likeness of sinful flesh, and in that body became a victim for the sins of the world,-when the Son of God hung upon a bloody cross with common malefactors, a spectacle to men and angels-to heaven, earth, and hell, then the two abstract truths, which angels could not have taught with efficiency, were embodied and harmonised in a fact of astonishing import, and incalculable power. If sin had not been much more malignant and hideous than we commonly imagine, it might have been expiated by a meaner sacrifice than the blood of God's own dear Son. And if the love of God towards the fallen had not been richer and deeper than human or angelic thought can reach, that great sacrifice would never have been offered for the life of the world. It was no wonder that the effulgent orb of day refused to shine on such a spectacle; leaving the face of nature covered with a pall of blackness, or that the very rocks became instinct with mysterious life, and shuddering, rent in sunder! for that scene exhibited the fearful |