every licentiate. The vulgate is the only translation formally permitted, and this has long since taken the place and usurped the authority of those originals which it so often distorts and misrepresents. Now, go through the lands of Europe. See those where the Bible is openly, securely, avowedly read; in other words, those which have embraced the principles of the Reformation. Their peoples are strong and noble in their doings and their virtues. The climate, the mountain scenery, and atmosphere, may inspire in others the love of libertypatriotism may bind them to their native soil by a passion which is very disease; but Tyrol and Switzerland, ready enough to repel the invader, crouch beneath their own yoke, and grind to their own superstition. Look at the German mind. Luther's version of the holy volume formed the language of that country. It gave freedom to the studies of its universities. It awoke the genius of its wide-spread family. It burst the spell which had oppressed it, from the time of the empire.

The predictions of Tacitus would never have otherwise been fulfilled. Never, otherwise, would its banded nations, with the lyre and the sword, have driven from their bosom the military despotism which sought to draw them into itself. Its wild transport, and hurrah of hatred to oppression, had never else been heard. It is this which confers self-respect on man. He is in constant communication with the truth of God. Nothing stands between him and it. His mind is filled with its noble images, its mighty conceptions, its triumphant hymns, its tender strains. He catches its inspiration. He imbibes its largeness. It is the book which makes man brave and free. The enlaying and infusion of it in his soul, turn him to another man. Its saving blessings apart, its general power is mighty. It reflects itself in the noblest efforts of human genius. Poetry, eloquence, music, literature, art, borrow unconsciously, if not directly, from its wealth. The Bible is the nation's sun, reflected when not seen. It is the same to the individual. He sits at the feet of no priest. He stipulates not for pardon with his fellow worm. His soul bowed before the deity, is seen in the attitude of seraphs, but it does not stoop to man. It is erect in its own rights and prerogatives.-Institutions of Popular Education.

"GUILTY, OR NOT GUILTY ?"

"Who told thee that thou wast naked?"-Genesis iii. 11.

THE circumstances in connection with this passage are familiar to all. No sooner does sin overtake our first parent in Paradise, than a sense of shame and dread comes over him, and renders him unwilling any longer to commune with his Creator, whose guiding and comforting voice he had hitherto sought with so much eagerness. To his accustomed call, walking as was his wont, in the garden in the cool of the day, Adam for the first time lends an unwilling ear, and he hides himself, on the conscious and heartfelt plea that he was naked-disrobed of all his native glory, and sensible that the Divine Image, in which he had been created, was sullied and dimmed through the wiles of that old dragon the serpent, with whose type he had just held parley, and by whom he had been persuaded to break the entire law at that time existing between his Maker and himself.

We lay stress upon this entirety, because unbelievers have cavilled at the vast apparent disparity between the crime of Adam and its punishment. The Adamaic law had many elements which aggravated any breach of it, and left the transgressor without excuse in God's sight.

1. It was short and simple. "Of the tree of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of it." There was no misreading it: no room for gloss or comment, no pretext whatever for raising on it, a doubt as to its meaning.

2. It was absolute-admitting of no alternative, no appeal, no evasion.

3. It was undeniably Divine. The very lips of Deity had pronounced it-solemnly, intelligently, intelligibly.

4. It was easy. Adam was lord of the creation. God had given him every herb-every tree pleasant to the sight, and good for food-he had made him a little lower only than the angels, putting all things under his feet-all sheep and oxen, the beasts of the field, the fowls of the air, and the fish of the sea

"Were they not his by a peculiar right,

And by an emphasis of interest his ?"

With all these treasures, he could want little-he could want nothing. The breach of the only condition by which God saw

fit to bind him was therefore a tremendous-an awful-an immeasurable sin. If he who, under the Jewish Law, offended in one point were adjudged guilty of all (and this principle has never been challenged as an unrighteous one)-of how much sorer punishment should he be thought worthy, who by one act swept away the entire system of obligations which bound man to his Maker? Yes, the sin of Adam lay not in plucking the forbidden fruit, but in doing despite to the entire covenant, so condescendingly and authoritatively propounded by God himself.

The law, then, thus broken, spoke out in thunder to our trembling parent, and he pleads his shame-facedness in bar of his appearing before his insulted Maker, who asks him in the words of our text-" Who told thee that thou wast naked ?"

The three ideas involved in this history may be represented in few words-Sin: Law: and Self-conviction.

1. There was evidently Sin here. All ungodliness is sinall aversion to God and the godlike, forms its very essence. Hence St. Jude, referring to the prophecy of Enoch, denounces sinners, as ungodly men, guilty of ungodly deeds, ungodly committed-reiterating the epithet that furnishes the type and image of their iniquity. Love casteth out fear; and love only is the atmosphere through which we can look on God and live. Wherever there is fear, there is the absence of love in precisely the same proportion, and this absence of love is of the nature of aversion—a turning away from, instead of a hasting towardsthe Sun of love, the centre of blessedness and rest.

With fallen creatures like ourselves, it is easy to account for this. Born in sin, and shapen in iniquity, we bear about with us a natural aversion to all that is holy. But when we look at Adam, privileged as he had been to commune with Deity unabashed, unconscious even of the tremendous disparity which now exists between the Creator and his fallen family-we are startled by the sudden and complete change that had passed over him. He turned away abruptly from the interview, conscious by an almost momentary change, that he was poor and miserable, and blind and naked-unwilling-unable to meet the eye of an offended God. Like himself, his sin sprang at once into full maturity. He turned from God, desiring no more a knowledge of his ways.

2. And this fear supposes the existence of Law, for sin is not imputed where there is no law. Hence the Apostle calls the law, the strength of sin; a power so overbearing and tremendous, that nothing but the meritorious death of Christ can rob it of its terrors, or interpose to break the crushing weight of its penalties.

3. From these two ideas, flows naturally the third-that of Self-conviction. As of death, so of sin.

"All men think all men sinners but themselves."

But this was not the case with Adam. It could not indeed have been for the whole world, then, centred in the guilty pair. Between himself and his partner lay the entire scope of human guilt. Yet even here he betrayed a sad likeness to his latest posterity; the first fruits of his unrighteous fear soon developed themselves in the forms of evasion and unkindness; and he charged his wife ungenerously, and hypocritically, with the chiefest share in his transgression-" The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree and I did eat." How true is it that by our first father's transgression s man is very far gone from righteousness"-wandering in this one act alone, as far as possible from the apostolic precept, “So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies: he that loveth his wife, loveth himself, for no man ever yet hated his own flesh, but nourisheth it and cherisheth it, even as the Lord, the Church." (Eph. v. 28, 29.)

But with the results of this self-conviction we have less to do than with the thing itself, our intention on the present occasion being to discuss these propositions. That the posterity of Adam, in all ages and countries, have inherited this sense of sin-this feeling of self-conviction. That the existence of this feeling implies an universal want, and, that the goodness and love of God, being granted, it is but reasonable to suppose he would meet this want by a proportionate grant.

I. The posterity of Adam in all ages and countries have inherited this sense of sin.

We do not speak here of the mere fact that all men are sinners; but suppose much more, contending that they all know it. Man is not only guilty, but fearful; not only naked, but

sensible of his nakedness. He requires no revelation to teach him that—it is written in characters of fire on his writhing and distracted heart, "his conscience bearing witness, and his thoughts accusing him.

Nor are we careful to attempt any explanation of the origin of evil. Here it is; and it came into the world by some means or other, not as a dry, naked, inoperative, unproductive, metaphysical fact. It brought with it a painful sense, a heartsickening conviction, that it was a thing wrong in itself, and ruinous in its consequences. Its sting touched poor human nature to the quick, and compelled the sufferer to cry out in spirit, if not in word, "O! wretched man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death!! The cry of the whole world, from the beginning to the present day, can have wakened but one enquiry-"Who told thee that thou wast naked?" Our creeds, our practices, the multitude of our sacrifices, are but so many confessions that we are not only painfully conscious of some fearful lapse of conduct, but of some great gulf so fixed between our Maker and ourselves, that those thoughts, even, which would pass to Him cannot! We all know that we are sinners, and "groan, being burdened," unconscious where to look for relief.

We

Now this sense of sin implies the existence of law. And hence all men from the beginning have been without excuse. thus get rid of that infidel objection to God's justice which argues that it would be unfair to punish any one for violation of a law he never knew to exist. The fact that man trembled for sin, plainly shows that he knew that sin to be the "transgression of the law." His crime has always been, not that his knowledge fell short of the full light of the gospel, but that his practice fell short of his knowledge. Destitute of any outward law, he was still a law unto himself-self-convicted and selfcondemned-knowing that he was poor, and miserable, and vile, and naked.

But independently of this inward consciousness of guilt, this Law of Conscience, it would appear that all men from the beginning possessed traditionary fragments of a law outwardly revealed that with the sin handed down from Adam, there passed some traces of the primitive faith, involving views more