scribing to their various creeds and confessions, which we could not do; believing as we do that Christianity, as taught by the Lord Jesus and his apostles, is perfect in itself, and the only teaching by which the disciples of the Lord should be guided in all matters of faith and practice relating to his kingdom. R. GRAHAM. P.S. If any of the evangelists visit us, they will find our president (for we have no pastors yet), on inquiring for Robert Laird, blockmaker, who will receive them gladly.

R. G.

Cupar, April 26, 1844.

ENCLOSED is a post-office order, the amount of our contribution to the Evangelists' Fund. The congregation is living in peace, but making very little advancement. For some time past there has not been the activity and zeal with which we at one time manifested our attachment to the truth. Many things have tended to this falling off: the principal one is the falling away of several from their allegiance to the Lord. It is no easy matter to get men and women brought into complete subjection to the authority of our King. If we are satisfied with being delivered from priestcraft, and being baptized for remission of sins, without manifesting those dispositions and sustaining that high moral character which the Scriptures require of every disciple of the Lord Jesus, what will be our disappointment, when that Lord whom we have professed to put on, shall say to us, "Depart from me, I never knew you!"' O, what need have we always to be kept in remembrance of this great truth, " Without holiness no man shall see the Lord, and not every one that saith Ford, Lord, shall enter the kingdom, but he that doeth the will of my Father, who is in heaven"? I am happy to say that the prospects in some other parts of Fife are very encouraging. May all who have put on the Lord, be enabled to continue faithful unto death that they may obtain the crown of life. In Newburgh the prospects are favourable. Several have obeyed the truth, and great excitement prevails. I hope many will be induced to put themselves under the government of Jesus. A. DOWIE.

NOTTINGHAM.-Two of those, who through the influence of untoward circumstances, some time ago forsook the congregation of disciples in this place, have recently been restored to the obedience of faith. Two others also have recently been immersed for the remission of sins, and added to the Lord.

EVANGELISTS.-Several inquiries respecting the present position of the evangelists have come to hand, in reply to which we beg to say, brother Reid is at Ilkley, near Leeds. In a letter dated May 10th, he says, "I have just had a visit from the doctor. He says I look ten per cent. better already; but, however, I am very weak, and it will require the greatest attention and care on my part to render the present means (Hydropathy) effectual." When last we heard from brother Thomson, he was labouring at Edinburgh. Brother Greenwell has been labouring for three weeks with considerable effect and interest at Carlisle. He is now at Dumfries.-ED.

CONTRIBUTIONS for the Evangelists' Fund have been received during the last month from Grangemouth, Cupar, Donnington, and Nottingham.

66

MYSTERIES IN RELIGION.

HIERARCHISM, or the religion of the priests; Christianity, or the religion of God; rationalism, or the religion of man: such are the three doctrines, which in our day divide Christendom." So writes D'Aubigne, the most fascinating of historians, either ancient or modern, and so testifies the experience of all, who have attentively considered the moral and religious aspects of society. "There is no salvation either for man or society in hierarchism or rationalism. Christianity alone can give life to the world;" and whilst it is to be deplored that, of the three systems prevalent, it numbers not the most followers, we are called upon more profoundly to lament over the fact, that even its numerical strength is weakened by the intermixture of doctrines both of rationalism, or hierarchism, with the pure, simple, but sublime doctrine of the cross. Priestcraft, from the very nature of our institutions, from the bold freedom of thought which ever characterizes a free people, and from the political obstructions that lie in the way to any great systematic scheme of delusive or tyrannical operations, can never become in this country, what it has too often shown itself to be in other less favoured lands-what Luther found it in Germany and over the Catholic world, when the great spirit of the reformer first spoke for the emancipation of thought, and what in its very essence it is a cold, heartless,

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persecuting and bloody power, without conscience, without mercy, without even the shame of crime or the honour of integrity, and destitute of the commonest charities and decencies of life. A power like this can never be much more than a negative principle in a government like ours, and the general circulation of the Bible over even the darkest regions of the earth, with other less evident, but perhaps equally efficacious agencies, that the Lord may employ, warrants the hope that the time is not remote, when everywhere priestcraft will be rendered a subordinate influence, and its power felt only in an angry but impotent opposition to the simplicity of truth.

Would that we were justifiable in anticipating an equally salutary fate to the less superstitious and imposing, but equally dangerous and dreadful doctrine of rationalism. The very causes, that seem to portend the overthrow of the religion of the priest, are made to minister to the extension of the religion of man; and freedom of discussion whilst it is looked to as the means of death to hierarchism, is made also an instrument of life to rationalism; and this doctrine, dreadful and ruinous as it is when concentrated into a system and enthroned with power, as in the frightful period of the "reign of terror," is still more to be dreaded in those diluted but insinuating forms, which it assumes in the Christian church. To oppose Christianity by fire and sword; to burn and torture, and in a thousand ways to persecute the disciples of the despised Galilean, was the first expedient of the adversary; but when extermination proved impracticable and the Sun of Righteousness could not be extinguished, the next resort was to contaminate the purity of the truth by associating it with error, and "the mystery of iniquity began to work." This, since the days of Constantine, has been an expedient, fruitful of the most disastrous consequences to the cause of Christianity, and subservient alone to the interests of the kingdom of darkness and death. How it has been effected, by what means, and in what manner men have been deluded into the reception of the shadow for the substance, the outward from the inner spirit, it would require a full history of corruption to tell. This would be as inappropriate, as foreign to our purpose.

It is the insertion of the doctrine of rationalism, the religion of man, with the sublime and mysterious doctrine

which comes from above, that constitutes at present the most dangerous feature in the aspect of the church. Reason is exalted a judge over revelation, and its power to comprehend made a test of the sound in doctrine, and the pure in faith. We have no objection to reason in religion, when its use is not perverted: God has given it to his creatures that they might apprehend the glorious attributes of his character that they might see the depth of the riches, both of the wisdom and knowledge of God, and feel how unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out. When she is confined to this, her legitimate use in religion, and meekly sits down to learn at the foot of the cross, filled with gratitude for those truths which she is permitted to fathom, and overwhelmed with admiration at the grandeur and sublimity of those which are too deep and intricate for her feeble powers to comprehend: in short, when she yields supremacy to faith, and permits the heart to believe even when the head cannot understand; how lovely then is human reason, and how honourable to Him who "giveth to a man wisdom, and knowledge, and joy," and "showeth light" to the children of men. But when she would exalt herself, and argue even against God, and in her own proud sufficiency interrogate the deep things of eternity and reject them from the canons of her faith, because they give not intelligible responses to her presumptuous inquiries, how vain and despicable becomes this, the noblest power of the human mind! and how forcibly applicable the words of the apostle, "Nay, but O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus ? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another to dishonour ?"

A religion without mysteries; a revelation without incomprehensible ideas; a hope that grasps no larger sphere than the circle of human discovery-why may not man have invented it all, and imposed it, a baseless fabrication, upon his race? It is a tame and grovelling spirit, that can fill all his powers of adoration, admiration, and praise, with the character of one whose grandest conception is no higher than mortal imagination, and whose attributes are all known and intelligible to the common intellect. The aspirations of a high, pure, nature sigh for something more glorious

and exalted, and it delights in the contemplation of One who hides himself in the depth of infinite wisdom, and whose perfection is past finding out. Such is our God: for “caust thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty unto perfection? It is as high as heaven, What canst thou do? Deeper than hell, What canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea." It is the glory of our religion that it hath mysteries-facts incomprehensible by human reason—not contrary to, but altogether above it. There is no inconsistency, no contradiction in God. So far as our feeble powers enable us to see his manifold works are the perfection of reason, for in wisdom hath he made them all; and when we are lost in the infinite maze of creation, and the chain which connects in heavenly harmony the wonderful elements of that which is known, seems broken over the chasm that separates us from that which is unknown, it is only the dim vision of the mortal, who "now sees through a glass darkly "that fails: "but when that which is perfect is come," when it shall be known even as we are known, the undiscovered links will appear and God will stand justified in all his ways.

But why should we reject anything in God's revelation because we cannot comprehend it? His unity of nature, yet plurality of person-the conception and incarnation of the Son, and the vicarious sufferings of Christ-the presence of God, yet the free agency of his creatures-the communication of the Spirit, and his indwelling presence with disciples-the mortality of man, yet the resurrection of the bod v- -are not these all mysteries, doctrines, glorious and sublime, yet utterly incomprehensible and above reason? But who would reject, because he cannot fathom them? To do so, were to discard the fundamental truths of our religion and put away from us, as unreasonable, our very hope of salvation. Yet there are persons who reluctantly admit the truth of these clearly revealed truths, and so cramp and straiten the teaching of the Scriptures, in order to square them to some previously conceived hypothesis, as almost virtually to deny them. They can believe a miracle, and upon proper testimony admit a fact contrary to their own experience and requiring a suspension of the long observed laws of nature, yet they cannot admit anything