hend the operations of
our own spirits upon our physical nature in order to an expression of
our own thoughts." Has such a revelation been made? From all we know of
man, his wants, and the adaptation of means in nature to those wants, we
are driven to the conclusion that it has, presenting the means adapted
to our spiritual wants so perfectly as to enable us to realize fully
what Volney declares our very nature, as creatures of hope, impelled us
to create "in our imaginations for ourselves." There is no consistent
ground that any man can occupy between Christianity and Atheism. And if
there is no God, "nature," or the "forces," or whatever lies behind
them, to which they belong, as the manifest energies of the same, call
it what you may, has made a very unreasonable, bungling mistake in
giving in the very nature of man's mind an empty vessel that is to be
filled only by the false whims of the imagination of an ever restless
and dissatisfied spirit, which, in that case, is to be eternally
disappointed and plunged deeper down by the realization of the fact that
all its anxieties and hopes were only so many misleading demons.

In order to a perfect revelation of God to man it was necessary that the
entire page, the "background" as well as the "foreground," or the human
as well as the divine, should be truth, and in every case, all the truth
that was necessary to enable man to realize and understand the whys and
wherefores of the divine procedure; and also to call out in word or
action the Divine Being in all his relations to the conduct of the
children of men. Such a record is found in the Bible, given to us by men
who were impelled and borne by the Holy Spirit when they wrote and
spoke. But it was not necessary that anything upon the dark human
"background" of this picture should have its origin with God; it was
only necessary that, having originated with man, men or demons, it
should be put to record just as it was in all its heinousness and
wickedness in order that we might see the true character of God in his
relations to it. If a wise physician should undertake to make himself
known to the world he would not give us a history of all he did with
every patient, and at the same time fail to give us just so much of the
true history of each patient as would be necessary to enable us to
understand him in all that he did, for both stand or fall together. So
it is in the Bible revelation of God to man. Take away the "backgroun