o exaggerate; but we are constrained to say,
that if all the wisdom and all the virtue on earth had dwelt in one man,
and if that one man had presented a revelation of God with a view to
supply the strongest, the mightiest, the most touching, the most tender,
the most varied, and the most irresistible inducements to renounce all
selfishness and sin, and to live a pure and godly, a holy and a useful,
a divine and glorious life, that revelation could have assumed no
better, no more perfect or effective form, than that which is presented
in the revelation of God by Jesus Christ. We feel, while we contemplate
it, that it can have no fitter or truer name than that bestowed on it by
the Apostles, 'The power of God to salvation to every one that
believeth.' And we are reminded of the words, 'We all, with open face
beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same
image from glory to glory, as by the Spirit of the Lord.'

Of course the destruction of this belief can operate no otherwise than
as an encouragement to evil, and a discouragement to good. The loss of
Christian belief in God can be to the virtues and the graces of the
heart and life, but as a blight to plants and flowers. The Christian
belief makes it summer to the soul, giving birth, and power, and full
development to all that is godlike and glorious in human character. The
loss of that belief is winter to the soul; killing with its frosts each
form of life and beauty, and making all a waste and desolation.

There have been three great disbelievers in God in our own country
during the present century, all of whom have written books denouncing
marriage, and counselling unbounded sensual license. If their counsels
were generally taken, the result would be a state of society as horrible
as that portrayed in the beginning of Paul's Epistle to the Romans, and
a return to faith in God alone could save the race of man from utter
extinction. But we will not dwell on this dreadful side of the subject.
We know the effects of the light and warmth of the sun; and we may
safely be left to infer the horror, the misery, the world-wide ruin, and
the utter dreariness and desolation that would follow if the orb of day
were extinguished, or for ever and utterly withdrawn. Religion is the
sun of the spiritual world; it is its light and life, its joy and
blessedness; and its extinction would be the death and destruction of
our race.

While belief in God is favora