ourselves; while this subject has these profound and far-reaching
applications, it also presses with sharpness and energy upon the case,
and the position, of millions of men in Christendom. And to this more
particular aspect of the theme, we ask attention for a moment.

This same process of corruption, and vitiation of a correct knowledge of
God, which we have seen to go on upon a large scale in the instance of
the heathen world, also often goes on in the instance of a single
individual under the light of Revelation itself. Have you never known a
person to have been well educated in childhood and youth respecting the
character and government of God, and yet in middle life and old age to
have altered and corrupted all his early and accurate apprehensions, by
the gradual adoption of contrary views and sentiments? In his childhood,
and youth, he believed that God distinguishes between the righteous and
the wicked, that he rewards the one and punishes the other, and hence he
cherished a salutary fear of his Maker that agreed well with the dictates
of his unsophisticated reason, and the teachings of nature and
revelation. But when, he became a man, he put away these childish things,
in a far different sense from that of the Apostle. As the years rolled,
along, he succeeded, by a career of worldliness and of sensuality, in
expelling this stock of religious knowledge, this right way of conceiving
of God, from his mind, and now at the close of life and upon the very
brink of eternity and of doom, this very same person is as unbelieving
respecting the moral attributes of Jehovah, and as unfearing with regard
to them, as if the entire experience and creed of his childhood and youth
were a delusion and a lie. This rational and immortal creature in the
morning of his existence looked up into the clear sky with reverence,
being impressed by the eternal power and godhead that are there, and when
he had committed a sin he felt remorseful and guilty; but the very same
person now sins recklessly and with flinty hardness of heart, casts
sullen or scowling glances upward, and says: "There is no God." Compare
the Edward Gibbon whose childhood expanded under the teachings of a
beloved Christian matron trained in the school of the devout William Law,
and whose youth exhibited unwonted religions sensibility,--compare this
Edward Gibbon with the Edward Gibbon whose manhood was saturated with
utter unbelief, and whose departure into the dread h