SECTION LX.

REV. v. 9.-"Thou hast redeemed us to God by thy blood."

IT is urged that it would have been a plan more worthy of God to have prevented sin from the first, rather than to have allowed it to enter the world, and then to accept the sacrifice of a Redeemer to make atonement for it.

But such reasonings display very little knowledge or thought of what is going on in the world around us; or, rather, such objections are founded on a complete ignorance of the visible creation, or on a total disregard of it.

For the whole system of Nature proceeds in the very manner in which the Scriptures have represented the Divine Being to have acted in the redemption of mankind by Jesus Christ. That system is one of poison and antidote; of disease and remedy; of injury and redress; of suffering and alleviation; of pain and relief. What are our asylums and hospitals, our courts of law, our surgeries, our penitentiaries, our

prisons, but proofs of this? What are the subscriptions of the benevolent on the occasion of hurricanes, fires, shipwrecks, and accidents, but proofs of the same thing? On the field of battle shall attend the surgeon to heal the wounds made by the enemy; on the loss of friends shall attend the compassionate to bind up the broken-hearted; on the unfortunate speculatist shall attend the charitable to repair his ruined fortunes. And as Scripture represents us as redeemed by Christ, so is the captive prisoner, or the stolen African, released, ransomed, redeemed by the silver of the humane.

And here I must mention an illustration of our subject, which forcibly struck me in walking by the Serpentine in London. The sight of the receiving-house of the Humane Society, and of the strong posts which are placed along the bank of the river, to enable ropes to be hauled for affording relief to sufferers from the parting ice, seemed to me to manifest a strong identity in the plan pursued by Nature and by Revelation, in allowing misery in the first place, and subsequently the means of restoration.

Then, in our fields and gardens we have noxious weeds growing around, and methods invented for eradicating them. In them we

have the destructive caterpillar, the venomous viper, the thievish fox; and in our houses other animals of disgust and annoyance; but ingenuity supplies us in various ways with the means of remedy and redress.

In short, Nature, in all her works, bears a testimony in behalf of the Scripture doctrine of a Redeemer, who "has risen with healing in his wings" for the spiritual maladies of a world suffering from the infection of sin.

THE END.

LONDON:

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