of his reason and conscience.  He does not like to think of a holy God, and therefore he denies that God is holy.  He does not like to think of the eternal punishment of sin, and therefore he denies that punishment is eternal.  He does not like to be pardoned through the substituted sufferings of the Son of God, and therefore he denies the doctrine of atonement.  He does not like the truth that man is so totally alienated from God that he needs to be renewed in the spirit of his mind by the Holy Ghost, and therefore he denies the doctrines of depravity and regeneration.  Run through the creed which the Church has lived by and died by, and you will discover that the only obstacle to its reception is the aversion of the human heart.  It is a rational creed in all its parts and combinations.  It has outlived the collisions and conflicts of a hundred schools of infidelity that have had their brief day, and died with their devotees.  A hundred systems of philosophy falsely so called have come and gone, but the one old religion of the patriarchs, and the prophets, and the apostles, holds on its way through the centuries, conquering and to conquer.  Can it be that sheer imposture and error have such a tenacious vitality as this?  If reason is upon the side of infidelity, why does not infidelity remain one and the same unchanging thing, like Christianity, from age to age, and subdue all men unto it?  If Christianity is a delusion and a lie, why does it not die out, and disappear?  The difficulty is not upon the side of the human reason, but of the human heart.  Skeptical men do not like the religion of the New Testament, these doctrines of sin and grace, and therefore they shape their creed by their sympathies and antipathies; by what they wish to have true; by their heart rather than by their head.  As the Founder of Christianity said to the Jews, so he says to every man who rejects His doctrine of grace and redemption:  “Ye will not come unto me that ye might have life.”  It is an inclination of the will, and not a conviction of the reason, that prevents the reception of the Christian religion.

Among the many reflections that are suggested by this subject and its discussion, our limits permit only the following: 

1.  It betokens deep wickedness, in any man, to change the truth of God into a lie,—­to substitute a false theory in religion for the true one.  “Woe unto them,” says the prophet, “that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter.”  There is no form of moral evil that is more hateful in the sight of Infinite Truth, than that intellectual depravity which does not like to retain a holy God in its knowledge, and therefore mutilates the very idea of the Deity, and attempts to make him other than he is.  There is no sinner that will be visited with a heavier vengeance than that cool and calculating