53. Christianity does not ignore the affections; it fully recognizes their existence and importance, and has many lessons for their due regulation. It makes the love of God and the love of man first principles of practical holiness. It insists much on hopes and fears; encourages courage, and nerves the good to suffer and die for the right, if need be, without fear and without regret. It recognizes punishments also, and often adverts to them as objects to be feared and shunned. To divinely appointed punishments belong repentances and every species of regrets. They are the worm that dies not and the fire that is never quenched. Repentance without hope is remorse, and is in some of its manifestations the most terrific and overwhelming of all human passions. It occupies the gate to madness and lunacy, and passes many miserable convicts through it to despair and death.

54. Repentance is the most inevitable of all known punishments of sin, and is that in which all others meet and unite. It is a species of pain, and in the form of remorse, where it exists without being tempered and modified by milder and pleasurable affections, rises to the keenest and most insupportable anguish. What an amazing blunder, to put the highest class of punishments inflicted on sinners in the front rank of virtues which characterize the reformation of the offender? Punishment may lead to reformation; it is inflicted with that design, and adapted to that purpose. But it is no part of reformation, and its greatest possible bitterness is without an element of moral virtue. Bodily pains are not to be pursued as an object, and just as little are they to be nursed and cherished. Who would think of basing a system of cure for diseases on headaches, and putting patients to nursing their pains as a means of getting on to health? Repentances occupy the same place in the moral system which pains occupy in the material. Both are divine warnings and divine punishments, and the man that does not heed them is a dead man; as much so in respect to the soul-pains of repentances as bodily pains. It is the part of wisdom not to seek them nor cherish them, but to note their slightest monitions and improve from them. As soon as the monition is received, the pain may be dismissed, if it will leave; but it will not always do this; the cessation of the punishment is not submitted to the discretion of the criminal; it rests with the court. God's arrangements, however, in this respect as in others, are tempered with mercy. He allows the reformed sinner to forget in a measure his sins, and cease from fruitless regrets as

soon as they become unnecessary. What an instance of the divine compassion! and what an encouragement to desist from evil doing! 55. Repentance is not a good per se, but an evil. It is no part of human blessedness and glory, but belongs to the family of pains and sorrows, and is the sister of shame and despair; no better entitled to a place among the virtues than either of them. Its sole use is like that of the prison and the scaffold, to punish sin and discourage its commission. Like other punishments it has no direct relations to well doing or well being; its direct relations are to ill doing and ill being; these it repels.

56. The present argument is not meant to depreciate the value of repentances. They are invaluable; they are an absolute necessity, and can not be dispensed with. But they have their place, and there is the field of their usefulness, and not among the virtues. Loves and hates, affections for present objects, hopes and fears, affections for future objects, and approbations and repentances, affections for past objects, all have an appointment from the kind Father to serve us; and all sustain relations to our holiness and happiness. Of these, loves and hates are first, hopes and fears next, and approbations and regrets last. The remembrances of the past, with all their just and reasonable affections, whether of pain or pleasure, have their uses; but our possible good and evil at every stage of our existence, all lies in the future. The past is gone and lost; we never can recall it, nor go back to it. It has left us forever, and is continually receding further and further from us, till the gulf of separation, which is from the first bottomless and bridgeless, widens to infinity. The present is an instant; it is a dividing line between the two eternities, of no breadth whatever. The possibilities of the past are lost; those of the present are joined to the past the next instant; and all the objects of our labor are in the future. There is our battle field, and there our harvest field; and we are approaching every point in it to which the line of our existence can come with the ceaseless progress of the ages. Loves and hates, hopes and fears, all find their objects in the future, near and remote; repentances and approbations find their objects in the past, and they are receding every instant further and still further from us. Surely then we ought not, in our systems of moral culture, to give any of the retrospective affections the preeminence over the present and prospective.

57. Still less ought the affections to take the precedence of ideas.

The eye of the mind is its faculty of ideas; all the objects of our affections are first objects of our knowledge and faith. It is the policy of Christianity to increase and exalt our knowledge, and perfect our faith, and thereby develop our affections. This is the order of the Scriptures, and it is equally the order of reason and sound philosophy, and can not be reversed. Right doing is conditioned mainly on right knowing and believing, involving right judging. For all our knowledges and faiths are judgments in which we infer objects from evidences, and conclusions from premises. Faith is a judgment; all believing is judging, and all right believing is right judging, inferring from the evidence what it shows and all it shows. To judge and believe thus is to perceive the truth, and the truth perceived and acted on conducts to holiness and happiness. To believe without evidence, or in opposition to it, or differently from what it shows, is to believe wrong, and peril all the interests involved in such faith. Correct faith is a virtue, and leads to all virtue; incorrect faith is a sin, and leads to all sin.

NOTE II.

THE LATER PROPHETS AND THEIR ARRANGEMENT

JONAH, ISAIAH,

JEREMIAH, ETC.

1. THE third division of the Hebrew sacred books consists of 15 Hebrew prophets, arranged in two series. (1.) The major prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel; (2.) The minor prophets, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, and Malachi. These books, in the Hebrew arrangement, are placed next after Kings, and followed by the fourth and last division of the Hebrew sacred books an arrangement entitled to be continued in the English Bible, and on no account to be abandoned. Daniel belongs to the next division, and will appear in its place.

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2. The Hebrew arrangement of the major prophets is in chronological order; Isaiah first, then Jeremiah, and last Ezekiel. The impropriety of a different order is manifest; but in the minor prophets, while a chronological arrangement is observed in the collocation of the last three books, and to some extent in that of the others, it is in several instances departed from, showing that the true order of the books was not known to the compiler. In the

present work, I have abandoned the division of major and minor prophets, as of no advantage in the study of the sacred books, but an injury; and arranged all the books in a single series, according to their supposed times. This is not always according to the probable date of their composition. Jonah, first on the list, may have been latest written. The affinities of its style are with the later Hebrew books; it is not attributed to Jonah as its author, and has every mark of being a parable, and not a strict literal history. The Old and New Testaments abound in parables, and the oriental and ancient taste inclined strongly that way; with what reason, the universal popularity of our Lord's parables and other ancient writings of the kind clearly shows. The absurdity of Jonah's conduct as a prophet of Jehovah, and its inconsistency with that sacred office, and the extravagance of making animals fast, clothing them with sackcloth, and prohibiting them from eating and drinking, to avert the divine anger, are not unsuitable to an eastern parable, but do not comport with strict and literal history. As a history, the book is embarrassed with great difficulties; as a parable, its exposition is easy, and its lessons weighty and powerful.

3. The earliest date in Isaiah is the last year of Uzziah, (6: 1,) 759 B. C.; another date occurs in the time of Hezekiah's sickness and recovery, 15 years before his death, 711 B. C., including an interval of 48 years. This is a long public life. But few clergymen preach their half-century sermons. The labors. of Isaiah are here represented for nearly half a century in the first 39 chapters of his book. The names of then living persons are often mentioned, and specific dates are sometimes given. The different poems are independent of each other, and some differ widely from the rest, but most of them are directed to the men of those times, and interspersed with notices and incidents, giving occasion for the advice of the prophet, and creating a demand for his messages. At the 40th chapter the style and structure of the book are entirely changed. The language bears marks of a later date than most of the poems which precede. There is no allusion to any living man of the age of Hezekiah, or to any contemporary incident or event of that period; but the people addressed as contemporaries are the Jews of the Babylonian exile. The great contemporary sovereign referred to, the Hezekiah of the age, is Cyrus; the great blessing proclaimed is the return from the exile, and the latter-day glories to follow, and the great duties, the abandonment of idolatry, the worship of Jeho

vah, and the practice of righteousness. Other representations and peculiarities concur to define this portion of the book as belonging to the close of the Babylonian exile, and not to the period of Hezekiah, 170 years earlier. If no express date had accompanied the song of Moses at the passage of the Red Sea, who would think of ascribing it to Joseph, or Jacob, or some other Jewish patriarch, who lived previous to the Egyptian oppression? The position of this part of the book next after the poems of Isaiah, with some slight historical notices only intervening, would create a presumption in favor of its earlier date, if the contents were consistent with such a conclusion. Against the indications of the contents, it proves nothing. I have therefore not ventured to give the chronology of this part of Isaiah at the head of my pages. Its most probable date is B. C. 536, a period of excitement well adapted to furnish the conditions for such a composition, and apparently well entitled to have its own contemporary prophet and poet.

4. The following are some passages in the latter part of Isaiah which sustain the above views: Isa. 40: 1, 2. Comfort, comfort my people, says your God; speak kindly to Jerusalem, and cry to her, that her warfare is accomplished, that her wickedness is forgiven, that she has received from the hand of Jehovah double punishments for all her sins. This is a message of consolation to the Jews, at the close of the Babylonian exile. It is not the method of God to comfort men before he has afflicted them. With this date the whole chapter agrees. The voice crying in the wilderness implies that the return was already proclaimed; and the admonition to Zion, as a news-bearer, to lift up her voice with strength, and publish her news aloud, implies that the decree permitting their return was then published. The connection of predictions with this reference to passing events is in order.

5. 41 25, 26. I have raised up one from the north, and he shall come from the rising of the sun, he shall call on my name ; and he shall come on princes like mortar, and like a potter tread the clay. Who declared [this] from the beginning, that we may know [him], and from before, that we may say, He is righteous ? Indeed, none declared it; indeed, none published it; indeed, none hears your words. I first gave to Zion, Behold, behold, and to Jerusalem, the bearer of good news. The sense of the latter part of this passage is misapprehended in the common version, but correctly translated it refers to Cyrus as having come, and the good news of the return as being already proclaimed.