ognized is the want of progress and movement in the spiritual life. When the pastor visits them, he may find them well disposed, ready to confess their sins, their insufficiency, their need of redemption, and the aid of the Holy Spirit; but at each succeeding visit their language will be the same; variety is wanting, because the reality is wanting. If he is called to treat a malady of this kind, he ought, on one hand, to see that the soul, of which we speak, takes account of its own state; and, on the other, to take care that he does not renounce what he has, because of the manner in which he obtained it. He should not refrain from speaking to him of grace, or withhold the promises which he has accepted, and which we do well always to accept. He must not change at all the conditions of the covenant of grace, and withdraw from this soul the privileges which belong to it; but he should guard it against hypocrisy, against the usual evidences which both to itself and others exaggerate the advantage of its state; he must then exhort it to a silent and interior activity, to the severe study and application of the law, and to whatever disciplines and mortifies the soul, as well as to all works which, while they imply charity, develop it without danger of inflating the heart; in a word, silently to imitate Jesus Christ. But the shades of this state are exceedingly various; each of them at once requires and indicates particular measures; the important point is (and it is what he had specially in view) precisely to distinguish and estimate each of them.

VI. We may form another class out of skeptics who are neither indifferent nor troubled, neither unbelieving nor believing, but who, through an infirmity or an evil disposition, can be settled in no point. There are minds naturally skeptical which are forever considering, and never come to any conclusion. The pastor can hardly hope to be a reformer of them; but, after trying as much as possible to throw arguments in one of the scales, or, rather, before even trying, he

should strongly endeavor to make them much more serious, who, without being of the same class with the indifferent, are perhaps far from giving to religious questions all the interest they deserve. In order to make a man of this character serious and capable of decision, let him be filled with a sense of the infinite. The most wavering skeptic does not doubt that he has a soul; and if we can succeed in giving him a sense of the reality and the great value of his soul, we have put him at the true point of view as to questions of this kind, and we have in some sort turned his face to the east.

There are sincere and unhappy minds who, impressed by the spirit of truth and touched by the Gospel, believe in their state of sin, abjure all self-righteousness, desiring to be clothed only in that of God, which they would be prepared to receive if they believed it were offered to them, and yet find themselves detained from entering at the gate, as by a chain which seems to be stretched before them by their education, their first impressions, too much or too little knowledge, I know not what -a skeptical temperament, which shows itself in them, even in things the most foreign from religion. It is well when we meet with such as these, to remind them that "faith," according to the expression of an enlightened author, "realizes itself in the will; that faith is nothing else than willingness to accept a pardon from God, and to renounce the pursuit of all other means of salvation; that doubts which remain in the mind do not change it; that God has not made our salvation to depend on the vacillations of our feeble understanding; that it is not the understanding which consents to accept of grace; that it is not the imagination which is moved by it; that it is the will, the only faculty always free, though feeble, which receives pardon, turns itself to God, and may even cry, 'Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.''

VII. The indifferent are a numerous class, inferior not only to the orthodox, but to unbelievers themselves, inasmuch as these latter are unbelievers in a positive manner. Their M

opinions, however, or rather their want of opinions, give them logically an intermediate position.*

These are, in general, worldly persons, dissipated men or men of business, who have not leisure either to be orthodox or to be unbelievers. There are occasions of reaching them in the actual state of things. They are not without relations to the Church, in the bosom of which they are still retained by habit or decency. They meet the pastor in social intercourse at the houses of others, or in civil affairs, or in solemn circumstances. They have affections, domestic pleasures and sorrows; they are men: on the side of humanity they may be reached; all their natural affections have an affinity for religion, without which, also, none of them have complete exercise. All these fundamental relations call and invite to a higher one.

When we have obtained the ear of the indifferent, we must destroy their security, and make them see that their position is not indifferent. We must not hesitate to arouse fear in them; in the majority of cases, it is impossible to connect the idea of God, in the mind of an indifferent person, with any other sentiment than fear; but, without neglecting to use this means, if we may give vibration to other chords, we should make them vibrate.

VIII. There are many unbelievers that we have full right to approach as such. And doubtless we can scarcely engage with these without a preliminary step, a conversation, which, from the circumstances, will necessarily have the interrogatory form. But infidelity has practical maxims as well as forms of doctrine; and the first, in default of the second, may open for us a door to religious discussion; and then infidelity is sometimes unwilling openly to declare itself; it more frequently appears in oblique forms; allusion or irony contents it. We must not start with the idea that every attack, direct or indirect, should lead to a discussion. Much rather should we avoid discussion in the presence of company, if it • See a discourse by M. VINET on Religious Indifference, etc.-Edit

be not directly provoked.

We must absolutely decline it when the attack is only a sarcasm or an abuse. As far as possible, we must change the discussion into an appeal to conscience and edifying conversation.

It can not be reasonably required of the pastor to engage in formal conflict on the stage of science with professed men of learning who draw their weapons against religion from their special pursuits. A clergy of such a stamp (so M. Vincent* insists) is an impossibility. Men of a particular class should be met by men of a corresponding class. Religion has more than one class of ministers, and more than one kind of proofs.

Infidelity, even with the most ignorant, piques itself on an aggressive character; that is to say, on believing something in opposition to the beliefs which religion proposes. Each has his system, which is often nothing more than a mass of gratuitous and incoherent assertions-a collection of pithy phrases, stolen, without understanding them, from conversations and books. There is no point of doctrine so abstract or subtile that it does not produce itself under some trivial and puerile form in the language of these bold spirits of low degree. Contempt is never seasonable, never useful; but we must not give these ambitious proverbs of ignorant infidelity honor which they do not deserve, and engage in discussions which, though they may have a limit and a result with persons of a cultivated mind, have often neither result nor limit with narrow and ignorant minds. If, nevertheless, it is useful to convince them that they have not so stately a system as they imagine, it is yet more useful, either in the sequel or at the beginning, to transfer them to another stage, namely, that of conscience and experience to awaken in them the wants which they have proudly put to sleep, and to show them in all their beauty the work and character of God, as revealed by the Gospel, and the privileges of a Christian as attested by a truly Christian life.

IX. We have more to do with rationalism, which accepts the sacred documents, than with infidelity, which discards them. We refer not only to learned rationalism, with which a simple.pastor can not always contend as a formal polemic, but to superficial and second-hand rationalism, which seeks to blunt the edge of that evangelical truth by which it is wounded. We venture little in assuming that this rationalism has for its ordinary source a repugnance of heart, and that it is in the rationalist's conscience that the weapons, in contending with him, are to be sought. Without, therefore, omitting arguments of another kind, furnished by science, and without seeming to shrink from the combat, we must make great use of internal evidence, and call conscience to bear witness.* Let us not forget how strong the Scripture is, and that it is sufficient in itself: The more we use the Scripture in explaining the Scripture, the more shall we be struck with the excellence of this method. We can not too earnestly remind ministers that the word of God should abound in them, so that, having learned it by heart and by the heart, the principal passages of the sacred books will recur to them easily and promptly whenever they shall be needed. This knowledge should be not of isolated parts, but of parts combined or forming a whole; and the sense of each verse should be presented as penetrated with the senso and the savor of all the principal passages that relate to the same subject. Such a knowledge of the Bible (talis et tanta) can not be too strongly recommended to all ministers of the Gospel (or stewards of the word of God).

X. Out of the pale of Christian belief there are Stoics, more or less religious, whose religion is strictly that of duty, even when they seemingly and sincerely desire to make God the object of duty. This class of men deserves more atten

* We may properly refer here to some works more or less popular on the evidences of Christianity: Cellerier, Bogue, Erskine, Whately, Jennings, Paley, and Chalmers.