The central Presbyterian. [volume] (Richmond, Va.) 1856-1908, 1881-07-06

man, OF miseries and disappointments.
Vanity of vanities" is written over all
It's hopes. No natural and reasonable
conscience is satisfied about its sins, or
ready to meet death and eternity. HUI
manity is the victim of a spiritual can
GER; and hitherto man has invented no
remedy. If the skeptic says that he
don't see this is so, he is but venting a
heartless insolence and deceit, which are
an insult to the sufferings of his fellow
creatures. He knoacs that his own soul
Is unsatisfed, that his own conscience is
defled, that he has not succeeded in
healing his own plague, and that death is
secretly terror to him.
Now, in this deplorable state of him
self and his fellows, there comes protested
news of an effectual remedy. How does
he entertain that news? Usually, with
prejudice and petulance such as though
he were afraid it might be truel AS
though the blessed thought that man
kind may, after all, escape the black and
horrid fate so obviously pressing on them,
and may taste, still, the blessed peace of
healing and eternal welfare, were gall
and wormwood to the skeptical heart.
What sort of heart is this? Is it fend-
ish, or human? Let the reader notice /:
we do not ask or wish the skeptic to
adopt this professed remedy without as
pertaining whether or not it is moral
quackery. We ask him to look at it.
But we demand that he shall examine
its value with fairness, with that hope
and wish that it may prove an adequate
remedy, which common philanthropy
should prompt.
Let 1t be noted also, that in this case
there is not the shadow of pretext for
any OF that Jealousy and honest indigna-
ton at the proposal, which might be pro-
voked by obvious pretension and deceit
full motive. Does the Christ of history
advance his pretensions to be the sin
healer, with any appearance of selfish de-
sign or dishonest quackery? There ex-
lists, not even the infdel, so blasphemous
as to dare this assertion. The divine
physician appears before us, from the
first, with every signature of heavenly
disinterestedness of seriousness, benig-
nifty, and sincerity. His true followers
also, his messengers to the perishing, al
though not like Him, perfect, present the
truest evidences Of philanthropy seen on
earth. The proposal, whether true or
not is at least the most seemly thatohas
ever. been heard among men, and the
most noble. 1t is the farthest possible
from healing the hurt of the people slight
ly. 1t is no less than that infinite attri-
butes of wisdom, power, holiness, and
love should be engaged, in human form,
to purify man from his sin and guilt; to
make him eternally happy by making
him righteous. Surely, at the news OF
such proposal, every right heart should
be prompted by its love and pity for man
and its zeal for God, to pray that the
promise may prove true, and to resist its
refutation with the intensest desire.
But the infdel often resists this pre-
cious<hope with sourness which looks
as though he were afraid mankind might
be redeemed from their misery. And
the unreasonableness of the case is crown
ed by this fact: that rejecting angrily
the Bible, remedy, he has none Of his own
to substitute for it. When perishing hu-
manity, writing in its misery, asks him
for his alternative, he has none to pro-
pose. His only expedient is to mock
their woe by telling them that they are
mistaken in thinking themselves sin.sick
He will explode everybody else's remedy
for the cancer of sin, and then comfort
the wretch who feels himself, by unutter-
able daily pangs, dying by inches. with
the cool assurance that it is a mistake to
regard cancer as disease at all.