THERE is one class of proofs for the divine origin of the Scriptures which is of a peculiar sort. Of how much use it may be in convincing an adversary, we shall have something to say before we close the present chapter: to the Christian himself it is the best of all proofs. It is, by way of distinction, called the inward, or spiritual evidence; that is, the evidence applied by the Spirit of God to the heart of the true believer, and which results from his own personal experience of the power of Christian truth. Independently of all the external and historical testimony, and though not independent, yet separate from all other internal and rational evidence, there is a self-evidencing power in the Scriptures, which declares, by its influence on the mind and heart of the believer, that they are the word of God.

  The Scriptures profess to accomplish, for all those who believe and obey them, what nothing else accomplishes. One way of proving to ourselves that this profession may be relied on, consists in making an honest and practical use of what they reveal. The religion they reveal professes to be a

  Has, then, the Bible proved itself a failure? and are there those who have fairly and honestly brought it to the test of experiment, who are convinced that it is not of God? Or has it proved itself true to the better; and are not all those who "have obeyed from

  There are those who do not obey the truth revealed in the Bible, and who, for this reason alone, have not this inward evidence that it is the word of God. How should they have it? And there are those who, while they are free to acknowledge their defects, do in some good measure obey it. They are the friends of truth and righteousness. They fear God, and love his Son. They respect his institutions, venerate his law, and make it the great object of their lives so to live as to enjoy his approbation. They are men of prayer, because they are sensible of their dependence on God, and their obligations to him; they are godly men, and men who are habitually influenced more by unseen and eternal realities, than by the things that are seen and temporal. We affirm that this class of men are conscious of an inward and moral sympathy with the disclosures made in the sacred volume, and that their own personal experience falls in with these disclosures.

  1. The great truths of the Bible are fitted to exert an influence on the internal emotions; they are weighty and important enough to do so and

  If you hold up to him a different delineation of the Divine character from that which is presented in the Scriptures, his mind instinctively revolts from it. His hope, his refuge, his portion, the God he loves and rejoices in, is the God of the Bible. The most subtil errorist cannot decoy the friends of God by any artful, or distorted views of the Divine character, Detract from his full-orbed excellence, or obscure its amiableness and glory by any additions of man's devising, and they instantly take the alarm. What the Bible affirms of God, their own hearts affirm: the moral sympathy is complete. Give them his presence and favor, and you cannot make them miserable: deny them these, and you cannot make them happy.

  They have the same inward sympathy with the Scriptures in the views they exhibit concerning the sinful character and lost condition of man. Severe as the imputations are which the Bible records against men as sinners, and though they are imputations which no man naturally submits to, and which, if untrue, prove this book to be a false accuser; yet do good men uniformly acquiesce in them, while the best of men have the strongest convictions of their truth. Their own daily confessions are the echo of these humbling statements; while the longer they live, the more do they discover sources of wickedness in themselves, which lead them to wonder how their own character could have been described

  The same inward sympathy is also felt with the representations which the Bible gives of the way of salvation by Christ. There is no truth which pious men have more honestly put to the test of experience than this. They have tried other remedies, and found no relief either from the curse of the law, or the dominion of sin. They have been driven from every other refuge, and have found in the Lamb of God alone the refuge they were looking for. The Bible tells them of One whose "blood cleanseth from sin," and through whom there is "peace with God;" and they have found it so, in the possession of peace which is as a river, and joys that are like the waves of the sea. The view which a Christian has of the method of salvation by Christ, is entirely different from that of the man whose head only is orthodox. He loves it; he confides in it; it is a view which he takes for himself and for his own soul. It is to him just what the Bible represents it to be; it is "precious;" there is a glory, and majesty, and beauty in it; a fitness and all-sufficiency in it, that mark it as the salvation he needs. It is his home; he cannot live without it. Take it from him, and you crush his hopes: you make him miserable. Whatever may be his powers of intellect, whatever his situation in life, the man who receives this redemption and lives upon it, has

  The same sympathy is also experienced with that great truth so much insisted on in the Scriptures, the regeneration of the soul by the Spirit of God. Good men have had a personal experience of the necessity of this change; and they are not un-frequently as conscious of the change itself, as they were of those sinful principles and affections which existed within them before the change took place. They have affections and principles of conduct to which they were once strangers, and which are altogether unlike those which belong to a mere speculative view of this truth. Men who have had the Gospel preached to them for years, and who, as a matter of mere rational inquiry, understood this truth none the better for having heard it so often, have now clear views of it, and views as different from what they once had as light is from darkness.

  If from the regenerating, we advert to the sanctifying work of the Spirit of God, and the meliorating, subduing influence of that spiritual religion of which the Scriptures speak, we find them equally responded to by a still, small voice within the soul. Every gracious affection renewed and invigorated is an expression of this sympathy; every breath of prayer is a recognition of it. The bright and brightening constellation of graces that lights up, with its rare lustre, the otherwise dark pathway from time to eternity, is but the reflection of those great truths of the Bible which shine as a light in a dark place.

  2. The Bible is a book of promises, "exceeding great and precious promises." Promises bloom upon this Tree of Life like the blossoms of spring; nor do they deceive us when autumn comes, and the fruit is gathered. They are promises which respect the life that now is, and that which is to come. They speak of "blessings upon the head of the just," and of "all that their heavenly Father knoweth that they need." They are promises of safety "under the shadow of the Almighty," and of deliverance out of their "many afflictions." They speak of "their mourning turned into joy;" of "light arising to

  Promises like these throw themselves upon every day's experience and observation. They are easily

  3. There is another peculiarity in the instructions of the Bible, which is also easily brought to the test of experience. I allude to its instructions on subject of prayer. It abounds in inculcating the duty of prayer; it speaks largely of the power of prayer; while page after page is devoted to recounting the achievements of prayer. It teaches that God is the "hearer of prayer;" and that "the effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth much." We affirm that the experience of the men of prayer is in remarkable coincidence with the spirit and import of these instructions, and furnishes perpetually accumulative evidence of the truth of the

  Of no fact in the history of the church does the experience of good men furnish more abundant testimony, than of the efficacy of that spirit of holy wrestling which finds its expression and its conquests at the throne of grace. The convictions of pious

  Now it strikes us that this is a very remarkable, and indeed an unaccountable fact, unless the instructions of the Bible on the subject of prayer are truthful. It is far otherwise in false religions. Men who offer their supplications to the Virgin Mary, or to departed saints, have no such experience as this. The worshippers of pagan gods pray to idols which their own hands have formed, but receive no answer. The moon is cold and deaf, and turns not from her steady course when oblation after oblation is poured out on the altar of this "queen of heaven." And the sun is listless, when sacrifice upon sacrifice sends upward its costly fragrance, to immingle with his rising, or setting beams. Like the prophets of Baal, when from morning to evening they cried to their absent, or sleeping deity, all such worshippers "find neither voice, nor any to answer, nor any to regard them." We make our appeal to unbelievers themselves, and ask them to tell us from their own observation, if when, as Christian men, we "lift up our heart to God who dwelleth in the heavens," we nave no greater evidence that he is the hearer of prayer than the pagan has when he prays to the "host of heaven," or the Musselman when he pays his devotions at the shrine of the false prophet?

  4. We pursue this induction of facts only a single step farther. The Scriptures profess to strengthen the people of God on the bed of languishing, and to give them peace and consolation in death. These are strong and high professions. We read in the Bible of the "rod and staff" that comfort the believer when he walks through the dark valley; of One who, when "flesh and heart fail," is the "strength of his heart and his portion forever;" and of peace, and hope, and triumph over the "last enemy." Whence come these high professions? Who is it, that professes thus to cheer the mind weighed down by the ravages of disease, desolated of all hope from creatures, and shrinking with instinctive dread from the agonies of death and the corruption of the grave? Who is it, in that sad hour when all human vigor and courage are broken and shivered; when all sublunary joys retire, and the tenderest ties that bind man to man are about to be broken, and the agitated spirit must go alone to her last account, that thus professes to soothe its fears and give it hope and confidence?

  If this be not the uniform lesson, yet is it the lesson of Christian experience: "The wicked is driven away in his wickedness, but the righteous hath hope in his death. I cannot tell how it is with other ministers of the Gospel, and with other men: for myself I can say, for almost forty years I have been familiar with scenes of sickness and death—among the rich and the poor—amid the ordinary visitations of disease, and amid the raging pestilence; and I cannot recall to my mind a single instance in which I have seen a wicked man die in peace. I have seen wicked men die courageously, and as though every nerve were wrought up to its highest tension in order to meet the conflict; but I have never seen one go out of the world peacefully. I have seen them submit to their fate, because their hour had come, and they could not help it. I have seen them die in stupid and brutish ignorance of their own character as sinners, and of a coming hereafter, just as many a pagan dies; but it was not a peaceful death. I have seen them die under the influence of powerful narcotics, and when they did not know they were dying and when medical attendants announced that then death was tranquil and without a struggle. I have seen them die in that state of indifference to life which is produced by the languor of disease, the

  It is not by inspecting such scenes as these, that this question can be brought to a practical test. Place yourself by the bedside of a dying man, whose mind is clear, whose conscience is awake, and who has strong perceptions of his own guilt and an approaching eternity; and it will be found that such a man dies in peace, and only he, who has found peace in that Saviour "whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood." If it be said that Christians themselves do not always die triumphantly, or even peacefully, we grant that it is so. A good man may die suddenly, and have no time for thought; he may die in a state of intellectual debility, or derangement, which incapacitates him even for hope; he may die when his loins are not girt about him, and his lamp is not trimmed and burning, and therefore he may die under the hidings of God's countenance, and pass away under the cloud; while in fact; his death never partakes of the agony and remorse of the wicked, and in the ordinary dispensations of Divine Providence, is full of

  Time would fail me to tell how Christians die; nor can anything save the pen of the recording angel, who has stood by their bed of death and borne them to Abraham's bosom, narrate the unnumbered instances of their delightful departure from the present world, which verify the truth of the Bible. "I could never have believed," said a dying saint, "that it was so delightful a thing to die; or that it was possible to have such views of the heavenly world as I now enjoy." The memorable Melancthon, just before he died, chanted in his sleep the words, "I will not any more eat thereof, until it be fulfilled in the kingdom of God." He seemed restless, and on being asked by one near him, "Whether there were anything more that he desired?" replied, "Aliud nihil, nisi coelum—nothing more, unless it be heaven." The most forbidding aspect now and then presented by the Christian's death, is that of rigid

  Infidels themselves see and feel the weight of such facts as these; and not a few of them have been constrained to adopt the language, "Let me die the death of the righteous, and let my last end be like his!" A writer in the Scottish Mirror affirms of David Hume, that, having witnessed in the family of the venerable La Roche those consolations which the Gospel alone could impart, he confessed, with a sigh, "that there were moments when, amidst all the pleasures of philosophical discovery, and the pride of literary fame, 'he wished that he had never doubted.'

  We will not say, such are the facts on which we rest our statement; for they are but a partial exemplification of the facts on which we rest the proposition, that there is a self-evidencing power in the Scriptures to every man who cordially receives them, which declares, by its influence on his own soul, that

  1. In the first place, the positive conviction arising from the Christian's experience of the truth of the divine oracles, cannot be philosophically overthrown by the mere negative conviction of the Deist who has no such experience. A million of negatives cannot overturn one positive. It is no proof that you do not see the light of the sun, that men who are born blind never saw it. It is no proof that the Christian's experience does not verify the truths of revelation, that the experience of men who are not Christians never verifies it. If the believer "has the witness in himself," it does not falsify his testimony that the unbeliever has no such witness. The testimony of the unbeliever is not opposing testimony; it is simply no testimony at all. It would be worse than childish for a jury to pronounce a man innocent of the crime for which he stands arraigned, because ten men declare under oath that they did not see him commit it, so long as five credible witnesses affirm that they did see him. Nor is this a stronger case than the one under consideration. The testimony of one creditable witness to a fact which he himself has observed, would overturn the negatives of half the world. Negation, in the law of evidence,

  2. It is of some importance also to remark, in the second place, that this inward testimony to the truth of the Bible is founded on good and solid reasons.

  The Deist replies to the Christian, who reasons as we have been reasoning, All this is a matter of mere feeling; it is simply your own impression; it cannot be argued out, but is a fancy of your own! No, it is not so: it is argument; it is a just and irrefragable conclusion from premises that are true. Those premises are, that there is no effect without an adequate cause; the conclusion is, that the effect produced by the Bible on the mind and heart of the Christian, is one whose cause is God. They are effects which nothing else can produce. Everything else has been tried—tried in every form, in every age, and by all the combinations of human power and human wisdom—and has proved a failure. If the Bible does not produce them, it is false to its own engagements; if it does produce them, it is true. This is one of the points on which it has committed itself. Its language is, "Search the Scriptures, for in them ye think ye have eternal life, and they are they which testify of me." "Taste

  The Christian's experience of the truth of the Divine promises and the power of prayer, is of the same convincing kind. If the Bible is false in these particulars, it is no difficult matter to detect the falsehood. Prayer cannot be answered, nor these promises fulfilled, except by God. He who is the hearer of prayer, and who fulfils the promises, must be concerned in the government of the world, as no other being is concerned save Him who made it. If he thus hears the prayers of his people, and accomplishes these promises, every answered prayer and accomplished promise furnishes evidence of the divine origin of the Scriptures. They ask, and receive: what is this but a witness that this Book is divine? They obey a direction of the Bible, and find the accompanying promise fulfilled; and what is this but proof that the direction and the promise are from God? If promises and directions like these were false, they would carry with them their own condemnation; the whole course of Divine Providence would testify against them, and give them the lie. No impostor would thus jeopard his veracity; nor would such pretensions ever have occurred to the mind of an impostor. If the Bible is the word of God, it may well thus commit itself, because its Author is both able and willing to redeem the pledge. His honor is concerned in making it good; while the experience of its fulfilment testifies, that the Book which reveals it is not the work of man. The

  3. There is a third remark, which presents this internal and spiritual evidence still more clearly in the light of rational conviction. It relates to the nature of the evidence which gives rise to all those convictions of the human mind which flow from experience and consciousness. It is the perfection of reasoning when the mind, by due process of argument, cannot help coming to the conclusion to which the argument would conduct it. By the universal consent of mankind, there are intuitive and instinctive principles of belief that are not the result of any process of induction, because they are self-evident; they are too plain to be established by any such process; nor is there anything more evident than they themselves are, by which such process may be conducted. The most conclusive argument does nothing more than unite propositions which are

  This remark, and these illustrations of it, present the thought I wish to convey in relation to those convictions of the mind which flow from experience and consciousness. The mind of man has its senses as well as his body. It has a sense of beauty and

  Now Christianity addresses itself, not to the intellect and reason of men merely, but to their moral nature—to their heart and conscience—to what may properly be called their spiritual senses. The man who has experienced its power, possesses this inward sense of its truth and reality. When the light of truth shines upon his mind, he knows it to be truth because he sees it. When the voice of God, his Maker, falls upon his ear, he asks for no other evidence that it is God's voice, than that he hears it. It is a well-known voice; there is no other voice like it, or to whose accents his mind so vibrates, and which produces the same inward emotions. It is the voice of the Good Shepherd, leading his flock in green pastures, and by the still waters. "My sheep," says he, "know my voice, and follow me; a stranger they will not follow, for they know not the voice of strangers." Good men love God, and love

  Nor is there any mysticism in this: it involves a principle of every day's concernment. The Deist replies, "This may be evidence that satisfies the man who feels it, but it is no argument with one who does not feel it; I have read the Bible, and find no such effects from it; to my mind it is a book of absurdities!" Let us test this objection, and see where it will end. Set the Deist to reason with an Atheist. The Atheist may ask him, "Why do you believe there is a God?" The Deist replies, "I see such evidences of design; such beauty, grandeur, order, and harmony throughout the creation, that to my mind it is impossible that it should not have been the product of a designing Cause." The argument is good; but it rests on the Deist's perception of design, order, and harmony. What if the Atheist replies, "Your impressions of design and harmony are all superstition; I have never seen any such indications in the created universe: the evidence

  4. There is a fourth remark, which gives still additional force to this argument. This testimony from experience is fortified by a great number of witnesses, and of great variety of external condition and nat-

  All Christians have this internal and spiritual evidence. All testify to the reality of the change, wrought, through the instrumentality of the Bible, upon their own hearts; the effect produced by it on their own minds and character is different from that produced by any other book in the world; nor is it possible for any other to produce the same moral transformation. It has disclosed to them the inmost recesses of their own bosoms, which nothing else could do. When polluted, it has made them holy; when anxious and troubled, it has given them peace; when miserable, it has made them happy. It has given the most accurate and vivid representation of their sorrows and their joys, their burdens and their relief, their temptations and their succors, their doubts and their confidence, their fears and their hopes, their unfaithfulness and their relentings, their conflicts and their triumphs; which no book could give unless its Author knew what was in man, and is able to write out their own inward history.

  It adds too not a little to the force of their testimony, that this experience is felt in all ages of the world, from righteous Abel down to the present hour. It is found in all climates, and under all forms of government. It is the same in the cottages of Greenland, and in the valleys of the Vaudois; in polished Europe, and in the savage wilderness; on

  There are but two ways in which this testimony can be repelled: the one is, by supposing the witnesses to be deceivers; the other, by supposing them to be deceived. That they are all deceivers will hardly be urged by the grossest infidel. They are

  Let it not therefore be wondered at, that Christian men place strong dependence upon this spiritual and internal evidence.

It is no preponderance of probabilities on which such a man rests his assurance of the divine origin of the Bible. It is not possible to persuade him to renounce it for any false religion, however plausible and captivating it may be, and however artful its seductions.

  This is emphatically the poor man's argument

  If the infidel does not confide in representations like these, if he does not give the argument any credence, it is matter of grief to us, but we cannot help it. There is no alternative for him between a true faith in Christianity, and living and dying without God, and without hope; between cleaving to God's testimonies, and absolute despair; between glorying in them, and being overwhelmed with shame and everlasting contempt.

"For judgment am I come into this world," says the great Author of the Bible, "that they which see not, might see; and that they which see, might be made blind." Men who know too much to be taught of God, must be left to their own blinding delusions.

  From my heart do I pity the man, who shuts the eyes of his understanding against the intrinsic evidence which this Book possesses of its heavenly origin. Would he allow it to speak its own facts and its own doctrines, without mutilation and in all their richness; would he allow it to utter its own promises and its own threatenings, its own love and mercy, its own heaven and its own hell; he would find that it is no more the work of man than the sun

  We part with the infidel, but we do not willingly part with him; nor do we leave him in the spirit of unkindness. There are truths of the Bible known to himself, and demonstrated by his own experience. We affectionately and earnestly invite him to a field of thought, which his own heart has not yet explored. We bid him rove over it from flower to flower, and from its vernal promise to its rich harvest; pledging him, that if he does so he shall not lose his reward. Let him prove the Bible by giving all its truths the trial of experience. Let him taste the honey, as well as the gall: they are sweet fountains, pure fountains, clear as crystal, from the throne of God and the Lamb.