IN FIDEL TENDENCIES OF THE AGE. "For the time will come, when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lust shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears, and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables."2 TIM. 5: 3, 4.

That Paul clearly foresaw the apostacy which followed the apostolic age, the passage above quoted gives full proof. It was his earnest desire to guard the churches he had planted against its attacks, and the ministry he had ordained from turning aside through the influence of popular

error.

Such has been the labor of all truly evangelical men since that day. Through evil report they have "contended earnestly for the faith once delivered to the saints," testifying against the waywardness of the world and its false conceptions of God and his truth.

The rocks upon which some men in all ages have been broken, are self-consequence and pride of opinion. They have over-estimated their own importance-their capabilities and powers; and when, plunging into the abyss of darkness, they have

found one mystery more mysterious than any other, they have clung to it with a tenacity worthy a better cause. Insisting upon their own visionary fancies as the alpha and omega of truth, they have followed a philosophy- an ignis fatuus,

Which leads to bewilder, and dazzles to blind;"

yet, say such, "we see," we see," therefore their "sin remaineth." The history of all these men, sects, and and parties, whether ancient or modern, is the same. After a day of prosperity they have been numbered with the things that were, because they lacked the living, vital power necessary to sustain the spirit under its trials and temptations, and in its struggles toward a higher perfection. Who does not know that the speculations of gnosticism dragged the Christian church down into deeper ignorance in ancient times, and that German Rationalism has endangered its first and paramount interests in our own times? It has not only degraded the profession of Christianity and unsettled the faith of some, but it has prepared the way for the triumph of the enemy through the force of the

reaction which must needs follow its extravagances.

It is not, however, to ancient gnosticism nor to the struggles and trials of Christian faith in Germany that we desire to call special attention. It is to the warfare waged in our own country against the faith of the fathers, as more immediately affecting our interests and demanding our earnest consideration.

When we say that the tendencies of a certain class of minds, in this age, are infidel, we affirm what all seriously minded, prudent thinkers are willing to admit. A class of the people of this country are becoming enamored with a philosophy which philosophy which sometime since culminated in Germany, and is now becoming effete, and the further extravagances which they add to it do not tend to bring them any nearer the solution of the question, "what is truth?" Wandering, unsettled, dissatisfied, they plunge into more monstrous absurdities, and supply a settled conviction with wilder extravagances and stranger dreams. God, Christ, heaven, hell, earth and man-his interests and destiny-are thrown together into the same crucible, and analyzed by that wonderful genius which essays to grasp the thunders of Jove, and guide the steeds of time and progress through illimitable space. And the destruction which they have wrought, though less apparent to the natural senses, is far more fatal than that of Phaeton in his daring attempt to guide the sun.

It is nothing strange that these wise men of to-day should begin by ignoring the Saviour of the world. Proud of the triumps of their own genius, or ambitious to attain the discipleship of some noted leader, they begin by making him less than the Jesus of the New Testament-by robbing him of the divinity every

where ascribed to him. His miraculous conception and birth, the song of the angels and the shepherd's fear, are treated as highly wrough rhetorical figures; his miracles are treated as the mistakes of an ignorant age, placed to the credit of magic, or ascribed to the action of laws neither then nor now understood; and the divine Master himself, instead of be. ing acknowledged "God with us,' "the brightness of the Father's glory and the express image of his person,' is made the "model man," wiser perhaps, and more exemplary than you or I,-yet, only worthy to be classed with Socrates, Plato and Swedenborg. His mission, instead of being a message from God, revealing truths which reason cannot reach nor intellect fathom, is made the philosophy of a better developed man, by no means free from the errors and mistakes incident to a limited nature. Thus Christianity, instead of being the New Covenant, the New Jerusa lem which came down from God out of heaven, the fullness of the law and the prophets, the, cap-stone, the head of the corner, brought forth with shoutings of grace, grace, unto it, is made but a scheme which is to give place to newer and higher improvements as these geniuses dive deeper into the arcana of nature.

The resurrection from the dead is made the counterpart of the child's progress with his books, without a higher purpose or a more perfect work. Thus the Christian's hope is destroyed, the mourner's comfort is taken away, and death is but the door to another department in the same school. Are you willing in this manner to reject Christ and his gospel? to parter Christian hope for the darkness of human philosophy? to make the world to come but the counterpart of this,-and in your thoughts, doom the friends who have