The benevolent character of the atonement is connected with all the redeeming acts of grace for the reformation and salvation of lost sinners; not merely in the example of disinterested devotedness with which Jesus Christ yielded to suffering and death for us; nor yet by the bare offering of himself as a sacrifice to satisfy Divine justice; but as procuring also a dispensation of mercy and grace; preventing, enlightening, persuading, and inclining us to forsake sin and turn unto God; and above all, obtaining for us the gift of the Holy Spirit to change and purify our hearts, that we may serve God in holiness without fear all the days of our life. To pardon sin and leave the sinner unrenewed, would produce no reformation. But the Gospel system provides for the justification of the believing penitent by an act of pardon for the alone sake of Christ, in which he is restored to the favor of God; and also for the future obedience of the believer by the renewing of the Holy Ghost, in which he is restored to the image of Him that created him. Hence the Gospel system of justification, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, has its superior excellence in the moral influence and exalted character of its benevolence; which is not only to save the guilty from merited punishment, but to restore the rebellious sinner to a holy and submissive obedience, that he may adorn the doctrine of God his Saviour in all things.

Having taken this view of the subject, we shall close with the following reflections:

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1. Justification by an act of pardon, accompanied with grace, is a personal benefit by which the sinner is released from his actual burden of guilt; the distress and anguish of soul under which he laboured and was heavy laden is taken away, and he is enabled to say with respect to himself, Whereas thou wast angry with me, thine anger is turned away, and behold thou comfortest me.' This is very different from the cold speculations about a fancied righteousness which a sinner claims in the perfect obedience of Christ, while he is himself a perfect slave to sin, or the still more dangerous deceit of an eternal justification, existing only in the sovereign will and mind of God, without any moral effect perceivable in our relative or real change from sin to holiness. As the pardon is real and personal, so the benefits accompanying our justification are personal and solid. For while the person possesses a lively sense of his acceptance with God, he enjoys peace of conscience and joy in the Holy Ghost; and walking in the light, he has fellowship with the Father and the Son. He realizes that the yoke of Christ is easy and his burden is light. He is not only delivered from the guilt, but from the power and dominion of sin. The love of God is shed abroad in his heart, and he rejoices in hope of the glory of God.

2. In considering the atonement made by Christ as the procuring cause of our salvation, it brings the pardon directly to the view of the trembling, desponding, and guilty conscience, not only as a

satisfaction to offended justice in behalf of the sinner; but in its benevolent character it pleads persuasively with man to turn from the evil of his ways, and with all the agonies and bitter groans of the bleeding, dying Saviour, asks, 'Why will ye die? It does not leave him to the appalling thoughts of pardon merely by prerogative as an act of entire sovereignty, which, if extended to all would annihilate the principles of moral government with respect to virtue and vice; or if limited to a few, would lead to the awful suspense and gloomy uncertainty of our being numbered with the elect, and at the same time awaken conscious, indignant disgust against the partial acts of arbitrary power. But in the Gospel, pardon is offered freely, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus; a pardon bought with blood; and the pardon is urged upon us with demonstrations of love and good will and with a positive assurance that whosoever will may come freely, and him that cometh he will in no wise cast out.

3. The sacrifice of Christ is set forth to be a propitiation through faith in his blood, for the remission of sins that are past. In the very terms of our pardon there is a suitableness, a wonderful adaptation to the wants and weakness of mankind; no previous works of righteousness, no goodness, no holy dispositions are required of the penitent sinner, to entitle him to pardon; for to him that worketh not, but believeth on him that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted to him for righteousness. He need not inquire who shall ascend into heaven, or descend into the deep; for the word of faith brings the atoning sacrifice near, even to his heart, and presents the promise of pardon to his guilty conscience in the language of inspiration, 'Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved;? Whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, but have everlasting life.' For God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them. He is therefore invited to come by faith, with all his guilt, and receive remission of sins that are past; and with all his helplessness to trust in the merits of his Saviour, who is able to save to the uttermost all them that come unto God by him.

As faith, in the atonement of Christ, is connected with the moral precepts of the Gospel, and the purest system of morality; so it presents the most powerful motives to obedience and virtue, by exhibiting the awful responsibilities of man to his God, the certainty of a future judgment, and the realities of an eternal existence of happiness or misery. It does not leave the motives to obedience to a cold philosophizing speculation; but it urges the claims of piety and virtue by the exhibition of the cross of Christ, and pleads directly with the heart by the manifestation of the love of God, the benevolence of the Saviour, and the hope of eternal life.

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APPLICATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO THE ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE WORLD.

[The two following articles constitute the latter divisions of an Essay on the Objects, Advantages, and Pleasures of Science, which forms the preliminary treatise of a series of popular works on literary and scientific subjects, published by the British Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. This essay was written by the president of the Society,-the present Lord Chancellor of England, who may be justly considered as one of the most remarkable men of the present age. Though principally known among us as a statesman and orator, and as a lawyer at the very head of his profession, he has yet found time, amid his numerous other avocations, to acquire a most extensive knowledge of general science, and does not think it beneath him to exert the noble powers of his mind in diffusing the light of it by the preparation and circulation of plain and popular essays such as this, for the public good.]

For the purpose of illustrating the advantages of philosophy, its tendency to enlarge the mind, as well as to interest it agreeably, and afford pure and solid gratification, a few instances may be given of the singular truths brought to light by the application of mathematical, mechanical, and chemical knowledge to the habits of animals and plants; and some examples may be added of the more ordinary and easy, but scarcely less interesting observations, made upon those habits, without the aid of the profounder sciences.

We may remember the curve line which mathematicians call a cycloid. It is the path which any point of a circle, moving along a plane, and round its centre, traces in the air; so that the nail on the felly of a cart wheel moves in a cycloid, as the cart goes along, and as the wheel itself both turns round its axle, and is carried along the ground. Now this curve has certain properties of a peculiar and very singular kind with respect to motion. One is, that if any body whatever moves in a cycloid by its own weight or swing, together with some other force acting upon it all the while, it will go through all distances of the same curve in exactly the same time; and, accordingly, pendulums have sometimes been contrived to swing in such a manner, that they shall describe cycloids, or curves very near cycloids, and thus move in equal times, whether they go through a long or a short part of the same curve. Again, if a body is to descend from any one point to any other, not in the perpendicular, by means of some force acting on it together with its weight, the line in which it will go the quickest of all will be the cycloid; not the straight line, though that is the shortest of all lines which can be drawn between the two points; nor any other curve whatever, though many are much flatter, and therefore shorter than the cycloid-but the cycloid, which is longer than VOL. III.-January, 1832. 3

many of them, is yet, of all curved or straight lines which can be drawn, the one the body will move through in the shortest time. Suppose, again, that the body is to move from one point to another, by its weight and some other force acting together, but to go through a certain space-as a hundred yards-the way it must take to do this, in the shortest time possible, is by moving in a cycloid; or the length of a hundred yards must be drawn into a cycloid, and then the body will descend through the hundred yards in a shorter time than it could go the same distance in any other path whatever. Now it is believed that birds, as the eagle, which build in the rocks, drop or fly down from height to height in this course. It is impossible to make very accurate observations of their flight and path; but there is a general resemblance between the course they take and the cycloid, which has led ingenious men to adopt this opinion.

If we have a certain quantity of any substance, a pound of wood, for example, and would fashion it in the shape to take the least room, we must make a globe of it; it will in this figure have the smallest surface. But suppose we want to form the pound of wood, so that in moving through the air or water it shall meet with the least possible resistance; then we must lengthen it out for ever, till it becomes not only like a long-pointed pin, but thinner and thinner, longer and longer, till it is quite a straight line, and has no perceptible breadth or thickness at all. If we would dispose of the given quantity of matter so that it shall have a certain length only, say a foot, and a certain breadth at the thickest part, say three inches, and move through the air or water with the smallest possible resistance which a body of those dimensions can meet, then we must form it into a figure of a peculiar kind, called the solid of least resistance, because of all the shapes that can be given to the body, its length and breadth remaining the same, this is the one which will make it move with the least resistance through the air, or water, or other fluid. A very difficult chain of mathematical reasoning, by means of the highest branches of algebra, leads to a knowledge of the curve, which by revolving on its axis makes a solid of this shape, in the same way that a circle by so revolving makes a sphere or globe; and the curve certainly resembles closely the face or head part of a fish. Nature, therefore, (by which we always mean the Divine Author of nature,) has fashioned these fishes so, that, according to mathematical principles, they swim the most easily through the element they live and move in.

Suppose upon the face part of one of these fishes a small insect were bred, endowed with faculties sufficient to reason upon its condition, and upon the motion of the fish it belonged to, but never to have discovered the whole size and shape of the face part; it would certainly complain of the form as clumsy, and fancy that it could have made the fish so as to move with less resistance. Yet if the whole shape were disclosed to it, and it could discover the

principle on which that shape was preferred, it would at once perceive not only that what had seemed clumsy was skilfully contrived, but that if any other shape whatever had been taken, there would have been an error committed; nay, that there must of necessity have been an error; and that the very best possible arrangement had been adopted. So it may be with man in the universe, where, seeing only a part of the great system, he fancies there is evil; and yet, if he were permitted to survey the whole, what had seemed imperfect might appear to be necessary for the general perfection, insomuch that any other arrangement, even of that seemingly imperfect part, must needs have rendered the whole less perfect. The common objection is, that what seems evil might have been avoided; but in the case of the fish's shape it could not have been avoided. It is found by optical inquiries, that the rays or particles of light, in passing through transparent substances of a certain form, are bent to a point where they make an image or picture of the shining bodies they come from, or of the dark bodies they are reflected from. Thus, if a pair of spectacles be held between a candle and the wall, they make two images of the candle upon it; and if they be held between the window and a sheet of paper when the sun is shining, they will make a picture on the paper of the houses, trees, fields, sky, and clouds. The eye is found to be composed of · several natural magnifiers which make a picture on a membrane at the back of it, and from this membrane there goes a nerve to the brain, conveying the impression of the picture, by means of which we see it. Now, white light was discovered by Newton to consist of different coloured parts, which are differently bent in passing through transparent substances, so that the lights of different colours come to a point at different distances, and thus create an indistinct image. This was long found to make our telescopes imperfect, insomuch that it became necessary to make them of reflectors or mirrors, and not of magnifying glasses-the same difference not being observed to affect their reflection. But another discovery was, about fifty years afterward, made by Mr. Dollond, that by combining different kinds of glass in a compound magnifier, the difference may be greatly corrected; and on this principle he constructed his telescopes. It is found, too, that the different natural magnifiers of the eye are combined upon a principle of the same kind. Thirty years later, a third discovery was made by Mr. Blair, of the greatly superior effect which combinations of different liquids have in correcting the imperfection; and, most wonderful to think, when the eye is examined, we find it consists of different liquids, acting naturally upon the same principle which was thus recently found out in optics by many ingenious mechanical and chemical experiments.

Again, the point to which any magnifier collects the light is more or less distant as the magnifier is smaller or rounder, so that a small globe of glass or any transparent substances makes a microscope. And this property of light depends upon the nature of lines, and is