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    become more varied and useful as time has advanced , and the means of communicating thought have been improved ; till there is , at length , a fair prospect of an intellectual commonwealth where each shall share the riches of all , and through the boundaries of whose realm the voice of divine truth shall reverberate more loudly and more clearly for ever .

    I say " for ever ; " because by the inferential nature of the divine doctrine and law , the permanence of Christianity is secured Lei the human mind expand as it will , the gospel expands with it , because it is the mind itself which makes it a gospel . When first presented to the Hindoo , in his lowest state of degradation , the sacred records form an intelligible , elementary book . A . s soon as he understands the language of the interpreter * be comprehends the facts that a good and wise Teacher healed the sick , arose from the dead , condemned certain practices and recommended others . As he advances in cultivation , he sees more in the revelation than he at first

    understood ; and if we imagine him to reach the highest point of wisdom yet attained , we shall find that he has still something more to learn from the gospel . Let him pursue natural science ; he finds that all his discoveries confirm truths contained in the Bible ; that the adaptation of natural objects to each other affords evidence of a Providence—their adaptation to the human mind , of a moral government . To the eye of a Newton these truths were as radiant as the planets in their courses , or as millions of suns in their

    unchanged glory . Let him pursue intellectual science , and be will discover a depth of meaning in the plainest narratives , bright touches of philosophic truth in the incidental remarks occurring in the sacred records , which administer a perpetual stimulus to his researches * It was not presumption which established in the mind of a Locke a feeling of congeniality with the Apostle of the Gentiles ; nor was it a narrow partiality for a favourite pursuit which enabled him to discover in Scripture the materials for extending the

    philosophy of the intellect . Let the disciple pursue moral science , and he will find that he cannot fathom the depths of wisdom which Christianity contains * In Heathen systems of morals , the waters of life were given by measure , and in scanty measure . Here he finds a perennial spring , where a Hartley might refresh his spirit , but which the quenchless thirst of a thousand such as he could not exhaust . The wisdom of this revelation having proved thus far

    fathomless and immeasurable , there is no reason to believe that its resources will be ever exhausted by human reason ; that it will cease to be a permanent gospel . There is every reason to believe that the simplest facts will yield inferences vast as the mind which deduces them , and co-existent with the faculty which infers . It is clear that no verbal scheme of doctrine could be thus permanent—no code of moral law thus expansive ; and since we can trace the action and reaction of the divine revelation and the human

    mind on each other , we cannot resist the conviction of their mutual adaptation ; that the office of reason is to interpret the gospel , and the object of the gospel to invigorate the reason . By the inferential nature of the divine doctrine and law , the universality of Christianity is secured . The facts which it displays are of general interest , and the media through which its instructions are conveyed are

    universally intelligible . Since all men die , the feet of a resurrection is of paramount importance to all . As the parental and fraternal relations subsist wherever man is placed , the parables of the prodigal son and the offending brother come home to the hearts o ( all . The wind blows , the fieldflowers spring , the light from heaven shines around the abodes of men in every land ; and the spiritualizing associations with which Jesus invested

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    The Education of the Human Race . 515

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  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Aug. 2, 1830, page 515, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2587/page/11/