human progress, while it says not a word about man’s dependence upon any thing above himself.

It may please the multitude to tell them that they must look solely to themselves for all the resources of a higher life. It tickles the vanity of men to preach to them of the virtues of self-reliance, and to exhort them with high-sounding oratory to cultivate their manhood, and follow the higher instincts of their nature; to bid them behave worthy of themselves, to find the true law of their being in their own self-hood, and to rely upon the strength of their own spiritual muscle to climb to the higher regions of spiritual perfection. Men love to hear it. They listen readily to the voice of such charmers. It flatters their pride. It deifies their manhood. It gets rid of all those humbling notions of dependence upon God’s power. It does away with all such useless exercises as prayer and supplication. It tells men to be true to themselves, to kindle the sparks of their own manhood, and walk in the light of them, while it says nothing of a “Rock which is higher than they.”

Grand as such teachings may seem to many, they sound very sad to the Christian: sad, because they are not true; sad, because they are as delusive as they are flattering.

According to all these theories, man is directed to himself for his own salvation and improvement. Nature, and not grace, must save him. He is his own rock on which he must build. He has no object above himself to look to. His god is his own developed humanity. What then is there for him to hold fellowship and communion with higher than himself? What is there to draw him upward; what to excite him to action? How can he rise above his own level? On what ladder will he plant his feet, and what object will attract his gaze and nerve him to exertion?

With nothing outside of himself and above himself to look to, you shut him up to grovel in the dust. Without the law of a higher attraction influencing him, man, with all his ambitious pretensions, will stay where he is. It is only when the sun is in the heavens, scattering its warm beams over the world, that the ocean sends up from its bosom its tribute to the sky. Destroy this solar attraction, and no particle of moisture would rise above the surface.

So the human soul aspires to something above itself, in obedience to the law of spiritual attraction which is beyond itself. Isolate it from God, who is far above it, turn away its thoughts from any rock higher than it, bid it look perpetually inward and never outward and upward, and you have doomed it to despair.

“Is it not strange,” remarks the earnest and profound John Foster, “to observe how carefully some philosophers, who deplore the condition of the world and profess to expect its melioration, keep their speculations clear of any idea of Divine interposition? No builders of houses or cities were ever more attentive to guard against the access of flood or fire. If He should but touch their prospective theories of improvement, they would renounce them as defiled, and fit only for vulgar fanaticism. No time is too long to wait, no cost too deep to incur, for the triumph of proving that we have no need of a Divinity regarded as possessing that one attribute which makes it delightful to acknowledge such a Being—the benevolence which would make us happy.

“But even if this noble self-sufficiency cannot be realized, the independence of spirit which has labored for it must not sink at last into piety. This afflicted world, ‘this poor terrestrial citadel of man,’ is to lock its gates, and keep its miseries, rather than admit the degradation of receiving help from God.”

That religion which is taught us in the Bible, is the opposite of all the cruel mockeries of a godless philosophy. It tells of human progress. It bids us hope for a higher life. It cheers us with promises of deliverance and salvation. But it bids us “cease from man, whose breath is in his nostrils,” and points us to a Cause above ourselves. It sounds no panegyrics upon our manhood. It talks not of nature’s doings, but of grace. It tells us not to trust ourselves, to rely upon our self-hood, but to consent to be helped by a divine power. It leads us not to ourselves, but to “the Rock that is higher” than we.

And in so doing we maintain that the religion of Jesus Christ alone meets the deep-felt want of our souls.

After all the cherished pride of independence, after all the praises sung to “our godlike manhood,” after all the strugglings for self-development, the soul feels a consciousness of its weakness, and is burdened with a sense of its own impotency. There are occasions, not a few, when it gives the lie to all the shallow pratings of philosophy, and looks around it for help. It feels its own infirmities. It wants to escape from its loneliness and isolation. It reaches after a power which it does not possess. It cries for a “Rock which is higher” than it.

The religion of Christ meets this condition of our nature. It tells me I must look beyond myself. It shows me where to look. It reveals to me a Rock, firm, enduring, safe, where I may rest—not in me, but above me, “higher than I”—to which, if I would reach it, I must consent to be led, and to receive aid.

In this school of religion are we taught the lessons of the deepest humility, and the most absolute dependence—lessons such as were never taught in the porch or the grove of refined philosophy. They are opposed to the strongest instincts of our carnal hearts. They extort from the soul the confession of its own helplessness: “Save, Lord, or I perish.”

Yet conflicting as true religion is with the pride and self-confidence of carnal man, its provisions and conditions meet precisely the wants of a humble believer. This abnegation of self, and looking away from and above self, is the highest comfort of a Christian’s life. This Rock, higher than he, is what he wants to get hold of and lean upon. Lead me to it, is his prayer, uttered from every department of his soul.

1. The understanding utters it, when it seeks for knowledge. It asks for a wisdom above its own, to instruct us in the great truths of our being, our relations to God, our duties, and our destiny. It feels that divine wisdom alone is competent to declare what the divine will is.

Men may bid me hear it through the voice of reason; but that cannot satisfy the soul. Like the spider which spins its web from its own bowels and hangs it in the air, have men been long busy in deducing from their own reason their profoundest systems of truth and virtue, and in laying down the rule of duty which would guide them to life eternal. But the result of all such labors has been poor indeed. All the systems which reason has ever framed could never rise above the finite; and multitudes of them have proved but metaphysical cobwebs, entangling the soul which seeks to walk upon them in their perplexing meshes, till, in its strugglings, it breaks through them all, and drops down into the abyss of hopeless scepticism.

I cannot trust my eternal welfare to such deceptive oracles. I want to hear a voice outside of myself to teach me life and duty. I want to hear what God speaks to me, and to believe it because He speaks it. And though in his divine revelation he says many things which are not articulate to my reason, still reason forbids me not to trust in them. Faith lays hold of them, and climbs upward to rest upon “the Rock.” Here the Christian soul takes refuge. To the infallible word of God it flies, from all the Babel utterances of rationalistic errors, as its only