how much more impressive and solemn is it that there is no form of sin, which had not its appropriate hour of expiation in the anguish of the Son of God upon the cross! Surely, if there be any thought that can fill the disciple of Jesus with loathing for every species of wickedness, it is this painful reflection. Surely, too, this thought should afford abundant encouragement in the darkest season of distress, whether from bodily pain, bereavement, estrangement of friends, malice of enemies, pecuniary embarrassment, loss of reputation, or the assaults of the great adversary. Jesus Christ is the same, yesterday, today, and for ever. His pity and his love are just as strong now, as when he voluntarily endured the hiding of his Father's face. Let us bear with patience, our hour of trial, since each kind of our sins had its double hour of penalty in "the pains, the groans, and dying strife" of our surety and substitute.

The body of our Lord was carried to its resting place in a garden. The first Adam lost his innocence in a garden, was driven out from his permanent home, and became a wanderer on the earth, with "the world all before him where to choose." The rest of the second Adam in a garden, seems to typify the repossession of the forfeited Paradise; the reversal of the sentence of expulsion. And as Jesus gained his great victory over the powers of darkness in the garden of Gethsemane, so he gained a triumph over the great destroyer of our race in this garden, in " the place of skulls." Thus, by an inscrutable providence, over-ruling and directing the wrath of man, the very name of the spot on which stood the cross, was suggestive of the desolation brought upon our race by man's disobedience, and emblematic of the conquest over the sting of death, and the victory over the grave, through the obedience of our precious Redeemer. And how the lesson taught by the three gardens, rebukes our proneness to judge by the specious show! "The Lord seeth not as man seeth; for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart." Paradise, with its beauty, its bloom, and its fragrance, brought the defilement of sin, the decay of disease, the rottenness of the grave. The struggle in Gethsemane on that black, moonless night, brought deliverance from the powers of darkness. The bloody sweat of the Redeemer wiped all tears from the eyes of the redeemed. That third garden in Golgotha, with its burial place of silence and of gloom, "brought life and immortality to light," gave an earnest of the resurrection from the dead, and assurance to that hope

"Which looks beyond the bounds of time,
When what we now deplore
Shall rise in full immortal prime,
And bloom, to fade no more."

The mystic connection among the three gardens, may explain the remarkable promise of our Saviour to the penitent thief, " To-day shalt thou be with me in Paradise." Did he not have in his mind his regaining, as the second Adam, the Paradise lost by the first?

Three women are specially distinguished for their care of the body of their murdered Lord — Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and Joses, and Salome. Our Saviour was three days in the sepulchre. Three angels came to minister unto him at his resurrection. One of these rolled away the stone, and kept guard at the entrance. (Matthew and Mark.) The other two went in to their Lord, served him as attendants, and wrapped up and laid by his grave-clothes. (Luke and John.)

Was this triplex concurrence of events accidental? Did a God of infinite wisdom have no design in it? Can we account for it upon the infidel scheme of the fortuitous arrangement of chance? No mortal man can explain the deep, hidden significance of the repetition. " The secret things belong unto the Lord our God; but those things which are revealed, belong unto us and to our children for ever, that we may do all the words of this law." "It is the glory of God to conceal a thing." The preceding conjectures are then mere speculations, it may be, idle and unprofitable speculations. But the impossiblity of an explanation makes most powerfully against infidelity. This constant recurrence of the number three cannot be accidental. Any one, the least acquainted with the mathematical theory of probabilities, knows that the hypothesis of the happening of so many threes, by mere chance, is too absurd to be entertained a single moment. There must then have been a controlling mind, either to direct the triple events, or to direct the relation of them. The first view gives us God disposing of all the affairs connected with the crucifixion. If God interposed, and arranged all these matters in this remarkable form, Jesus of Nazareth was no ordinary sufferer. We take the infidel on his own ground; he constantly denies the intervention of the Creator in the minor operations of creation. The doctrine of a special Providence finds no favour with those who "have not God in all their thoughts." The conclusion, then, is inevitable, the Providence of God displayed in so many little particulars, must demonstrate that He who died on Calvary was no ordinary being.

But, let us take the second view, and see whether it helps the cause of unbelief. Let us suppose that the events did not occur, and that the Evangelists fraudulently and designedly gave us this concatenated series with its triple links. The question then arises, what was the motive for throwing in so many curious facts in their narrative? How did they happen to select this precise number three? And why have they repeated it some twenty times? Was their object to produce something novel, a sort of Chinese puzzle? But the inventors of rare and ingenious machinery are careful to display their works of art. This cannot be said of the Evangelists, for the tripleply has been woven in their story in such a manner that the world has not perceived it at all. That which is so singular and wonderful in their story, has completely escaped the notice, as well as the comment of mankind. We are not aware that a single individual has ever called attention to it. But even if this has been done, it is certain that the vast majority of readers of the gospels have not observed the tri-form nature of the occurrences connected with the Crucifixion. Remember that we have shown that so many particulars, all in this form, could not have been related without some design on the part of the narrators. The accidental concurrence of so many circumstances in a tale, is mathematically impossible. Upon the infidel hypothesis, that the Evangelists were writers of fiction, we are driven to the absurd conclusion, that four men agreed to connect the number three with almost every incident related by them, and yet to conceal the connection so carefully, that it should escape observation. The individual who can believe that the Evangelists could commit such an absurdity, may disbelieve their record, but it is from no want of credulity in his mental organization. He is certainly credulous enough to believe anything. It is a notable fact that those who are most sceptical in matters of religion, are generally most credulous in all other matters. The boasted free-thinker is generally the veriest slave of superstition. He gives his doubts to the gospel of the Son of God, and his faith to everything else. There is nothing too wild, too unnatural, and too preposterous for him to believe; God has given him over to "strong delusion that he should believe a lie."

Man is so constituted that he must have one sure object of belief, else his faith will lay hold upon ten thousand absurdities. The anchor, loosed from its hold on firm ground, catches the drifting seaweed in its flukes. Men lose the knowledge of the true God, but to people the groves, the fountains, the hills, and the valleys, with imaginary deities. All the delusions that have perplexed, maddened, and cursed our race, have had their root in unbelief of the truth, as it is in Jesus.

An incident in the life of the infidel, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, exhibits most strikingly the grossness of the superstition into which the rejecters of the gospel are prone to fall. After he had written his deistical work, called De Veritate, he had doubts about publishing it. "Being thus doubtful in my chamber," writes he in his Memoirs, "one fair day in summer, my casement being open to the south, the sun shining clear, and no wind stirring, I took my book, De Veritate, in my hand, and kneeling on my knees, devoutly said these words: — ' thou eternal God, author of the light which now shines upon me, and giver of all inward illuminations, I do beseech thee, of thy infinite goodness, to pardon a greater request than a sinner ought to make. I am not satisfied enough, whether I ought to publish this book, De Veritate. If it be for thy glory, give me some sign from heaven; if not, I shall suppress it.' I had no sooner spoken these words, but a loud, though yet gentle noise came from the heavens, (for it was like nothing on earth,) which did so comfort and cheer me, that I took my petition as granted, and that I had the sign I demanded; whereupon also I printed my book." "This," he adds, "how strange soever it may seem, I protest, before eternal God, is true: neither am I in any way superstitiously deceived herein, since I did not only clearly hear the noise, but, in the serenest sky that I ever saw, being all without cloud, did also, to my thinking, see the place from whence it came."

And so Lord Herbert, who could not believe that God would deign to manifest himself to save millions of our race from eternal death, yet could believe that this great Being did manifest himself to him, in order to encourage the publication of a paltry book!

Lord Herbert was but the representative of his class. It is notoriously true, that the sin-darkened mind will believe any thing, save that the Bible is from God, and that Jesus is the Author of eternal salvation. It is notoriously true, that the most extravagant and dangerous speculations prevail most extensively in those regions where the gospel of Christ has the least influence. Athens was celebrated for its schools of sceptical philosophy, when Paul, standing in the midst of Mars-hill, proclaimed, "Ye men of Athens, I perceive that in all things ye are too superstitious." Nearly eighteen hundred years after this declaration, France rejected the true God, and worshipped a veiled prostitute, as the goddess of reason! And so we account for the idolatrous devotion of the French soldiers to Napoleon. He became as God, to those who had no God. "Why do you weep," said he to a wounded grenadier, " am I not with you?" "True, sire," replied the dying man, "I had forgotten that." And so the poor fellow was consoled.

There is no difficulty in explaining why the infidel is so grossly superstitious. God avenges his insulted majesty. He has made faith in himself a cardinal principle of our moral constitutions. When we do violence to our faith, we do violence also to our spiritural natures. When there is no one legitimate object of belief, there will be hundreds of false and pernicious objects. The vitiated appetite, which rejects wholesome and nourishing food, craves that which is vile and hurtful.

Believers have been content to defend themselves against the charge of superstition. This defensive policy has been bad policy, to say the least of it. "Tell my lord prince," said the gallant old Suwarrow, "that I know nothing of defensive warfare. My strategy is, to seek the enemy, and to fight him, when and wherever found." Let Christians imitate the conduct of the brave Russian. Let them carry the war into the enemy's country. Let them show, that those who boast the most of their freedom from idle fancies and religious impressions are, of all men, the most childishly credulous, the most completely given up to the rioting of loose imaginations. Let them show that these boasters are, of all men, the most apt to believe in dreams, omens, prognostics, presentiments, foreshadowings, spiritual agencies, and every species of delusion. Let them tell how Hume, the great infidel leader, could chatter about the river Styx, and Charon the boatman, until death stopped his frivolity. Let them tell how the puerilities of heathenism, instead of the solemn realities of eternity, occupied the mind of the dying philosopher. Let them then ask, What is gained by substituting pagan mythology for the religion of the Son of God?

Poor, miserable sceptic! Has your freedom from superstition ended in this? Have you given up the glorious light of the gospel, to return to the darkness of heathenism? Have you ceased to worship God, that you might worship devils? Have you left Mount Moriah and the temple of the Lord, to go down into the polluted vale of Hinnom, and there sacrifice to demons and unclean spirits?

Father in heaven! help us to adore thee in spirit and in truth, that we may not be given over to the bondage of superstition, and the madness of unbelief.

53. The sum of our argument is this. The recurrence of the number three so many times, could not have been accidental. There must then have been some design in the mind of God, to make the events occur in this triple form, or there must have been some design in the mind dictating the narrative. Take the first view, and we have a special Providence controlling all the transactions connected with the crucifixion. But the infidel denies the interposition of Providence in the ordinary affairs of life. Hence, upon his own principles, the death of Jesus could have been no ordinary affair. Take the second view, and we have some mind dictating the story of the cross, according to a preconceived plan, of giving a triad shape to the principal occurrences. But this directing mind must have been the mind of the Spirit of God. It is utterly impossible to believe that the Evangelists would frame designedly so singular a tale, and strive to conceal its singularity from their readers. We can account for their silence touching that which is so extraordinary in their narration, upon the supposition that they wrote, as the Holy Ghost dictated, and were not themselves aware of the remarkable recurrence of the number three. But, according to the infidel scheme, they had a design without a motive, a plan without a reason for it, a pre-arranged system without any definite object in view! Surely, human credulity can go no farther than to believe such an absurdity as this.

We leave the unbeliever to take his choice in the dilemma; either to suppose design in controlling the events connected with the crucifixion, or design in controlling the recital of them. Whichever horn he takes, will push his infidelity to the last extremity.