ble and child-like faith, they guided the followers to heaven and eternal life. The divine mercy gave them only so much light as was suited to their state; and thus they were saved from the awful sin of rejecting and profaning the purer and more spiritual forms of divine truth. The human mind had for ages been immersed in the worst forms of idolatry and sensuality. It was necessary, therefore, that it should be very gradually brought out into the pure light of heaven. If the poor prisoner, who had long been confined to some dark and gloomy dungeon, were suddenly brought out into the full light of day, he would gladly rush back to his dark retreat. And thus would the human mind have fled back to the lowest depths of sin and profanation, if, from the dark haunts of idolatry and sensuality, it had been suddenly brought forth into the pure light of spiritual truth. If, when the Corinthian church turned the Holy Supper into a drunken feast, (see 1 Cor., ch. 11,) they had known that the bread and wine which they were thus using to gratify their low sensuality, represented the Lord's divine goodness and truth, they would have been guilty of a profanation which might have closed heaven forever from their sight. It would have been a deed fit only for the worst spirits in hell. But an act which, if done by us, would sink our spirits into the lowest depths of hell, was comparatively a trivial offense with them, for they saw not and heeded not the interior, spiritual nature of that solemn ordinance.
Such appears to have been the general character of the human mind at the dawn of the Christian dispensation; external and sensual, capable of receiving those truths which are merely scientific and natural, but not those which are spiritual and rational, unless in a very limited degree. And the writings of the apostles, as seen under the light of the new dispensation, appear precisely adapted to the state of the human mind in that age. The apostles had received just that measure of divine illumination which
