successful enterprise devoted for years and years to worldly and selfish schemes and aggregations? what the vastest hoards that ever man in this or any country called his own, beside the measureless value of such an acquisition? Mr. Adams had riches, and has left them to his heirs; but what would these be without his undying renown, based upon high moral worth, and perpetuated by veneration and gratitude? They would give him no distinction above others, dying in similar circumstances. They would inscribe no enduring tablet to his memory, either on the page of history or in the hearts of his countrymen. It would have been said that a rich man died, and with nothing more to be urged in his behalf, his name would soon perish from the earth. But his honored name now lives, and will live, embalmed in the brightening annals of our history, whose office is to record and preserve the heroic deeds of lives most singly devoted to the public service and the general weal; and so it would live, had his wealth, when he died, not been sufficient to buy the coffin in which he sleeps. His name is a monument that will outlast the granite, and a legacy to children's children, to his country and humankind, whose price scorns the aid of figures to set forth, and will not diminish with the passing years.

And he too, with all his fame and all his honors, is

now gathered to his fathers. These could not save him from the grave. Nature must have its course. "The mighty man, and the man of war, the judge and the prophet, and the prudent and the ancient, the honorable man and the counsellor, and the cunning artificer and the eloquent orator" fall equally before the indiscriminating scythe which mows down all with its remorseless sweep. In the present case, not the tender plant, nor the green grain, nor the branch white with the blossom-promise of the autumn has been cut down, but the stalk of corn, nodding with its golden fruitage "fully ripe in its season." And what is replete with peculiar and pensive interest is the fact, that in this death, neither unlooked for nor too soon, another of the few remaining links which unite the revolutionary period to our own has been sundered. Thus, one by one, the tomb is garnering the venerable forms of those whose eyes looked upon the struggle which issued in our national freedom. Soon the last link of this kind will be broken, and we shall stand, and live, and act among a generation born after the revolution. God grant that when the fathers of illustrious memory who lived in this great period shall all slumber in the dust, the mantle of their virtues may for ever rest on their posterity.

THE INCOMPARABLENESS OF THE HOLY

SCRIPTURES.

(Before the Ulster Co. Bible Society at Kingston, Feb. 1851.)

"For I testify unto every man that heareth the words of the prophecy of this book, if any man shall add unto these things, God shall add unto him the plagues that are written in this book; and if any man shall take away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part out of the book of life, and out of the holy city, and from the things which are written in this book." REV. xxii. 18, 19.

We have in this passage a distinctly uttered interdict, sanctioned by a portentous penalty, against the addition to or subtraction from the words of the prophecy of this book. What book, will it be asked? That book which the inspired revelator wrote in the lonely Patmos of his exile, and in which the words of the prohibition and the penalty are recorded? Yes; though not that book alone, which is only a part of the inspired volume, but every book, preceding it and associated with it, in the celestial record, springing from the same source, written by the same unerring pen, bearing the impress of the same Infi

nite Mind, and coming to man with the same high testimonials to authenticate its character and claims. Every book, forming like the Apocalypse a part of the law and the testimony, whether written at the Spirit's guidance by patriarch or seer, by king or ruler, by prophet, or evangelist, or apostle, is fairly comprehended within the words of the prohibition before us. All Scripture is given by inspiration of God. No prophecy of Scripture, in any part of the blessed volume, is of any private invention, is the product of man's ingenuity or cunning craft, or farreaching sagacity, but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.

The Scriptures, therefore, in their essence and integrity, owe nothing to man's faculty of contriving or power of executing. Man has not laid a single stone of the broad foundation on which the blessed volume rests. Man has not put a single beam, or rafter, or support of any kind, in the comely edifice which rests on this foundation, nor added a solitary outward decoration. It is the Lord's work, from foundation to topmost stone, and marvellous in our eyes. And being such, the work is necessarily not defective or different materially from what He designed and had the power to make it. It is not half finished nor badly finished, but finished in all

its parts perfectly and symmetrically, the whole body being fitly joined together and compacted by that which every joint supplieth. Completed thus, there is room for no earth-furnished additions. God might add, but man cannot. He has given it to the world in the state in which the world itself, with man to dwell upon it, came forth from His own hands very good, without deformity, or malformation, or vitiating imperfection-not susceptible of essential improvement, or better adaptation to the grand purposes for which it was designed, by adding anything or taking away anything—but sure to find damage and derangement from any presumptuous and foolhardy tinkering of man.

This, then, is the book of which such things may be safely and soberly spoken. The book composed of many books; the book of all books, scorning the paltry intellect of man that would make it better, and brooking no profane hand of mortal to intermeddle with it, or take a tittle from the consecrated treasures of its wisdom and its love; the book which God Almighty, after filling its pages with whatever he has seen fit to communicate to the species, has closed and sealed with His own hand and signet, and declared with all the authority of the Power who grasps the thunders of destruction, that no man