IT cannot be denied that the Bible has been laid as a yoke upon the human heart. If any man think that a repudiation of its authority can proceed only from the evil part of our nature, he has more to learn respecting humanity; he may have much to learn respecting himself. For the reproach has been often uttered, and is widely believed true, that the religion of the Bible is a selfish religion, that its main maxim is to secure our own interests; and men whose hearts rise up against the dogma that self-interest can be the true or rightful spring of human life, condemn it unheard. But is it not taught that the Bible makes self-interest the basis of religion? Is not that reproach inseparable from the doctrine that life and death are happiness and suffering? Let these ideas be refined to the utmost, the pollution of self-love cannot be purged from them. Men will still say? that religion is but another form of self-seeking, and not deliverance from it. The world rejects a Gospel clothed in a garment which makes it but the reflex of themselves. The substitution of future happiness and misery for life and death, of something to be got for ourselves lor deliverance from the necessity of self-regard, is the death of Christianity. It can not rob, indeed, the death of Christ of its saving power over individual men, but it despoils the Gospel of its prerogative, and quenches in darkness the life that should be the light of men.