Religious Faith the safeguard and consolation of Man. we will not serve thy Gods, nor worship the golden image, which thou hast set up. We are not careful to answer thee; that is, the case is so plain that it admits not of doubt or hesitation: our answer is easy and ready. If it be so; if thou be determined to enforce this wicked decree upon us; the God, whom we serve, is yet able to preserve us from harm, to deliver us even out of the burning fiery farnace; and we trust that he will deliver us out of thine hand. But, should he not do this; should it be his righteous pleasure to abandon us to the severest sufferings, which thou canst prepare for us; we know that he cannot finally forsake us: we know that it is better to die in obedience to his will, because we are assured that all his ways are goodness and truth, than to break one of his commands, for the favour of the greatest monarch upon earth. Know, therefore, O king, that we will not serve thy imaginary Gods, nor worship the senseless idol of gold, which thou hast set up. The king executed his decree upon them. The wonderful issue is recorded in the words of my text. To render the victims of his fury Religious Faith the safeguard and consolation of Man. more helpless in agony, and to add intensity to their sufferings, he commanded them to be bound, and the furnace to be heated five times hotter than usual. Such was the degree of heat, that the flames destroyed the servants, who approached them, with the bound bodies of the intended sufferers. But the Almighty God whom they served, himself, or by his angel, burst the bands that tied them, suspended the destructive power of the fire that blazed around them, raised them up unhurt, and walked with them in the midst of the flames. The form of the fourth is like the son of God, said the astounded king; appears with brightness and glory beyond any thing human: or, appears in the brightness of an angel or, some think that the son of God himself appeared to Nebuchadnezzar, as to St. Paul at his conversion, when he was persecuting the Christian Church. I now proceed to offer some observations upon this interesting portion of sacred history, with reference to other parts of Scripture, to shew the nature of religious faith. The three holy persons, whose history we are Religious Faith the safeguard and consolation of Man. are contemplating, were fully assured of the immutable truth and goodness of the everlasting God, their God, and the God of their fathers. They had studied the history of the Patriachs, the law of Moses, the prophecies of their own times, and of those which had preceded them. Hence, they looked forward to a life after death, and to the resurrection of their bodies from the grave. We must conclude that they had this knowledge of futurity; for we cannot think that, persons so distinguished for their righteousness, for their fidelity to God, for their obedience to the precepts of both the moral and ritual law, could be ignorant of things so plain to every one, who diligently and faithfully studies that law, with the other Jewish Scriptures. But, indeed, this matter is proved beyond all doubt in the fortitude, with which they met the cruel penalty of disobeying the ordinance of the Babylonian king. For, they had no sure foresight that God would save them from the destroying power of the flames. If not, said they, if it be his will that we perish in the fire; yet we will not worship thy gods, nor Religious Faith the safeguard and consolation of Man. the golden image, which thou hast set up. What could have prompted this declaration, but the knowledge that the God, whom they worshipped, was the God, not of the dead, but of the living; that, if by keeping his commandment, they forfeited the present life, they would yet live with him, in a happier existence? If they had been mindful of this life, they need not have put it to hazard in resisting the king's command. If they had possessed no hope of a future being, they would have chosen to preserve some time longer the life they had, by paying adoration to the fictitious deities, who were powerless to do either good or harm, rather than to worship him, who would suffer them, for so doing, to be destroyed for ever. It is evident, therefore, they knew this life was not their resting home; that, as St. Paul speaks of their Father Abraham, and his immediate posterity, they knew they were strangers and pilgrims on earth, desiring a better, a heavenly country, a city not made with hands, whose builder and maker is God. St. Paul, in the eleventh chapter of his epistle Religious Faith the safeguard and consolation of Man. epistle to the Hebrews, alludes to the case of these three righteous persons in these words. Faith hath quenched the violence of fire. We are not thereby to understand that, an extraordinary degree of faith necessarily procures to its possessor a power to suspend the agency of fire; but that, it is so acceptable to God, that it always brings his blessing upon the soul, in which it exists; so that he may be pleased to interpose his providence to save him in the utmost perils, as he did to preserve these three youths in the burning fiery fur nace. St. Paul, in the chapter already cited, says, faith is the substance of things hoped for; the evidence of things not seen. From the visible works and laws of the creation we infer the existence and attributes of the Creator. The things seen, exercising the reasoning faculties, beget the ideas of things not seen. Hence we derive a belief in the existence of those things. This common principle of faith is the property of all intelligent beings. And, where a love of truth prevails; when the mind improves that disposition to rectitude, which it has by nature, |