credit of them for his reward?

Or lastly, put the matter thus: For more than a thousand years the
Bible, collectively taken, has gone hand in hand with civilisation,
science, law--in short, with the moral and intellectual cultivation
of the species, always supporting, and often leading, the way. Its
very presence, as a believed Book, has rendered the nations
emphatically a chosen race, and this too in exact proportion as it is
more or less generally known and studied. Of those nations which in
the highest degree enjoy its influences it is not too much to affirm,
that the differences, public and private, physical, moral and
intellectual, are only less than what might be expected from a
diversity in species. Good and holy men, and the best and wisest of
mankind, the kingly spirits of history, enthroned in the hearts of
mighty nations, have borne witness to its influences, have declared
it to be beyond compare the most perfect instrument, the only
adequate organ, of Humanity; the organ and instrument of all the
gifts, powers, and tendencies, by which the individual is privileged
to rise above himself--to leave behind, and lose his individual
phantom self, in order to find his true self in that Distinctness
where no division can be--in the Eternal I AM, the Ever-living WORD,
of whom all the elect from the archangel before time throne to the
poor wrestler with the Spirit UNTIL THE BREAKING OF DAY are but the
fainter and still fainter echoes. And are all these testimonies and
lights of experience to lose their value and efficiency because I
feel no warrant of history, or Holy Writ, or of my own heart for
denying, that in the framework and outward case of this instrument a
few parts may be discovered of less costly materials and of meaner
workmanship? Is it not a fact that the Books of the New Testament
were tried by their consonance with the rule, and according to the