of her artisans to every clime. It is to the sailor we owe it that the cottons of Manchester, and the cutlery of Birmingham reach even the wigwams of our western Indians. Literature employs and needs the seaman, and the scholar beyond the Alleghanies studies books that were purchased for him in the book-fairs of Germany, and brought across the sea by the adventurous mariner. And look to the home, and see how many of its delicacies, and luxuries, and adornments are brought to us from abroad by the sailor's skill and enterprize. And our agriculture needs his aid. The grains of the North, and the cotton of the South would find little vent, were not the swift ships ready to bear them to a market. They have served the church also. By them the Pilgrim Fathers reached a refuge on these shores, and found a home. By them the missionary has been wafted to his station in the heathen world. As a people we are under special obligations to the art and enterprise of the navigator. We are a nation of emigrants. The land we occupy was discovered and colonised by the aid of the mariner. The seaman has, then, been employed in our service. And as far as he was our servant, doing our work, we were bound to care for his well-being; and if he perished in our service, it was surely our duty to enquire whether he perished in any degree by our fault. The ten commandments describe the duties of the employer as well as those of the parent. Care for the servant as well as the child was one of the lessons of Sinai. And though literally the servant named in the Decalogue might be only the servant of the household, not he who does service for us at a distance; yet the spirit of these commandments is not to be confined by so close and literal an interpretation. When our Savior was asked, "Who is my neighbor ?" he pointed the enquirer to the remote and alien Samaritan. All whom we can reach, and all whom we use in service, mediate or immediate, we should seek to benefit, as far as our power and influence extend.

3. Others of those buried in the waters have lost their lives in defence of those upon the shore. In the last of our wars with the mother country, the navy was regarded as the right arm of our defence, under God, from the foreign foe. And so it has been with other lands. Their possessions, their liberties, their families and homes, have been protected by the deaths of those whom they have never known, but who expired, fighting their battles, leagues away, on the deep sea. Are no obligations imposed on us, in behalf of those who have thus befriended us, and in behalf of their successors and associates? Can a nation claim the praise of common honesty or gratitude, who neglect the moral and spiritual interests of these their defenders?

4. Let us reflect, also, on the fact, that many of those who have perished on the waters will be found to have perished through the neglect of those living on shore. We allude not merely to negligence in providing the necessary helps for the navigator. The Government, that should leave the shoals and reefs in its harbors unmarked by buoys, and that, along a line of frequented but dangerous sea-coast, should rear no light-houses, would be held guilty of the death of all shipwrecked

in consequence. But may there not be other classes of neglect equally or yet more fatal? The parent who has neglected to govern and instruct his child, until that child, impatient of all restraint, rushes away to the sea as a last refuge, and there sinks, a victim to the sailor's sufferings or the sailor's vices, can scarce meet, with composure, that child in the day when the sea gives up its dead. Or if, as a community, or as churches, we shut our eyes to the miseries of the sick and friendless seaman, or to the vices and oppressions by which he is often ruined for time and eternity, shall we be clear in the day when inquisition is made for blood? No, unless the church does her full duty, or in other words, reaches in her efforts the measure of her full ability, for the spiritual benefit of the seaman, her neglect must be chargeable upon her. Now, in the Savior's description of the condemnation of sinners at the last day, it will be observed, that he selects instances, not of sins of commission, but of sins of omission, as destroying the world. "In as much as ye did it not," is the ground of the doom pronounced. May not the perishing sailor take up most of the items of that sentence, and charge them home upon many of the professed disciples of Christ? Neither by influence, nor prayers, nor alms, did they relieve his temporal and spiritual destitution, when hungry, or thirsty, or sick, or naked, or in prison. And far as this neglect operated to form the habits that hastened his death, and led, perhaps, to his eternal ruin, so far it cannot be desirable to think of meeting him again, among those who shall rise in the last day from the ocean depths, to stand with us before the judgment seat.

5. Many, we remark lastly, of the dead of the sea will be found to have been victims to the sins of those upon shore. Those who have perished in unjust wars waged upon that element, will they have no quarrel of blood against the rulers that sent them forth? The statesmen, the blunders or the crimes of whose policy the waters have long concealed, must one day face those who have been slaughtered by their recklessness. How many of the victims over whom the dark blue sea rolls its waters have perished, year by year, in the nefarious slave trade. Such is the large proportion of the miserable children of Africa who die on the voyage, that, along the ordinary course of the slave ship from the eastern shores of Africa to our own continent, the deep must be strewn, and the bottom of the sea, at some portions of the way, paved with the remains of those who have been torn from their country and home, by the orders or connivance of the slave-trader, to perish on the ocean. In the day of the resurrection that galaxy of skeletons will rise; and the voice of wailing and accusation, stilled for centuries beneath the waters, will be lifted up to be stilled no more forever. And so it may be said of every other form of wickedness, of which those that sail in our ships are rendered the instruments or the victims. The keeper of the dram shop, or the brothel, where the sailor is taught to forget God and harden himself in iniquity, will not find it a light thing in that great day of retribution, to encounter those whom he made his prey. The seaman may not have died on the premises of his tempter,

in drunken riot; but out upon the far ocean he may have carried the habits there acquired, and died, the victim of intemperance, or profligacy, in a climate far removed from that where he was first lessoned in the ways of ruin, sinking perhaps in a shipwreck caused as many shipwrecks have been caused, by the intoxication of the commander or his crew. But the sea does not contain all the victims among its sons, who have thus been destroyed by the vices learned of the landsman. Many a sailor thus corrupted has perished on shore in a drunken broil, or pined away in some foreign hospital, or ended his days in a prison. Human laws seized not on those who first ensnared him; but will divine laws be equally indulgent, or equally remiss? The literature of the shore will be called to account for its influence on the character and well-being of the seaman. The song writer, who, perhaps, a hungry and unprincipled scribbler, penned his doggrel lines in some garret, little careful except as to the compensation he should earn, the dirty pence that were to pay for his rhymes, will one day be made to answer for the influence that went forth from him to those who shouted his verses, in the night watch, on the far sea, or perchance upon some heathen shore. The infidel, who may have sat in elegant and lettered ease, preparing his attacks upon the Bible and the Savior, thought little, probably, but of the fame and influence he should win upon the shore. But the seeds of death which he scattered may have been wafted whither he never thought to trace them. And in that day of retribution, he may be made to lament his own influence on the rude seaman whom he has hardened in blasphemy and impiety; and who has sported with objections derived by him at the second hand or third hand from such writers, whilst he figured amongst his illiterate and admiring companions, as the tarred Voltaire or Paine of the forecastle and the round top, the merriest and boldest scoffer of the crew.

The meeting, then, of the dead of the land with the dead of the sea will be one of dread solemnity, because of the ties of kindred and influence that bound them together, and because multitudes of those buried in the deep died in the service of the landsman, or in his defence, many by his neglect, and many as the victims of the varied wickedness in which he had instructed, hardened, or employed them. Those who have been allied in sin, and accomplices in transgression, will find it one of the elements of their future torment, to be associated together in the scenes of the last judgment, and in those scenes which lie beyond that day. The animosity, revenge, and hate of the unregenerate heart, then released from all restraint, and exasperated by despair, will find vent; and rage uncontrolled through the sinner's long eternity of wo.

In conclusion, let us dwell on some of the practical results of the theme we have considered.

1. The dead shall rise, all shall rise, and together. From the land and from the sea, wherever the hand of violence, or the rage of the elements have scattered human dust, shall it be reclaimed. And we rise to give account. We rise to be judged. If, my hearers, we

would anticipate that judgment, we might, as the apostle assures us, escape it, "for if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judg

If feeling our sins, we do, as penitents, confess and forsake them, and flee to Christ and implore the Spirit, the dawn of that day will bring to us no terrors, and the sound of that trump be the welcome summons to a higher degree of blessedness. Cleansed in the Savior's blood, renewed by the Spirit, and arrayed in the righteousness of Christ, we may in that day stand accepted, confident, and fearless. But, out of Christ, judgment will be damnation.

2. If the re-appearance from the seas of the sinner, who perished in his sins, be a thought full of terror; is there not, on the other hand, joy in the anticipation of greeting those who have fallen asleep in Christ, but whose bones found no rest beneath the clods of the valley, and whose remains have been reserved under the waters until that day, while, over their undistinguished resting-place, old ocean with all its billows has for centuries pealed its stormy anthem? Then to see them freed from decay, and restored to the friends in Christ who had loved and bewailed them-this will be joy. Ensure, christian parent, the conversion of your sea-faring child, and then, whatever may betide him, it shall be well. His body may rest as safely amid coral and seaweed as in the church-yard; and his soul fly as swiftly to the bosom of Christ from the midst of engulphing waters, as from a death-bed, attended by all the watchfulness and all the sympathy of weeping friends.

3. This community especially owes a debt to that class of men, who go down to the sea in ships, and do business in the great waters. The providence of God seems to indicate that our city is yet to become the Tyre of this western world. Some have estimated the seamen who yearly visit our port at more than seventy thousand, and suppose the average number constantly in our harbor to be from three to five thousand. Contributing as they do to the comforts and prosperity of every home, and guarding as in time of war, they do this commercial metropolis, do they not demand and deserve a still increasing share in our sympathies and aid?

4. It is, again, by no means the policy of the church to overlook so influential a class, as is that of our sea-faring brethren. They are in the path of our missionaries to the heathen. If converted, they might be amongst their most efficient coadjutors, as, whilst unconverted, they are among the most embarrassing hindrances the missionary must encounter. They have, it should be also remembered, in their keeping, the highways of the earth, along which travel its literature, its commerce, and its freedom. What would be thought of the statesmanship or patriotism of the man who, in time of war, should propose surrendering to the enemy all the roads and bridges of the land, in hopes of retaining possession of the rest of the territory? The mere proposal would be regarded as combining folly the most absurd, and

1 Cor. xi. 31.

treason the most disastrous. Yet what else is the church doing, if she relinquish the sea-faring class to the influence of sin and to the will of the destroyer of souls? She would be proposing virtually a most ruinous truce with satan, when resigning these to his unresisted control, and offering to abandon to his keeping the keepers of the highways of the nations.

5. While humbled in the review of her past negligence, and in the sense of present deficiencies, as to her labors for the seaman, the church has yet cause for devout thankfulness in the much that has recently been done for the souls of those who go down to the sea in ships, and in the perceptible change that has already been wrought in the character of this long neglected class of our fellow-citizens and fellow-immortals. God has poured out his spirit even on the incipient and uncertain efforts of his people; and from many a cabin and forecastle the voice of prayer even now ascends, and on many a deck the words of this salvation are read. "Let us not be weary in welldoing."

6. And now, lastly, we ask each of you: In that day, when earth and sea shall meet heaven in the judgment, where do you propose to stand? Among the saved, or the lost-the holy, or the sinful-at the right hand of the Judge, or at his left? Purposes of partial reformation or of future repentance cannot save you. Christ is now waiting to be gracious. He who will at last appear as the Judge, now comes as the Redeemer. He is now an Advocate; soon he will be the Avenger. Heaven stoops to win you. Hell rises to allure and destroy you. Oh, yield not to satan. Reject not Christ; for the Judge is at the door. And not this soul only of yours, but this body also must live must live forever: and can you wish it to live in endless, hopeless misery? A throbbing brow, or an aching tooth, are now sufficient to embitter all the enjoyments of life. What will it be when the whole body is cast into torment? Can you desire to meet your impenitent friends, to spend an eternity together in growing hate and mutual recrimination-to face your pious friends, a godly father, or a praying mother, and catch your last glance of hope, your last sight of happiness, as you see them mounting to glory, whilst you sink yourselves into the sea of fire-the lake that burneth with fire and brimstone forever and ever?