shall not we assume a louder strain, and swell the burden of the song till heaven shall ring, while we-the saved from Satan, the mystic antitype of that lone victim-echo, across the chasm of ages, the praises of the mercy, that crushed for ever the earthly omnipotence of Satan, that hurled the fiend, "like lightning," from the heaven of his power, and raised on the ruins of sin and sin's slavish law the everlasting monarchy of grace? "O woman, great is thy faith!" O Church of the living God, great was thy endurance in the days of old: "We have heard, and our fathers have declared unto us the noble things of their day, and of the old time before them!" High and holy is the inheritance, thy faith, through fire and blood, hath transmitted! And oh !-people of the living God!— Gentiles "grafted into the olive tree" of Christ!-heathens who are blest, while "the children of the kingdom are cast out," whom grace, itself unbought, hath bought from hell, buried in baptism and therein risen again!-shall any wile of the seducer delude you back to the ruin from which you have been saved? Shall this august heritage of glory have been offered and bestowed in vain ?-that heritage of mercy, no smaller though thousands share it! "The devil is gone out" of the Gentile daughter, but shall he return with the seven. darker spirits, and the last end be worse than the first? God grant you light to see, and strength to avoid this fearful doom; and, knowing that graces abused are far worse than graces never given, may He by faith and godly fear enable you to reach that holy country, where the Canaanite mother has ere now, it may be, learned to glory in a celestial Canaan, and the demoniac daughter, whom Jesus freed on earth, has found a voice to speak her gratitude in heaven!

SERMON XII.

THE FAITH OF MAN AND THE FAITHFULNESS OF

GOD.

THE

1 THESSALONIANS, v. 24.

Faithful is he that calleth you.

HE highest object of man's existence is undoubtedly to hold communion with his God. For this his nature was originally framed, and in this alone will his nature ever find contentment or repose. God is, as it were, the counterpart to his being; the divine and human elements are fitted to each other; and humanity, without the corresponding principle of Deity, is a thing imperfect, insufficient, incomplete. This it is that makes human life such an enigma; this it is that has perplexed the speculative, and maddened the misanthropic, and clouded the calculations of even the amiable among mankind. The vital tie that connected us with heaven is broken. We are as a limb of the body separated (by paralysis or any other internal cause) from the benefits of the general circulation. God is, so to speak, the great centre of life and motion, the heart of the universal frame. We have insulated ourselves from God; we have deadened the nerve that conducted his influences, and what remains but a mass, with perhaps the outward appearance of life, some wild convulsive struggles that look like life, but in reality, and for all purposes of regulated strength, or useful effort, or graceful motion, a cold, unprofitable, unanimated mass! And this is just the condition of man so long as he continues exiled from the communion of his God; all the appearances of power and vitality, none of the truth; faculties pre

"he

pared for action, but no energy to set them in play; like that Church of the Apocalypse to which the Spirit writes, hath a name that he liveth, and is dead!"

Were man wholly and hopelessly, and from the beginning, this lost, debased thing, such expressions as I have used would indeed be preposterous. No one, I suppose, ever lamented that the brute creation was shut out from the converse of angels. Now why should this be so? What is it which would convict of gross extravagance the man who should waste his days in lamenting, that the beasts of the field were condemned to perpetual exclusion from the glories of that angelic community which encompasses the throne of God? Plainly, because there are no organs, or faculties, or attributes of any kind in the brute that point to a brighter destiny. There are no traces of a fall from original brightness; there is nothing about him which makes it a practical contradiction that he should be as he is, and yet be what he is; nothing which evermore cries out that, though corruption be around and within him, there is a voice also which condemns the corruption, and desires that seek for better satisfactions than this miserable world can ever bestow! The true, clear, unequivocal perception of his own destitution, and of the necessity of a reunion with the source of all excellence, is indeed the exclusive gift of the enlightening Spirit of God; but even in the natural man there are faint, occasional gleams of a something over and above his present state, even though he knows not what it is. There is, at all events, in his own perpetual unhappiness, a tacit, but pressing and perpetual proof, that, whatever be the nature of the state for which he was originally intended, this world, most assuredly, from its incapability of answering the call of his whole being for happiness, can never have been that state. It is most true that the man may never once have declared, in so many words, that he feels himself not in his native element; but what avails that? His sorrows, his tears, his whole nature, are everlastingly proclaiming it. This is a confession, not made with lips, but written in blood, and registered in all the woes of all mankind. Every domestic bereavement, every public

calamity, every groan for himself or for others, that ever was uttered by man, all alike are a confession (more mighty than language can devise) that man was never ultimately designed by the great Creator of all for a scene like this; that, by some cause or other, he has been excluded from his own appropriate sphere; that, made for God, he has deserted his Maker, and for a time, in terrible retribution, has been deserted by Him!

I say, then, that everything in nature, but, above all, our own melancholy conviction, attests the reality and the consequences of our separation from God; and the reason why I have dwelt upon the point is this,-that without some notion of the extent of the loss, you can never arrive at an estimate of the value or the nature of the restoration. It is by the length of the dark shadow you are to compute the height of the elevation beyond it. It is by summing up in your own minds the long catalogue of woe, which, even within our own ordinary experience, sin has introduced, that you will be enabled to conceive (as far as man can yet conceive) the enormous importance of that manifestation of mercy, whose object is, by the descent of God Himself among mankind, to bind once more the broken links of communion between man and God! Yes, if there be among us, and what assembly of human beings is without such auditors?-if there be here one soul that has ever mourned in solitude over hopes deceived and prospects dimmed, and a life at times without motive or consolation, to that person I would say, "you are yourself among the most powerful proofs of the deep truth of Christ's eternal Gospel!" It was not to a world perfect in all its elements, that He came upon His mission of salvation. It is the perpetual mark of all false systems, that they begin by flattering men and end by debasing them. Christ alone began by teaching (what you now feel) the bitter lesson of man's degradation, feebleness, and uncertainty, in order that, upon the deep foundation of human depravity, he might build the immortal structure of human sanctification. The gospel of faith is not the gospel of a consummate paradise, but of a weak, and shivering, and wretched world. All your sorrows were present to Christ Jesus when He framed His own glorious remedy; and it is to such as you that he speaks, when,

early in His blessed work, He proclaims, that through Him the mourners shall be comforted, and "the weary and heavy-laden" receive "rest."

Now what is the nature of the restoration provided for man, whom we have thus seen in all the shame and misery of a banishment from God? We have dwelt upon the wretched characteristics of his unredeemed condition. We have dwelt upon the evident tokens in his nature, of powers formed for a mightier grasp and a vaster theatre. We have seen him, along with the rest of "the whole creation," "groaning and travailing ;" unable to content himself with darkness, at the very time that he is "loving darkness rather than light." If you believe that I have over-stated one item in the list of human debasement, I am content with the remainder. But well do I know that there is scarce one among us (would we all but make the examination) whose recollection cannot summon as sad an assortment of weaknesses permitted yet condemned; of follies unavailingly regretted; of promises to God (for I speak to baptized Christians), repeated, and reiterated, and broken; of purposes of amendment deliberately rejected or carelessly forgotten;—I say there are few indeed among us, who have made any attempt to realize the spiritual life, and whose memory is not charged with as sad a catalogue of self-abasement as any I could devise! Recall it, then! Recall the cause,-separation from God!—and ask yourselves, what must be the nature of the remedy provided for man?

The answer is simple: the remedy (whatever its specific nature may be) must, in some form, be a restoration of the communion of man with God. And this is the most general character of the Christian religion,—the simplest definition of its nature and object. Man is separated from God as a criminal; the communion is restored, by free pardon on God's part, and the acceptance of that pardon upon man's. Man is separated from God, as unholy; the communion is restored by accepting the sacrifice of Christ instead of the absolute sinlessness of Man, and by that perpetual and progressive process of sanctification, which makes a lost and ruined soul at length "meet for the inheritance of the saints." Christ, the great conduit of mercy