2. That the spirit of decay esteems the support of gospel institutions a burden. The cost of the sanctuary, and the ministry, and the thousand varied appendages of evangelical worship and ordinances begin to be considered lost. Then comes the inquiry, What am I the gainer by sustaining the gospel? How am I drained of the means of accommodating my family with conveniences! How many acres of territory might I have purchased with the sums that the gospel has cost me ! How poor have I kept myself and my family by the offerings of the temple! Could I have them paid back, the whole would be a fortune for my children! Thus men grudge the Lord the sacrifices he demands as the very price of their prosperity; and the children learn how reluctantly their parents support religion, and how gladly they would rid themselves of the galling burden. Hence, as soon as their parents are asleep in death, and the property is in their hands, they are all disciplined for the business of pulling down the institutions of heaven, and making the experiment of bartering away the truth for money. Unhappily, all their respect for a parent's judgment goes to establish them in the belief that the gospel does but oppress and impoverish them. Thus the parent dug the grave of his offspring. He incautiously taught them principles that undermine his house and blast his memory. He had not counted up the cost, how the absence of gospel institutions would alter and injure the character of his offspring, how it would neutralize the Sabbath, and remove the means of becoming wise, and break the grapple of conscience, and lessen the worth of morals and the estimate of character, and throw down his children from the elevation they occupied, and his whole posterity from the position they might have held, into the bosom of a besotted, and mean,

and miserable community :-how, with the removal of the gospel there would vanish all the blessings it brought; the sweets of domestic intercourse, the bonds of the social compact, the elevation of intellect, all the means of being great and good in this life, and holy and happy in the life to come. Unhappy father, he sprung a mine under his own house that threw his offspring, and his name, and his estate, to the winds of heaven, while a tithe of his income, paid honestly to the Lord, would have insured the whole, down, perhaps, to the funeral day of the world. He saved indeed his money and taught his children to save it, but God took vengeance on his inventions. And there follows of course,

3. A disrespect for the ministry of the reconciliation. That ministry can be useful no longer than respected. When men begin to speak of the office as a mere sinecure, they are not to be expected to derive any great profit from it; and when they treat the men who occupy it with coarseness, they may calculate that they are ruining their offspring. He that Heaven has commissioned to negotiate with a rebel world, while he may claim nothing on the score of personal importance or elevation, may still demand that men hold the office, and himself, because of the office, in due respect. And in the absence of this respect there is lost to the world the whole influence of that highest means of its redemption, a preached gospel; and what is more, there is laid the train that is to carry moral devastation down through unborn generations. But,

Finally-There is one token of approaching desolation so marked in its character as to deserve a distinct and prominent notice. I refer to the case when the people of God feel that they are not obliged to make greater sacrifices than others to sustain the sanctuary,

and hand down to unborn generations the blessings of the gospel of peace. I consider no one sign so articulate that God is about to remove the candlestick out of its place. God's people ought to do more than others, and if the world would come forward and act so liberally as to save them the necessity, it would be a curse to them. A Christian can pray better when he is making great sacrifices for the Lord, and will grow more rapidly in grace and in the knowledge of the truth, God will feed the most plentifully, and smile the most graciously upon the child that serves him the most cheerfully. Christians receive more blessings than others through the gospel. In a minor sense, it blesses all, but in a major sense, believers.-All learn truth and receive elevation of character, and enjoy comforts through the influence of the gospel; but the believer through its influence is sanctified, and made meet to be a partaker of the inheritance with the saints in light. The one has temporal, and the other temporal and spiritual blessings. The temporal blessings are worth a thousand times the cost of them to the unsanctified; hence, by what measure can we calculate their worth to him who hopes to reach heaven through them? It is for them as well as for the world a wise appointment that they shall do more than others. We would not have them exempted if we could.

Now, when the people of God begin to stand aloof from his sanctuary, and to fear they are bearing an undue burden, and are ready to let it fall, unless others will lift as laboriously as they lift, then you may expect a famine of the truth. When the professed people of God, who are called by his name, and tell of being bound to him by an everlasting covenant, who profess to have laid up their treasure in heaven, and to look for "a city

that hath foundations, whose builder and maker is God," when these will shrink from any sacrifice to sustain the gospel of his Son, and suffer an institution that prospers all others to fail through their covetousness, then, who, can it be expected, will stand and prop the sinking honours of God's house? It is feared we could point you to a great many gloomy sections of this ruined world where this very cause has operated, and is now operating to turn the fruitful field into a wilderness, and render some of the holiest territories in christendom cheerless and dreary as the very caverns of death. On this point one need not fear to say too much, the professed Christian, who grudges the drafts made upon his purse by the gospel, and is ever poor when its claims are presented, is to be classed with Demas and Judas, and to be held up to the world as its greatest foe, and to the church as its darkest and deepest blot.

How charming is the place
Where my Redeemer, God,
Unveils the beauties of his face,
And sheds his love abroad!

Not the fair palaces,

To which the great resort,

Are once to be compared with this,
Where Jesus holds his court!

Here on the mercy-seat,

With radiant glory crown'd,
Our joyful eyes behold him sit,
And smile on all around.

To him their prayers and cries
Each humble soul presents:
He listens to their broken sighs,
And grants them all their wants.

Give me, O Lord, a place

Within thy blest abode,

Among the children of thy grace,
The servants of my God.

SERMON III.

MIRROR OF HUMAN NATURE.

Proverbs xxvii. 19.

"As in water, face answereth to face; so the heart of man to man."

THIS text has received various interpretations; but there is among them one, more generally approved by the friends of truth than any other; and which it would seem to me, is its plain and obvious meaning:-As a man looking into the water, (used anciently as a mirror,) sees there an exact transcript of his own countenance, so every heart has by nature precisely the same moral character with every other unsanctified heart. However men may differ, as to the circumstances of their being-as to their age, country, habits, and education-still every child of Adam, till renewed by divine grace, has, in the view of Omniscience, the same moral aspect.

Many, who still wish to be considered believers in divine revelation, have asserted, that the parts of Scripture, which give unregenerate men a deformed and polluted character, are not applicable to men of the present day. When Paul says of the unregenerate world, and quotes the saying from another inspired author, "There is none righteous, no, not one; there is none that understandeth; there is none that seeketh after God; they are all gone out of the way; they are together become unprofitable; there is none that doeth good, no, not one; their throat is an open sepulchre; with their tongues they have used deceit; the poison of asps is under their lips;