separation from your children for a month or a day, how can you think of being separated from them for ever? Ye parents who are sleepless with anguish when they suffer on a bed of pain, who watch with earnest solicitude over them in the slow-moving hours of night, how can you bear the thought that they are to suffer on for ever and ever? Ye who would start with horror at the thought of their sinking into a watery grave, or at the idea that they would be wrapped in flame in a burning vessel at sea, how can you be unmoved at the sibility that they may sink in an ocean of fire to roll amidst its billows forever? Rouse, parents, rouse! Awake, arise, and call upon your God that they may be saved!

pos

2. If the subject leads those who are not now christians, to similar reflections, it will accomplish another object which I wish. Among those of you who do not profess to be christians, are husbands separate from your wives, parents from your children, children from your parents. From that father, and that mother, who have consecrated their hearts to the Son of God, and from that Savior to whom they have devoted themselves, you are divided. Shall this continue? Shall it be deepened and prolonged until it terminates in the great separation that shall endure forever? Dear objects of our earthly affection; friends whom we love more tenderly than we love any other friends, why not come and let heart beat against heart in love to the same Redeemer, and walk hand in hand with us in the same path to heaven? How can you bear the thought of an eternal separation from your christian friends? Divided in religion from us, yet you are not divided in affection. Without our hope of heaven, yet you love us; and though with different feelings in regard to the prospect of eternity, yet at home, at the table, at the fireside, in affliction, in joy, your heart beats against ours, and the same chord is struck in our souls and yours. Children of pious parents, parents of pious children, husbands of pious wives, how can you bear the thought of an eternal separation from your friends? How can you think of their walking on the banks of the river of life— happy spirits, while you wander-wretched outcasts-on the plains of despair? How can you think that all these tender ties are to be torn asunder, and that you are to be banished from them for ever and ever? Friends that we love! Awake! Arise! and call upon our God! Seek the salvation of the soul! O let the love begun on earth be perpetuated on the plains of heaven! Save us, O save us, we beseech you, from seeing you driven away from us that we may behold your faces

no more!

3. A third result to which our subject should lead should be to cause us to look forward to the future world, and to contemplate the possibility that a family should be united in heaven. It is possible that there should be such an eternal union. It is not necessary that religion should make an eternal separation. There is nothing in the nature of christianity that naturally and necessarily demands this. There is no such adaptation of the gospel to one member or portion of a family only as to make such a result inevitable; there is no restricting of the

offer of salvation to the father, the mother, or to one of the children of a family; there is no limitation of the efficacy of the atonement which makes it impossible that the blood which saves one should save all; there is no such circumscribing of the power of the Holy Spirit that he can renew and sanctify only a portion of the family group. The blood which has been sprinkled on one heart may cleanse all; the same Spirit that has renewed and sanctified the father or mother is able to renew and sanctify each child; and the same grace of the gospel which prepared that loved and lovely sister who has been taken from you to walk by the side of the river of life in white raiment, can prepare you also to join with her and walk arm in arm on those shady banks. Look upward to yonder heavens. See there your smiling babe! It stretches out its hands and invites you. "Come, father, mother," is its sweet sound, "come and take the water of life." May not that same grace of the gospel which has raised that child to heaven, save you also?

graves,

Why should it not be? A whole family united in religion-what a spectacle of beauty on earth! A family lying side by side in their to be united again in the same blessed resurrection, what a spectacle for angels to look down upon with interest! A whole family united in heaven-who can describe their everlasting joys? Not one is absent. Nor father, nor mother, nor son, nor daughter, are away. In the world below they were united in faith, and love, and peace, and joy. In the morning of the resurrection they ascended together. Before the throne they bow together in united adoration. On the banks of the river of life they walk hand in hand, and as a family they have commenced a career of glory that shall be everlasting. There is to be hereafter no separation in that family. No one is to lie down on a bed of pain. No one is to wander away into temptation. No one is to sink into the arms of death. Never in heaven is that family to move along in the slow procession, clad in the habiliments of woe, to consign one of its members to the tomb. For no member of the family is the soil of heaven ever to open its bosom to furnish a grave. God grant of his infinite mercy that every family in this assembly may thus be united in religion in all the joys and sorrows of this life; united when they lie down in the grave in the hope of the same resurrection; and united on the banks of the river of life, to drink of the streams of salvation for ever! AMEN.

SERMON CCCXLII

BY REV. ALBERT BARNES,

PHILADELPHIA.

THE SOVEREIGN PURPOSE OF GOD TO SAVE HIS PEOPLE AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO EFFORT.

PREACHED BEFORE THE SYNOD OF PENNSYLVANIA OCTOBER 25, 1842, AND

PUBLISHED AT THEIR REQUEST.

"Then spake the Lord to Paul in the night by a vision, Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace; for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee, to hurt thee: for I have much people in this city."-Acts xviii: 9, 10.

The Gospel, when first preached, every where encountered difficulties. The obstacles to its diffusion were laid primarily in the depravity of the human heart, but those obstacles were modified by the customs, the opinions, the prejudices, the philosophy which prevailed in particular places. In Jerusalem, the main difficulty arose from the disappointed hopes and the prejudices of the Jews; in Ephesus, from the dread of losing the gains accruing to a portion of the citizens from the connexion of the mechanic arts with idolatry; in Athens, from the reigning philosophy of the Epicureans and the Stoics. In Jerusalem, in Ephesus, and in many other places, the apostles had seen these difficulties give way, and the gospel assert its ascendency there in the conversion of multitudes. On the philosophy of Athens almost no impression was made, and having preached there with less success than attended his ministry elsewhere, Paul turned his steps to the neighboring city of Corinth. Here a new difficulty met him. It was not Jewish prejudice; it was not the self-interest of men whose "gains" were likely to be taken from them by the prevalence of the new religion; it was not philosophy rendering the heart inaccessible to all the appeals of truth, it was that which has been always, wherever it has existed, a greater obstacle to the gospel than all these combinedthe prevalence of moral corruption. In Corinth this corruption pervaded all classes of citizens. It made the name of the city proverbial throughout Greece, and the world. It had caused splendid temples to be reared devoted to impurity. It attracted strangers there from all

lands, and that splendid city had become the centre of pollution for the whole world. Amidst this universal dissoluteness of manners, Paul needed some special encouragement in his work there. That encouragement was granted him, and the record of it constitutes my text. "Be not afraid, but speak, and hold not thy peace; for I am with thee, and no man shall set on thee to hurt thee; for I have much people in this city." That is, he had 'much people' there whom he designed to convert and save. It cannot mean that there were many there who were then his people, or who in fact loved and served him, for that was not true, and that was not the encouragement which Paul needed. It must mean that there were those there in large numbers whom he intended to save, and to whom he now sent the gospel as the means of their conversion, and whom, therefore, He, who calls "things that are not as though they were," might call "his people." In the corrupt, debased, and sunken mass then bowing down in polluted temples, and giving unrestrained indulgence to the form of sin which offers the most direct resistance to "the gospel of the blessed God," there were those whom he meant to "wash, to sanctify, and to justify, in the name of the Lord Jesus," and to save. The doctrine of the text, then, it is not difficult to perceive. It is, that the purposes of divine sovereignty are an encouragement to efforts in doing good; or the fact that it is the intention of God to bring his chosen people to heaven, should stimulate us, and cheer us on in our efforts to save souls. This doctrine I propose now to illustrate and defend.

I am aware that it is often supposed that this doctrine has just the opposite tendency. I am not ignorant of the form in which it is often professedly held by the impenitent and the wicked, that "if they are to be saved they will be, and that effort will be useless;" nor am I ignorant of the effect which it may be made to have on many of the professed friends of truth. There is no doctrine of the scriptures which may not be abused; and there is no occasion for denying that this has been so held by many ministers of the gospel, and many churches, as to produce any other effect than to stimulate them to effort for the salvation of souls. And I am not ignorant that there is often real difficulty in pure and honest minds on the subject. If God is a sovereign; if he has a purpose which embraces all things; if he has a plan of electing love by which he designs to save all those who will actually be saved, it seems to be a doctrine that will paralize effort; that will render fruitless all exertion; that repels all human interferance, and that must throw the cold chill of death over all the gushing sensibilities that would weep over the lost. But it is not desirable or necessary that it should have this effect on any minds. It had not on the mind of Paul; and I shall render a good service if I can show you that it does not necessarily or properly have this effect. The design of this discourse therefore, is to show, that so far from having of necessity this effect, the purpose of God to save his elect, is the best ground of calculation, the best basis for effort, and the best encouragement for doing good in

this world. I shall do this by a series of propositions closely connected but plain, and so clear to all, that I trust they will leave no doubt of

their truth.

I. The first is, that in the work of salvation there are many things to be done which are wholly beyond human power, or where the agency of man will be wholly insufficient. In other words, there is a sphere of operations which belongs only to God, and where he only can efficiently act. It is, indeed, no less true, that the same principle exists in regard to all that is to be done with which the agency of a created being has any connexion, but my object requires me to illustrate it particularly only with reference to religion. A man plants a field, or sets out a vine. There is a sphere of agency in the result contemplated that appertains only to God, and where he only can operate, and any calculation which shall anticipate the result without that agency would certainly fail. All that pertains to the sun-beam; to the rain; to the dew; to the revolution of the earth and the return of the seasons; to the atmosphere, to the mysterious laws by which the juices are conveyed through the fibres of the root, and carried up the stem, and diffused to each leaf, and branch, and tendril; to the delicate and beautiful agency by which the leaf is opened, and the fruit formed and matured, all this belongs to God, and there is no human agency that can be substituted in its place. A man fits out a vessel for a distant port. In the success of this mercantile adventure there is a sphere of operations wholly beyond the reach of man. All that relates to the freedom of the ocean from dangerous storms, to prosperous gales, to the purity of the air which the mariner is to breathe on a foreign strand, and to the preservation of life and health, appertain to the exclusive agency of God; and he who leaves out this as a part of his calculation, leaves out that which is an essential element in the question of success. A physician approaches a sick man and prescribes for him. In his recovery there is a work which appertains wholly to God. In the laws which govern health, in the recuperative powers of the human frame, in the guarding of the system from some other insidious and dangerous attack, and in the prolongation of the vital functions, there is a sphere where

God only can act. There is no skill, or wisdom, or power, which can

do what God has reserved for himself to do;-and though man has done much and boasted more; though he claims to have disarmed the lightning, and.can almost people the canvass with living forms, and make the marble breathe; and though he has set up an empire over seas and floods, yet he has made no invasion on the prerogatives of the Almighty, or passed the bounds which were fixed when it was said to him, as to the ocean, "Thus far, but no farther." He paints no flower; he gilds no insect's wing; he colors no rainbow on the sky; he lights up no dead matter with the brilliancy of the living eye; he teaches no vital current to meander through an organized frame diffusing beauty, and health, and life. And to the end of time there will be a sphere in which God alone will act, and which will never be invaded by the wit, the skill, or the power of man.