there is really, in spite of all your expressions of regret, and your attempts to be "exceeding sorry," a feeling of relief, rather than a sense of disappointment, as if it were not a labour of love which you were reluctantly hindered from undertaking, but a task and irksome drudgery, from which you had made your escape?

Then beware of the hardening of your hearts through the deceitfulness of sin. If questions like these cause you ever so little to wince and feel sore, it is high time for you to awake out of sleep. It is no longer in mere weakness, but partly, at least, in wilfulness too, that you are availing yourselves of the convenient services of a "but yet;" and although you may still, from time to time, experience enough of poignant and sharp remorse to make you "exceeding sorry," it is now fast becoming a settled thing with you, that such sorrow is itself a vexation, with which you must lay your account, and of which it is scarcely reasonable to expect that you should ever be able to get rid.

The same sad course might be traced in the palliation of sin, as well as the evasion of duty. And here the rapid progress which may be made in the art of self-justification conspicuously appears. For the vague and indefinite character of the line that marks off the forbidden ground, enhances at once the force of the temptation, and the facility of finding excuses for compliance. There are so many difficult questions that may be raised as to particular instances of worldly conformity, and the considerations for and against them are so complicated, that the path of duty comes to be enveloped in a cloud; and you are at a loss whether to go or stay, to resist or yield. Thus you venture upon your first liberties with doubtful steps, being really

unable to determine what is best. But the misfortune is, that you soon become unwilling too. The sort of haze, which at first was so distracting and distressing, gradually becomes rather welcome than otherwise. The difficulty you feel in determining the right course, ceases to be so vexatious as once it was, and you are rather inclined to take refuge in it. Naturally, in such a state of mind, you exaggerate the difficulty. In fact, you have no objection to see the whole subject of the Church's separation from the world involved in an inextricable maze of minute special pleading. And you glory in the alleged elasticity of gospel principles and gospel precepts the very feature over which you professed, at first, most painfully to lament.

Alas! how soon and how certainly does this train of thought lead to a confirmed habit of tampering with these principles and precepts in detail! And then, with what ease do you contrive to give yourselves indulgence as you practise the tricks of trade with which your professional calling may be beset, and join in the lighter levities, or in the graver follies, of your rank and station in the world. You may be still sorry, "exceeding sorry;" but it is the sorrow of one bemoaning a fatality, not bewailing a fault. And, accordingly, it scarcely at all disturbs the equanimity of your complacent acquiescence in many things which once might have greatly shocked you, but which now you have learned to view in their right light, as inevitable incidents of your place and standing-to be regretted, perhaps, but scarcely to be remedied or redressed.

Thus, your skill in the art of justifying yourselves is rapidly improved by practice; and you may rely

on it, that your bold defiance of God will keep pace with it.

This is the other mark, or symptom, of weakness passing into wilfulness, to which we referred; and a very few words may suffice to expose its insidious and deadly nature.

may

It is always a dangerous thing to tempt the Lord; and never is it more so than when you tempt him with a sincere expression of sorrow, and under a plausible plea of necessity. It be the very turning-point of your spiritual history. It is, indeed, a critical moment when at any time you find yourself beginning to reckon beforehand on the forbearance of God. Deeply, daily, must you be indebted to that forbearance; and the more you know of the deceitfulness and desperate wickedness of your own hearts, and grapple in close conflict with the world, the devil, and the flesh, the more must you feel your ever-increasing debt of obligation. But there is the utmost possible difference between your owning the forbearance of God, as it is with unwearied pity and patience exercised towards you in your actual walk before him, and your anticipating that forbearance, and laying your account with it in the previous planning of your walk. The two states of mind are "wide as the poles asunder." There is a great gulf between them, though, alas! it is a gulf over which the deceitfulness of sin can but too easily and imperceptibly effect a passage.

And if you once begin to venture on such a liberty with God, where are you to stop? It is in itself essentially the height of presumption thus to treat the High and Holy One. In fact, it is so daring and pro

fane an instance of impiety, that at first you shrink from explicitly avowing it, even to your own minds. But mark the beginning of evil.

Is there ever a course of conduct to which you reconcile yourselves, perhaps with some difficulty, by the reflection, that if it be not altogether right, God, in his long-suffering patience, and in consideration of your difficulty, may pass it by? What is this but the germ of the very spirit that prompts the language of the wicked "The Lord seeth not, the Lord regardeth not;" "Where is the God of judgment?"—the spirit which the Lord so signally rebukes-"These things hast thou done, and I kept silence; thou thoughtest that I was altogether such an one as thyself: but I will reprove thee, and set them in order before thine eyes,” (Psalms x. xiv. l.)

You may not indeed adopt the very words of the ungodly; you may even repudiate the thoughts and imaginations of their hearts. But what is it that your conduct really implies? Let it be ever so trifling and unimportant a step that you are called to take; let it be a step, moreover, about which ever so much may be said in the way of specious advocacy and extenuation; and let it be taken with ever so many compunctious visitings of regret, and under ever so strong a pressure of necessity;—still, is it a step for which you have a shrewd idea, as you take it, that you will have to draw more or less upon the forbearance of God? Then, be sure, there is nothing whatever of a difference in principle between that step, so taken, and the bravado of the scoffers in the last days-" Where is the promise of his coming?" And farther, be sure that, having once passed the line of a holy and scrupulous

conscientiousness, there is nothing whatever likely to arrest your progress before you reach the stage of hardened insensibility, when you can sin with a high and careless hand, as if you might defy the Holy One to judge you.

Surely this is a consideration well fitted to warn and alarm. God is not mocked. It is no light matter to trifle with him. His forbearance towards sin is not so cheaply purchased as that you may make a convenience of it at your pleasure; nor does his way of dealing with you, in reconciling you to himself, warrant your presumptuous dealing with him as if he were to accommodate himself to you. The Cross of Christ, the just and necessary price of God's long-suffering patience and your perfect peace, makes all such compromise impossible; and the full and free forgiveness of the glorious gospel cries shame on the very thought of it. The very bondage of guilty fear is to steal abroad on some sly errand of doubtful gain or pleasure, in the hope of escaping notice or evading punishment. The liberty of conscious acceptance and acquittal-the love and joy of adoption and conscious sonship-demand a franker and more guileless walk. To give way to circumstances you think you cannot control, being all the while "exceeding sorry," but yet preparing beforehand the plausible excuses that are to justify your doubtful choice-is to enter on a course of double dealing with God, such as can scarcely fail to land you, perhaps before you are well aware of it, in the sin of lying against the Holy Ghost, and turning the grace of God into licentiousness-the sin, in short, of crucifying the Son of God afresh, and putting him to open shame.