from back-sliding, we have there the admonitory record of the fate of those who in the hour of trial have mourned over what they had once professed to resign. And the lesson which the history of these judgments affords, is, that they who hesitate are undone; and that whatever their previous advancement may have been, if they once deliberately look back, when they have put their hands to the plough, their labour proves all in vain.

"Remember Lot's wife;' for she was one,” as Bishop Andrewes instructs us, who "fell when she had stood long, and who wofully perished at that instant when God's special favour was proffered to preserve her; when of all other times, she had means and cause to stand; then, of all other times, she fell away." Having been brought out of Sodom, and warned of the danger that would ensue; having Angels to go before her, Lot to bear her company, her daughters to attend her, and being now at the entrance of Zoar, the haven of her rest, that very time, place, and presence, she made choice of to perish in.

And she who died with her face towards Sodom, was one whose sin it was that she "looked back." She did not go back, she only looked back: and she never looked forward more!"

My brethren, let us think of these things.

SERMON X.

TRUSTFULNESS.

JOB Xiii. 15.

Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.

THESE are the well-known words of that Holy Patriarch whose praise is in all the Churches, for the patience and trustfulness with which he bore the trying of his faith, and submitted to the merciful chastisements of his heavenly Father.

It is a great matter with us, my brethren, if, when we can weep no longer for a bereavement, we begin to endeavour to resign ourselves to God's will; if, when bodily pain, or worldly anguish, have come upon us, and after a while are lightened, we acknowledge God's hand in the matter, and on that ground abstain from murmuring, we make as though we had done something very exemplary. Yet this man, when his servants had been slaughtered, his flocks and herds carried off, his children all slain in a moment by the fall of their house, and himself "smitten with

* sore boils, from the sole of his foot unto his crown,"

gave way to no hasty repining, nor expressions of impatience; he "neither sinned nor charged God foolishly;" but declared, as you have heard in the text, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in him.”

Therefore it was, that when he had been tried, "the Lord turned the captivity of Job," and "blessed the latter end of Job more than his beginning;" therefore it was that the Holy Ghost speaking by the mouth of the prophet Ezekiel, classes him with Noah and Daniel, as among the most eminent of those whose righteousness might, under certain circumstances, have not only delivered their own souls, but been a plea for mercy in behalf of their native country, when it had trespassed grievously; therefore it was, that St. James holds him up for our imitation, as an "example of suffering affliction, and of patience.”

Job endured, as seeing Him that is invisible; he had that faith which has realized to itself the conviction that some how or other all things are working together for good to them that love God, and which calmly submits itself without anxiety to whatever God sees fit to lay upon it. This Christian grace of trustfulness, is in a great degree, the same as faith; only faith comprehends trustfulness; it is the larger term of the two; faith being that process of the mind by which it assents to everything which God has

made known; whereas trustfulness seems rather limited to those circumstances in which belief is connected with endurance: thus, it was Faith which taught Abraham to believe that Sarah should conceive and bear a son, though he was himself an hundred years old, and it had ceased to be with her after the manner of women; and it was Trustfulness which enabled him to stretch forth his hand, and take the knife to slay his son, though by the very act it seemed as though he would himself make the performance of God's promise impossible, namely, that his seed should be as the stars of heaven. It was Faith which incited Job to offer burnt offerings according to the number of his children; it was Trustfulness which, in the midst of bereavement, worldly loss, and bodily suffering, drew from his lips the glorious acknowledgment, "Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.”

Now let us, in the ensuing discourse, say something upon Christian Trustfulness.

None of us can have lived any length of time in the world without having, as part of our appointed trial, been visited with pain and sickness, with the loss of friends, and with more or less of temporal misfortune. How these chastisements have been borne by us, has depended upon how far we have taught ourselves to look upon them as a precious

legacy from Christ our Saviour, as a portion of His Cross, as a token of His love, and of His desire that we should be united with Him in the fellowship of sufferings. It is to be feared that there are very few of us but have given way in some measure to impatience and repinings; it is to be hoped that none of us have so used our chastisements as to turn into curses what were sent to be blessings, and that our hearts have not been hardened instead of softened by the visitations of God. I will assume that we have received our trials in a Christian spirit, at least so far as this, that we have not endeavoured, while under their pressure, to resist and rebel against God. And this being the case, I will ask you whether, now that the first pangs and bitterness of those trials are over, you cannot see for yourselves that they were sent for a wise and merciful purpose? Can you not trace how, and in what respect, it has been good for you to be in trouble and disappointed? How well it has been for their survivors as well as for themselves, that "the righteous have been taken away from the evil to come?" How disease and pain have worked together for your good? Looking back ten, twenty, thirty years, upon what, at the time, you considered the great misfortunes of your life, can you not now see the gracious designs with which they were sent? Will you not own that what Providence chose for