converted sinner, are at present all in their full force addressed to you. Deceive not yourselves with the thought that you are baptized Christians already; or, that having been instructed in the truths of the Gospel, you are to be considered as Christ's disciples already. Remember that he that doeth righteousness is righteous; that he that committeth sin, that is, who is in the habit of carelessly committing it, hath not seen Christ, neither knoweth him, but is of the devil, who has been a sinner from the beginning. With young persons, such as I am speaking of, their state is of no doubtful kind; it is not improvement that is required, but a change of heart and life; a change of principles, of hopes, of fears, of masters; a change from death unto life; from Satan to God. They have walked all their lives, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and, therefore, they are still the children of wrath. Such persons, then, are required to learn the Christian's lesson; to count all things but loss for the excellency of the knowledge of Christ Jesus, their Lord not one thing or another thing only, but all things. Pleasure, vanity, fame, idleness, selfishness of every kind; all must be accounted loss in comparison with Christ. And are they not loss, my brethren? What shall it profit a man to gain

the whole world and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? This strikes our ears at once as true; but our hearts cannot be made to believe it on any experience but their own. He only who does truly belong to Christ, knows how completely what he has parted with is loss, and what he has received in exchange is gain. We must prove this ourselves, or we shall never fully understand it. "O taste and see how gracious the Lord is,— blessed is the man that trusteth in him."

SERMON V.

MATT. xiii. 17.

Verily I say unto you, that many prophets and righteous men have desired to see those things which ye see, and have not seen them; and to hear those things which ye hear, and have not heard them.

THERE are a great many other passages in the Scripture, which speak nearly the same language there are a great many which speak of the Gospel, as the greatest blessing which was ever given to the world; nay, it is said, that the things which it shews us, are so wonderful and so excellent, that even the angels desire to look into them. In this, as in many other instances, the words of the Scripture are repeated by ourselves over and over again, till they become words of course, which we fancy we most thoroughly believe. Every body who calls himself a Christian, talks of the excellence and of the blessings of the Gospel, and that it is the most precious gift ever given by God to man. But

that

it is very useful that we should be brought to think about what we thus readily confess we should not repeat a number of words without meaning, lest we most fatally deceive ourselves; that we should not talk of the Gospel, as being the greatest blessing in the world, when in reality it is one of those for which we care the least; which goes the least way towards making us happy, and whose loss we should in our hearts endure with the least regret.

The words of my text have often struck the ears of us all, and few of us, perhaps, have stopped to ask ourselves how far we really could agree with them. Many prophets and righteous men have desired to see the things which Christ's disciples saw, and have not seen them. It seems all very natural that they should have desired it. But can we honestly say, that we should have desired the same thing, if we had been in their places? that is, that if we had been born before the birth of Christ, under the Law of Moses, that we should have been anxious to know more of God's will, and to have clearer views of his purposes towards men than we possessed already. Perhaps, we cannot fancy ourselves living in such a state of things, and, therefore, cannot tell what might have been our feelings. But there is a very easy and plain way

of finding out how we should have felt then, by observing what we feel now. We may guess how much we should have longed for a thing before we had got it, by seeing how much we value it now that we have got it. We may tell whether we should have desired to see and hear what Christ's Disciples saw and heard, by merely asking our own hearts, how much pleasure it gives us now that we do see and hear those same things. It may be, indeed, that we may be aware of the value of divine knowledge, after it is given to us, although we never should have thought or cared about it beforehand; but if we find that we do not care about it when it is put in our way, we may be very sure that we should never have missed it before we had it, and that we should never have gone out of our way to obtain it.

I believe that this would be the honest answer of most men calling themselves Christians, if they were not ashamed and afraid to examine and confess their real feelings. I believe, that when in the words of our Church, we bless God for all the blessings of this life, but above all, for his inestimable love in our redemption, for the means of grace, and for the hope of glory, that many repeat the words untruly; that they feel the blessings of this life much more keenly