wanting the proof of the miracle, in bestowing wisdom, and knowledge, and skill in speaking or interpreting languages, on those who possessed the natural requisites, and could avail themselves of the ordinary means of acquiring them. Add to this, that it was the fashion, as I can positively affirm, among the female part of the congregation rendered so notorious, to attempt to acquire a smattering of Hebrew, Greek, Latin, and various other languages, some time before these extraordinary exhibitions were got up. The perusal of a pamphlet written by one of the persons this folly had deluded, will throw further light on the subject. (67.)

The conversions in consequence of the display of the gift on the day of Pentecost were instantaneous. I have not as yet heard of one such as the result of this first effusion of the gift on women. Several persons have indeed been thrown into a state of suspense. They tell us they cannot come to a decision on the point, till it has been more fully scrutinized. But this is not the ordinary effect of a miracle. A miracle requires no scrutiny. It is manifestly a supernatural act, and its testimony is either at once admitted, or at once rejected. (68.)

By a reference to 1 Cor. xiv. 15-19, it will be seen, that the early Christians not only exhorted or prophesied, but prayed, and sang, and gave thanks, or blessed, in an unknown tongue. No such variety has been attempted in the enunciations of our English fanatics.

Those on whom the Holy Ghost at first fell partook of all its miraculous energies, enumerated by St. Paul in 1 Cor. xii. 8—10. Thus Peter both uttered the words of wisdom, and displayed profound scriptural knowledge, and gave token of unwavering faith, and healed the sick, and wrought other miracles, and foretold things to come, and was a discerner of spirits, and spake with new tongues, and doubtless also interpreted. This was the best, the most incontrovertible proof of heavenly inspiration; the most triumphant refutation of any charge of collusion. Paul himself furnishes another eminent example. How then can it be so confidently asserted, that "no one individual in the church was to expect all the gifts ?" and how does the modern practice in this respect accord with that of antiquity? (69.)

Once more. The first instance on record of the exercise of the primitive gift was in open day-light, "when the day of Pentecost was fully come," and there is no reason to suppose it ever took place under cover of darkness, which would have afforded such manifest opportunity for imposture. The Founder and apostles of our holy religion were too well aware, also, of the evil propensities of human nature, and of the devices of Satan, to countenance any such questionable and dangerous expedient. They required all things to be done decently, and in order. The contrasted ravings of which we have so much reason to complain, take place at an early hour in the morning, before day-light, in a remarkably large place of worship, lighted but by one solitary lamp, and that not in a very prominent situation, rendering the gloom scarcely less impervious than that of a sybil's cave. Is such a theatre a fit resort for female purity? (70.)

The manifestation of the real gift was a cause of rejoicing to pious believers. This has been a cause of the deepest sorrow to them already, and where the evil may end it is painful to conjecture.

So that there is no resemblance, but a frightful contrast between the abomination now called a gift of the Holy Spirit, and that of which it aspires to be the offspring. The two are in every feature dissimilar, and their tendencies are diametrically opposed to one another.

Many other observations offer themselves; but it is time to draw to a close. I speak to Christians, and to Christians, it is to be hoped, who have not adopted the fanatical notion that reason and faith, both gifts from heaven, are incompatible with each other. To such, what has been already said will surely furnish ample materials for pronouncing a decisive opinion on the subject. "To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them."

Consult the oracles of truth, the word of God, and make a right use of the reason with which you are endowed, for the purpose of edifying your own souls, and glorifying your Maker and your Redeemer. Walk not in the steps of the degenerate Corinthians, who, instead of taking the trouble to judge for themselves, were content to exclaim, I am of Paul, or of Apollos, or of Cephas. For," Thus saith the Lord, Stand ye in the ways, and see; and ask for the old paths, where is the good way; and walk therein." Search the Scriptures, and attend the appointed ordinances of the church, and listen to the voice of the Spirit in the word of God, which says to all those who sincerely and diligently consult it, "This is the way, walk ye in it." "I am the way," saith Jesus, "and the truth, and the life. By me if any man enter in, he shall be saved, and shall go in and out, and find pasture." Faith on the Lord Jesus Christ, such a lively and steadfast faith as bringeth forth the fruits of good living, through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit,—and a salutary dread of meddling with them that are given to change,-constitute the good old way, as you will assuredly discover if you thus inquire for it.

In this way, therefore, make it your study to walk, obeying all the commandments of God, with a pure heart, with all diligence. Walk as the saints of the Most High have walked from the beginning, according to their experience recorded in Heb. xi. Walk as Abram, and Isaac, and Jacob, and all the fathers, walked; walk, as you have Paul and the other holy apostles for an example; walk, as a succession of martyrs, confessors, and saints, have walked for eighteen centuries; in faith, in virtue, in knowledge, in temperance, in patience, in godliness, in brotherly-kindness, in charity: "for if these things be in you, and abound, they make you that ye shall neither be barren nor unfruitful in the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ." Follow not, in any wise, after the promulgators of strange doctrine, having itching ears, but follow on to know the Lord. Then shall you know him, and the power of his resurrection, and the fellowship of his Spirit, illuming, comforting, and establishing your heart, through faith, and fitting you for unspeakable and everlasting glory. On this portion of our subject I need not at present farther dilate. The old and the good way is so frequently and fully pointed out to you, that it cannot be from any pardonable ignorance if you walk

not in it.

III. To advert then to the Third head of our discourse, THE ADVANTAGE OF A FAITHFUL DISCHARGE OF THESE DUTIES. In what does it consist? In the possession of what all men desire; but what will ever be sought for in vain except in the paths of God's commandments. "Ye shall find rest for your souls." A blessed advantage truly. The wicked are like the troubled sea, which cannot rest. And those who err as to the essential doctrines of the gospel, resemble them in this respect. "Clouds are they without water, carried about of winds; -trees whose fruit withereth, without fruit, twice dead, plucked up by the roots; -raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame;-wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness for ever." "There is no peace, saith

my God, to the wicked;" and it must be evident there can be no calmness of spirit to the unstable. They have no imperishable, unchanging doctrines, whereon to repose their hopes. The ground of their imagined faith is for ever changing; for the first step into any by-path of error is seldom the last. They are ever learning, yet never coming to a knowledge of the truth. Do we not see this exemplified in the leaders of the present attempted division in the Protestant church? Are their doctrines, their fundamental doctrines, the same they commenced their career? Have they been the same, for any length of time, at any given period? Have not these persons been laboriously climbing up a ladder of absurdities ever since they were heard of, which, however effectually it has raised them to a region of clouds and storms, will never conduct them to heaven, nor fill them with heavenly peace? There is, in such characters, a restlessness of intellect, which will not suffer their souls to be at rest.

as when

It is not so with such as inquire after the old and the good way, and walk therein. They find rest for their souls. They are soothed by the gentlest consolations amidst the trials of their pilgrimage, and retain unclouded a good hope, through faith, of an abundant recompense of reward. Those who are rooted and grounded in the true faith, experience the peace of God, which passeth all understanding; and by that their hearts and minds shall be securely kept, in the knowledge and love of God, and of his Son Jesus Christ, in quietness and assurance, for ever. But these topics are likewise more ordinarily insisted on in our pulpit ministrations. I therefore proceed at once,

IV. In the Fourth and last place, to notice THE FATAL CONSEQUENCES OF

VENTURING ON ANY OF THE NEW AND DEVIOUS TRACKS INTO WHICH WE ARE CONSTANTLY INVITED.

ourselves and others.

Such a step is fraught with the direst mischiefs both to

We are thereby placed in imminent danger of losing our own souls. Not only will our spiritual advantages and enjoyments be more or less withdrawn or blighted, by the adoption of such erroneous tenets, but we shall gradually wax more and more averse to the faith once delivered to the saints, and may at length be wholly incapacitated from walking in the only way of peace and righteousness. This was the case with the persons adverted to in the text. Their hearts had waxed gross, and their ears were dull of hearing, and their eyes they had closed; lest at any time they should see with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and should understand with their hearts, and should be converted, and the great Physician of souls should heal them. They impatiently interrupted even an admonition from heaven with the profane exclamation, "We will not walk therein:"and obstinately refused to hearken even to the Scriptures of truth, and the authorized ambassadors of God. They were given up to reap the fruits of their own imaginations, and the vengeance of heaven speedily overtook them. (71.)

And think you lighter punishments await such conduct under the Christian dispensation ?-Do we live in a day of less light and knowledge? Will the despiser of the gospel of Christ escape with impunity, when the despiser of the law of Moses could not? What says reason? What says Revelation? What says experience? What says conscience?

Persons who countenance fallacious claims to miraculous gifts, as all have been since the primitive ages, expose their neighbour, in the most extensive acceptation of the term, to grievous spiritual peril. They provide the demon of scepticism with the most formidable weapons wherewith to assail him. The subtle Hume, and the insinuating Rousseau, founded their most plausible arguments

against the miracles of the Gospel, on the vantage-ground afforded them by the pretended miracles performed at the tomb of the Abbè Paris. "It seems the great artifice of the father of lies," says an able writer, "when he saw he could not at first either defeat the power of those miracles by imitating them himself, or suppress the notice or conveyance of them to the world;-by an after-game, in a more lazy and stupid age, to advance some wonders of his own framing, some of them very absurd and ridiculous, all of them very remarkable for their superstition; and so bring the thinking and considering man to suspect, that if those miracles have the same foundation, and were carried on with the same designs, as those by which Christ and his apostles confirmed Christianity, that then they may all be equally subject to dispute and question. And it is well for those countries where these miracles are most boasted of, and seemingly believed, if they do not find a very sensible growth of atheism and irreligion among them." (72.) Fanaticism sows plentifully the seeds of infidelity. (73.)

Those who thus sin against their own souls, and those of their contemporaries, sin against the souls of their posterity also. Such transgressions particularly, the anger of God pursues unto the third and fourth generation. See what the effects have been of that mystery of iniquity which begun to work in the days of the apostle Paul, and which was consummated in the idolatries and corruptions of the Church of Rome. Are not those who laid the foundation of that great temple of antichrist in the primitive times, guilty concerning their brethren, whose blood has been shed in such profusion, and whose souls have been consigned, so multitudinously, to the dark dungeons of despair, bound in the chain of fostered, of prescribed, ignorance and error, through so many ages, and throughout so many countries, in order to cement and give permanency to its now formidable and massy walls? Are not Montanus, and his frantic prophetesses, answerable for the apostasy and the cruelties of the Mahometan imposture, in which their unauthorised innovations at length terminated? Can we not distinctly trace the abominatians and atrocities perpetrated at Munster, and its vicinity, under the fanatic who constituted himself king of that city, as well as the extensive spread of free-thinking throughout Holland and Germany almost immediately subsequent, to the rigid but unhallowed tenets of the frenzied anabaptist prophets and prophetesses who preceded him? (74.) Did not the extravagancies of puritanism, in this and other northern nations, issue in delusions, strange and cruel delusions, which caused human blood to flow like water, in England, in Scotland, in America, in Sweden? (75.) And to what other cause are we to attribute the extraordinary circumstance of so many of the old puritan meeting-houses being now the temples of Socinianism, under the patronage of the descendants of the original founders ? Why are so many hereditary quakers entangled in the snares of Deism? And, think you, the primary innovators, in each of these instances, are not sharers, in some degree, in all the subsequent guilt? Religious error is the fruitful parent, not only of irreligion, but of the most revolting crime; and those with whom it originates have much to answer for besides their own actual offences.

And is there no danger to be apprehended from the prevalence of such errors as those we have now to lament? Alas! there is much. To the pretended Jansenist miracles, and other Roman Catholic frauds, during the last century, may be traced much of that infidelity in France, which issued in the first French Revolution, and rendered that great, and as to intellectual attainments, enlightened people, a spectacle of horror and aversion to the whole world. And who shall say that the root of evil, which has so suddenly sprung up in this country, will not produce

D

a plant which, in its maturity, shall effect a transformation as horrible in our own countrymen, and as extensively pernicious to mankind?

But time warns me to draw to a close. Suffer, in conclusion, the word of exhortation. The destroyer is at your door. Have pity on yourselves,—have pity on your neighbours,-have pity on your posterity,-have pity on the whole world, for which Christ died: and for the honour of his gospel,-for your soul's prosperity and salvation,-for your country's welfare,-shun, discountenance, condemn, abhor, these, and all other innovations of men whatever, in matters of religion. Flee from them as you would from the face of a serpent. Shun them as you would the pestilence. Institute against them every available precaution; for they are, in fact, a moral pestilence, and may plunge in spiritual death, or bring to its brink, thousands of your weaker and worse instructed brethren, if you step not into the breach to prevent it. Pray to God to avert the calamity; and neglect not to implore him in behalf of such infatuated persons themselves; for he has not interdicted our intercession as he did that of Jeremiah. And beware of deepening their delusion, by seeming undecided on the matter. There is no intricacy in the case. It is one of the most manifest aberrations from the oracles of God by which heaven has ever been insulted, and the dwellers on earth placed in jeopardy. Put it down, then, to the utmost of your power, by the spiritual weapons with which we are all provided for such purposes, lest your own souls suffer loss, and the blood of thousands yet unborn be on your heads. Condescend to the weakness of the deluded, and speak to them the truth in love. Go to the armoury of God, and supply yourselves with arguments from his word. It is our bounden duty thus to exert ourselves to close again the flood-gates of iniquity, the moment we see others attempting to throw them open.

For your encouragement, hear the concluding words of the General Epistle of James: Brethren, if any of you do err from the truth, and one convert him, let him know that he which converteth the sinner from the error of his way, shall save a soul from death, and shall hide a multitude of sins." In the faithful discharge of such a duty, you will receive aid from your Divine Master, and find rest for your soul. And at his second glorious appearing you will be hailed as good and faithful servants, and hear him say, "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me. Enter ye into the joy of your Lord."