ual language of his heart is, I will not have the Being who made me to rule over me. It is to go to the man of honour, and, while we frankly award it to him that his pulse beats high in the pride of integrity-it is to tell him, that he who keeps it in living play, and who sustains the loftiness of its movements, and who, in one moment of time, could arrest it for ever, is not in all his thoughts. It is to go to the man of soft and gentle emotions, and while we gaze in tenderness upon him-it is to read to him, out of his own character, how the exquisite mechanism of feeling may be in full ope

perpetual and the unfailing habit of subor- man, is to fasten on the radical element of dination to his law. It is conceivable, that depravity, and to show how deeply it lies with them too, there may be varieties of incorporated with his moral constitution. temper and of natural inclination, and yet It is not by an utterance of rash and sweepall of them be under the effective control ing totality to refuse him the possession of of one great and imperious principle; that what is kind in sympathy, or of what is in subjection to the will of God, every kind dignified in principle-for this were in the and every honourable disposition is che- face of all observation. It is to charge him rished to the uttermost; and that in sub- direct with his utter disloyalty to God. It jection to the same will, every tendency to is to convict him of treason against the maanger, and malignity, and revenge, is re-jesty of heaven. It is to press home upon pressed at the first moment of its threatened him the impiety of not caring about God. operation; and that in this way, there will It is to tell him, that the hourly and habitbe the fostering of a constant encouragement given to the one set of instincts, and the struggling of a constant opposition made against the other. Now, only conceive this great bond of allegiance to be dissolved; the mighty and subordinating principle, which wont to wield an ascendency over every movement and every affection, to be loosened and done away; and then would this loyal, obedient world, become what ours is, independent of Christianity. Every constitutional desire would run out, in the unchecked spontaneity of its own movements. The law of heaven would furnish no counteraction to the im-ration, while he who framed it is forgotten; pulses and tendencies of nature. And tell while he who poured into his constitution the us, in these circumstances, when the re- milk of human kindness, may never be adstraint of religion was thus lifted off, and all verted to with one single sentiment of venethe passions let out to take their own tu- ration, or on one single purpose of obemultuous and independent career-tell us, dience; while he who gave him his gentler if, though amid the uproar of the licentious nature, who clothed him in all its adornand vindictive propensities, there did gleam ments, and in virtue of whose appointment forth at times some of the finer and the it is, that, instead of an odious and a revoltlovelier sympathies of nature-tell us, if ing monster, he is the much loved child of this would at all affect the state of that sensibility, may be utterly disowned by world as a state of enmity against God; him. In a word, it is to go around among where his will was reduced to an element all that Humanity has to offer in the shape of utter insignificancy; where the voice of of fair and amiable, and engaging, and to their rightful master fell powerless on the prove how deeply Humanity has revolted consciences of a listless and alienated fa- against that Being who has done so much mily; where humour, and interest, and to beautify and to exalt her. It is to prove propensity-at one time selfish, and at an- that the carnal mind, under all its varied. other social-took their alternate sway over complexions of harshness, or of delicacy, is those hearts from which there was excluded enmity against God. It is to prove that all effectual sense of an overruling God. If he let nature be as rich as she may in moral be unheeded and disowned by the creatures accomplishments, and let the most favoured whom he has formed, can it be said to alle- of her sons realize upon his own person the viate the deformity of their rebellion, that finest and the fullest assemblage of themthey, at times, experience the impulse of should he, at the moment of leaving this some amiable feeling which he hath im- theatre of display, and bursting loose from planted, or at times hold out some beau- the framework of mortality, stand in the teousness of aspect which he hath shed over presence of his judge, and have the questhem? Shall the value of the multitude of tion put to him, What hast thou done unto the gifts release them from their loyalty to me? This man of constitutional virtue, with the giver; and when nature puts herself all the salutations he got upon earth, and all into the attitude of indifference or hostility the reverence that he has left behind him, against him, now is it that the graces and may, naked and defenceless, before him the accomplishments of nature can be plead who sitteth on the throne, be left without a in mitigation of her antipathy to him, who plea and without an argument. invested nature with all her graces, and upholds her in the display of all her accomplishments?

The way, then, to assert the depravity of

God's controversy with our species, is not, that the glow of honour or of humanity is never felt among them. It is, that none of them understandeth, and none of

ول

them seeketh after God. It is, that he is | for all that is manly in the accomplishdeposed from his rightful ascendency. It ments of nature, disjoined from the faith of is that he, who in fact inserted in the hu- Christianity. They take up a separate man bosom every one principle that can residence in the human character from the embellish the individual possessor, or main- principle of godliness. Anterior to this retain the order of society, is banished alto- ligion, they go not to alleviate the guilt of gether from the circle of his habitual con- our departure from the living God; and templations. It is, that man taketh his way subsequently to this religion, they may in life as much at random, as if there was blazon the character of him who stands out no presiding Divinity at all; and that, against it; but on the principles of a most whether he at one time grovel in the depths clear and intelligent equity, they never can of sensuality, or at another kindle with shield him from the condemnation and the some generous movement of sympathy or curse of those who have neglected the great of patriotism, he is at both times alike un- salvation. mindful of him to whom he owes his continuance and his birth. It is, that he moves his every footstep at his own will; and has utterly discarded, from its supremacy over him, the will of that invisible Master who compasses all his goings, and never ceases to pursue him by the claims of a resistless and legitimate authority. It is this which is the essential or the constituting principle of rebellion against God. This it is which has exiled the planet we live in beyond the limits of his favoured creation-and whether it be shrouded in the turpitude of licentious- at every thing that bore upon it the characness or cruelty, or occasionally brightened with the gleam of the kindly and the honourable virtues, it is thus that it is seen as afar off, by Him who sitteth on the throne, and looketh on our strayed world, as athwart a wide and dreary gulf of separation.

The doctrine of the New Testament will bear to be confronted with all that can be met or noticed on the face of human society. And we speak most confidently to the experience of many who now hear us, when we say, that often, in the course of their manifold transactions, have they met the man, whom the bribery of no advantage whatever could seduce into the slightest deviation from the path of integrity-the man, who felt his nature within him put into a state of the most painful indignancy,

ter of a sneaking or dishonourable artificethe man, who positively could not be at rest under the consciousness that he had ever betrayed, even to his own heart, the remotest symptom of such an inclinationand whom, therefore, the unaided law of justice and of truth has placed on a high and deserved eminence in the walks of honourable merchandize.

And when, prompted by love towards his alienated children, he devised a way of recalling them-when, willing to pass over all the ingratitude he had gotten from their Let us not withhold from this character hands, he reared a pathway of return, and the tribute of its most rightful admiration. proclaimed a pardon and a welcome to all but let us further ask, if, with all that he who should walk upon it-when through thus possessed of native feeling and constithe offered Mediator, who magnified his tutional integrity, you have never observed broken law, and upheld, by his mysterious in any such individual an utter emptiness sacrifice, the dignity of that government, of religion; and that God is not in all his which the children of Adam had disowned, thoughts; and that, when he does what he invited all to come and be saved happens to be at one with the will of the should this message be brought to the door Lawgiver, it is not because he is impelled of the most honourable man upon earth, to it by a sense of its being the will of the and he turn in contempt and hostility away Lawgiver, but because he is impelled to it from it, has not that man posted himself by the working of his own instinctive senmore firmly than ever on the ground of re-sibilities; and that, however fortunate, or bellion? Though an unsullied integrity however estimable these sensibilities are, should rest upon all his transactions, and the homage of confidence and respect be awarded to him from every quarter of society, has not this man, by slighting the overtures of reconciliation, just plunged himself the deeper in the guilt of a wilful and determined ungodliness? Has not the creature exalted itself above the Creator; and in the pride of those accomplishments, which never would have invested his person had not they come to him from above, has he not, in the act of resisting the gospel, aggravated the provocation of his whole previous defiance to the author of it?

Thus much for all that is amiable, and

they still consist with the habit of a mind that is in a state of total indifference about God? Have you never read in your own character, or observed in the character of others, that the claims of the Divinity may be entirely forgotten by the very man to whom society around him yield, and rightly yield, the homage of an unsullied and honourable reputation; that this man may have all his foundations in the world; that every security on which he rests, and every enjoyment upon which his heart is set, lieth on this side of death; that a sense of the coming day on which God is to enter into judgment with him, is to every purpose of

practical ascendency, as good as expunged by oceans and by continents; when he fixes altogether from his bosom; that he is far the anchor of a sure and steady dependence in desire, and far in enjoyment, and far in on the reported honesty of one whom he habitual contemplation, away from that never saw; when, with all his fears for the God who is not far from any one of us; treachery of the varied elements, through that his extending credit and his brighten- which his property has to pass, he knows, ing prosperity, and his magnificent retreat that should it only arrive at the door of its from business, with all the splendour of its destined agent, all his fears and all his susaccommodations-that these are the futuri-picions may be at an end. We know nothing

finer than such an act of homage from one human being to another, when perhaps the diameter of the globe is between them; nor do we think that either the renown of her victories, or the wisdom of her councils, so signalizes the country in which we live, as does the honourable dealing of her merchants; that all the glories of British policy, and British valour, are far eclipsed by the moral splendour which British faith has thrown over the name and the character of our nation; nor has she gathered so proud a distinction from all the tributaries of her power, as she has done from the awarded confidence of those men of all tribes, and colours, and languages, who look to our agency for the most faithful of all management, and to our keeping for the most unviolable of all custody.

ties at which he terminates; and that he goes not in thought beyond them to that eternity, which in the flight of a few little years, will absorb all, and annihilate all? In a word, have you never observed the man, who, with all that was right in mercantile principle, and all that was open and unimpeachable in the habit of his mercantile transactions, lived in a state of utter estrangement from the concerns of immortality? who, in reference to God, persisted, from one year to another, in the spirit of a deep slumber? who, in reference to the man that tries to awaken him out of his lethargy, recoils, with the most sensitive dislike, from the faithfulness of his ministrations? who, in reference to the Book which tells him of his nakedness and his guilt, never consults it with one practical aim, and never tries to penetrate beyond There is no denying, then, the very exthat aspect of mysteriousness which it holds tended prevalence of a principle of integrity out to an undiscerning world? who attends in the commercial world; and he who has not church, or attends it with all the life-such a principle within him, has that to lessness of a form? who reads not his Bible, which all the epithets of our text may or reads it in the discharge of a self-pre- rightly be appropriated. But it is just as scribed and unfruitful task? who prays not, impossible to deny, that, with this thing or prays with the mockery of an unmean- which he has, there may be another thing ing observation? and, in one word, who which he has not. He may not have one while surrounded by all those testimonies duteous feeling of reverence which points which give to man a place of moral dis-upward to God. He may not have one tinction among his fellows, is living in utter carelessness about God, and about all the avenues which lead to him?

Now, attend for a moment to what that is which the man has, and to what that is which he has not. He has an attribute of character which is in itself pure, and lovely, and honourable, and of good report. He has a natural principle of integrity; and under its impulse he may be carried forward to such fine exhibitions of himself, as are worthy of all admiration. It is very noble, when the simple utterance of his word carries as much security along with it as if he had accompanied that utterance by the signatures, and the securities, and the legal obligations which are required of other men. It might tempt one to be proud of his species when he looks at the faith that is put in him by a distant correspondent, who, without one other hold of him than his honour, consigns to him the wealth of a whole flotilla, and sleeps in the confidence that it is safe. It is indeed an animating thought, amid the gloom of this world's depravity, when we behold the credit which one man puts in another, though separated

wish, or one anticipation, which points forward to eternity. He may not have any sense of dependence on the Being who sustains him; and who gave him his very principle of honour, as part of that interior furniture which he has put into his bosom ; and who surrounded him with the theatre on which he has come forward with the finest and most illustrious displays of it; and who set the whole machinery of his sentiment and action agoing; and can, by a single word of his power, bid it cease from the variety, and cease from the gracefulness of its movements. In other words, he is a man of integrity, and yet he is a man of ungodliness.

He is a man born for the confidence and the admiration of his fellows, and yet a man whom his Maker can charge with utter defection from all the principles of a spiritual obedience. He is a man whose virtues have blazoned his own character in time, and have upheld the interests of society, and yet a man who has not, by one movement of principle, brought himself nearer to the kingdom of heaven, than the most profligate of the species. The condemnation, that

he is an alien from God, rests upon him in all the weight of its unmitigated severity. The threat, that they who forget God shall be turned into hell, will, on the great day of its fell and sweeping operation, involve him among the wretched outcasts of eternity. That God from whom, while in the world, he withheld every due offering of gratitude, and remembrance, and universal subordination of habit and of desire, will show him to his face, how, under the delusive garb of such sympathies as drew upon him the love of his acquaintances, and of such integrities as drew upon him their respect and their confidence, he was in fact a determined rebel against the authority of heaven; that not one commandment of the law, in the true extent of its interpretation, was ever fulfilled by him; that the pervad-fering to his Maker? But wherever the religious principle has ing principle of obedience to this law, which is love to God, never had its ascendency taken possession of the mind, it animates over him; that the beseeching voice of the these virtues with a new spirit; and when Lawgiver, so offended and so insulted-but so animated, all such things as are pure, who, nevertheless, devised in love a way of and lovely, and just, and true, and honest, reconciliation for the guilty,-never had the and of good report, have a religious importeffect of recalling him; that, in fact, he ance and character belonging to them. The neither had a wish for the friendship of text forms part of an epistle addressed to God, nor cherished the hope of enjoying all the saints in Christ Jesus, which were him, and that therefore, as he lived without at Philippi; and the lesson of the text is hope, so he lived without God in the world; matter of direct and authoritative enforcefinding all his desire, and all his sufficiency, ment on all who are saints in Christ Jesus to be somewhere else, than in that favour at the present day. Christianity, with the which is better than life, and so, in addition weight of its positive sanctions on the side to the curse of having continued not in all of what is amiable and honourable in huthe words of the book of God's law to do man virtue, causes such an influence to rest them, entailing upon himself the mighty on the character of its genuine disciples, aggravation of having neglected all the of-that, on the ground both of inflexible jusfers of his gospel.

said, that prosperity, with some occasional variations, is the general accompaniment of that credit, which every man of undeviating justice is sure to draw around him. But what reward will you tell us is due to him on the great day of the manifestation of God's righteousness, when, in fact, he has done nothing unto God? What recompence can be awarded to him out of those books which are then to be opened, and in which he stands recorded as a man overcharged with the guilt of spiritual idolatry? How shall God grant unto him the reward of a servant, when the service of God was not the principle of his doings in the world; and when neither the justice he rendered to others, nor the sensibility that he felt for them, bore the slightest character of an of

tice and ever-breathing charity, they are We say, then, of this natural virtue, what ever sure to leave the vast majority of the our Saviour said of the virtue of the Phari- world behind them. Simplicity and godly sees, many of whom were not extortioners, sincerity form essential ingredients of that as other men-that, verily, it hath its re- peculiarity by which they stand signalized ward. When disjoined from a sense of God, in the midst of an ungodly generation. The it is of no religious estimation whatever; true friends of the gospel, tremblingly alive nor will it lead to any religious blessing, to the honour of their master's cause, blush either in time or in eternity. It has, however, for the disgrace that has been brought on it its enjoyments annexed to it, just as a fine by men who keep its sabbaths, and yield an taste has its enjoyments annexed to it; and ostentatious homage to its doctrines and its in these it is abundantly rewarded. It is sacraments. They utterly disclaim all felexempted from that painfulness of inward lowship with that vile association of cant feeling which nature has annexed to every and of duplicity, which has sometimes been act of departure from honesty. It is sus exemplified, to the triumph of the enemies tained by a conscious sense of rectitude and of religion; and they both feel the solemn elevation. It is gratified by the homage of truth, and act on the authority of the saysociety; the members of which are ever ing, that neither thieves, nor liars, nor exready to award the tribute of acknowledg-tortioners, nor unrighteous persons, have ment to those virtues that support the in- any part in the kingdom of Christ and of terests of society. And finally, it may be God.

DISCOURSE II.

The Influence of Christianity in aiding and augmenting the mercantile Virtues.

For he that in these things serveth Christ is acceptable to God, and approved of men."-Romans xiv. 18.

We have already asserted the natural ex-| istence of such principles in the heart of man, as lead him to many graceful and to many honourable exhibitions of character. We have further asserted, that this formed no deduction whatever from that article of orthodoxy which affirms the utter depravity of our nature; that the essence of this depravity lies in man having broken loose from the authority of God, and delivered himself wholly up to the guidance of his own inclinations; that though some of these inclinations are in themselves amiable features of human character, and point in their effects to what is most useful to human society, yet devoid as they all are of any reference to the will and to the rightful sovereignty of the Supreme Being, they could not avert, or even so much as alleviate that charge of ungodliness, which may be fully carried round amongst all the sons and daughters of the species; that they furnish not the materials of any valid or satisfactory answer to the question, "What hast thou done unto God?" and that whether they are the desires of a native rectitude, or the desires of an instinctive benevolence, they go not to purge away the guilt of having no love, and no care for the Being who formed and who sustains them.

But what is more. If the virtues and accomplishments of nature are at all to be admitted into the controversy between God and man, instead of forming any abatement upon the enormity of our guilt, they stamp upon it the reproach of a still deeper and more determined ingratitude. Let us conceive it possible, for a moment, that the beautiful personifications of scripture were all realized; that the trees of the forest clapped their hands unto God, and that the isles were glad at his presence; that the little hills shouted on every side, and that the vallies covered over with corn sent forth their notes of rejoicing; that the sun and the moon praised him, and the stars of light joined in the solemn adoration; that the voice of glory to God was heard from every mountain and from every water-fall; and that all nature, animated throughout by the consciousness of a pervading and presiding Deity, burst into one loud and universal song of gratulation. Would not a strain of greater loftiness be heard to ascend from those regions where the all-working God had left the traces of his own immensity, than from the tamer and the humbler

scenery of an ordinary landscape? Would not you look for a gladder acclamation from the fertile field, than from the arid waste, where no character of grandeur made up for the barrenness that was around you? Would not the goodly tree, compassed about with the glories of its summer foliage, lift up an anthem of louder gratitude than the lowly shrub that grew beneath it? Would not the flower, from whose leaves every hue of loveliness was reflected, send forth a sweeter rapture than the russet weed, which never drew the eye of any admiring passenger? And in a word, wherever you saw the towering eminences of nature, or the garniture of her more rich and beauteous adornments, would it not be there that you looked for the deepest tones of devotion, or there for the tenderest and most exquisite of its melodies?

There is both the sublime of character, and the beauteous of character exemplified. upon man. We have the one in that high sense of honour which no interest and no terror can seduce from any of its obligations. We have the other in that kindliness of feeling, which one look, or one sigh of imploring distress can touch into liveliest sympathy. Only grant that we have nothing either in the constitution of our spirits, or in the structure of our bodies, which we did not receive; and that mind, with all its varieties, is as much the product of a creating hand, as matter in all its modifications; and then, on the face of human society, do we witness all the gradations of a moral scenery, which may be directly referred to the operation of him who worketh all in all. It is our belief, that, as to any effectual sense of God, there is as deep a slumber throughout the whole of this world's living and rational generations, as there is throughout all the diversities of its mute and unconscious materialism; and that to make our alienated spirits again alive unto the Father of them, calls for as distinct and as miraculous an exertion of the Divinity, as would need to be put forth in the act of turning stones into the children of Abraham. Conceive this to be done then-and that a quickening and a realizing sense of the Deity pervaded all the men of our species-and that each knew how to refer his own endowments, with an adequate expression of gratitude to the unseen author of them-from whom we ask of all these various individuals, would you look for the halleluiahs of devoutest ecstacy?